 |
 A wealthy widow is "haunted by her husband and seduced by a handsome stranger -
all in her dreams!" They say that her dreams are "so real that she is trapped
in an eerie world existing between fact and fantasy." She can't trust anyone,
including herself. This movie is supposedly "one of the most acclaimed and
notorious films" that William Castle ever made. This film is "liable to give
you a case of insomnia you may never recover from!" 1964, 86 minutes, VHS
There's probably nothing more boring than having to listen to someone prattle
on endlessly about some idiotic dream they'd had the night before. You'll be
sitting there nodding your head like you can completely identify with whatever
freak hangup they're accidentally letting you in on, all the while you're
wishing your were somewhere else getting a cheese grater rubbed on your
genitals. Finally, they'll finish it up with a flourish and say, " it was all
so real! What do you think it means?" What it means is that you are a
degenerate freak that should probably be institutionalized or at least not
allowed
near day care centers, you sicko. That reminds me that the only thing worse
than
having to listen about somebody's dream is to listen to them puke up
sickeningly dull stories about their stupid and ugly kids. If I wanted to
listen to pointless garbage about kids, I would have gone out to the bar,
picked up some leathery skank that looked like she was rode hard and put away
wet, took her home, drowned my common sense in some Red White and Blue label
beer and had a brood of my own. But I didn't, so just shut up about how so and
so likes to take craps in his sandbox like a cat. Luckily, The Night Walker is about dreams, not kids taking dumps out of doors (that would have been
something like Pink Flamingos). Specifically, the dreams of a wrinkled up has-been version of Barbara
Stanwyck. She plays an old lady who is married to a paranoid blind slug in
director William Castle's take on a "psychological thriller."  Howard Trent is the blind guy who doesn't have the decency to wear sunglasses
so that we aren't subjected to his grody blind eyes, characterized by being
pure white. He is convinced that his wife, Irene, is having an affair and
confides this to his lawyer, Barry (Robert Taylor). He also confides to Barry
that he thinks she is having an affair with him. Barry pooh-poohs the idea
that he would be sniffing around Irene's Depends, but Howard is convinced and
tells Barry that he has everything in his mansion secretly recorded. Then he
plays some audiotape of Irene blabbing in her sleep about some love affair or
something. You see, it turns out that every night when she's not up battling
the incontinence that comes with being over 100 years old, she's having dreams
of this Romeo-type dude coming and sweeping her off her feet and saying suave
things that I don't really recall. I do recall thinking that this dream-lover
looked like a scaled-down version of Al Gore, with his slick hair and insincere
smile. Well, as luck would have it, Irene's blind husband is blown up in an
explosion in his secret lab up on the second floor of the mansion, leaving
Irene all alone with her dreams. Of course, Howard's body can't be found, but
the fire marshall tells Irene that since the explosion took place in a room
with a fire proof door, she can still live in the rest of the house. I guess
the fact that the big blow-up tore a gaping hole in the roof of the lab and
blew out part of the floor didn't really matter. Just walk around it, when
you're having a dinner party, I suppose. Good conversation piece and all that.
She actually stays there a night and has bad dreams of Howard coming after
her, so she tells Barry to sell the mansion and she'll move into the little
apartment in the back of the beauty shop she owns. Barry's kind of like, well,
it will take time to sell the house because it has to go through probate and
all that and you can immediately tell by his oily hair and questionable tan
that he's up to no good (well, all that and the fact that he's a lawyer).  At her beauty salon apartment, Irene continues to have dreams of her secret
lover. This time she dreams that he has come to whisk her away and marry her.
They go to this church and the rest of the wedding party is made up of
mannequins. Even though the priest is a mannequin, he still tries to officiate
the wedding, much to Irene's chagrin (she must be Jewish or something) and then
all
we start to get William Castle, Director. William Castle, Director decides to
dress up this dream sequence with shadows, crazy camera angles, and spinning
chandeliers. It's not badly done in and of itself, but it comes off as being
fancy for fancy's sake and doesn't add much to the dream. Sometimes a little
bit of understatement goes along way, but I doubt if anyone's ever accused
Billy Castle as understated (except for maybe the plots of his films). In any
event, these tricks come off all together as a kind of hokey, haunted house
deal and goes on way too long to remain effective. Eventually, you're just
hoping the old broad either wakes up or croaks in her sleep so that the scene
will end. Once it does end, she goes whining and crying to Barry and wonders
if it's just a dream. Neither of these two nincompoops can figure out how to
solve this puzzle, but to me and maybe it's because I have some higher
education or have watched A Nightmare On Elm Street, the thing to do is have
somebody watch this old prune while she sleeps. Now, I sure as heck ain't
volunteering for that duty, I mean I've got no desire to sit and count the gray
nosehairs on an actress twenty years past her prime, but maybe Robby Taylor
wouldn't mind, since he was married to Stanwyck once upon a time. They come
up with their own plan involving driving around looking for the church were she
and Al Gore were going to be married. They find it somehow and it turns out to
be closed for a few years and they go inside and Barry's kind of saying she's
nuts, but she spots the ring on the floor that Romeo gave her in her dream.
