Review: 'The Beast with Five Fingers'

Spoilers ahead…



American horror spent the ‘40s running on fumes. In the wake of The Wolf Man and the 1935 departure of monster-champion and production-chief Carl Laemmle, Jr., Universal Pictures put less stock in its horror films, churning out a succession of increasingly half-hearted sequels. The films by the genre’s new golden boy, producer Val Lewton of RKO, were atmospheric and cerebral but shied away from the paranormal. The supernatural spook pictures emerging elsewhere were either tempered with humor (Paramount’s The Uninvited) or sheer lethargy (MGM’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde). All of these problems are grasped in the disembodied paw of Warner Bros.’ The Beast with Five Fingers. Had it been produced in the previous decade, this adaptation of W.F. Harvey’s short story might have been a first-rate chiller. It certainly has a lot going for it: stylish direction from Robert Florey (Murders in the Rue Morgue), a script by Curt Siodmak (The Wolf Man), a lush score by Max Steiner (King Kong), and meaty lead parts for Peter Lorre and J. Carrol Naish (doing an Italian caricature worthy of Chef Boyardee).

The glitch is that The Beast with Five Fingers isn’t quite sure if it’s man or beast. After a long, long lead up to the death of a crusty pianist (Victor Francen), his personal secretary Hilary (Lorre) starts seeing the dead man’s disembodied hand scurrying all over the place and people start getting choked. Although the hour preceding the hand’s appearance receives able support from fine performances by Francen, the ever-clammy Lorre, Robert Alda (Alan’s dad) as a wisenheimer musician, and Naish as a cop, it drags badly. Those who came to the picture for horror will note a decided reluctance to leap into those waters, possibly because the genre was such a pariah at the time. When the hand finally crawls out of a box like Thing, the terrific visual effects (which recall The Invisible Man) render the previous, humdrum 60 minutes irrelevant and the fun begins.



But even now it’s difficult to suss where the filmmakers were aiming. The hand’s exploits are played dead-seriously, yet the sight of it tapping out a Bach partita on a grand piano is pretty silly. The ultimate cop-out arrives when we learn that the five-fingered beasty was nothing more than a psychotic hallucination of Hilary, who’d been committing the killings he attributed to the pianist’s nefarious mitt. As if tasked with helping us decide whether we should laugh, shriek, or shrug, Naish turns to the camera and drops a few creaky one-liners in his “that’s a spicy meat-a-ball!” accent. So it’s a comedy after all? Were the filmmakers shoehorning in jokes at the last minute to deflate the potentially heart attack-inducing horrors we just witnessed? Or were they working overtime to avoid having their picture filed in the career-killing horror drawer? Shrug. One thing is for sure: it’s a good thing the Brits were on the verge of taking horror seriously. Otherwise the genre may not have survived beyond the ‘40s.

Review: ‘33 1/3: Some Girls'

One of the marvelous things about Continuum’s 33 1/3 series is that it allows writers a wide range of approaches to discussing classic albums. Without any set format, the books range from neatly organized (Andy Miller’s The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society and Bryan Waterman’s Marquee Moon opt for tight chronologies followed by track-by-track analyses) to creatively messy (Marc Woodworth’s book on Guided by Voices’ Bee Thousand mimics that album’s random abandon with pleasing results). Some of the series’ writers would be better served by tighter parameters. John Dougan primarily used his The Who Sell Out as a study of pirate radio, failing to give The Who’s greatest album the attention it deserves. Cyrus R.K. Patell is another writer who could have used some editorial guidance. While Woodworth’s Bee Thousand was purposefully sloppy, Patell’s look at The Rolling Stones’ Some Girls gives the impression he wasn’t sure how to fill 150 pages.

This book is all over the place. The writer begins with a personal anecdote about a high school teacher without tying it into the album’s story satisfactorily. He then wastes time going over familiar territory: Andrew Oldham’s grooming of The Rolling Stones as the anti-Beatles. I think Patell’s intention is to establish how every move The Stones made was a reaction to existing factors in the pop world, which he explains via a discussion of literary historian Hans Robert Jauss’s “horizon of expectations” theory, but it’s overly labored for such a short book. All of that wordiness does little to illuminate why Some Girls is exceptional, which is contentious in itself. The album was a good return to form after the water-treading Black and Blue, but it doesn’t measure up to the band’s work from the ‘60s through Exile on Main Street. This book seems as though it was written by a writer who did not realize his subject lacks substance until after starting his assignment. So he filled it out with unnecessary autobiographical tangents, pretentious literary theories, and way, way too many passages pulled from other sources. Patell recycles so much of Life that Keith Richards should receive royalties for this book. What does a reprint of Patell’s own blog review of the Shine a Light concert film have to do with an analysis of Some Girls? I understand how Glen Campbell’s “Rhinestone Cowboy” may be relevant to a discussion of “When the Whip Comes Down” (both songs are about rubes and their eye-opening experiences in NYC), but do we really need to know how Campbell came to record the song and how it moved up the pop charts? More filler.

