King of Candy Mountain
Last weekend, I spent a frustrating evening trying to enjoy William Castle’s 1960 low-budget shocker 13 Ghosts on DVD without the special glasses originally supplied to cinemagoers so that said ghosts might appear on-screen via the miracle of ‘Illusion-O’. ‘You’re both sad and insane,’ a friend told me when I related this story. Mind you, he was about to wait up till four in the morning just to watch some idiots kicking a ball around a paddock!
Like most movie nerds of my vintage, I first heard about William ‘King of the Gimmicks’ Castle in the essay ‘Whatever Happened to Showmanship?’ in John Waters’ classic 1987 book, Crackpot, and later in Castle’s likeable, if outrageously self-serving, autobiography, Step Right Up! I’m Gonna Scare the Pants Off America, which Waters managed to usher back into print in the early nineties. Although these days Castle is perhaps better known for his cameo appearance in Warren Beatty’s Shampoo (where he supplies the feed line for the notorious blowjob joke) than for his amazing career as ‘the poor man’s Alfred Hitchcock’, most of his movies are available for home viewing (not, of course, in Australia) where you, sadly, can only imagine the crazy gimmicks that entranced young filmgoers in the late fifties and early sixties. I guess you could restage Castle’s madcap ‘processes’ in your loungeroom – wiring up armchairs to electrocute your friends during The Tingler (‘Percepto’), trundling a luminous skeleton over their heads during House on Haunted Hill (‘Emergo’), or insisting they take out a $1000 life insurance policy before viewing Macabre. Certainly no DVD screening of Homicidal is complete without a Castle-style ‘Fright Break’, where your more terrified guests are invited to stand in a makeshift ‘Coward’s Corner’.
So, I finished 13 Ghosts and discovered that the disc contains another Castle movie, one I’d not heard of before: 1963’s 13 Frightened Girls. Hastily retitled in the US to cash in on the success of 13 Ghosts (even though the poster lists the number of frightened girls as twelve, and the trailer as fourteen), the movie was released in every other country as The Candy Web, which today sounds like a website for paedophiles. The Candy Web, as I’ll refer to it here, is a bizarre movie, even by Castle’s nutty standards. Leonard Maltin rates it a ‘BOMB’, but calls it ‘a side-splitting camp classic awaiting rediscovery’. I wouldn’t go that far – large sections of it play like a fairly ordinary Wonderful World of Disney two-parter – but it is hard to work out which particular audience Castle was going for. Ostensibly the story of a Nancy Drewish schoolgirl taking on Communist spies while attending an exclusive Swiss finishing school with an indeterminate number of other easily frightened girls, the movie also features grisly knifings and characters impaled on meathooks. There is a somewhat suspect relationship between the young heroine and the mayor from Jaws, a cat that meows without ever opening its mouth (although when it does, the MGM lion’s roar emerges), and a bizarre overall tone; characters who were earlier attempting to have each other stabbed to death later laugh and carouse like the cast of Cannonball Run. But what, I wondered, was the patented Castle gimmick for The Candy Web?
Turns out there were two. First, a saliva-activated ‘Danger Card’ issued to every patron. How did this work? No idea, as the idea was abandoned at the last minute for reasons that have never been revealed. Perhaps the thought of encouraging audience members to salivate during a film about schoolgirls was judged inappropriate. The DVD contains a tantalising remnant of this rejected gimmick: a pre- and post-film message from Castle himself, who arrives with a sample ‘Danger Card’ securely contained in a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. He promises that after the movie he’ll show you how to ‘collect a fabulous prize from the manager’, but first, ‘try not to get caught…in The Candy Web.’ Try not to get freaked out and confused would have been better advice from the ever-cheerful gimmickmeister, who immediately disappears through some wobbly French windows and ambles towards a badly painted backdrop.
The big Candy Web gimmick was an international search for thirteen fresh faces to star as the alternatively titular frightened girls. In Step Right Up! Castle claims that this notion occurred to him after the ‘dazzling success of Strait-Jacket’, even though that hilarious Joan Crawford axe-wielder wasn’t released till a year after The Candy Web. In each of the thirteen (or possibly twelve, or fourteen) countries – including Australia – the winning girl would be promoted as the star of the movie, and receive ‘$300, hotel accommodations and a first-class new wardrobe.’ In each country the local star would garner massive press coverage (with typical hyperbole, Castle claims that the release date of The Candy Web was declared a national holiday), be accompanied to the premiere by the director himself, and generally be treated like Princess Grace of Monaco for the evening. Evidence of this can be seen on the Australian poster for The Candy Web. ‘Australia’s own lovely teenager Janet Prance makes her Hollywood screen debut’, it says, and further down, ‘The All-Australian teenager Janet Prance heading the 12 Teenage Diplomats’. The local winner, Miss Prance, whose only film appearance this was, appears smack-bang in the centre of the artwork, while, in much smaller letters, we can read ‘with Kathy Dunn as Candace Hull’.
Except that Candace – the ‘Candy’ of the title – is the film’s actual main character, narrating it and appearing in almost every scene. The ‘Teenage Diplomats’ appear in the pre-credits sequence, where a spider causes a schoolbus to careen out of control down a mountainside, and then barely feature for the remainder of the running time. Our own Miss Prance has approximately four lines and less than a minute of screen time. But – and this is where the genius of William Castle comes in – thirteen (or possibly twelve, or fourteen) different versions of the opening scene were shot, so that in each country the local star would be at the wheel of the out-of-control bus, and supply the opening narration. So, for the first five minutes of the glamorous Australian premiere, it must have seemed like the film was going to be all about Janet Prance. But once the titles were over…it was back to being the Candace Hull story. What an odd, slow deflation of expectations must have occurred in each country as the movie progressed. What a weird feeling there must have been at the after-party, as William Castle stood awkwardly, drink in hand, with the parents of the local star, who no doubt expected their daughter to be doing far more than just answering a phone and saying, ‘It’s for you’, given all the posters and ads and international coverage. Castle must surely have felt like ducking out early, through the French windows.
Nearly fifty years later, ‘Australia’s own lovely teenager’ Janet Prance has enjoyed a long career in Perth as a radio and TV presenter, corporate speaker and events manager. She even mentions the movie in her on-line bio. Part of me wants to phone her up and bombard her with questions about the brief time she spent caught in The Candy Web with the King of the Gimmicks. But I’m not a journalist and I don’t want to pester her or dredge up old ghosts.
Although she wouldn’t be able to see them without the special glasses.
Tony Martin is the Melbourne-based author of ‘A Nest of Occasionals’ and ‘Lolly Scramble’. Podcasts of his radio show ‘Get This’ are still available for free download at iTunes (type in: ‘Get This: Richard Marsland Lives’). Most recently, he directed new episodes of ‘The Librarians’, which returns to ABC1 on October 13.
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