FANTASIA OBSCURA: ‘Love Boat’ Crooner Jack Jones in a ’70s Horror Flick?
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, getting back on that horse can be a great trial, and not just for the rider…
The Comeback (1978)
Distributed by: Enterprise Pictures Ltd.
Directed by: Pete Walker
Okay, who here remembers Jack Jones?
Jones is a singer who didn’t exactly “fit the mold” as it were during his career. He was doing standards during the early rock era, tunes like the above just as Elvis was winding down and the Beatles were coming over. During the 1970s, Jones would try and modernize with an album of covers of Bread’s music and a collaboration album with Bruce Johnston of the Beach Boys in an effort to stay “with it” in music.
And, for some strange reason, he felt he had to stay before the public’s eye by being in this sad affair…
We open cold with the POV of someone on the roof of a London East End warehouse, watching as a young woman enters the dilapidated structure. We follow her as she works her way into the interior of the warehouse, where a spacious and luxurious duplex apartment has been built into the building. We then cross cut between her, who we find out is Gail Cooper (Holly Palance), and scenes at the airport, where her ex-husband Nick (Jones) is flying back to the UK.
We discover through her answering the phone (a perfect opportunity for an info-dump) and responding to a journalist looking for a statement that she recently divorced from Nick, who is looking to release an album for the first time in six years now that he’s no longer with her, and that she doesn’t have anything else to say. Which is too bad, because a masked maniac soon gruesomely cuts her to pieces, which makes her curt deflection of the press a really bad choice for her last words…
Nick, for various reasons, does not come home right away, instead taking a meeting with his A&R man, Webster Jones (David Doyle) and Webster’s secretary Linda (Pamela Stephenson). He is informed by Webster that in order to allow Nick to concentrate on making music, that he’s secured the rental of an old home, Foxwarren Park, where a studio is set up for him to work in. It’s a nice old place, complete with creepy old caretakers Doris (Sheila Keith) and Albert B (Bill Owen) with whom things seem… wrong, somehow…
…much like all the cross-cuts to poor Gail’s corpse, which we watch decay further with every cut-away from the main film, from action such as this:
It’s not all laying down tracks, however; there’s plenty of time for Nick to be awoken by strange sounds and horrific images, and for his best mate Harry (Peter Turner) to spend a couple of moments being creepy to Linda before this bargain basement Mal Evans gets sliced up like poor Gail did by the same assailant.
The strange sounds and general creepiness ultimately leads to Nick having a nervous breakdown. He gets very little sympathy from everyone expecting him to work on his album , and even gets ribbed by his nurse (June Chadwick in her first role) in an unprofessional manner for going bonkers, before things come to a sloppy end…
And to be frank, “sloppy” is probably the most descriptive (and kindest) word one can use for this film. Walker’s continued cross cutting between the dead and decaying versus the living (if you could call it that) shows that as a story teller, he’s good at arranging dead bodies for the camera. Walker’s efforts at bringing an English-themed giallo to the screen try hard for that look and feel, but just fall apart as the visuals are piled on to cover for a weak story.
The story that we get has no strong motivational reason for being in that form, and things come out of nowhere just for the sake of existing without purpose. The script the crew works with is haphazard, with very little that’s said that actually memorable or worth saying, and with all the random bits that show up and get forgotten later, they just can’t take this film anywhere.
For example, there’s Webster’s sequence where he’s dressing up as a woman:
It shows up in one scene, has no build-up for it, and never gets mentioned again. This serves no purpose whatsoever, except as fodder for a 
joke on this page about Charlie’s Angels’ Aunt, and once you’re done with reading that, then that’s that.
And then there’s the acting, which is all horribly over the top from all the players, because there’s no depth the script gives anyone to build upon, all except for the lead. Jones is a musician, so it may have been asking a lot of him to try and act and play the role of… um, a musician, which he does horribly. It’s so underplayed he could have been a corpse alongside Gail and Harry in their scenes.
Overall, the film was a perfect waste of effort by the crew and a waste of time for the audience. No one is done any favors here, especially Jones, who if he was expecting a boost to his career by being in the film would end up rather disappointed.
But Jones need not have worried about that, as a year after the film came out, he got another opportunity to build his audience. Instead of needing to cross the Atlantic, he needed only to have cruised upon the Pacific…
Jones’ rendition of the theme for The Love Boat would play before every episode for eight of its nine seasons, and give him something he could pin his fame on without needing to lead another ghastly horror film.
Not that he’d avoid all ghastly films, mind you…
Yet this misstep failed to sidetrack him in the long run. If anything, the current phase of his career proves that, so long as you just keep trying, things will ultimately work out.
No matter what mistakes you make along the way…
NEXT TIME: We look back on a literary adaptation where everything was beautiful and nothing hurt…