The most interesting chapter is the one titled “Aftermath”, which covers the controversies Some Girls stirred, The Stones' “Saturday Night Live” performance in support of the album, and reactions to the band in their middle-aged years. But the book goes off the rails again when Patell gets into an extended, irrelevant discussion of the Steel Wheels tour. Is the point to show how commercially minded Jagger had become in the ensuing ten years after The Stones made their reaction to punk? Because punk gestures aside, he was pretty commercially minded in ’78 too. Whatever. This is not the worst book about The Stones out there, but with so many superior choices, it’s not really essential. Kind of like Some Girls.

Review: ‘33 1/3: Marquee Moon'

The late-‘70s punk movement gestated for a long time— some may say it began way back in 1963 when The Stones’ recorded Lennon and McCartney’s “I Wanna Be Your Man” as a hyperkinetic rave barely crossing the 90-second mark. Punk slipped through some unexpected variations on its way to becoming one of Rock’s most dogmatic splinters in 1977, when even the wrinkliest journalists knew the formula: two chords, two minutes, some spiky-haired scuzzo from London or NYC screeching about anarchy. Television did not fit that bill at all, yet they sat among the handful of bands that could really be credited with launching punk. They broke in CBGB for Patti Smith, The Ramones, Talking Heads, Blondie, and all the other bands that would establish the former home of country, blue grass, and blues as ground zero for New York Punk. Tom Verlaine’s snotty yowl wasn’t radically different from Johnny Rotten’s or Stiv Bators’s, but neither The Sex Pistols nor The Dead Boys would have ever played a ten-minute anthem streaked with ecstatic runs of psychedelic guitar, nor would they have composed lyrics as evocative and poetic as Verlaine’s.

Television could be transcendent on stage, but harnessing that fluid magic on vinyl was tricky. After a false start recording demos with Brian Eno, who one might think would be a perfect match with Television’s atmospheric sensibility, they tried again with Andy Johns, best known for his work with Led Zeppelin and The Stones. The collaboration was surprisingly right (at least once Johns stopped miking Billy Ficca’s drumkit to sound like John Bonham's). Ambitious and beautiful, Marquee Moon is a rare jewel. Television crumbled nearly as soon as their debut was released, managing one other record, the so-so Adventure, before going on hiatus for nearly 15 years.

Bryan Waterman accomplishes quite a lot in chronicling Television’s bumpy path toward making Marquee Moon in his new book for the “33 1/3” series. His book serves as a well-researched biography of the band’s earliest days, which means it tells the portion of Television’s story that will most interest fans. Waterman maintains focus on the music, so anyone looking for anecdotes about Richard Lloyd’s days as a prostitute or other tabloid tales should stick with their copies of Please Kill Me. Yet we still get a rich portrait of the band because so much of their history is relevant to how Marquee Moon was created: the friendship between Verlaine and bassist Richard Hell and their bitter break, Verlaine’s relationship with Patti Smith, new bassist Fred Smith’s defecting from Blondie, the history of CBGB and the New York punk and poetry scenes. Waterman details the album’s recording before providing individual analyses of its tracks, doing his best in the face of Verlaine’s tendency toward the cryptic. Compact yet comprehensive, Bryan Waterman’s Marquee Moon crams a lot of interesting information and insights onto its 211 tiny pages.

Psychobabble’s 200 Essential Horror Movies Part 5: The 1960s

In this feature, Psychobabble creeps through 100 years of horror cinema to assemble a highly personal list of the genre’s 200 most monstrous works, decade by decade.

