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La Momia Azteca (1957)

aka The Aztec Mummy

Dr. Almada (Ramon Gay), a Mexican Doctor of SCIENCE(!), presents a group of his jaded peers with his theories about the use of hypnosis to help people to remember their previous lifes.

Surprisingly, his public thinks this preposterous, especially when Almada has to admit that he has never tried to actually hypnotize someone to find out if his theory holds. You see, the "remember a former life" part makes the procedure mortally dangerous for the present life, and Alamada, not being a mad scientist, really does not want to let anyone get hurt in any way.

He can't resist when his fiancee Flor (Rosa Arenas) offers herself as a willing test subject, though, and soon listens to a rather interesting story. Flor once was a temple virgin - and therefore born to be sacrificed - named Xochi. Alas, the forbidden love between her and the warrior Popoca (Angel Di Stefani) destroyed her chance for a real nice sacrificial death. Instead, the priesthood kills them both in a (long and boring) punishing sacrificial ceremony.

That'll teach 'em.

Listening in to Almada's experiment through a window is the delightfully dressed masked science villain the Bat, known and feared (or so a voice over explains) for grafting animal parts onto other animals (will that get important later on? Umm, no).

But the Bat isn't going to be a problem in the short run. Much more important for Almada is that he now knows that his theory is true, but he still can't prove it. Unless...he breaks into the secret temple in the ruins of Tenochtitlan whose position he now knows thanks to Flor's memories and grabs something called The Aztec Breastplate. How this is supposed to prove his theory, I don't know, but I'm no doctor of SCIENCE(!) myself.

For some reason, this breastplate is also the key to the lost treasure of the Aztec Empire, which explains the interest of the Bat in the whole thing - at least somewhat.

Of course, poking around in the hidden temple and absconding with an artifact as Alamada does brings the curse of the gods upon him, or rather the mummified remains of Popoca, shambling, shambling ever onward.

La Momia Azteca is one of the classics of the Mexican horror wave, and very typical of it in the way it takes elements of the Universal horror films of the 30s (in this case of the mummy films), mixes them with pulpy serial business like the Bat and transfers them into contemporary Mexico.

Unfortunately, I wouldn't say that the film does this all that well. Even for a film of its time, La Momia Azteca suffers from some terrible pacing problems. Two thirds of the film are already over when the mummy finally appears, and those two thirds aren't exactly filled with thrills. Instead, director Rafael Portillo treats us to many a scene of bad science, odious comic relief in the form of a "cowardly and superstitious" student (Crox Alvarado) and Almada's little brother's tendency to hide and follow the Doctor around.

And don't get me started on the Bat, a criminal scientific mastermind who never does much criminal or scientific and is dispatched in what must be one of the least entertaining ways in film history - he just gets arrested without much of a fuzz. I don't have the slightest clue why he's in the film at all.

It's not all bad, though. The actors are playing their cliché roles with a certain gusto, especially Rosa Arenas nails the all important hysterical tone needed for the reincarnated lover of a mummy perfectly. But, most importantly, every scene where the mummy itself appears is golden, from the perfect 50s monster movie score to the pleasantly desiccated monster design. It's just too bad that there's so little mummy in this mummy film.

Mostly, La Momia Azteca feels like a dry-run for the beauties of lucha cinema, already merrily mixing classic horror with the pulpy and the gothic, but still missing the all-important ingredient of the masked, crime-fightin, monster-catching wrestler.

Well, that or a script that makes better use of the elements it already contains.

 

Technorati-Tags: mexican movies,adventure,horror,rafael portillo,reviews,rosa arenas

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Three Films Make A Post As Big As A Battleship

Time Walker (1982): An alien mummy runs amuck on a university campus after an overdose of radiation (damn you, Mister Röntgen!) has woken it up from its death-like sleep. Although it kills quite a few people, it is not an evil alien mummy, but only wants to finally get home. Just like a moldy version of ET.

