The Horror!?

Some Guy Who Kills People (2011)

2012-01-31T10:27:00.001+01:00

Warning: here be rather large, yet unavoidable spoilers.

After having spent time in a mental institution (or loony bin, as he and everyone else how ever was in one calls it) to help him get over his suicidal depression, Ken Boyd (Kevin Corrigan) walks through his life with the shell-shocked expression of somebody neither able nor willing to take the risk of actually beginning to live again. Ken has moved back in with his - deadpanning and sarcastic - mother (Karen Black, truly delightfully deadpan) and works in the local ice cream parlour, where he frequently has to take on the undignified job of dressing up as an ice cream cone. His life is pretty horrible, but at least nothing is happening in it.

That is, until Ken's eleven years old daughter Amy (Ariel Gade, who actually manages to be as charming as the script wants her to be, no mean feat in the nightmare world of child actors) steps into his life. Amy's the product of a one-week-relationship, and until now, her mother was able to pretend her father just disappeared. However, once happenstance leads Amy to the truth, the girl decides to get to know her father, if he thinks he's too much of a fuck-up to be one or not. Amy decides to move in with Ken for a week, and she sure isn't going to take no for an answer.

Spending time with Amy slowly opens up something in Ken, and with the girl's encouragement, he even begins dating British ex-pat Stephanie (Lucy Davis, still orange).

However, while all this has been going on, the small town Ken lives in has been hit by a series of murders. The victims are all major pricks, and, though the Sheriff (Barry Bostwick, just as deadpan as Black) - who just happens to be the boyfriend of Ken's Mum - doesn't realize it for quite some time, were once involved in a flashback-inducing traumatic event for Ken. In fact, there's a lot the Sheriff doesn't know that implicates Ken to the audience as a serial killer, and soon enough, Amy will have to share our point of view.

Colour me confused, for Some Guy Who Kills People was made by Jack Perez, the director and writer of Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus and other crap, yet it is actually pretty darn good. It's a clear demonstration of the fact that putting one's heart into a movie leads to much better results than putting in self-serving irony.

Not that Some Guy is free of irony or humour, it being a comedy and all, but this is not the sort of film that points at itself and shouts "Look how crap I am! Now laugh at me!". Most of the film's humour is of a rather more deadpan type that is in my mind part of the US indie movie tradition. It's the sort of humour that points out the absurdity of the situation the characters are in, and finds the funny in the quiet horribleness of Ken's life, but never stoops to making fun of people's pain. And there's a lot of pain to go around, for Some Guy's greatest strength is the quiet and honest way it shows its characters' unhappiness. There are no big dramatic break-downs, instead, Corrigan's stooped shoulders, and Gade's often a bit too ready smile are all the Perez needs to demonstrate how his characters are feeling for most of the running time.

However, Some Guy isn't only a film out to explain how much life sucks, but also one willing to suggest that yes, it might get better. I'm nearly tempted to use the word "heart-warming" like some of my more courageous movie-loving peers do when talking about the film, if that particular word didn't suggest a kitschiness neither Perez' quiet and unassuming film nor the nuanced performances of the cast have anything to do with.

Ironically, given my general tastes and unflinching pretend-cynicism (surely, I've never cried while watching Doctor Who), it's the film's horror part I find the least convincing. For one, I'm not sure if Ken's and Amy's story actually needs the serial killer plot at all, and while it certainly isn't anathema to the rest of the film, that aspect of the movie also feels a bit superfluous. It sure doesn't help that the film's indictment of Ken for the murders does not really play fair with the audience, showing things to make us think Ken really is the killer that don't seem believable anymore once we know he isn't.

On the other hand, the serial killer plot is so minor in its impact compared with the interplay between the main characters that its lack of success doesn't pull down the film too far. It may be keeping Some Guy Who Kills People from being a perfect film, yet it still is highly recommended one.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,comedy,horror,drama,jack perez,kevin corrigan,barry bostwick,karen black,ariel gade,lucy davis

Music Monday: Haven't Posted Jazz Here For A While Edition

2012-01-30T08:40:00.001+01:00

Technorati-Markierungen: music,music monday,tomasz stanko

The New Daughter (2009)

2012-01-29T12:46:00.001+01:00

After an unpleasant divorce, writer John James (Kevin Costner) moves with his teenage daughter Louisa (Ivana Baquero) and younger son Sam (Gattlin Griffith) to Mercy, South Dakota, or rather, a lonely house in the woods near Mercy, South Dakota.

Not surprisingly, the children aren't exactly happy about the move. Sam's a bit too young to actually understand what's going on, and seems mostly afraid and confused, while Louisa - in the throes of puberty and now half a country away from all her friends - blames herself, her father and her mother in turn.

The family's situation doesn't improve when Louisa discovers the burial mound in the woods behind the house. The male members of the family seem somewhat repelled by the place, but for Louisa, it fastly becomes a retreat from everything that ails her. However, contact with the place begins to change her: she starts sleepwalking, gets a curious rash on her neck and upper back, and all of a sudden acts much rougher than the rather timid girl she was before. She's not just getting more assertive against bullies than is generally considered correct, but also begins to experiment with (slightly) shorter skirts and make-up. And that really is just the beginning.

At first, John thinks Louisa's changed behaviour is another consequence of the divorce and the move, but the longer things go on, and the more like a stranger his daughter becomes, the more his conviction grows that there's some outside force changing Louisa. Being a writer and therefore knowledgeable in the ways of the search engine, he begins to research and stumbles upon the sad story of the former owners of his home that includes a changed teenage girl, a run-away mother and a death. Below that, though, lies something more ancient.

In theory, Luiso Berdejo's (whom you may know as the co-writer of the [Rec] movies) The New Daughter should be a film right up my alley: an Americanization of a short story by John Connolly from the author's excellent collection Nocturnes with clear nods in the direction of Arthur Machen, shot atmospherically and with obvious love for detail, well-acted (even Kevin Costner is perfectly alright when he for once doesn't salute flags or explain the sanctity of baseball or said flags), and all-around solidly made.

Alas, in practice, the film turns out to be rather limp and ineffectual. It is one of those films that clearly prides itself on following modern Hollywood's beloved three act structure as closely as if scriptwriter John Travis had written the handbook on it, leaving us with a film that might as well have ended after thirty minutes, for everything that's going to happen after the set-up is going to happen exactly by the book. It's the sort of film where you can be sure that a gun that was buried early on in the proceedings will be dug out again and used later on, for what is good writing if not following rules Anton Chekhov set up once that never were meant to be strict rules every writer has to follow in the future? As it turns out, slavishly following the rules and regulations of the craft isn't good writing, but riskless writing.

As if that weren't bland enough, the film also spends too much of its running time spelling out its metaphors and themes (adolescent female sexuality is so frightening for dads, don't you know? also, it's icky) so clearly that even the idea of ambiguity or (oh noes!) openness to diverging interpretations of what's going on seems preposterous. The audience, after all, should never have to think for itself. We are dumb and need to be told.

Having said that, I also have to make it clear that The New Daughter isn't a bad movie at all, it's just a movie so aggressively lacking in life and actual imagination that it made me wish for an actual bad movie. Those films do at least know how to surprise.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,luiso berdejo,horror,kevin costner,reviews

In short: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011)

2012-01-28T12:11:00.001+01:00

If there's a more peculiar and specific way to make a guy feel old than Tomas Alfredson's rather brilliant John le Carré adaptation just found for me, I don't really want to know what it is. What got me was the (in fact pretty obvious, but I've never pretended to be able to see the obvious before it bites me in the ass) realization that you can adapt the good novels of John le Carré today only by turning them into period pieces, which feels slightly off to someone who does remember the Cold War as more than just a more or less exciting background for movies.

Anyhow, Alfredson not only makes his film a period piece, but also a film heavily reminiscent in spirit of the sort of film major Hollywood studios in the 70s - before the arrival of the blockbuster and long before a whole industry seemingly turned to prefer whining about piracy while making huge profits instead of actually trying to make movies worth paying for - still dared to produce: slow, based on grown-up characters having grown-up character feelings, talky, and sure not only of their own intelligence, but also of their audience's intelligence. Alfredson's film displays a subtlety and a trust in the ability of his actors to emphasise the complexity of their characters without becoming showy that is extraordinary, and that is - not surprisingly - repaid by those actors in form of brilliant, subtle and nuanced performances worthy of a script and direction just as subtle and nuanced.

Thematically, Tinker, Tailor is a movie not only about the paranoia that comes with the spy territory, but also one asking questions about loyalty, trust, the necessity of the little betrayals that get people through the day, it's also a movie especially centring around the question if there actually is something like a little betrayal; are the little betrayals perhaps more destructive in the long run?

Tinker, Tailor's biggest strength is that it doesn't answer these questions cleanly, even though it ties up its complex narrative of double-crosses and small and large cruelties clearly enough. A mystery like the one of the Russian double agent in the British intelligence services, can, after all, be solved with finality; it's just it's emotional costs and emotional reasons that truly can't.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,in short,spies,tomas alfredson,gary oldman,benedict cumberbatch,john hurt

On WTF: Sennentuntschi (2010)

2012-01-27T19:51:00.001+01:00

I don't think I've ever talked about a Swiss movie here before, but who can resist a perfect piece of art house exploitation cinema like Michael Steiner's Sennentuntschi? It's the sort of film that could have found a place of honour in Tohill's and Tombs's Immoral Tales if it had been made a few decades earlier.

It's not a perfect film, but I'll go into some of Sennentuntschi's flaws and more of its virtues over at WTF-Film.

Technorati-Markierungen: swiss movies,reviews,horror,thriller,michael steiner,roxane mesquida,nicholas ofczarek,other places

In short: Zombie Apocalypse (2011)

2012-01-26T10:18:00.001+01:00

Not to be confused with other Zombie Apocalypses. This is the Syfy/The Asylum one.

As its title oh so subtly suggests, the film takes place in the late stages of JAZA (Just Another Zombie Apocalypse, featuring all four types of zombies: fast, slow, mid-tempo and CGI tiger). After having hidden away in a hut in the woods for most of the end of the world - which makes them zombie apocalypse virgins who can be exposited to whenever necessary - Ramona (Taryn Manning), Billy (Eddie Steeples), and some zombie-chew friend of theirs emerge to wander around randomly and provoke zombies by being obnoxious and loud.

Ramona and Billy are saved from a zombie attack that kills Zombie-Chew by a merry band of effective survivors (who'll turn ridiculously ineffective whenever the script calls for it) lead by Henry (Ving Rhames) and Cassie (Lesley-Ann Brandt). The survivors adopt the two slackers, and together they go on their way to Catalina where there's supposedly a zombie-free area to be found. On their way, the group goes through all the zombie movie standards, except for the dialogue about how much women suck popularized by The Walking Dead.

Curiously, Zombie Apocalypse is another SyFy-produced movie I don't utterly loathe. Even stranger, it's also a The Asylum production that looks like an actual movie. Sure, the film's script, written by Brooks Peck and Craig Engler who were also responsible for that other SyFy movie that was at least entertaining crap, seems to be out to remove as much subtextual complexity from zombie cinema as possible while going through all the genre's clichés and presenting all its expected set pieces, but at least it's doing that with a degree of competence and love for (alas, CGI-infested) cheap zombie carnage that's actually pretty entertaining to watch. Plus, this is one of the few horror movies I've seen that contains more than one person of colour in a central role without trying to sell itself as some sort of hip hop horror thing; this natural inclusiveness goes a long way to make up for the film's flatness in all other social and political regards.

For once in an Asylum film, the direction's not too horrible either. Director Nick Lyon actually manages to shoot decent action scenes (until the ridiculous CGI zombie tiger in the climax, that is), and is doing a job that is all-around not crap. Probably a first in the world of The Asylum.

Then there's the additional bonus of a very good low budget movie cast, doing very decent low budget movie acting. Okay, Taryn Manning's pretty horrible, but I have witnessed The Asylum's Sherlock Holmes movie and know that "pretty horrible" is still better than what this particular production company is willing to take from a lead actor.

If all this sounds as if Zombie Apocalypse's greatest virtue in my eyes is that it's not atrocious, then, well, you do understand me right. Sometimes, not being horrible is enough.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,horror,zombies,ving rhames,lesley-ann brandt,nick lyon

In short: Children Who Chase Lost Voices From Deep Below (2011)

2012-01-25T09:20:00.001+01:00

A little girl who has lost her father early in life enters Agharta, a semi-mythical world lying under the surface of the Earth. She falls in with her teacher cum agent of a secret society in his attempt to bring his dead wife back from the dead by opening the gate between the world of the living and the dead situated down there. The people living in Agharta are not amused. Various action sequences and obvious melodrama happen.

This anime by Makoto Shinkai sure is pretty in a "let's try to imitate Studio Ghibli's visual style as closely as possible (hopefully without getting sued)" kind of way, especially when it comes to the character design that more than once oversteps the line between loving homage and outright rip-off.

Unfortunately for the film at hand, this visual closeness to the works of Hayao Miyazaki also invites the comparison with the other aspects of that man's work, and it's here where Children starts to look and sound rather tired. Shinkai replaces what I assume to be his big model's actual insight into humanity and the world with a sweeping soundtrack and trite morals like "you have to let your dead loved ones go". It's Miyazaki without soul and the understanding of the actual complexities of life, love and humanity.

As an adventure movie, Children is trying to hide its basic emptiness and its lack of a sense of wonder behind visual lavishness, but never manages to make the actual adventuring exciting enough to let its audience (at least in my case) overlook the general lack of charm and urgency of the endeavour.

For the tastes of someone like me, who prefers the rough and interesting to the slick and mindless, watching Shinkai's movie was particularly annoying: all that talent and all that money wasted on something without any emotional, intellectual or artistic ambitions beyond being a good imitation.

Technorati-Markierungen: anime,adventure,fantasy,in short,makoto shinkai

Look Ma, I'm quoted in the Wall Street Journal!

2012-01-24T10:32:00.001+01:00

Fellow M.O.S.S. agent Beth of Beth Loves Bollywood fame spends some of the 48 hours in her day on a weekly column about Bollywood movies for the India blog of the Wall Street Journal Online.

Because she has been slowly driven insane by us other M.O.S.S.ers, Beth decided to spend this week's column exploring the world of the movies of Harinam Singh, Hindi no budget horror auteur extraordinaire/from hell. Such a thing is, of course, an endeavour best not started alone, so Beth asked me a few pointed questions about the why and wherefore of a certain part of the cult movie bloggers' set's love for the works of the kindly Mister Singh.

Read all Beth discovered, and some of what I gibbered, here!

Technorati-Markierungen: bollywood,harinam singh,horror,me me me,moss

Custodes Bestiae (2006)

2012-01-24T10:18:00.001+01:00

After making some sort of big discovery via a handful of scratched photographs he has stumbled upon and a fresco he's restoring in a provincial village church, (art historian?) Professor Dal Colle (Giorgio Merlino) invites newspaper Journalist Londero (Massimiliano Pividore) to an interview in which he is planning to unveil whatever that discovery is.

Just as Dal Colle is about to get into the details, a car arrives in front of his house. Clearly, Dal Colle is frightened of whoever is inside. The professor gives Londero a bag with his old camera and asks the journalist to hide until the unbidden visitor leaves again.

That's the last Londero sees of Dal Colle for quite some time. When the visitor is gone, so is the Professor. Londero takes the camera with him, and starts an investigation to find out what the historian wanted to tell him. It soon becomes clear that Dal Colle must have made an enemy of a very dangerous group, men who don't have any trouble killing or lobotomizing whoever crosses them, and that this group won't stop at anything keeping Londero away from their secrets.

However, the physical danger isn't the only thing Londero has to fear. The further his investigations lead him, the clearer it becomes that Dal Colle's big secret must have been kept for centuries and concerns things that are neither fully natural nor sane. The supernatural qualities of the whole affair are made clearer to the audience by the presence of increasingly more comprehensible flashbacks into the late 16th century which the film's poor protagonist never gets to see.

The few bits and pieces I've read about Lorenzo Bianchini's Custodes Bestiae on the 'net put a heavy emphasis on the film being an homage to Argento in his short occult phase (which just happens to be my favourite part of Argento's career). I don't entirely agree with that emphasis. Sure, the film does contain more than one nod to Argento's films, but the differences between Argento's style of film-making and that of Bianchini are gigantic.

In part, these differences are certainly caused by the much tighter budget the younger director clearly has to work with. Of course, there are the usual problems of a film made in the 00's, like sometimes amateurish acting, sometimes problematic sound and the generally cheap look of something shot on digital video - problems never found in Argento's movies when he was good. However, Bianchini doesn't actually seem to be trying to emulate Argento's aesthetic closely, which, given the circumstances, is something to be commended, for the film would only ever become a pale imitation of Argento, as built with cheap papiermache. Visually, Bianchini doesn't reach for Argento's highly stylized, hypnotic artificiality, but uses predominantly real locations in Friuli, sometimes giving his film slightly documentarian appearance that works well with the investigative story he tells, at other times trying his best - and more often than not succeeding - to create a weird mood by cheap and simple camera and editing devices. Custodes Bestiae is not always as slick as one would probably wish from a film, but there's an intelligence and care on display that really helps to make it work for me.

How well the film does work for a given viewer will probably depend on one's tolerance or liking for a film that by and large consists of scenes of people doing research and trying to make sense of it in a narrative that reminded me of my favourite investigative Call/Trail of Cthulhu scenarios more than once. In fact, while the film doesn't use Lovecraft's mythos, its background story has more than just a slight resemblance to Shadow over Innsmouth, as does its climax and the inevitability of the self-destruction of its protagonists. If you think watching people puzzling over books and crawling through archives until they meet their certain doom sounds boring, then this will probably not be the film for you at all. If, on the other hand, the idea of a well-constructed investigation into an equally well-constructed mythology that fits excellently into the way real-life myth and religion work sounds like your kind of thing, Custodes Bestiae should be right up your alley.

Me, I'm always happy when I can watch people doing research into the occult in movies, and if a film knows as well how to pace this sort of narrative as this one does, I can't help but be spellbound.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,reviews,lorenzo bianchini,massimiliano pividore,horror

Music Monday: Tallulah Edition

2012-01-23T08:45:00.001+01:00

Allo Darlin' - Tallulah from Will Botting on Vimeo.

Technorati-Markierungen: music,music monday,allo darlin

Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark (2010)

2012-01-22T11:53:00.001+01:00

Because of the girl's obvious psychological troubles, her mother sends Sally (Bailee Madison) to live with her ex-husband Alex (Guy Pearce) and his new girlfriend Kim (Katie Holmes, surprisingly decent here) in the Victorian mansion they are restoring to sell on.

As if that weren't enough trouble for a little girl, Sally is soon enough beset by the rat-like fairies living in the house's ash pit. At first, the creatures are pretending to make friends with the little girl, but it doesn't take long until they show their nastier side. While Alex - excellent dad that he is - doesn't seem to take Sally's problems as much more than a nuisance, Kim begins to believe Sally's stories about the monsters sharing their house once the occurrences become too strange to take them for expressions of a troubled child.

I have never been as big an admirer of the original TV movie Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark as many of my horror film loving peers, so I have to admit that this Guillermo Del Toror-written and produced remake directed by Troy Nixey is not pushing my sacrilege buttons at all. In fact, if I had to decide between the two films, I'd clearly take the cinema version over the TV movie.
For my tastes, Don't Be Afraid is a remake done right, taking elements of the original, but giving them its own spin and direction, turning the very white upper middle class (as all TV movies of that period invariably were not just by "virtue" of the characters, but also in feel and ideology) original with its TV-induced bland production design into a modern gothic of the visual style that's pretty typical of del Toro projects. The character's are now even more upper middle class than they were in the original, but curiously enough, the film itself doesn't feel that way anymore.

I like the film's re-interpretation of its monsters a lot: turning them into fairies (with the proper shout-outs to Arthur Machen, thanks to at least one scriptwriter who actually reads books in form of del Toro), and an appropriately creepy version of the tooth fairy to boot, gives the monsters' existence and threat a proper weight the somewhat characterless creatures of the original didn't have for me. Thanks to this (and the inclusion of various of the frequent themes of del Toro's work), the new Don't Be becomes more of a dark fairy tale, trading the innate American middle class-ness of the TV movie for the mood of one of our dark European fairy tales, frequently cleverly broken and mirrored by modern psychological concepts and a playful sense of what you can change about the traditional tropes of fairy tales. So, fortunately, step mothers aren't inherently evil, and even rather ineffectual and superficial fathers can rise to the occasion, though only when it is much too late for a happy ending.

As befits a fairy tale in this key, Don't Be Afraid has an ending that is surprisingly consequent and absolutely keeping with the tone of what came before, even though it's not as complete a downer ending as a film from the 70s would have had. In this film's world, it's one of the characters who at least "deserves" it, who dies; it's as if virtue is not necessarily something that will be rewarded, and contact with the supernatural has its price even if it's not fair to the person who has to pay that price at all.

While there are a lot of interesting things happening on more than one subtextual level, and its visual side is as sumptuous and detailed as you could hope for, Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark may be a bit too conventional on a dramatic level to satisfy some. It's a film that frequently makes fascinating and fruitful decisions about what it can and will do inside of the frame of a very traditional horror movie but it never tries to completely break out of the structures of a film of this type, featuring suspense scenes that look and feel exactly as you'd expect them too, following each other in exactly the expected way. On one hand, this formal conservatism is a bit of a disappointment, but on the other, it is also a reminder that you can work inside of traditional structures without having to act dumb.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,horror,troy nixey,guillermo del toro,bailee madison,katie holmes,guy pearce

On WTF: Mr Wrong (1986)

2012-01-21T21:43:00.001+01:00

There's a horrifying lack of write-ups of movies from New Zealand on this site or over at my WTF-Film column, so I'm glad to put things right a little by talking about the only good movie about a haunted car I know.

