`Different' is probably the word that will spring to mind after a viewing of Inner Sanctum. It's unusual in its choice of milieu and subject matter (even its choices within that subject matter); unusual in its slapdash mixture of tone and acting styles; even unusual in its length of merely 52 minutes. It also leaves viewers in an unusual disarray of responses.
The film's most horrifying moment is its very first: A man (Charles Russell) stabs a woman on a railroad siding and dumps her body like a sack of meal on the observation platform as the train pulls out. Alas, a bratty little boy (Dale Belding) is hanging around the tracks this stormy night and witnesses some of this; since Russell doesn't know how much, he tries but fails to silence the kid with a crowbar.
The storm has washed out roads and bridges in the Pacific Northwest, so Russell hitches a ride to a town so little that there's no hotel, only a rooming house where it turns out the meddlesome boy lives with his harried mother (the wonderful Lee Patrick, midpoint between The Maltese Falcon and Caged). Another resident, Mary Beth Hughes, spots that rarity, an unattached slab of male flesh, and comes at him in sections, to get him to take her away to San Francisco. But Russell, like a cunning beast of prey, only has eyes for the kid....
In its crummy look (the sets consist of the railroad siding, the boarding house, and a back-lot park) and creepy story, as well as in its ultimate surrender to an all-powerful and malevolent Fate, Inner Sanctum most resembles Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour of three years earlier. But Lew Landers doesn't quite have Ulmer's touch (or, for that matter, Ann Savage). The movie also recalls Detour in that it seems to have been cobbled into coherence from footage already shot once the meagre budget ran out.
So the final scene is a reprise of the one that opens it, and both of them stand as gargoyle-bookends to the story that they frame. At the end, however, the murder is prefaced by a cautionary tale even a prophecy told to a young woman on the train by an old blind traveler, whose last words are `Don't get off the train!' The tale, of course, is the movie we have just watched, evoking an ever-repeating, inescapable loop of Fate.
The film's most horrifying moment is its very first: A man (Charles Russell) stabs a woman on a railroad siding and dumps her body like a sack of meal on the observation platform as the train pulls out. Alas, a bratty little boy (Dale Belding) is hanging around the tracks this stormy night and witnesses some of this; since Russell doesn't know how much, he tries but fails to silence the kid with a crowbar.
The storm has washed out roads and bridges in the Pacific Northwest, so Russell hitches a ride to a town so little that there's no hotel, only a rooming house where it turns out the meddlesome boy lives with his harried mother (the wonderful Lee Patrick, midpoint between The Maltese Falcon and Caged). Another resident, Mary Beth Hughes, spots that rarity, an unattached slab of male flesh, and comes at him in sections, to get him to take her away to San Francisco. But Russell, like a cunning beast of prey, only has eyes for the kid....
In its crummy look (the sets consist of the railroad siding, the boarding house, and a back-lot park) and creepy story, as well as in its ultimate surrender to an all-powerful and malevolent Fate, Inner Sanctum most resembles Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour of three years earlier. But Lew Landers doesn't quite have Ulmer's touch (or, for that matter, Ann Savage). The movie also recalls Detour in that it seems to have been cobbled into coherence from footage already shot once the meagre budget ran out.
So the final scene is a reprise of the one that opens it, and both of them stand as gargoyle-bookends to the story that they frame. At the end, however, the murder is prefaced by a cautionary tale even a prophecy told to a young woman on the train by an old blind traveler, whose last words are `Don't get off the train!' The tale, of course, is the movie we have just watched, evoking an ever-repeating, inescapable loop of Fate.