13 FOR HALLOWEEN #6: Curtains

This is the basic premise of ‘Curtains’:

Egomaniacal film director Jonathan Stryker (John Vernon) acquires the rights to a melodramatic novel entitled ‘Audra’ via his long-term leading lady Samantha Sherwood (Samantha Eggar), who sees the part as her career-defining role. Stryker balks at an early rehearsal, criticising Samantha for being unable to communicate Audra’s madness. The two of them cook up a ruse to have Samantha committed to an asylum so that she can observed psychiatric illness at close quarters. Only Stryker does the dirty on Samantha and leaves her there while he invites six actresses to his opulent home, with the intent of casting one of them as Audra. One by one these hopefuls are targeted, the first buying the farm before she’s even arrived at chez Stryker.

Now, this is a pretty decent set-up for a slasher. Machiavellian anti-hero, a woman spurned and a cluster of gorgeous victims, all wrapped up in a blurred-lines-between-fantasy-and-reality meta-narrative. Plus it has prowling Argento-esque camerawork, creepy dolls, a killer in a creepy mask, and a handful of genuinely iconic images.

Yep, ‘Curtains’ is an off-kilter, eccentric, memorably bizarre little number. It’s the kind of movie for which the phrase “cult classic” was invented. It’s also an abject clusterfuck in many ways, often resembling a set of writers’ room notes rather than an actual scripted feature film. Intriguing ideas are flung into the melting pot, but never developed. Subplots are hinted at but not developed. Hell, there are at least two actual frickin’ characters who are given no development: one seems to be set up as a sexual rival to Stryker, only to disappear for huge swathes of the 89 minute running time and then be dispatched offscreen, while the other has to carry the weight of an extended soft-of-final-girl sequence without having been granted any shred of personality or emotional investment by the script.

Then there are the lacunae around Samantha’s escape from the asylum, Stryker’s tolerance of her presence when she shows up at his gaff, and why he attempted to sequester her there in the first place. (To secure the rights to ‘Audra’ for himself? Surely Stryker’s rich enough to hire a slick lawyer to inveigle them from Samantha.) And then there’s the film’s aesthetic schizophrenia: the way it lurches from Strindbergian investigation of the creative process (only with kill scenes) to boilerplate stalk ‘n’ slash tropes and hot tub nudity.

To understand how this loveable muddle of maniacal mishmash came into being, let’s consider the making of ‘Curtains’. Euphemistically speaking, it was a troubled production. But let’s be honest, the very nature of film-making – particularly when budgets are undercut during filming, creative differences emerge with the intensity of 2am pub car park fights, and script rewrites proliferate even as the cast are trying to learn the scenes that have just been summarily junked – means that more movies than not are troubled productions: particularly low-budget exploitationers.

Which is to say, there are troubled productions … and then there’s ‘Curtains’.

Initially conceived as a more mature and intelligent take on the stalk ‘n’ slash genre – i.e. a full-on genre flick, but one populated with adults rather than teenagers and character motivations more complex and interesting than smoking weed and fucking in the woods – creative tensions quickly developed between director Richard Ciupka and producer Peter Simpson. The latter, as is the wont of producers, viewed the project in purely commercial terms. Ciupka however wanted ‘Curtains’ to have the feel of an art-house movie. And if there’s one thing that’s guaranteed to strike fear into the heart of a money-fixated producer, it’s the phrase “art-house movie”. With only about 45 minutes of usable footage in the bag, Ciupka left the project.

‘Curtains’ was then shelved for a year or so, during which at least one role was recast, and heavy-duty script revision was undertaken. New scenes were written, and eventually filmed, that never made it to the final edit. That character I mentioned who disappears for a whole chunk of the movie only to be murdered offscreen? His death scene originally involved a tricky stunt involving a snowmobile crashing into a house – something that I can only assume was pretty expensive for a meagrely-budgeted production of this ilk – but this was inexplicably junked in favour of the offscreen death that makes little narrative sense. Likewise, an entirely different ending was shot but it found no favour with Simpson’s wife (she dismissed it as improbable) so again: cutting room floor, new scene written, more reshoots.

All told, from pre-production to the final negative being locked down, ‘Curtains’ took three years to make. Ciupka petitioned to have his name removed from the film; it’s credited instead, in perhaps the most meta (and certainly most interesting) aspect of the production, to Jonathan Stryker.

Ciupka went on to direct a small handful of films that I’ve never heard of and work mainly in television. Simpson producer quite a few more films, including ‘Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II’, ‘Prom Night III: The Last Kiss’ (which was also his sole foray into directing) and ‘Prom Night IV: Deliver Us From Evil’ (he’d scored an early hit with the original the year before ‘Curtains’ went into production). Neither would work with such an eclectic or interesting cast again, nor emerge with a film quite as characterful … notwithstanding that it truly is a multi-layered clusterfuck.