Gaylene Preston's Mr Wrong is based on the Elizabeth Jane Howard story of the same name, and turns out to be a quietly feminist, unassuming and clever film. Head on over to WTF-Film to learn more.

Technorati-Markierungen: new zealand movies,gaylene preston,heather bolton,reviews,horror

Some Random Thoughts On Akira (1988)

2012-01-21T11:49:00.001+01:00

Because who needs another full write-up of a classic everyone has already written about? Still, I have a handful of jumbled thoughts and ideas to share.

First of all, I'm impressed by how well the film still holds up as an aesthetic whole. A big part of the film's effect on me is the earnestness and relentlessness with which director Katsuhiro Otomo intensifies most of the more exhausting (one could say hysterical) tropes of anime and manga to the brink of the apocalyptic, creating a whole new set of tropes and concepts for later creators of anime to follow.

But what still gets me most isn't actually the apocalyptic, the boyish manliness, the shouting and the explosions, it is Otomo's treatment of silence. Some of Akira's most impressive moments are happening without a sound, at times accompanied by a few notes of the still pretty weird soundtrack, reminding me of the quiet/loud dynamic that was starting to become important in music at about the same time.

Perhaps related to that, perhaps its total opposite, I think, is the director's decision to stuff his film full of telling details, none of them emphasised, all of them just there, until Akira becomes so full of these details that it's more than just a little jarring whenever Otomo actually does emphasise something. A part of this is probably an attempt of Otomo to adapt his much more sprawling manga the whole affair is based on without having to leave out too much of the incidental detail (though large swathes of plot are left out, and the movie's better off that way), but its effect of me as a viewer is still just as confusing, exciting, and exhausting as it was when Akira was shiny and new.

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese movies,anime,sf,katsuhiro otomo,thoughts

In short: The Monolith Monsters (1957)

2012-01-19T11:01:00.001+01:00

Those darn meteors, always bringing down trouble when they crash down near small US towns! This time around, said meteor-brought trouble does not come in form of a malevolent (or just very hungry) life form, but in form of silicate rock carrying some rather curious traits. When coming in contact with water, the alien rock gets a lust for growing and multiplying that seems quite fitting to the somewhat phallic shape it has when it gets larger.

It also somehow (the film becomes especially unclear about the how and why on this point) manages to turn people coming in contact with it and water slowly to stone, except for those people it comes in contact with that don't turn to stone.

Will heroic Department of the Interior geologist Dave Miller (Grant Williams) and his former Professor Arthur Flanders (Trevor Bardette) find a way to stop the rebellious rock formations before they can stomp the quaint little town of San Angelo? Will Dave's girlfriend Cathy (Lola Albright) be allowed to do anything of import? Will I be able to keep from rhyming "rock formation" with "park bench mutation"?

If there's one thing John Sherwood's The Monolith Monsters (shouldn't it rather be called "The Monster Monoliths"?) should be remembered for, than it is the rather clever idea of its scriptwriters - Norman Jolley, Robert M. Fresco and Jack Arnold - to construct a film that hits most of the mandatory beats of a 50s giant monster movie while replacing the standard giant monster with an even less conscious force of nature. This small change doesn't really shake up the way the film's plot develops much, and sure as hell does not change anything about the narrative techniques of the genre its operating in, but gives it that slight but important degree of memorability a film operating inside of a genre that always tended to especially samey movies desperately needs.

If you ignore the novelty of The Monolith Monsters' non-monster, you're left with a 50s monster movie that isn't on the level of perennial favourites like Them!, but that is surrounded by a pleasant air of low budget competence. The film goes by with a rather sprightly pace and avoids some of the more annoying pitfalls these films tend to jump in with abandon. Namely, the (very minor) romance bits aren't completely nauseating and Williams's hero is not as much of a square-jawed jerk as one is used to.

Add to that the rather nicely designed and realized monolith effects, and you may not have a classic of its genre, but certainly a movie worth a bit of time for anyone who doesn't outright hate all 50s monster movies.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,sf,giant monsters,horror,john sherwood,grant williams,lola albright,in short

In short: Hobo With A Shotgun (2011)

2012-01-18T09:24:00.002+01:00

It looks like movies based on the fake trailers in Grindhouse have truly arrived and become their own little genre now. Jason Eisener's film about a Rutger Hauer's titular hobo (soon enough to be outfitted with a shotgun, obviously) doing the vigilante thing in a city full of freaks also has a lot in common with the school of self-conscious Japanese exploitation films following The Machine Girl in that it manages to make up for its low budget and the usual problems that come with it by dedicating itself to a feverish interpretation of what's most entertaining in exploitation films. Which it then proceeds to heighten to the absurd to at times awesome and exhilarating effect. Often, the film is even as funny as it thinks it is.

Alas, there are a few other times when the film's hysteria comes over as phony, the winking and nudging taking away some of the fun Hobo's crassness and violence generally bring. I'm also a bit disappointed about how little imagination the film shows when it comes to the treatment of its female lead Molly Dunsworth. I'm not going to complain about her being a prostitute - for the stories of prostitutes are worth telling as much as (let's be honest, more than) those of vacuous New York media people - but I was quite disappointed that the film chose to let her sudden moment of kicking some ass end in a whimper that's only there so that Hauer can die a more heroic death - especially compared to the Japanese school of these movies where objectification of girls in school uniforms and having a female lead with actual agency mingle in classic exploitation style. Not that I expected much from a movie from North America in this regard. Keep in mind that Dunsworth still gets to stab someone with her arm bone splinter.

This doesn't mean I didn't enjoy myself for most of Hobo's running time. As I said, large parts of the film are exhilarating and/or imaginative in that special blood-spattering way and/or crassly funny - what's not to enjoy about that?

Plus, Rutger Hauer imbues his on paper utterly ridiculous character with surprising amounts of humanity, putting the "man" back in homicidal maniac. Not a bad achievement for an actor often described with the cruel words "limited range". Clearly, it's not the range, but what one does with it.

Technorati-Markierungen: canadian movies,action,exploitation,in short,rutger hauer,molly dunsworth

Assignment Naschy: Seven Murders for Scotland Yard (1971)

2012-01-17T10:19:00.001+01:00

Original title: Jack el destripador de Londres

A murderer roams the backrooms of 1970s London, murdering (mostly) prostitutes as a self-styled new Jack the Ripper. The police in form of the frighteningly coiffed Inspector Cuthbert Campbell (Renzo Marignano) soon have a main suspect. It's the second victim's boyfriend, former trapeze artist Pedro (Paul Naschy), his solid alibis for more than one of the murders notwithstanding.

Implicated to the audience by quite a few sledgehammer-subtle red herrings, Pedro is soon fleeing the police and trying to avenge his lover by catching the killer himself. That's not quite as easy as it sounds, for there's not only the police trying to catch him, but the local gangsters have seen Fritz Lang's M one too many times, and want to see supposed serial killer Pedro dead.

Pedro's investigation eventually points him towards Inspector Campbell himself as the possible perpetrator. This, however, may be just another red herring, for Campbell's buddy, teacher, guy with sexual problems, frequent lounger in house coats and inappropriate admirer of his students Winston Darby Christian (Andrés Resino) is just as good a suspect.

Sometimes, my project of getting my hands and eyes on every Paul Naschy movie possible turns into a bit of a chore. As someone who is completely unable to learn from my own mistakes, I decided to follow the pretty dire Spanish giallo A Dragonfly For Each Corpse with another one of Naschy's giallos, in form of Seven Murders, directed by José Luis Madrid (possibly known as the director of the also not very good Horrible Sexy Vampire, a film about a vampire who is neither). And wouldn't you know it, this one's only slightly better.

At least, Seven Murders isn't quite as unpleasantly reactionary as the later movie, a film whose protagonist and scriptwriters would probably applaud the killing spree of this one's villain. In fact, Seven Murders (at least in the version I saw; the different character names on the film's IMDB page suggest that other versions of the movie may be quite a bit different from the one I saw - on the other hand, the IMDB may just be full of crap) never suggests for a second that the victims deserve to be killed for being prostitutes, adulterers or just young and trying to experiment a bit. There's an uncommon unwillingness to identify with the murderer even in those scenes that are shot from his point of view that is on one hand pretty sympathetic, but that on the other hand only increases the film's distanced and disjointed feel.

As is so often the case with the films Naschy starred in, Seven Murders suffers from a script that doesn't seem to be able to make up its mind about much. Should it use too much exposition (like in one third of it)? None at all even when it would be useful (as in its other two thirds)? Should it really play this fast and loose with the guilt and innocence of its protagonists and include red herrings of a kind that can't be explained away and will therefore have to be ignored after the film is through? And who exactly is the protagonist: Pedro? Cuthbert Campbell? Winston "the Dandy" Darby Christian? How to tell a story in a way that doesn't drag and jerk from scene to scene as if the film were assembled from bits and pieces of two or three movies (it actually flows less well than some of Godfrey Ho's frankenfilms I've seen by now)? Scriptwriters Tito Carpi, Sandro Continenzo, Madrid and Naschy either don't know or are of different minds. Not surprisingly, this results in a film that's not just lacking focus, but can't even imagine having such a thing.

Now, a certain lack of logic and narrative focus isn't uncommon for a giallo; in fact it is something rather to be expected. However, the better films of the genre manage either to use these theoretical problems to enforce their thematic argument(s) (in which the absence of logic is often one of the points), to bury them under a pleasing, confusing or mesmerizing aesthetic surface, or to just throw so much weirdness and sleaze at their audience as to produce a state of bliss that makes caring about incoherence impossible. Seven Murders just doesn't manage any of these three feats. If the film has a theme, than it's something extremely generic like "in every man dwells a murderer", and Madrid (or the other writers) really can't be bothered to do much of interest with it.

Seven Murders' aesthetics are as confused as the writing. For every moment of beauty, every moodily framed scene, every bit of visual cleverness, there are two scenes of talking heads in anonymous rooms draining away all visual (and intellectual) excitement. Finally, weirdness and sleaze don't make any appearance at all.

One of Seven Murders' few high points is Naschy's performance. While it's really a Naschy standard role (the dark, brooding romantic with a dark past who is loved by all women, unpleasantly adept at physical violence, but has a good, yet tragic, heart), the actor puts a lot of energy into it, acting as the only physical and personal presence in a movie that is lacking personality in most other respects.

Technorati-Markierungen: spanish movies,reviews,paul naschy,jose luis madrid,giallo

Music Monday: Glories of Video-Editing Edition

2012-01-16T09:28:00.001+01:00

Technorati-Markierungen: music,music monday,julia holter

Unearthly Stranger (1963? 1964?)

2012-01-15T11:54:00.001+01:00

Panicked and sweating scientist Dr. Mark Davidson (John Neville) speaks his terrible story onto a tape machine.

Davidson is a British scientist working on a way to transport humans to other planets through the power of their minds, whichever doctorate you may need for that sort of thing. While Davidson is on holiday in Switzerland, his project leader dies under mysterious circumstances that seem pretty unnatural for natural causes. Davidson is made the dead man's successor. What the security chief of the project, Major Clarke (Patrick "Lestrade" Newell), fails to mention to Davidson, but tells the scientist's boss and friend Professor Lancaster (Philip Stone), is the fact that this wasn't the first death connected with the project, or rather, related projects in the USA and the Soviet Union have taken the same losses, under the same circumstances. One might think someone or something does not want humanity to reach for the stars. And why is it that the dead man's blood contains a substance that can only be found in outer space? Davidson soon enough finds out that his job may be a death sentence, but, being British and all, he keeps comparatively calm and carries on.

During his Swiss holiday - which must have been pretty epic - Davidson also met and married his new wife Julie (Gabriella Licudi). Something is a bit strange about her, though: not only is her body language exceedingly weird, but one night, Davidson realizes that she sleeps with her eyes open, doesn't breathe and doesn't blink. And, as is revealed when Major Clarke investigates her background, she also does not seem to exist. Unlike the audience, Davidson isn't quite ready to realize the obvious at that point. It will, however, come to him sooner or later; perhaps too late.

Unearthly Stranger is a decidedly British production (as in, doesn't contain a visible monster and nobody who is square-jawed) directed by John Krish whose filmography suggests your typical journeyman film-maker to me, and whose work here shows a clear noir influence in his staging of emotional scenes as well as in his use of shadow and light. It's a fine little low budget SF/horror movie that convinces through a clever script, some excellent acting, and Krish's slightly melodramatic yet moody direction.

In style and content, the film has a lot in common with some of the anthology TV shows of the 60s, especially the original Outer Limits, sharing these shows' ability to take a silly basic idea and elevate it by treating it seriously and with an eye on contemporary anxieties, as a proper piece of SF horror should. Rex Carlton's script may play fast and loose with its science, it does, however, show a sure hand juggling the film's themes - the paranoia of the "they are among us" invasion movie, some surprising (in a film of this place and time) barbs in the direction of the classism of UK society, and the fear of (certain) men of women (especially well realized in the film's brilliantly creepy last shots). There's also a bit of the old "alien woman gets hit with human emotions" trope that wasn't much better in the 60s than it is today, but the film handles that part well enough not to annoy.

It's also only fair to praise the actors for helping the film work. John ("Sherlock Holmes"/"Well-manicured Man") Neville's performance is quite intense, selling the moments of paranoia and distrust as well as those of tenderness, while Licudi convinces by using a body language just alien enough to neither be too ridiculous nor too normal.

All in all, Unearthly Stranger is exactly the sort of film I'm happy too stumble upon: clever, cheap yet stylish, and pretty damn unknown.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,sf,horror,john krish,john neville,philip stone,gabriella licudi,patrick newell,reviews

Three Films Make A Post: Born A Man...Turned Into A Living Laser Beam By Science's Most Gruesome Experiment!

2012-01-14T10:42:00.001+01:00

The Last Killer (1967): Slow, ponderous, but not as weighty as it would like to be Spaghetti Western about George Eastman making a crash-course as a gunfighter and professional killer to be able to avenge his murdered father. Boredom ensues, though I can't say the film is actively bad.

Sector 7 (2011): Generally, contemporary South Korean filmmakers seem to be much better at making big budget genre movies that aren't dumb as rocks than their US counterparts, so I did go into this monster on an oil rig movie with certain expectations to be entertained. Alas, Sector 7 is a proper catastrophe of a movie. It's a plodding mess, dumber than you may think possible, full of clichéd non-characters who do things too idiotic to even accept in a monster movie (it really is that bad), hideous "comic" "relief", actors working on valium and a monster that looks a lot like that from The Host but (of course) worse.

The whole affair has a SyFy monster movie vibe, with all the crappiness that entails, just with a higher budget.

The Gibbering Horror of Howard Ghormley (2005): Fortunately, this brilliantly creepy piece of Weird filmmaking (shot on Super 8, no less) that is available to watch on YouTube in two parts here and here, gives me the opportunity to end this on a positive note. Director Steve Daniels uses the rawness of Super 8, editing and staging that at times remind me of Eraserhead and Weimar expressionist films, and a pretty fantastic soundtrack and sound design to create a nightmarish mindscape I found utterly irresistible and properly conducive to feelings of actual dread.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,south korean movies,american movies,spaghetti western,horror,in short,george eastman,steve daniels

On WTF: Étoile (1989)

2012-01-13T19:06:00.001+01:00

Clearly, everyone's favourite ballet "Swan Lake" is much too good a place to start an exploration of identity - or rather its loss - in a young woman from for Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan to have been the first movie to use it.

In fact, Italian director Peter Del Monte attempted something quite similar to, yet totally different from, the American movie a few decades earlier with Étoile, starring young Jennifer Connelly and some glorious set design. If you want to learn more, click on through to my column on WTF-Film.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,reviews,other places,horror,fantasy,peter del monte,jennifer connelly,gary mccleery

In short: Django the Bastard (1969)

2012-01-12T10:18:00.001+01:00

Original title: Django Il Bastardo

aka Django the Avenger

aka The Stranger's Gundown

A rather creepy gunman with very limited facial expressions - for the movie's first hour, I count one and a half - named, like these gunmen usual are, Django (Anthony Steffen), rides through the West delivering crosses containing the given day as their date of death to various men before he shoots them. Of course, Django is out for vengeance for something that will be explained in a (slightly comical) flashback later on.

The avenger's job is nearly done, too. After getting rid of two of his victims in short order, there's just Rod Murdock (Paolo Gozlino) left, but Murdock is a more worthy opponent than the others. Once he realizes someone is after him (Django ain't one for subtlety), Murdock decides the protection of his mad brother (Luciano Rossi in a role that has a decided whiff of Kinski) and a few men isn't enough, hires a lot more thugs and holes up with them in a town he empties of other inhabitants.

Now having to use various techniques I usually connect with the goddamn Batman, Django goes to work on them.

I always seem to be of two minds about the Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Garrone. On one hand, they are all highly derivative, with hardly any plot point that don't come up regularly in other Spaghetti Westerns, and with characters completely following the expected types, on the other hand, they are also usually highly entertaining and accomplished films.

Django the Bastard may even be Garrone's best Western - it is at least the best I've seen to date - mainly because this time around, there are actually a few elements to the film that aren't quite as often explored in other Spaghettis.

The main point of interest in this regard is the way the film treats its avenging anti-hero. That a Spaghetti Western's protagonist has near superhuman abilities with the gun and incredible tenacity isn't anything new, of course, but for about the first hour, Garrone's and Anthony Steffen's script builds him up as a nearly supernatural threat, putting a bit more of the creepy in their West than is the rule. In fact, the script uses this aspect so intensely that it came as a bit of a disappointment to me when Django turned out to be only a very messed-up and angry man who consciously tries to seem more than merely human, making the comparison to Batman more than just a throw-away joke of yours truly.

Another peculiar pop-cultural resonance of Garrone's film is Django's cruelty, and the strangely ritual elements of some of his killings, that - especially early in the movie - give the impression that he's not just traumatized and angry, but an actual serial killer preying on pretty atypical victims. If you squint, you could even argue that this makes Django the Bastard some sort of proto slasher movie, but then you can say that about nearly all movies with vengeance-driven plots if you broaden your definition of makes a movie a "proto-slasher" enough.

Apart from these aspects, Django the Bastard is very typical of this phase of the Spaghetti Western: a minimal (or minimalist, if you prefer) plot with archetypal characters is executed with true visual panache; actors with very limited range work excellently within their limits (in Steffen's case, this is clearly one of his best performances); rich people are bastards; fun is had by all.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,spaghetti western,in short,sergio garrone,anthony steffen,luciano rossi,rada rassimov

In short: Psychophobia (1985)

2012-01-11T09:20:00.001+01:00

The death of her husband in a plane crash leaves Mary (Mary Saint Peter) with two children frighteningly dubbed by adults trying to sound like children, a house threatening to fall back to the real estate company they bought it from, and frayed nerves.

Mary's nerves surely aren't going to become any better when the company her husband was working for decides to not pay her any money for what may or may not have been a work accident. At least there's a friendly lawyer and former school friend to help her out and fall in love with coming into play.

But monetary troubles aren't going to stay Mary's main problem. Strange phenomena begin to surround her and her house, and people treating her badly start to die horrible off-screen deaths.

A professor of parapsychology diagnoses a psychic infestation. Whoever or whatever may the problem be?

Psychophobia won't go down in the annals of Italian weirdo horror as anything more than a mediocre effort by a guy (Stefan D'Arbo) who didn't make any other movies, but if you have stepped as deeply into the world of these movies as I have, you will probably appreciate some of the film's more peculiar aspects.

If you are, on the other hand, looking for a "good" movie, you'll probably be less than delighted by the usual traits of Italian cheapo cinema, like erratic pacing and a narrative that never even seems to try to make sense.

Of course, what drives some people away is exactly what I enjoy about these films (unless it's not), so a complete breakdown of time, space and logic isn't just perfectly alright with me, but something I'm actually looking forward to. Psychophobia's brand of illogic isn't all that exciting or interesting for most of the film's running time, yet from time to time, the film comes up with lapses in logic peculiar and brilliant enough to help one through many scenes of melodramatic declarations and not much happening. Plus, there's that parapsychologist whose earnest explanations are always funny and never make any sense.

It seems as if the film were saving most of its powers of blowing minds for its last fifteen minutes. Suddenly, the lumbering narrative begins to jump and dance with silly glee. A hilarious tape from the beyond causes joy, and a brain explodes, until it all ends in awesomely dumb psychic powers manifesting. I couldn't have asked for more.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,in short,horror,wtf,stefano d'arbo,mary saint peter

Twilight Q (1987)

2012-01-10T10:30:00.001+01:00

This OVA in two independent parts was initially supposed to be the start of a whole series of episodes in the Twilight Zone mode, but, as so often happens, commercial problems got in the way of art and the project was canned before it could even begin properly.

Fortunately, it at least left us with two episodes that are showcases of two very different anime directors in the early stages of their careers.

Episode 1, usually called "Reflection", sees school girl Mayumi find a beat-up camera that must have been lying on the ocean floor for some time. The camera contains a roll of film with only one photo on it. Strangely enough, the photo turns out to show a slightly older Mayumi with a boy she has never met before. Research turns up a very peculiar fact about the camera - it is a model that hasn't gone into production yet. It's as if it came from the future. However, her finding the camera from the future is only the beginning of some strange occurrences surrounding Mayumi. Soon, she will find herself traveling through time, meeting her future husband in the future after her (future) death, and falling back into a parallel 1936. Is it all just a dream, or is time out of joint?

