Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie''s plot.
Jazz pianist Tom Stewart is set to marry his girlfriend Meg when his ex Vi shows up, trying to blackmail him into coming back to her. They’re arguing in the abandoned lighthouse on an island where Tom and Meg have separate vacation cabins. I think you know where I’m heading with this. The argument leads to the top of the lighthouse because that’s the most logical place to have an argument you don’t want anyone to know about, the top of the abandoned lighthouse, out on the deck. When Vi leans smugly against the railing, which then gives way, toppling her over the edge and leaving her hanging on for dear life, Tom’s got a choice to make.
The next day, he searches the beach, and spies on the water what he believes to be Vi’s body washing ashore. He runs down to the water, grabs her and brings her back to shore, but as he watches, the body changes into a lump of seaweed, and just in time because Meg’s little sister Sandy shows up. Tom tells her nervously he needs to be alone and to run along and play somewhere else.
Slowly, over the next week, Tom’s hold on his sanity slips more and more until everywhere he looks he sees signs of Vi’s return, visible only to himself. His paranoia mounts, helped along by trinkets from Vi’s corpse that suddenly appear about the island; her watch, and a charm bracelet. And when Tom puts Meg’s wedding ring on Sandy to let her try it on, Sandy insists she’s not wearing it. When Tom looks, the ring rests on the finger of a disembodied hand, which then vanishes into thin air. In the end, all of this leads to a less than startling climax and a movie that does nothing at all to contribute anything meaningful to our beloved genre.
TORMENTED, the 1960 snooze fest starring Richard Carlson as the . . . well, the tormented Tom Stewart, is just another in a long line of similar stories like THE SCREAMING SKULL and, long before either, Poe’s THE TELL-TALE HEART. Sure it makes for an interesting story when the main character does something terrible in the beginning and is then haunted by the consequences of his actions thereafter, but come on people, if you’re gonna tell such an overdone story, at least TRY to make it interesting.
In this case, story originator and director Bert I. Gordon seemed less interested in making a GOOD movie and more intent on just recreating 1958’s THE SCREAMING SKULL, only on a sandy beach. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.
The story doesn’t even make much sense at its core. In the beginning, Vi tells Tom, “I’ve still got your letter, I wonder what a lawyer would make of it,” but no more is said, nor do we ever find out what this letter’s all about, so we don’t even know, really, why Tom is so afraid of Vi that he lets her plummet rather than help her up. Of course from there, it’s all about keeping Vi’s existence--and death on the island--a secret, but it would have been nice to know what started it all.
To make matters worse, the actors here turn in some of the most wooden performances I’ve seen. Carlson seems to have a whole two expressions, anxious and more anxious. Lugene Sanders as Meg is almost a non-entity, while Susan Gordon as the lovelorn Sandy is just creepy.
In fact, a LOT of this movie is creepy. If it’s not bad enough Sandy, the “almost 9” little sister of Tom’s intended is in love with Tom--she even asks why he can’t marry her instead--in the final scene the implication is that Tom is about to toss Sandy over the edge of the lighthouse as well (earlier, Sandy saw Tom kill a ferryboat captain who had brought Vi to the island, but knows she never left and is then trying to blackmail Tom to keep his secret).
Yet another big con for TORMENTED is one glaring inconsistency. The top deck of the lighthouse has a faulty railing that sometimes repairs itself and from which Vi tumbles to her death (it almost also claims the life of blind real estate agent Mrs. Ellis), but that’s not the glaring part. Vi falls from the railing to the rocks below, but when seen from a distance, there’s a much wider balcony not 10 feet below the top deck. If anyone fell through the rail up there, they’d probably get a bruise, maybe a sprained ankle, but they certainly wouldn’t die, and they wouldn’t be anywhere near the rocks. You’d think someone would have realized that during the making of the movie.
When all is said and done TORMENTED offers nothing new to either the genre, nor even to the situation itself. The acting barely deserves to be called acting. And after watching it, I feel like I need a shower. You want to experience a story about paranoia that doesn’t suck, just read Poe and leave this thing to the seaweed.
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