You’d be hard-pressed to find many Oliver Stone trademarks in this,
his 1974 debut. It’s not a great or even very good film, being
amateurish and pretentious--a deadly combination!
The Package
SEIZURE, filmed in Canada in order to take advantage of that
country’s tax shelter financing system (which also benefited the early
films of David Cronenberg), contains a noteworthy cast: DARK SHADOWS’
Jonathan Frid, former Bond girl Martine Beswick, Mary Woronov, Troy
Donohue and FANTASY ISLAND’S late Herve Villechaize.
The film is far removed from the heavily political Oliver
Stone we know today, and for that matter from the freaked-out Nam vet he
was back in the early seventies. It seems like the sort of thing any
marginally talented film student might have turned out.
Yet SEIZURE wasn’t entirely uncharacteristic, at least in
light of Stone’s second directorial effort
THE HAND (1980), another
straightforward horror film. Yes, for over a decade the man was known as
a genre specialist, and I for one would love to see a contemporary
Oliver Stone horror movie.
The Story
Horror scribe Edmund Blackstone is suffering from disquieting
nightmares involving a black executioner, a murderous woman and a
malevolent dwarf. These characters, we later learn, are all historical
figures: a Russian slave used to scare superstitious peasants known as
the Jackal, a sadistic French prince named Spider, and the Hindu goddess
Kali, the “Queen of Evil.”
Blackstone invites several smarmy acquaintances to his
lakeside home for a weekend retreat, unaware that three homicidal
maniacs have escaped from a local insane asylum. The gathering is
interrupted by the three figures from Blackstone’s nightmares, who may
or may not be the escaped loonies. The Queen of Evil, in a soliloquy to
Blackstone and his guests, lays out their aims thusly: “Our purpose, our
only purpose, is death!” These three maniacs commence killing off
all Blackstone’s guests until only he, his wife and his young son are
left alive.
Around this point the action stops and Blackstone wakes up in
his bed. Has the preceding been another of his nightmares? No such luck,
as the dwarf, executioner and evil queen are still loose in the house.
But now Blackstone’s wife has been transformed into some kind of
avenging angel who’s itching to take on the killers--and then Blackstone
wakes up again...
The Direction
SEIZURE looks and feels like a student film in many respects,
with loose compositions, pedestrian camera set-ups (which the young
Oliver Stone tries to gussy up with fisheye lenses), harsh lighting
(further marred by frequent camera shadows), weak characterizations and
college-level soliloquies on reality, madness and other “heavy”
subjects. The problem is that neither the script or the direction do
those concepts justice.
To be fair, there are some effective images here and there,
most notably an early shot of Herve Villechaize emerging from a tuft of
fog and a climactic fight between the protagonist and a scantily clad
Mary Woronov. As in Oliver Stone’s later work, the film plays best when
it’s at its most hyperbolic, as in the aforementioned Frid-Woronov
mano-a-mano and the many graphic murder sequences. Be advised,
though, that the Prism VHS version (which due to legal entanglements is
currently the only way to see this film in the US) has been shorn of a
reported four minutes of footage. Not that I’ve heard too many
complaints!
Vital Statistics
SEIZURE (a.k.a. QUEEN OF EVIL)
Intercontinental Leisure Industries
Director: Oliver Stone
Producers: Garrard Glenn, Jeffrey Kapelman
Screenplay: Edward Mann, Oliver Stone
Cinematography: Roger Racine
Editing: Nobuko Oganesoff, Oliver Stone
Cast: Jonathan Frid, Martine Beswicke, Joe Sirola, Christina Pickles,
Herve Villechaize, Roger De Koven, Mary Woronov, Timothy Ousey, Henry
Baker, Troy Donohue
