Short Film Friday: The Gaze

In short: Cuadecuc, vampir (1970)

Supposedly, this started out as a behind the scenes documentary about the making of Jess Franco’s version of Dracula. But something must have happened with director Pere Portabella on the way, for what we actually get is a film that uses the behind the scenes material, B-roll from the Franco movie, and assorted footage to tell its own version of Dracula in the proper chronological order. Shot in beautifully grainy black and white this looks like the somewhat more concise ghost of the Franco movie.

To make matters more interesting, Portabella doesn’t use dialogue or location sound for most parts of the movies – until Christopher Lee gets the final word, as he so clearly loved to have. The soundscape instead consists predominantly of electronic and not so electronic drones, manipulated jazz orchestral music and indefinable noises composed by Carles Santos. This not only adds to the movie’s avantgarde score card (or is it a bingo card?) but also combines with the atmospheric quality of the footage and Portabella’s often striking editing rhythms to produce a curiously eerie mood.

More often than not, things feel downright spooky, and even perfectly normal and natural moments like the application of a bit of bloody makeup on Soledad Miranda’s face (which Portabella quite sensibly seems to love as much as Franco did) can take on a tense, perhaps even mildly disturbing, quality. Other viewers’ mileage may vary considerably, of course, for my mood of ineffable eeriness might very well be yours of goofy camp, imaginary reader. Which either demonstrates the magic of filmmaking, or the pointlessness of all movie writing, depending on one’s mood.

Humanoids from the Deep (1980)

A small New England fishing town has rather a lot of trouble: the fishing yield of the local salmon has been decreasing for years now, so much so that most of the population greets the plans of a corporation to build a cannery and start on a highly industrialized fishing operation with happiness. Only a couple of people, really mostly native American Johnny Eagle (Anthony Pena), are set against it. Johnny even might have a chance to stop the project in court, so the New England fishing rednecks under the leadership of Hank Slattery (Vic Morrow) are getting antsy enough, they start acting like the Klan. Despite being for the cannery, local boat owner Jim Hill (Doug McClure) doesn’t hold truck with these assholes, and might even become a voice of reason for the saner of the local fishermen, if he and the rest of the cast didn’t get distracted by a bunch of fish men going around killing men and raping women.

These gill men are of course the result of genetic experimentation by Evilcorp meant to increase salmon yield, a side-effect their own chief scientist Dr Drake (Ann Turkel) had warned them about (but they wouldn’t listen, and she apparently wouldn’t whistleblow). And yes, the local Salmon Festival is right around the corner, and the Mayor of AmityEvilcorp would absolutely prefer if things like a bit of murder, rape and kidnapping were kept on the down low. So it’s left to the fists (and guns) of Doug McClure and Anthony Pena to fight the fish folk eating the fisher folk.

It is rather astonishing how many Nature Strikes Back, Jaws-alike and classic monster movie clichés can be squeezed into eighty minutes of runtime, but that’s how producer Roger Corman liked it in this phase, and that’s certainly what director Barbara Peeters (with additional sleaze shot by Jimmy T. Murakami and/or James Sbardellati) delivered.

Because the film is stuffed to the gills with clichés and tropes that need little explanation, it zips along at an often incredible pace. Peeters somehow manages to keep things surprisingly coherent, with character motivations that make sense as far as they go, and a plot that may be a mix of the greatest hits of all monster movies, but also holds together through kill scenes, unpleasantness and weirdness.

Obviously, I have no problem at all with the film’s nature as a bit of a best of album with added sleaze, particularly not when it is executed with such vigour, as well as a true commitment to being a bit gory and unpleasant in the traditional exploitation style. The effects, particularly in the great, climactic attack on the Salmon Festival and the fantastic Alien rip-off moment that gets us out of the door do get rather Italian from time to time and become so imaginative, they stop being just unpleasant and instead turn surreal.

An added ace in the hole in this regard are the monster suits designed by Rob Bottin. While they were clearly realized on the cheap, there’s a sense for the strange detail on display that makes them work very well indeed. These things – all of them recognizable individuals too – look wrong in the just the right way. Mouths that are too broad, or arms that are too long suggest these creatures are something not coming out of nature as we know it, but mutants that don’t have a place in an ordered universe. Which is quite the effect to achieve with a batch of rubber suits.

In short: Fatal Exam (1990)

It’s nearly the end of the semester for a group of university students. Their parapsychology – and yes, the film actually acknowledges that this isn’t a mainstream field of study – professor has come up with a bit of an adventure for them to end on: investigate a supposedly haunted house over a long weekend. It’s quite the place too, with a nice day of ritual murder in its past and more to come in its future (spoiler?).

