It is finished. What began in 1980 with The Nightmare Never Ends and led into Gretta in 1984 and Night Train to Terror the year after comes to a stunning finale twelve years after it commenced with Marilyn Alive and Behind Bars. Originally set for production in 1982 under the title Scream Your Head Off, Marilyn was only partially made, and it took ten years for the scrapped footage to be turned around into a full movie. I suspect that the movie we would've gotten with Scream Your Head Off would have been more similar to "The Case of Harry Billings" from Night Train to Terror, but sometime in the decade between its start and finish director John Carr and writer Philip Yordan developed an obsession with actress Marilyn Monroe, and decided to work that angle into the affair. The success of the result means that this whole quartet is amazing all the way through: Marilyn doesn't drop the prestigious ball passed to it by its predecessors.
Harry Billings accidentally kills his wife in a drunken accident on the first day of their marriage, and shortly afterwards, tries to commit suicide. For this, the hospital that retrieves him follows what is clearly real-life procedure and sends him to a mental hospital for indefinite, nonconsensual treatment with no notification to his surviving family. The hospital is run by Dr. Brewer and Dr. Fargo, and they use the hospital to harvest women to sell to Middle Eastern oil sheikhs using hypnotically-controlled patients. Considerably odder than just kidnapping the women for body parts, no? While being used for this purpose Harry also encounters a patient who claims to be Marilyn Monroe, who speaks of a powerful conspiracy to imprison her in this place. Due to the meds they give her she frequently reverts to the mental age of 12, desiring a handsome prince to come save her. Curious to bring up her age, given that Marilyn hasn't, y'know, aged in the last thirty years since her ostensible death. Eventually Dr. Fargo lobotomizes Brewer, but this will bring about her downfall when she seeks to have Harry, the hospital, and all the money to herself.
Not too far a deviation from Night Train, I'd say, but the introduction of the Marilyn plot, and the screentime it consumes, cannot be understated. This is significant for one big reason: this movie is edited drunkenly, trying desperately to stitch on the newer Marilyn bits to the older Scream Your Head Off bits. Making the whole mess hopeless is that the older parts of the movie were shot on film, while the newer Marilyn chunks are very obviously shot on video. This makes the whole affair seem less like A Night to Dismember and more like Run Coyote Run, the pseudo-remake/sequel to Lady Street Fighter. It's a patchwork monster but I always love when one of those makes itself at home in my house.
The film bits feature the same sort of artistic scripting and direction that made Gretta seems so self-contradictory. There's a scene where Dr. Brewer gives someone the "Roman thumb" and it actually feels like something from a real movie. Then the video comes along and it's stiff, hurried, and over-focused on making cheesecake out of Marilyn Monroe. There is no sense of quality in the script. This fits John Carr's filmmaking very well, though; even the good bits that are continuous with one another are still largely suspended in seas of Just Not Getting It. Carr knows how good movies look, but he doesn't know how they work. As ever, this quality works entirely to our benefit.
The mental hospital is still unbelievable medieval, though that might be partially to blame on Fargo and Brewer's crooked natures. However, I don't understand why an ordinary hospital chooses to send someone to a psychiatric facility against their will, rather than, y'know, offering them treatment at the actual hospital and discharging them with recommendations for a therapist. Harry hasn't even regained consciousness when they choose, via shitty dub work, to send him off to Brewer's "care." This must be a weird alternate universe in several ways besides that unusual detail, though, since one of Harry's victims is only mildly put off by a "cab driver" who drives an unmarked cab, is oddly insistent on driving her, waives the fare, and also buys her coffee which he does not allow her to refuse. Sometimes movies just do this. I don't why. They just keep doing it.
I'm running out of things to say, but I'm going to spoil something before I wrap it all up. In the end, the twist seems to be that Harry's friend is actually Marilyn Monroe. That's why I made a note how she hasn't aged since 1962; it's not because she's someone who believes she's Marilyn Monroe, it's because she actually is her. That means the conspiracy against her was real and is probably still out there with no one really investigating it. That's a big slug in the jaw from a movie which already has the audacity to not print a colon in its title. But the movie does have a happy ending, a non-ableist one at that, with the various patients all getting what they want without judgment.
I can't possibly hope to conjure words for my feelings about the journey these four movies have taken me through. So I'll simply end here with the knowledge that these were not the only movies John Carr and Philip Yordan worked on. Those that survive are in my scopes. The party lives on. And if you want to join the party, you should check out Marilyn Alive and Behind Bars. Just don't take the complimentary coffee.
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