As October rolls around again, the days become shorter and the sundowns spookier, the seasonal need for haunting cinema becomes a thing. Aside from those cinematic anomalies by filmmakers from each generation creating their own Horror movie premises (Jacques Tourneur, Jack Arnold, George Romero, John Carpenter, Wes Craven, Clive Barker, etc.) certain classic Horror movie mainstays seem to get a celluloid rebranding every decade or so. Vampires, Mad Scientists, Ghosts, Witches, Werewolves, Zombies, etc. always seem to get a theatrical reboot. As did the Mummy, and the older Mummy flicks never held my attention for very long. The pretext was always cool and atmospherically eerie, but once the old school movie Mummy started stumbling around and strangling people who were too slow to get away, Mummy movies didn’t really pique my interest. The music in these movies was always haunting and exotic which set an apt and unsettling tone, cats in the musical score blowing over those altered minor scales and shit, but the scare payoff was always almost laughable once the Mummy started un-aliving folks.
In 1980, my Ten-year old Sister Courtenay and I, her Twelve-year old Brother, went with our Mother to the movies, somewhere on Cape Cod. I want to say it was a multi-plex in Wellfleet, but Hyannis is also a possibility. The movie must have been something halfway reputable because Mom didn’t view shlock, still doesn’t. So it would happen that in the Summer of 1980, Mom took us to the movies twice while visiting Cape Cod; once to see the tween film “My Bodyguard” starring Adam Baldwin and Tim Makepeace, the second time I don’t know what she went to see in an adjacent theater, because Courtenay and I were allowed to see “The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu” starring Peter Sellers. At the time, Hollywood was still making and the Western public was still accepting, culturally inappropriate fare where British actors were allowed to do caricatures of Asians. Mom wasn’t watching that shit, and I dare say after watching it myself, I’m not sure why I went to see it, either. In my mind’s eye, after a few years in the rear view mirror, I thought this movie had been another Pink Panther sequel.
Before the Peter Sellers movie started, there was a parade of trailers, including one where the trailer didn’t show any action from the movie, just teaser-trailer type ominous activity inside the labyrinth of a pyramid. At the end of the trailer, the title of the movie was “The Awakening” starring Charlton Heston and Susannah York. To my Twelve-year old mind, the trailer looked potentially spooky and fright filled. On the ride home on some darkened Cape Cod Highway back to Dennis, Mass, Mom asked us about the forgettable Peter Sellers flick (Which I believe was the last movie he appeared in before his death), we responded somewhat unenthusiastically. We asked her were there any trailers before her movie. Mom replied something to the effect of “There was some God awful trailer for some Horror movie with Charlton Heston…I won’t be watching that.” I still had viewing boundaries in 1980, which was normal, when it came to R-rated movies. I could see anything PG, but to see a movie with an R rating, either with Mom or her friends, that required permission. If the R-rated movie had artistic merit, such as 1978’s “Who’ll Stop the Rain”, 1977’s “Black Sunday” or 1979’s “Monty Python’s Life of Brian”, I could go. R-Rated 1970’s Horror, no way, strictly ferbotten.
In 1986, I was working until close at an on-campus fast food eatery called the Tartan Grill on the campus of Carnegie-Mellon University. The outfits we had to wear for the job were horrendous, we looked like the fucking Bad News Bears with Blue Jeans on. Yellow Baseball caps and tight-ass Yellow team shirts, we looked like dorks. The restaurant closed at Midnight, closing duties took another hour or so, my dorm was across Forbes Avenue from the “Restaurant”, if you could call it that. I loved that feeling of being done with work, I would go straight back to my dorm room on Friday nights, hopefully my roommates, who were all drama majors, would let me watch their TV while I smoked what little cannabis I had on hand and enjoyed a couple of drinks. I had a radio in my dorm room and would tune it into either WAMO or WPTS for the latest rap and R and B hits that were spinning on the air at 1 AM.
I got back to my dorm room after another soul-crushing fast food closing shift on a Friday night in October, my roommate had moved the TV to the kitchen for late night viewing so he could get some sleep. I took a couple of bong hits and cracked open an Iron City beer from the cheapie dorm room fridge we had, clicked on the TV and channel surfed until I arrived at the late night movie channel in Pittsburgh back in them days, Channel 53, which years later became a Fox affiliate. From the looks of the movie that was on, I realized it was October because a potentially intense Horror flick was showing, where a Woman was alone in a house that had lost it’s electricity suddenly and the soundtrack was full of screeching strings and it appeared that some bad shit was about to go down as statues of Dogs, Snakes and Cats appeared ominous and threatening and I was here for all of it because those post-work shift bong hits I had just indulged in had just kicked in. When the movie paused for a commercial, the voice over the screen shot which read “Channel 53 Late Night Movie” announced, “We will return to ‘The Awakening’ starring Charlton Heston in a moment”. What a tease! As it turned out, I had only 20-30 minutes left to enjoy, I had to check this movie out at some other time.
