Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with the next installment of A Movie A Day: Halloween 2010 edition!
[For the entirety of October I will be showcasing one horror film each day. Every film is pulled from my DVD shelf or streamed via Netflix Instant and will be one I haven’t seen. Unlike my A Movie A Day or A Movie A Week columns there won’t necessarily be connectors between each film, but you’ll more than likely see patterns emerge day to day.]
MAN IN THE ATTIC is another title that I bought simply because it was a horror movie twofer disc that had a movie starring a favorite actor. I didn’t read anything about it, but I knew the title MAN IN THE ATTIC and that it starred Jack Palance. Sold!
Then, to my great pleasure, I find that Palance isn’t just playing some random creepy dude, but Jack the Ripper himself.
I love Jack the Ripper tales. There’s something about the foggy period London setting and the overall mystery surrounding the true life brutal slayings that is endlessly fascinating to me.
There’s so much room to play with this history because there’s a perfect mixture of documented fact and still unsolved mystery.
For instance, this story is about a handsome, yet odd, Pathologist named Slade (Palance) who rents a room from Frances Bavier (Aunt Bee herself). Bavier soon begins to suspect that her new tenant is Jack the Ripper.
You’d think the movie would be about this mystery, but it instead if focuses on the possibility that The Ripper could have fallen in love. In this case, Slade finds himself attracted to the girl downstairs, a relative of the home’s owners and an actress on the cusp of fame.
We come to learn that Slade has an obsession with actresses. He loves and hates them just as he loved and hated his actress mother, a woman he believed to be beautiful, but evil after driving his father to alcoholism and an early grave.
Lilly Bonner (Constance Smith) is this girl and she finds herself in quite an interesting love triangle. She doesn’t know it, of course, but on one side she has Jack the Ripper and the other she has Byron Palmer’s Inspector Paul Warwick, Scotland Yard’s head of the Ripper murders.
The meat of the movie is in the sequences of both men in the same room, verbally sparring as Warwick becomes more and more suspicious of Slade. It’s quite interesting to see this suspicion take root because it sure seemed to me that Warwick wanted Slade out of the way in order to have Lilly all to himself more than a pure desire to solve The Ripper case.
In fact Warwick himself almost comes across as a shadier character than the actual Ripper. There’s a fantastic scene in the middle of the movie where Warwick is giving a tour of the Black Museum to Lilly and Slade (whom Lilly invites on what Warwick saw as a date). Now, this place is a shrine to the macabre and Warwick acts as if it’s a trophy room, happily pointing to a series of death masks of executed murderers and describing the history of a myriad of murder weapons.
The callousness of this officer offends even Jack the Ripper and to think this was his idea of a good date to boot makes me question the wiring of this man’s brain. And he’s supposed to be the good guy!
In fact, all the good guys seem to either be fuck-ups or kinda creepy in their own right. There’s a subplot of two cops walking their beat around White Chapel. We see them twice and each time they walk a girl home only to have the Ripper murder the lady they were just escorting. Two murders! Those guys must feel like shit!
Palance is fantastic as Slade, really selling the inner turmoil of this tortured killer. He views Lilly as his salvation and she just might well have been if things had turned out differently. He portrays The Ripper as a conflicted individual, someone who wants to be at rest, settle down with the right woman who understands and accepts him, but there’s also a significant pride in his work that we see clearly in his dialogue with Inspector Warwick. It’s a great performance and one that deserves more recognition.
I’d also like to note the beautiful and crisp black and white photography of Mr. Leo Tover whose work you know from THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL. It’s a right pretty picture, I tell ya’.
Final Thoughts: I found Man in the Attic to be a pleasantly surprising character study of one of the most fascinating killers in mankind’s history. I’m a sucker for Jack the Ripper tales and What If? stories, so I’m an easy mark for a film like this, but it’s a genuinely well-made flick that would make a helluva double-bill with another great Jack the Ripper What If? flick TIME AFTER TIME. This one’s an easy recommendation.
Currently in print on DVD: YES
Currently available on Netflix Instant: NO
Here are the next week’s worth of AMAD titles:
Monday, October 11th: NEW YEAR’S EVIL (1980)
Tuesday, October 12th: PROPHECY (1979)
Wednesday, October 13th: THE OTHER (1972)
Thursday, October 14th: THE MUMMY (1959)
Friday, October 15th: THE GORGON (1964)
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Saturday, October 16th: MAD LOVE (1935)
Sunday, October 17th: REPULSION (1965)
Tomorrow we hit up an ‘80s schlocker called NEW YEAR’S EVIL thanks to the glorious Netflix Instant!
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
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