"Reflection" is the work of Tomomi Mochizuki, and clearly inspired by things like the inevitable Girl Who Leapt Through Time and thoughts about environmental destruction that may turn the laws of nature themselves against humanity. Stylistically, Mochizuki goes for a semi-realist anime style highly typical of 1987. The character designs are a bit too generic to cause any enthusiasm, but the animation is lively and presented with a good eye for the telling detail it should not skimp on, which is even more important in a story that tries to condense as many plot elements as your normal full-length movie has into less than thirty minutes. It's a small wonder - and a compliment to Mochizuki's ability to keep a visible through-line in a story like this - that the episode does not only not collapse under its own weight, but actually manages to evoke a mood that can only be described as bitter-sweet, seeing as it does include a feeling of youthful hope as well as one of preordained loss. Not bad for half an hour of anime.

The second episode, "File 538", concerns a private detective breaking into the room of a man and a child he has been watching for some time now while investigating the disappearance of airplanes (or, as the audience knows, the airplanes turning into carps) from the skies over a nameless city. In the room, the detective reads the story of the man, and learns that the man himself was a private detective hired to investigate a man and a child living in this room, and that man in his turn was a private detective hired to investigate a man and a child living in the room, and so on and so on.

This episode was directed and written by Mamoru Oshii. It shows Oshii at his strangest with a plot that clearly imagines itself to be a (Japanese) detective novel as written by Kafka and Borges (or it might all just be a Paul Auster influence - who knows?). The episode's execution is peculiar indeed - one third (the plane transformations and the story's intro and outro) are realized as typical Oshii animation, while the other two thirds are nearly static pictures of a guy reading from a print-out and completely static tracings of photographs. Clearly Oshii aims for a distancing effect fitting the alienation and distance of the circular story he tells. Unlike many of the director's other more surreal projects (especially the live action ones), this one works for me, probably because thirty minutes are just a better running time for the kind of emotional abstraction the director is going for than the two hours he prefers.

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese movies,anime,sf,fantasy,mamoru oshii,tomomi mochizuki,reviews

Music Monday: Train Edition

2012-01-09T08:49:00.001+01:00

Technorati-Markierungen: music,music monday,amanda shires

The Eerie Midnight Horror Show (1974)

2012-01-08T11:42:00.001+01:00

aka Enter the Devil

aka The Devil Obsession

aka The Sexorcist

aka The Tormented

Original title: L'ossessa

When art student and ingénue Danila (Stella Carnacina, who will turn out to by a very enthusiastic actress when her time to writhe, shout, moan and puke green stuff comes) takes on the job of helping restore a wooden religious statue whose mere sight seems to arouse her, she probably doesn't expect what follows. After watching her mother (Lucretia Love) take a friendly rose whipping by her lover, Danila has a vision of the statue coming to life as Ivan Rassimov and having sex with her (most reviews actually speak of rape, but the act is clearly consensual in the print I saw). Suddenly, Danila's mild-mannered character begins to change.

A new-found interest in very rough masturbation and spending her nights screaming soon turns into an attempt to seduce her father (Chris Avram), who declines, leading to more noisome behaviour. Why, you could think Danila is possessed!

A bit of rest seems to help the young woman just fine, though, until she visits a former heathen temple. At this point, it's vision time again. Now, Danila sees herself at a Witches' Sabbath, where she pledges herself to Satan (who likes to spend time hanging on a cross, laughing, it seems) and gets crucified for her trouble. Danila's following hysterics are enough for the group of doctors her parents called in to diagnose her as Possessed by the Devil (it's SCIENCE!, I tell you) and give her into the loving (perhaps too loving) hands of exorcist Father Xeno (Luigi Pistilli), a man who, frankly, sucks at his job so much I was rooting for Satan.

Yes, Enter the Devil (or whichever title you prefer) was another of many attempts of the Italian cheap-shot film industry to beat The Exorcist (winner of the title "classic horror movie I personally care least about") at its own game by sexing it up a little (or a lot) and going into directions US movies even in the 70s seldom dared to walk.

For the first thirty or forty minutes, director Mario Gariazzo (last seen here making the noirish and very interesting Passport for a Corpse) delivers a film with a fine eye for taboo-skirting sleaze, put side by side with imagery that would probably look pretty blasphemous to me if I were Catholic; you just gotta love the willingness of Italian filmmakers to go to places like this.

Unfortunately, the conceptually wonderful and creative scene of the wooden statue coming to life and then having a bit of fun isn't really a sign pointing in the direction the film will be moving in during its second half. It doesn't take too long until The Sexorcist mostly gives up on the sexually loaded imagery (except for a slight return with a lame but nearly effective attempt by possessed Danila to seduce the hapless Father Xeno), wags its finger at Danila's mum's sex practices (really), and goes for the most basic exorcism movie stuff, with a lot of unexciting writhing and praying. In a film that starts out as sleazily strong as this one did, that really is a bit of a shame.

The Devil Obsession isn't improved by Gariazzo's rather variable direction style. Here, too, the film starts out strong with scenes filmed with a certain panache, a clear eye for the strange, and a complete absence of subtlety, but soon enough gets dragged down to a level where nothing that's happening on screen is staged in an interesting manner. I wouldn't be at all surprised if somebody told me there were two directors at work here, one responsible for the three vision sequences and the early scenes in the church, and somebody much less talented for the rest of the film. This is, of course, mere speculation.

Be that as it may, I can't say I found The Eerie Midnight Horror Show (a most puzzling title for the film at hand) to be all that bad as possession movies go. While its second half is pretty boring, it does at least have three (perhaps even four) good scenes, which is more than I'd be willing to say about a lot of movies.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,reviews,horror,mario gariazzo,stella carnacina,lucretia love,ivan rassimov,luigi pistilli

In short: Diabolicamente…Letizia (1975)

2012-01-07T10:40:00.001+01:00

aka Sex, Demons and Death (two out of three are even in the movie)

Because they can't have any children of their own, rich couple Marcello (Gabriele Tinti) and Michaela (Magda Konopka) take Michaela's teenaged niece Letizia (Franca Gonella) from the boarding school she's on to live with them from now on.

Little does the couple expect Letizia to be a witch who uses her psychic powers to ruin their lives by the usual exploitation movie ways of seduction and encouragement of lesbianism and depression (and yeah, the film really seems to think same sex love is a mental illness) until the whole household, including the two servants, is a zoo where everyone has at least groped everyone else once and people scream melodramatically at each other a lot. And if Letizia didn't have a partner who walks around in the skeleton mask of the killer from Im Banne des Unheimlichen and kills people, that would be all that would ever happen. All the sex and melodrama takes place because Letizia wants to take revenge on Marcello and Michaela for something to do with the death of her mother. I'd love to tell you more about Letizia's motivation, but this, as you will be no doubt unsurprised to read, is not a film bothering with actually explaining stuff like it to its audience.

Salvatore Bugnatelli's Letizia is one among many Italian exploitation movies about a more or less sexy teenager (or, often, as is the case here, "teenager") destroying some nasty rich people with sex and/or magic and/or violence before dying herself in an ironic twist of fate. The plot in these films is usually an excuse to show off as much nudity as possible and excite or annoy an audience with suggestions of incest and underage sex, which makes these films probably not the ideal family movies - depending on one's family, of course.

Letizia is one of the less interesting entries in this sub-genre, for it is a film surrounded by an air of apathy. Sure, there are the mandatory scenes of people rubbing against each other and Letizia making googly eyes that are supposed to suggest hypnotism but rather look like the effect constipation to me. However, none of these scenes ever leave much of an impression beyond that of a director and movie going through the motions of exploitation without actually having a feel for it.

The problem - apart from Bugnatelli's extremely bland direction - Letizia can't (and possibly doesn't want to) solve is that I (and therefore its prospective audience) have seen everything it has to offer in other movies made by directors with more of a sense of visual style who were much more enthusiastic about being kinky, cynical, and exploitative. Letizia's just too square to boldly go where other films had already gone.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,in short,horror,exploitation,salvatore bugnatelli,gabriele tinti,franca gonella,magda konopka

On WTF: Grave Encounters (2011)

2012-01-06T19:44:00.001+01:00

I'm probably not the only one suffering from a bit of POV horror fatigue (for which I mostly blame the insufferable Paranormal Activity movies) at the moment, but from time to time, the sub-genre does still produce movies good enough to break through my apathy.
Case in point is the Canadian Grave Encounters, a film that just happens to be the theme of my column on WTF-Film this week.

Technorati-Markierungen: canadian movies,reviews,horror,vicious brothers,sean rogerson,ashleigh gryzko,mackenzie gray,merwin mondesir

In short: Elemi (2009)

2012-01-05T10:03:00.001+01:00

Original title: Denshinbashira Elemi no Koi

Suburban Japanese telephone pole Elemi falls in love with phone technician Takahashi. After Elemi learns something about transience and compassion through the death of a cat, she begins phoning Takahashi, pretending to be a human girl instead of a cute telephone pole, even going so far as to do some stock trading to be able to buy Takahashi a birthday present. Through their conversations, Takahashi falls in love with Elemi too, but what kind of a relationship can a telephone pole and a guy have - if the guy will even believe Elemi when she tells him what she truly is? And what will the utility pole community say?

Hideto Nakata's short (44 minutes) stop motion animation is - among other things - a reminder that not all Japanese animation is of the drawn sort; in fact there's a not quite as popular but strong tradition of other types of animation in the country, usually of a (compared to the anime mainstream) more indie movie nerd than a otaku sensibility.

Elemi is a fine piece of fantasy (the term "magical realism" is for the weak of heart) meditating - in a very Japanese way - about things like transience, love and the culture of utility poles. For my philosophical taste, the film's probably a little too accepting of fate in its outlook, but then I am less than enamoured of the concept of treating acceptance of that which makes one unhappy as a virtue.

Nonetheless, Elemi is a pretty wonderful piece of work, hitting the sweet spot between melancholia, a love of the slightly weird (this is after all a movie that spends time inventing the social rules of utility poles), and beauty.

The film delivers all this through an appropriately leisurely pace, a very fine soundtrack, and pretty brilliant character design - the sort that knows how to anthropomorphise a telephone pole properly and provide it with real character.

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese movies,animation,in short,hideto nakata,fantasy

Die Bande des Schreckens (1960)

2012-01-04T09:04:00.001+01:00

aka The Terrible People

Before his execution, master criminal Clay Shelton has a friendly meet-up with the people he holds responsible for his arrest and his death (poor executioner of London). Shelton promises that all of them will be killed by "the Gallow's Hand".

Chief inspector Long (Joachim Fuchsberger), also known as "the Better", bets against it, which is pretty understandable, seeing how he is one of the threatened victims himself. To nobody's surprise, the promised murders begin soon after Shelton's death. What's really peculiar, though, is that people see someone looking a lot like the dead criminal in the vicinity of these murders. Is Shelton taking his vengeance from the grave into his own hands, or does somebody just want Scotland Yard to think he is?

Of course, this being an Edgar Wallace adaptation, this is not the only troubling question Inspector Long will have to answer before the criminal or criminals can be apprehended. He'll also need to escape various assaults on his own life, muddle through the usual pool of suspect victims and even more suspect suspects (among them usual professional suspect actors in the Wallace films like Dieter Eppler and Ulrich Beiger), un-kidnap the woman and - of course - heiress of his dreams (Karin Dor), and find out how his own father, the brilliantly named Lord Godley Long (Fritz Rasp), is involved in the whole affair. Who said it's easy working for Scotland Yard?

Die Bande des Schreckens is one of the more straightforward movies in Rialto Film's Wallace cycle, not in its plot construction - that part is as byzantine and improbable as usual in these movies - but in its presentation as a classical thrill-a-minute pulp movie with relatively little interest in self-irony, camp or madness. The film is not completely without humour. There's still Eddi Arent walking around doing his usual shtick, yet - also as usual - being allowed to do a few things that make him actually useful, too. However, where the humour is all-pervasive in many of the other Wallace films even this early in the cycle, it's really just a minor element Die Bande des Schreckens includes because films are supposed to have comic relief, and Edgar Wallace movies are supposed to have Eddi Arent as comic relief.

On the down side, director Harald Reinl replaces some of the comic relief with additional scenes of stiff melodrama, putting more energy into the "romantic" (as romantic as scenes between two actors with zero chemistry and horrible dialogue can get) parts than strictly necessary or recommendable.

Generally, the Wallace films tend to revel in their own silliness and divorce from reality in a way that straddles the Weird and the absurd, while still trying to keep a straight face. Reinl's movie just doesn't seem to be all that interested in its own silliness and ridiculousness, instead putting the emphasis on, in the beginning, creating a mildly spooky mood through techniques influenced either by the film noir or the films that influenced film noir (take your pick). The scene where Shelton basically curses a bunch of people just before he is going to die is one of Reinl's finest achievements in a directorial career containing quite a few of these. With the help of Dutch angles, uncomfortable close-ups and stark shadows and lights, Reinl sets Shelton's threat up as something closer to destined doom than just your normal death threat. It's as gothic as any scene of classic gothic horror.

Die Bande des Schreckens doesn't keep to the gothic mood for very long, though, only using it as the starting point for a much more conventional pulp thriller with the expected assortment of weird murder methods (shot by phone is a fine one), last minute escapes and heroine kidnappings. In combination with the romance bits that just don't work, I could have become quite disappointed with this state of affairs, but - the more Vohrer-like stiffness of the acting notwithstanding - Reinl is pretty darn great as a director of straight-up pulp thrills packaged in sometimes painterly, more often dynamic black and white pictures. The downplaying of the more outrageous elements of the Wallace cycle in this particular movie just makes all the more clear how good Reinl is at this sort of thing, how energetic a director he is when he wants to be.

Technorati-Markierungen: german movies,reviews,harald reinl,joachim fuchsberger,karin dor,fritz rasp,dieter eppler,eddi arent,krimi

Three Films Make A Post: Enter a prime-evil world of future shock and alien terror.

2012-01-03T10:14:00.001+01:00

The Unholy Four aka Ciakmull - L'uomo della vendetta (1970): Enzo Barboni's Spaghetti Western about four escaped mental patients (Leonard Mann, George Eastman, Woody Strode, Pietro Martellazana) finding out the truth about the amnesiac (Mann) among them, which obviously leads to some vengeance-ing in the end, starts out strong if loosely plotted, but peters out somewhat after half of the film is over and the actual main plot is truly starting. A film that up to that point was dominated by some beautifully photographed scenes taking place in autumnal Europe/America becomes predominantly bound to not very interesting looking sets and wants a type of highly melodramatic acting from the cast that only Evelyn Stewart actually knows how to provide.

It's thanks to Barboni's impressive tight editing rhythms and his always inventive direction that the film stays watchable and recommendable.

Island Claws (1980): This film about a giant crab and his little crab buddies fighting "eccentrics" in Florida is the only movie by director/producer/writer Hernan Cardenas, and watching it, I wasn't much surprised by that. It's not a catastrophically bad monster movie, but if the internet wouldn't tell me differently, I'd have taken it for a rather mediocre TV movie without anything in the writing or direction marking it as something other than just another movie made for no other reason than a pay check, and without much enthusiasm. The film does have one or two moments of pleasant silliness but the rest of it is just so dumb and inoffensive that I think I've already spent enough words on it.

Heavy Metal (1981): As a rule, I don't watch much Western animation, what with the form's peculiar fixation on kids and a family audience, and it's corresponding lack of exploitational values. The portmanteau film Heavy Metal (based on the US version of the French magazine) is an exception to this rule, seeing as it was made with the twelve year old boy in all of us in mind and therefore exists only to provide exploitational values. I find the quality of the animation rather rough when compared to Japanese films of the same era, but it is rough in a way that fits the film's fixation on breasts, blood and freaky humour.

Personally, I could have lived without the segment based on Richard Corben's Den, but then I do think that the Den stories are the absolute nadir of Corben's rather wonderful body of work. However, as we all know, every film like this is bound by law to contain at least one bad segment, and the rest of the segments is entertaining enough to make up for that beautifully.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,american movies,in short,spaghetti western,horror,sf,fantasy,animation,giant monsters,enzo barboni,leonard mann,woody strode,george eastman,evelyn stewart

Music Monday: This Year Edition

2012-01-02T08:20:00.001+01:00

Technorati-Markierungen: music,music monday,the mountain goats

Cowboys & Aliens (2011)

2012-01-01T11:11:00.001+01:00

The Old West. A man (Daniel Craig) with a pretty strange wound, a futuristic looking bracelet around one of his arms and not a clue who he is and how he got there wakes up somewhere in the desert. After proving his alpha male badassitude on some ruffians and demonstrating why men with tiny little heads shouldn't wear hats, he reaches the nearest town, where he eventually learns that he is a wanted robber and possible murderer named Jake Lonergan. His trip to a federal jail is cut short when aliens attack the town and, as aliens are wont to do, abduct some of its inhabitants (among them a badly underused Keith Carradine). Fortunately, Jake's fine little bracelet turns out to be some sort of blaster, which doesn't save everyone from abduction but is rather helpful in pushing the rude aliens back to wherever they came from. For now.

Lonergan (still wearing hats though he shouldn't) becomes part of a posse of townsfolk trying to rescue the abductees. Among the (obviously rag-tag) bunch are the local sadistic torturer and potentate with a hidden heart of gold Woodrow Dollarhyde (Harrison Ford, better at wearing a cowboy hat) and his kinda-sorta Apache adoptive son (Adam Beach), the mysterious Ella (Olivia Wilde, much better at wearing a cowboy hat than Craig), a shotgun-toting preacher (Clancy Brown in a too small role), a wasted-on-his non-role Sam Rockwell (he's the mild-mannered shop keeper learning to be A MAN, you know), a goddamn orphan boy and his stupid dog and various other alien fodder characters.

Later developments will see the group team up with some bandits and a small tribe of Apaches as the only hope to save Earth from the scouts of an alien invasion. Because no alien baddies ever follow up on their lost scouts.

Wasted as a bunch of great to competent actors are in it, I did find Cowboys & Aliens much easier going than the full-grown catastrophe its critical reception let me expect. Sure, it's a film full of tired old cliché characters doing tired old cliché things, but it's also a film actually willing to use the oldest tropes in the writing book (and by the way, why are scriptwriters Orczi, Kurtzman and Lindelof so much less intelligent when they write for the movies than when they write for TV?) to entertain an audience in an adequately old-fashioned style. There are some moments of the dreaded "wink-wink, nudge-nudge, we know how silly this all is", but more often than not, Cowboys & Aliens plays its silly nonsense straight, which of course is the way silly nonsense has to be played to be any fun at all.

For me, more problematic than the clichés alone ever could be is the film's length in combination with these clichés. There's really no reason for a concoction about cowboys (and Native Americans and bandits) fighting off an alien invasion to be one-hundred and thirty minutes long when ninety would lead to a faster, punchier and less bloated feeling movie; I don't think Cowboys & Aliens would have lost anything by cutting thirty minutes of character bits (and the orphan and his dog), especially not when all the character bits are taken from the handbook for blockbuster writer beginners and are below actors like Rockwell, Brown, Beach, Carradine and Wilde (see how I cleverly not mention Craig and Ford?).

And here I go again making a film sound much worse than I actually feel about it. For most of the time, Cowboys & Aliens is utterly serviceable - if dumb - entertainment that may be completely forgettable, but is at least mildly exciting while it lasts. Which, sadly enough, makes it much better than your average blockbuster shat out by Hollywood these days.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,jon favreau,daniel craig,harrison ford,olivia wilde,sam rockwell,clancy brown,sf,western,reviews

Curse of the Crimson Altar (1968)

2011-12-31T08:54:00.001+01:00

Peter, the brother of antiques dealer Robert Manning (Mark Eden), disappears while trawling the British countryside for merchandise. The last note and package Robert receives of him point to a small town in the middle of nowhere. Because Robert's a go-getter, he doesn't do boring stuff like going to the police with his problem but follows his best clue - the letter head of a J.D. Morley (Christopher Lee) Peter's last missive was written on. When confronted, Morley insists he hasn't ever heard or seen anything of Peter, but because the letter truly was written on his paper, he takes Robert on as a sort of house guest, giving the man ample time to romance his niece Eve (Virginia Wetherell), make the acquaintance of an eminent expert on witchcraft (Boris Karloff) and take in the local colour in form of a festival celebrating the death of the witch Lavinia Morley (Barbara Steele) in the 17th century.

The longer Robert stays at the house, the more peculiar things get. Soon, the antiques dealer has dreams of Lavinia in blue body paint wearing a fetching Bollywood Satanist costume and being served by the members of what must be the most peculiar gay S&M club. Lavinia's trying to convince our hero to sign his name in a big, black book. One can't help but assume that a) it wouldn't be a very good idea to sign and that b) these dreams have a base in a very real witch cult in town.

Will Robert discover the truth before he chokes on his own smugness? Who is better, Karloff or Lee? Karloff, obviously.

Curse of the Crimson Altar has something of a bad reputation as a film doing a special sort of violence to the works of H.P. Lovecraft, but since it doesn't even mention the author's name in the titles and sure as hell doesn't have more to do with his work than borrowing a few names and a very vague plot thread that has been changed so much as to become generic, I can't get all that riled up about it. I prefer to see the movie as yet another attempt of an old British geezer (in this case nearly seventy years old director Vernon Sewell working for Trigon) to get at some of that sweet psychedelic zeitgeist money by updating 30s horror movie ideas and concepts with pretty colours, a hilarious party scene and some of the more ridiculous Satanist rituals imaginable.

Needless to say, as a horror movie - old-style or not - Curse is an utter failure, and there's really no need for me to actually get into what's wrong with it in this regard at all; let's just say "everything" and leave it at that.