Of course, before the murders can eventually start again, there a lot of very slow scenes of actors wandering the least creepy house imaginable, slowly reading from papers, and so on.

Because if writer/director/producer/editor Jack Snyder’s local (in this case Missouri) production is one thing, it is thorough. So expect half of the dialogue to be repeated two or three times in the same emotionless and bored tone the amateur thespians here say – and do – nearly everything in; scenes not to end – ever!; and for half of the dialogue to be repeated two or three times in the same emotionless and bored tone the amateur thespians here say – and do – nearly everything in. Did I mention the repetitions? It’s no wonder the whole things goes on for nearly two hours that feel rather more like eight.

Anyway, from time to time, Fatal Exam does get to the good stuff I hope for from weird little local one-off productions. There is, for example, a pretty incredible scene in which one of the characters encounters a head – actually, “a fucking head” if we want to quote the guy – in a dining table, repeating the same lines of dialogue about it again and again with even less emotional energy than the rest of the cast one has to see to believe. Even better, the character will verbally return to this episode repeatedly later on, until he sees a ghostly apparition with a sword hack up a just as ghostly woman, from which point on, he, until his demise, will talk about that one a lot. It’s all a bit like being trapped in the mind of someone with obsessive compulsive disorder. I am unsure if that’s a selling point or a warning.

Music Monday: Hammer Horror Edition

KKN di Desa Penari (2022)

A group of Indonesian university students on the KKN-part of their academic life come to a village out in the middle of nowhere to develop a new water source for the place. While somewhat eccentric and certainly beholden to some beliefs rather confusing to our city folk protagonists, the villagers are for once in a film like this friendly enough and seem to genuinely care for the young people’s safety and health. Since the village is rather spirit-haunted, this does result in helpful rules like “don’t enter that part of the forest, it doesn’t belong to us”, but what are young people to do when they hear gamelan music from there? Or when a female jinn (Aulia Sarah) makes offers they simply can’t refuse?

Awi Suryadi’s KKN di Desa Penari was apparently a huge blockbuster hit in Indonesia, even bigger than the director’s Danur movies. The story is based on a “true Internet story”, which I read as “serial creepypasta” by somebody going by the handle of simpleman. Lacking completely in Indonesian, I couldn’t say how close it sticks to its source, though the film’s somewhat episodic structure seems typical for the kind of thing it adapts. Eventually, most of the curious experiences our students have are tied together with the big threat and/or the spirit protecting our Muslim final girl Nur (Tissa Biani), but two thirds of the film are a bit too loose for my tastes, more held together by Suryadi’s experienced and capable hand for creepy – but not too creepy – set pieces than by any kind of narrative drive.

Part of the problem there is how long Desa Penari is, with more than two hours runtime that include two epilogues and a triple dose of crying; a bit of judicious cutting down of repetition and the lesser of the spooky set pieces would probably have been a considerable improvement. Which is not to say this isn’t a good, sometimes even great, bit of contemporary Indonesian horror, but a tighter focus and this would have been an actual masterpiece.

Even so, there is a lot to like here, beginning with Suryadi’s eschewing of jump scares for longer, lingering suspense scenes that often end in some wonderfully creepy imagery. The first Gamelan dancer possession, for example, feels particularly eerie because the director gives it room to breathe, visually exploring it instead of throwing it away as a quick shock. Which also opens up room for a handful of very cool possession sequences the young actresses can throw themselves into, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my horror watching life, it is that young actresses really seem to love doing this sort of stuff.

As an admirer of folk horror, I’m also very happy with the decision to not make the villagers evil cultist, but rather a group of people who have learned to live with the supernatural forces surrounding them, having found a way to live and let live with malevolent things that are still an inescapable part of their world. Of course, they are not terribly competent at protecting their guests. As the film portrays it, that’s in part thanks to the divide between town and country beliefs which makes it impossible to actually explain what’s going on before it is too late. In part, because our young people do tend to “sin” – like all of Suryadi’s films, this is a bit more on the socially conservative side than the more brutal style of Indonesian horror – and in part because supernatural forces of this kind which are also natural forces can’t truly be contained by us mere humans. Even the god(s) of your choice can have problems there.

Speaking of folk horror, the mix of jinn and spirit beliefs, including the beliefs of the local pagan (is that the right word for the Muslim part of the world?) past, and the way they intersect with Muslim folkloric (more than religious) ideas is particularly fascinating here, suggesting a comparable dialectic as existed between Christian and pagan belief structures but playing out with less of a drive to violently suppress the old ways. So there’s quite a lot of interesting stuff going on in this particular crowd pleaser, despite my issues with its pacing.