(Updated in September 2021)

60. Eyes Without a Face (1960- dir. Georges Franju)

Review: The Next Wave of Kinks Deluxe Editions

The Kinks entered 1966 as a radically different band. Power-chord pile drivers such as “You Really Got Me”, “All Day and All of the Night”, and “Till the End of the Day” gave way to sensitivity and social observation. These ingredients had already seasoned the more sedate moments on their earlier records, but they became The Kinks’ raison d'être on Face to Face. The band could still whip up a froth on stuff like “Party Line” and “House in the Country”, but the heaviness had dissipated. So had trivial lyrics about hand holding and all that follows. Ray Davies’s literate tales of self-pitying layabouts, wayward teens, and vain bounders placed him in the same league as Britain’s top composers. In his own way, Davies nearly matched Dylan in terms of influence on his mid-‘60s peers. He was single-handedly responsible for spearheading the wave of music-hall nostalgia and unapologetic Britishness that made London swing in ’66 and ’67. It is impossible to imagine The Stones’ Between the Buttons, Donovan’s Mellow Yellow, and even Sgt. Pepper’s without The Kinks’ inspiration. Yet few beyond their fellow musicians and hip music critics were aware of the full breadth of The Kinks’ greatness during this period, because they were still generally regarded as a singles band. A Musician’s Union ban from the United States further damaged their commercial potential.



Still The Kinks soldiered on, crafting an L.P. that should have been their masterpiece. Arriving in late 1967, Something Else by The Kinks develops upon Face to Face to formulate a perfectly realized microcosm of English life populated by a particularly vivid cast of characters. Peculiarly, Ray chose to tell his stories not from the perspectives of these golden boys and girls, but from drab, envious bystanders. As such, “David Watts”, “Two Sisters”, “Lazy Old Sun”, and “Waterloo Sunset” are among his most humane and finely detailed character sketches. Meanwhile, brother Dave—the Sybilla to Ray’s Priscilla—was developing into a fine songwriter in his own right with the comparatively extroverted rockers “Funny Face” and “Love Me Till the Sun Shines” and the sublime Dylan-pastiche “Death of a Clown”.



Something Else should have been The Kinks’ masterpiece because no band should have it in them to make a record of greater beauty or depth. That did not stop them from conjuring The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society a year later, and a more perfect pop creation is impossible to imagine. So magnificently realized, the album made decline an inevitability, and though Arthur or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire is wonderful, it does feel like The Kinks’ had passed the rainbow’s peak. Recorded as the soundtrack to an uncompleted television film, Arthur drags slightly because of the extended jams cut to fill out dramatic sequences. Yet Ray’s compositions continue to astound—“Victoria”, “Shangri-La”, and “Yes Sir, No Sir” certainly rate among his finest—and the band sounds positively elated to be back in harder rocking territory.

Village Green received an extraordinary sonic upgrade and expansion way back in 2004, but the other records that komprised The Kinks’ most kreative period were only available in poorly mastered, hard-to-find editions. Sanctuary/UMC’s new kampaign to refurbish The Kinks’ back katalogue (OK, I’ll stop with the K’s …) has finally bestowed the definitive editions of Face to Face, Something Else, and Arthur on a patient public. Well, as definitive as we’re likely to get. The sound of these discs cannot be improved. Like the double-disc editions of The Kinks’ first three records released this past Spring, these latest releases are dense and detailed. Each album is presented in both mono and stereo mixes, which is slightly redundant on Face to Face since several tracks on the “stereo” album are actually in mono. These numbers are given all-new stereo remixes as bonus tracks, though a quick listen will reveal why they were left in mono in the first place. Something Else is the record on which The Kinks were well represented in stereo for the first time. The mixes are unusually well balanced and full-bodied for the era. The mono version is still worth hearing for its fascinating alternate details, particularly apparent in “Lazy Old Sun”. Arthur was recorded after the proliferation of stereo, and the mono mix sounds lacking in comparison.

The compilers did a good job of sweeping together a bundle of bonus non-L.P. sides, alternate mixes, BBC cuts, and oddities (collectors will be pleased to discover “Sand on My Shoes”, an early version of “Tin Soldier Man”, and an acoustic version of “David Watts”). Still, it isn’t nitpicky to note that several great, lost Kinks classics still have not received official release. The scuttlebutt is that Ray blocked the inclusion of “Pictures in the Sand” and “Till Death Us Do Part” from the deluxe edition of Village Green Preservation Society for some reason, so he may be blameworthy for their non-appearance on these latest discs, too. Those divine songs would have been preferable to the alternate mix of “Drivin’” and backing track of “Shangri-La” included on Arthur. So would orphans such as “There Is No Life Without Love” and “I’m Crying” from Dave’s abandoned solo record featuring The Kinks as his backing band. Oh well. There’s always hope that these tracks may find their ways onto a deluxe edition of Lola vs. Powerman and the Money-Go-Round sometime in the future. Keep your fingers krossed.

