2026-10-06 01:00:00
Even though they’re not the least bit scary, I really, really like the Hammer movies about Dracula. I love how the colors are all super-saturated. I love how the lighting is perfect throughout, so everything seems super-sharp1. I love how Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing seem simultaneously like they’re slumming and like they’re putting every last bit of their talent into it. I love how Lee’s version of Dracula has all the swagger and pomposity but invariably finds himself going bug-eyed and running away like “oh geez I’m in a pickle is this the end of poor Dracula?!” I love how they never have enough ghastly white make-up to cover up his five o’clock shadow.
But my biggest disappointment with them is probably the same thing that most other people find upsetting: their version of Dracula never lives in a time when he could visit Walt Disney World, which opened in 1971. Thankfully, they finally addressed that in Dracula A.D. 1972. (Spoiler: he doesn’t actually go to Disney World in this movie. But I still felt better knowing that he could have if he wanted).
This one starts with the Count in 1872 in a last stand against Van Helsing on an out-of-control carriage through a London park. The sequence ends with Dracula getting a wooden wheel spoke right through the sternum. Fortunately for him, there’s a creepy guy who grabs Dracula’s magic ring and a bunch of Dracula dust, and he buries it all just outside a church graveyard.
Fast forward exactly 100 years, and we’re with a cringingly straight-edge gang — err, group — of youths who apparently like to party at mortified rich people’s houses, dancing and making out to some of the corniest “rock music” from a featured band that’s about as hardcore as The Lovin’ Spoonful, making a run for it just before the fuzz shows up. They meet up at a bar called The Cavern where they drink coffee and Coca-cola right from the bottle (with straws).
Riddled with caffeine and trying to come up with a new thrill, they listen to their new friend Johnny when he suggests they all visit an abandoned church down by the embankment that night at midnight, so they can all conduct a black mass. You know, for kicks. Some of the kids are reluctant, but they’re convinced that they don’t have anything to be suspicious about with good old Johnny Alucard.
The black mass scene is actually really cool. Johnny’s gotten shrouds for everybody to wear, and he’s got a modern reel-to-reel tape player for music and sound effects.
After things go badly, there’s a surprisingly sophisticated edit that I wouldn’t have expected from a Hammer movie. Some characters are talking about the first victim and deciding she must be all right, and we get a smash cut to a shot of her body as some little kids discover it.
It would be easy to expect too much from the promise of Dracula A.D. 1972 and come away disappointed. Dracula never once sets foot in a nightclub, although the one they do show a lot of would be perfect for him, with purple lighting and a lot of gothic-looking metalwork. And it does very much feel like a bunch of men in their 40s and 50s trying to be trendy and connect with the youth. Our most important young person, Jessica Van Helsing, spends much of the movie dressed as a hippie milkmaid, and in one scene is wearing a tunic with a patch that reads “Have A Nice Day” with flowers.
But if you’re interested in seeing a Hammer take on the whole Dracula formula but in early 1970s London, I think it delivers. The movie seems to be more interested in mimicking detective stories and police procedurals than London youth culture, so there’s a lot of cop show music with a horn section and rhythm guitars going heavy on the wah-wah pedals. Peter Cushing as Van Helsing’s grandson, old-man running through the streets of London as Mannix-style music plays on the soundtrack, is A-number-one as far as I’m concerned.
I also love a moment when Van Helsing, the expert on the occult and lifelong scholar of the lore of Count Dracula, needs to draw a diagram to figure out the cunning cipher behind Johnny’s surname.
It’s especially great when he’s talking to a police detective later on and casually says, “By the way, his name is Dracula backwards,” like it’s totally obvious and the detective should’ve already figured it out immediately.
So no, Dracula A.D. 1972 doesn’t quite live up to the movie you might think of when you hear the title, since it’s more interested in being a contemporary iteration of the Lee-and-Cushing movies than updating the formula in any significant way. But cool vampire hunters and Van Helsing descendants chasing Count Dracula throughout the 1970s would be coming just a year later. Peter Cushing walked through the streets of Chelsea (clutching his side and stopping for breath every few minutes) so that Blade could run.