Three Films Make A Post: It Never Forgives Or Forgets

The House Where Evil Dwells (1982): A couple played by Edward Albert and Susan George (and their kid) move into a traditional little house in Tokyo. It was surprisingly cheap, but then, it is haunted by a trio of ghosts who have nothing better to do than to entice the couple and their best friend (played by Doug McClure) into a repeat performance of their own deadly love triangle from some hundred years ago. All of which does sound rather nice as an example of US/Japanese horror, particularly once you realize the film does actually utilize quite a few Japanese actors and locations. Unfortunately, whereas the film’s basic idea is sound, the script by Robert Suhosky and James Hardiman is tediously obvious, and lacks any even second or third hand clue about how Japanese ghosts and curses might work.

And Kevin Connor – usually great when staging scenes of Doug McClure punching rubber monsters and pirates – is a terrible director choice for a ghost story. There’s simply no sense of subtlety, nor any ability to build up the proper ghostly mood in the man’s toolkit, so all we get is goofiness and very little of substance or interest beyond the basic idea of the film.

The Black Tower (1987): This British short film by the somewhat anonymously named John Smith about a man being haunted by a building, the titular black tower that somehow follows him wherever he goes, on the other hand, is a brilliant example of how the techniques of experimental filmmaking can achieve a feeling of true, creepy weirdness. On paper, there’s very little to a film that consists of an off-screen monologue and shots that mostly show that black tower from various angles and in various surroundings, and some dislocating editing tricks, but in practice, this is one of the most effective treatments of the encroachment of true strangeness into daily live I’ve seen. That it also from time to time manages to be very, very funny indeed just adds to Smith’s achievement.

Im Schloß der blutigen Begierde (1967): But let us end our first post in this new October on a bummer, as is traditional in horror. This was initially supposed to have been directed by the great Jess Franco, and thereby acquired some members of Uncle Jess’s ensemble like Janine Reynaud, Howard Vernon and Michel Lemoine. Fate in form of the siren song of a Fu Manchu movie put Adrian Hoven on the director’s chair instead. As treated by Hoven, the film mostly consists of a series of scenes of characters babbling horrifying double entendres, having flashbacks, getting their kits off and from time to time committing acts of violence, all badly held together by your typical Gothic horror guff and flashbacks to former lives; also included are some real life operation shots, which the film treats as a big selling point.

Hoven is very good at aping the tedious side of Franco (or he can be tedious all by himself, I don’t want to be unfair to the guy), but brings little of the visual inventiveness, the obsessive energy, or the plain coolness of Franco’s filmmaking into play. For a film full of Gothic tropes, nudity and a bit of blood, this feels surprisingly boring and anaemic. The theoretically good stuff is there, but it is treated perfunctorily, without any drive or actual interest in it.

Short Film Friday: Night Visit

A couple of days off

In the roll up to the best month of the year, I'm going to take a few days off from blogging. The October festivities will begin after I return on September, 30th.

In short: Haunted Forest (2007)

Native American Sean (Sevy Di Cione) and a couple of his friends come to a supposedly haunted forest looking for a cursed tree. Sean is following a trail laid down by his grandfather in a pretty eldritch looking book, trying to right the wrong which caused the supernatural problems the area is now suffering from. Things don’t go terribly well for the group, nor for the parallel wood traipsers of Jennifer (Jennifer Luree) and Kiyomi (Naomi Ueno), because the Evil around here is physically as well as spiritually infectious.

I had rather a lot of fun with director/writer Mauro Borrelli’s WarHunt, so taking a look at this earlier example of his work that just happens to also be about people encountering the supernatural in a creepy patch of forest seemed like a good idea. This is a bit less slick than the later movie, clearly made on an even tighter budget, but it also shows some of the same elements I enjoyed so much there. Mainly, Borreli has a great eye for the creepy picture and so manages quite a few highly effective and genuinely interesting and inventive shots and scenes of plant-based body horror and rather original witchcraft. Practically every horror scene here has one really clever or creepy bit that elevates everything around it, turning what could be a very by the numbers kill show into a movie that’s rather more macabre than these things typically get.

To be fair, there’s also a lot of not terribly involving character interaction on screen, with middling acting and middling dialogue, but I found myself okay with these moments of slight tedium, because there was always the next cool little scene of plant witchery to look forward to.

In short: Men (2022)

If you want, you can certainly read this pretty feminist horror film by Alex Garland as a very on the nose and thereby much too blunt “all men/Rory Kinnears are evil” sort of affair. That reading of the film certainly is in the tale of a Harper - often brilliantly portrayed by Jessie Buckley, adding emotional nuance even in scenes where simply gaping at the weirdness would be perfectly sensible as an acting decision - fleeing the remains of a terrible relationship and the death that ended it to a quiet country cottage where she inadvertently steps into the weird. Which, apparently, is a place where all men, even creepy little boys, are played by Rory Kinnear.