13 Spine-Tingling Horror Scores

Strings that scream and synthesizers that growl, menacing orchestral music and spooky jazz, from the funereal to the phantasmagoric, the cacophonous to the melodious, great scores are often essential ingredients in great horror movies. In honor of the 100th birthday of one of the cinema’s greatest composers— Bernard Herrmann— Psychobabble surveys 13 of horror’s greatest scores.

1. White Zombie by Abe Meyer (1932)

Sound horror was still a new thing in the early ‘30s, and the genre’s first films were short on non-diegetic music. Universal’s Dracula and The Mummy both settled for brief passages from Swan Lake over their opening credits sequences. Bernhard Kaun provided the overture to the otherwise music-devoid Frankenstein. Over on Poverty Row, Abe Meyer of the Meyer Synchronizing Service put together a feature-length, newly recorded score for the Bela Lugosi vehicle White Zombie. Meyer chose a superb selection of compositions by Richard Wagner, Franz Liszt, Modest Mussorgsky, Hugo Risenfeld, and Leo Kempenski. Particularly memorable are the excerpt from Gaston Borch’s Incidental Symphonies that swoops through the gloom while Lugosi casts a voodoo spell over Madge Bellamy and Guy Bevier Williams’s percussive “Chant”, which opens the film. Aside from Bevier Williams’s piece and a jota by Xavier Cugat, White Zombie does not feature original music, but its use of background music, orchestral and otherwise, broke new ground for sound horror.

2. King Kong by Max Steiner (1933)

King Kong was one of the most lavish productions to pummel the early sound era. There was no skimping on its special effects, sets, or globe-spanning scope. RKO had pumped so much money into Kong that studio president B.B. Kahane schemed to cut corners in post-production by asking Max Steiner to create a composite soundtrack of existing music. Producer/director Merian C. Cooper hadn’t copped out on any aspect of Kong so far, and he wasn’t going to start with anything as important as its score. Unable to convince Kahane to compromise, he paid the $50,000 cost himself, and Steiner created one of cinema’s most magical, memorable scores. The composer enhanced onscreen action with pieces that worked as both music and sound effects: booming brass blasts along with each blow from Kong’s mighty fists. The harp laced piece that sets the tone for the crew’s foggy journey toward Skull Island— and the entire picture when it unfolds during the “overture”—is groundbreaking in its eerie subtlety.

3. Bride of Frankenstein by Franz Waxman (1935)

For its sequel to the smash success Frankenstein, Universal sprang for a lush score to accompany its most lush monster movie. Director James Whale recruited Franz Waxman after meeting him at a Christmas party and explaining how much he liked the composer’s work in Fritz Lang’s Liliom. Waxman outdid himself, creating the instantly recognizable leitmotifs that electrify the picture. For Karloff’s Monster, Waxman wrote a raspy, four-note brass grunt. Ernest Thesiger’s charmingly nefarious Dr. Pretorius is introduced by shuddering strings, while his drunken escapades in a crypt are accompanied by a loopy rattle inspired by Saint-Saëns’s Danse Macabre. Elsa Lanchester’s Bride is signified by a swooning ellipsis that serves as her shorthand whether she’s on screen or merely discussed by other characters. Elsewhere Waxman discharges what Scott MacQueen describes as a “charming period-style minuet” that devolves into an ominous fugue when Shelley and Byron recount the story of Frankenstein, a clangor of church bells when we first see The Bride in her wedding gown, and an orchestra rush that heightens the already apocalyptic destruction of Frankenstein’s laboratory to utter hysteria.

4. The Night of the Hunter by Walter Schumann (1955)

A Golden Circle: Looking Back at the “Twin Peaks” Finale

*Warning: This must be where Spoilers go to die…


So little time passed between that golden era when Laura Palmer’s blue face smirked out of every magazine cover in America to the barely-on-the-radar “Twin Peaks” finale that first aired twenty years ago today. The story has been told countless times: ABC forced Mark Frost and David Lynch to reveal Laura’s killer earlier than they intended (i.e.: never), the viewers who so demanded that revelation tuned out as soon as it dropped early in the second season, ABC rescheduled and preempted the show so many times that real fans could barely keep track of when and whether or not it was on TV. Following an extended break after Josie Packard was left trapped in a wooden pull knob in the Great Northern Hotel, ABC allowed “Twin Peaks” to return briefly enough to finish out its second season while manacled in the ratings dungeon. ABC was so over “Twin Peaks” that the network crammed its final episodes into a two-hour “movie of the week” format just so it didn’t have to deal with the show another day. Some who worked on it, including David Lynch, claimed they weren’t sure whether or not “Twin Peaks” would be renewed for a third season, but it’s unlikely anyone involved was really that naïve. When Mark Frost directed the first-season finale, he purposely loaded the episode with so many cliffhangers that the network would have to renew it. The scheme was a clever one, but not realistic from a business stance. No network pours money into a program that isn’t pulling in viewers. “Twin Peaks” ended its first season as a hit, which guaranteed its renewal more surely than the notion that anyone at ABC cared to find out if Shelley Johnson and Catherine Martell survived the mill fire, if Ben Horne discovered his daughter was the masked prostitute at One Eyed Jacks, and who shot Agent Cooper.

