Flicks of Shame: what's a nice actor like you doing in a movie like this?

The Sentinel (1977)

Walken has one of those remarkable careers that has allowed him to reap Oscar glory (Best Actor for The Deer Hunter, nominated for Best Supporting Actor for Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can) while appearing in an often bewildering parade of bizarre or just plain bad movies, his schizophrenic choices seemingly having no ill effect on his job prospects. Of course, nobody plays Christopher Walken quite like Christopher Walken, so it’s fair to say he’s always going to have something of a monopoly in his field.

But how, you ask, can you find a film among the likes of Kangaroo Jack, Gigli and The Country Bears that’s strange enough to stand out from such illustrious company? Simple. You head back to the Seventies, and this religious horror show from bad taste legend and car insurance spokesman, Michael Winner.

Alison Parker (Cristina Raines) is a model. She’s happy, pretty and in a long term relationship with suave lawyer Michael Lerman (Chris Sarandon). He wants to get married, but she’s not so sure. For one thing, she used to be his mistress and when his first wife died in a mysterious fall from Brooklyn Bridge, the stress drove her to attempt suicide. And this wasn’t her first wrist encounter of the slashed kind. She tried to off herself as a teenager as well, after finding her spiteful father romping naked with two prostitutes. The girl’s got issues.

In order to find some space, she rents an apartment by herself – a lavishly furnished place in Brooklyn Heights that the realtor is suspiciously eager for her to take. From the upstairs window stares one of the building’s other occupants – a reclusive blind priest. If Alison was aware she was in a Seventies horror film, this fact alone would set off alarm bells, but she isn’t, and so she moves into the clearly-evil apartment building with a skip and a jump.

Sure enough, weird things start happening. First of all, her neighbours are of the strange and creepy Rosemary’s Baby variety. The camp and sinister Charles Chazen (Burgess Meredith) keeps popping round uninvited, accompanied by his cat and canary. Two German ballet-dancing lesbian sisters live downstairs. While Alison is visiting them, the mute younger sister (Beverley D’Angelo) openly masturbates in front of her while the other one makes coffee. Chazen throws a birthday party. For his cat. There’s also some polka music involved. Something sinister is clearly going on.

When she mentions these unusual neighbours to the realtor, the weird gauge flies off the scale – there are no neighbours. The only other tenant is the blind priest. All the other apartments are empty, and covered in dust. Naturally, the clanking noises from upstairs now take on a more terrifying aspect, and while investigating one night, clutching her mandatory “wandering around spooky house” kitchen knife tightly, Alison finds herself faced with the reanimated corpse of her dead father. So she stabs him in the chest, gouges out his eye, slices off his nose and then runs screaming into the streets soaked in blood.

Cue the cops, represented by Detective Gatz (western legend Eli Wallach) and his gum-chewing deputy, Detective Rizzo – played by a freakishly pale and young Christopher Walken. The two detectives check out the names of the imaginary tenants, as well as the guests at Chazen’s party, and discover that they were all executed killers. “She went…to a…party? With eight…dead murderers?” spits Walken in his famous deadpan staccato style. Considering how iconic Walken’s delivery is, it’s a shame that this is one of his only lines in the movie, and for the rest of the time he’s required to do little more than hang around behind Wallach and look vaguely reptilian.

Of course, as movie cops in a horror film, Gatz and Rizzo prove about as useful as an inflatable dartboard. It’s up to Michael Lerman to discover the truth – that the apartment building is one of the entrances to Hell, and the blind priest is the last in a long line of attempted suicides who have been groomed by the church and manipulated into guarding the portal. The only way the forces of evil can open the entrance is if the next person marked to be a sentinel can be made to kill themselves before they take up their destiny – hence Chazen’s mind-buggering charade, and the polka music.

Sadly, Lerman fails in his last minute dash to save his beloved. He ends up dead, his face devoured by the lesbian ballet dancers (now naked, just for fun) and the movie ends with a new couple being shown the remodelled building many years later. The only other tenant? A blind reclusive nun…

Need to know: The Sentinel is an absolute minefield of recognisable faces in impossibly tiny roles. Jeff Goldblum appears several times as a fashion photographer, Jerry Orbach plays a pissed-off TV director, while the realtor was played by Ava Gardner. Tom Berenger (see: Melanie Griffith) has a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him cameo as the potential tenant at the end. Our doomed heroic lead, Chris Sarandon, is of course the ex-husband of Susan Sarandon, and she retained his surname after they split.

And just in case you were thinking that it all sounds rather tame for a Michael Winner film, the gleefully confrontational director used genuinely deformed and mentally ill people to shamble around the apartment building, representing the mangled and misshapen inhabitants of Hell for the grotesque climax. For another equally tasteful Winner outing, see: Rufus Sewell.

And for yet more weird Burgess Meredith cameos, see: Jeff Bridges, Tony Curtis.

Honourable mention: Another early Walken oddity worth seeking out is the 1972 thriller The Mind Snatchers, also released as The Happiness Cage or The Demon Within. Despite the lurid titles, the movie is actually a quiet character piece, with Walken giving a magnetic performance as a hot-headed US Army private sent to Joss Ackland’s secret hospital to have his brain rewired. A dialogue-driven slice of dystopian sci-fi, it plays like One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest by way of A Clockwork Orange, and is a great showcase of the young Walken’s talent. Also worthy of note is The Prophecy (see: Viggo Mortensen), the religious horror trilogy in which Walken plays a psychotic archangel Gabriel. Walken stars in all three movies, though only the first deserves your time.

Availability: The Sentinel received a UK video re-release in 2000, but the US DVD release is easier to locate.