However, there are a lot of other thing going on here as well that point away from the blandness of allegory and the sort of metaphor that can only have one meaning like a stupid crossword puzzle, into a truer and freer weirdness. This weirdness is still interested in the obvious thematic core concerns, making the sort of shitty exchanges with shitty men they probably expected better from many women have to go through much too regularly additionally disquieting in ways they wouldn’t be in the real world, and which make normal exit strategies from these situations barely even thinkable.

There seems to be a whole realm of spiritual and existential horror floating just out of Harper’s line of sight at first, only to be pushed into the foreground more and more. Old bad myths out of the realm of folk horror – in particular a very strange reading of the Green Man - want to take control of Harper’s life in ways very similar to how her relationship to her husband ended up, with anger, helplessness and inversions of ideas of fertility pushing and pulling at reality. The Old Ways as a very different kind of nightmare than usual in folk horror, realized by Garland in often striking and hypnotic pictures that are often much more than just weird for the metaphor’s sake.

Music Monday: Clownish Edition

Blind Rage (1976)

A mysterious mastermind (B.T. Anderson) gets wind of an opportunity to steal a huge load of secret US government money meant to be pumped into South East Asia to buy away the domino effect. He has a brilliant plan: convince five blind men (Tony Ferrer, Leo Fong, D’Urville Martin, Dick Adair and Darnell Garcia) of various nationalities and backgrounds to commit the robbery. This way, they won’t ever see their boss and so can’t identify him. The blind gang will be protected, as well, for they are going to pretend to be able to see during the robbery. Obviously.

Before the heist can happen, our robbers will go through an embarrassing training regimen with Sally (Leila Hermosa), a teacher specialized in helping the blind.

There’s really no way around it, so, like everybody else writing or talking about Efren C. Piñon’s Blind Rage, I have to lead in with the obvious: this is indeed a riff on The Doberman Gang in which the dogs have been replaced by blind people. That’s obviously all kinds of problematic from today’s point of view, but it is also very, very funny, once you start thinking about how the development of this particular piece of exploitation must have happened. One can’t help but imagine a certain amount of alcohol being involved.

Unlike the Doberman movie, Blind Rage is actually fun. Sure, it carries some of the hallmarks of Filipino export exploitation cinema of its time, so expect some flat acting, a peculiar dub, and some dark side streets and beige walls standing in for Hong Kong, Tokyo, Manila and parts of the USA. However, after a somewhat slow beginning, the whole affair develops a pleasant amount of energy, going by with a nice zip while hitting all of the heist movie tropes and nods to all kinds of exploitation sub-genres you’d expect, and doing this with conviction. Piñon may not be a terribly stylish director here – he’s really more on the functional side of things – but he does know how to stage cheap action, and how to shoot around ugly sets rather well, something that again helps keep spirits and pace of the film up.

Another likeable aspect about Blind Rage – and mostly what keeps the weird blindness fetish from becoming too offensive – is how seriously it treats its utterly goofy set-up. Keeping irony and self-consciousness to the minds of prospective viewers works wonders, and lets Blind Rage treat its blind criminals like this kind of movie would treat any seeing one. In other words, they are mostly violent shitheads, one of them’s rapey, and rolling over for the police as state’s witness happens in a manner of seconds for another one. All of which doesn’t exactly make for a likeable group of protagonists, but also staves off any potential mawkishness.

I’m not as happy with the decision to introduce the characters – about half with a short scene in which we learn of the violent way they lost their sight – as specialists in particular fields (one is a stage magician, and another a bull fighter!) only to then not make use of these talents in the heist itself, but I suspect these backgrounds are more the film’s attempts at characterisation than a doing Chekhov’s bull fighter kind of deal.

On the other hand, there are not many other films that feature a heist scene based on actors awkwardly playing blind people who are awkwardly pretending to see; nor many that would shoot a scene like that like your typical brutal crime movie heist, including quite the body count.

And if that’s not enough, Blind Rage decides to finish up on a short sequence of scenes in which good old Fred Williamson suddenly pops in for a cigar, some near shirtlessness and a good ass-kicking to reprise his role as Jesse Crowder and finish off the gang’s male, seeing, handler nobody cared about up until this point in a not terribly spectacular roof fight.

Structurally, that’s of course utter nonsense, but it does end things on an unexpected note while adding to the Williamson quota in a viewer’s life, which can only be a good thing.

Three Films Make A Post: I stopped caring a long time ago

Samaritan (2022): If ever you wanted to see a cross between Over the Top and The Dark Knight Rises, director Julius Avery, writer Bragi F. Schut and an expressionless rock formation named Sylvester Stallone have made the movie for you. Apart from badly ripping off the least regarded Nolan Batman movie, this is a film whose makers ignore the last three decades of superhero movies, instead preferring the eldritch horror of using a child as their viewpoint character, and the bad child acting that belongs to this sort of thing.

