As regular readers of this blog will know, I have always been fascinated by films featuring monstrous or malevolent plants, especially of the scientifically-unknown variety, but the exceedingly strange mid-1970s American flick that I discovered entirely by chance online last night and watched straight away takes this whole sub-genre of monster movie along an entirely different, extremely unexpected route. Largely forgotten nowadays but truly a hidden gem in my personal opinion after having viewed it, this obscure yet fascinating feature has been marketed with a range of different titles, including Seeds of Evil, Garden of Death, and The Touch of Satan, but is best known nowadays as The Gardener, whose inscrutable eponymous character is its central focus.
Directed and written by James H. Kay, and released in 1974 by Nolan Productions, The Gardener was filmed on the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico, famous for its lush vegetation and multicoloured tropical flowers, but when it comes to botanical beauty (especially of the deceiving kind) you ain't seen nothing yet, trust me!
SPOILER ALERT! Detailed online synopses of this little-known movie are exceedingly few and far between, so I am providing one here, summarizing the most significant aspects of its plot, including its extraordinary climax. So if you don't want to know what happens in it, read no further!
The Gardener opens with a scene inside a hospital room, in which a youngish woman named Dorothy is lying asleep in bed, strapped up to various drips and clearly not in the best of health. As she slumbers a nurse brings a large bowl of unusual, brightly-coloured flowers, apparently a present from her gardener, and places them near her bed. The nurse then leaves, but as she does, Dorothy stirs, with an alarmed look on her face, and turns around, towards the flowers, presumably having detected their scent. When she sees them, she screams, and from outside the room the nurse hears a massive crash. She races inside, to find Dorothy hanging out of the bed, her face contorted with terror, and dead, as if she'd died of fright. We are then briefly shown Dorothy's funeral before the opening credits roll.
The scene then changes to Dorothy's home, where two of her acquaintances, the somewhat unworldly Ellen Bennett (played by Katharine Houghton, a niece of Katharine Hepburn) and the unequivocally worldly Helena Boardman (Rita Gam), who is also Ellen's neighbour and best friend (as well as this movie's sex-mad comic-relief character for much of it), are reminiscing following the funeral. While there, they encounter a tall, taciturn employee who turns out to be the late Dorothy's gardener, Carl (Joe Dallesandro, in his first post-Warhol movie), who had sent her those strange flowers in hospital.
As Carl's services are no longer required in Dorothy's garden, however, and as the garden of Ellen and her wealthy but inattentive husband John (James Congdon) is in need of some herbaceous TLC (well, that's Ellen's story after casting her eyes over the habitually bare-chested Carl and she's sticking to it!), she invites him to become their gardener now, which he accepts.
Within just a few weeks, Carl has entirely transformed Ellen's garden into an Edenesque paradise, with its blooms bursting forth all over, bigger and brighter than she has ever seen them before, and even blossoming out of season. Carl takes pains to decorate the interior of Ellen's home with flowers too, much to the upset of her local maids, who are disturbed not just by the flowers' seemingly unnatural growth rates but in particular by the mysterious, enigmatic Carl who has wrought such strange transformations in them. They view him as sinister and his accomplishments as witchcraft.
The annual carnival, featuring a costumed masked ball, comes along, and Ellen is persuaded by Helena's husband to dress as the Greek flower goddess Persephone, who according to classical mythology is doomed to spend six months of every year in the Underworld with her husband Hades, during which period it is Autumn and Winter in our world, but is free to return here for the remaining six months, during which period we experience Spring and Summer. Carl garlands Ellen's gown with exquisite glowing flowers (which the maids unsuccessfully attempt to discard before she can see them, as they consider them to be evil), and Ellen is enraptured by the sight of such a gorgeous costume. John, conversely, is less enamoured by it, because each time he attempts to touch her, his hands somehow become torn by the mysterious flowers' all but imperceptible yet painfully sharp thorns.
Gradually, Ellen becomes disturbed about Carl's inexplicable horticultural talents, and also about her growing attraction to him, try as she might to resist his unnerving charms – and when one evening she somehow finds herself standing in her garden's pool kissing a totally naked Carl, yet unable to remember why she was even there, she begins to agitate about his increasing presence and manipulative influence in her life, especially as she is only too aware that she knows absolutely nothing about him.
Consequently, Ellen persuades a reluctant Helena to join her in investigating Carl's background, only for Ellen to discover to her considerable alarm that all the women for whom Carl has previously worked as their gardener (including Dorothy of course) have died, and in odd, unexpected ways – all but one, that is. The lone exception is a Mrs Garcia (Anne Meacham in wonderfully creepy form), whom they visit, only to realize very swiftly that she has somehow been driven insane…by flowers. So much so that she lives entirely inside her heavily-curtained house, where sunlight cannot penetrate and where, according to her, flowers therefore cannot bloom and release their poisons. Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice would have said.
By now, Ellen has become thoroughly unnerved by Carl, but Helena considers the death toll of former employers linked to the grim grass-reaper to be mere coincidence, and that Ellen is grossly over-reacting. Nevertheless, to ease her friend's mind once and for all, Helena suggests that Ellen should sack Carl, on the pretext that he won't be needed when she and John leave for the long overseas holiday that John has recently promised her. Moreover, to soften the blow for Carl, Helena agrees – and without needing any persuasion either! – to take him on as her gardener instead. And so the switch is swiftly set in motion, albeit with much apprehension for Helena's well-being with Carl by Ellen, and with much anticipation for her own well-being with Carl by Helena!