2026-10-05 01:00:00
As a recent subscriber to Shudder, I assumed that everything in their catalog would be appropriate Spooktober viewing. When I got hit by the triple whammy of the title “The Terrornauts,” a fantastic logotype, and an evocative screenshot of a woman on a planet with two obviously-superimposed moons, I was hooked. This was going to be some charmingly old-school sci-fi horror.
During the opening credits, I saw that it was from Amicus Productions, which got me even more excited. None of the Amicus movies I’ve seen so far have been what you’d call good, but they’ve all been fun and charming as hell. That streak ends with The Terrornauts, which is one of the dullest movies I’ve ever seen.
The story involves a SETI-like project where a small group of extremely British scientists are borrowing time on a radio telescope to listen for signals from extraterrestrial life. When they finally do receive a strange signal, they try to transmit a message in response. That’s when aliens take them away, building and all, to a distant asteroid for some nefarious purpose.
If you’re like me (and I know I am), you can hear that and be completely on board. The problem is that the “action,” such as it is, takes an eternity to get started. Literally the first half of the movie is entirely about a couple of scientists having to deal with British bureaucracy and being worried that their project is going to lose its funding. Eventually the movie introduces a very fussy accountant and a very oi I don’t very much loike the look of that one, I don’t! woman who runs a tea service cart, both intended as comic relief. But they’re about as close to actual comedy as carob is to actual chocolate.
When stuff does finally get moving, it’s a decent enough 1960s sci-fi concept (it’s based on a novel called The Wailing Asteroid), with a solid idea of why and how aliens would want to be contacting Earthlings. And a pretty intriguing idea of the lead scientist having found something at an archeological dig as a child, something that led to his wanting to become an astronomer and find a way to communicate with extraterrestrials.
The way that story is delivered is via sub-Doctor Who sets, robots, and creatures, and some models that make Godzilla movies look hyper-realistic. The Earthlings do eventually end up meeting a group of aliens, and even calling them “low effort” is giving them too much credit.
There’s a sequence on the alien planet that, by contrast with the rest of the film, is way too short. Perhaps they could only afford one day of shooting on location, and they had to hurry back to their cheap set? In any case, it means that our action packed climax is a lot of this:
It’s not a horror movie by any definition, but I’m still including it in Spooktober simply because I got fooled into thinking that it would be charmingly dated sci-fi horror. There is about 15 minutes worth of stuff that’s interesting enough to be charming, and it probably would’ve been suitable for a children’s series that was a knock-off of Doctor Who or Star Trek.
I complain about Letterboxd a lot, but occasionally it delivers, and I did see this gem of a review from a user called “slippers”: “One of the best films ever made about terrornauts.”
2026-10-04 04:26:06
I’m not certain that I’ve ever read The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson; it’s possible I did and entirely forgot about it. I have a vague memory of reading the first chapter in high school English, because the phrase “some houses are born bad” has always stood out. That idea of a place that is not just haunted by horrible events that occurred there, but is a place of evil itself. The past tragedies are the symptoms, not the cause.
I do know that I have seen three adaptations of the source material: Mike Flanagan’s series The Haunting of Hill House, which uses the book as inspiration and adds in elements of sprawling Stephen King multi-general stories, and Lake Mungo‘s unsettling depiction of ghosts as lurking in our periphery, unstuck in time. I saw the awful 1999 adaptation, which misses the point entirely but nailed the casting of Catherine Zeta-Jones as Theo. And I’ve now twice seen the 1963 classic by Robert Wise, starring Julie Christie and Claire Bloom.
For spooky season, I rewatched the 1963 version, convinced that now that I’m more mature and refined, I’d be better able to appreciate all of the nuances that I missed years ago. After all, it’s almost universally beloved. And it’s regularly listed as one of the all-time classic ghost story movies, along with The Innocents. I finally watched that one last year, and I did come away from it with a greater appreciation for the existential horror of a ghost story, in a way that would’ve probably been completely lost on me even a decade ago.
But I still just don’t like The Haunting. And the only thing that’s changed from the first time I saw it and didn’t like it: I think I have a better understanding of why I don’t like it. It’s a case of going into an adaptation with the right ideas, but choosing the wrong way to execute on them.