There’s a big reveal you’ll see coming ten minutes in but that still takes more than an hour to happen, and whose early use would have made the film and its characters a million times more interesting, action sequences that can’t see the difference between low-powered and badly structured, and a lead actor who either can’t act anymore or simply doesn’t on general principle. That the dialogue is dreadful and the plot harbours neither surprises nor interesting ideas and can’t even hit generic plot beats well should come as no surprise in this context.

Nope (2022): The new movie by Jordan Peele, on the other hand, fails on a much higher level. But then, even in this, his by far worst film, you can’t help but see that he’s still an excellent director. Just one who lets himself down as a writer this time around, creating a film that bloats a ninety minute plot up to more than two hours. I’m all for slow horror and spending lots of time to get to know characters as well as to build up dread, but in this case, the characters and their relations are simply not interesting or complicated enough to reward the time spent with them, and the monster that’s the film’s major threat is not the kind of thing for which “dread” is the appropriate feeling. Worse, the film’s attempt at a commentary on people’s drive to win cheap entertainment fame has little that intrinsically or metaphorically connects it with the horror movie parts of the affair, which makes the film not just feel sluggish, but also somewhat disconnected.

Requiem for a Village (1975): Most films about traditional country ways getting swallowed by the New and the city do tend to have a certain reactionary undertone in which the old is somehow always better than the new. David Gladwell’s documentary about the memories of an old country man coming to life on a graveyard is not such a film. There’s a deep longing for disappearing ways of living running through the film, yet it is also painfully honest about the harshness and cruelty of country life and country people, often seeming to suggest that only the good bits of the Old are swallowed by the New, while the violence, the rape and the cruelty just continue on in other clothing.

Short Film Friday: Mrs. Duprey

In short: Love Crazy (1941)

Steve (William Powell) and Susan (Myrna Loy) Ireland are a very happily married couple, until their latest wedding anniversary turns into a series of comedic misunderstandings, certainly helped by Steve’s seeming inability to ever just straightforwardly tell his wife what the hell is going on. Soon, Susan is convinced Steve is cheating on her with the ex-girlfriend (Patrick Grayson) he dropped to marry her (or the other way round, depending on who you ask) and puts in for a very, very quick divorce. Steve decides his only way out of this trouble is to pretend to be insane, which would delay the divorce long enough for him to explain to Susan what actually happened, eventually. Alas, the man is declared rather more insane than he had hoped for.

I’m sure quite a few elements of this Powell/Loy vehicle directed by Jack Conway would not go over well right now with everyone. Its portrayal of mental illness is certainly, even for a film from its era, on the risible side, cliched and more than just a bit stupid; though, on the plus side, it clearly finds the business and practice of psychiatry just as hilarious as it does the mentally ill. If one isn’t grabbed by outrage by the thought of a film from the early 40s being terribly of its time, one might even suggest the film quietly argues that mental health and “normality” are very much things depending on the perspective of the onlooker. But then, this might indeed be a bit too much to put on a screwball comedy quite as low-brown in the style of its humour as this one is. Then again, when reading as many negative things into movies seems to be a perfectly serviceable critical approach for quite a few people, perhaps I’m allowed the opposite too, from time to time?

I’m generally not a fan of the comedy in my screwball being quite this low-brow, but the slapstick timing is often impeccable, especially when Powell is throwing himself bodily into perfectly ridiculous situations, mugging towards a Loy whose job here is mostly to be the straight woman to Powell’s mania, or to be wonderfully sarcastic. It’s very bread and butter comedy in this sense, but it’s the best bread and butter and town, served with perfect flair.

The Death of Me Yet (1971)

The Cold War. A man at that point going by the name of Edward Young (Doug McClure) is trained full-immersion style in a fake US small town to become something of a perfect infiltrator for the Soviets. He seems to be rather good at this sort of roleplay; at least, he’s the favourite of the father of the program that trains him, one Barnes (Richard Basehart).

When we meet him again, he is living in – you’ve guessed it – a US small town under the name of Paul Towers. He has become a bit of a pillar of the community in his role as newspaper owner and writer of anti-war commentaries, and is married – apparently happily - to Sibby (Rosemary Forsyth). As we will learn soon enough, Paul – let’s keep that name – has defected from the Soviet cause, using a fortunate (for him) plane accident to make his handlers believe he is dead. His love for Sibby is clearly real, though Paul hasn’t told her anything about her past, putting some strain on the marriage. Otherwise, his life seems pretty perfect.

