A taste for Bert I. Gordon is as personal a thing as the approach he takes to his modest little movies, and this his contribution to the early 60s supernatural craze is gourmet stuff. No subtlety, and who expects it, in this 19th century style tale of ghostly revenge as a modern day jazz musician is hounded to insanity by the ghost of a scorned lover whose death he deliberately failed to prevent. How this angry barfly manifests herself is alternately hilarious (the floating head) and downright creepy (the footprints in the sand, the wilting wedding bouquets) but, in the climax-focused tradition of Mr. B.I.G.'s best size meditations, especially the first COLOSSAL with its javelin-syringe, these moments imprint themselves on the viewer's memory and meet the standards of pure cinema, however unassumingly. There's a certain period loveliness to the lazy California beach town locale (many of the sets reused in the charming but perverse BOY AND THE PIRATES) and the pace has a leisureliness to match, but what grips one is the sheer moral ambiguity of the not quite anti-hero Richard Carlson. He's really not such a bad guy but who knows what extremes he'll be driven to, especially concerning the little girl who finds herself in the middle of things. A lot of Gordon flicks, in fact, have this melancholiac uncurrent of the aggressor's turmoil between human decency and the urge, circumstance-driven, to destroy. I'll leave analysis of this to the academically inclined, but I do wish true lovers of B-films would get past that "Mystery-Science" whatever nerd-need to express one's imagined sophistication with shrieking assaults on another era's conventions and technical primitiveness, and simply go with the flow and reap the rewards that films like TORMENTED offer. The finale, involving sea weed and the mind's eye, is really quite brilliant.
Review of Tormented
