Redux Reviews :: Who Killed Jenny? The Doberman Did It in James Goldstone's They Only Kill Their Masters (1972)

When the sleepy seaside town of Eden's Landing is jolted out of it's perpetual bucolic slumber by the shocking death of one of its more eccentric residents (-- and judging by the locals we meet, that's saying quite a bit), it's up to the small town's police chief to unravel what few clues there are, sift through all the town's seamy secrets, and find the killer.

They Only Kill Their Masters (1972) begins with the body of Jenny Campbell (Pulford), local artist and nudie photographer, rolling in the surf, seemingly under attack by her pet Doberman that's savaging the bodies' extremities. Thinking the volatile breed went nuts and killed her, the body is recovered and the animal is scheduled to be put down. However, the autopsy not only reveals that Campbell's cause of death was not the mauling, she actually drowned in fresh-water that was made to look like salt-water, but the victim was also six-weeks pregnant.

Realizing he now has a homicide on his hands, Chief Abel Marsh (Garner) and his dippy deputies check out the victim's bungalow: that's a little too clean in some spots, namely the bathtub, and obviously ransacked in others; but the only clue he finds is a photo of a retreating, unidentifiable naked couple running along the beach. Marsh also arranges to meet with the victim's jilted ex-husband (Lawford), an obvious suspect, who reveals their divorce was caused by his wife's infidelity, not his, but swears the split was amicable and that the "other person" was, in fact, another woman. Confused by the news of his late ex-wife's condition, Campbell has no idea who it is in the photo, nor whom the baby's father could be, but agrees to meet with the equally confused Marsh later at his ex-wife’s bungalow to see if anything else seems suspicious or missing.

Meanwhile, Marsh delivers a reprieve to Murphy, the Campbell's exonerated dog, at the local vet clinic, where we meet the genial Dr. Watkins (Holbrook) and falls for his new leggy assistant, Kate Bingham (Ross), who reeducates him on the Doberman breed's dubious reputation for viciousness. Later, with his new dog in tow, things start to heat up when Marsh returns to the beach and finds the victim's bungalow engulfed in flames -- with Campbell already dead inside! Marsh catches a glimpse of the retreating killer before he roars off, but finds his own tires slashed, negating any chance of pursuit.

Adding up the clues, which, honestly, add up to the point on the graph that's exactly between shit and squat, a frustrated Marsh makes a quantum leap in logic and concludes the original victim was involved in a ménage à trois gone bad with Watkins (-- hey, it's Hal Holbrook, he's gotta be a turncoat baddie, right?,) and most probably Kate Bingham. He confronts her, accusing Kate of being the nude woman in the picture; it doesn't go well, she denies it, and things get ugly from there.

Moving on, Marsh confronts and arrests Watkins. He cops to the murder, sort of, but manages to engineer an escape and nearly kills Marsh in the process with a near lethal dose of dog tranquilizers. However, things are not quite as they seem. And will Marsh be able to recover in time to see the truth and bring the real killer to justice? The short answer? Yeah, he does. The long answer? Well, that's gonna take a little more explaining. WARNING: There be massive spoilers ahead.

Like most major studios, after a string of high-profile flops, MGM was in dire financial straits by the time the 1970s rolled around. And after a hostile takeover by Las Vegas financier, Kirk Kerkorian, former CBS exec James Aubrey was appointed to take over the studio and turn things around. To accomplish this, Aubrey ruthlessly slashed budgets, canceled productions, ran off a ton of talent, and sold off the majority of the studio's assets, including cameras, props and costumes (-- like Dorothy's ruby slippers), funneling all that cash back to the boss to help finance the new MGM Casino in Las Vegas, ushering in the era of Mega-Resorts along the famed Sin City Strip.

Also on the block was MGM's famed back-lot, and They Only Kill Their Masters was the last feature film to use these familiar landmarks before the developer's wrecking ball and bulldozers moved in. And while the film isn't a complete waste of time, and that's being pretty generous, it is a testament to the studio's corner-cutting at the time and an indictment on the quality of the behind-the-camera talent pool of that era, making it a cheap and sad last gasp for a storied franchise like MGM.

Honestly, the whole thing comes off like a tired and tepid TV Movie of the Week that's laughably whitewashed over with a few naughty words and some kinky scenarios to try and punch things up. Lane Slate's script is pretty bad, asking us to accept a lot, and hopes we won't mind when the plot dots are finally connected to reveal a concluding picture that makes little sense and comes completely out of left field. Things aren't helped out much with James Goldstone's direction, either. His pace is ... very slow. And ... deliberate. And ... horribly plodding, when it isn't tripping over the padding; the padding being a lot of cameos by some old MGM celebrities as the kooky townsfolk.

Garner, as always, is worth the time and does his best to keep things moving forward. But he always seems to be angry about something. I don't think anybody does the world weary cynic better than Garner --see The Americanization of Emily (1964) or The Rockford Files (1974-1980) as proof, but here he is way beyond cynical and needling well into bitter and downright surly. But I guess if I had to say some of that clunky dialogue I might be a little cranky and churlish, too.