The movie's climax arrives with unexpected swiftness and an outrageously unexpected revelation. Driving at night, Ellen fears for Helena's safety alone with Carl living on the premises of her home, so she drives at a furious pace to reach her, her head seemingly filled with the lascivious on-screen images that the viewers see of Carl with Helena amid much midnight fondling in the foliage and flowerbeds of Helena's garden. When Ellen arrives, she searches the garden and is horrified to discover Helena trapped inside a veritable cage of vegetation, her hands and arms bound firmly to its bars by thick rope-like strands of ivy and vines that are not only growing ever tighter around her but also actually appear to be sprouting from her. Helena is shrieking in terror, so Ellen races off to fetch some shears to cut through the binding plants, but returns instead with a gardening sickle.
Seemingly driven out of her own mind with horror at what has happened, Ellen swings the sickle down again and again at the ivy and vines, with wild, indiscriminate fury, apparently oblivious to the gruesome fact that she is chopping not only the plants but also Helena's arms and hands, as they and the plants are now as one, thereby causing Helena to scream in excruciating pain and uncontrollable fear, before finally collapsing, dead.
The commotion has attracted Carl's attention, and he appears out of the darkness, bare-chested as ever, his eyes glowing with fervor, exhilaration, triumph, who can say? But as he gazes fearlessly at Ellen, ready to claim her as his next victim, she suddenly pulls out a revolver and shoots him at close range. Shocked and, for the very first time, on the receiving side of persecution and danger, Carl flees, closely pursued by Ellen, intent upon ending his deadly, murderous spree forever. But then, abruptly, he stops stock still and faces her, stretching his arms upwards. And then, to Ellen's total disbelief, Carl…
This is a very timely point at which to mention that over the years Joe Dallesandro has attracted criticism from some film buffs, who have claimed that his acting performances are wooden (conversely, I've seen several of his films and totally disagree with their opinion), but if ever there was a role in which he truly needed to act wooden, this is the one – because…
As Ellen stares in total disbelief, Carl begins growing larger, and larger, transforming, transmuting, transmogrifying, transfiguring, until his astonishing, inexplicable metamorphosis is complete – towering over Ellen where just moments earlier Carl had been standing with arms upstretched, there is now a huge, demonic tree!
Yet somehow, despite being confronted by this supernatural monstrosity, Ellen's mind breaks free of the chains of fear that had momentarily held it rigid, enabling her to race away to fetch what is needed to conquer Carl, or whatever he is now.
Moments later, Ellen returns with a can of petrol (gasoline) that she hurls all over the tree, soaking its trunk – and then she throws a lighted match at it. The petrol catches fire immediately, resulting in an explosive conflagration that wholly engulfs the vile entity as Ellen stands and watches at a safe distance.
Eventually morning breaks, and she is still standing there, as sunlight filters down through the garden, lighting up the incinerated, burnt-out wreck of a massive tree, a tree that had previously been a green-fingered, murder-minded gardener named Carl.
As you can tell, The Gardener is no ordinary monster plant movie, that's for sure! In fact, I'm not actually sure what it is. It is generally classed as a horror movie, and yet except for the last few minutes, beginning when Ellen starts hacking away maniacally at poor doomed Helena before confronting Carl as Carl and then as a diabolical tree, it is conspicuously horror-lite. True, there was the brief opening scene of Dorothy expiring in the hospital courtesy of Carl's fatal flora, and every so often there is some suspenseful music playing in the background, but that's it. Even the supernatural elements are hinted at rather than made manifest prior to the dramatic climax, with the single exception of a brief scene set in Ellen's garden, when Carl holds her hand over a flower and she is shocked to see the flower instantly expand to twice its size.
Nor are any explanations offered for the strange, eerie events being witnessed by this movie's viewers. First and foremost: what exactly is Carl? His intimate, psychic rapport with plants, which extends to his incredible, preternatural capability to transform into one, readily demonstrates that he is not human. More like a were-tree, in fact, than anything of the mammalian persuasion!
And what is Carl's purpose, his motive, for killing all of his employers? What does he benefit from doing so? All that seems to happen is that he is shunted from one garden to another, instead of staying put at one particular garden where he would surely derive sustained pleasure from ensuring that it is maintained to its greatest possible (even impossible!) potential via his uncanny powers.
Visually, The Gardener is beautiful to look at, replete with glowing colours and captivating imagery, most especially during the carnival scenes, which as a connoisseur of masquerade masks I particularly enjoyed (click here to check out some from my own collection within my review of the movie Night Train To Venice aka Train To Hell). There is a rich abundance of classic 1970s chic and kitsch too – including the music score, for much of the time anyway (when it's not heralding some disquieting occurrence, that is, usually of the floral kind). But when it comes to elucidating the actual plot to which all of this sun-drenched and moon-lit spectacle provides an elegant, edifying backdrop, answers come there none.
Despite a long and varied acting career, Joe Dallesandro remains best-known for his early movies directed/produced by Paul Morrissey and Andy Warhol, such as Flesh, Trash, Heat, Lonesome Cowboys, Flesh For Frankenstein, and Blood For Dracula. However, The Gardener, his first movie beyond the Morrissey/Warhol period of his career, began his journey down some very different acting pathways.
Speaking of which: another of Dallesandro's post-Morrissey/Warhol fantasy/horror movies that I'd like to view (and review) but have yet to chance upon in a reasonably-priced DVD format is Black Moon, released a year after The Gardener. In it, he plays a mysterious telepathic mute youth named Lily, alongside an atypically portly, greenish-brown unicorn that does talk. I strongly suspect that another decidedly strange movie watch lies ahead with Black Moon!
As for The Gardener, if you'd like to watch this cinematic curiosity in its entirety, simply do what I did after discovering it last night – watch it for free on YouTube, by clicking here. Or click here to view a somewhat blurry trailer for it.
Finally: to view a complete chronological listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE, and please click HERE to view a complete fully-clickable alphabetical listing of them.
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