The 1999 version feels even more dated than the original, since it is 100% a millennial Hollywood take on how to adapt psychological horror to a movie. All of the subtext is made text, and all the scares are made explicit, complete with turn-of-the-century CGI guaranteeing that just about everything in the house is animated at some point.
So credit to the original for understanding that what makes the story special are those moments of inexplicable horror. Characters unable to explain exactly why they are so terrified, but it’s all-encompassing and overwhelming. The irrational certainty that something is going to do even worse than kill them, but swallow them, making them eternally a part of itself. It recognizes that the modern attempts to give a psychological explanation of the fear of ghosts, calling it a fear of the unknown, misses the more primal terror of a ghost story: the fear of being forever trapped in a place, eternally walking it alone, disconnected from both humanity and the afterlife.
But The Haunting does this mostly via voice-overs. Eleanor is constantly looking, haunted, off into the middle distance while her inner monologue takes over the soundtrack. We hear her loneliness and her desperation to escape and find a group of people where she can fit in, and we hear that gradually turn into madness. And isn’t that supposed to be how books work? To describe scenes where things like a bump in the night can go from odd to terrifying, not necessarily because of an immediate physical threat, but because of a character’s mindset?
My problem with that is that it never stops feeling clumsy. I’ve got a strong aversion to voice-overs and text scrolls1 and other fallbacks in general, moments where filmmakers declare that they can’t think of a better way to depict something cinematically. And throughout The Haunting, it just comes across to me as a lack of confidence either in Christie’s performance, or the ability of a movie to depict a character’s mindset without explaining exactly what they’re thinking. I would even have preferred there to be more of Eleanor’s inner voice being more of a dialogue than a monologue, more a sense of her arguing with herself as her mental instability takes over.
Even in this movie, her introductory scene does a much better job of portraying her mindset without giving her thoughts a VO. You really understand how awful and unstable her home life is, with the condescension and the sniping from her brother-in-law and sister, the mocking from her awful niece — “Auntie Nell is blinking again!” is so effective here, but it’s a tic that is never really repeated — and most of all, the horrible children’s music that almost overwhelms the dialogue of the scene. That scene is the best at making you fully comprehend Eleanor’s mental state, in a way that’s genuinely empathetic instead of sympathetic, in a way that nothing later in the movie ever achieves.2
There are other aspects that felt clumsy and dated to me as well, making The Haunting a movie that was roughly contemporary with Psycho but still feels at least a decade older. The music is as overpowering as the corniest Hammer or Castle horror movie. And even more disappointing to me is the sound design. This movie’s most terrifying scenes depend almost entirely on the sound design, and in my opinion, they simply don’t work.
The centerpiece is that first night, when Nell and Theo are alone in a bedroom when they hear a pounding sound thundering through the house. It might be the crucial scene of the movie, the whole mission statement of a story about abject, overwhelming, irrational fear of what might be just outside the door, trying to get in. But here, it just doesn’t sound right, in a way that to me suggests limitations of technology or artistry instead of being deliberately otherworldly. There’s no sense of a source to it, or anything really identifiable to make it eerie. It just comes across as someone banging on something with the microphones’ gain turned up too high, so it’s muffled and directionless.
The best scene in Willow Creek, for instance, is entirely built around a similar idea, and it’s one of the scariest scenes I’ve ever seen in any movie, actually making me squirm, remembering the moments in my life when I’ve been the most afraid of the dark, and desperately wanting it to just end.
There’s a similar scene later, where Eleanor stares at a pattern on the wall for so long that an evil face emerges from it, and she hears laughter, she becomes furious that the house is torturing a child, and she keeps being distracted by how tightly Theo is squeezing her hand. And again, I just felt that it was all undercut by the relentless VO, the sound, and the camera work. Something as straightforward as more inventive lighting could’ve done a lot to really bring out the psychological horror of seeing evil in the pattern on the wall, but this just seems like the filmmakers were content to say “see, you can make out a creepy face” and leave it at that.