After this revelation they split for some reason and Irene goes back to her
apartment. After they leave, her dream lover appears in a phone booth near the church and
makes a phone call to a woman at the beauty salon. She's in on something
against Irene with Romeo and waits for Irene to come back. Irene returns and
the woman stays with her while Irene naps (she's tired an awful lot, maybe if
she got a job or something she wouldn't have to worry about all this). Barry
calls, but the woman leaves the phone off the hook and doesn't ever tell Irene
that Barry called. Later this woman gets a knife thrown in her back and dies.
Irene hauls her saggy ass out of the beauty parlor and runs into Barry who has
come to see why he couldn't ever get through on the phone (Riiiight.) For some
reason they go back to the mansion where Barry tells her that he thinks this
private investigator named George that Howard once hired to spy on his
narcoleptic wife, is behind everything. Barry runs into the mansion with his
gun and then we hear gun shots. Irene goes into the mansion and up to the
secret lab. There she runs into her blowed-up husband Howard, but this guy
takes his mask off and reveals himself to be Barry. It was one of those Mission Impossible type masks that look exactly like somebody even though you
don't have anywhere near the same body type as the person you're trying to
impersonate. Howard wasn't nearly as big as Barry, but he sure looked like
him. Besides, where in the world did Barry get a perfect Howard mask? Barry
reveals that since Howard was blind he wrote himself into the will as a
beneficiary instead of Irene and he needed Irene out of the way so there
wouldn't be any trouble when Barry tried to collect the money. Of course, once
he got rid of Irene, he was then going to have to get rid of the entire
California Bar, since I imagine they tend to frown on attorneys naming
themselves as beneficiaries in wills they write. So Barry gets ready to kill
Irene when he gets shot in the back by her dream lover (a PI named George). It
turns out that the woman killed in beauty salon was George's wife and Barry did
that. See, all three were in on it together for some reason, but I guess,
Barry killing George's wife wasn't part of the plan. Now George gets ready to
kill Irene, but Barry stirs and starts rasslin' with George and they both fall
into the hole in the floor left by the explosion (I knew that wasn't safe!)  This movie was a pretty unsatisfying experience. The big problem was that it
didn't make any sense. First of all, they never explained how they got Irene to
go with the Al Gore look-alike without her knowing it was happening. I mean,
was she drugged with something that made her forget she did those things? Why
did she wake up and think it was all a dream? I'm pretty sure if some dude
took me to a church and tried to marry me in front of a bunch of mannequins
that I would remember it. Also, I never understood the point of their little
scheme. Was it to drive her insane (until Barry decided he should kill
everyone) so that she couldn't contest the will? If so, that doesn't address
the fact that Howard's lawyer named himself in the will to get all the loot. I
think somebody would notice that, don't you? "Hey Barry, how did you end up
with Howard Trent's mansion?" "Uh, oh, was this Howards?" Why would all these
people sign on to such an absurd scheme? Aside from that, the movie looked
better than some of Castle's other flicks like The Tingler. At least he put in
some effort to make the movie feel like more than a grade Z thriller, with his
shadows, lighting, and sometimes fluid camera work. It's too bad the story was
such a dungheap. I'm also going to say that Stanwycke and Taylor did little to
enliven their characters with her being a whiner and dunderhead for the entire
film. "I don't know if I was dreaming or if it was real!" Give me a break.
Wake up, dunce! Robert Taylor had this look like he'd been pickled in
preservative or varnish or something. Not very attractive at all. Time to
hang it up, buddy. Plus he was able to rig the will because Howard was blind
and couldn't see that he was writing in "Barry" instead of "Howard." Are
people really stupid enough to believe it's that easy? Completely ridiculous,
but it never gets ridiculous in a loopy kind of way like The Tingler to make it worth your while.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
|
|