Still, the “Twin Peaks” team tried that scheme again with the episode that would be the series’ last. Audrey Horne, Pete Martell, and Andrew Packard blow up in a bank explosion, their fates unknown. Nadine Hurley recovers from delusions that she’s a high school girl, leaving her relationship with teen Mike, and her husband’s with Norma Jennings, in uncertain shambles. Doc Hayward may or may not have murdered Ben Horne. And, most shattering of all, Agent Cooper is left under the influence of the demonic Killer BOB. That’s quite a lot of unfinished business, but the show’s abysmal ratings meant none of it would be resolved.

Writer Bob Engels has spoken quite a bit about where “Twin Peaks” might have headed in its phantom third season. He told the Twin Peaks Archive that it might have shifted “away from the high school setting, so after the resolution of the Cooper-BOB-possession plot point, they would have cut to something like ‘Ten Years Later’, and then shown us a Twin Peaks where Cooper had quit the FBI and had become the town pharmacist, Sheriff Truman had become a recluse, etc.” He also mentioned the possibility of bringing “Sheryl Lee back yet again, this time as a redhead, and having her character killed by BOB again.” No one else involved in the show has corroborated any of this.

The fact remains that there was no way ABC was going to bring back “Twin Peaks”, and that David Lynch had yet to begin toying with the idea of a feature-length sequel (or prequel, as it would turn out). One can reasonably surmise that everyone involved knew “Episode 29” would be the series’ last even before it was finished being scripted. So how does it hold up as such? Most of its cliffhangers discussed above end on an unsatisfying note—assuming one views the show as a soap opera in which no one is ever really dead. “Twin Peaks” had played that game before when Coop survived getting plugged three times and Catherine Martell finally emerged weeks after everyone believed she’d perished in the mill fire. The bizarre nature of Josie’s “demise” suggests she might have returned too. But most of the folks who were supposed to be dead stayed that way: Laura and Leland Palmer, Maddy Ferguson, Harold Smith, all three Renault Brothers, Blackie and her sister, etc. The fates of Audrey, Pete, Andrew, and Ben may very well have been tied up in the finale. It would certainly be farfetched to have everyone survive that bank explosion. Ben’s “death” is more ambiguous, but it certainly looks as though he is breathing his final breath and shuddering into oblivion after clunking his head on the Hayward’s fireplace.

This leaves us with the finale’s biggest shocker: Cooper left in the Red Room while his BOB-“possessed” (for lack of a better word) doppelgänger is free to roam Twin Peaks, and presumably, cause a lot of mischief. But think way back to Episode 2, which ends with Cooper’s famous dream in which we first glimpse BOB, the Red Room, and the rest of the phantasmagoria with which the show is associated. In this dream, Cooper is twenty-five years older. And what does Laura (or the spirit who resembles Laura) tell the agent during his disorienting trek through the Red Room in the series’ finale?

"I’ll see you in twenty five years."

While these two details do not clue us in to everything that transpires during that twenty-five years, they do give us a degree of closure on Cooper’s fate. In Twin Peaks, there is only the thinnest veil separating the dream world from the waking one. The bizarre characters that populate Cooper’s dream in Episode 2 eventually appear in the waking world. Messages he receives in his dreams relate to events yet to pass in the real world. Dreams are not mere nocturnal fancies; they relate tangibly and directly to waking life. The old Cooper we see in his dream really is Cooper, just as the Little Man from Another Place and the “dream Laura” really give him real clues about her murder that will manifest in the real world: Leland reveals that he is his daughter’s murderer (or the vessel that housed her actual murderer) when he repeats the Little Man’s strange statement, “That gum you like is going to come back in style”; the Little Man refers to the cousin who would be BOB’s next victim even before Cooper is aware that Maddy Ferguson exists.

