Monday, October 14, 2013

I Asked for a Bride and They Sent Me a Witch

Beyond Evil (1980)
directed by Herbert Freed
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

This struck me as a rare example of a movie that uses Los Angeles as a stand-in for someplace else without making any effort to disguise or amend the city's identity. Which isn't to say that Herbert Freed is lazy. A bar with a neon sign in an Asian language might as well be on the Pacific Rim as Hollywood, and the hills behind Bob Hope Airport have a humid kind of color at the right time of year. When characters go inside that bar with the neon sign, they aren't visiting a set or another location--just the inside of the bar!

In other words, Freed is willing to take all of the ways that LA can look like another country at face value, not just by passing the city off as an exotic destination, but by connecting the dots on a map to draw out impressions and patterns (like a constellation!). Instead of rendering the city a blank slate--instead of saying that Southern California is synonymous with anywhere on earth, from the Swiss Alps to African diamond mines--Freed sees all of the ways that the world is in LA.

Maybe it's not such an inversion or much of a trick, but it made an impression. Sadly, the plot--about the misery of a business relationship with your wife's ex-husband--never gave the protagonist much credit, either relative to the men in her life or with regards to the random curse that the daughter of a Portuguese merchant enacted upon her. It's up to Barbara's husband to not believe in possession and to actively oppose the efforts of the benevolent (white) spiritual doctor on the island to help her, just as it's up to the old witch to take control of Barbara's body or leave her alone.

And what does the witch really want? Is the devil she sold her soul to simply bored? The primary colors and VHS quality of the flashbacks (complete with odd magnetic tape effects in the print) lent this something of the Guy Maddin spirit, although you wouldn't hear a Guy Maddin heroine say, "We don't have to get rid of the house for me to change my hair."