Meanwhile, the ever beautiful Katherine Ross -- The Graduate (1967), The Stepford Wives (1975), is pretty much wasted in a thankless, sleep-walking / eye-candy roll as Marsh's squeeze, and later punching bag. And sadder still, with no help from the script, there is absolutely no spark or chemistry between the leads at all whatsoever. I mean: Holy crap, was that "romantic dinner" scene painful to sit through.

Which leaves us with the ultimate victim in this film (-- no, not the viewer), and one final cinematic kick to the crotch by the cheating script. Turns out Holbrook -- unlike in Magnum Force (1973) and The Star Chamber (1983) was innocent for once and was covering for the real killer: his kooky, bi-sexual wife -- whose brief, dry-belch of screen-time before the conclusion totally justifies my calling shenanigans on the whole damned movie, who was played by a barely recognizable June Allyson.

It's true. I thought it was Betsy Palmer until I checked the credits. That's right: the doting wife of Jimmy Stewart in many a classic movie -- the Depends lady fer chrissake -- is our psychotic, sex-addicted lesbian killer. Wow. Just, wow.

They Only Kill Their Masters (1972) Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) / P: William Belasco / AP: Barry Mendelson / D: James Goldstone / W: Lane Slate / C: Michel Hugo / E: Edward A. Biery / M: Perry Botkin Jr. / S: James Garner, Katharine Ross, Hal Holbrook, Harry Guardino, Tom Ewell, Peter Lawford, June Allyson

Trailer Park :: What You Can't See Might Kill You : John Carpenter's The Fog (1980)

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"I don't know what happened to Antonio Bay tonight. Something came out of the fog and tried to destroy us ... But if this has been anything but a nightmare, and if we don't wake up to find ourselves safe in our beds, it could come again. To the ships at sea  who can hear my voice, look across the water, into the darkness. Look for the fog."

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I was about four or five when I saw The Ten Commandments for the very first time on TV; and one of the things that always stuck with me from this first viewing was the last plague Moses sics on the Pharaoh, when the Almighty sent his Angel of Death to kill all the first born sons of Egypt. (Well, that and that whole parting of the Red Sea thing...) This was realized in the film with an unearthly fog, creeping and seeping through the streets, and to even touch this vapor meant instantaneous death -- and, to me, it seemed regardless of your birth order. 

Several years later, while driving home on a lonely country road I crested a hill and, in one of those bizarre barometric twists of nature, spied a small fog bank on the other side, barely three-feet high, that devoured the road ahead of me. As I dipped down into the small valley below the fog engulfed the headlights and broke around the car's hood, but then immediately stitched back together just past the trunk. Intrigued by this encompassing soup, I pulled over, kicked the hazards on, and got out. The moon was full and bright and lit the mist up like white liquid under a black UV-light. Wading into this cloud, the vapor whipped up in my wake as I ran my hands over the top of it, like I was wading in a pool of water; and then, on a whim, got down on my hands and knees where, to my surprise in the headlamp glow, I saw about a six-inch gap between the gloom and the ground. Above, as I continued to move around, all that was visible were some fence-posts, a nearby windmill, and the top of the car. This was all as cool as it sounds (I hope), and my words don't do it justice, but then, just like when you’ve been in the water for a while and that stupid shark music starts playing in your head and gives you the willies as you contemplate your place on the food chain, a small, dour pit or irrationality developed in my stomach and settled there as I smiled sardonically at myself, wondering if there was anything lurking nearby, no matter how nonsensical its existence, just beyond my sense to detect it properly. 

No. This wasn't any kind of old school biblical dread that I felt that night, but ghosts. Ghosts of the unsettled dead, who linger, fed by a need for vengeance, and walk the earth until their untimely and unjust deaths are avenged ... That's right, in the middle of nowhere, and several time zones removed from any major body of water, I was worried that Captain Blake and his men were out there, somewhere, waiting for me to turn my back to his best advantage. So, yeah, you could say John Carpenter's The Fog made a helluva impression on me, too...

Video courtesy of horrornymphs.

The Fog opens on a quiet beach near Antonio Bay, where an old salt enthralls a group of kids gathered around a campfire with ghostly tales of the sea. As the fat full moon rises and the brackish tide slowly ebbs, our storyteller listens to a forlorn wind as he checks his watch, that shows five minutes to midnight. 

Time for one more story:

When the clock strikes twelve, he direly intones, it will be the 21st of April -- a date that will live in infamy, we’ll soon find out. For on that date, exactly 100 years ago, the Elizabeth Dane got lost in a dense, meteorological defying fog in these very waters. And when the crew spotted what they thought was a signal fire to lead them safely in, it was only someone’s campfire. Terminally off course, then, the ship cracked up on the rocks off Spivey Point, just over yonder, and sank, with all hands lost to the cold and dark and unforgiving sea. And as the Elizabeth Dane settled to the bottom, seemingly having served its aberrant purpose, the preternatural fog disappeared ... Now, I know this story sounds more tragic than scary, but this tale ends with ominous portent, when the old man prophesizes that when that unnatural fog returns, those doomed and drowned men will rise up out of the water and seek revenge on whoever lit that misleading fire just as a distant church bell strikes midnight -- in more ways than one -- on the sleepy little hamlet of Antonio Bay, whose sinister secrets are about to surface and be cleaved wide open!