That is, until his old masters find out he is still alive and try to murder him, repeatedly. Further complicating matters is some proper espionage that has been going on at the company of Paul’s brother in law. This puts Joe Chalk (Darren McGavin), the most fed looking fed this side of Edgar J. Hoover, rather closer to Paul than he’d like.

This John Llewellyn Moxey TV film is, despite an open ending that suggests ambitions for a sequel (or for a follow-up TV show) that never came, a nice example of the form. Casting the all-American Doug McClure as our Soviet deep cover spy on the run is certainly a nice touch, particularly since McClure (mostly known for his magic fists around here) is pretty good at projecting the character’s underlying ruthlessness without making his actual humanity unbelievable.

The plot – based on a Whit Masterson novel, apparently – is not terribly original and rather too straightforward in its clarity about Paul’s true, decent and upstanding character, but does still build a nice net of differing emotional loyalties for him to get caught in. Moxey, as was his wont, manages to pack a lot of incident and character work into a seventy minute running time, even finding time for a bit of 70s kitchen sink psychology in between the espionage shenanigans without things ever feeling too superficial or the plot too cramped.

As a McGavin fan, I got a bit of a kick of the specific kind of asshole he’s playing here, with his haircut fifteen years out of style, his unempathetic character, all squinty little eyes suggesting a man of limited intelligence who mostly gets through life by rote, a badge, ruthlessness and a total lack of belief in his fellow man. Which is a weird and interesting way to portray the US intelligence community in a film about a highly capable Soviet spy who retired himself for moral reasons.

In short: Eye of the Needle (1981)

World War II. A highly ruthless and dangerous spy known to British Intelligence only as “The Needle” (Donald Sutherland) has been doing the bad work without being caught for quite some time, leaking important information and leaving a line of dead bodies behind.

The British side – chiefly represented by one Godliman (Ian Bannen) – is getting closer to the Needle just when he manages to make photos that prove that the Allied Invasion can only occur in Normandy. Fortunately for the Allies, for some contrived reason that makes little sense, the German spy must deliver this information directly to Hitler, and so has to catch a ride on a German U-boat. Thanks to a storm, his attempt at reaching his ride via boat is rudely interrupted and he is stranded on a small island, population 4. From here on out, Needle stumbles right into an early D.H. Lawrence novel about the unhappy marriage between Lucy (Kate Nelligan) and the husband who lost his legs and the opportunity to die in the Battle of Britain on their marriage day in a car accident (Christopher Cazenove). Lucy lets herself be seduced by the mysterious stranger before you can even say “why, this is starting to get a bit improbable, old chap!”.

Though things might not end up to happily for our spy once Lucy cops to having been emotionally manipulated, her husband getting murdered and her child threatened.

Richard Marquand’s Eye of the Needle (based on a Ken Follett novel) is generally highly regarded by mid-brow critics, but I can’t say the film does much for me, independent of today’s eye-brow position. Sure, there’s an obvious high level of technical accomplishment on display, Marquand using old-fashioned and brand new cinematic techniques in tandem to create an artificial yet highly effective sense of time and place, but the film’s emotional content, as well as its slow, slow pacing does not work for me at all. Its tendency to repeat beats that are supposed to convince us how ruthless and shitty Faber/The Needle is, does not help there at all. I really got it the first two times around, so repeating this with a different victim after that just seems like a waste of my time. There’s a lack of subtlety here, as everywhere else in the movie, that just doesn’t connect with me, particularly not in combination with the pomposity of the film’s tone that confuses the pose of having depth with actually having it.

As central as it is, I never found the D.H. Lawrence with more melodrama marriage crisis of the Roses convincing or involving, either. Despite the actors doing their very best (which is considerable), the film replaces believable humanity with melodramatic posturing. Worse, it isn’t actually terribly good at this posturing, forgetting that good melodrama isn’t just meant to perform heightened emotion but also to draw the viewer into these emotional with the characters. Eye of the Needle never does, at least for me.

Music Monday: Fish Edition

Kidnapped (1971)

You know the Robert Louis Stevenson tale: Scotland, shortly after the Battle of Culloden. Young David Balfour (Lawrence Douglas), after the death of both of his parents now without a family, introduces himself to his miserly uncle Ebenezer (Donald Pleasence), only to get sold into slavery by the sad old man unwilling to share a fortune that belongs by rights completely to David. Before his way to the indentured farming life in the colonies can get on its way, David falls in with Alan Breck (Michael Caine), a Bonnie Prince Charlie loyalist (the film never really uses the term “Jacobite”) on the run. Apart from a bit of a murderous disposition and the inability to understand his cause as lost, Alan’s a stand-up guy. He also really needs to get out of Scotland and get to France, where he plans on regrouping with whoever still wants another round of getting smashed by the English. Obviously, complications lie on the way for both men. The younger one will find true love in the form of Alan’s cousin Catriona Stewart (Vivian Heilbron), while the older man will find his conscience.

