My latest AndersonVision review, though not so kind in nature!
SEIZURE United States, 1974 U.S. Release Date: ? Running Length: 94 minutes MPAA Classification: R Theatrical Aspect Ratio: ?
Starring: Jonathan Frid, Martine Beswick, Joseph Sirola, Christina Pickles, Herve Villechaize, Anne Meacham, Roger De Koven, Troy Donahue, Mary Woronov, Richard Cox, Henry Judd Baker Directed by – Oliver Stone Written by – Edward Mann and Oliver Stone Cinematography: Roger Racine Original Score: Lee Gagnon Studio: Cinerama Releasing Corporation
Film Rating – A star and ½ out of 5 (3 out of 10)
Ladies and Gentlemen, I am quite displeased to present to you my first true negative review for AndersonVision. Instead of dishing out such crapper classics like “Highlander 2: The Quickening” and “Hudson Hawk,” I decided to give my royal flogging to a picture that itself is super obscure, even within the giant wave of European art house exploitation horror pictures of the 1960s and 70s.
In fact, the only reason it’s remembered at all is that it was the directorial debut of Oliver Stone. Yes, you read that right. The same Mr. Stone that after this insignificant failure, he would become a top gun of an Oscar-winning screenplay writer in Hollywood, then his directing career took off like Ray Liotta on cocaine with the Oscar-winning “Platoon” followed by several more good and great pictures of his career.
However, like Francis Ford Coppola’s own zero-budget horror-themed directing debut “Dementia 13,” people wouldn’t have realized from watching this movie that Stone was on his way to filmmaking success. Well, sort of.
If anything, there are indications of film schematic philosophy that will re-surface in Stone’s later movies, though with greater success in those films. Going hand-held into the chaotic vegetation of the forest, which we will see in “Platoon,” rapid-edited montage clip of footage from earlier in the film will happen in “Natural Born Killers,” bastard stock-hungry millionaire from “Wall Street,” color-tinting like “JFK” and “Nixon,” and so on.
Of course, unlike those other films, these ideas don’t work to save the film from its ultimate fate. In spirit and ambition, I assume Stone wanted to make for a macabre morality tale, along with such horror fantasy genre conventions that might have been found in the pulp paper-works of the Victorian Era. For we have a horror author Edmond Blackstone (Frid) who is suffering from horrific nightmares on the eve of a weekend party with a wide range of guests. He dreams of three evil people that terrorize his family and friends, but when Edmond proceeds to write and draw these devilish creatures, they themselves arrive for a night of horror. Edmond’s nightmare is happening again, but this time its real…
If anything, I respect Stone’s intentions, but such lofty noble thoughts are undermined by the reality that such allegorical representations of evil, whatever from past times of Earth or mythology, end up being that of a dwarf (Villechaize, before “Fantasy Island”) who seems almost the non-intentionally silly ancestor of Mini-Me, a strong black executioner (Baker) who looks like a reject from “Star Trek,” and a black Queen of Evil (Beswick) who seems like a carbon Xerox copy of similar femme fatale figures from the European horror mood pictures of the time, though not as seductive on an evil level, nor as menacing as such. Never mind that Stone himself apparently was aiming for a twist shock ending to which would follow the grand literary tradition of unreliable narrators, specifically the American classical masterpiece short story, “An Occurrence at Owl Bridge,” but again like much of the film, it doesn’t compute like it should, nor is it as surprising as Stone probably hoped for.
Not every directorial debut can be a home run like “”Duel” or “Reservoir Dogs”. Sometimes directors are learning the ropes and managing their intentions, so I do give Stone some leeway on that regard. But yet, watching such initial works from people that would later be cited as masters or among the greats is morbid curiosity, especially those pictures that fail. Though with “Seizure,” this is a real hard to find movie that hasn’t been on VHS since a brief run in the late 80’s (to capitalize on Stone’s career emergence) and of which apparently Stone tried to bury, much like Stanley Kubrick’s “Fear & Desire”.
I do understand why Stone would want nobody to ever know, much less see, this early weak work from him, but people have got to start somewhere.