Well, mildly interesting is what comes to mind here. I have seen films that were much worse in every aspect of the craft of filmmaking (although the script here is exceptionally clunky), but I have also seen films that were a lot more entertaining to watch. As it stands, it's mostly for the hardcore mummy lover crowd or people who have to see everything for themselves (me).

 

The Bride From Hell (1972): A very traditional Chinese ghost story. Man (Yang Fan) unwittingly marries a ghost (Margaret Hsing Hui) and starts to act like an ass when he gets suspicious about her place among the living. Her nightly vengeance expeditions to avenge her family's and her own death and post-mortem rape don't help to lighten the matter.

This is a much more conservative film than your typical Shaw Brothers horror, with only the slightest flourishes of madness. Might be too stuffy for some, but I enjoyed it.

 

Necropolis (1987): 300 years after a botched attempt at gaining immortality, a witch (LeeAnne Baker) is reincarnated and trying for eternal life again. To attain it, she has to kill a few people to "suck their ectoplasm" and feed it through her six breasts to her undead minions. Too bad that the people who were responsible for her earlier defeat are also reborn and trying to stop her.

Apart from the six breasts and ectoplasm business, this is a bog standard 80s variation of ye olde witches' revenge yarn with some choice bad acting and not much else of interest, unless you really like 80s pseudo punk fashion a lot more than I do. On the other hand, it could have been much worse.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,hong kong movies,shaw brothers,horror,sf,yang fang,margaret hsing hui,in short

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• 13:37 "The Deranger" wins the prize for most stupid slasher movie killer
• 13:37 name
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On WTF: Los Momias De Guanajuato (1972)

On WTF! See me ramble! See me get excited about just about everything, starting with undignified luchadores! See me talk lovingly about the director of the first Superzan film! See me use the made up term "pop & pulp cinema"!

 

Technorati-Tags: mexican movies,reviews,lucha,other places,blue demon,mil mascaras,federico curiel,horror,el santo

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In short: Blindman (1971)

A blind gunman (or rather rifleman, going by his favorite weapon) only known as Blindman (Tony Anthony) is hired to escort fifty mailorder brides to their future husbands in a Texas mining town. Before he can even gets his hands on them, they are kidnapped by the bandit Domingo (Lloyd Battista) and his men and brought to Mexico. There, Domingo wants to use the women to help him deal with the local military in a never explained kidnapping and murder plot to get money out of an unnamed General (Raf Baldassarre).

Blindman lets his Manmohan Desai-clever horse take him to Mexico and nicely asks for his women back, of course to no avail. Abducting Domingo's stupider brother Candy (Ringo Starr, oh yes; well, actually, oh no) to exchange him against the women doesn't work out as our hero planned, and just leads him into captivity, but don't fret, he'll escape to do the usual Spaghetti Western revenge dance.

Someone in the Italian film industry thought it a good idea to finance this fever dream the drug-addled brains of director Ferdinando Baldi and his star/producer/story idea provider Tony Anthony cooked up, and who am I to blame him?

A Spaghetti Western variation of Zatoichi with the goofiest looking Western actor of them all in the lead role must have sounded irresistible. Unfortunately, the finished film isn't as fun or as accomplished as I'd like it to be.

It all starts out fine enough in the insane, weirdly good-natured - even when people are killed and mutilated - tone that would make Baldi's and Anthony's later The Stranger Gets Mean so much stupid fun, but after forty minutes or so of Anthony mugging through absurd set-ups (personal favorite: the bad guys hiding a snake in his salad), the film suddenly turns mean on us. There's a scene where Domingo's men are hunting down, raping and killing the escaped fifty women that would be effective, poignant, deeply uncomfortable and touching in a Corbucci film, but just comes over as vile and misogynistic here. In theory, Baldi pushes all the right buttons, he just isn't able to let the viewer connect emotionally to the victims of the violence, leaving the impression of someone just not knowing what he's doing and (worse) why he is doing it.

