Sometimes, you go in thinking you know what type of movie you’ll be watching and then it turns out to be about three different ones. “A movie about a golem starring Roddy McDowall” seems like a straightforward pitch (although they still manage to misspell his name in the opening credits), but It! Aka Curse of the Golem (also maybe Anger of the Golem? That title is kinda bad, let’s ignore it) complicates matters a bit by making a movie about a golem starring Roddy McDowall that also blatantly rips off Psycho—and it’s not particularly subtle about it, either. Certainly, it’s a bizarre mixture, not one that many people would even think to imagine—sometimes, it doesn’t even feel like the scriptwriter was finished imagining it before filming started—but it’s also surprisingly novel. On paper, it asks the question “what if a put-upon sort controlled an unstoppable monster?”, but in practice it becomes “what if an unstable weirdo controlled an unstoppable monster?”, and mostly thanks to McDowall’s performance, I think we get an interestingly off-the-rails answer.
McDowall plays Pimm, the world’s most appropriately-named English assistant museum curator, who investigates a mysterious warehouse fire alongside his boss and finds that the only artifact remaining is a tall, craggy statue. While examining it, Pimm steps away for a moment and then comes back to find his boss dead, while also noticing that the statue’s arms appear to be in different positions. They take the statue back to the museum, but he is puzzled by it—and becomes increasingly intrigued when a workman also dies while working around it. Could monster-based shenanigans be afoot? In a normal movie, that would be the case, and that would be the tall and short of it. But before Pimm knows for certain about this statue business, he goes home and talks up a storm about things to his mother, and as soon as we see that his mother in a chair with its back facing us, we know exactly what’s going on—and, yep, they jump straight to the Psycho climax shot before the actual golem plot even begins, telling us that we are not dealing with a normal movie here.
It’s not like we need to know that Pimm is off the bend to understand his subsequent motivations—despite his years of loyal service, he is passed up for the curator job for perhaps the crustiest old British fusspot to ever exist, who starts glowering and complaining as soon as he appears, and that would be enough. It would even be enough if we saw his affection for the dead curator’s daughter Ellen (British genre film regular Jill Haworth) be rebuffed, followed by him figuring out that she is really in love with a rep from a New York museum who has come over to London to potentially take the statue off their hands (the museum board is not particularly happy with the publicity brought on by the multiple deaths, even if it also seems to bring in business.) He learns from the American that the statue may be the fabled golem of Prague, and then takes an etching of some Hebrew on the statue and has it translated by a concerned Rabbi, learning about the dire prophecies written on the golem—but also the potential use of it. He’s clearly someone with a chip on his shoulder (and also a huge creep, as at one point he daydreams seeing Ellen laying naked in his room, and when he salaciously approaches her, she turns into his dead mother), so when he has a chance to get an edge over the rest of the world, of course he’s going to take it. Just remember that by the time he finds the magic scroll that allows him to command the golem, we also know that he’s not just a standard-issue nebbish, but one who has conversations with the desiccated corpse of his mother. It kinda colours the whole thing a bit differently.
By the way, technically this movie is about the same golem that appeared in The Golem—not the same one that was in the movie, I mean, but the one from the same legend that the movie was based on (the American guy lists at least two other golems known in history, and I wonder what they’re up to?) It doesn’t look anything like the golem in that movie, as this one is much more pointy and honestly looks less like it was made from clay and more like it was chiselled out of the side of a volcano, which is a unique look, at least. Since the first part of the movie features the golem killing people off-screen, I was beginning to think that they would never show it moving, but eventually it does indeed become a guy in a suit who can walk around and smash things, so props to the movie for not cheaping out in that regard.
The American explains the entire story of the golem to Pimm, putting extra emphasis on the consequences to him—basically, reading out one of the paragraphs from my post about The Golem. Pimm is essentially acting out the latter parts of the story, where the golem is used for selfish reasons and causes everything to go haywire, and what’s sort of interesting here is that he comes off as very hot-and-cold on the whole business. One of the first things he gets the golem to do is murder the cranky curator, which everyone in the audience saw coming, and he later reasons that it was self-defence (because he was about to be fired.) After that, though, his use of his monster minion becomes increasingly petty: he gets it to smash open a case of museum jewellery that he steals, and in a truly baffling move, gets it to pull down the Hammersmith Bridge, seemingly because he had told his unrequited love interest that he had the power to do it. After that point, the combination of the American’s warning and his own guilt (because, surprise, the collapse of a bridge killed people) forces him to do a complete one-eighty and denounce all the golem business. Hilariously, his attempts to the get rid of the golem are with the exact methods that the rabbi had earlier told him would definitely not work: with water and with fire (the writing on the golem has a bunch of rules that seem to apply only to each subsequent hundred years, including outright stating that there will be no more people in the twenty-first century—close, but not quite, sixteenth-century rabbis!) When confronted, he confesses and seemingly shows genuine remorse, decrying the corrupting influence of power.
That doesn’t last, though, and when Pimm is caught by police and sent to an institution, he has the golem break him out—how did they not see that coming? He then pivots right back to supervillain territory, kidnapping Ellen and holing up in a castle in the country with an old lady who Will Not Be Having It, so he sets her on fire. The last ten or so minutes of the movie are hurried and utterly bizarre, not just with McDowall going full tilt kooky, but with the sudden appearance of the British military, who like in most of these movies is mostly there to show how ineffective their artillery is against the monster, and then immediately decide that the only course of action is to nuke the castle with a small warhead. Yes, this movie about a Norman Bates type with a golem does indeed end with a nuke being dropped in the English countryside. Not surprisingly, this does not destroy the golem, who instead decides to wander into the sea, who knows why. They never did live up to the warnings of an out-of-control golem rampage, which would be the obvious, poetic justice-inflected way to conclude a story like this—but there is no real poetry in this ending, just a nuke. For how much gets crammed into a very short amount of time and how gratuitously over-the-top it gets, it’s played in such a mannered way that you might not even notice how jaw-droppingly nonsensical it is.
That’s pretty consistent throughout the movie: never really getting across how unhinged it actually is. Maybe it lacks the macabre visual aspects of the Hammer films it is likely trying to ape, let alone the aesthetic of Psycho, to really make it clear that what we’re watching is a lurid fever dream. The only one who seems to get just how off-kilter the whole thing is McDowall, who effectively plays all the different aspects of Pimm—his passive-aggressive public face, his power-addled self-justification, his guilt-ridden alcoholism, his barely concealed gruesome mommy’s boy side—and how he can flip between them at a moment’s notice, and then at the end seemingly combines all of them with pure unbridled madness. If anyone was going to use a golem for bloody personal gain (although not nearly as much as you’d think), it would probably be a person like this? Also, I’m sure someone out there was thinking that people wanted to see Roddy McDowall play Norman Bates, but in that case they got way more than they bargained for.
This is just an example of a movie that wants to have everything, regardless if that everything actually has any congruence. Taking the Jewish history aspects out of the golem story (despite both referencing them and still including many of their themes) is rather peculiar, but the “Psycho + Monster” idea is actually pretty interesting, and with McDowall putting his all into making the character as Anthony Perkins-y as possible, you do actually get that here, and it does distinguish what could have been a rather rote absolute power/revenge-of-the-meek horror story. But it flits back and forth, much like the psyche of McDowall’s character, and you may be lulled into the false notion that It! Is a pretty standard monster movie, up until they drop a nuke on it.
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