Okay, then, now, that beginning sequence with John Houseman's preamble on the beach sneakily lulls the viewer into lowering your defenses and really sucks you in (...and let's face it: Houseman just reading the phone-book in these surroundings would be spooky enough). And this eeriness continues right through the opening credits as the town is overrun with bizarre and vandalous poltergeist-like phenomenon. Most shots have a clock in them somewhere, showing the Witching Hour as it slowly tics by. If there is no clock, resident disc jockey Stevie Wayne (Barbeau) gives the time over the air. It's a very subtle -- yet very satisfying, sequence. But, the film just cannot sustain the mood past this point. There are a few flashes of brilliance later, but the film loses its focus somewhere in the middle, switching back and forth between characters and plot-threads so fast you'll get whiplash. And after the scatter-shot middle, we're left with an all too familiar ending where Carpenter resorts back to his Howard Hawks roots and gets his Rio Bravo on with another hole-up and siege scenario, similar to Assault on Precinct 13, only this time with water-logged zombie sailors.

It’s been documented that Carpenter has a framed copy of Variety in his possession that proclaims The Fog was the biggest moneymaker for a certain period in 1980. He says he keeps it as a reminder for how close he came to a complete, cinematic disaster. Co-writing the script with his long time collaborator Debra Hill (Halloween, Escape from New York), the film was meant to be a ghostly/ghastly homage to Lovecraftian themes of terrible family secrets, curses, and evil-squishy things hell bent on vengeance. And unlike his other films, The Fog truly is a straight-up ghost story designed to titillate, creep-up, and give you a bad case of the drizzles. We hear a lot of death in this movie, but we rarely see it. Once principal photography was completed -- aided, abetted and greatly enhanced by the efforts of cinematographer Dean Cundey, another Carpenter regular, the director turned the film over to his trusty editors, Charles Bornstein and Tommy Wallace, and began hammering out the film's soundtrack. But after splicing all of it together, the end results were rather dire. Finding it too plodding and too slow, Carpenter initially thought about biting the bullet and letting the film ride, but then, with the studio's encouragement, who felt the film lacked sufficient shocks, the director decided to try and salvage it. He took a month, rewrote and re-shot several scenes, and even redid the film’s score, then spliced it back together with the old footage into something that he and AVCO/Embassy could live with. When the film was finally released, The Fog didn’t receive as much acclaim as Halloween but it did do very well at the box office.

There are a few interesting subplots that are brought up, like when Solley (Curtis) and Castle (Atkins) find and search the inexplicably swamped and salt-encrusted Sea Grass, which inevitably leads to a reanimated corpse in the morgue. Cool, yes, but this also reinforces one of my biggest beefs I have with the movie -- another interesting plot development that's spooky enough as an isolated incident but only adds confusion when looking at the whole. And making matters worse, more often than not these tangents are left to die on the vine. Are the other missing sailors, Dan the Weatherman, and Mrs. Kobritz now among the dead assaulting the town? Close scrutiny of some of the publicity materials show that they very well could be. And, more importantly, were all the victims direct descendants of the six original conspirators like Father Malone (Holbrook), whose church was built with the blood-stained gold? 

Despite these complaints, I do like this film -- really, and quite a bit, actually. Most of the problems I have can probably be blamed on its patchwork origins and over-tinkering after the fact; and I've been told that a lot of the questions and holes the plot doesn't answer or fill in are expanded upon in Dennis Etchison's novelization, and even confirms some of my theories and suspicions.

Perhaps lost in the, forgive me, fog of Carpenter's more famous films, The Fog probably deserves to be brought out into the sun more often, which can burn away any and all misgivings. Besides, it is really, really creepy. A slow and slithering creep, sure, but sometimes, those are the best kind.

This post is part of the John Carpenter Blogathon, originating over at J.D.'s Radiator Heaven. Thanks for throwing out such a wide net and allowing me to participate. Now click on over there and check out the other entries. Good reading, to you all! 

The Fog (1980) E.D.I. :: Debra Hill Productions :: AVCO Embassy Pictures / EP: Charles B. Bloch / P: Debra Hill / AP: Barry Bernardi, Pegi Brotman / D: John Carpenter / W: John Carpenter. Debra Hill / C: Dean Cundey / E: Charles Bornstein,Tommy Lee Wallace / M: John Carpenter / S: Adrienne Barbeau, Tom Atkins, Jamie Lee Curtis, Janet Leigh, Hal Holbrook, Nancy Loomis, John Houseman

The Doberman Did It :: A Beergut Reaction to They Only Kill Their Masters (1972)

This review has been moved. Click the link to read on. 

They Only Kill Their Masters (1972) Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) / P: William Belasco / AP: Barry Mendelson / D: James Goldstone / W: Lane Slate / C: Michel Hugo / E: Edward A. Biery / M: Perry Botkin Jr. / S: James Garner, Katharine Ross, Hal Holbrook, Harry Guardino, Tom Ewell, Peter Lawford, June Allyson