7 Nights of Perfect Double Features

Monday: A Cure for Wellness (2017) & The Haunted Palace (1963)

Now we’re gonna ease into the work week with a double feature about longing, loss, discovery, and baroque romanticism. We begin our two-step journey with Gore Verbinski’s A Cure for Wellness. The lofty cinematography and alpine setting make for a heady baptism into a world of swelling music and old world European richness. The plot, as lofty and free as the mountain air of the film’s setting, follows Lockhart (Dane DeHaan) up to a wellness center on a corporate mission and into the clutches of Volmer (Jason Isaacs) that spirals into a nightmare of alternative medicine, suspicion, lampreys, and a mysterious young woman (Mia Goth) who wanders the wellness center.

To complement this delectable treat, we have the archetype for Gothic, artistic schlock – Roger Corman’s The Haunted Palace. The plot of Corman’s mad poetic fever dream follows Charles Dexter Ward (the inimitable Vincent Price) as he returns to his ancestral home where his great grandfather Joseph Curwen (also Vincent Price but having a lot more fun), was burned at the stake after cursing the surrounding village and all of its generations to come. The reason the two films blend and play well together relies on style and melodrama. Verbinski seems to channel Roger Corman’s unique style of macabre play. After a stunning modern reimagining of Corman’s work, it’s a never a bad idea to see where it all started. If you’ve got a case of the Mondays, you can find a cure at the haunted palace.