Another aspect of The Haunting that makes it feel dated is the camera work. There are some moments of great cinematography in it; a key one is a distorted shot of Eleanor walking down a dark hallway, which is revealed to have been looking at her through an old mirror. But there are also what appear to be handheld zooms and other cheap camera tricks that, again, feel more like they come from The House on Haunted Hill than The Haunting of Hill House. Throughout, I was frustrated that The Haunting was telling me instead of showing me, and then disappointed when it tried to show me, but seemed to resort to using all the tricks of 1950s B-movie horror.
Whenever I have a take on a movie that runs so far counter to the consensus on it, I try and make sure to triple-check my work. So I looked at other Letterboxd reviews, to see if there were some aspect that I was missing. And because it’s a social media site in the 2020s, the comments are overwhelmed with observations on how OMG Theo is a lesbian with ESP!
And simmer down, kids. In the 1963 version of The Haunting, the subtext is so far buried that it’s rendered entirely inert. I don’t think it would’ve even occurred to me had I not seen the 1999 adaptation first, which makes it more explicit. In this version of The Haunting, Theo’s sexual or romantic orientation is given just the barest hint of a mention, when Eleanor asks if she’s married, and Theo says “no” with a look that suggests “there’s more to that answer that we won’t be talking about.”
What’s far more interesting about Theo, who’s the most interesting character in the movie, is her independence and self-confidence. She is uniquely capable of empathy for Nell, because her ESP makes her uniquely capable of instantly reading people, but she’s also everything that Nell isn’t. Stylish, self-assured, more fully realized as a person who doesn’t need anyone else to complete her or validate her. Her assumed sexuality is an aspect of that, but it’s far from the most interesting aspect.
She repeatedly describes her and Nell’s relationship as being “like sisters,” and I suppose if you’re eager, you could read it as a sly acknowledgment of subtext. But then she goes on to spend most of the movie treating Nell like an actual sister. All of the things that was missing from Eleanor’s relationship with her real sister: joking with her, letting her paint her nails, suggesting a new hair style, being with her as she experiments with alcohol. And all of the things that she got plenty of from her real sister: cruel mockery, accusations of how she treated her mother, sudden inexplicable coldness.
So looking for signs of queer subtext feels about as relevant as the videos that went through Mike Flanagan’s miniseries adaptation, looking for ghosts hiding in the background. It may be fun, and it was certainly intentional on the part of the storytellers, but it doesn’t actually mean much of anything on its own. “Look! I saw a lesbian!” is much less interesting than a character who stands both as a contrast to Eleanor and also the one most capable of understanding her. She’s also somewhat on the fringes of society, not having the traditional sorts of connections with other people. But unlike Eleanor, she’s never a victim.
Claire Bloom’s performance and her look are both excellent and perfect for the part, but I felt like she was let down by the screenplay. Her swings in behavior and random snipes at Eleanor don’t seem to be motivated by anything; it’s just that sometimes she’s kind and other times she’s cruel for no reason. Is the movie being an unreliable narrator, and showing us the version of Theo as Eleanor sees her in the moment, as her mind is breaking down? Who knows? When the movie is constantly giving us a voice-over of Eleanor’s exact mindset, adding a layer of misdirection in the form of an unreliable narrator is going to be completely lost, anyway.
Incidentally, the handling of Theo in Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House is one of the ways I think it’s a better adaptation, by means of veering farther from the source material. Here, in addition to the Stephen King and Lake Mungo, Flanagan adds a little Rogue from The X-Men, giving Theo distinctive gloves that prevent her from being overwhelmed by her ability to involuntarily read people with any skin contact. It’s an extremely direct and explicit image, but it also shows you exactly what it wants to show you about the character. Unlike Eleanor’s, her feeling of isolation is self-imposed, because her empathy is too much. It’s juggling some of the ideas of the original story, throwing in a few decades’ worth of pop culture, and synthesizing something new that’s faithful in concepts if not in details.
So ultimately, my take on The Haunting is that its intentions were in exactly the right place, in understanding that B-movie scares aren’t what make the story scary. But it undermines those intentions by applying too much B-movie filmmaking to it, making the end result feel even more dated than movies that preceded it.
