Hockey/horror picture shows
As soon as I heard they were doing interviews for the psychological thriller The Dark Hours at Rue Morgue Avenue, a former funeral parlour that’s now the headquarters of the eponymous horror mag, I couldn’t get the Bob Dylan song out of my head that featured the lyric “don’t you put on any airs when you’re lost on Rue Morgue Avenue.”
I pestered everyone in my general vicinity about the song’s title. No one knew. So I Googled it.
Just to put everyone out of his/ her misery, it’s “ Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues.”
Segue, segue, segue.
This turns out to be pertinent to the film, in which Kate Greenhouse plays Dr. Samantha Goodman, a psychiatrist with an incurable brain tumour that precipitates hallucinations, homicide and digit self- mutilation. I don’t know if it was an index finger or her thumb that she cut off, because at that point, I was watching the film through my scarf.
Greenhouse, a gorgeous, sunny blonde, admitted that shooting that prolonged scene was a slice. It wasn’t as if she were trimming her cuticles.
“ I saw it in Montreal at the Fantasy Film Festival with an audience of 600,” she recalled over a slice of pizza at Vesuvio’s down the street. “ At first it started with wild groans, then people cringed and then it turned to laughter as the scene went on and on and on.
“ I’m not good with horror. I’m a total chicken shit. If I do see a horror film, it’s by mistake. I’m not good with gore; I can’t eat my dinner if I watch ER. I lose it if I’m watching Learning Channel and they’re showing implants or liposuction.”
Obviously she’s never seen Nip/ Tuck. Samantha is confronted by a deranged and vengeful former patient played by Aidan Devine. When Greenhouse first read the script for Dark Hours, she had reservations.
“ I couldn’t quite believe what I was reading,” she confessed. “ In one scene, I’m forcing my sister to do something disgusting. Initially, it was somewhat disturbing but I approach it as a character. When you are doing it yourself ( as opposed to reading it), it’s like doing a love scene. It’s not terrifying — not like I’d vomit because I knew it was fake.” She was a horror film virgin. Dark Hourswas her first.
“It’s smart,” she explained. “They were trying to evoke Hitchcock and Polanski.”
There is no gratuitous T&A — except perhaps inadvertently.
“ It’s on the Internet,” she said with amusement. “I pull my pants down and you see the ( needle) rash on my thigh and it’s documented on a website.”
She’d worked with Aidan Devine immediately before Dark Hours in the Carol Shields short story Windows, shown on WNetwork.
“ We hung out in Winnipeg hotel rooms,” Greenhouse recalled. “ And then the next project was Dark Hours. He is such a great actor. When playing a scene with him, it’s so easy — we just have to look at each other. This is an actor’s piece. There are no special effects.” But there are animals. Samantha and her husband have a golden Lab, which is required to lie down and play dead.
“ He was a beautiful dog,” she recalled. “ He’d fall down on cue and was so pleased with himself, his tail would be wagging. It was his close- up. That was one of the most fun days; we’d be trying to act but we’d crack up at this wagging tail. He’d sense that.” Greenhouse was in town to do press for the day from Montreal, where she is shooting the CBC miniseries The Tournament, in which she plays a hockey mom who is a victim of fashion, not a deranged killer. Her other TV credits include Street Time, Missing, This is Wonderland, Earth: Final Conflict, The Miracle Worker, PSI Factor, Traders and La Femme Nikita. The second season of Tournament debuts Tuesday. It’s a mockumentary about hockey. A hock- umentary?
“It’s broad comedy,” Greenhouse explained. “ I play a dysfunctional single hockey mom.”
She’s Deb Pishatelli, workout babe. Doing comedy involved a certain amount of terror also. What if she wasn’t funny?
“I’d never done comedy before,” she admitted. “ I hope it’s sort of funny; I love it and I was totally terrified. There are some Second City people in the cast and there is a lot of improv. We’d improv on Street Time
but this is comedy.” Then why did they pick her, an unknown comedic quantity?
“I auditioned for them four times before they cast me,” she acknowledged. “ I came in and I wasn’t their image of the character: She was someone who recently lost a ton of weight. But I surprised them. I brought something into it and I guess they thought I was funny. In my own life with friends, there is a lot of laughing and screaming.
“ You can’t try to be funny. I try to play it real. The situation and lines are funny — what I am wearing is funny. Deb is trying to do couture but there is too much animal print. I show up in highheeled boots and the town wears ski jackets and hockey jackets. It’s a hockey town.”
What’s on her plate after she packs up all her hockey gear from Tournament?
“I’m a Canadian actor,” she shrugged. “ I don’t know.” Who knows? It could even involve liposuction or implants.