There’s quite a bit to like about Delbert Mann’s combined adaptation of Stevenson’s “Kidnapped” and its sequel “David Balfour/Catriona”. For one, the landscape photography is often genuinely striking. It not just looks pretty, it actually manages to add to the emotional weight of quite a few scenes in a pleasantly subtle manner. Also rather a joy is the bunch of great actors and character actors on screen, from Donald Pleasence to Gordon Jackson to Freddie Jones to Trevor Howard; most of them make a muddle of their Scottish accents, obviously, but that’s part of the fun of traditional adventure movies like this one. Speaking of accents, Michael Caine barely bothers with one, which seems to be the right decision, since his handful of pathos-filled speeches about bonnie Scotland are already melodramatic enough, and would become absurd with too much bad accent work. Of course, Caine’s most convincing here when he is either brutal or companionable – the big speeches do tend to be a bit too much, in part because Jack Pulman’s script can’t quite hit the right tone for them, so that they sound pompous rather than dramatic and moving.

Which is a curious thing in a script whose main strength otherwise is tone. Not just in its ability to get the brightly colourful and imaginative tone of the film’s more action-heavy and adventurous first half just right but also in its willingness to be fair-minded to both sides of the political conflict here, avoiding to declare one side as the good guys and the other as the baddies, as would be rather more typical for an adventure movie. Kidnapped shows very little love for the oppression of the Scottish through the English, and demonstrates this in very 70s ways. Yet it is just as sceptical about the Jacobite side, who, after all, wasn’t simply fighting for Scottish independence but working hard to get yet another civil war on the British Isles going, with the end goal to exchange one inbred fool on a throne for another, with the population of the countries having to pay the price. Which is a rather 70s way of looking at the situation as well, come to think of it.

At the same time, the script shows a lot of respect for people like Alan who live so strongly by their principles and beliefs, even when it disagrees with them. Alas, this very interesting and complex view on questions of peace, war, independence and personal and political loyalty does suffer a bit from the film’s need to squeeze two novels into a running time of less than two hours, so that rather a lot of emotional and thematic work that would be better expressed via action has to be simply talked out. Particularly Alan’s final decision doesn’t quite work treated this way.

This talkiness results in Kidnapped being front-loaded with practically all of its – finely realized – action set pieces taking place in its first half, and most of its talky bits in the final one. It’s not a fatal flaw in this particular case because of the whole affair’s general interest, yet it is one that’s clear and obvious enough even the best will can’t ignore it.

Three Films Make A Post: If you can't breathe, then you can't scream.

Reeker (2005): From time to time, Dave Payne’s low budget supernatural slasher hits on the set-up for a good scene or two. Invariably, said scene never is quite as good as it could be because it is shot and/or staged as the most clichéd bit of early 00s horror imaginable. The pacing is off as well, characters are the usual annoying clichés, and the ending goes for the worst plot twist. And yes, it’s exactly the twist a curiously large number of desert set horror movies use, and towards which I feel a particular dislike. It’s a pretty desert, at least.

What movie those among the film’s contemporary critics saw to speak of interesting characters and a smart script, I don’t know.

Black Wood (2022): This contemporary indie horror western directed and written by Chris Canfield, does actually feature rather better character writing than you’d expect, as well as a script that understands how to use elements of the – somewhat revisionist – western and horror genres well together. The acting’s a little off sometimes (in a way typical of very indie films), but the central performances by Tanajsia Slaughter and Bates Wilder are very strong. Plus, the film does manage to work as a western as well as a horror film, which isn’t actually that easy a thing to achieve.

Moloch (2022): There are a lot of things to like about this piece of folk horror from the Netherlands: peat bogs and bog bodies are sadly underused elements in horror at the best of times, and director Nico van den Brink does milk the locations for quite a bit of foggy mood building. The script (by van den Brink and Daan Bakker) has some fun ideas about how to include the central folk legend; I haven’t seen this sort of thing done in a sort of screwed-up child nativity version before, and it certainly works well with the way actual folk traditions radiate outwards from their sources.

The more typical horror moments are a bit too generic and jump scare-heavy for my tastes, but the film’s use of folklore and its attempts at speaking about family trauma via horror are more than enough to make up for that.

Short Film Friday: The Mime

In short: Glorious (2022)

Warning: spoilers are somewhat unavoidable with this one!