Edited to add: While I was hating on this classic movie, I totally forgot to call out the one scene that I think works, completely and unreservedly. There’s a scene where all of the characters are in a room as the house’s evil is pounding through the halls, trying to get in, and we see the door breathing. The solid wood itself has become elastic, as something seems to be pushing its way not just into the room, but at the barrier between the supernatural and the real world.
It’s a fantastic effect, expertly done. And it’s so effective that Disney would borrow it years later for their Haunted Mansion. (But it’s undermined yet again, in my opinion, by the movie keeping all of its focus on Eleanor instead of the character that some of them should be more immediately invested in. More grounds for Eleanor being an unreliable narrator who’s trying to make everything about her, but not done strongly or consistently enough to make it land).
2026-10-03 01:00:00
Mārama is currently a Shudder exclusive, which I’m hoping will do a lot to bring it to a wider audience. It’s the debut feature from writer and director Taratoa Stappard, and it has the feeling of a very earnest and opinionated production that is doing a lot with a modest budget.
The story centers on Mary, a young Māori woman who’s been summoned to Yorkshire from her home in Wellington, by a mysterious letter from a man who claimed to know about her birth parents. She soon finds herself inside an impossibly dark gothic mansion, filled with haunted mirrors and strange visions, owned by a wealthy Englishman who seems to be obsessed with Māori culture. He’s learned the language, he’s taught the language to his granddaughter, and he invites Mary to live at the mansion as the girl’s governess.
Based on the premise and the few promotional images, I’d expected this to be similar to Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, or something like Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito. And it is, somewhat, although it’s much more earnest and serious in tone than either one of them. It’s more like a drama with horrific scenes than a full-on horror movie, which isn’t what I usually associate with Shudder. And it’s so eager to show proper respect to Māori culture that it sometimes feels more like the culture is a set of taboos not to be violated, instead of something to be celebrated. The result is that it’s a movie where I like the ideas behind it a good bit more than I like the movie itself.
Choosing a gothic horror to tell a story about colonialism is absolutely brilliant. And all the standard elements of gothic horror fit perfectly with a culture that so strongly values respect for ancestors and looking to the past; the phrase “walking backwards into the future” is repeated several times throughout the movie. The dark mansion in the English countryside, filled with repression and secrets, cursed by the sins of the past that are waiting to be revealed by the young governess forced to make it her new home, it all fits perfectly into place.
Especially when that kind of you-don’t-belong-here wrongness that plagued the protagonist of Rebecca is here not just as a reflection of her station or her relationships, but the entirety of her identity. A big part of the feeling of dread in Mārama comes from the sense of people and a culture who’ve been transplanted to the wrong place. When wealthy Englishman Cole speaks the language and has the artwork, it doesn’t feel respectful, but stolen.
But as with a lot of Mārama, it’s better at making you recognize the way you’re supposed to feel than it is at making you actually feel it. As one example: there’s a dramatic moment when Mary/Mārama is shown a Māori house that Cole has moved to his gardens in Yorkshire. She sees it as a desecration, enough to pointedly and accusingly ask him about it in a later scene. But the way it was presented, it wasn’t clear whether this was offensive to her as a Māori person, or offensive to her personally for some reason, tied to the visions she keeps having. And I couldn’t tell the scale of the offense, either. Is it generally disrespectful, or is it along the lines of exhuming a grave?
Normally, this would settle comfortably into the category of “not everything was made for you to get it.” But I do think that the first half of the movie was so unnecessarily impenetrable that it backfired. I started second-guessing the details I thought I’d heard, and then the entire premise. Was Mary raised by Māori or Europeans? (There’s a line where she mentions her adoptive parents, to explain how she speaks French, but I forgot the details). How much of this is a culture that she lived in, vs part of her ethnicity? Is the movie suggesting an innate understanding of culture vs one developed through lived experience? Are the filmmakers suggesting that?
Around the midpoint of the movie, Mārama does a complete 180 from impenetrable to too-obvious, with a scene where the characters are so over-the-top in their disrespect of the Māori culture and mockery of the people that it would be impossible for even the densest person in the audience to misinterpret it. But I do at least appreciate a movie where one of the most horrific scenes is one that’s about cultural appropriation and arrogant disrespect.
