Saturday Scream Queens: Barbara Parkins and Jacqueline Bisset

With the 31 Nights of Halloween coming to a close, we're ending it as it started, with a double-dose of Scream Queens!

Barbara Parkins

Canadian actress Barbara Parkins is best known for her long-time role role as Betty on the soap opera "Peyton Place" and for her starring turn in "Valley of the Dolls". However, she also appeared in some of the niftiest horror movies to come out of the early 1970s, such as British anthology film "Asylum" and the made-for-television chiller "Mephisto Waltz". By the 1980s, she mostly retired from acting, but she continues to accept the occasional role.

Jacqueline Bisset

British-born Jacqueline Bisset was a model-turned-actress who emerged as an international sex symbol during the 1960s and built a genre-spanning spanning, highly successful career from "window-dressing parts" into trend-setting leading lady roles. She starred in several horror and suspense films during the 1970s and 1980s, among which are "Murder on the Orient Express", "The Deep", "Mephisto Waltz" (where she co-starred with today's other Scream Queen), and "Crime Broker". As the 1990s gave way to the 2000s, Bisset made a successful transition from leading lady to character actress, and she continues to act in one or two movies every year.

'The Mephisto Waltz' oozes 1970s horror

The Mephisto Waltz (1971)
Starring: Jacqueline Bisset, Alan Alda, Barbara Parkins, Bradford Dillman, and Curt Jurgens
Director: Paul Wendkos
Rating: Seven of Ten Stars

A dying pianist (Curt Jurgins) makes a bargain with Satan to have his soul put into a younger man's body (Alan Alda). The younger man's wife (Jacqueline Bissett) realizes slowly something is different about her husband... and realizes something is seriously wrong people around them start dying mysterously.

"The Mephisto Waltz" is an unsettling little horror film from the 1970s (and it oozes '70s sensibilities from every frame, along with an unsettling sense of dread) that features a surprising twist as it enters the third act and an even more startling ending. It's not often that I am taken completely by surprise by a film's direction, but I was with this one. (And I've just taken three cracks at hinting at the twist while drafting this review, but each time I felt like I was revealing too much and possibly spoiling the film. I feel the surprsing story development here has to be witnessed "cold" to have its full impact.)

As impressed as I am with the ending of the film, it doesn't start out strong. The filmmakers make a tremendous mistake at the beginning of the film by revealing beyond doubt that Alda's character has been possessed by the old man, and that we are dealing with true Satanic magic. By showing us this up front, it removes a degree of mystery and uncertainty that could have make the movie even more suspenseful.

Still, the film does recover nicely from the early blunder, delivering lots of chilling moments, some suitably eerie dream sequences, and one of the best-handled summonings of Satan I've ever seen. It's a film that's worth seeing, and it's a film that doesn't deserve the obscurity it currently endures.