However, as it is often the case with movies as full of failure as this one, Curse possesses quite a few charms which make it impossible (well, for me at least) not to keep a small place in one's heart reserved for it. This is, after all, a movie that features Barbara Steele (alas, never interacting with Karloff or Lee) keeping her dignity and even some sort of allure in a get-up so silly it could star in its own comedy show; a movie that shows an elderly, ill, wheelchair-bound Boris Karloff stealing every scene he's in with charisma and style, relegating Christopher Lee to a mere stooge whenever they are on screen together; a movie that might have no clue how to be a modern (for 1969) or an old-fashioned horror film, but really tries hard to put all the most cheesy aspects of both on screen. In short, this is a movie you can only hate if you have no heart and no appreciation for the beauty of utter failure.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,horror,vernon sewell,barbara steele,boris karloff,christopher lee,reviews

It is the season

2011-12-14T17:13:00.001+01:00

for my usual holiday break. Time to grow new tentacles and eat my favourite cultists. Normal service will resume January 31st.

If you (yes YOU) want to talk to me in the meantime, I'll still be on Twitter as @houseinrlyeh and reachable under the usual email.

Happy Holidays to everyone who wants them, and don't forget:

Technorati-Markierungen: maintenance,fishmen

In short: Halloween Night (1988)

2011-12-14T10:28:00.001+01:00

aka Hack-O-Lantern

A Halloween pumpkin delivering Satanist barn sect high priest only known as Grandpa (Hy Pyke) - well, the members of his cult may call him by a different name, but the film ain't tellin' - decides that the time has finally come to fully induct his grandson and son (Gramps did some Satanist hypnosis to his daughter on her wedding day, you see; also, yuck) Tommy (Gregory Scott Cummins) into the fold of EVIL. Tommy is already most of the way there, seeing as he's already of age but still seems to live in a garage with a floor full of unwashed clothing, listens to hair metal, dreams hair metal music videos (no, really), and is a bit violent.

Clearly, either Tommy or Gramps or some random Satanist or Tommy's understandably neurotic mother is the perfect suspect when October 31st and especially the Halloween party of Tommy's sister are disrupted by a handful of murders committed by someone wearing the barn Satanists' favourite garb and a devil mask. Not that anyone notices or cares for much of the film's running time.

If you know Halloween Night's director Jag Mundhra at all, then it's probably as a drab director of drab softcore movies. Looking at his filmography, though, it becomes clear that Mundhra was perfectly willing to direct whatever kind of exploitation people were willing to pay him for (full disclosure: I don't know about the quality or nature of his Bollywood films).

Not that Halloween Night is lacking in softcore parts. In fact, the film does statistically feature one boob ever 6.7 minutes, ending up with a breast count near infinity. On the down side, this amount of gratuitous nudity is so gratuitous that it does at times seem to leave little room for other things one might look for in a horror film, like tension, horror, or (dare I even suggest this?) suspense.

This problem is further heightened by all the other weird crap Mundhra fills the time between breasts and sometimes kills: there's the already mentioned music video Tommy dreams up, an appearance by another, even worse band, (alas the least explicit) sex scene on a grave, an appearance by the worst comedian imaginable doing some shtick about nudie magazines (if Mundhra can't show breasts for a second, he can at least let somebody talk about them), etc. and so on. It's like in one of these late career Santo movies just that there are no nightclubs (those cost too much, I assume) and much more nudity.

Obviously, giving these problems, Halloween Night fails as a narrative just about as hard as it could. On the other hand, if you have your mind set on watching an often random assortment of very 80s slasher movie clichés spiced up with a bit of cardboard Satanism, you've come to the right place. From Hy Pyke's hysterically histrionic performance as Grandpa Satanist to the painful dialogue, the film features everything you could wish for when in search for a bit of 80s cheese. Not to reiterate the point too often, but this is a film where a guy dreams a music video, Satanists meet in a barn to not have sex, and the killer prepares one of his murders by first making his victim's corset a bit tighter than she probably wanted - it's barely even a film, but by Satan, it's stupid enough for half a dozen others. And I mean that as a compliment.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,horror,slasher,in short,jag mundhra,hy pyke

Corpse Eaters (1974)

2011-12-13T10:29:00.001+01:00

"How did this nice dead young man supposedly mauled by a bear really die?" asks a cynical mortician.

Well, that nice young man was one member of a quartet of thirty-something teenagers looking for a wild time by breaking into a crypt and playfully invoking Satan. Clearly, that's not the thing to do in a horror movie, and so our heroes are attacked by a bunch of zombies. Three make it out, but the so-called bear victim does not survive his following visit to the hospital.

You think he might become a zombie himself and eat a mortician or two?

Canada in the 70s is not quite as famous for its idiosyncratic independent horror movies produced for a regional market as its southern neighbour, but Corpse Eaters (as well as some other films I've seen) proves that the same spirit of individual (and glorious) weirdness could strike the more polite country too.

If you're familiar with this style of filmmaking, you'll not be surprised to hear that the film at hand is far from anything which could be called a "good" movie; in fact, I wouldn't blame anyone for calling it a horrible one. This is, after all, a film barely an hour long that wastes the first twenty-five minutes of its running time on scenes of a mortician driving and driving through a cemetery while he's holding a cynical and completely irrelevant monologue, our quartet of non-teenagers having painful fun to equally painful rock music, and a sex scene, before anything that could be called a plot begins.

For the initiated, that first half hour is already full of wonders - scenes that are staged in the least effective manner (personal favourite: a short dialogue between the back of someone's head and a face invisible thanks to the shadow thrown by a door - it's like instant and completely unconscious art cinema), intercutting of scenes never ever meant to be intercut until things just dissolve into a mess of unconnected pictures, a plot that neither starts nor moves but just is - or rather isn't. It's all beautiful, and, before and after the acid rock starts, accompanied by pretty insane synth warbling.

And that's before the - surprisingly creepy looking - pale dusty zombies appear and start a disconnected feeling, and oh-so-weirdly edited, slow-motion attack which culminates in what might be the longest gut munching scene I've ever seen in a zombie movie, though its length is made problematic to measure by its being intercut with the survivors' car driving away, and driving away, and driving away.

This phase of the movie seems to be the product of a mind who has seen all of zombie cinema 1974 had to offer, wants badly to imitate its greatest moments (therefore the epic gut-munching), but hasn't the faintest idea how to realize this ambition on a technical level. As is sometimes the case, this total cluelessness in regards to how horror is properly done leads the film on the road to actual effectiveness as a horror movie by the sheer power of weirdness, at least for ten minutes or so. It is as if the execution of the zombie attack scenes (and a dream sequence) were so peculiar and strange that these scenes can't help but become disquieting like the long lingering look of a possibly psychotic stranger. It's truly beautiful stuff, at least if you're willing and able to see beauty in films like Tony Malanowski's Night of Horror, or in Manos - The Hands of Fate.

Corpse Eaters is a bit more professionally made than these anti-classics, but it has the same air of being a window into either somebody else's quietly skewed mind or into a dimension populated by people for whom it makes sense to produce a film that just ignores large parts of the common language of film and puts wobbling cameras and loving close-ups of weird looking people in its place.

For my tastes, finding a film like this (or more precisely learning of its existence by reading an awesome sounding and true write-up on the venerable Bleeding Skull, as was the case here) that turns moments of boredom and incompetence into beauty and awe (I'm not kidding, if you need to ask) beats watching most canonical classics - even those I like - by miles. Not to sound even more pretentious than I usually do when I talk about films like Corpse Eaters (that's a sentence I love to have written), but it, and its brethren in spirit, are expressions of some of the best humanity has to offer. Let's call it "soul" (without "a").

And I didn't even mention Corpse Eater's own version of the good old Horror Horn - it's a buzzing noise accompanied by a shot of a nearly bald guy just about to vomit. The best thing about it? It's clearly not meant as a joke.

Technorati-Markierungen: canadian movies,reviews,horror,zombies

Music Monday: Claims Edition

2011-12-12T08:37:00.001+01:00

Technorati-Markierungen: music,music monday,laura cantrell

In short: Der Hexer (1964)

2011-12-11T10:10:00.001+01:00

aka The Mysterious Magician

aka The Wizard

aka The Ringer

A group of human traffickers of the usual societal make-up in an Edgar Wallace adaptation - a lawyer, a fake priest, etc. - using a very Edgar Wallace human trafficking plan with the usual home for criminal young women and a home-made submarine make a capital mistake when they kill the sister of Arthur Milton, the vigilante known as "Der Hexer" (I'd translate that as "The Warlock", clearly not "The Wizard"). Once Milton hears of his sister's death, he and his wife (Margot Trooger) fly in from their exile in Australia, and they're not just coming for the burial.

Inspector Higgins (Joachim Fuchsberger) does his damndest to catch the traffickers and the vigilante, but even with the help of retired Inspector Warren (Siegfried Lowitz, unconvincingly aged by dying his hair white), Higgins is always one step behind the gangsters and two steps behind Milton who goes about avenging his sister with some enthusiasm. Things would be easier for the two Inspectors if they at least knew how Milton looked, but as it stands, he could be anyone, like, for example, the kleptomaniac comic relief butler (Eddi Arent) or the Australian writer James Wesby (Heinz Drache) with his tendency for always being exactly where Higgins or The Warlock are.

Alfred Vohrer's Der Hexer has always been a favourite among German fans of the Rialto Wallace cycle, yet I can't help but disagree with them emphatically. Sure, the film is decently made on a technical level (though it is not difficult for a movie to look better than your average German movie of this era), and concerns itself with some of the plot elements many of the Wallace films obsess about - the home for difficult young women lead by a shady or fake priest, a genius vigilante, mysterious people from equally mysterious Australia. However, the film is also inordinately in love with particularly unfunny comedy that is disrupting the film as soon as some of its pulp action threatens to become actually fun. Apart from the usual antics by Schürenberg and Arent (that are actually funny in some of the other films, but not here), there's also a lot of humour of the unpleasant "aren't women dumb? - but look at their legs!" type. The film wastes way too much time on jokes about Higgins's brain-dead girlfriend stereotype that haven't been funny when they were invented back in the stone age, and sure weren't funny anymore in 1964.

As I already mentioned, Der Hexer isn't too bad visually, but Vohrer never achieves the creative mix of the stiff German melodrama, weird pop stylings, noir influence and home-made Gothic he does best. There are a few scenes of good, dynamically edited pulp action, and the camera sure isn't nailed down, yet that's as far as Der Hexer ever comes. This aspect of the movie is just too routine to make it worth wading through the "humour" for.

Technorati-Markierungen: german movies,in short,krimi,pulp,alfred vohrer,joachim fuchsberger,heinz drache,siegfried lowitz,siegfried schürenberg

On WTF: Magic of the Universe (1986)

2011-12-10T15:55:00.001+01:00

If your days are darkened by movies that just make too much sense, if most films' love of reason depresses you, then it's time to read my words about Magic of the Universe, a movie about an evil witch with a pulsating head and an enormous posse of freaks (including a monster band and a thing with a magic TV as its belly). You can thank me later.

Technorati-Markierungen: filipino movies,reviews,tata esteban,michael de mesa,fantasy,other places

In short: Rage of the Yeti (2011)

2011-12-08T10:38:00.001+01:00

Billionaire Mills (actor turned director of this thing David Hewlett in a series of smug cameos) hires a bunch of idiots (actor names redacted to protect the guilty) to rescue another bunch of idiots (names also redacted) who got into trouble trying to steal an old Chinese codex from a Canadian Arctic island.

The book came to the island via the wreck of British ship carrying crap the Chinese emperor didn't care for and so loaded off onto the British (no, really, that's the backstory). Alas, besides the book, there was also a group of Yeti on the ship (yup, they were other crap the Emperor didn't care for). The creatures survived the wreck and have somehow managed to eke out a living from the barren wasteland they were stranded on, so that their descendants can now threaten - and hopefully eat - both bunches of idiots.

As if being dumb and having Yeti trouble weren't enough, our heroes also have to cope with traitors working for another billionaire in dire need of a codex among them, as well as the fact that their own billionaire wants his own life yeti once he realizes those are available.

I think I may have made my general position about the SyFy [sic] Channel's movie productions already clear. I have probably used terms like "crap", "not fun", "not funny", "lazy writing", "certainly not as clever as it thinks it is" and "painfully bad CG effects" when I did, so colour me somewhat surprised when I realized that I was kinda-sorta okay with this one.

Sure, Rage of the Yeti's script has all the originality and depth of something put together during the course of thirty minutes (and probably put down on a paper napkin), but unlike a lot of other SyFy movies I've seen, it's decently paced - for once in one of these films, we actually start in medias res and don't really stop for long until it is over -, and shows a sense of fun. Sometimes, that sense of fun goes a bit too much in the direction of the loathsome "we know this is crap, but it's all, like, ironic, man" I still blame on Wes Craven's Scream movies, but more often than not, the film gives the impression of being written by people doing their best to throw cool shit on screen because they actually want to entertain their audience with a decent monster movie, instead of promising things they aren't then willing to deliver.

David Hewlett's direction is basically okay. He doesn't have much of a visual imagination, his action direction is pretty pedestrian, and he seems to have a thing for his own - and other people's - feet that reminds me disturbingly of Doris Wishman, but there's not much truly wrong with anything he does. Well, except for the foot thing. This puts Hewlett above most of the directors (except for Tibor Takacs) slaving away for SyFy, and about on par with your typical point-and-shooter, so I'm not going to complain.

Rage of the Yeti's major downside are clearly its special effects, with the expected boring and ugly monster design (what's with the teeth?), as well as the usual lack of physicality of everything on display. I am, however, willing to overlook crappy effects in a film like this that is working hard at wringing some excitement out of them, for that is all I ever ask of a low budget monster movie.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,horror,david hewlett

In short: The Edgar Wallace Mystery Theatre - The Man Who Was Nobody (1960)

2011-12-07T08:55:00.001+01:00

The German Rialto movies were of course not the only Edgar Wallace adaptations made during the 60s. In Wallace's home the UK, Merton Park Studios produced a ton of short b-movies (in the initial sense of the word) between 1960 and 1965, of which The Man Who Was Nobody is an early example.

I have to say, though, that this is hardly playing in the same league as the Rialto movies. Sure, the plot is Wallace-typically overcomplicated, but the British production side-lines the pulp elements and the plain, over-excited weirdness the German Wallace movies loved to play up as much as possible until The Man is only ever another mystery movie without much to excite one.

It sure doesn't help the movie much that its director Montgomery Tully - who always was good at making a perfectly entertaining set-up boring - does not seem to believe in doing even the slightest thing that may be of visual interest to anyone. Though the camera isn't nailed down, it might as well be for all the non-excitement Tully's going for.

The Man isn't a total loss, though, for it thankfully features a very surprising element for a Wallace adaptation - an early 60s hip female private detective as its main hero. Even better, said heroine Marjorie Stedman is played by Hazel Court. Court seems to have quite a bit of fun with her role; she's certainly doing her best making a lot of rather boring and trite scenes of not very exciting adventures in talking to less than exciting people at least look somewhat glamorous and exciting. It's probably not enough to save the film for anyone who doesn't know and admire the actress from Corman's Poe adaptations, but Court fans like me will certainly enjoy seeing her associate with beatniks and be the only actor in the film who actually seems to be alive.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,in short,mystery,montgomery tully,hazel court

The House (2007)

2011-12-06T09:28:00.002+01:00

Original title: Baan phii sing

(Not to be confused with the army of other movies of the same title)

Warning: even though I'm not spelling out the film's main plot twist, I'll discuss is concretely enough to possibly spoil it for some; obviously, if you think the mere mention of plot twists is a spoiler, please don't read reviews of anything, ever.

Thai TV journalist Chalini (Intira Charoenpura) - usually called "Nee" - is investigating the story of young (but not very young looking) doctor Vasan's (Worapong Nimwijtr) murder of his girlfriend. Her enquiries eventually lead Nee to the house - part of a housing program of the hospital the doctor worked in - Vasan lived and killed in. Despite the dire, syrup-y blood rich, warnings of a female ghost to not enter it, and the less freaky warnings of the place's caretaker, Nee still does enter, only to meet with visions of more dread, doom and murder and a fainting spell there. What a stroke of luck that her boyfriend, the slightly sleazy lawyer Nuanchavee (Chutcha Rujinanon) - called "Nuan" - is in the area to distract the caretaker and so is able to rescue her from the house when she doesn't come back.

For a lot of people, Nee's experiences with the supernatural until now would be quite enough to keep them from poking their noses into the murder case any further, but our heroine is of a much more persistent type. That persistence pays off well when the journalist finds out that Vasan is not the first doctor living in the house who killed his spouse or girlfriend. It's as if something dwelling in the house is out to perpetuate its own pain by reliving it through others.

While Nee is researching, her relationship with Nuan becomes increasingly strained. The couple never seems to have completely talked through Nuan's problems with Nee having a job, her not wanting to become pregnant right now and her not being much of a housewife (don't you like her already?), but what once was a point of contention now angers Nuan to the point of violence. Add to that a bunch of burned ghosts angrily whispering in his ears, trying to convince the lawyer Nee is cheating on him and has to die for that, and you might assume history is bound to repeat itself again.

Monthon Arayangkoon's The House is a bit of a frustrating effort. It's not a bad movie by any definition of the word: too slickly and effectively does the director work around an obviously low budget - at least until an ill-advised CGI sequence in the movie's finale that I'll just let slide because I may not like its execution but do like its concept; too clear are the film's ambitions at consciously using the opportunities its kind of ghost story offers to talk about things like the divides and the distrust that can grow in a relationship which doesn't really face important differences in outlook between the partners (with a pinch of "beginnings of abusive relationships" thrown in); too knowingly - sometimes even elegantly - does Arayangkoon use the standard tropes and shocks of post-Ringu Asian horror cinema; too decent is the work of the actors.

All these elements should add up to a movie that is interesting and good, probably even one well on its way to excellence, but (isn't there always a "but" with me?) The House falters when it goes the well-trodden route of the "plot twist at the beginning of the final act". Conceptually, The House's plot twist is a rather good one, seeing as it is based on subverting gender expectations (though one could also interpret it as a rather nasty jab at the belief in the equality of men and women - I don't read it that way), and does make sense in the context of the movie's plot, which is more than I can say about a lot of final act plot twists in horror films. Alas, the twist's execution leaves something to be desired, because The House only begins to emphasize the subjectivity of what it shows us after the twist has already been played out, and shows a few things that only work as red herrings but not as an organic part of the movie once the audience knows what's really going on.

Instead of the feeling of shock and the satisfaction of a well-constructed lie it goes for (I do like playfulness of that sort in my writing, when it works), The House's twist produced mild annoyance that the film had been lying to me all this time - which is a sure-fire way to destroy immersion exactly at the point when a movie should want its audience as deeply immersed in its world as possible.

Once pulled out of the movie this way, I found myself too distanced from the finale to care as much about it as the film wanted me too, still seeing and appreciating parts of its emotional point, but not feeling these points as I was supposed to.

Technorati-Markierungen: thai movies,reviews,horror,monthon arayangkoon,intira charoenpura,chutcha rujinanon

Music Monday: Godhood Edition

2011-12-05T08:23:00.001+01:00

Technorati-Markierungen: music,music monday,randy newman

The Unnamable II: The Statement of Randolph Carter (1993)

2011-12-04T17:46:00.001+01:00

Despite having been made five years later, The Unnamable II begins right where The Unnamable ended. The bodies of the Unnamable's victims are recovered by the police, and the female lead and Howard (Charles Klausmeyer) are hospitalized, the former never to be seen again (I blame non-Euclidean geometry). However, as the expository ghost of Winthrop - aka the guy responsible for the monster whom you might remember possessing a tree in part one - helpfully explains to Howard, the monster problem is not solved, for his roots might be able to hold the-monster-who-is-also-his-daughter, but they can't and won't kill her/it even though the Fate of the World™ is at stake.

Fortunately, Randolph Carter (Mark Kinsey Stephenson) still has the Necronomicon and is not afraid to use it. Together with Professor of Folklore (I think) Warren (John Rhys-Davies), Randolph mounts an expedition into the tunnels below the Winthrop house. There they do find a pretty sprightly yet still rooted monster. Because of some hand-waving QUANTUM SCIENCE(!), our heroes realize that the monster does actually consist of two separate halves existing in the same place in space and time. Or something. One of the halves is Winthrop's daughter Alyda, and the other a demon (shouldn't that be a creature from the Outer Dark?).

Clearly, the best thing to do with the couple is to inject Alyda with insulin so that the demon thinks she's dying, wait until the demon leaves, and then save Alyda's life with the magic of sugar cubes! Would you believe that Alyda turns out to be a very naked young woman (Maria Ford) of understandably dubious mental faculties who falls for Carter head over heels, and that the demon (a rubber-suited Julie Strain) does not return where it came for but kills a bunch of people to get her host back?

Only some random pages of the Necronomicon (that will turn out to be utterly useless) and a trusty chair can save our heroes.

I did not get along too well with Jean-Paul Ouellette's first Unnamable movie, which I thought was a rather boring, but at least not hopeless, example of the late 80s Young People Running Through A Dark House movie. I wouldn't exactly call its sequel a good movie, yet Unnamable II is at least a major improvement on the first film on all fronts in so far as it is still a silly monster movie with a lot of running around in dark buildings, but it's now a silly monster movie with a lot of running around in dark buildings that actually manages to be somewhat fun. Plus, the running takes place in more than one building - there's even running in a library! (Don't do that in real life, kids!)