It also becomes the clear standout scene of the entire movie, as Mārama, wearing the crimson dress chosen for her by her host, becomes so enraged that she performs a haka directed at the crowd. (In front of a painting honoring Captain Cook). It’s fantastic.
It’s also one of the only moments in the movie where you really feel it, instead of understanding how you’re supposed to feel. I don’t think it’s a huge surprise that Mārama transforms from gothic horror to revenge horror. Which is another genre that happens to fit perfectly into a story about the evils of colonialism. And the strength is that the appropriately convoluted and dark, lurid story involving Mārama herself isn’t the only thing driving it. It feels like the rage of an entire culture screaming against centuries of history.
2026-10-02 02:21:17
Stronger people than I can keep up with a movie every day for October, as part of a blog-based Countdown to Halloween, but I can only commit to watching as many horror movies this month as I can. I’ve even got a Shudder subscription and everything! For my official first-movie-in-October entry, I chose to watch Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead.
The first Phantasm movie along with its sequel are pretty inexplicable. Both in that it’s near impossible to explain what actually happens in them in any kind of coherent way, but it’s also near impossible to explain how it all still works.
I’ve heard people say that Phantasm III keeps the streak going, and in fact is their favorite in the series. That was definitely not my experience. For me, it just seemed like a movie series that was always more “interesting” and “charming” than actually good, but here is just running on fumes.
It seems like the essential elements of a Phantasm movie have now been firmly established, and they’re all present here: guns and cars, and as many cars blowing up as possible. Gruesome practical effects for the various zombies and dwarves and murder victims. The Tall Man clearly enjoying himself, raising his eyebrow and shouting “BOOOOYY.” Of course, all of the chrome Phantasm balls and all their bladed and laser-based attachments. A nonsensical story structure that can charitably be described as “dream-like.” And of course, Reggie carrying the whole franchise by being so inexplicably cool that he somehow manages to get away with being a shameless horndog.
Phantasm 3 brings back Mike’s original actor — after recapping the second movie in a way that never shows the replacement’s face, and also, hilariously, gets rid of his love interest as quickly, definitively, and joylessly as possible. It also adds Tim, an orphan who’s been living by himself in an old house and horrifically slaughtering any looters who dare intrude on his property. And Rocky, a nunchuck-wielding badass with some vague and unspecified military history, who’s apparently started a side-hustle of hog-tying and robbing strangers in mausoleums with her sister.
I think the introduction of Rocky, and of Tim’s various murder implements, are the reasons some people think highly of the third installment. The movie does have those flashes of weird originality that run throughout the series, the bits that you might not think are that great, but you definitely remember. This one has that in the form of a zombie nurse and a trio of zombie looters, a weird attack from the Tall Man’s hands, and the reveal that the balls have little brains in them.
But they also have the feel of that Key & Peele sketch about Gremlins 2: whatever they could come up with during a brainstorm went into the movie, whether or not they were able to figure out how to make it all fit. The Idea of Rocky is pretty solid: now there’s a bad-ass character. But in practice, you just get shown over and over again how absolutely useless nunchucks are against zombies and Phantasm balls.
So the movie just feels like a zombie itself. Struggling to keep a franchise alive, retaining just enough of the vestigial elements to make it recognizable, but there’s no light behind its eyes. By the end of the movie, after the fifteenth time a character popped into a scene out of nowhere, with no resolution of their previous scene — Hang on, I know for a fact that Rocky was left hanging from a balcony after losing her nunchucks! — it had killed all the energy it had built up with zombie nurse and the looters.
By that point, I just wanted it to be over. So even though there are two other movies in the series, I’ll bow out with the one that has some kinda interesting stuff in the first 30 minutes or so. And I won’t say goodbye, but “Keep your balls in the air, Reg.”
2026-09-27 08:08:28
It is a matter of public record that I only-slightly-abashedly love Godspell. I’ve been a fan ever since I was a drama club kid in high school, and I saw a production of it performed by our “rival” school across town. (And credit to them: I’ve seen an off-Broadway revival and multiple filmed or recorded versions, and I still think their staging was the best).
