#lugene sanders

[schlock-luster-video]

On November 18, 2006, Tormented was released on DVD in Canada.

Here's some new Lugene Sanders art!

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[cultfaction]

New 4K Scan of Bert I. Gordon’s "Tormented" (1960) to be released!

[moviesandmania]

TORMENTED (1960) Reviews and free to watch online

Bert I. Gordon’s Tormented is being released newly restored in 4K from original 35mm archival elements on April 23, 2024, in a Film Masters collector’s special edition loaded with bonus features, on Blu-ray and DVD. Tormented is presented with its original theatrical aspect ratio of 1.85:1. Discs are region free and include English SDH. Audio is DTS-HD/Dolby AC3s. Special features: Unreleased TV…

[screamscenepodcast]

Director Bert I. Gordon finally makes an appearance on the podcast with TORMENTED (1960)! Taking a break from his "Thing Big" schtick, Gordon takes on a ghost story that stars Richard Carlson, Juli Reding and Susan Gordon.

Context setting 00:00; Synopsis 21:16; Discussion 34:28; Ranking 50:42

[cinemacentral666]

Tormented (1960)

Movie #1,111 • WATCHLIST WEDNESDAYS

I wish I hadn't read that this was a MST3K movie because I kept thinking of the spots for possible quips and it was actually kind of distracting. Made by B-Movie legend Burt I. Gordon — best known for his work in the idiom of giant monster films — this is a quick little 75-minute ghost story featuring some lovable in-camera FX of the era (even if that's all there really is). It's pretty much one-note: dude is seeing shit.

This is "bad" but is it really THAT Bad? It's biggest crime is that it's fairly boring in between the charming (and legitimately!) cool visual stuff. This type of B-movie is fun for mostly good reasons unlike films skewered for bad dubbing and editing, and poor continuity and acting, etc. The main character does consider murdering a child in the end though (played by the director's daughter too lol). It's fine!

SCORE: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

[brokehorrorfan]

Tormented will be released on Blu-ray and DVD on April 23 via Film Masters. The 1960 horror-thriller is perhaps best remembered for its appearance on Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Bert I. Gordon (Empire of the Ants) directs from a script by George Worthing Yates (Earth vs. the Flying Saucers). Richard Carlson, Susan Gordon, Juli Reding, Lugene Sanders, and Joe Turkel star.

Tormented has been newly restored in 4K from original 35mm archival elements. The Mystery Science Theater 3000 version of the film is included. Special features are detailed below.

Special features:

Audio commentary by film historian Gary Don Rhodes (new)

Mystery Science Theater 3000 version of the film (1992)

Bert I. Gordon in the 1950s & 1960s: Bigger Than Life featurette (new)

The Spirit is Willing: CineMagic and Social Discord in Bert I. Gordon’s Tormented visual essay by The Flying Maciste Brothers (new)

Interview with director-producer Bert I. Gordon

Famous Ghost Stories - Unreleased TV pilot created by Bert I. Gordon and hosted by Vincent Price

Original trailer (scanned in 4K)

Recut trailer

Booklet with essays by film historian Tom Weaver and former Susan Gordon fan club president John Wooley

Set on an island in a tight-knit community, Tom Stewart (Richard Carlson) is preparing to marry the woman he loves. All is well until Tom's old girlfriend, Vi, confronts him at the top of the island's lighthouse, claiming he can only be hers! A freak accident throws the scorned woman to her death. At first relieved, Tom's tune changes when her vengeful spirit begins to follow him wherever he goes. He's soon tormented, body and soul, by an unforgiving she-ghost! What lengths will Tom go to in order to protect his secret? Will the vengeful Vi finally reveal herself to the others at hand? Find out in this harrowing tale of love between the living and the dead!

Pre-order Tormented.

[classicmoviesarchive]

Tormented (1960) / Horror film / Richard Carlson, Susan Gordon, Lugene Sanders

[stubobnumbers]

Tormented (1960)

Dir: Bert I. Gordon

Starring: Richard Carlson, Susan Gordon, and Lugene Sanders.

IMDB Synopsis: A man lets a former flame fall to her death rather than let her interfere with his new relationship, but her ghost returns to disrupt his impending nuptials.

[20th-century-man]

Lugene Sanders / publicity photo for Bert I. Gordon's Tormented (1960)

[davidosu87]

[creepingirrelevance]

Lugene Sanders 

[mst3kproject]

414: Tormented

When Bert I. Gordon took breaks from attempting to adapt H. G. Wells’ Food of the Gods, he made some half-decent movies.  There, I said it.  Thing is, half-decent is still not whole-decent.