According to this interpretation, “Twin Peaks” itself is a “golden circle,” just like the ring the Giant takes from Cooper, or MIKE and BOB’s “golden circle” of appetite and satisfaction. Cooper essentially begins the show in the Red Room, so it is inevitable he will end up there. Time is cyclical in the Twin Peaks world. But the situation is not so simple as to conclude that the Agent Cooper left waiting in the Red Room for twenty-five years is the “real” Coop and the one we see leering at his reflection in the Great Northern bathroom while cackling “How’s Annie?” is nothing more than an evil replica created by BOB. They are both Cooper. Like all of us, the heroic special agent is capable of good and bad. Remember, this seeming paragon of good had an affair with his former partner’s wife. Cooper’s two poles have split à la Jekyll and Hyde. As his new love, Annie Blackburn, will later explain, “The good Dale is in the Lodge, and he can’t leave.” Annie speaks these truths to Laura in what may be a dream, reinforcing the realness of dreams in the Twin Peaks world. That she speaks them in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, which takes place before Laura dies, reinforces the looping nature of time in that world.

So the “Twin Peaks” finale does give us some idea of Agent Cooper’s future (as well as his past): his good self remains in the Red Room for twenty-five years, while his evil, BOB-possessed self continues to hunt in the outside world. That period could conclude with the Good Dale reemerging from the Red Room to defeat his evil twin. That, of course, we’ll never know. But as it stands, Episode 29 works fairly well as a series finale since it finally shows us how Cooper ended up languishing in the Red Room for twenty-five years: a mystery presented very early in the series, whether we viewers realized its importance or not.

We are also left with what may be network television’s most experimental and disturbing hour. Following a diffuse period in which characters and situations were becoming increasingly silly and meandering, David Lynch finally returned to set “Twin Peaks” back on track with reinvigorating confidence. The power of those early episodes leading up to the revelation of Laura’s killer is back. Episode 29 unravels with the slow queasiness of a nightmare (a Lynch trademark) as we see beloved characters dispatched mercilessly. Then there’s Cooper’s walk through the Red Room, which stands alongside his first dream of The Red Room (Episode 2) and the death of Maddy Ferguson (Episode 14) as one of the series’ most mesmerizing sequences. To a backdrop of sawing string bass, characters emerge from behind curtains and furniture to posit puzzles and threaten Cooper. Long lost Laura, Maddy, and Leland are back in various states of good and evil. Little Jimmy Scott materializes to croon a haunting torch song about the sycamores standing guard around the entrance to The Black Lodge, then disappears. Cooper comes face to face with Caroline Earle, the lost love about whom we’ve heard so much. She transforms into his new love, Annie, then into her own wicked husband, Windom. But as soon as we catch sight of Cooper’s own cataract-eyed doppelgänger lurching into the strobe light, we can already guess how all this will turn out. His pursuit of the Good Dale is terrifying. The resolution of that pursuit in the Great Northern bathroom is punishing, heartbreaking. Painful as it is to see our friend Cooper making a mockery of the good person we’d come to love throughout the previous 28 episodes (and pilot), there is comfort for viewers open-minded enough to experience the unfairly maligned Fire Walk With Me. We see the Good Dale once again, gabbing to his little tape recorder, chatting with his curmudgeonly buddy Albert Rosenfield, investigating, drinking coffee, being the old Cooper we all adore. In the end, we see him during his twenty-five year stint in the Red Room, as angelic as ever, guiding the Good Laura to a better world where she will finally be at peace. A happy ending for Coop, Laura, and “Twin Peaks”, because as Lynch informed us in his first film, he believes that “in heaven everything is fine.”

Review: 'Boris Karloff: More Than a Monster'

Boris Karloff would have hated Boris Karloff: More Than a Monster. The man who became a legend by portraying the Frankenstein Monster and the Mummy beneath pounds of movie makeup loathed nothing more than having his private life revealed. The two instances in Stephen Jacobs’s 500-page-plus biography in which Karloff allows his politesse to drop is when being ambushed on TV’s “This Is Your Life” and prodded by a tactless interviewer. Karloff’s intense privacy is all the more interesting and endearing considering the lack of skeletons in his closet. Nearly everyone of the countless colleagues and friends Jacobs quotes have nothing but effusive praise for the screen’s greatest villain. “A true gentleman” and “sweet” are repeated with such regularity that readers of the more common muck-raking biography might wonder why Jacobs even bothered chronicling Karloff’s life. His legions of fans will recognize that life was so rich and fascinating because it was so far removed from the creatures he played. Tremendously generous with his time, loyal, caring, and dignified, Karloff lived up to all the wonderful things people said about him. That innate kindness really shone through creeps like the Frankenstein Monster and the Mummy, making them deeply sympathetic and infinitely more complex than their heroic human costars.