Six years later, I was living with a girl who I really liked. We had been living together for six months, the relationship was on the skids. She thought it would be a cool idea to get a hotel room for the night away from the house we were renting together, the house housed 2 other girls. We rented a room at some fleabag motel in West Virginia, we had a ritual of smoking weed and watching movies together, sometimes we would smoke and watch campy shows she liked, such as “The Love Boat” or Elvis Presley musicals. I would scan local TV guides for stuff for us to watch together, we shared a taste for movies with outrageous premises. We would go to the movies together often, we went to see “Shattered” with Tom Berenger and Great Scacchi and she couldn’t stop laughing at the movie, the moment spoke highly of her intellect, she knew when material was so contrived and superfluous that it deserved ridicule. On the night we were to spend the night at the strange Motel together, “The Awakening” was playing on USA Network. Hell, I didn’t even pay attention to the ACC Basketball Tournament that weekend on her behalf. If you know me and my addictions to March Madness and the University of Virginia’s Men’s Basketball Team, you know it must’ve taken a special Woman to make me ignore UVa’s chance to play their way into the Big Dance.
We watched the movie in bed, smoking joints and eventually bickering about trivialities. I remember the flick as an effective Horror movie, but so effective that I associate it with the end of that relationship, that within two months of that night I would be searching for a new place to live because things had gotten so bad between us. The movie was concerned with a young Woman being possessed by the spirit of a vengeful Egyptian Witch-Queen from centuries past, I sometimes surmised that my love life became a victim of that fictitious queen’s wrath that night. That this downer Horror pic with vengeful Woman power was analogous to hammering nails into the coffin of my prospective love life.
To begin with, “The Awakening” in some ways is what my Mother predicted 45 years ago by watching the trailer; a frivolous and predictable exploitative Horror movie. Yet there are edges to this movie that for me make it quite memorable. I was amused to learn that it was released on Halloween night, 1980, which if memory serves, was a Friday night. I have probably watched it at least Five times now and the technical aspects of this film make it a guilty pleasure. Even my latest viewing, on a rogue Russian Youtube channel, was pleasurable from a visual and audial perspective. The film has an absolutely beautiful look to it, brought about by old-hand Hollywood Cinematographer and Director Jack Cardiff (Cardiff directed “Sons and Lovers” and many more). Filmed on location in Egypt, London and New York City, the eye candy is incessant here, every frame is, pardon the pun, a treasure. Speaking of visuals, the opening titles are done by none other than Maurice Binder, the opening titles grand master who did many of the early James Bond film title sequences. His work here is understated but one is hard-pressed to forget it, done with images of famed Egyptian statues, building sites and World Wonders shown through a filter of what looks to be the waters of the Nile River.
While the titles are going on, the extraordinary score music of Claude Bolling begins, a fantastic and haunting musical score, it’s searing ancient Egyptian Oboe melody at the onset is hard for me to get out of my head for days after every time I hear it. Since the movie is most obviously a knock-off of “The Omen” movies from 1976 and 1978, it would only be fitting that the filmmakers here would have a score that sounds a shit ton like the work of “Omen” film score composer Jerry Goldsmith. I only know of Bolling from some original works he wrote where he attempted to fuse Classical Orchestral work with Swing Jazz, the end result was awkward at best. Here, Bolling’s work is masterful; lush strings and well-done Horror film tension at the right spots. Bolling’s score gives the movie a haunting and dread-inducing tragic tone.
Finally, before more description of the film is warranted, the direction by Mike Newell here is A-list, you can see plainly why and how Newell went on to bigger and greater things; he knows what the fuck he is doing behind the lens and from the Director’s chair. Newell has had a distinguished career, he directed the forgotten(and important) gem “Amazing Grace and Chuck” (A movie from 1987 that I will be getting to at a later date). Newell is an Executive Producer on the 2000 Oscar-winning “Traffic” and a co-Producer of the provocative 1999 English film “Photographing Fairies” (another criminally underrated movie I will be getting to at a later date.). Other well-known movies that Newell directed include “Donnie Brasco”, “Four Weddings and a Funeral” and “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire”.
Though “The Awakening” was based on a sturdy novel by Bram Stoker, “The Jewel of Seven Stars”, the screenplay that was written for this picture by Clive Exton, Chris Bryant and Allen Scott is absolutely laughable, an assemblage of cliches that required the actors to deliver them with straight faces. The most egregious sins of the script are that the film plagiarizes and cannibalizes so much of “The Omen” films, especially Mike Hodges’ fantastic script for “Damien:Omen II”. I mean, the last Ten minutes of this movie is almost a direct steal from the Hodges screenplay. Then there is a mini-borrow from the legendary scene from the first “Omen” flick (In the “Omen”, Lee Remick has to protect Damien from the Baboons at the London Zoo, here Stephanie Zimbalist sets off a wild African dog at the Bronx Zoo) as well as variations in this of death scenes from “The Omen” movies; to say that this movie is derivative is an understatement of vast proportions. Unlucky folks get impaled, run over by trucks, crushed, etc., you get the jist.
