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The Comeback
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray B - United Kingdom - 88 Films Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (9th December 2024). |
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The Film
 Pop singer Nick Cooper (singer Jack Jones) has recently divorced his wife Gail (The Omen's Holly Palance) who convinced him to give up singing, and is planning to recording a comeback album in England. His agent Webster Jones (Charlie's Angels's David Doyle) arranges for him to stay in a country house staffed by housekeeper Mr. and Mrs. B (Last of the Summer Wine's Bill Owen and who else but Sheila Keith); which is just as well since Nick's riverside loft is a mess as an old hag with a sickle hacked Gail to pieces on the staircase and left her corpse to decompose. Nick finds further distraction in Webster’s secretary Linda (Bloodbath at the House of Death's Pamela Stephenson) but cries and laughter in the night, moldering corpses in the basement, and severed rotting heads in the hatbox set Nick on edge while everyone else thinks he’s cracking under pressure (well everyone else who hasn't been slashed and hacked to bits by the cackling old hag). Could the kindly old housekeepers know more than they are letting on – oh, come one, one of them is Sheila Keith, of course they do… The Comeback was written by returning writer Die Screaming, Marianne's Murray Smith – rather than a dusted off Smith script like Schizo which was retrofitted by McGillivray – and it is a bit more "old dark house" than the McGillivrays. While the finished product is an amusing diversion, and Walker says in the interview that the combination of older leads and the showbiz setting made it a more mature mainstream thriller rather than a horror film. Walker himself admits he may have misjudged his audience by putting macho Jones in a role commonly characterized as a terrorized vulnerable, and sometimes scantily clad, "final girl" – although Jones does show a bit more skin than love interest Stephenson) – and he might have gotten away with it had he and Smith been able to engineer the kind of disturbing, blunt, violent set-pieces that characterized the best of the McGillivray collaborations in order to convincingly drive Jones into hysterics. All the same, it is interesting to see a male protagonist go through the motions under Keith's watchful eye. Some other suspects are thrown in. Doyle's agent washes something red off of his hands in one scene and crossdresses in another scene, and young Harry (The Krays' Peter Turner) expresses a certain "otherness" in his slightly possessive behavior over Nick before he gets hacked up on a visit to the loft (this film might have been more novel had it taken the Schizo gimmick). House of Whipcord's Penny Irving returns in a small role and Richard Johnson (The Haunting) has a one scene role as Nick’s doctor. Jessop’s photography is a plus as usual, but Myers' score is the real standout this time around, preventing the accumulating moments of black comedy and absurdity from spilling over into camp. The climactic reveal of the killer's shrine should be shocker but the coverage is insufficient (a publicity still seen in some reference books gives the impression of Jones serenading a mummified corpse but there is really nothing so surreal). Walker tried to get away from the genre with an attempt at British kitchen-sink drama that might have had fans expecting a return to sex comedy in the ultimately ponderous Home Before Midnight (also written by Smith), and it would be another four years before Walker made his next and final film: his highest-budgeted horror film with an all-star cast as Cannon Films dusted off the stage play "Seven Keys to Baldpate" for the quite endearing Gothic/slasher hybrid flop House of the Long Shadows, after which he nearly directed a Sex Pistols documentary before ultimately retiring from film. 
Video
The Comeback was released theatrically by Enterprise Pictures Ltd. which put out a mix of exploitation and mainstream/arthouse product. The film was released as a VHS pre-cert by Derann – at some point a reissue titled "Encore" running approximately ten minutes shorter turned up in some territories and on VHS but it was not a video retitling since the credits were new film opticals overlaid in different spots than the original – but did not turn up again until DVD with the Anchor Bay U.K. set and Shriek Show U.S. DVD. Possibly due to it being considered lesser Walker, the film only had a Blu-ray release in the U.S. until recently with the German mediabook and 88 Films' 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 Blu-ray under review here which is also a "restored HD master" cleaning up the existing one which looked quite good to begin with given once again the more naturalistic photography and lighting which extends to the old dark house sequences with the improvements here mainly being a light touch of color correction removing the yellow cast resulting in livelier skin tones and redder blood. Diffusion is used in a couple bright exteriors, although to deliberate effect at times like the final wink to the camera. 
Audio
The film includes the original English mono track in 24-bit LPCM 2.0 mono. We do not know if they have also had any additional clean-up over the older masters, but dialogue is always clear enough for lines to be intelligible but uneven levels are sometimes evident as well as occasional overdubbing. Jones' studio vocals never convince as anything other than lip-synching but the shrieks of the old hag doing her murderous work come through joltingly. Myers' score gets good support and is far better than the film deserves. Optional English HoH subtitles are also included.
Extras
The Comeback features two commentaries starting with an audio commentary by screenwriter David McGillivray, moderated by film critics Kim Newman and Barry Forshaw in which McGillivray reveals that he did not work on the film but still has plenty of anecdotes since, in spite of their fall-out, Walker did bring him the script to look over, and that in spite of Walker claiming that he did hire writers to do rewrites the finished film looks like what he recalls of the script he saw; although he does suggest that the other writer shares credit with Murray Smith Michael Sloan must be a pseudonym for another writer and cites elements of the film as evidence of very un-Smith-like touches. The trio discuss how the script must have dated back from a decade before and that some of its outdated elements survive, including characterizing cleancut crooner Jones as "lewd" with various suggestions as to who might have been more appropriate had the film been made in the sixties or who might have better represented the characterization in the late seventies like Adam Ant, Bryan Ferry, or Alice Cooper. In spite of him being wrong for the part, the commentators do commend Jones' acting, and McGillivray even suggests that the film might have been better with Jones in the role had the character been acknowledged as being out-of-step and doubtful about his comeback rather than presented as a hip and current talent. They also discuss the gender reversal of having Jones slip in and out of bed barely clad and wandering the house at night in an absurd equivalent of a negligee, as well as the absurdity that a senior citizen assailant might pose a physical threat to Jones. They also chuckle over the absurdity of some of the red herrings involving Doyle, suggest that Stephenson's love interest character might have made a better potential killer along with underused Turner (who had been the bisexual younger lover of Gloria Grahame whose relationship had recently been depicted on film in Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool). Ported from the earlier editions is an audio commentary by director/producer Pete Walker, moderated by "English Gothic" author Jonathan Rigby who points out that the plot seems very much like something Jimmy Sangster would have scripted for Hammer in the sixties (not to mention Fear in the Night in the seventies and a number of Sangster's American TV projects during that decade). Walker says he originally had Bryan Ferry in mind for the lead – he had previously offered the singer a role in Schizo – and admits that the shot of Jones getting out of bed and in the shower were cheeky nods to the fact that he is playing the woman-in-peril role. "Walker's Women" (11:34) is another interview with Walker, but it is a more dispensable piece in which he rattles off anecdotes about some of his actresses but also commenting on the importance of casting female leads both vulnerable and attractive without worrying about the age gap when casting male actors, moving towards casting more experienced actresses rather than women to do nude scenes with his later films while speaking of Sheila Keith as his "leading lady." In "The Making of The Comeback" (7:30) is another loose assemblage of comments form Walker, production manager Denis Johnson Jr. (Sky Pirates), and camera operator Peter Sinclair (The Monster Club). The disc also includes the theatrical trailer (2:10). 
Overall
Pete Walker's last independent horror film The Comeback has a poor reputation but its throwback qualities and spikes of slasher gore can work with a viewer in the right mood.
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