Review: Simon Pegg's 'Nerd Do Well'

Simon Pegg is the role model horror, sci-fi, and comedy geeks always craved. Less contemptuous of his fans than Bruce Campbell, Pegg is the ultimate geek hero because he is completely grateful for and humbled by his success with such stellar work as “Spaced”, Shaun of the Dead, and Hot Fuzz. That humbleness pervades his memoir Nerd Do Well, although I’m not really sure why this is categorized as a memoir rather than an autobiography. I’ve always made the distinction that autobiographies are by famous people and memoirs are by unknown people who’ve been hooked on crack, abused in some way, or most commonly, both. Pegg is famous enough, and aside from a good deal of ganja puffing, there isn’t anything in the way of drug abuse in this book. Aside from his parents’ divorce, several teen heartbreaks, and one genuinely tragic event involving a boyhood friend, he seems to have lived a pretty happy, pretty charmed life.

Pegg often writes that he doesn’t really know why such a jolly story needs to be told. He’d rather be doing other things, like making up a cheeky sci-fi scenario starring his superhuman alter-ego and robot butler buddy that could easily have made a neat novel in itself, or delivering a thoughtful multi-chapter essay about his favorite movie, Star Wars. Pegg’s autobiographical vignettes aren’t always as interesting as his tangents, but his flawless writing and sincere amiability make every page enjoyable reading. Pegg knows a straight life-story narrative is no way to convey the geekiness that made him a cult hero. By showing us what he likes to do and talk about, what cracks him up, and what inspires him, he creates a complete, personal, and specific self-portrait. And like his best work on TV and film, it is breezy, often touching, and frequently hilarious fun. Pegg’s accounts of befriending his own heroes—George Romero, Gillian Anderson, Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino, John Landis, Rob Morrow—are delivered with geeky awe rather than name-dropping smarm. He is just as jazzed about meeting these people as anyone reading his book would be to meet him. Simon (I hope he doesn’t mind my assumption we’re on a first-name basis) never lets us forget he is one of us.

Charlie Watts's Ten Greatest Beats

Keith Richards may have recently spent nearly 550 pages grumbling about the prancing vocalist to his right, but only one Stone was terse enough to tell Mick Jagger “Don’t ever call me ‘your drummer’ again. You’re my fucking singer!” before giving him a face full of knuckles. That’s the kind of forthright might one should expect from Charlie Watts. He is equally brusque on drums, never overplaying or needlessly upstaging his cohorts, but like that famous punch, he isn’t above letting you know who’s really pulling Jagger’s strings every once in a while. The Charlie Watts Beat is as instantly recognizable as Ringo’s wash of hi-hat or Keith Moon’s thunderous chaos: never a hi-hat and snare played in unison, always a little behind the beat. Funky, loose but driving, the perfect compliment to Mick’s mercurial yowling and Keith’s sparse shades of strumming. Charlie Watts is The Rolling Stones’ “Man Behind the Curtain,” but in honor of his 70th birthday, we’re gonna yank that curtain down, shine a light on him, and groove to his ten greatest beats.


1. “Get Off Of My Cloud” (1965)

With “Get Off Of My Cloud”, Charlie Watts essentially does for the drums what Keith Richards did for the guitar on The Stones’ previous single, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”: he creates his instrument’s most instantly recognizable lick. The big difference is that iconic guitar riffs had been a Rock & Roll staple since Ike Turner choked out the boogie-woogie on “Rocket 88”. How many iconic drum beats had there been? “Peggy Sue” perhaps? “Bo Diddley” maybe? But even on those songs the drums served as backdrop for Holly and Diddley’s manic strumming. Right from the start of “Get Off Of My Cloud” we know who’s ruling the record. That purposeful thunder of semi-open hi-hat invaded by a lightning-bolt snare fill is to Rock & Roll drumming what “Once upon a time” is to storytelling.

2. “Paint It Black” (1966)

“Paint It Black” is a glorious testament to The Stones’ ensemble power. Everyone is delivering stellar work: Keith’s snaky guitar riff later echoed by Brian’s zingy sitar, Mick’s crimped inflections, Bill’s bass swoops that propel the track through its concluding dervish dance. But it is Charlie’s tom-tom pounding that inspired Melody Maker to swoon that he “creates a galloping beat suggesting high-speed elephants.” The powerful thumping Charlie muscles through the majority of the song is only topped by the simple yet shattering fill he discharges after the quiet mid-song break. A curt volley between toms and snare and the track is immediately thrust back into frenzied violence. Transcendent.


