Two on a Guillotine: Movies about Writing

Ruh oh, Raggy.

Two on a Guillotine is about Cassie Duquesne (Connie Stevens), the estranged daughter of a famous magician (Caesar Romero) who was famous for his dangerous and shocking tricks. When he dies, she inherits everything, despite him having given her to relatives after her mother (also Connie Stevens) disappeared twenty years earlier. Cassie has to stay in her father’s gothic mansion in order to get the money (wait, I know this story).

The press is fascinated with her which bring us to the writer character of this silly horror story. Val Henderson (Dean Jones) is a reporter pretending to be a real estate agent trying to get the inside scoop on her life. Cassie still finds his ethics questionable when he pushes to get close to her. Clearly, he works for a rag of a paper if his boss is insisting he write a story about her without her consent, essentially interviewing her off the record without her knowledge. However, Val sticks around because the house is full of tricks and booby traps that Cassie isn’t keen on investigating on her own. Despite this being a very cornball film, Cassie is a well done character. She is is innocent and empathetic without being naive or unrealistic. Val falls for her and becomes protective of her. When she starts to breakdown over the idea that her father might have actually wanted her, he realizes how people could use that to hurt her or take her money. This, naturally leads to Cassie finding out that Val is a reporter. Boy snoops on girl, boy falls for girl, boy loses girl . . . for snooping.

SPOILERS: There’s a horribly filmed nightmare sequence and Cassie decides that Val is still the only person she can trust. Of course, it turns out that her father is still alive (gasp), haunting his own house, and completely out of his mind. He accidentally murdered her mother twenty years earlier with a trick involving a guillotine. Believing Cassie to be her dead mom, he knocks her out, CHANGES HER INTO HER MOM’S STAGE COSTUME (that’s right, her father stripped and redressed his full grown daughter who he thought was his wife - gross), and sets her in the guillotine. Val runs in just in time to see the magician attempting the trick, convinced it will work this time. And it freaking does! Despite this, Cassie’s father is too far gone to realize that he almost murdered his daughter. Does Cassie get any money from her dad’s estate if he’s in the loony bin? Will she find a good therapist in the 1960s? Does Val actually put any of this into his article? Who knows. The film ends with a close up of a rabbit.

The Spectre of Edgar Allan Poe: Movies about Writing

Let’s stay in the 70s for another installment. The Spectre of Edgar Allan Poe is a 1974 trip. A terrible, terrible trip that would make you swear off all substances forever, even aspirin.

Robert Walker Jr. plays a lackluster Poe who starts the film getting sympathy from Lenore (Mary Grover) about his job as a literary critic. They frolic to take his mind off his agony (Lenore is NOT wearing a corset or bra under her costume and jumped around too much for this movie to ever be taken seriously), however, Lenore collapses. Poe cries out with a bland and rather calm, “Help” and the opening credits are accompanied by a bad 70s rock ballad.

Lenore is declared dead and almost buried alive only to cry out in a last second. She pops out of the casket like a cheap Halloween scare with stark white hair (a.k.a. a ghastly wig even scarier than her performance). Somehow they got Tom Drake (Meet Me in St. Louis) to play Poe’s doctor friend and Cesar Romero (from lots of stuff - look him up) to play the doctor at Lenore’s mental hospital. I did like seeing Carol Ohmart from House on Haunted Hill as Romero’s wife and an adult Marcia Mae Jones from Shirley Temple movies as Sarah, a nurse with practically no lines.

The hospital even more anachronistic than Lenore’s free-range boobs. It’s “humane” facility full of activities to keep the mind busy and a loving, clean environment. Psh. I could go into a history of asylums and how such ideas did exist, but rarely and not in the ways portrayed in the movie. Maybe if I ever do a Ted Talk I’ll just ramble about this topic for fifteen minutes, but believe me when I say - nope. Not happening in Poe’s time and his part of the world. Also, who’s paying for this place? Where’s Lenore’s family?

Fear not those of you bored and wondering why this movie was even made? Here comes the terror. The mild, saw it coming in the first thirty minutes terror. The hospital is not all it seems. The doctor has locked away his brother-in-law in the basement and performs illegal medical experiments on the patients. Dun Dun DUUUUUUNNNN! This revelation is followed up by about seven minutes of Poe being tortured with snakes and knives while his friend wanders through the same shot several times calming saying, “Edgar?”

I won’t give the rest away. I will warn that there’s a torture chamber, madman who makes the same sounds as a dog having rabbit chasing dreams, and a twist . . . I think that’s what it was supposed to be anyway.

Despite Poe fitting in some drinking and long-winded musings, he doesn’t write much in this film other than to chronicle the tragedy of Lenore, a woman who serves as no other character than to be the object of his depression. Even the description he gives of Lenore is flat and more of a fantasy than a woman.