Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (1974)

"You're all the same, the lot of you, with your long hair and faggot clothes.  Drugs, sex, every sort of filth.  And you hate the police, don't ya?"
"You make it easy."

Aka The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue, aka Breakfast at the Manchester Morgue, aka Don't Open the Window, Do Not Speak Ill of the Dead, aka Zombi 3, aka at least half a dozen other titles depending on the country in which it was released, Jorge Grau's zombie opus Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (the title on my Blue Underground DVD) has an international pedigree worthy of its plethora of monikers.

Directed by a Spaniard, starring a half Brit-half Italian (Ray Lovelock), a Spaniard (Cristina Galbo), an American (Arthur Kennedy), and a host of Spanish and Italian character actors in minor roles, and shot mainly in the English countryside around Manchester and Yorkshire, Let Sleeping Corpses Lie is a strange and wonderful horror film.  Taking cues from Night of the Living Dead, the Manson murders, environmental fears and generational unrest, it is shocking to realize Grau's film presaged Romero's Dawn of the Dead by four years.

We begin with George (Lovelock) locking up his London curio shop and goin' up the country for a weekend of R&R.  An ill-fated gas station encounter with spacey Edna (Galbo) leaves the two of them traveling together, not by choice, to Edna's sister's house.  A couple wrong turns and an unfamiliar landscape soon see the pair among markers such as rolling hills, oaks and streams instead of signs for Leicester Square.

As they stop to ask for directions, Edna is attacked by a man with blood red eyes (this is, coincidentally enough, 28 years before the rage virus induced similarly scarlet orbs in 28 Days Later...) and a like thirst for the crimson stuff.  George, who was over the hill asking a farmer for directions, shrugs off Edna's hysteria as a mixture of fatigue and the possibility of her exaggerating an encounter with a tramp.  Later that night, Edna's sister's husband is killed by the same man who attacked Edna, and as the police get involved, there is an immediate friction between the inspector (Kennedy) and George.

The anti-authoritarian, long-haired, bearded and hiply-garbed George doesn't go over well in small town England a mere five years after the Tate-LaBianca murders, and nor does the inspector's hard-headedness and bigotry sit well with George.  As bodies begin to pile up and the dead begin to rise (highlighted in one chilling scene at the...uh, the Manchester Morgue), the two poles of George and the inspector pull further apart and we see the clash between rational thought and blind belief taken to the extreme.

Having more in common with Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man than, say, Lucio Fulci's Zombie (though there's enough graphic grue on display to please the gorehounds), Let Sleeping Corpses Lie is a smart, well-acted, moody (owing largely to the chilly, grey, misty English countryside) horror film in which the director's reach does not exceed his grasp.  There is a terrific one-two punch of an ending, but be warned - Blue Underground released two versions of this within a year of each other, the regular titled Let Sleeping Corpses Lie, and the special edition titled The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue.  If you pick up the latter (which we have in stock at the FBE), please ask a staff member to help you find it and be sure not to look at the DVD cover, as it contains a MAJOR spoiler.  I guess BU assumed everyone buying/renting this had already seen it, but still...that's weak.

Anyway, if you count yourself among the zombie faithful and have yet to see this one, move it to the to the top of your pile.  Highly recommended.

I stand corrected.....

lotsa girls here...

You go girl.....Caprika!

Caprica, Ronald D. Moore and David Eick's followup to their wildly successful Battlestar Galactica series is a tough nut to crack. The story is set a generation earlier, around the time the first Cylon prototypes were being created, and revolves around two families tied together by a shared tragedy. A deadly terrorist attack on a commuter train launches the interconnected stories, told from the viewpoints of two families: the Adamas and the Graystones. The Adamas are first generation immigrants using an adopted name (Adams) to fit in, but they remain connected to their ethnic community. The Graystones are a wealthy Caprican family, the father an entrepreneur billionaire running a robotics/computer firm, the mom a doctor and their daughter a 15-year-old prep-school student. The act of terrorism instantly rips the characters from their worlds and Caprica quickly morphs into a story about virtual reality, artificial intelligence research, religion, racism and raising the dead.