Yet the borrowing of the “Omen”-type menace (I’ve always surmised that Nicholas Roeg’s “Don’t Look Now” is “The Omen” for the literary crowd) makes and made “The Awakening” a scarier Mummy movie than Mummy movies of the past. I had originally planned to use a Hammer Studio produced flick from 1971 titled “Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb” (also based on the same aforementioned Bram Stoker novel), but aside from the presence of the very fetching English Actress Valerie Leon as the cursed Woman and some effective scenes of terror mid-film, it was just too silly. “The Awakening” was overall a more effective Mummy vehicle. While the kill scenes are entirely predictable, they are no less what the viewer wants when one sits down to watch a movie of this timbre. The killings here aren’t as graphically pronounced as the “Omen” film deaths, but they are vicious and nasty nonetheless.
The character arcs and motivations presented are almost non-sensical aside from the aspects that I was able to get behind and be co-opted by, looking past some of the obvious awkward writing here at times. The portrayal of Charlton Heston as the Archaeologist who almost appears to be suicidally obsessed with in his pursuit of illuminating the spirit of the dead Egyptian Queen Cara is lampoonable at times if we’re talking about a rational character, but maybe we’re not. Heston as Matthew Corbeck seems turned on by the perversity of reanimating a sexy dead spirit, I have waffled on this watching it before whether this is a concept gone too far for me to accept or whether dramatic license can explain everything questionable away, that Corbeck inhabits the headspace of a mad scientist, embracing the words of the old Soft-Rock song; “If lovin’ you is wrong, I don’t want to be right.”
A rule of Horror films of the 1970’s and 1980’s and beyond appeared to be pushing shock boundaries. The shock boundary that “The Awakening” pushes, in my opinion, is that of implied incest between Corbeck and his daughter Margaret, played vigorously by Industry legacy Stephanie Zimbalist (more on her performance momentarily). The build-up to sexual improprieties between Father and Daughter are icky and farmed out through implications that are remarkably sinister and unnerving. One of the film’s better scenes of shock and horror involves Margaret blacking out and intentionally causing her Father to harm himself physically so as to not disrupt ancient jars of the Dead Queen’s remains needed for a potential resurrection ritual, which happen to be locked away in his personal safe. This scene carries not only implied torture but also hints of psychological abuse and sexual bondage as well.
Stephanie Zimbalist is best known as an actress for her TV work on a breezy NBC Network 1980’s Detective show called “Remington Steele”, a show remembered by many as being the introduction for American audiences to future British acting superstar Pierce Brosnan. Zimbalist, the daughter of legendary TV and Film actor Efrem Zimbalist Jr., was a perfect and beautiful foil to Brosnan on the TV show as his partner. Zimbalist had a steady career, making TV and Theatrical films, probably some of her best known movies are flicks like “The Awakening” and “The Babysitter”, salacious Horror pics. She has a bevy of cliche-ridden lines here but she gives quite an effort despite the script’s shortcomings. She’s convincingly innocent when need be, sultry, psycho, disconsolate, Zimbalist had a difficult task here with the lines she is given and exceeds expectations. She has to sell the idea that her soul is being engulfed and replaced by the spirit of a Dead Egyptian Mad Queen and Zimbalist’s sincerity shines through. Her mood and personality swings are plausible, which makes the overall effect of the movie’s crescendo morally murky and believable.
The grown folks in this are what they need to be, Jill Townsend is authentically demure, yet her character frees herself from the insincerity of her marriage to Corbeck, as Margaret’s Mother, she doesn’t have a whole lot to do here, but her presence is welcomed as a character tethered to sanity. Susannah York plays a character who is initially Corbeck’s assistant and later his live-in lover, you hardly remember her for being in this, except for one key scene in the latter half of the film. Charlton Heston has a great distinguished academic look in this, while nobody would ever accuse him of giving one of his ten best performances of all-time here, he is not a likable character and that is to his credit. His presence is compelling and his character’s actions drive the film’s story more than any other’s. Heston’s ability to project a character that is not only self-obsessed, but tragically self-indulgent gives this movie it’s sardonic bite. Unlike “Omen” movie film stars Gregory Peck and William Holden, who play initially corrupt characters that eventually see the light and take up arms in the hopes that good will triumph over evil, Heston as Corbeck never does, he is blinded by a timeless lust, he is a follower of his own inner feelings of self-importance, his character has willingly shed his need for ethics, morals and propriety.
What could have been an absolute turkey of a film is saved by Director Newell, who gives some early scenes almost a Giallo-type vibe to advance certain thematic suggestions. Newell’s staging of the Egyptian scenes is perfect, though it almost appears as if the script again borrows the Egyptian scene ideas from both “The Omen” and “The Exorcist” (with Egypt substituting for Iraq from the latter film). While “The Awakening” is not nearly as good as those films, Director Newell’s pacing and use of Cardiff’s Cinematography and Bolling’s music creates an ambiance that is hard to shake and unfolds like a Greek tragedy. When it’s Halloween season, Horror movie junkies don’t need feel-good vibes, we want to be spooked and Newell’s vision for “The Awakening” quenches that insatiable thirst.
Leave a Reply