A pair of lovers, Tom and Vi, meet at a lighthouse on an isolated island – but Tom’s only there to break her heart, telling her that he’s in love with another woman, Meg, and Vi can never see him again.  The meeting ends in tragedy, with Vi falling to her death while Tom, who could have saved her, lets it happen.  Man, she is gonna haunt the living snot out of you, Tom, and I won’t feel sorry for you at all.

Sure enough, as his wedding day approaches Tom grows more and more paranoid.  Everything he sees looks like Vi’s drowned body.  Every sound makes him think he hears her calling his name.  At first it seems like it’s all in his head, but soon other people begin to notice odd manifestations, too.  Either Vi really is back to take some spectral revenge, or Tom’s own guilt over not helping her is quickly driving him mad.  In the end, does it really matter which is the truth?  There’s only one way this movie can end, with Tom following his lost mistress to a death on the surf-scoured rocks.

This movie had an awful lot of potential.  The opening, in which Tom doesn’t actually murder Vi but doesn’t stop her falling, doesn’t try to benefit from her death but certainly doesn’t avoid doing so, is really very effective.  The events that follow start off as ambiguous and then it grows more and more certain that Vi’s spirit really is hanging around, perhaps trying to lure others to their doom.  At first Tom tries to draw others’ attention to what he is seeing, to confirm he’s not going crazy… later, he starts trying to hide the manifestations from them, because he doesn’t want to know after all.  The interplay of fantasy and reality, with the corpse that transforms into seaweed and the footprints that are washed away before Tom can point them out to Meg, feels like a precursor to the layers of unreality Gordon would later explore more fully in Necromancy.

The setting, a beach with vacation houses and a lighthouse, is well-used.  There are only a limited number of sets and locations, but that just underscores the smallness of the island and the idea that everybody on it is trapped there with this vengeful ghost.  I suspect that the beach itself is the same one that appeared in The Space Children, where it was bleak, featureless, and often deserted.  It looks very much the same in Tormented, even when there are multiple people enjoying the waves.  Tom feels increasingly isolated as the film progresses, with this terrible secret eating him alive, and the setting underscores that: the beach house and lighthouse both stand alone in establishing shots with nothing but rocks and sand all around them.  The island itself is isolated, and the buildings there are further isolated within that isolation.

There are even a few places where the tension builds very nicely. The bit where Vi’s ghost almost lures the landlady to her death is nail-biting, and there’s a moment when the movie teases doing the same thing to Meg’s little sister Sandy, which actually made me whisper, “oh, no!”  Vi egging Tom on to commit murder, as a sort of devil on his shoulder transforming him into what he most wishes not to be, suggests that she can be a ghost and a symptom of his mental disintegration at the same time, and the fact that he gives in to her is as terrible as it is inevitable. The sound of him dragging the dead sailor down the steps while the camera remains in the room is one of the creepiest moments in the film.

Even the effects are sometimes quite good.  Vi’s body melting away into a mass of seaweed is much better than it has any right to be.  Her ghost floating there with a white gown billowing around her like the foam on the rocks is cliché, but that’s intentional – is she really a ghost, or just what Tom thinks one ought to look like?  Her spectral interruption of the wedding is cheesy, but in a fun kind of way, and the ending maintains just that slight bit of ambiguity as we are left to wonder if Vi deliberately saved Sandy, or if Tom chose to commit suicide rather than do any more harm to this innocent child.

Yet for all that, this is still not a good movie.  It comes closer than a lot of MST3K material, but doesn’t quite arrive.  There are several reasons.  The first, noticeable right from the opening titles, is the jazz soundtrack.  It does have its moments, but it never really feels like it belongs in this ghost story, at least not as background music.  A more traditional spooky score would have helped emphasize the front Tom was putting up through his own jazz music by providing a foil to it, and it’s a shame they missed this opportunity.

The second is the acting.  Most of the players, such as Lugene Sanders as Meg or Richard Carlson as Tom himself, are pretty bland.  Juli Reding as Vi is oddly more believable as a ghost than she is as a living person.  Two notable players, however, are very bad indeed. One is Joe Turkel as the sailor Vi goads Tom into killing.  I’m not sure how old this character is supposed to be but I’m guessing considerably younger than Turkel, who was thirty-three at the time (and who died, creepily enough, on the day I watched this film for review, December 30, 2018). He speaks Beatnik slang, referring to marriage as ‘getting spliced’ and calling everybody ‘Dad’, and it’s so at odds with his sailor’s clothing and his early-middle-aged features that it’s rather unsettling.