The film has more than one moment of this type, and I never felt that Baldi was able to connect this half of his movie with the manga-esque exaggeration of its other half. In fact, I was never sure that Baldi knew what kind of film he was actually making, nor what its themes or mood were supposed to be.

It doesn't help that our titular blindman isn't much of a hero, not even an anti-hero. When he's not actively shooting someone, he is about as effective as a traffic cop without any knowledge of traffic laws.

It's quite a shame really, because the film does look very nice, and some of the action scenes are very ably done. I just don't think it is worth wading through the muck for them.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,ferdinando baldi,tony anthony,spaghetti western,in short

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Kuntilanak (2006)

aka The Chanting

Samantha (Julie Estelle) is a troubled young woman. Her life's like a certain type of country song: she is plagued by highly disturbing recurring nightmares, her mother just died, and something has happened that convinces her to keep her distance from her boyfriend Agung (Evan Sanders). And that's not enough. Her step-dad would very much like her to take her mother's place in his bed.

Obviously, Sam isn't going to live at home for much longer and moves into an exceedingly cheap boarding house specialized in catering to poor young people. I wouldn't know who else would want to move in there - the building is rather run-down, its entrance can only be reached by strolling through a small but creepy graveyard and nearly the first thing the landlady tells Samantha is that a Kuntilanak - a ghostly cross of white-haired corpse woman and horse with an unhealthy connection to children - is said to live in the big tree in the middle of the cemetery. While she claims not to believe in the Kuntilanak, the woman is wildly enthusiastic about the legend. She even sings Sam a chant that is supposedly used to summon the creature.

The chant has a strange effect on the girl, nearly letting her collapse on the floor.

Samantha's nightmares aren't stopping in her new home and while Agung, who studies psychology, tries to find out what his secluded girlfriend's dreams mean, ever stranger things start to happen.

Whenever Samantha feels threatened or upset, she falls into a trance-like state and starts to sing the Kuntilanak's chant. Her (not necessarily undeserving) victim bleeds from the nose, Samantha herself pukes maggots and a little later, the Kuntilanak pays a lethal little visit.

Apart from the ghost problem, there's something else just not right with the boarding house. Rumor has it that it belonged to a satanic cult that somehow used the Kuntilanak's powers to gain fortune. It really doesn't look to good for Samantha's health and sanity here.

Kuntilanak is a mighty fine part of the Indonesian share of the big Asian horror wave. The budget may be low, but director Rizal Mantovani is more than able to hide the rubberiness of his monsters. Even better: Mantovani has a real talent for using the decrepitude and decay of his locations to build a creepy mood and he avoids using too much jump cuts or other stylistic flourishes I still like to blame MTV for.

The plot isn't exactly what I'd call original, but the cliched elements the film is made of are put together cleverly and with classical genre verve. I may have heard this song a hundred times before, but the new cover version is still great. And look, it even has traditional Indonesian instruments (or ghosts), but uses them in a modern enough way.

It's also a nicely straightforward plot, without the sort of underhanded bad twists which have ruined more than one film for me with their insistence on acting as if there were no difference between inanity and cleverness. Instead, Kuntilanak puts its energy into old-fashioned values like logical plot progression, and not deep but believable characterization and wins at least my heart with craftsmanship you might as well call art.

The acting is very solid. Julie Estelle is a little awkward from time to time, but this awkwardness fits Sam's character better than your typical clever young method actor ticks would. Estelle is also quite adept at looking creepy into the camera while chanting, which is a real plus and she has no problems selling her character's thematically and plot-important inner strength while still seeming vulnerable. Sanders' Agung doesn't have much to do, but I'm certainly not going to complain about a film that decides to let its heroine rescue the hero and take care of her own troubles.

Kuntilanak is exactly the type of movie that can make me fall in love with genre movies again and again, doing the same thing every other film does, just better and with a handful of thoughtful changes to the formula that really make it worth my while.

