By hidden camera, it’s Burl, here to report on a piece of oddballania from the Great White North! Ha ha, many strange concoctions have emerged from that land, and the movie under discussion today is not the strangest – but most certainly it is not the most normal, either! It’s claimed in certain quarters to be a made-for-TV movie, but I don’t think that’s true! I think it’s just a plain old freaky little mystery, and it goes by the name of Till Death Do Us Part!
I can see why some would think it’s a TV movie though – the VHS version I saw had been sort of transformed into one with some weird and very apparent editing elisions; a clearly re-cut credits sequence, which shows bits from the movie to come; and an abbreviated running time! I suppose it was chopped and reordered from whatever it started as into a post-hoc TV movie in much the same way as Dr. Moreau surgically alters people into half-animals! So it’s a bit of a mutation, this little movie, but does it still work? Ha ha, sort of!
We open in a big country house at night, with a scullery maid played by Riva Spier from Pinball Summer discovering a young man rocking back and forth in his chair as he watches a screen showing two people engaged in pre-bohankie! The maid steals the big ¾ inch video tape and escapes the house by the tried-and-true method of tying sheets together and shinnying out the window – though, ha ha, her knots are not so good and she takes a tumble! Worse still awaits her in the woods, where she is killed, has a cross carved into her forehead, and is crucified on some trees by person or persons unknown!
Then it’s the next day and we’re back at the country mansion, which proves to be a marriage counselling retreat run by a radical post-Freudian psychologist called Dr. Sigmund Freed, ha ha, who’s played by none other than the director of Mon Oncle Antoine, Claude Jutra! (Some pretty unsavory stories have come out about poor Jutra in recent years, but as they haven’t really been confirmed so far as I’ve heard, and as he’s dead anyway, drowned in the St. Lawrence, I tried not to let that bother me as I watched the movie!) His character is meant to be a crazy unpredictable obsessive wearing a thin veneer of rationality, and for a non-actor he pulls it off pretty well!
Anyway, three married couple arrive for therapy: we have the world’s rudest man, Wally, played by Jack Creley from Tulips and Videodrome, and his long-suffering wife Edna, essayed by Helen Hughes from Incubus; floppy-haired Robert Craig, played by the picture’s requisite American star, James Keach from Cannonball and Vacation, and his wife Dr. Susan Craig, who is played by Candace O’Connor from The Silent Partner; and, late to the party and therefore subject to a fearsome dressing-down from Freed, drugs aficionado Tony, impersonated by veteran summer-camp actor Matt Craven from Meatballs and Indian Summer, along with his wife, played by someone I forget who, ha ha!
Already at the big country house is Freed, of course, along with his wife Honora, played by Toby Tarnow from Utilities; Honora’s brother, who seems mute but later protests that he’s only shy, played not by an actor but by a lighting technician; and Terrence Labrosse as a crusty, gun-toting, bunny-loving handyman! The bickering couples are subjected to various mind games and constant surveillance, and are informed that they must not leave the premises for the entire weekend! Ha ha, but after Freed does things like pretend to machine gun everyone to death, it’s inevitable that they will insist upon leaving in the most strenuous terms! Except, ha ha, they don’t really – they make a lot of noise, but these are not very proactive people!
And eventually, they start dying! Wally, the world’s rudest man, is first to go: bonked on the head with a meat tenderizer, a cross carved in his forehead, and sent plummeting down a well! And it seems to take forever, but eagle-beaked Tony goes next: after a long sequence in which he’s blitzed by mind drugs given him by Freed, he relaxes in a hot tub and is heated to death! (We have to assume this – we don’t see it, but he is later found in the tub looking a little ruddier than usual!) There’s also a knife to the gut! And eventually – ha ha, spoiler alert I suppose – the killer bonks Freed on the head, and the garrulous quack goes down still talking as though nothing has happened, but dies once he’s on the floor!
Well I won’t tell who the killer is, but I will say that I, a notoriously bad guesser of such things, was not surprised at the culprit! Nor do the other characters seem terribly shocked, but this is in keeping with their reactions all throughout the movie, ha ha! They muster only the most feeble of requests to call the police once bodies start turning up! Keach, wearing a truly bizarre hairstyle, turns out to have a secret of his own, and is positioned as the hero, but like everyone else he pretty much just stands around in small-mouthed astonishment as the film’s climax unfolds! (He does deliver one minor punch to Freed, however!) We never really find out what the deal is with the crosses in the forehead, but I assume that’s just a holdover from the Duplessis era in Quebec, where the movie was shot!
It’s a strange little movie: part horror, part country-house murder mystery, part comedy! The bizarre lengths Freed is willing to go and his psychopathic egoism; and the outsized behaviour of many of the other characters, in particular the world’s rudest man and the necro-groper handyman who’s constantly fondling bunny rabbits; and the astonishing passivity of the patients, all help make up the oddballness of the picture, and are what makes it compelling despite the long stretches of not much happening and the unpleasantness of many of the characters! The acting is fine, the direction adequate if unspectacular (the director went on to a long TV career, naturally), and the screenplay eccentric enough to make it interesting! It’s no lost classic, though it is virtually lost, and I’m going to give Till Death Do Us Part two polygraph machines!
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