Unnamable II does even work a bit better as a Lovecraft adaptation. It's not that it's actually Lovecraftian, yet it does at least feature the right jargon for some of the time, drops the proper names and might even be onto something fitting into Lovecraft's cosmology with its quantum physics angle (if the script only knew what "quantum physics" actually are); that's surely not enough to make the old gent's more easily annoyed fans happy, but I'm quite pleased with Ouellette's efforts.

As you might imagine after reading the plot, the film's script is no great shakes. It suffers from a meandering structure and an unfortunate tendency to include quite a few scenes of particularly awkward humour, some of which is based on Alyda being played by softcore actress (whose bodily assets are - in a very puritanical and not very exploitation movie appropriate manner - hidden by a judiciously applied wig) Maria Ford but having the mental development of a child. It's the sort of thing that could make the more morally upright viewer a bit uncomfortable in her skin. As someone not quite as upright, I'm fortunately not able to take the film seriously enough to be scandalized by little things like that. This is, after all, a movie where the unnamable, bullet-resistant evil is conquered by the power of a very normal chair.

On the more positive side, I probably should mention a small cameo by David Warner and the somewhat longer appearance of John Rhys-Davies doing a pretty funny example of his special brand of avuncular scenery-chewing. Stephenson has improved quite a bit since the first movie, losing some of the stiffness of his performance and gaining not exactly believability, but the sort of artificiality that works well in this sort of thing.

It's easy to criticize The Unnamable II for its manifold flaws, but I found it just as easy to be rather charmed and entertained by them and it, as well as by the good-natured way it goes about being a monster movie about a girl in a monster suit doing what people in monster suits have done since time immemorial.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,horror,jean-paul ouellette,maria ford,john rhys-davies,mark kinsey stephenson,julie strain

On WTF: The Invisible Man vs. The Human Fly (1957)

2011-12-03T09:57:00.001+01:00

Original title: Tomei Ningen To Hae Otoko

WATCH astonishing DEEDS of super SCIENCE! Witness the DEATH REIGN of the HUMAN FLY! THRILL to the heroic adventures of THE INVISIBLE MAN!

Only in this week's column on WTF-Film!

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese movies,reviews,other places,mitsuo murayama,sf,horror

In short: Alternative 3 (1977)

2011-12-01T10:03:00.001+01:00

While making a reportage about the brain drain of scientific minds from Britain, the team of UK's Anglia TV's Science Report stumbles upon a series of suspicious disappearances of highly qualified people. The investigation leads the journalists onto the trail of a grand conspiracy among international governments that at once tries to hide the truth about climate change and the coming inhospitability of Earth for human life and their solution to the problem: cart off a few chosen ones to the moon and a terraformed Mars.

Obviously, the Apollo program was only devised to distract the populace from what's actually going on, and if that doesn't work, there are clearly other steps the conspiracy is willing to take to keep things on Earth calm.

Alternative 3 is a fine demonstration of the fact that the fake documentary is not a filmic form invented in this century. Initially meant to be an April Fool's joke but only broadcast in June 1977, this episode of the actual science show Science Report recommends itself to friends of conspiracy theories by virtue of a well-constructed conspiracy that is - as is only fair and proper for something in a science show - on the more sensible side of conspiracy theories and avoids all the alien abduction and grey reptiloids eating our fear business, instead opting for something´more based in actual scientific ideas going around at the time, like proper Science Fiction.

Apart from the quality of its construction and an air of objectiveness that fits the documentary format nicely, Alternative 3 also succeeds surprisingly well as a TV movie. I wouldn't have expected people with a background in journalism instead of fiction to be quite so adept at simple yet effective dramaturgical and directorial tricks as the makers of the movie are, but there's a nice sense of escalation throughout the script as well as some really clever uses of the documentary format. The film even uses different formats of footage to create verisimilitude as well as the proper mood. The latter is further enhanced with the help of a soundtrack by Brian Eno which sets a fitting ambience for the story the film presents. Eno's presence and the obvious care the film takes with little details demonstrate how much love has gone into it - there's nothing half-assed about what should be a throw-away episode; in fact, I'd be glad if more of the found footage movies booming right now would take an approach this careful and loving.

Having congratulated it on it's verisimilitude, I'm still a bit surprised that Alternative 3's conspiracy theory seems to have become the basis for some actual conspiracy theories. There are even some people who think the show is an actual documentary only pretending to be a fake, even though it should be pretty obvious to anyone who has ever seen a movie how much what happens on screen is carefully staged. And let's not even start on the actors clearly acting.

But that's crackpots for you.

Technorati-Markierungen: british tv,british movies,in short,sf

Three Films Make A Post: A Shriek You Will Remember In Your Frightmares!

2011-11-30T09:02:00.001+01:00

Super 8 (2011): So, we've now reached a point where filmmakers are making nostalgic films about films that had a nostalgic view of childhood, and get these films produced by the people whose films they are nostalgic about. While I will always disagree with the Spielbergian position on childhood as a precious and magical time for everyone, J.J. Abrams' film sells the concept much better than the guy whose work he so obviously adores, mostly because Abram is much better at acknowledging the parts of childhood that aren't bicycles and unicorns. Plus, the film has a very satisfying monster and - even in a happy end - does understand that life is messy and complicated more than anything Spielberg himself ever did.

Mimic - The Director's Cut (1997): This cut does not turn a flawed yet good monster movie into a masterpiece, but it excises some of the Weinstein cut's least effective moments (second unit material much hated by director Guillermo del Toro, it seems), and manages to add a bit more humanity to its characters through the slightest of additions. There's also a much more visible subtext about the concept of motherhood in there now, that avoids much of what usually is annoying when male directors try their hands at commenting on the theme.

Additionally, Del Toro's audio commentary tells a great filmmaking horror story of the sort that makes one wonder how Miramax ever managed to put out a decent movie.

Ghastly (2011): The directorial debut of South Korean Ko Seo-jin may not have a single original idea in its head (or script) and may be about as subtle as a sledgehammer yet it is a tight little spook show that never pulls any of its punches and doesn't overstay its welcome. There are a few too many dream sequences in it for my tastes, though.

It's just another film about a possessed/evil child and hacked off body parts, but it's still perfectly entertaining.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,south korean movies,j.j. abrams,guillermo del toro,ko seo-jin,horror,sf,in short

Assignment Naschy: A Dragonfly For Each Corpse (1974)

2011-11-29T09:47:00.001+01:00

Original title: Una libélula para cada muerto

A black-garbed and red-trousered killer strolls around Milan, killing addicts, prostitutes and lovers of kinky sex, leaving an artificial dragonfly with each corpse. To prove himself after a never explained case that went spectacularly bad, sadistic, mean-spirited cigar-chomping Inspector Paolo Scaporella (Paul Naschy) is put on the case. Scaporella - whom the film first shows threatening a flasher with death the next time he sees him - seems not too excited about the prospect, for he thinks the victims are getting exactly what they deserve. But it's a job, right?

Scaporella's actual investigation plays out with him not doing much for a while, except getting his wife Silvana (Erika Blanc), who is clearly the brains of the marriage, interested in the case and using a dinner party to a) learn that the dragonfly is a Chaldean symbol to mark "degenerates" and b) put a friendly gay fashion designer to finding out who made the special button he found with one of the victims. The latter will - quite unlike anything Scaporella is going to do - be important later on, but until the film reaches that point, it's scenes and scenes of our "hero" walking around chomping on his cigar, getting pascha-ed by his wife and beaten up by nazi bikers while following up clues that won't actually be important later on. Once the audience really has enough of that, the killings finally reach the inspector's friends from that all important dinner party. There's just enough time for Silvana getting close to the truth and herself in danger before Scaporella understands what's going on.

Directed by Paul Naschy's frequent collaborator León Klimovsky, Dragonfly is the duo's attempt at fusing the Italian giallo and the Italian cop movie by combining both genre's worst traits into a single, meandering piece of reactionary boredom.

So we get the silly mystery full of holes and the loosely structured plot typical of the giallo without much of the genre's visual panache; we get the cop film's hatred of everything and everyone who is different without much of its hatred for large-scale corruption, its often conflicted view of its cop heroes or its exciting action scenes.

Naschy's Scaporella is clearly set-up to be the shining hero of the piece. Yes, the audience is supposed to admire a guy who lets a wounded gangster he's going to arrest crawl to his car on his wounded leg, and who only sees "degenerates" deserving of death in addicts, prostitutes and people who like utterly innocent things like threesomes and necrophiliac role-play. If you see a clear opportunity for the film to explore some rather interesting points about how close its supposed hero and its villain are, then you're a lot cleverer than Naschy's script - like he does with everything potentially interesting in it, Naschy decides not to explore that aspect to put in another scene of himself being shirtless, as if you couldn't combine these things perfectly in some sexposition if you wanted to.

Another of the film's problems is that its ideas of what's "degenerate", and its way of showing them off is painfully behind what the Italians did and unpleasantly reactionary. Where even the most suspect giallos are so gleeful in their depiction of sex and depravity (or "depravity") that it's usually impossible to tell if they are in awe of or looking down on it (I usually suspect them to do both at once), Dragonfly really is so little into that sort of thing that it shows nearly none of it in an interesting way, leaving me neither shocked by the depths of human depravity as I'm clearly supposed to be, nor titillated as I'd have liked to be.

But even if you ignore these problems and flaws, Dragonfly just plain doesn't work as a mystery or a crime film. I could live with the ridiculousness of the set-up, but Naschy the writer is not someone able to produce the tightness of script that would be the only thing able to save the film. It's all wandering around and Naschy showing off how awesome he is without ever actually being awesome. Our supposed hero really comes off as a particularly dense bully who should listen to his wife more (even when she calls that thinking he never does "women's intuition"), stumbling through a case that's just not all that interesting.

Technorati-Markierungen: spanish movies,giallo,mystery,reviews,paul naschy,leon klimovsky,erika blanc

Music Monday: Not A Movie Edition

2011-11-28T08:50:00.001+01:00

Technorati-Markierungen: music,music monday,okkervil river

Prokletinja (1975)

2011-11-27T11:41:00.001+01:00

Most of Prokletinja's story is told via flashbacks starting during the inquest about the death of a man that is held in his shack somewhere out in the wilderness. The man - who like everyone else in the movie is nameless - had come to the place following rumours of a "Damned Thing", something invisible roaming the wilderness. He became increasingly obsessed with the thing, discussing its philosophical implications and the shattering of his beliefs it caused with a journalist he was friends with, until he finally was killed by it.

For pretty obvious political reasons, what with the notorious negativity and lack of "scientific reason" in the genre, there wasn't much horror produced in countries east of the Iron Curtain. Sometimes, however, as the slow dripping of fan-subbed TV productions from 1970s Yugoslavia suggests, filmmakers did have a bit of leeway to turn towards the darker side of the fantastic.

Prokletinja is director, screenwriter and actor Branko Plesa's (who is also playing the man holding the inquest) version of Ambrose Bierce's short story The Damned Thing. It's an hour-long TV movie, so Plesa probably did not have many resources to work with, but he does make fine use of what he had, namely the black and white (at least in the version I saw; I'm not sure if the film was actually shot in black and white) cinematography of Milorad Markovic and a darkly dramatic soundtrack by Stanko Terzic.

Terzic's soundtrack is predominantly used to impress the presence of the damned thing on the audience. There are a bit of fog, some growling and some moving bushes later on in the movie, for large parts of it, however, only the soundtrack, the expressions on the actors' faces and the threatening undertone of Markovic's nature shots are what create the monster in our minds. If you're an imaginative sort like I am, this method should work well for the movie and you, following the old adage that the most frightful things you can see in a horror movie are those things you don't see.

Plesa is more interested in the philosophical implications and in the world-view shattering dread the creature causes the film's main character anyway. As it stands, the Damned Thing's mere existence puts in doubt the nameless dweller in the wilderness's formerly scientific and orderly view of life, and suggests to him that the order of nature and mankind's position in it he believed in are just plain wrong. Worse, he may not like at all what he thinks has to take the place of the things he did believe in.

Aesthetically, Prokletinja rather reminds me of an arty Spaghetti Western turned Weird West (actually, I'm not sure if the actor's clothing are supposed to suggest the early 18th century US or Yugoslavia - it's not that important for the film at hand, I think, but I'd go with the former if I had to) Gothic horror. There are a lot of close-up shots of hairy, dirty-faced and obviously very poor men staring at a point beside the camera, and a dry, somewhat cynical humour of the type the Spaghetti Western genre and Ambrose Bierce shared; at other times, weirdly effective slowly swirling camera movement and slow-motion shots of animals that suggest the main character's new, horrific view of nature remind of something one of the Sergios might have shot in an especially philosophical mood.

If you like your obscure horror movies with a philosophical bend (and therefore more in tune with the classic weird tale as with modern ideas of horror), Prokletinja is a film to search out. It also makes me pretty curious about some of the other TV movies Plesa directed during the 70s. Hopefully, some daring fansubber will enlighten us about them one day (I sure don't think we'll ever get to see official releases of movies like these).

Technorati-Markierungen: yugoslavian movies,yugoslavian tv,reviews,horror,branko plesa

In short: Prayer Beads (2004)

2011-11-26T10:42:00.001+01:00

A woman and her imaginary children take bitter vengeance on the friend who slept with her husband. A vending machine in the country is the source of a very special soft drink. A doctor takes a drug that lets him see the worms and tentacles that are really inside of people. A creepy anime character fulfils wishes in a variation of the story of the monkey's paw. Two elderly espers hunt down and explode the killer of their granddaughter.

These and other stories belong to the Japanese nine-part horror anthology series Prayer Beads. Most of the episodes are written and directed by a certain Masahiro Okano, who also has a "supervised by" credit. Okano seems to exclusively work for Japanese TV, so info about him or what else he did is hard to find on the Western internet. It is pretty clear, though, that he has extensive knowledge of all the horror clichés you'd find in this type of anthology show, and is not ashamed of using them.

The episodes are shot in the somewhat raw and cheap looking style typical of contemporary Japanese TV. Okano and the other directors do their best to use this rawness to give most of the episodes an immediacy that is making it much easier to swallow the sillier of the stories. In a few episodes, there are pretty effective attempts at producing a more dream-like feel and pacing through the magic of weird and fast editing and colour filters, or by going the extra mile and actually creating cheap animation for the anime-themed episode. This sort of thing doesn't let the show's budget look more impressive on screen, but it demonstrates an interest in the details and a willingness to experiment that makes it difficult to argue against a show this visibly putting an extra effort in.

Tonally, Prayer Beads is all over the place. Some episodes are examples of earnest yet weird character psychology-based horror, while others, like the vending machine episode or the mushroom hunt story, seem to exist mostly to set up a rubbery gore gag, which in case of the vending machine story is absolutely worth it. The show isn't at all timid when it comes to the rubbery gore anyhow - generally, Okano seems to belong to the school of Japanese horror that just loves to put improbable explosions of red and gooey stuff on screen, at least as far as the TV budget and TV morals allow.

All in all, Prayer Beads is worth watching. There's nothing sensational or original about the show, but it's clear that its producers have their hearts in the right places and know how to have fun with the traditions of the horror genre.

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese tv,masahiro okano,in short,horror

Assignment Naschy: El Retorno Del Hombre Lobo (1980)

2011-11-25T15:29:00.001+01:00

aka Night of the Werewolf

aka The Craving

aka Return of the Wolfman

As you know, Hungarian countess Elizabeth Bathory (Julia Saly) got in a bit of trouble with the Church for black magic, cannibalism, Satanism and that little thing with bathing in the blood of virgins, leading to the execution of her and her co-satanists and servants. Among those servants was the wolfman Waldemar Daninsky (of course Paul Naschy). Wally wasn't in it for Satan but for reasons of mind control, but clearly, that's not a thing that saves one from death by silver cross through the heart by the loving hands of the Church.

Centuries later, a trio of anthropologists and parapsychologists - Erika (Silvia Aguilar), Karin (Azucena Hernández) and Barbara (Pilar Alcón) - have spent years trying to find the place where Bathory and her servants are buried, and have now finally found it. Little do Karin and Barbara realize that Erika isn't on the side of science(!) anymore but has been converted to the ways of black magic through telepathic contact with the dead and buried Bathory. Consequently, Erika isn't planning on just examining the countess's grave but wants to revive its inhabitant with the help of a magical amulet and the blood of her two friends.

Some undefined space of time before that, while Erika is still killing to get the amulet and the other women are waiting around in Rome, graverobbers have found the crypt of Waldemar. Clearly, a silver cross is too much of a temptation not to steal it for them, even if it is sticking in a corpse's chest, and so the wolfman lives and (oh so tragically, if "tragic" means "without ever doing anything to avoid it") kills again. Together with supposed witch Mircalla (Beatriz Elorrieta) he off-screen-rescues from angry villagers, Wally moves into an abandoned castle close by the ruins and the system of crypts and underground tunnels where Elizabeth is buried, seemingly planning to wait around until a woman comes around who will love him enough to sacrifice herself to kill him.

When the trio of scientists arrives in the area, it fastly becomes clear that Karin is exactly the woman Waldemar has been looking for, but before they can commit double suicide, there are a few other problems for the couple to solve, for Erika manages to bring Bathory back to unlife as a vampire with a taste for creating other female vampires and ambitions for world and wolfman domination. Obviously, there's a wolfman versus vampire women throw-down standing between our heroes and their preferred end.

Even though I still have my problems with various elements of Paul Naschy's creative persona, my fastly growing experience with his body of work has shown the man to be the sort of artist capable and willing to learn from his mistakes, try new things even in the context of a long-running series like the Daninsky films, and improve his weak spots with every film he makes. To my eyes, this sort of passion for improving on previous efforts instead of coasting on their successes deserves much respect.

In El Retorno's case, Naschy is taking the improving pretty far, for the film is a re-working of the man's earlier Noche De Walpurgis, with many of the old film's problems removed and additions made that make the film much more dramatically involved and less random in its feel and structure. Even those of Naschy's weaknesses as a scriptwriter that reappear like bad pennies - namely a tendency to tell in stiffly expository dialogue scenes what he really should be showing - are comparatively reigned in and even make a certain amount of sense this time around. In El Retorno, Naschy isn't showing certain things because they may be important for the plot but are just not very interesting to watch, or are, like the process of Waldemar and Karin falling in love with each other, supposedly so natural - we are talking about the perfect male specimen here, after all - that there's just no need to dwell on them.

Transitions are left out completely, unless they involve skimpily clad vampire women returning into their graves (priorities, you know), which surprisingly does wonders to tighten the film's pacing as well as helps produce the dream-like mood continental European horror in the early 80s had often already lost.

For El Retorno, Naschy has also entered the director's chair, and instead of ending in a megalomaniac clusterfuck, this actually results in a Daninsky film that for once feels like a whole, losing the messiness I now suspect to be a result of directors and scriptwriter/lead actor of the other films in the series not seeing eye to eye about what they were trying to achieve. The price for this new-won unity of purpose is the loss of the batshit craziness I've learned to associate with Naschy, but Naschy the director replaces craziness with oodles of gothic mood and some very supernatural and weird (capital w version) feeling vampire women who very convincingly move from the seductive to the animalistic and back again, like they move from otherworldly gliding to predatory leaps. Julia Saly (who did work quite a bit with Naschy), Silvia Aguilar and Beatriz Elorrieta are properly great as the vampires, too, adding a distance and a sense for melodrama and some pretty fantastic screeching noises to their roles and making the perfect foil for Naschy's by now excellent wolfman and Azucena Hernández' sometimes feisty, sometimes whimpering (always doomed) heroine.

In Retorno, Naschy manages to unite his two main interests of his work - the comic book/pulp stylings and the more atmospheric parts inspired by Universal and Hammer horror - until they become something all his own. Turns out I don't miss the craziness of many of his other films at all in this case.

Technorati-Markierungen: spanish movies,horror,reviews,paul naschy,julia saly,silvia aguilar,azucena hernández,beatriz elorrieta

Things I Thought While Watching Conan The Barbarian (2011)

2011-11-24T10:21:00.001+01:00

for it's really not worth a proper review. Yes, I know I've reviewed much worse films.