 

Technorati-Tags: indonesian movies,horror,rizal mantovani,julie estelle,reviews

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In short: Nurse Sherri (1978)

aka The Possession of Nurse Sherri

aka The Borening

aka Beyond the Living

aka Black Voodoo

aka Hands of Death

aka Hospital of Terror

aka Killer's Curse

aka Terror Hospital

Pity the poor soul who accidentally saw this one twice under different titles!

The black magician, cult leader or whatever he's supposed to be Reanhauer (Bill Roy) collapses while trying to re-animate one of his followers who must already be smelling rather ripe.

Reanhauer is brought into something that's supposed to be a hospital, and dies during an operation. We'd all be much happier if this were the end of the film, but unfortunately Reanhauer's spirit decides to possess the body of Nurse Sherri (Jill Jacobson) by crawling inside her in the form of animated glittering snot.

So now the poor nurse has to use her sparse free time to hunt down and kill the doctors who operated on Reanhauer, other people the old dead guy doesn't like and again other people the old guy most certainly never met. In contrast to other people I know, Sherri's boyfriend Peter (Geoffrey Land) really doesn't think too highly of having to have sex with dead people, so he tries his best to put things right.

There's also some business about a black, freshly blinded football star ("It's not the end of the world.") and his dead voodoo priest grandma and some sex farce stuff, as well as the most unexciting car chase in film history to pad out the running time and lull you to sleep.

It's probably pretty obvious by now that I have a somewhat higher tolerance for boring movies than many other people and am therefore willing and able to enthuse about the most improbable directors. Nurse Sherri's director Al Adamson and his hand for utter, irredeemable boredom however have always been too much even for me.

Sherri is often called one of Adamson's more watchable films, and I can see why, really - there are at least five, possibly even ten funny minutes in it. Alas, it has a running time of nearly ninety minutes, with the rest of them dedicated to boring the living daylights out of everyone foolish enough to watch this abomination by the power of the holy trinity of padding, unnecessary flashbacks and mind-numbing acting with a special appearance by our old friend, the night shot with zero visibility and overdramatic music.

Usually, I am able to find something positive to say about nearly any movie I watch, but in the case of Nurse Sherri the nicest thing that comes to my mind is that watching it is preferable to getting one's eyes poked out by spiders. Possibly.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,al adamson,in short,horror,why

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Music Monday: No Rock'n'Roll Fun Edition

Technorati-Tags: music,music monday,sleater-kinney

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Exterminators of the Year 3000 (1983)

We are in Post-Apocalyptica again. Judicious use of atom bombs has destroyed the ozone layer completely and turned the Earth into a dried-up wasteland where roaming bands of would-be punks called exterminators duke it out against each other. How fortunate for them that there's no lack of petrol.

One remnant of civilization still remains, though, in the form of a bunch of people living in caves and using their own private waterhole to help their greenhouse plants grow. But these people have troubles of their own. Their well will dry up any day now, leaving them ill prepared for survival.

At least they know where to find more water. Trouble is, the water source is hidden in the territory controlled by a gangleader called Crazy Bull (Fernando Bilbao), who isn't really someone you could start up diplomatic relations with or even meet without getting killed and probably eaten. Thus, the first man trying to reach the water hasn't returned yet. The cave dwellers decide to send out a second badly armed group to get the precious liquid, but a run in with Crazy Bull's men leaves only the child Tommy (Luca Venantini) and his pet hamster (presumably called Boo) alive.

So Tommy, in his annoying kenny-like way, decides to get to the water on his own. On his way, he falls in with the local more assholish semi-Mad Max, Alien (Robert Iannucci). Alien's not trustworthy at all, but at least he is an enemy of Crazy Bull, since he stole Bull's favorite super car, The Exterminator.

Not that Alien was able to keep the thing. He has learned the hard way that you shouldn't leave your car unlocked - not even in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

On their way to the water source, Tommy and Alien have various silly adventures and meet interesting people like the ex-astronaut/now mechanic Papillon (Luigi Pigozzi/Alan Collins hamming it up beautifully) and Alien's ex-girlfriend, the honest thief Trash (Alicia Moro).