The science fiction elements of Caprica are pushed well into the background, revealed in scenes of virtual reality and robotics rather than spaceships and spooled-up FTL drives. It introduces a society of the near-future that is mostly compatible with our own. The writers do a good job maintaining dramatic tension by parceling out information to the viewer as the characters themselves learn it. The overall plot is fairly straightforward (although and, truth be told, a little predictable at times), but it also asks deeper questions of character, ethics and motivations, something that doesn't happen all that often in television. At its core, Caprica is an variation on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein with a little Issac Asimov I, Robot thrown in for good measure.

What Moore and Eick have produced here is an extraordinary piece of science fiction, different in almost every way from BSG, but still striking the central points of good science fiction writing. Its role is to create metaphors for us to view as mirrors to our own world. Concepts that are invisible to us within our own society are stark and obvious when seen in an alien context. The creators of Caprica were obviously going for something quite different than they did in Battlestar. Opposites play out consistently on screen – Caprica is a world at its peak, its people intoxicated by success and oblivious to what lay ahead (Good Morning America!). BSG on the other hand, took place in a dark, often-hopeless world, populated by broken people, loss and the struggle to survive (Good Night Detroit!).



something's wrong here.....

 But the biggest problem with a series like Caprica is its limited marketability. Moore and Eick have created a highly-intelligent series that relies on ideas and dialogue, but its science fiction pedigree will likely starve it of the audience they seem to be after.... Girls! The problem with aiming the series at chicks is twofold – first, they don't watch science fiction and second, they don't watch science fiction. It simply doesn't matter that the story can be watched without any prior BSG knowledge. Geek television is meant to be watched by boys and Caprica, even with its fine writing and excellent acting, has just too many... well...., “girly” moments. Everybody knows that girls don't show up at Star Trek conventions dressed as their favourite character... Kadas and Jules do. If Caprica was about sexy teenaged-vampires - well maybe, but it's not, it's about robots.... bad robots, and that's definitely guy territory.

It almost seems too late to retool the show at this point so I'm guessing Season 2 might be the last we'll see of Caprica and that's a damn shame. I hope I'm wrong because there's a nut at the centre of Caprica that's really interesting, but then again this comes from a network who thought changing their name from “SciFi” to “SyFy” was a cracking-good idea, so I doubt it.

With apologies to Kendall, one of the biggest BSG fans out there...... and a yucky girl to boot.
 
Sporgey out.

The Tomb of Ligeia (1964)

The very last of Roger Corman's uncannily successful Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, The Tomb of Ligeia is yet another winner.  Starring Vincent Price (I'd seriously watch the man read the phone book) as Verdon Fell and treasured Film Buff East customer Elizabeth Shepherd as The Lady Rowena Trevanion, Ligeia breaks somewhat with Corman/Poe tradition as there are many outdoor settings and many scenes shot in daylight.  Still, Corman's trademark gothic chill pervades the film, and several of the more unsettling scenes are clothed not in satin drapery but bright sunshine.

The story begins with Fell burying his newlydead wife, the Ligeia of the title, although there is some doubt as to whether or not she is actually dead.  A priest implores Fell that he cannot bury his wife in consecrated ground as she died unnaturally.  Price chews up this scene, spewing forth dark prophecies about his wife's will being too strong for her to die, and comes across somewhat like the devil himself.  A black cat jumps on the coffin and Ligeia's eyes flutter open!  Fell informs the priest and the pallbearers that it is simply an effect of rigor mortis.

Later, on a fox hunt, Rowena stumbles across the crumbling abbey where Ligeia is interred, but is thrown from her mount when the black cat returns and spooks the horse.  Fell appears from behind a wall and startles Rowena to fainting.  From this point on, Rowena is transfixed by Fell's wounded widower, and becomes intent on marrying him.  However, that seemingly vengeful cat just won't go away, and interrupts any attempt at intimacy between Fell and Rowena.  Is the cat actually the reincarnated soul of Ligeia, who will not rest while any potential suitors for her husband live?  Or is the answer more grounded in a shadowy reality, where everything is not as it seems, and those who project a noble countenance actually carry a dark purpose?  Such is the beauty of these Corman/Poe adaptations: likely owing to the original literary source, things are rarely as simple as they seem, and there almost always (as there are here) undercurrents of madness, obsession and brooding, buried sexuality.