Oh hey, it's another Robert E. Howard adaptation that has fuck all to do with the stories it's supposed to adapt. Now if it were at least good…
The Hyborian age was so brown, people even bled a brownish hue. Remember when movies had colours in them?
Wait, so Jason Momoa is Ron Perlman's son? I think that's the sort of situation paternity tests were invented for.
CUT OUT OF HIS MOTHER'S WOMB ON THE BATTLEFIELD! EXCLAMATION MARK!
Li'l Conan shows all the signs of becoming a psychopathic serial killer. I would not suggest forging a sword for him, but then I'm not Ron Perlman. Also, now I want to watch an all ages cartoon show named "Li'l Conan".
Slow motion horsemen. I dunno how they ever manage to ride down anyone, what with them moving much slower than normal riders or people on foot.
You gotta love how these war-like non-nomadic Barbarian movie tribes always have no defensive structures whatsoever at their places of habitation and always seem completely unprepared for any attack.
Ron Perlman prefers death to being in this movie any longer. I do understand, Ron, I really do. The bad guy doesn't, though, so he just has to hold out for one scene longer. Say "War. War never changes", Ron!
Is denositation a word? If it is, that's what Conan's good at.
These barbarian tribe members all have fantastic teeth. Except for most of the bad guys, of course. I imagine time travelling dentists with high morals are to blame.
Aha, so all the actual Howard stuff happened between little Conan shouting "Grraaaaar" and becoming Jason Momoa so that there's room for the crap the scriptwriter came up with instead of Red Nails.
And now he's a leading member of a gang of hard-partying pirates.
Conan is way too fond of decapitations for comfort. And of torturing people and then being a dick to them afterwards. I thought he was a Cimmerian, not an American.
The Shadowlord? But which one? And where is Lord British?
Conan has known his pirate friends since he was a child, but he only now mentions the name of the guy who killed Ron Perlman (and wiped out Conan's tribe, but that's obviously not worth mentioning). He's only playing to the camera.
Hooray for martial arts monks!
In a surprising twist, Rachel Nichols is actually allowed to be competent in a fight.
It's rude to discuss the property rights to a woman in front of her. I think.
"Woman! Come here! I said, come here!". That element of Howard they did not change.
Stop the press! The big bad has a motivation apart from being evil!
They're bickering and he's tying her up. Obviously, these two are meant for each other.
"Why would you save me only to tie me up?"
My incest sense is tingling.
I think someone responsible for the production mixed up Conan and the Punisher.
Exploding barrels! Why didn't I invent them? I'm sure I'd be rich now.
You know, I'd totally watch a movie about Rachel Nichols' character having swashbuckling adventures instead of the one about Jason Momoa avenging his father in a very brown land.
So Conan is a grunter during sex. Who'd have thunk?
Obligatory kidnapping of female lead so we can have more scenes of Conan scowling and mumbling through his dialogue. Which is what this movie thinks is "being heroic and badass". Bored now.
Why isn't this scene awesome? It has Conan fighting a tentacle monster below him and bad guys around him while also trying to protect a thief companion. There are cages and chains. And yet it's still not very exciting at all. I don't think Marcus Nispel is all that good at this directing lark.
"Behold - in despair - your new master!". I wouldn't work as a henchman for this guy, but then I am something of a wimp.
"Barbarian, I don't like you anymore". I assume when they taught smack talk in villain school, Mister Bad Guy did not attend.
Dual-wielding broadswords looks dumb.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,fantasy,sword and sorcery,marcus nispel,rachel nichols,jason momoa

In short: Ministry of Fear (1944)

2011-11-23T08:46:00.002+01:00

England, 1944. Stephen Neale (Ray Milland) is released from the asylum he spent the last two years of his life in for the mercy-killing of his fatally ill wife into the bomb-scourged countryside. On his way to London, Stephen visits a charity country fair and wins himself a cake under slightly complicated and bizarre circumstances that involve a fortune teller and attempts to renege on the promised cake (I wouldn't be surprised if GLaDOS had seen the movie, really). Next thing Stephen knows is a fake blind man is stealing his cake, only to be hit by a German bomb.

Stephen can't let the strange occurrences he experienced rest, so, once he has arrived in London, he begins a series of enquiries that will lead him onto the trail of a Nazi spy ring. Stephen will visit a drunk private detective, take part in a séance that will leave him under the suspicion of being a killer, and stumble into the arms of an Austrian émigré (Marjorie Reynolds) who may either be the woman he's going to marry or a Nazi spy herself.

I know this is still something of a sacrilegious idea in certain circles, but I've always preferred Fritz Lang's Hollywood movies to those he made in his first German phase. I think it has something to do with the friction between a fiercely intellectually independent like Lang and the strictness of the Hollywood system, or rather the sparks that can result when a director has to fight for every self-indulgence (see for example also Seijun Suzuki).

Ministry of Fear has always been one of my favourite films by Lang. This will probably not come as much of a surprise to regular readers of this blog (hi, Mum!), for Ministry of Fear contains many of the elements known to get me excited. First and foremost, there's a feeling of the bizarre (and sometimes the whimsical) lying at its heart, as if it were perfectly reasonable for a Nazi spy ring to hide McGuffins away in cakes and stage fake séances to cover their tracks and scare interlopers away; if you need realism instead of the peculiar yet coherent logic of certain types of mental illnesses or dreams in your plots, you'll probably despair of Lang's film quite soon.

Ray Milland's Reynolds is obviously the perfect foil for a plot of this kind, because he's more than just a little unsure of his own position in life and reality, and at first clearly can't decide if he's gotten so out of step with life in the world that quotidian reality looks strange to him, or if quotidian reality itself has gotten out of step. Lang's matter-of-fact depiction of wartime England as a place where it's as normal as waiting at a bus stop to keep to blackout rules and calmly go to the next bomb shelter once the bomb warnings sound emphasises this feeling of a world that's become strange even further. Once the outside world has reached a point like it did during World War II, Lang's film seems to say, there's just no telling what's real and what a paranoid fantasy. There might never have been that much of a difference anyway.

Technorati-Markierungen: in short,american movies,fritz lang,ray milland,marjorie reynolds,thriller

Zombies: The Beginning (2007)

2011-11-22T10:38:00.001+01:00

Who would call the sequel to a movie "The Beginning"? Bruno Mattei is who, demonstrating the crystal clear sense of logic you expect from his body of work.

Now, you may remember that Island of the Living Dead ended with our last survivor Sharon (Yvette Yzon) being declared dead by her rescuers and rising again as a zombie. Curiously enough, this hasn't actually happened, and Sharon (who turns out to be a doctor of biology, by the way) is alive and well and suffering from regular nightmares. If you're a more generous person than I am, you might read the first movie's ending as one of Sharon's nightmares, but dear Bruno doesn't actually bother to sell it that way. Anyhow, it also turns out that the protagonists of the last movie were lying to us when they repeatedly called themselves treasure hunters and acted that way, for they were in fact working salvage operations for an evil corporation, Tyler Inc.

Obviously, Tyler Inc. doesn't believe ~~Ripley's~~Sharon's story about ~~aliens~~zombies killing her crew mates and fires her for reasons of mental instability and "the inexplicable explosion" (cough, self-destruct button, cough) of her ship, leaving ~~Rip~~Sharon with ~~working at the docks~~becoming a Buddhist nun as her only career option. If you know Mattei's films, you'll probably now have flashbacks to the other times when he ripped off James Cameron's Aliens, and verily, he does it again. Only this time around, Mattei keeps even closer to Aliens' narrative structure, leaving Zombies with nary a scene that isn't mirroring another one from what we must imagine to be the Italian's favourite film. Good old Bruno (or his script-writers, returning Antonio Tentori and new guy Giovanni Paolucci) manages to borrow even more of the original's dialogue than he and his buddy Claudio Fragasso did in the best movie ever aka Shocking Dark, though I am a little disappointed he didn't find a way to include anything about nuking the place from orbit. I also decry the sad absence of androids.

Given that everybody really should know the plot of Aliens, there's no need for me to do any further plot synopsising for Zombies. Just imagine Aliens without Newt and Bishop (and of course without anything taking the place of Newt in motivating Ripley/Sharon, because we can't have her act in a way that makes sense, right?) and with mutant zombies and later on conehead mutant zombies replacing the aliens, and an inexplicable and unexplained talking - of course with a British accent, for all brains are British - brain in a glass cage standing in for the alien mother. If much of the plot doesn't seem to make much sense to you after these replacements, hey, it's a Mattei movie, and the man aimed to please. I think.

As a matter of fact, I found myself hard pressed to not be pleased by Zombies while watching it. This reaction to what happened on screen is probably on the same level as the delight of a certain kind of anime fan confronted with scenes of female characters whose breasts make "boink! boink!" noises when they move, but what can a guy like me do when confronted with a guy like Bruno Mattei not having learned a bit about filmmaking in all the years he worked as a director.

All the shoddiness the connoisseur expects from a Mattei movie is there and accounted for: acting on school play level with an especially hysterical performance by the guy standing in for Bill Paxton (Yvette Yzon who was one of the least terrible actors in the first movie also manages to top her performance there and sometimes reaches the levels of overenthusiastic horribleness the film surrounding her deserves); action directed without an eye for the position of the characters taking part in it; dialogue that is borrowed from another movie not exactly known for brilliance of dialogue and then dumbed down until it fits the quality of the acting; a sense for weird, stupid and peculiar details that manifests in things like flame throwers that seem to work without fuel (I imagine they use fire elementals), that brain in a glass cage, or a fascination with mutant foetuses that really shows by comparison how tasteful H.R. Giger's shtick is; sets that include empty brown rooms, empty grey rooms and not much else; a complete lack of sanity. In other words, Zombies: The Beginning is an awesome film that never ever wants to waste a single second boring you or talking sense. After all, there's still a scene from Aliens it hasn't transformed through the magic of its $100 budget it needs to rip off.

Some may find it tragic that Mattei's last film is a shot-on-very- visibly-digital rip-off of a James Cameron movie, without a budget and clearly nobody of talent involved, but if I am honest, I think this is the perfect, honest end point for the man's career. Mattei's talent did after all always lie in his ability to make highly entertaining crap, and in this regard, he couldn't have succeeded more than he did with Zombies: The Beginning.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,reviews,horror,bruno mattei,yvette yzon,zombies

Music Monday: Beardy Edition

2011-11-21T08:28:00.001+01:00

Technorati-Markierungen: music,music monday,jonathan coulton

Nothing to see here

2011-11-15T09:16:00.001+01:00

At least until next Monday. I'm sure this has nothing at all to do with the release of Skyrim, for elder horrors do not roam imaginary countries rescuing kittens and shooting bandits in the back.

Technorati-Markierungen: maintenance

Music Monday: Born Alone Edition

2011-11-14T08:36:00.001+01:00

Technorati-Markierungen: music,music monday,wilco

On WTF: Island of the Living Dead (2006)

2011-11-13T16:42:00.001+01:00

I was very sceptical about Bruno Mattei's return to filmmaking via crap looking direct to DVD features, but I did do the great man wrong.

While Island of the Living Dead isn't quite as brain-damaging as Mattei's films made together with Claudio Fragasso, it still does contain more than enough of the good stuff to cause major hallucinations. My column on WTF-Film will explain - as far as Mattei is explicable - more.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,horror,zombies,reviews,bruno mattei,yvette yzon,gaetano russo,ydalia suarez

In short: Don't Look In The Attic (1982)

2011-11-12T23:01:00.001+01:00

Original title: La Villa Delle Anime Maledette

aka House of the Cursed Spirits

aka House of the Damned

Three relatives and one spouse (Annarita Grapputo, Tonino Campa, Fausto Lombardi and Ileana Fraia) who didn't know about each other's existence because they've all been scattered around the world by their parental generation, inherit the family fortune and the family mansion. Alas, the fortune comes with the condition to live in the mansion, and the mansion is cursed, having cost the lives of many a generation of the family by driving them to murder and suicide.

This time around, family member Elisa has a direct connection to the beyond, but despite her mother's dire warnings from the grave, she - and her male cousins - still end up living in the unhealthy family home. Elisa's cousins soon succumb to the house's bad influence, and it's only a question of time until a bloodbath will happen and/or a completely random explanation for what's happening in the movie will pop in out of nowhere.

Carlo Ausino's (whoever he might be) Don't Look In The Attic is a shoddy and threadbare movie even for the not exactly high standards of Italian movies made at the beginning of the 80s. I've become used to the often stiff and always slightly off nature of the English dubbing of these films, but Don't Look beats most everything I've encountered from these quarters by virtue of swinging in a wildly out of sync way between the incomprehensible and the plain stupid.

The dubious quality of the English language dub is quite a good thing, for it adds entertainment value to a film in dire need of it. Between its too few expected moments of batshit insanity, Don't Look is quite a bore, you see, so it's actually necessary that its longish discussions of the reproductive problems of some family members (really) and the non-relationship between one of the family lawyers and his secretary Martha (Beba Loncar), who will also swing a mean silver dagger later on, are made more interesting through the dubbing.

The main problem standing between Don't Look and a place in my heart is that it spends too much time on scenes of nothing happening at all, and too little on expanding my mind with true Italian weirdness. It's true that there are moments of the skewed and nonsensical beauty I'm looking for in this sort of film, but these moments are drowned out by the wrong, which means the uninteresting instead of the hypnotic, kind of boredom. Don't Look In The Attic is a film that can even make an incestuous rape attempt look utterly boring.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,horror,in short,carlo ausino,beba loncar,annarita grapputo

Three Films Make A Post: Things happen that have never been seen by human beings. The blood flows like vintage wine.

2011-11-10T09:03:00.001+01:00

And The Crows Will Dig Your Grave aka Los Buitres cavaran tu fosa (1972): Despite its being graced with an awesome title, routine Spanish Western director Juan Bosch's film is a wee bit too generic to warrant me writing anything long about it. It's the usual mess of people (Craig Hill, Angel Aranda and Fernando Sancho among them) of variable nastiness doing nasty things to each other for monetary reasons - not much vengeance going around here - with some light political allegory thrown in. While I've seen it all before, I can't really complain about Bosch's execution of the story: the cruelty is cruel, the action is tight, the dialogue scenes have a certain amount of bite. Add decent acting by people with excellent facial hair and a generic yet fine soundtrack by Bruno Nicolai, and you get a Spaghetti (Paella?) Western that might be totally forgettable, but is also pretty entertaining.

My Horse, My Gun, Your Widow (1972): Again directed by Bosch, again made in 1972 (and still not the last film the director shot in that year), again a Spaghetti Western, again featuring Craig Hill, a Bruno Nicolai soundtrack and an awesome title. Alas, I wasn't as happy with this one, for this is one of those dreaded "comedic" films that suffer from not being funny at all. There are of course some good Spaghetti Western comedies, but those films usually know if there in it for the jokes, want to be parodies of the genre their working in, or hide more complex things behind their humour. My Horse etc doesn't seem to have much of a plan at all, and ends up being one of those films that are just kind of there without ever amounting to much.

Captain America: The First Avenger (2011): After the rather disappointing Thor, Joe Johnston (the guy responsible for the horrible Wolfman remake) of all people pulls the Marvel superhero films out of the druthers again with what is as fine a piece of blockbuster cinema as you're likely to encounter. The film not only gets the core of the character it is about right, but also realizes which elements of the original's serial/pulp origins will work under these particular circumstances and which won't, and then proceeds to dial up the useful elements to awesome. Add that the film has an actual heart, and find me a very happy man.

Technorati-Markierungen: spanish movies,italian movies,american movies,juan bosch,craig hill,joe johnston,chris evans,hayley atwell,stanley tucci,tommy lee jones,hugo weaving,spaghetti western,comedy,superheroes,in short

In short: Gamera (1965)

2011-11-09T09:11:00.001+01:00

Original title: Daikaiju Gamera

A pretty hot moment in the Cold War somewhere in the Arctic ends in a plane carrying an H-bomb exploding. The explosion sets free the ancient devil of the Inuit tribes, the giant fire-breathing turtle Gamera. After eating a Japanese research ship, only leaving alive zoologist Dr. Hidaka (Eiji Funakoshi), his assistant Kyoke (Harumi Kiritachi) and journalist Aoyagi (Junichiro Yamshiko), Gamera disappears to parts unknown.

Some time later, the turtle lands on Hokkaido and smashes up a lighthouse. Because he's a suicidal, dumb little twat, a turtle-loving boy named Toshio (Yoshiro Uchida) is climbing the lighthouse while Gamera is already smashing it. Then Gamera makes a grave mistake. Instead of letting the little bastard fall to his well-deserved death, Gamera rescues him, leaving Toshio free to spend the rest of the movie whining, moping, shouting for Gamera and wandering into danger. Thank you so much, Gamera.

When the film doesn't show us the non-adventures of the most stupid boy in Japan, it does from time to time allow us to watch Gamera's further adventures and the attempts of scientists and military to somehow get rid of the fire-breathing menace.

The plan that succeeds in the end is very special indeed.

The first film in Daiei's Gamera series (the studio's attempt to create a monster as successful as Toho's Godzilla/Gojira) is actually two films. The first one is a pretty fine kaiju eiga about one silly yet wonderfully imaginative monster, with some fine suitmation - clearly the best in a Gamera movie before Shusuke Kaneko got his hands on the character -, pleasant city-smashing and what might just be my most favourite way of getting rid of a monster in all of kaiju-dom. In other words, that film isn't as good as the best Toho productions - it's lacking a bit in emotional resonance and depth for it - but it is a smashingly good time. Director Noriaki Yuasa even manages to let Gamera quite often look like the threatening force of nature a giant monster should be. That Yuasa does this with a rocket-propelled, fire-breathing turtle deserves all respect.

It's just too bad that Yuasa loses that respect again with the second film you can find inside of Gamera. This Gamera is about a whining little brat named Toshio who neither possesses a sense of self-preservation nor empathy with the suffering of others nor a brain and is always at hand to distract from the stuff that's fun and important in a kaiju eiga, that is, a monster smashing things and earnest people in white coats talking SCIENCE(!). I know, I know, Toshio's supposed to be the audience identification figure for the children Daiei was mainly aiming the Gamera movies at, but you can't tell me that anyone - child or not - could watch him going on whining and moping and not come out of the experience hating him with great passion. What makes Toshio even more infuriating is the fact that you could cut all of his scenes out of the film, and nothing at all about the plot would change, making Toshio not only annoying, but also completely useless.

How much you'll be able to enjoy the parts of Gamera that don't contain Toshio will really depend on how hardened your are against annoying child characters in movies. I found myself suffering so much from the child's scenes that I began to wish for odious comic relief instead.

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese movies,in short,kaiju,giant monsters,noriaki yuasa,eiji funakoshi

Assignment Naschy: La Maldicion De La Bestia (1975)

2011-11-08T10:31:00.001+01:00

aka Night of the Howling Beast

aka Hall of the Mountain King

aka Horror of the Werewolf

aka The Werewolf and the Yeti

In this edition of the long and continuity-challenged cycle of movies about poor beleaguered Waldemar Daninsky (Paul Naschy), our hero is a famous psychologist, anthropologist and adventurer. Because of his manifold talents, a certain Professor Lacombe (Josep Castillo Escalona) - coming with the mandatory young, pretty, and soon Wally-adoring daughter (Mercedes Molina) - asks for Waldemar's help mounting an expedition to continue the life's work of a now deceased colleague who was travelling Nepal looking for the Yeti. In fact, the dead scientist managed to find the animal, but making a photo of a yeti and then getting mauled to death by one is no proof for it's existence. Or something.

Anyway, Waldemar does of course agree to help out with the expedition. Once they have arrived in ~~Catalonia~~Nepal, the main body of the expedition stays behind while Waldemar strides forth heroically to find a pass to Yeti Central, an attempt that is the death of his only companion on this part of the journey, and nearly Waldemar's as well.

After some exhausted stumbling through Catanepalia, Waldemar comes upon an inhabited cave, where two women pray to Black Kali and a stone sarcophagus with an arrow in it. Despite saving Waldemar's life and starting a freaky threesome, the two don't have his best interests at heart, for they are cannibalistic witches with lycanthropic tendencies (or something of the sort), and they are planning to turn Waldemar into their companion (he will be an avid lover, or so they say). That arrow sticking out of the sarcophagus comes in handy once Waldemar has found out that his hosts aren't exactly human, but even though he manages to kill the women, one of them gives him a good and proper bite that of course infects our hero with the curse of the wolfman.

While all this has been happening to Waldemar, the rest of the expedition has decided to follow their disappeared friend, but soon find themselves under attack by bandits working for the local potentate, Sekkar Khan (Luis Induni). These bandits are of the "torture the young men, rape and kidnap the women and just kidnap the wise old men" persuasion, so it's no surprise that soon enough not many members of the expedition are left. The Professor, Waldemar's buddy Larry Talbot(!) (Gil Vidal), and Talbot's girlfriend Melody (Veronica Miriel) are captured and brought to the Khan's palace. Sylvia manages to escape only to run straight into the arms of another rape-y group of the bad guys.

Fortunately, it is then that Waldemar re-appears. Even though it is daylight, he's walking around in wolfman form and he's not at all in the mood for rapists. Soon after taking care of Sylvia's attackers, our hero loses his fur again, so it's time for him and Sylvia to try and rescue their kidnapped friends. There are also still a wise monk, more kidnappings, an evil witch/mad scientist named Wandessa (Silvia Solar), some Naschy-style swashbuckling, a short Wolfman versus Yeti fight and a surprise ending waiting in the couple's future.

After the rather boring gothic horror of El Retorno de Walpurgis, actor/scriptwriter and professional wolfman Paul Naschy brought his series of Waldemar Daninsky movies back to their roots, that is to say, into the realm of pulp craziness where he - as I now realize - ruled supreme.

This time around, Naschy has decided to spice up his stew of supernatural silliness with a dollop of adventure movie tropes, and cut down on Waldemar's self-pity. Even though Naschy possibly made the latter decision only because there was no space for the usual whining scenes in his film's allotted running time, it turns Waldemar into a more sympathetic character than he usually is for me; there is a time and place for whining about being a werewolf, but it's pretty difficult to see Waldemar as a tragic figure when he never seems to spend a single thought on the people he killed.

Watching Maldicion, I was also pretty surprised by the film's ending, or rather, I was surprised that Naschy didn't hold to his established formula for the ending this time around, but actually went for something a bit more friendly for this more deserving Waldemar. I don't know if Naschy had an especially optimistic year in '75, if he just wanted to shake things up a little, or if the film's ending was producer mandated; I do know that I like this change, even though I'm a pessimist at heart.

As a writer, Naschy had become quite a bit more proficient at this point in the Daninsky cycle. Sure, especially the film's beginning still features scenes of people telling each other parts of the plot, but generally, Naschy now prefers to show us potentially awesome things instead of just telling us about them. Structurally, Maldicion is still a bit of a mess, but it's one because Naschy has stuffed it full of, well, everything.

While this grab-bag approach to plot (or "plot") construction may be rather problematic if you believe only in the tight, the clear, and the coherent, I can't help but admire it, for I think this approach is based on Naschy's unwillingness to just repeat his favourite elements of a certain Universal movie. It's an attempt to liven things up, even if the narrative has to get crazier with each film and Naschy has to go to more ridiculous lengths with each film, this time around ending up with a film containing witches, werewolves, warlords, yetis, kindly monks and everything else that's wonderful and cheap.