Giuliano Carnimeo's Exterminators starts out with half an hour of nearly non-stop post-apocalyptic carnival car stunt driving and assorted fighting, and at that point contains already more of it than 90 percent of Italian Mad Max imitations. One would expect that the well of fun would then start to dry up (see what I did there?) and the rest of the film would consist of copious amounts of people stumbling through the desert while a synthesizer gently bleeps.

One would expect wrongly. Exterminators is one of the handful of films of its genre which know what to do when no cars are exploding, which is to say, it starts to throw silly pieces of whimsy at the viewer, not with the gesture of someone doing world building, but with the gentle, laconic enthusiasm of someone really getting into that pulp SF thing. The film isn't getting especially insane, instead, Carnimeo opts for charm and consciously used humor to present the ideas that are wildly stuffed into the script. Surprisingly enough, it works, and my inner twelve year old was having the time of his life with bionic arms, ex-astronauts and mutant guys in robes.

Technically, the film is mostly alright. Nobody would call Carnimeo a stylish director (I hope), but his no frills way of filming does fit the film's dry tone (oh my god, I did it again) rather nicely. The acting is mostly neutral, with dear old Pigozzi and Fernando Bilbao doing some fine overacting and everyone else mostly making shifty eyes and/or screaming nonsense (the script was co-written by Dardano Sacchetti, after all).

One last thing besides being a whole lot of fun that  Exterminators does right is the production design. Everything is either dusty and scavenged looking or delightfully retro-futuristic, most probably because most of the props and costumes were in fact scavenged from the sets of other films.

All in all, that's more than enough to make me happy.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,post-apocalypse,action,sf,luciano pigozzi,giuliano carnimeo,reviews

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In short: Gakidama (1985)

aka The Tastiest Flesh

aka Demon Within

A newspaper sends a writer and a photographer with a special talent for shooting the really weird stuff into the woods to get a picture of a will-o'-the-wisp reported to appear there. The thing actually does appears, obviously lured in by the tasty treats the two have hung into the trees to attract it. During the photo action, the thing transforms into a worm and stealthily sneaks into the writer's ear.

The next three months of his life, he doesn't do much more than to eat and eat, and then eat some more, until he falls into a comatose sleep from which he - to the shock of his wife - only awakes when a gremlin-esque creature (here called a "ghoul") escapes through his mouth. Fortunately a strange man with a face mask is there to catch the little beast; unfortunately he let's the bugger escape without telling the couple about it.

In the following weeks, the writer will learn that he has now developed an addiction to eating the (cooked) flesh of these ghouls and his wife will have to cope with a classic zuni doll situation which can only end in pregnancy.

"Oh those wacky Japanese etc etc" are words that of course do apply here, as they do all too often where my movie watching politics are concerned. Apart from this - what we call "the obvious" - Gakidama is 54 minutes packed full of weird, blackly comical fun, with some slightly gross moments and more off-kilter ideas than most of us could use up in a two hour film.

That the photography is very nice and the main monster is a charming latex muppet seems somehow beside the point when you're talking about a short film that has the bizarre exuberance of a Kazuo Umezu manga, but there you go: the film's photography is in fact quite excellent and the muppet cute in a very toothy way.

It's all cobbled together from disparate elements most friends of genre films will recognize without my help, yet its Frankensteinian construction has a beauty all of its own. Just don't ask for explanations or a logic that isn't emotional and (at least partly) thematic. You won't get any, because the film has already jumped to the next idea, without looking back. And why shouldn't it?

 

Technorati-Tags: japanese movies,horror,comedy,wtf,in short

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On WTF: Mirageman (2007)

Who says you need Hollywood money to make a good superhero movie? Not I.

Learn what I do say about the Chilean film Mirageman in my review on WTF-Film.