3. “My Obsession” (1967)

The potency of simplicity. As he did on “Get Off Of My Cloud”—and as he would do often throughout Between the Buttons—Charlie provides a track’s chief instrumental hook on “My Obsession”. Bass-snare-bass-snare-snare. When the sound evaporates at the end of each verse, the drummer ushers the band back in with a return to his ponderous solo like a nightmare that refuses to end. Only by killing it mid-beat is Charlie able to halt his obsession.


4. “Please Go Home” (1967)

Another Between the Buttons track gets its oomph from the man behind the kit. While Keith’s absurdly overdriven guitar doesn’t slack, it is Charlie’s “shave-and-a-haircut” jive that launches “Please Go Home” into the stratosphere. Punctuated only by the occasional gong-like cymbal crash, the beat never relents or alters, and the listener’s heart never stops racing until that final wave of guitar shudders into the shadows.


5. “Complicated” (1967)

Charlie gets even funkier on “Complicated”. Once again, he provides the hook, a hypnotic cha-cha-cha that expands into an unbreakable roll by the end of the track. There’s something very cheeky about his shifts into a Ringo Starr-like wash on the verses.


6. “2000 Man” (1967)

Here’s where words fail me. I’m not a drummer, so I can’t really explain what Charlie is doing in this song. I’m guessing most drummers couldn’t either. As Keith picks out a fairly conventionally rhythmic folk melody on his acoustic, Charlie trips the beat into disorienting psychedelia (or is it prog rock?) with his syncopations, keeping the beat moving with his hippity-hoppity bass drum but landing the snare where you’d least expect it. On first listen, his beat sounds completely out of place and distracting. After the third or fourth listen, you couldn’t imagine “2000 Man” without it. And just in case you’re concerned that Charlie has succumbed to some sort of massive psychedelic head trauma, he lays down his familiar funk on the mid-section to remind us he is still well capable of kicking out a basic beat.


7. “Sympathy for the Devil” (1968)

Mick and Keith did not provide Charlie with a lot of material requiring Latin rhythms, so hearing him samba as naturally as Tito Puente on “Sympathy for the Devil” is kind of shocking. He gets the intricate rhythm jingling from the opening seconds. When Rocky Dijon on congas and Bill Wyman on cabasa join in, the voodoo ritual is in full effect. Add in Mick’s screams and Keith’s tortured guitar shrieks and jittery bass, and you have one of the most rhythmically exhilarating Rock & Roll tracks ever cut.


8. “Honky Tonk Women” (1969)

No Latin flourishes here. No tricky syncopations or signature hooks. “Honky Tonk Women” is where Charlie lays down the archetypal Charlie beat, and this list would be incomplete without such an example. A few insouciant clicks from Jimmy Miller’s cowbell then Charlie thuds in slightly behind the beat, as is his way. He then propels the tempo without pushing it, barely altering the beat throughout the track’s three minutes. Notice how consistent the drums remain even as the brass, guitars, and bass approach euphoria on the instrumental break. Then when all instruments and voices cut loose on the grand finale, swooping and diving around each other like asteroids, Charlie trips up his beat a bit for emphasis, but doesn’t hit harder, doesn’t really go out of his way to up the intensity because he doesn’t need to. “Honky Tonk Women” is a sublime example of the drummer’s taste and his ability to lead the show from the back row. And you can dance to it.


9. “Moonlight Mile” (1971)

Perhaps the most gorgeous song in The Stones’ catalogue is also one of the band’s most deceptively powerful ones. Gentle acoustic guitars and piano provide a velvet backdrop to Mick’s sensitive vocal. Charlie rolls in with what sounds like soft mallets, creating cinematic flourishes redolent of crashing waves. He never breaks into standard bass-snare interplay. Rather he washes and booms and tumbles his way through the track, providing its exhilarating might, driving Mick to wails that ring with greater sincerity than the mass of his vocals. “Moonlight Mile” suggests that Charlie may have missed his calling as a great movie director.

10. “Time Waits for No One” (1974)

Charlie’s rhythm on “Time Waits for No One” is just as visual as his work on “Moonlight Mile”, cracking a rim shot that instantly conjures images of a grand, looming clock even before Jagger begins decrying the stoic cruelty of time. When the guitars flood in, he releases all of his signatures: the lax beat, the cinematic rolls, the Latin off beats, the simple yet mighty tom fills. By the end of the track, he’s back to tick-tocking, leading this epic out toward infinity.