As always, Price looks likes he's having an absolute blast with the character of Verdon Fell, and when the truth of his wife's "death" comes out at the end, the mixed sympathies we feel for him throughout the film come crashing down like the mossy stones of the the abbey.  While I would have a hard time picking a Price/Poe favourite, this one stands up with the best of them.  I still have a couple to watch - and I don't think anything will top Witchfinder General or The Masque of the Red Death - but Ligeia is a fun, occasionally spooky descent into necrophiliac lust and the supernatural.  Worth it.

And I can't wait for Ms. Shepherd to brighten our humble shop's door again; I've got many questions (and a few compliments) for her.

The Legend of Hell House (1973)

Richard Matheson's countless film and TV writing credits are often overshadowed by his most famous work, I Am Legend, from which three (to date) official adaptations have been made, with many other "last man on earth" films drawing direct inspiration from his original novel.  But attention must be paid to the fantastic work he has contributed elsewhere in the cinematic realm, the absolute peak of which, for me, is 1973's The Legend of Hell House.

Directed by John Hough (who would later go on to direct Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, the "Witch Mountain" films, and the supremely creepy "children's" movie, The Watcher in the Woods), The Legend of Hell House begins with a group of four characters - mental medium Florence Tanner (Pamela Franklin), physicist Lionel Barrett (Clive Revill), his wife Ann (Gayle Hunnicutt), and physical medium Benjamin Fischer (Roddy McDowall) - converging on The Belasco House, aka Hell House, the "Mount Everest of haunted houses" we are informed by Lionel.  They have been charged by the wealthy Mr. Deutsch with shutting the door once and for all on the haunting.  Trouble is, this very same thing had been attempted before, 20 years earlier, and all involved were either killed or crippled and made insane.  All but one, that is, McDowall's Benjamin Fischer, returning to the home not for any sense of closure, but simply to shut himself off from any psychic phenomena to which he may be susceptible, wait out the week, collect a paycheck, and bid goodbye to the house forever.  The young Miss Tanner and Dr. Barrett have other plans though - Tanner wishes to commune with the spirits in the home through her psychic powers, and Barrett wishes to zap the home of its energies with his newfangled technology.  Neither of them see their goals through to the end.


The film plays out in a tastefully restrained fashion a la The Haunting, and some opulent, creaky, cobwebby  sets inside the home (as well as the home itself) provide much appreciated eye candy.  Director Hough conjures a slow burn build to a simultaneously preposterous and chilling finale.  Along the way there are ghostly whispered threats and pleas, a possessed cat, a ghost-rape/possession, an eerie seance, overtones of sexual repression/buried desire, and an uncovered rotting corpse. As the days go by, the screws are tightened, and minds begin to break.  Bizarre and often grotesque camera work from Alan Hume (who lensed From Beyond the Grave, among many others) is filled with exaggerated angles, jarring depths of field, and tight compositions, and augments the claustrophobic, disorienting atmosphere of uncertainty and dread.


Executive produced by James H. Nicholson (of American International), The Legend of Hell House has a similar feeling to the films that came out of AIP's stable; brooding, gothic, ghostly, horrific more in their implication than what they actually showed, and with a wonderfully downbeat ending.  You could do far worse than to pop in this classic ghost house thriller on a rainy day like this.

Scream of Fear (1961)

I've been enjoying the hell out of revisiting some old Halloween chillers this last week. Much as I'm not that keen on most modern horror, the earlier ones are proving to be a real treat. The latest is the 1961 Hammer Studios film, Scream of Fear (also known as Taste of Fear), more thriller than horror to be sure, but a terrific film on all accounts. I read somewhere that reviewers tend to call Scream of Fear a mini-Hitchcock but producer/screenwriter Jimmy Sangster always identified his model as Henri-Georges Clouzot's Les Diaboliques. It's a better fit quite frankly. The story is deceptively simple - Penny, a wheelchair-bound young woman (played by Susan Strasberg, the daughter of famed acting guru, Lee), returns to her family home and begins to suspect her father's temporary absence maybe isn't so temporary after all. It doesn't help when she begins to see his dead body popping up and then disappearing in all sorts of unusual places around the estate.