The other is Susan Gordon (Bert I.’s daughter) as Sandy.  She’s actually a well-written character, who does very realistically child-like things such as playing Chopsticks on the piano over and over, or asking for a burger with nothing but pickles on it.  Her obsession with the idea of marriage is a little creepy, but that was what little girls were taught to aspire to in the 50’s.  Unfortunately, Gordon is not a very good child actress.  Most of her lines sound grating and false, and this undermines the movie quite badly, because Sandy is a pivotal character.  She is the person through whom we see the effect Tom’s behaviour is having on the people around him, and there are multiple points in the story when we’re supposed to be very worried for her, which is lessened when we find her so damn cloying.

The spot where the movie really fails, though, is the sequence in which Vi’s disembodied head appears and has a conversation with Tom.  It sounds silly when I type it out and the execution is so awful it’s hilarious.  It completely ruins everything the film has built up until that point, and it just gets worse and worse.  First we’ve got her head sitting on a shelf like she’s part of Donald Pleasance’s collection, then we’ve got Tom wrapping a mannequin head up in a towel to go do god-knows-what with it.  I laughed so hard I inhaled part of a Dorito.  It literally nearly killed me.  If the whole movie were that bad it would be enjoyable on a whole different level, but having that in the middle of an otherwise fairly effective film is like shooting a hamster with a harpoon.  There’s no recovery possible.

On a thematic level, this is obviously a movie both about guilt and about the slippery slope: Tom goes from merely neglecting to save Vi to actively killing the beatnik sailor to thinking about murdering a child.  In each case, having done the previous deed makes the next one both necessary and easier to do, and then it piles on the terrible burden of guilt he carries.  Tom wants to take responsibility for what he’s done. He straight-up tells Sandy, nobody could help any of it but me, and there are points when he desperately wants to give in to the urge to tell somebody the truth.  He doesn’t want that enough, however, to face the consequences.  He is as much a victim of his crimes as anyone.

It’s tempting to see Tom as filling the ‘victim/observer point of view’ role we see in so many of Bert I. Gordon’s movies, but he’s not quite there. For most of Tormented there is almost nothing Tom can do about his predicament – there’s not much you can do to argue with a ghost, and so he is stuck passively watching Vi’s reign of terror.  But to say he’s the equivalent of Sally from Attack of the Puppet People or Audrey Aimes from The Beginning of the End, we have to ignore the fact that unlike them, Tom got himself into this mess.  He could have saved Vi, but he didn’t.  He didn’t have to kill the sailor, but he did.  He could have come clean at any time, and he did not. Tom himself admits that this is his own fault, even as he continues to compound his bad decisions.

The moment when we know Tom is doomed comes early in the movie, when he goes out to the lighthouse to address Vi’s spirit directly for the first time.  The appropriate thing to do at this point would be to apologize to her for failing to save her – but instead he taunts her, telling her he’s going to marry Meg and there’s nothing she can do about it.  At a moment when he could have tried to placate Vi, Tom challenges her instead, and at the end of the film he is forced to return to the lighthouse and admit that she has won.  The final shot of the film only reinforces this, as Vi (is it short for Vivian?  For Violet? Or for Victory?) claims her prize.

I could go for a remake of Tormented.  It wouldn’t even be an expensive movie – I’ve seen effects and acting that would do the trick in Nostalgia Critic videos.  This one came so close to being effective that it was both very enjoyable and deeply disappointing.

[moviesandmania]

Tormented - USA, 1960 - reviews and free to watch online

Tormented – USA, 1960 – reviews and free to watch online

‘A horrendous tale of supernatural passion!’

Tormented is a 1960 American horror feature film directed and co-produced by Bert I. Gordon from a screenplay co-written with George Worthing Yates (Earth vs. the Spider; War of the Colossal Beast).

The movie stars Richard Carlson (Creature from the Black Lagoon; The Maze; It Came from Outer Space), Susan Gordon (Picture Mommy Dead), Lugene Sanders,…

[raynbowclown]

Tormented

In Tormented, a pianist dumped his singer girlfriend and became engaged to a young socialite from an affluent island community. A confrontation between them at the top of a lighthouse results in her falling to her death to the rocks below. The pianist t

Tormented (1960) starring Richard Carlson, Lugene Sanders, Juli Reding

In Tormented, a pianist dumped his singer girlfriend and became engaged to a young socialite from an affluent island community. A confrontation between them at the top of a lighthouse results in her falling to her death to the rocks below. The pianist tries to keep the death quiet while proceeding with the wedding plans.…

[delux2222]

Tormented-Lugene Sanders