All of this is of course very very silly, a silliness that is further emphasised by the film's brazen attempt to sell late-autumnal/early winter Catalonia as Nepal without even trying a bit of movie magic to make it look that way. The whole adventure movie element, with its bizarre ideas about local dress and culture, is a lot like little kids pretending to be Cowboys and Indians, which of course means that it's much more enjoyable than more earnest attempts would be, at least in the context of a Dansinky movie. Plus, the parts of Catalonia this was filmed in are very picturesque places for a wolfman to wander through, Nepal or not.

But even if you don't like to look at the pretty landscape or to laugh about not-Nepal, Naschy is trying his hardest to find something that might entertain you, so there's his wolfman, a bit of swashbuckling, some near-nudity, somewhat freaky sexiness, utter confusion, some curious Buddhism, a handful of moments of a certain ickiness, romance, a yeti, various witches and half-witches, multi-coloured fluids, a real deus ex machina, a very colourful (remember when movies weren't avoiding colours?) cave, "native" dancing, etc. and so on and so forth, all held together with a shoe-string budget (I suspect) and a clear and wonderful feeling of enthusiasm. Whatever you like in your pulp entertainment, Paul Naschy, director Miguel Iglesias, and La Maldicion de la Bestia have your back, and they have it gladly.

Technorati-Markierungen: spanish movies,horror,adventure,reviews,paul naschy,miguel iglesias,mercedes molina,silvia solar

Music Monday: Days Edition

2011-11-07T08:39:00.001+01:00

Technorati-Markierungen: music,music monday,st. vincent

Assignment Naschy: Dr. Jekyll Y El Hombre Lobo (1972)

2011-11-06T10:43:00.000+01:00

aka Dr. Jekyll versus The Werewolf (and variations thereof)

After having a little party with their friends, including a certain Doctor Jekyll (Jack Taylor) who doesn't like to be reminded of his grandfather, aging industrialist Imre Kosta (José Marco) and his freshly married wife Justine (Shirley Corrigan) are off to a most romantic honeymoon. The loving couple visits rural Hungary to let Imre breathe the air of the land of his birth and give him an opportunity to visit the graves of his parents - that's what all people do on their honeymoon, right?

The local villagers warn Imre off from going to the old graveyard where his parents lie buried, for the area is infested with murderous bandits and opportunity rapists, and the castle next door is supposed to be inhabited by a monster, but the industrialist, being a man of the world, takes it all for superstition and nonsense. It turns out that we're witnessing darwinistic principles at work here. After visiting the graveyard, Imre is knifed to death by a trio of the non-existent bandits, and Justine's life is only saved with the help of a barrel-chested man dressing like a French existentialist novelist. Hello again, Waldemar Daninsky (Paul Naschy), the world's most frequent werewolf. Waldemar - no slouch even when he's not wearing a face full of fur - kills two of Justine's attackers and takes the - by now fainted - woman to his castle where he lives with the local leper and an elderly woman the villagers take for a witch.

After the expected hysterics, Justine just as expectedly falls for the irresistible manly and tragic charms of Waldemar (yes, of course this was scripted by Naschy), even when she learns of his curse; things seem to go well.

Alas, the last surviving bandit is a very bad loser with highly dubious ideas of right and wrong, and begins to obsessively plan Waldemar's demise. The jerk's first plan of attack only costs the lives of some more bandits when he happens to learn that trying to kill a guy you know to be a werewolf on the night of the full moon is a pretty stupid idea. The jerk's second plan is a bit better - not attacking on the night of the full moon, beheading the old woman, and exciting the whole village into a state of torch-wielding mob-dom to do his dirty work for him.

Despite these dangers (and thanks to the modern commodity we know and love as the motorcar), Waldemar and Justine escape to London. There, Justine tells her friend Jekyll all about Waldemar's little werewolf problem, hoping for help.

Although Jekyll is pining for Justine himself, he's putting an honest attempt into helping Waldemar, quite to the disgust of his assistant Sandra (Mirta Miller), who for her part is a) pretty mad and b) pining for Jekyll. The doctor has a fantastic plan to cure Waldemar, too. Just wait for the night of the full moon, pump the man full of the serum that turned Jekyll's grandfather into Mister Hyde, wait until "the absolute evil kills the wolfman", and inject Waldemar with the antidote to the serum Jekyll invented killing off (off-screen, in the past) dozens of guinea pig patients. I can't imagine what could go wrong.

As you will have realized by now, Dr. Jekyll Y El Hombre Lobo is - in a different version of the usual structural eccentricity all scripts written by Paul Naschy I've encountered thus far feature - a film of two very different halves that do suggest an interesting production history to me, what with them being of so very different style and content. The first one is a slightly silly, yet very atmospheric piece of neo-gothic filmmaking that shows off director Leon Klimovsky's talents at more than just racking the zoom lens.

This part of the film is dominated by moody shots of an atmospheric winter landscape (with only a little snow), and is blessed with a modernized version of the play of light and shadow that's so important for everything gothic even in a film that doesn't take place in the olden times. There's also a surprising narrative consistency to the film's first forty minutes. Scenes flow into each other in a manner that makes logical and narrative sense, all important scenes are actually happening on screen, and for once, Naschy's script even manages to convince me that Waldemar is a somewhat tragic figure. The latter may very well have something to do with the simple fact that Waldemar's attempts at not killing random people when he wolfs out seem less half-hearted this time around.

Then, quite abruptly, the film's style and content change. Neo-gothic turns into mock-psychedelic, Spain in winter standing in for Hungary turns into some classical "look, we actually carted Paul Naschy to London for two days" scenes and some not very interesting looking sets, while the not exactly clever, but up to this point at least coherent, plot turns into raving lunacy of the sort that may be inspired by late period Universal movies or poached from the scribbling of an overexcited twelve year old boy. I'm not complaining about it, mind you. As much as I would have liked to watch a Naschy wolfman movie that is coherent yet still good, I won't ever complain about a film turning this delightfully strange.

I can't help but admire the absolute, beautiful wrong-headedness that leads to Paul Naschy playing a wolfman and Mister Hyde - for no good reason but tradition dressed like the Fredric March version - in the same film, as if these figures weren't different sides of the same archetype anyway. As nobody who has ever witnessed Naschy's werewolf performances will doubt, the man plays his Hyde scenes with great relish and enthusiasm.

Our man's script for its part attempts to cram variations on all of Hyde's traditional misdeeds into about fifteen minutes of misdeed time, with a high degree of success. It's as if Naschy and Klimovsky had decided to not just give their audience two films for the price of one but to also cram both films as full with fun stuff™ as they could in a technique that reminds me a bit of the wild abandon of 90s Hong Kong cinema. Sure, this way the pair had to leave sense and coherence behind in the end, but who wants coherence when she can have scenes of Paul Naschy with grey make-up and yellow eyes strolling through early 70s London dressed like a Hollywood Victorian, and nobody around him caring?

If my explorations of Naschy's work have taught me anything, then I surely don't

Technorati-Markierungen: spanish movies,reviews,horror,paul naschy,leon klimovsky,shirley corrigan,jack taylor,mirta miller

In short: Blood Runs Cold (2011)

2011-11-05T09:32:00.001+01:00

Winona (Hanna Oldenburg), a popular artist (musician, I suppose, but the film's not making that part too clear) is in dire need of a bit of rest and relaxation, so her manager rents her a house in the deep dark wintery woods somewhere around the town where she grew up in.

When out and about in what just might be the only bar in town, she meets her ex-boyfriend Rick (Patrick Saxe) whom she had left to have a career closer to civilization. In an attempt to rekindle old feelings, Winona invites Rick, his perfectly annoying friend Carl (Andreas Rylander) and Carl's girlfriend Liz (Elin Hugoson) to her house.

Alas, poor Winona had stumbled into the wrong home right from the start and is accidentally squatting in the abode of the local cannibalistic undead serial killer. While Winona is sleeping, the axe-wielding and very hungry killer gets rid of her guests for good. The following day will find Winona going toe to toe with her very grumpy host.

Generally, it's never a good sign when a movie's marketing material tries to turn its budget into a selling point. It comes over either as an attempt to excuse a film's flaws or as way too self-congratulatory. I don't think director Sonny Laguna's Swedish $5000 movie (or so the marketing tells me) Blood Runs Cold is good fit for either of the two, for it has mostly the same flaws and troubles any other contemporary ultra-generic slasher movie has.

Problem number one is, of course, the film's desaturated look, keeping with the adage that having actual colour in a movie instead of kinda-sorta colour is something that is to be avoided at all costs. After all, there's no great tradition of horror directors working on a budget using intense colours to good effect at all, right?

Problem number two is the cast's pretty variable acting that isn't completely horrible all the time, but fluctuates between basically alright and pretty horrible without ever reaching the exalted heights of being horrible or alright in a compelling way. I don't think it helps the quality of the performances that the Swedish actors are all speaking English. While it's clear that everyone actually understands what he or she says, and their accents are a lot better than my own, the English dialogue does make the acting look more artificial. It also adds unnecessary distance to the film as a whole; it's more difficult to lose yourself in a movie - a state a film with a plot this thin and full of the usual slasher movie holes needs a viewer to get into - when the all-Swedish cast for some reason decides to speak English with each other all the time.

The rest of the film is slasher movie by numbers. Although there are two or three tense moments, and nothing about the film is technically bad, the film lacks a personality of its own. I have seen everything that's going on here a million times before, so a film really needs to do something original or strange to keep me interested. Blood Runs Cold unfortunately doesn't.

So yes, Blood Runs Cold proves you can make a middling slasher movie for $5000 that is just as middling and basically okay as a movie that cost twenty times as much. I just don't think this is an achievement I should be praising.

Technorati-Markierungen: swedish movies,horror,slasher,in short,sonny laguna,hanna oldenburg

On WTF: The Incite Mill (2010)

2011-11-04T18:02:00.001+01:00

While the once great Takashi Shimizu makes absolutely horrible films now, that other core director of the Japanese horror renaissance Hideo Nakata seems to have slowly recovered from his horrible US The Ring 2. Nakata's making thrillers with SF elements now, and he's actually very good at it.

Case in point is The Incite Mill, the film I talk about at length over at WTF-Film today.

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese movies,reviews,thriller,sf,hideo nakata,tatsuya fujiwara,haruka ayase,satomi ishihara,kinya kitaoji,nagisa katahira

In short: The Five Man Army (1969)

2011-11-03T10:19:00.001+01:00

Somewhere in revolutionary Mexico. Certified criminal genius The Dutchman (Peter Graves) summons a group of old acquaintances and friends for a heist. Knife-throwing swordsman Samurai (Tetsuro Tanba, trying to go broaden his reign of being in every Japanese film to Italian cinema too), food-fixated strongman Mesito (Bud Spencer), explosives expert and cardsharp Captain Augustus (James Daly) and unsuccessful bank robber and former trapeze artist Luis Dominguez (Nino Castelnuovo) are perfectly willing to take part in one of the Dutchman's plans, seeing they all have hit rock bottom in one way or the other.

The Dutchman has been hired by Mexican revolutionaries to steal half a million dollar of foreign bribes in gold that are bound to be delivered to the military dictator of the day, and instead give them to the revolution. Officially, every member of the Dutchman's team is promised a thousand dollars, but he heavily hints at further plans to steal the gold from the revolutionaries too.

However, before anyone can think about any kind of double-cross, there are a few problems to solve. Chief among these problems is that the gold is being transported in a heavily armed and guarded train only a fool or an army would take on in a frontal assault. Fortunately, the Dutchman is quite the planner when it comes to impossible missions.

From time to time, Italian producers didn't just import a handful of foreign stars to improve their films' chances at success in international markets, but also made attempts to give the director's chair to an American. Usually, these films didn't amount to much, for the US directors were generally of the dependable workhorse type of filmmaker badly equipped to work through the peculiarities of Italian scripting practices, as well as just not the sort of visual stylists many of even the lesser Italian directors were.

The Five Man Army's director Don Taylor is quite a good example of the type of American willing to do this type of work for hire. As a very experienced director mostly working on TV, Taylor is enamoured of a straightforward point and shoot style that makes the film look visually impoverished when compared to other Spaghetti Western. Ironically, how much of the film was actually directed by Taylor is not clear at all. Depending on the source, Taylor either directed most everything or was replaced by the film's producer Italo Zingarelli after a day or so. Since not even the actors playing in the damn thing are telling the same story about its production history, we will probably never know for sure.

Personally, I'd go with Taylor as the film's main director, though, because Five Man Army looks like the product of exactly the kind of director Taylor was, someone who doesn't have much of an eye for beauty or for mood, but who knows how to keep a film moving. The script (curiously co-written by US animation writer Marc Richards and Dario Argento) plays more to Taylor's strengths as a director than is normal in this sort of project, replacing much of the moral ambiguity and cynicism typical of the Spaghetti Western with more easily digestible boy's adventure tropes, and featuring a narrative that is as straightforward as the director's style.

Consequently, Five Man Army isn't much to talk about as a Spaghetti Western, but works perfectly fine as a straightforward Western with (also straightforward) heist movie elements. Plus, it has a pretty great scene where Tetsuro Tanba hacks an office full of soldiers to pieces while Nino Castelnuovo looks on with a shocked expression, which is something that can't be said about many Westerns, Spaghetti or not.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,spaghetti western,in short,don taylor,peter graves,james daly,bud spencer,tetsuro tanba,nino castelnuovo

Three Films Make A Post: INVISIBLE and DEADLY!

2011-11-02T09:32:00.001+01:00

White: The Melody of the Curse (2011): At first, I thought South Korean former experimental film director brothers' Kim Gok and Kim Sun's horror movie taking place in idol circles would be quite the thing. It is, after all, stylishly shot, solidly acted and interested in exploring the point where melodrama and horror movie - both emotional and visceral genres - meet while throwing mild barbs in the direction of showbiz, and therefore perfectly inside my areas of interest. Unfortunately, after fifty minutes or so, the film begins to drag quite horribly, its plot moving off into a direction that is slightly surprising but not all that interesting. Mainly, though, it moves slowly, until all the goodwill it has built evaporates or transforms into mild disinterest. If I were of a nasty disposition, I'd suggest that what we have here is a movie that only had enough material for seventy minutes of running time but had to be bloated up to a hundred minutes by any means necessary.

Terra Nova (2011): I don't usually talk about contemporary US TV here anymore, but I wanted to at least turn some of the time of my life the pilot to this show - which is as much as I'll ever want to see of it - stole from me into something worthwhile. If you think that the best way to set up a show about a US (the rest of the world doesn't exist, as we know) project to colonize an alternative timeline Jurassic age is to let us view this potentially exciting world through the eyes of that classical US family (though Mum has a British accent) I have come to hate with a passion through overexposure, then you're probably Brannon Braga and Steven Spielberg. Also, creatively bankrupt. As if it weren't enough to make the central cast direly uninteresting, the show also shows them to be ridiculously egotistic, but obviously wants the audience to admire them for that, too. We can also look forward to old auto-plotting chestnuts like the whiny male teenager who will surely learn the meaning of "family" one of these episodes. And while I'm mentioning the word "family" - I think the script writers had a bet going how often they were able to shoehorn the word in; painfully often, it turns out.

Gorath (1962): To end this on a continuing down note, let me just state that this is the only Ishiro Honda movie I've seen I barely could stomach at all. Despite the appearance (or not, depending on the cut you see) of a decidedly silly walrus monster, this is a movie living in that area of the SF movie where only the insufferably po-faced dwell. Expect characters sacrificing themselves, young military officers singing rousingly and ideas about women coming from the least enlightened corners of the 50s.

I'm not usually one for calling movies out for taking themselves too seriously (rather for taking themselves not serious enough), but I have make an exception for Gorath.

Technorati-Markierungen: south korean movies,american tv,japanese movies,horror,kaiju,sf,ishiro honda

Assignment Naschy: Assignment Terror (1970)

2011-11-01T09:51:00.001+01:00

Original title: Los Monstruos Del Terror

aka Dracula vs. Frankenstein

A group of aliens from a slowly freezing planet decide to take over Earth to ensure their continued existence after that thing with the artificial sun hasn't worked out for them. Their invasion plan has a certain whiff of Plan 9, what with them transferring alien minds into the dead bodies of scientists Dr. Warnoff (Michael Rennie), Maleva Kerstein (Karin Dor) and Dr. Kirian (Ángel del Pozo). These undead scientists then begin to gather around them various classic monsters to experiment on so that humanity can be conquered by their own fears, or to just build an army out of them, or something. The aliens first revive Count Dracula and/or Nosferatu (Manuel de Blas) - obviously found as a skeleton in a sideshow tent -, then everyone's favourite werewolf Waldemar Daninsky (Paul Naschy), then a surprisingly creepy looking mummy (Gene Reyes), and finally - coughing innocently - the monster of Farancksalan (Ferdinando Murolo), whom I'd imagined bigger.

Because the aliens leave behind quite a few dead bodies in these activities, Inspector Tobermann (Craig Hill) of the city police(!) is soon on the case. Alas, the good Inspector is really more interested in listening to exposition, sexing his mandated romantic interest Ilsa (Patty Shepard), and hallucinating "humorously", so he does not make much progress at all.

Fortunately, mankind is protected by something much stronger than Tobermann: human emotions that can easily influence a corpse-riding alien to become quite a bit nicer, especially if it is female (woman's intuition, the film explains). Well, that, plus Waldemar turns out to be quite a bit more heroic than the supposed hero of the piece in what I assume is one of the perks of being played by the scriptwriter.

After my last visit in Paul Naschy land lead me to encounter a surprisingly un-silly piece of filmmaking, I decided to go back a few years in the Daninsky cycle to a film directed by Tulio Micheli and written by Naschy and possibly (never trust the IMDB) a few other people. That's something easily done in a series of movies without much of a continuity. In this respect, the Daninsky films are on the same level as the equally free-form adventures of El Santo, with whom Naschy also shared his basic body form and favourite sport. Someone should really write a short story about El Santo and Waldemar Daninsky teaming up.

But I digress. Quite unlike El Retorno De Walpurgis, and even more so than the earlier Daninsky films, Assignment Terror is a full-time monster mash that uses what there is of a plot exclusively to put everything on screen your basic monster movie loving kid and adult adores. Body-snatching aliens, variations of all four classic Universal monsters, a bit of mind control, some happy mad science ranting by Rennie, a lab with more blinking lights than most Christmas trees, monster bashing and monsters mashing, chauvinist nonsense, Paul Naschy being irresistible to women, and even some slight eurospy stylings coming from Craig Hill - the only thing the film, at least in the cut I saw, leaves out is some friendly nudity.

Now I have obviously reached the point in this review where I should begin to criticize Assignment Terror for its non-plot, the sometimes cardboard-y sets, and the fact that it is utter nonsense. That, however, would be quite a bit more nonsensical than anything the movie itself puts on screen, for Assignment Terror was not made to fulfil my silly ideas of what a "good movie" is supposed to look like or do, nor to further my love for films peeking into the subconscious of Paul Naschy. The reason for this particular film's existence (apart from parting people from their money) is plain and simply to reiterate one important point that has been at the core of my philosophy of life for years now, and certainly had an equally strong influence on Naschy's thinking: monsters are awesome.

Technorati-Markierungen: spanish movies,reviews,horror,tulio demicheli,paul naschy,michael rennie,karin dor,craig hill,patty shepard

Music Monday: Werewolf Edition

2011-10-31T08:16:00.001+01:00

Technorati-Markierungen: music,music monday,cat power

Assignment Naschy: El Retorno De Walpurgis (1974)

2011-10-30T17:36:00.001+01:00

aka Curse of the Devil

aka Return of the Werewolf

aka The Return of Walpurgis

In ye olden tymes of the middle ages, when everything was tinted quite yellow, the rather smug knight Irineus Daninsky (Paul Naschy) crushes the witch cult of the Bathorys. Daninsky probably shouldn't have announced his plans of evil smiting beforehand, for Elizabeth Bathory and her co-witches had more than enough time to curse his line before they die. It doesn't save the witches from getting hanged or burned at the stake, but Irineus' descendant of a few generations removed, Waldemar (of course also Paul Naschy), will encounter a whole bunch of problems because of it.

Waldemar lives in ye olden times of the not-19th century, when people dressed funny but - unless they are superstitious peasants - never acted any differently from the 70s; not even pre-marital sex seems to be much of a problem.

Anyway, on a hunt Waldemar shoots a wolf that looks remarkably like a dog but finds himself facing the dead body of a naked gypsy. Oops. Despite Waldemar's attempts at paying them off, the gypsies - probably fuelled by Bathory's curse, or not - decide to teach the guy a lesson with the help of good old Satan. Said lesson consists of first letting gypsy Ilona (Ines Morales) seduce the virginal Waldemar, only to then infect him with the curse of the werewolf.

From then on every full moon night sees Waldemar growing a very hairy face and going around killing off members of the local peasantry. Fortunately for him, there's also an axe murderer running free, so everyone - there's no difference between the wounds an axe or a wolfman leave, it seems - thinks the poor madmen is the guilty party.

When he's not growing more hair in his face than he has on his head, Waldemar spends his time romancing Kinga Wilowa (Fabiola Falcon), the daughter of an engineer newly arrived in town. The romance business is a good thing, too, for as we all know, it's the job of a loving woman to kill a wolfman, especially since Waldemar sure likes to whine about his cursed state once he realizes it, but just as surely doesn't do anything to stop himself from killing further. Too bad for the peasantry and Kinga's family.