The film was directed with immense polish and skill by Seth Holt, a former editor for Ealing Studios who moved to directing with the seldom-seen, but superb, Nowhere To Go (1959), a film we have in the FBW Black Vault. Scream of Fear was his second feature and it already seems like you're watching the work of a seasoned pro. The film also marked a slight departure for Hammer away from the Gothic horrors they were famous for and toward the modern thriller. The ensemble cast is excellent with great turns by Strasberg in a difficult role as Penny Lame (just made that up... the Lame part), Ann Todd (from Hitch's Paradine Case) playing her concerned, but possibly evil-bitch stepmother, Ronald Lewis as the friendly family chauffeur, and Hammer go-to actor Christopher Lee as the doctor who may or may not know more than he is telling.



Daddy?... Is that you?

 Scream of Fear was photographed in deep contrast B&W by the Douglas Slocombe (of The Fearless Vampire Killers fame) and the movie drips with mood and atmosphere. Several spooky scenes are played for all they're worth, but Holt never pushes them over the top and into campy overstatement territory. The film succeeds where other thrillers sometimes fall flat due in part to the reserved and deft direction Holt manages to hang onto throughout. Hammer's subsequent black and white thrillers never quite recaptured the adroit refinement of this outstanding debut. Holt died in the early '70s, but not before he directed Bette Davis in another stellar and deeply creepy Hammer film, The Nanny (1965), a film we don't have on DVD, but should get. Christopher Lee called Scream of Fear the best Hammer ever made.... and he should know – he was in most of them.

Scream of Fear is on DVD in Hammer's Icons of Horror Collection with 3 other films. It is the definite standout in the set, but The Gorgon (1964) is probably also worth a look. I didn't love The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb (1964) and haven't seen The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll (1960).

La Spookenza.

Carnival of Souls (1962)

One of the strangest and most effective mood pieces I've seen, director Herk Harvey and screenwriter John Clifford created this no-budget macabre masterpiece seemingly out of thin air. Carnival of Souls starts with a car accident and ends with the dead dancing at an abandoned amusement park. The sounds of a church organ haunt nearly every scene and the heroine, trapped in a purgatory neither entirely real nor completely disconnected, fades in and out of the physical world.... kinda like Joey.

Something about this cult film resonates with everyone who sees it. In spite of the fact that it sometimes feels like a dated, beatnik throwaway, Carnival of Souls has another, entirely more complex and haunting quality that remains difficult to describe. If David Lynch captured the essence of a filmed nightmare with Eraserhead, Harvey's film is the cinematic equivalent of an hallucination. Carnival of Souls influenced any number of films that followed, including Romero's early films and Kubrick's The Shining. It's stunningly original and even though you might be inclined to write it off as hokey the first time through, it's a film that you will not soon forget. Its imagery will rattle around in the back of your mind for a long time.

Proof-positive that you don't need buckets of blood (or money) to make an effective horror film, just a great imagination, one trained actress and somebody to play the organ.

Sporgey.

Dead of Night (1945)

Inspired by Joe's kick-off Halloween flick, From Beyond the Grave (1973), I thought I'd go back to one of the early horror anthologies, Dead of Night, a 1945 British film from Ealing Studios. Collections of short stories had been around since the earliest films (Waxworks from 1924 for example, was composed of 3 short horror stories), but the structure and content of Dead of Night would come to influence many subsequent films and TV series (the Twilight Zone, for one) and some consider it one of the great horror films.

The plot involves an architect arriving at a country estate, only to discover that the place, and each of its inhabitants have haunted him in recurring nightmares. As he slowly recalls premonitions from he dreams, the group begins recounting their own previous brushes with the supernatural, each of which is detailed within an episodic flashback. Dead of Night isn't particularly scary, although the famous ventriloquist dummy segment with Michael Redgrave is creepy enough. The genre changed so dramatically in subsequent decades that much of the wit and charm of the dialogue seems almost out of place in a horror film. Still, it's an interesting film from an historical perspective.

One of the problems with Dead of Night is its narrative structure. Each of the characters tells their own tale and the viewer is therefore aware that they must have survived the horrors they faced. It zaps the individual segments of some potential tension, but it must be remembered that this was 55 years ago so you need to cut the film some slack. The surreal, avant-garde ending is terrific and plays well all these years later, even if some of the individual tales come off a bit flat. That dummy still gets under my skin.

Unfortunately, the DVD release of this film is long out of print (and once again, the title trades online for stupid prices), so I yanked it off the FBW shelves last year. If you're in the mood for a little horror nostalgia however, I'll bring it in. It's an interesting and important early film in the genre.

