REVENGE IN THE HOUSE OF USHER (1982)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

"I know the day I collapse, so will these walls"-- Eric Usher.

This prediction, validated by the end of REVENGE IN THE HOUSE OF USHER, is almost the only trope writer-director Jess Franco borrows from his ostensible source, Poe's short story FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER. But for once, Franco's deviations don't bother me, because REVENGE is the first Franco film I've seen that seemed to click on all cylinders.

To be sure, there are a fair number of Franco films that are interesting near-misses, like 1962's AWFUL DOCTOR ORLOFF, to which REVENGE is a rough conceptual sequel, and others that are just dumb fun, like ATTACK OF THE ROBOTS. Up to this point I might have rated 1969's VENUS IN FURS as the director's best film, but I have not re-watched VENUS in some time. But as I opined in the ORLOFF review, most of Franco's output has been either shoddy or pretentious. I'd even seen an English-language version of REVENGE that I remembered with no better opinion. However, the English-subtitled French version I streamed, entitled NEUROSIS, proved a House of a Different Usher.

Technically some of REVENGE may have been altered from Franco's original version by the producers of Eurocine after a disastrous first screening. Nevertheless, whatever others added, the film always feels like Franco bringing together a host of his favorite (however eccentric) tropes and character-types. REVENGE includes flashback-scenes taken from ORLOFF, in which the actions of the earlier mad scientist, who was seeking to cure his disfigured daughter, are coterminous with the current actions of Eric Usher (Howard Vernon), who's kidnapping local women in order to transfuse their blood into the comatose body of his daughter Melissa. Both mad scientists are served by a mute slave named Morpho, who like Usher has aged since his 1962 adventure, though now his eyes have become even more grotesque. How much time has passed? There's no telling, particularly since both ORLOFF and REVENGE seem to take place in the early 20th century. (One REVENGE character comments on the "new" science of psychiatry.)

Unlike ORLOFF, though, Usher's castle plays host to a real "family romance." Like Orloff, Usher has something going with his housekeeper Marie (Lina Romay), but Usher unlike Orloff has a wife hanging around, Edmunda (Fata Morgana). But is Edmunda really alive? She spends most of the movie flitting around the castle in a white gown, and at one point she appears to summon up the specters of Usher's past victims, so I'm going to say she's not really all there. Additionally, Marie does have something going with young hunk Adrien, so this adds to the soap-operatic complications.

Outsider Alan Harker (Antonio Mayans), an analogue of the Mark Damon character from Corman's HOUSE OF USHER, arrives at Usher Castle in response from a letter from his former mentor. Harker finds Usher acting crazy, raving about his dead daughter and about the medical board that failed to recognize Usher's genius. Harker summons Usher's doctor, whose name is Seward (yes, that's right; both names borrowed from Stoker's DRACULA, though with no other parallels). Usher raves at his medical man too, accusing him of being a petit-bourgeois in love with routine.

Harker spends the night, but awakens and wanders the corridors. He promptly finds evidence of all Usher's depredations-- caged women, the dead-alive Melissa, and flitting Edmunda-- but he collapses. He awakens in his bed once more, and is quick to prove Usher's Frankensteinian complaints about mediocrity by deciding he dreamed it all.

So does Usher take advantage of Harker's conventionality? No, he freely admits having kidnapped and murdered countless women, and shows unusual self-knowledge by calling himself a "sadist." Yet Harker, like Seward, still believes that Usher is merely deluded. Meanwhile, Edmunda flits around Usher, claiming that she plans to take him to hell with her. Usher raves about his injured hands, which is a new element, but fitting if one considers that because of his age, he's an "Eric" without his "Rod." At one point he rants that he thinks that either Adrien or Harker are threats to his personal harem, including Marie, Melissa, and Edmunda. Edmunda brings about the downfall of both Usher and Usher Castle, and the pathetic Melissa only comes to life long enough to be buried alongside faithful Morpho, who cares about the girl far more than her egotistical sire. Only the clueless viewpoint character survives.

A lot of earlier Franco films flirted with Freudian themes, but this is the earliest one in which all the characters play off one another in a stimulating manner. For whatever reason, one of Franco's most-used tropes was that of "The Evil Old Man Doing Dastardly Deeds," whether the old man was drawn from Sade, Stoker, Mary Shelley, or old Bela Lugosi flicks. REVENGE's highlight is the sight of Vernon, almost eighty years old in 1982, giving the audience a strong, nuanced take on the generally cartoonish figure of the Evil Old Mad Scientist. I suppose Usher's guilt over his past excesses plays into the movie's alternate title, since the original context of "neurosis" was that of an impairment brought about by buried psychological trauma. Often I've scorned Franco's indifference to details, but here I liked the fact that one doesn't know exactly what Usher did to Edmunda, or how Morpho became so devoted to Melissa. I can appreciate that the Spanish director wanted to be a mover and shaker in film, but I wish he'd managed to shake out a few more films with this much symbolic richness.