This third film in my small, somewhat frightening Assignment Naschy project finds our actor/writer and sometimes director hero producing the up to now most coherent script I've seen by him. Gone are the wastelands of scenes that have no importance at all for the film's plot, gone too is most of the "tell, don't show important things" style, and if you're generous you may even be able to argue the script's pacing is somewhat less slow, even though it still isn't anything for the impatient.

These improvements in Naschy's writing certainly do result in a more coherent film, film a film even that actually seems to know what kind of story it wants to tell: the classic Universal wolfman tale with a bit more blood and breasts and a bit more backstory. Unfortunately, what the film wins in coherence and clarity it loses in dream-like mood and craziness. Where Naschy's other Daninsky films are balancing certain po-faced tendencies with the merry silliness of their slow-motion vampires or yeti-induced lycanthropy, El Retorno wants to be a serious, moody horror melodrama in the gothic mood. On one hand, that's an ambition I respect a lot, but on the other hand, it opens El Retorno up to comparisons with films like Universal's Wolfman and Hammer's The Curse of the Werewolf, it just can't stand up to, even though it is trying its best.

While the acting is pretty decent this time around, Naschy sure is neither an Oliver Reed nor a Lon Chaney Junior (against whose acting much can be said, but who was a hell of a human face for a werewolf), and while El Retorno's script sure is slicker than those of many Naschy films, it is still pretty awkward in comparison to the films it has set its eyes on.

El Retorno's visual side deserves some praise, though. Director Carlos Aured has a fine eye for creating mood through the play of light and shadows, and some rather nifty framing tricks. Aured is certainly helped here by access to some spooky looking locations, as well as a few effective sets. I assume he'd have been able to make quite a nice piece of gothic horror under more fortunate circumstances.

It is a bit ironic that I enjoyed El Retorno De Walpurgis the least of the three movies I've watched as a part of Assignment Naschy until now, even though it's the technically most accomplished of the films, as well as the least idiosyncratic one. It's the old problem with merely competent films being much less interesting than films that are batshit insane, I suspect.

Technorati-Markierungen: spanish movies,horror,reviews,paul naschy,carlos aured

In short: Leviathan (1989)

2011-10-29T11:16:00.001+02:00

The crew (played by an ensemble consisting of Peter Weller, Amanda Pays, Richard Crenna, Ernie Hudson, Hector Elizondo, Michael Carmine, Lisa Eilbacher and Daniel Stern that isn't exactly challenged by the material) of an experimental deep sea mining project is looking forward to the end of their stay underwater in just three days; it's probably just early enough to keep people from kicking the shit out of each other.

Things take a turn for the unpleasant when the dumbest, most unpleasant and least long-lived of the crew stumbles upon a sunken Russian military vessel, the "Leviathan". Finding a ship and stealing its safe are one, of course. The safe doesn't contain much of value: there are the personal effects of quite a few dead Russians, a videotape speaking of some kind of plague on board, and a bottle of vodka. Personally, I'd abstain from drinking that particular stuff, even if I were into harder drinks, what with it coming from a plague ship and all, but then I'm not a character in a horror movie. It won't come as much of a surprise when the fittingly named Sixpack and his female buddy Bowman show fewer inhibitions toward suicide and soon come down with a lethal case of severe genetic mutations.

The dead crewmen don't stay dead, though, or rather, after some time their bodies transform into a single monster with too many mouths, tentacles and other fun appendages that then proceeds to go on a rampage. As if a deadly monster on board of a deep sea station weren't enough, the surviving crew members take their dear time before they decide to evacuate. Once they do, they learn why one shouldn't work for a company with Meg Foster in a leading position.

Leviathan is another film belonging to the small yet fun late 80s SF horror movie sub-genre that - probably trying to borrow some of the fire of James Cameron's Abyss (aka "be nice, or we'll kill you all, for we are space Americans") - puts either Alien or Aliens from space into the deep sea. While this isn't the height of creativity, I always do respect the willingness of certain producers to rip off more than one successful movie at once; it sure is more interesting than ripping off only one film.

In George Pan Cosmatos' (a director without a directorial personality if ever I saw one) Leviathan, the producers decided to borrow from the first Alien movie (and a bit of The Thing, too, for good measure), just without everything that could be read as feminist, and in general without much of that "subtext" stuff the eggheads are always talking about. That Cosmatos isn't as great at building a mood of dread even before the monsters appear as Ridley Scott was will come as no surprise. However, to be fair to the movie at hand, it's perfectly entertaining if you don't compare it with the film it's ripping off, and instead just roll with its ambition of being a decent monster flick taking place underwater.

Cosmatos is certainly competent competent enough when it comes to staging gory (and pleasantly rubbery) effects scenes. The effects themselves aren't works of genius but certainly do suggest that someone on the effects team liked his shape-changing anime creatures with heads and mouths at the wrong places well enough. Which does come in handy for me, as I do too.

I'm also bound to like a competently made traditional monster movie, no matter if it takes place in New York, in space or underwater, so Leviathan is fine by me.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,sf,horror,george pan cosmatos,peter weller,amanda pays,ernie hudson

On WTF: The Power (1968)

2011-10-28T18:24:00.001+02:00

George Hamilton versus the Übermensch in the excellently paranoid SF thriller The Power by Byron Haskin! Hitchcock, psychedelics and the disquieting collide!

See me stay this excited in my column on WTF-Film!

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,sf,thriller,byron haskin,george hamilton,suzanne pleshette,michael rennie,aldo ray,other places

In short: The Night Flier (1997)

2011-10-27T09:49:00.002+02:00

A very peculiar serial killer using the pseudonym Dwight H. Renfield (Michael H. Moss) is striking at small airfields all over the USA. He's flying a black Cessna Skymaster, only flies by night, and likes to rip people to pieces and/or drain all their blood. Why, you might think he's a vampire!

With some reluctance, the tabloid reporter and amateur pilot Richard Dees (Miguel Ferrer) who is even more of a cynical jerk than his job description suggests, starts to investigate the killings. He finds out some pretty weird things. Firstly, the killers victims all have died from bite wounds of a rather impressive size that have little to do with the pithy little holes a sparkly vampire or Bela Lugosi leave but have more in common with the bites of a large animal. Secondly, the killer seems to be able to put some kind of mental hold on his victims, hypnotizing them into housing him for a day or two, and giving themselves up willingly. Renfield's not always using that ability, though. Sometimes, he just goes in for a bit of slaughter.

Dees gets close enough to the killer whom he dubs "the Night Flier" that the vampire starts to take notice. He's trying to warn the reporter off for large parts of the movie's running time, but messages written in blood only cause Dees to become increasingly obsessed with finding and most of all seeing the Night Flier. It's doubtful this will end well for him.

Generally, neither 90s horror nor Stephen King adaptations have much of a reputation among cult movie fans, so watching a Stephen King adaptation made in the 90s is not a project one should take upon oneself lightly.

In a surprising turn of events, The Night Flier isn't all that bad of a film. Sure, it has large, vampire-jaw shaped problems, yet there's also quite a bit to like about it.

But let's talk about the film's problems first. Chief among them is how weak most of the supporting acting is, with everyone going for broadness where subtlety would have been asked for, and some ill-fitting scenery chewing in exactly those places where it is least called for. The film's script likes to draw things out a bit too much, presumably to get to feature length somehow, leading to a lot of scenes that just go on a little too long, and some whose inclusion seems dubious at best.

On the positive side, director Mark Pavia does achieve some pretty atmospheric shots on what obviously was a low budget and tries his best to make the confrontation between Dees and the vampire (who for some reason wears an utterly ridiculous cape, but I'll just let that one slide) thematically resonant by casting Dees as a bitter cynic who has begun to seek death in more than one way.

Miguel Ferrer's performance is the other big positive the film has got going for it. It comes as no surprise that the actor is good at playing an unrepentant asshole, but he also manages to give the character a degree of charm and a suggestion of doubts that make him an unrepentant asshole who is interesting to watch for an hour and a half instead of just an unrepentant asshole.

While these positives aren't enough to turn The Night Flier into a completely satisfying film, they are enough to make it worth watching.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,horror,mark pavia,miguel ferrer

In short: The Hypnotic Eye (1960)

2011-10-26T10:15:00.001+02:00

A wave of peculiar facial self-mutilations of beautiful women hits an American city. The victims seem to have trouble realizing how bad acid is for the skin, or that you shouldn't poke your face into a fan, and only remember having done something quite harmless afterwards. Steve Kennedy (Joe Patridge), the cop investigating the affair, is understandably confused by what's happening.

Thing only start to become clearer - if not necessarily to Steve - when he, his girlfriend Marcia (Marcia Henderson) and her friend Dodie (Merry Anders) visit the stage show of hypnotist Desmond (Jacques Bergerac) and his assistant Justine (Allison Hayes). Desmond (and please, imagine the name spoken with a French accent) practices some exciting hypnotizing on Dodie, and shortly afterwards, she decides that there's not much difference between acid and soap. Marcia, obviously the brains in the relationship with Steve, thinks that there's something fishy about Desmond. Why, he might even have hypnotized poor Dodie into washing off her face! Steve reacts to that theory with huffy scepticism, so Marcia waltzes off to get herself hypnotized on stage for science. She resists getting the mind whammy, even though Desmond enhances his hypnotic powers with a blinking electronic gadget in the form of an eye, and so remembers the hypnotist's suggestion that she should visit him in his dressing room at midnight. And the 50s are barely over!

When Marcia tells Steve about it, he finally admits that something is going on with Desmond, and yes, it would be a great idea for Marcia to pretend the hypnosis had actually worked on her and visit the hypnotist in his dressing room, just as he wanted. Would you believe that this turns out to be A Very Bad Idea?

If you think the great William Castle was the only one doing gimmick driven horror films and thrillers during the 50s and early 60s, you will be quite surprised to encounter directorial hired gun George Blair's The Hypnotic Eye. The film's gimmick is twofold: firstly, in the sort of fourth wall breaking manoeuvre I suspect Castle would have approved of, the audience in cinemas was provided with the same balloons carrying the same drawings of "the hypnotic eye" as the audience of Desmond's show in the movie; admittedly, that's not as good the The Tingler's fourth wall breaking, but it's creative in a friendly and huckster approved way that doesn't disturb the enjoyment of the movie as a movie.

Which is - unfortunately - not what you can say about gimmick number two: taking the ten minutes directly before the movie's supposed climax to let poor Jacques Bergerac perform a hypnotism number on the film's audience that is not just much less interesting than his first number, but also takes away all possible tension the film might have developed for a viewer until then, deflating the movie like a needle-stuck balloon (with or without hypnotic eye).

It's a bit of a shame too, for up to that point, The Hypnotic Eye is a very serviceable little matinee thriller with some pleasantly gruesome moments and even some hints at a certain psychological complexity. The film's frankness about Desmond using his hypnotic powers as a sort of date rape drug isn't exactly pleasant, but quite effective, for example, while the hypnotist's relationship to Justine has quite an unexpected power dynamic I wish the film had explored a bit more instead of showing us a scene of a supposedly hypnotized studio audience jiggling their arms while Desmond blathers on.

But even with its total break-down right when it is supposed to get exciting, The Hypnotic Eye is a solid example of the huckster horror/thriller right at the point when it began to turn into what we now know would become a part of true exploitation cinema just a bit later.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,thriller,horror,in short,george blair,jacques bergerac,allison hayes,marcia henderson

The Land That Time Forgot (1975)

2011-10-25T09:37:00.001+02:00

1916. A German submarine commanded by a Captain Von Schoenvorts (John McEnery, about as German as his character name) sinks a British passenger ship. While it's surfacing to recharge the batteries, the submarine meets a force it can't resist - a lifeboat full of the British ship's crew, biologist Lisa Clayton (Susan Penhaligon) and two-fisted American Bowen Tyler (Doug McClure). As we all know, nobody can resist the fist of Doug McClure, and so it takes only a short fight until the submarine's new commander is named Tyler. The American promptly decides that the best direction to point his shiny new submarine in is New England. Or so Tyler thinks, for the German first officer and professional jerk Dietz (Anthony Ainley) is clever enough to sabotage the boat's compass.

When Tyler and his British friends realize this small problem days later, they get so distracted the Germans have no particular trouble taking their submarine back. At least for a time, because the Fist of the McClure punches its way back into command again after a time.

Now truly lost somewhere in Antarctic waters, and lacking in supplies and oil, the submarine eventually travels through an underwater cave into the lost continent/island/place on a volcano crater Caprona, where it is warm and cosy, and food will surely be plentiful.

As it is with places like this, Caprona is full of dinosaurs, cavemen and everything nice. These dangers convince the rather gentlemanly Von Schoenvorts, Tyler and the British that it would be best to just forget about the war at home and work together to find a way to first survive and then escape the continent. The longer the men and woman stay, the clearer it becomes that Caprona isn't your typical lost world - for some reason, the further north the group travels, the more highly developed the cavemen and creatures they meet become (which mostly means the cavemen getting better at guerrilla tactics and getting the knowledge to build shields). There must be a mystery behind it, but - quite disappointingly - the film never explores it pretty well.

Of course, expecting an Amicus adventure movie with Doug McClure that's based on the first Caprona novel of Edgar Rice Burroughs to thoroughly explore the pretty interesting SF-nal concept at its core would be asking too much, even though it credits great yet curmudgeonly SF and fantasy writer and editor Michael Moorcock as its co-writer in Moorcock's only screenwriting credit. After all, Amicus's The Land That Time Forgot isn't really a film out to explore ideas, but one out to show Doug McClure punching out cavemen and shooting dinosaurs while Susan Penhaligon makes slight screeching noises.

Once the film actually arrives at that point of natural awesomeness, it becomes not exactly overwhelming - it's not mad enough for that - but at least pretty damn entertaining, entertaining enough to let me just ignore the film's wasted potential for becoming a fantasy adventure movie with a brain. The Land's problem is how much time it takes to get its characters to Caprona. The film's first forty minutes feature more than just a moment of feet-dragging to get to the appointed running time without having to put much money on screen. Director Kevin Connor (who started a short phase of being Amicus's go-to guy for this kind of adventure movie with the film) really isn't too great at letting his filler look like anything else, and is never able to hide there's no need at all for some of the script's early long-windedness. For example, instead of putting McClure, Penhaligon and the British sailors into one lifeboat from the start, the civilians and the sailors are in different boats only so that the film can spend five minutes it could have used for showing us something interesting on their meet-up. And let's not even start with the weird back and forth in submarine ownership, which is - again - neither interesting nor necessary.

Fortunately, once our heroes have arrived on Caprona, things get quite a bit more interesting, the pace increases and the script stops letting its characters do everything three times.

Connor has, after all, dinosaurs of highly variable quality to put on screen. Worst in show here is certainly the wire-driven pterodactyl McClure encounters late in the movie: it's stiff, it's badly detailed, and its appearance is marred by the fact that Connor doesn't even seem to try disguising the wires it's hanging from; Tsuburaya, dinosaur effect guy Roger Dicken definitely isn't. Some of Dicken's other dinosaurs are a bit more effective, but really, I'm pretty much satisfied with any kind of prehistoric monster as long as it is fighting Doug McClure doing his patented two-fisted kinda-sorta everyman American bit. In that regard, The Land That Time Forgot's only disappointment is that McClure doesn't punch a dinosaur, but only a lot of cavemen of various stages in their development.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,reviews,adventure,fantasy,giant monsters,doug mcclure,susan penhaligon,kevin connor

Music Monday: Lantern Edition

2011-10-24T08:22:00.001+02:00

Technorati-Markierungen: music,music monday,lanterns on the lake

Skeletons in the Closet: Im Banne des Unheimlichen (1968)

2011-10-23T12:10:00.001+02:00

aka The Zombie Walks

In the first themed month of many, the members and agents of M.O.S.S. point their eyes/eye-stalks/tentacles/augmentations towards all things skeletal and skull-shaped. You can find our ever growing (at least throughout October) list of fleshless knowledge here.

The rich philanthropist Sir Oliver Ramsay has been killed in a plane crash, leaving his brother Sir Cecil (Wolfgang Kieling) as his inheritor. Sir Cecil isn't quite convinced that his brother is really dead, though, for the badly burned corpse supposedly belonging to Oliver was missing his scorpion ring. Something definitely is up with Oliver's death: during his burial, a terrible laughter fills the church, seemingly coming from Oliver's coffin.

Following this rather disturbing event, Cecil repeatedly sees a stylish skull-faced form wearing a broad-rimmed hat, skeleton gloves and a scorpion ring. That's enough to convince that his brother has turned into a zombie and is out for revenge for some undisclosed misdeed. Once the skeleton-faced form begins to kill the people - starting with Cecil's lawyer - around Sir Cecil with a rare poison hidden in the scorpion's tail of his scorpion ring, Inspector Higgins (Joachim Fuchsberger) of Scotland Yard gets on the case.

Poor Higgins will not only have to cope with a murderous zombie (if he is one)/skull-masked villain of impeccable style, the charming roving reporter Peggy Ward (Siw Mattson) who knows it's '68, and the "comedic" shenanigans of his boss Sir Arthur (Hubert von Meyerinck). Our hero will also have to sort through a whole bunch of suspects including a shady physician (Siegfried Rauch), a shady mortician (Wolfgang Spier), a shady and very ill green-faced white guy who is supposed to be a creole from the West Indies (Peter Mosbacher), a shady stranger (Pinkas Braun), a shady nurse (Claude Farell), a shady chauffeur (Jimmy Powell), a shady priest (Hans Krull) and his shady wife (Renate Grosser), and a shady expert (Ilse Pagé) on poisons who lives and works in the most preposterous home ever to be filled with prepared animals. Some of these people would be financially quite better off if something happened to Sir Cecil, which - this being an Edgar Wallace adaptation - of course means many of them will end up quite dead while Higgins is still trying to get his act together.

I'm not an expert on statistics, and therefore can't be quite sure, but I suspect Alfred Vohrer's Edgar Wallace krimi Im Banne des Unheimlichen (which translates to "under the spell of the uncanny" - or "under the spell of the uncanny one", rather than the more pedestrian "the zombie walks") might be the Rialto Wallace movie featuring at once the highest number of suspects and the highest number of corpses; as you know, there's only a thin line dividing suspect and corpse in these films.

Im Banne is a Wallace krimi far on the pop side of the tracks, a film whose stiffly conservative side is permanently subverted by Vohrer's playing up of the script's inherent silliness, as the stiffer and more conservative elements in Vohrer's directorial style are drowned out by his obvious enjoyment of finally being able to play around with colour now that the Wallace films had given up on black and white. It's 1968, after all, and even though Vohrer's idea of pop is pretty far from hippie dreams, it is one that has room for moments of utter psychedelic delight like his frequent use (some will say overuse) of red and green light, a very swank nightclub sequence, and lovingly hideous interior decorations that culminate in the nearly Bollywood-ripe place Professor Bound works in that looks as if a bunch of dead animals had invaded a 60s ethno kitsch bachelor pad.

There are also some very peculiar ideas about the West Indies on display throughout the film. The West Indies, you see, are filled with creole people, some of them very white guys with green faces, who spend their time making zombies with the help of Aztec poison when they're not creating shrunken heads or mixing a drink known as "the zombie". Culturally, the film further suggests, the West Indies are at once part of the Caribbean and of Mexico. Some people will probably find enough material in here to be insulted for life, but for that, you'll have to be able to take this stuff seriously - I certainly don't, nor does the film itself.

The camp quotient pretty much goes through the roof, yet Vohrer does also use the more typical accoutrements of the earnest side of the krimi: rather drab churches, cobwebbed crypts, a swank castle, and a creepy hospital are all there, accounted for and created with a loving look for detail as well, providing the film with as much contact with the style of 1948 as with that of 1968. This contrast works well for the film, since it underlines its slightly surreal streak and pushes its mood into the dream-like and artificial, which is the only way I personally can stand a film this camp. In fact, this works out so well for the film (and for me) that I found myself utterly enthralled by the silly nonsense happening on screen while watching it.

My enjoyment was heightened even further when realizing that Vohrer (or script writer Ladislas Fodor) for once in a Wallace film actually includes a semi-competent woman on the side of the good. Sure, Siw Mattson's Peggy Ward isn't above getting kidnapped and threatened repeatedly, but she's also shown to shrug these meaningless little issues off like a good heroine and do something useful again afterwards; she's also pretty aggressively (and sillily) flirting with Higgins, which is as far from the regular passive female leads of the series as is possible. We probably have to thank the pervading popularity of The Avengers and Emma Peel (who is even mentioned in the dialogue) in Germany for this particular change to the accustomed formula of these films; I give my thanks daily.

Also worth mentioning (what with this being part of Skeletons in the Closet and all), is the excellent, excellent Laughing Corpse/Skull-Faced Gentleman. This particular masked evildoer is one of my absolute favourites in the whole Wallace cycle because he manages to be at once campy and somewhat creepy in concept, and is realized with a fine sense for the importance of little details. There aren't many skull masks with a moveable jaw after all, and not many villains wearing a skull mask, a cloak and gloves would sew themselves actual skeleton gloves. (Am I the only one hoping for a costume sewing scene in one these films?). It's that sort of enthusiasm that makes the true villain as much as the ability to speak of oneself in the third person and build death traps.

The very same enthusiasm that created this wonderful villain get-up is running through the whole film, making it one of the most outrageous as well as one of the most entertaining films in the Wallace cycle.

Technorati-Markierungen: german movies,krimi,reviews,skeletons in the closet,alfred vohrer,joachim fuchsberger,siw mattson,wolfgang kieling,pinkas braun,hubert von meyerinck