Sporgey

The Stone Tape (1972)

Originally broadcast on the BBC as a Christmas ghost story in 1972, The Stone Tape has gained a significant cult following that belies its humble beginnings.  It's greatest pedigree is screenwriter Nigel Kneale, best known for his creation of Bernard Quatermass, the character around whom the Quatermass series and the resulting films are based.  The Stone Tape treads in a similar track as the more renowned Quatermass, but while the latter deals mainly with science (and science fiction), the former, and the subject of today's review, delves into superstition and the supernatural, and delivers a nice ghostly chill that the earlier series lacks.

We begin The Stone Tape outside a secluded mansion which has been purchased as a research facility by Ryan Industries.  The purpose of the research is for the team to come up with a new recording medium, something beyond tape.  As research team leader Peter Brock (Michael Bryant - no, not that one...) says, "Give me Wagner's Ring Cycle on the head of a ball bearing with instant playback".  Somewhat quaint, by today's standards; or perhaps prescient?  As the team begins setting up equipment in one particularly cavernous room, Jill (Jane Asher, ex-Ms. Paul McCartney) hears echoing footfalls and then a woman scream.  As others hear the woman at varying intervals, it is determined that the room is haunted.  After attempts are made to expunge the ghost, Brock, with some insistent urging from Jill, realizes that there is not a physical roaming spectre per se, but that the spirit in the room is recorded in the very walls themselves, a "stone tape".  What at first seems like a major breakthrough in the team's research (i.e. this is the recording medium that has eluded them thus far), soon becomes something far more sinister as Jill becomes obsessed with and haunted by the spirit and her history, and makes a chilling discovery that the ghost to which they have been witness is simply on the surface, or the first layer of the "tape", and that there are far older things recorded or contained on sub-layers of the stone, back, back in history, back perhaps to when the stone itself was formed.  Old, dark, unspeakably malevolent things.

The whole cast here is wonderful, with especially exceptional turns by Asher, Bryant, and Iain Cuthbertson (see also the similarly spooky Children of the Stones).  Bryant's team leader is headstrong and vain, and is nearly seized by madness while trying to remove the ghost from the room (in a terrifically psychedelic and possibly seizure-inducing scene) before refusing to acknowledge that what he had clung to so tightly was even a possibility after the experiment has failed.  Asher is the typical gothic heroine, fragile and tough in the same package, and one whose pleas and warnings are mostly ignored by the rest of the team, save Cuthbertson's Roy Collins.

The sound and visual effects are dated but work well in reinforcing the theme.  Analogue sound and video effects are nowhere near as precise as modern CGI, but the amorphous green shapes and eerie glowing lights the VFX crew conjures up are a perfect match for old, weird things that cannot be described, let alone shown visually.  The effects have almost add to the creepiness, because instead of striving for realism and falling hard, they simply embrace the sort of abstract concepts in the play and work marvelously to that end.  Some might see the effects as cheesy or dated, but they worked well given the concepts and subject matter of the play.

The final 5 minutes of The Stone Tape are truly chilling and a semi-ambiguous ending leaves the viewer contemplating the terrible consequences and possible outcomes of Jill and Peter's actions for days.

Not available on R1 DVD, there does exist a BFI PAL release, both on tape (how appropriate) and DVD.  But since that's probably not going to materialize in either shop soon, here, for your viewing pleasure, is The Stone Tape (part 1 - the rest of the parts are on the Youtube sidebar):

Oh ya.... that guy.

I read yesterday that director Arthur Penn died on September 28th, the day after his 88th birthday. In spite of the fact that I know he directed a bunch of stellar films, Bonnie and Clyde is the only one I can ever remember off the top of my head. Arthur Penn is a little like Tony Blair for me. When I think of Blair, I picture Michael Sheen as David Frost coaching a Derby football team instead of Britain's Ex-P.M. Same goes for Penn. I'm forever mixing up his ouput with a crop of other Hollywood New Wave directors that arose in the early '60s - guys like John Schlesinger, Sidney Lumet, Robert Altman, Peter Bogdanovich, Sydney Pollack, Irvin Kershner, George Roy Hill, William Friedkin and John Frankenheimer. I just can't remember who did what.