If you haven’t seen it, the show starts with a single trumpet and the performer playing John the Baptist/Judas solo belting out “Prepare Ye The Way of the Lord.” In most productions I’ve seen, he enters from outside the theater and marches through the audience towards the stage. It was the first time I’d seen anything like that, and it’s still fantastic.
The reason I mention all of that: I’ve been really excited to see You Had to Be There ever since I first heard about it. And as I was driving to the theater today, I thought how cool it would be if they started the movie with the trumpet and a rendition of that song. And they did, which was an immediate acknowledgement that this movie and I would be completely in sync.
The documentary isn’t about the play in general, but about a specific production, in Toronto in 1972. There’s a clip from Late Night with David Letterman where Gilda Radner talks about doing the show with Paul Shaffer, and then he plays piano while she signs the first part of “Learn Your Lessons Well.” She mentions how that show launched the careers of so many other people who would go on to become famous: Eugene Levy, Martin Short, Andrea Martin, Victor Garber, and Dave Thomas probably being the most well-known to Americans.
There’s almost no footage of the play available, just one clip from a rehearsal, and a bunch of audio recordings, many of the bootlegs made by Martin Short. So the documentary focuses on the still-living performers giving interviews about their experience before the show, the auditions and casting process, the casting changes during the show’s run, and their friendships and careers afterwards. It’s supplemented by a lot of animation done in early-1970s Hanna-Barbera TV style.
The trailer for the documentary, and the first 15 minutes or so of the movie itself, emphasize what a terrible idea it is to make a film about a stage play for which there is almost no existent recording. Hence the title, which Dave Thomas says in one of his interview clips. I was hard-wired to be into You Had to Be There, but the thing that really surprised and impressed me was how it turns that liability into a strength. By focusing almost entirely on interviews with the cast, it gives more of an insight as to why the production was so important, more than a more straightforward documentary might have.
You get personal descriptions of where these people were in their lives when they were cast, the friendships that already existed and the new ones that would form, and very personal accounts of why it meant so much to them.
Which I think is especially relevant with Godspell. The movie doesn’t actually spend that much time talking about the actual content of the play, with several of the cast simply saying they “didn’t get it” before they started the show. There are also some photographs of people in conservative Toronto protesting that it was blasphemy or a mockery of the Gospel of Matthew, along with a couple of newspaper clippings from people complaining about it.
And Levy acknowledges that it was odd at the time for someone so “visibly Jewish” to be taking over the part of Jesus later in the run, but he just says that he didn’t think that much about it. The more memorable part of that story was the request that he wax off all of his body hair. But that’s the kind of thing that you’d get from any documentary about the play itself.
The thing that makes Godspell so appealing — apart from the catchiness of all the songs, obviously — is that it’s all about accessibility. Getting through millennia of scripture, dogma, and ritual, and right to the ideas presented in the gospels, the betrayal, and the Passion. In a way that doesn’t feel “owned” but universal. It can read to everyone, whether they identify as Christian or not. I think it’s all about giving people the opportunity to form their own personal relationship with the source.
But again, to be clear, this documentary isn’t really about the play Godspell. It focuses a lot more on the group of performers and friends who had this experience change their lives, and then all of the things they’d go on to do in their careers. SNL and SCTV most notably, but really all the various directions — definitely not all of them positive — that a career in the entertainment industry can go. And how one joyful experience can create lifelong friendships.
Near the end of the movie, there’s extended footage of a dinner party where all of the interview subjects (except Thomas, if I remember correctly) have gotten together, and they all gather around Paul Shaffer at the piano to sing songs from the show. I’d never heard Andrea Martin sing not in character, and had no idea that not only did she perform the most well-known song “Day by Day,” but was excellent. (Martin Short describes her as the funniest person you’ll ever meet, which is pretty impressive when you consider all the people that Martin Short has met).
But because Gerry Salsberg, who’d played John the Baptist in that production, has passed away, they asked Eugene Levy to sing “Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord.” I never expect to get teary-eyed hearing Eugene Levy sing, but this is now the second time he’s done it. There are few things that could feel more artificial and insincere than a staged dinner party with a bunch of celebrities, but at the end of this documentary, you really do get the sense that you’ve gotten to spend some time with a bunch of absurdly talented people who’ve been friends for as long as I’ve been alive.