A BBC telefilm from 1994, and one of the final such efforts by England’s Dennis Potter (who died that same year). Sadly, it’s not very good, although it does contain some very representative themes.
Another representative Potter element is the presence of actress Louise Germaine in a pivotal role. Germaine, a statuesque cockney-accented blonde who starred in the vastly superior Potter production LIPSTICK ON YOUR COLLAR, was one of Potter’s two late-period muses (with the brunette Gina Bellman, of BLACKEYES and SECRET FRIENDS, being the other). Here Germaine is lusted after by a pair of lecherous middle-aged men (a la Bellman in her Potter-scripted roles), just as she was in real life by Potter, a parallel that was most likely fully intentional on his part.
The sleazy American film producer James Boyce (Brian Dennehy) has rented a secluded mansion in England, together with his much younger trophy wife Amber (Germaine). The mansion was the setting of a sixties-era horror film entitled SMOKE RINGS, whose lead actress, one Mandy Mason—Amber’s mother—died shortly after appearing in it.
Henry Harris (Jim Carter), the lawyer who arranged the sale of the mansion to Boyce, lusts after Mason. Upon attending a tension-filled dinner party at the mansion Harris transfers his affections to Amber, who assumes the starring role in sexually-tinged recreations of scenes from SMOKE RINGS that play in Harris’s mind.
Amber, meanwhile, becomes consumed with apprehension, convinced that the house is haunted by her mother’s unquiet spirit. She impulsively (and implausibly) seduces Harris, apparently while possessed by her mother’s spirit, and later on she has no memory of the seduction.
Harris in turn finds his own hold on reality disintegrating, especially after crashing his car on a country road and discovering that his breaks have been cut. A long-buried corpse is dug up on the property by an inquisitive dog, and Harris comes to suspect that Amber had something to do with the murder—and that she’ll be committing another before long…
The material, based on a novel by Rosalind Ashe, certainly had promise, and the actors do what they can, with Brian Dennehy faring best as the sleazy American movie mogul. Carter and Germaine, by contrast, both overact—although in Germaine’s case not a whole lot appears to have been expected from her performance-wise. Her true importance to the film was evidently in the many skimpy outfits she wears throughout; a scene in which she parades around in sexy lingerie is given outsized prominence, doubtless at the behast of Dennis Potter himself.
The direction by Renny Rye (who helmed the Potter telefilms LIPSTICK ON YOUR COLLAR, KARAOKE and COLD LAZARUS) is lively, if painfully obvious. As a horror movie the film doesn’t work, being far too by-the-numbers and predictable. The frequent clips from SMOKE RINGS are tacky, looking like exactly what they are: unconvincing and insincere attempts at aping the Hammer horror flicks of the 1960s. This in turn lessens the impact of the fantasy sequences, which are explicitly patterned after those clips.
In Rye’s defense, Potter’s script doesn’t give him much to work with. The storytelling is so overwrought it renders the fantasy sequences—and by extension the twist ending that justifies them—superfluous. It seems odd to concentrate so intently on fantasy, after all, when the film’s “reality” is so unconvincing.
Vital Statistics
MIDNIGHT MOVIE
British Broadcasting Corporation
Director: Renny Rye
Producers: Rosemarie Whitman, Dennis Potter
Screenplay: Dennis Potter
(Based on a novel by Rosalind Ashe)
Cinematography: Remi Adefarasin
Editing: Clare Douglas
Cast: Brian Dennehy, Louise Germaine, Jim Carter, Colin Salmon, Steven Mackintosh, Anna Cropper, David Curtiz, Lucinda Clare, Gerard Horan, Anthony Pedley, Michael Gardiner, Michael Poole, Robert Putt