		The Sentinel (1977) Walken has one of those remarkable careers that has allowed him to reap Oscar glory (Best Actor for The Deer Hunter, nominated for Best Supporting Actor for Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can) while appearing in an often bewildering parade of bizarre or just plain bad movies, his schizophrenic choices seemingly having no ill effect on his job prospects. Of course, nobody plays Christopher Walken quite like Christopher Walken, so it’s fair to say he’s always going to have something of a monopoly in his field. But how, you ask, can you find a film among the likes of Kangaroo Jack, Gigli and The Country Bears that’s strange enough to stand out from such illustrious company? Simple. You head back to the Seventies, and this religious horror show from bad taste legend and car insurance spokesman, Michael Winner. Alison Parker (Cristina Raines) is a model. She’s happy, pretty and in a long term relationship with suave lawyer Michael Lerman (Chris Sarandon). He wants to get married, but she’s not so sure. For one thing, she used to be his mistress and when his first wife died in a mysterious fall from Brooklyn Bridge, the stress drove her to attempt suicide. And this wasn’t her first wrist encounter of the slashed kind. She tried to off herself as a teenager as well, after finding her spiteful father romping naked with two prostitutes. The girl’s got issues. In order to find some space, she rents an apartment by herself – a lavishly furnished place in Brooklyn Heights that the realtor is suspiciously eager for her to take. From the upstairs window stares one of the building’s other occupants – a reclusive blind priest. If Alison was aware she was in a Seventies horror film, this fact alone would set off alarm bells, but she isn’t, and so she moves into the clearly-evil apartment building with a skip and a jump. Sure enough, weird things start happening. First of all, her neighbours are of the strange and creepy Rosemary’s Baby variety. The camp and sinister Charles Chazen (Burgess Meredith) keeps popping round uninvited, accompanied by his cat and canary. Two German ballet-dancing lesbian sisters live downstairs. While Alison is visiting them, the mute younger sister (Beverley D’Angelo) openly masturbates in front of her while the other one makes coffee. Chazen throws a birthday party. For his cat. There’s also some polka music involved. Something sinister is clearly going on. When she mentions these unusual neighbours to the realtor, the weird gauge flies off the scale – there are no neighbours. The only other tenant is the blind priest. All the other apartments are empty, and covered in dust. Naturally, the clanking noises from upstairs now take on a more terrifying aspect, and while investigating one night, clutching her mandatory “wandering around spooky house” kitchen knife tightly, Alison finds herself faced with the reanimated corpse of her dead father. So she stabs him in the chest, gouges out his eye, slices off his nose and then runs screaming into the streets soaked in blood. Cue the cops, represented by Detective Gatz (western legend Eli Wallach) and his gum-chewing deputy, Detective Rizzo – played by a freakishly pale and young Christopher Walken. The two detectives check out the names of the imaginary tenants, as well as the guests at Chazen’s party, and discover that they were all executed killers. “She went…to a…party? With eight…dead murderers?” spits Walken in his famous deadpan staccato style. Considering how iconic Walken’s delivery is, it’s a shame that this is one of his only lines in the movie, and for the rest of the time he’s required to do little more than hang around behind Wallach and look vaguely reptilian. Of course, as movie cops in a horror film, Gatz and Rizzo prove about as useful as an inflatable dartboard. It’s up to Michael Lerman to discover the truth – that the apartment building is one of the entrances to Hell, and the blind priest is the last in a long line of attempted suicides who have been groomed by the church and manipulated into guarding the portal. The only way the forces of evil can open the entrance is if the next person marked to be a sentinel can be made to kill themselves before they take up their destiny – hence Chazen’s mind-buggering charade, and the polka music. Sadly, Lerman fails in his last minute dash to save his beloved. He ends up dead, his face devoured by the lesbian ballet dancers (now naked, just for fun) and the movie ends with a new couple being shown the remodelled building many years later. The only other tenant? A blind reclusive nun… Need to know: The Sentinel is an absolute minefield of recognisable faces in impossibly tiny roles. Jeff Goldblum appears several times as a fashion photographer, Jerry Orbach plays a pissed-off TV director, while the realtor was played by Ava Gardner. Tom Berenger (see: Melanie Griffith) has a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him cameo as the potential tenant at the end. Our doomed heroic lead, Chris Sarandon, is of course the ex-husband of Susan Sarandon, and she retained his surname after they split. And just in case you were thinking that it all sounds rather tame for a Michael Winner film, the gleefully confrontational director used genuinely deformed and mentally ill people to shamble around the apartment building, representing the mangled and misshapen inhabitants of Hell for the grotesque climax. For another equally tasteful Winner outing, see: Rufus Sewell. And for yet more weird Burgess Meredith cameos, see: Jeff Bridges, Tony Curtis. Honourable mention: Another early Walken oddity worth seeking out is the 1972 thriller The Mind Snatchers, also released as The Happiness Cage or The Demon Within. Despite the lurid titles, the movie is actually a quiet character piece, with Walken giving a magnetic performance as a hot-headed US Army private sent to Joss Ackland’s secret hospital to have his brain rewired. A dialogue-driven slice of dystopian sci-fi, it plays like One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest by way of A Clockwork Orange, and is a great showcase of the young Walken’s talent. Also worthy of note is The Prophecy (see: Viggo Mortensen), the religious horror trilogy in which Walken plays a psychotic archangel Gabriel. Walken stars in all three movies, though only the first deserves your time. Availability: The Sentinel received a UK video re-release in 2000, but the US DVD release is easier to locate.
Text © 2008 Dan Whitehead. No cut and paste, y'hear? All images remain the property of the offending studios and their reproduction is covered by Fair Use law.