Technorati-Tags: chilean movies,reviews,action,comedy,marko zaror,ernesto diaz espinoza,other places

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• 18:30 Oh, a new Lightning Bolt record coming in October.
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In short: The Dark Power (1985)

John "Foureagles" Cody (Robert Bushyhead) has been guarding the place called Totem Hill for a long time. The Native American is convinced that the hill is the resting place of a group of evil Toltecs that somehow made their way far north into the US and that said evil Toltecs still like to rise and do what evil Toltecs do if not held bound by his rituals.

Too bad that the man dies before he can make his testament and give his hill to a group of "mystics" we'll never get to see. So instead, his son David (Tony Shaw) inherits the place and does the obvious, namely rent his father's old place out as a dorm for female college students.

Soon, a quartet of comedy zombie Toltecs rises and raises quite a stink. What a stroke of luck that the typical modern sorority girl knows how to treat a zombie and that Cody's old friend, the local forest ranger Girard (whipwielding hero of many a poverty row western Lash LaRue), still knows how to wield his magic whip. When he's not flirting with a reporter who could be his great granddaughter.

Oh my. The Dark Power is once again one of those films that would lead most sane people to questions like "What is this? Why am I watching this? Am I insane?". Fortunately, I have never been one with much of a hold on sanity, so I just look at a film like this and sigh wistfully.

So nothing except boring college student shenanigans happens for most of the film? There's more bad acting than in any soap opera you'd care to mention? Lash LaRue is by far the best actor? The jokes in this horror comedy aren't funny at all? Sexy Grandpa LaRue makes you uncomfortable? As does action hero smack talking Lash? I can take it!

I can even feel kind of amused by it, especially when out of the mire of nonsense that make up this thing suddenly enticing shapes arise (and I don't mean the badly done zombies, or the naked sorority girls) and try to form some sort of anti-racist message. Not that they succeed, but the effort really is endearing, as is the obvious love the film has for LaRue (even if some people might call it misguided).

To be honest, nothing about The Dark Power works as it's supposed to do, yet its constant efforts at being funny, or an ode to Lash, or just plain competent are as sweet as can be.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,horror,comedy,zombies,lash larue,in short,phil smoot

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Hands of Blood (1974)

aka Stepsisters

A small town in Texas. Diana (Bond Gideon) returns home to live with her stepsister Norma (Sharyn Talbert) and Norma's husband Thorpe (Hal Fletcher) after a stint in Dallas hasn't turned out too well for her.

Norma and Thorpe really hate each other's guts. Thorpe mostly seems to have married Norma for her land, yet is irrationally jealous of her supposed affairs with random men, while Norma leaves out no possibility when it comes to berating her husband. Thorpe wants Norma to sell the mansion they are living in, because the oil on the grounds whose existence he's trying to keep a secret from her in vain should make quite a fine profit for him to buy more whiskey from, but Norma doesn't want to. She even (and how shocking is that!) refuses his marital right to intercourse!

What can a real Texan example of manliness like Thorpe do? Oh, yes, start an affair with Diana by trying to rape her and then try to talk her into helping her to murder her stepsister in a plan that can only work in a state where killing your wife when she's in bed with another man is no big deal at all, which Texas seems to be - hopefully only in the mind of the script writer.

Alas, Thorpe has bit off more than he can chew. There is another killer making his rounds and he has already killed and hidden away another lover of Diana's and this other killer has quite different plans from our would-be wife killer.

Hands of Blood is another one of those films I absolutely wouldn't recommend to anyone with "normal" tastes, yet that I nonetheless find quite compelling.

It's certainly not a "good" film - the script is limp, the acting amateurish and mostly more than a little off, the sound recorded so badly that it's often difficult to understand what anyone's talking about and director Perry Tong obviously doesn't know what he's doing.

But it is exactly the combination of these factors with some lucky breaks in form of moody rural decay (Texas style) and beautiful early 70s film grain that make the film worth the time spent on it.

The script has a randomness about it which makes the predictable thriller plot more interesting than it should be. You never know in which way the film will get its plot beats wrong, and I was absolutely delighted by the sudden jolt caused by the few times it gets them right. There's also a wonderfully strange little country ditty that explains the plot right at the end of the movie, just in case you couldn't follow.