A minute and a half on IMDb.com and the full weight of Penn's loss hit me. Here was a director that had produced some of the seminal movies of my lifetime, a number of which perpetually reside on my ever-changing top 25 list and I had no idea they were all directed by Penn. In a number of the obits I read him described as “the most underrated American director of the '60s” and must admit to being guilty of the same oversight. In an effort to rectify that lapse of acknowledgment, I thought I'd try to summarize a number of his more-interesting films, starting with his most famous;

Bonnie and Clyde (1967) – It was probably 10 years after Bonnie and Clyde was initially released that I first saw it. It was already a famous movie, one that had changed cinema and rewrote the rules, but I was too young to realize it. Unfortunately, a different wave was rolling over Hollywood at the time – it was the start of the spectacle film (which incidentally rages to this day) and it spelled the end of the the brief Easy Riders & Raging Bulls period, the last golden era of American film making, of which Penn was a founding member. I suppose it stands to reason that Arthur Penn didn't end up on my radar given the fact the Lucas and Spielberg ruled the day by the time I was able to go to an R-Rated movie. I discovered the Hollywood New Wave during my 20's because of the home video revolution and all these years later, I'm still finding treasures from that period. It would be years before I returned to Bonnie and Clyde and was able to recognize it for the innovative and ground-breaking work that it was.

Little Big Man (1970) - Little Big Man is an epic tall tale and adventure-comedy from a great screenplay by Calder Willingham. Every bit as good as Bonnie and Clyde, in part because of a standout performance by Dustin Hoffman, Little Big Man is amongst the best of the Revisionist Westerns. It's hilarious too.

Night Moves (1975) - Penn's challenging neo-noir Night Moves stars Gene Hackman at his absolute peak. It's a film that sits nearly hidden amongst a series of much-better-known movies that explored the noir motif around the same time - Chinatown, The Conversation, The Long Goodbye, The Stone Killer, Klute, and Dirty Harry to name a few. Night Moves is every bit as good and yet, like much of Penn's work, remains nearly forgotten. This is a gem.

The Left Handed Gun (1958) – Penn's feature film directorial debut and an influential one, in spite of the fact that it was a box-office disappointment in its initial release. It was the film that some consider the unofficial kickoff of the '60s-style Revisionist Westerns of Sam Peckinpah and others. Paul Newman plays Billy the Kid. Worth a look.

The Missouri Breaks (1976) – The 2nd strangest of Penn's films, by turns weirdly humourous and light- hearted and then dark and cynical. The pacing is wacky, time is oddly stretched, then contracted and Brando is completely unhinged throughout. One of my favourite films of the '70s, but for reasons I can't explain. If you want to see a barking mad Marlon Brando, silhouetted against a moonlight sky, dressed as Little Bo-Peep (bonnet and all, I shit you not) hurling firebombs into the darkness and cackling like a lunatic, this is your movie. Jack Nicholson plays the straight man.

The Train (1964) – Penn oversaw the development of the film and directed the first day of shooting, but Burt Lancaster (a notorious prick), apparently dissatisfied with Penn's concept of the picture, had him fired and replaced by John Frankenheimer (Penn got Frankenheimered, as one Hollywood reporter wrote). Penn's original script envisioned a more intimate film that would muse on the role art played in the French character, and why they would risk their lives to save the country's great art from the Nazis. It ended up an pure-action film, but Penn's presence remains at the periphery. It's reported the Lancaster said of Frankenheimer... "He's a bit of a whore, but he'll do what he's told". Coincidentally, I read somewhere that almost no one from Hollywood attended Lancaster's funeral years later.

Mickey One (1965) – A highly-obscure film directed by Penn that everyone seems to hate....except me, that is, because I loved it. When I say everyone, I mean the 25 people that know it exists and/or saw it at some late-night MoMA screening in the '90s. This was Penn's attempt at making a French New Wave film and the results are ...mixed, to say the least. Warren Beatty plays a stand-up comic who finds himself the target of Detroit mobsters, heads for Chicago to hide out and changes his name to Mickey One. He attempts to start again, but can't shake the feeling that he is still being followed - a hunch confirmed by a subsequent ass-kicking he gets walking home from work one night. Mickey One probably plays better now than it did back then and has a great Stan Getz's cool jazzy score. Penn's weirdest work, but intriguing and innovative. Not surprisingly I suppose, our Black Vault DVD copy has never left the store, which is a crying shame.

btw - Tony Curtis cacked the same day. R.I.P.

Sporgey