The same can be said about the acting - it's all wrong, but it is wrong in unpredictable and fascinating  ways. It's as if you are watching people trying to imitate an alien imitation of the way people act in real life.

But best of all - and chiefly responsible for the film's magic - is Tong's direction. He is using weird angles, subjective camera, illogical editing. He is framing the important parts of his scenes somewhere in the background. If you'd let him, he'd probably even sing and dance for you, all in a desperate attempt to keep his film as far away from being static or normal as possible.

And it is true that much of this just doesn't work, or just makes scenes that should be simple obtuse and hardly to follow instead, that it breaks most rules of good filmmaking for no discernible reason.

But it also creates something special and very dear to my heart, not a tight and clever thriller ("a good film"), instead a film that is more like a state of mind you as the viewer can share with the people making it for a little while; or a world of its own - a little like Texas, yet much more like a dream-state Tong is gracious enough to pull us into for a moment or two.

There are a few times during Hands of Blood's running time when Tong's frankly absurd style and the basic acid rock (courtesy of one Sandy Pinkard) that makes up about half of the soundtrack combine and transform what should be a shabby backyard low budget film into about the closest thing to transcendence I know. If that's not what filmmaking is all about, I don't know what.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,reviews,perry tong,thriller

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In short: The Lone Runner (1986)

Somewhere, at some inexplicable point in time, a bunch of rather dull people live in a desert.

Various tribes - let's call them the Poor People, the Bedouins and the Sand People - roam the desert around something that could be meant to be a town (or not). A man called the Summer King (Donal Hudson) rules over the place (or not) peacefully enough, while Garrett the Lone Runner (Miles O'Keeffe and his magical hair, mostly riding and not running) rides through the desert looking heroic, righting wrongs (or not) etc.

One day the Summer King's daughter Analisa (Savina Gersak) is kidnapped by the Bedouins.

The whole kidnapping business is just a ploy thought up by the Summer King's confidante Emerick (Michael Aronin) to get at the thousand diamonds (and the film is pretty adamant about that number) his boss has stashed away. I'm pretty sure those diamonds will be of use in the desert.

Of course, rescuing kidnapped women falls under Garrett's job description, and he'll have quite a bit of rescuing and re-rescuing to do, because he might be great at pulling a damsel out of distress, but he's just crap at keeping said damsel un-kidnapped.

The desert dwellers don't make his job any easier. The Sand People, lead by a certain Skorm (John Steiner), also want a piece of the diamonds and are willing to do the most fiendish evil cackling to get what they want.

Well, that was slightly underwhelming, yet puzzling. The Lone Runner is usually called a post-apocalypse film with horses standing in for cars, but I'm not completely convinced that it is supposed to take place after a global catastrophe. Knowing how Italian genre films use history, this might as well be meant to take place in 19th century Tunisia, or the time and place when Maciste met Zorro.

Unfortunately, thinking about this is the most fun I had with the film. It's just not all that interesting to watch people ride through a indifferently shot desert while one of the more boring synthesizer soundtracks in Italian film history noodles away in the background.

Points of interest between all the riding are few and far between. O'Keeffe moves his facial muscles at least once, John Steiner plays his baddie as Adam Ant on crack and some of the fight scenes are somewhat competently done. You could also add O'Keeffe's use of a crossbow with exploding bolts and the homemade laser the Sand People use to the mildly awesome.Alas, director Ruggero Deodato never heard of the word "awesome" and does everything in his power to make even these flourishes rather slow and boring.

I'm not asking for much in Italian post-apocalypse (or not) action films from the 80s, but a film needs to show a little effort, either by being insane or enthusiastic or both.

What Deodato delivers instead is a desert of wasted opportunities.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,post-apocalypse,action,ruggero deodato,miles o'keeffe,john steiner,in short

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Death Rides A Horse (1967)

A group of bandits attacks a small family farm to get at the wagon full of money that is kept there for the night.

The bandits don't just kill the guards, though, they quite senselessly slaughter the family and burn down their farm. One of the killers takes pity on the smallest boy and hides him from his partners. The child hasn't seen the face of his savior, nor many of the faces of the others, but he has seen some distinguishing marks on each of them, and he doesn't look like he's ever going to forget them. The only physical trace the men leave behind is a peculiarly formed spur.

Fifteen years later, the boy, whose name turns out to be Bill, has grown into John Phillip Law, and the way he trains with his guns and never seems to take his eyes off of them shows that vengeance is the only thing he is living for. Alas, the last fifteen years have never brought any of his family's killers close to him. Bill is sure they are still out there, somewhere, but he doesn't know where to look for them.

That changes when Ryan (Lee van Cleef) comes to town. Ryan has spent the last fifteen years in prison, betrayed by the same people who killed Bill's parents. For some reason (and what might that be?), the first place he visits when coming to town are the graves of Bill's parents.

Ryan doesn't even have to look very hard for his former friends like Bill does, no, his first night in town two gunmen try to kill him in his sleep. Of course, he is played by van Cleef and therefore not in the habit of letting himself getting killed that easily. Ryan now knows very well where he has to go, and leaves behind two corpses wearing quite peculiarly shaped spurs.

When Bill sees the spurs, he rides off in pursuit of the older man, convinced that Ryan can lead him to his objects of vengeance. Ryan himself doesn't want a partner in his endeavors and manages to leave the angry young man behind without a horse. This is not the last time one or the other of the men does this, but they always end up helping each other out in the end, even though Ryan's idea of vengeance on his "friends" consists in getting money out of them.

One doesn't get the impression that he minds too much when they are getting killed, though.

Bill and Ryan really need each others help, too, because the bandits have become well situated in various communities, with lots of henchmen and unsavory plans.

I'd like to put Death Rides A Horse into the larger context of its director's Giulio Petroni's work, alas I have seen nothing else by him, and the Internet's not exactly full of deep essays about his body of work.

Fortunately enough, the film is an excellent Spaghetti Western even without such context.

Its plot does sound like an Italian Western by the numbers, but its execution elevates the generic to the archetypal and mythical with an effortlessness you don't see all that often.

Sometimes - usually when I have drunk too much Green Tea - I like to try and see films not as worlds made from moving pictures, but as rhythm made visual. Death Rides A Horse is perfectly easy to watch - or rather feel - that way, with its sense of perpetual forward motion and its fantastic, yet weird Morricone music. The music is really very important here. It is at once a typical Morricone soundtrack, rhythmic and minimalist and always dancing with the things we see on screen (or is it just making them dance?), but it's also always threatening to drift into the atonal and weird, as if what we witness on screen is of such mythical proportions that there's no other way to react to it than to leave musical structures behind.

Petroni's direction is often brilliant, eschewing dialogue whenever possible, preferring a telling hand movement of Van Cleef or Law's merciless, empty gaze to reams of dialogue. The viewer knows the character archetypes here anyway; there's truly no need for explanations, and what human depths are needed are better provided through physical acting, camera placement and movement than words.

This tactic could backfire badly with less capable actors in the lead, but Van Cleef and Law are both doing perfect work here. Looking at Van Cleef's body of work this is not all that surprising, but Law isn't the type I would have expected to be all that great in a Western. I tend to be wrong frighteningly often, though, and Law really steps up to Van Cleef's presence here and even provides his hate-driven character with an underlying sense of compassion.

The film is structured rather episodically, I wouldn't however call its structure "loose" - it's more as if the film's forward motion started out in more than one place, yet inevitably (and there is true capital-I Inevitability on display here) finds its end in the same place.

What we have here seems to me like a perfect Spaghetti Western, just slightly below the quality of the best films of the three Sergios, yet also a little less cynical, angry and hurt than much of the output of those three is. The latter is no point against Petroni's film. Sometimes it's good to have a film with a belief in compassion.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,reviews,spaghetti western,lee van cleef,john phillip law,giulio petroni