Following the loss of, or perhaps a break-up with, his girlfriend Brenda (Sylvia Grace Crim), Wes (Ryan Kwanten), is on something of a bender of performative depression (including lots of face rubbing and even a bit of “Noooo!!!!”-screeching like a Bollywood character who has just lost his mother) and related destructive behaviour. After a bit of that and a lot of whiskey, he finds himself stranded in a public restroom out in the middle of nowhere.

A voice (J.K. Simmons) from the next stall over that comes through a large hole in the dividing wall surrounded by a picture of something eldritch is rather interested in what’s going on with Wes.

The voice, it turns out, belongs to a creature from the void calling itself Gatanothoa. Gat, as Wes will come to call it, needs something from Wes, so much so, that it’s perfectly willing to trap him and torture him with waking nightmares. It’s all in service of saving the universe and humanity, so surely, Wes will help poor Gat out, right?

I know director Rebekah McKendry mostly as a veteran podcaster involved in some of the better podcasts about horror (because of which I also can report on her teaching film). As a director, she has slowly worked herself up to this lovely little low budget indie that makes excellent use of only a couple of locations and a tiny cast, treating these things, as most good filmmakers on this budget level do, as a creative anchor for the film instead of a hindrance.

There’s an effective sense of surrealist weirdness to the proceedings, suggested mostly via lighting and appropriately freakish camera angles that pairs nicely with the simplicity of the actual plot, and some moments of fun, macabre imagination. Also of note is how the film actually manages to have a final plot twist that enhances and explains what came before. It will probably even enrich the experience on a second watch, for much what might rub a viewer the wrong way about Wes and his reactions to various revelations makes a lot more sense in hindsight, instead of the twist making a mockery of what came before like too many of these things like to do.

And how could I not love a film in which an eldritch entity speaks with as much delightful politeness as J.K. Simmons puts into his performance here? Kwanten has one of his better outings as well, and most of the bits that didn’t work for me the first time around actually work after the twist, which is the sign of a thoughtful performance.

All of which makes for a fun movie that has a bit more depth than one might at first believe.

Starcrash (1978)

aka The Adventures of Stella Star

Intergalactic smuggler Stella Star (Caroline Munro) and her weird-ass partner Akton (Marjoe Gortner) have been giving the forces of Law and Order quite the run for their money. Finally caught and sentenced to a quintillion years of hard labour, Stella stages a daring escape which is rudely interrupted by a plea for help from the Emperor of the First Circle of the Galaxy (Christopher Plummer) – whatever that is - himself. Apparently, the evil Count Zarth Arn (Joe Spinell) - not Sa Tan, alright - has developed a planet sized secret weapon of horrifying destructive power.

All attempts at actually locating the planet where this weapon is hidden have come up empty and even resulted in the disappearance of the Emperor’s only son Simon (David Hasselhoff) while looking for it. Stella’s superior piloting and Akton’s excellent navigational skills are the only hope left to the forces of good. They are to be supported by one Chief Thor (Robert Tessier) and the law robot who caught them, one Elle (the voice of the fittingly named Howard Camp in the body of Judd Hamilton). Obviously, the bad guys aren’t going to make things easy for them.

Fortunately, Stella has more luck than a Corellian smuggler, and Akton gets a new superpower whenever the plot needs it.

Among the various attempts at ripping off Star Wars on the cheap, this US-Italian co-production directed by the great Luigi Cozzi is one of the most entertaining. Nobody’d ever confuse it with one of those boring “good” films, but it certainly is a great one, a triumph of crass commercialism somehow turning into a feast of childish/child-like imagination, barely suppressed horniness and a love for the joys of pulp science fiction.

The films production design often suggests Star Wars with the serial numbers filed off, full of shapes and constructions that look sort of like the real thing if you squint but never quite so much as to invite a law suit. Every space ship interior, space(!) cavern and mine looks cheaper, weirder and more improbable than in the movie’s guiding light, but little of it looks carelessly thrown together. This may be the tackier, cheaper version of what George Lucas did, but it is a tackiness and cheapness somebody has clearly worked hard at, so it feels personable, alive, and exciting in a deeply goofy yet undeniable way.

Also palpable, and very typical of Cozzi as well as Italian SF cinema as a whole, is a sense of enthusiasm when it comes to hands on special effects. The stop motion robots may be ill advised, what with them looking as if they come right out of a peplum, yet they are also lovely, silly and exciting. The same goes for miniature effects that hold up to little scrutiny while exuding a sense of sheer joy. I can’t help but imagine Cozzi (who is a genre movie nerd in the best meaning of the phrase) looking at what he has wrought grinning from ear to ear.

The script does its very best to hit all of the pulp science fiction tropes, not just those Star Wars used, so the plot evolves/devolves into a series of encounters with everything from evil space amazons to space cave men, environmental dangers our heroes survive via random magical space powers, and only from time to time touches base with more direct, usually preposterous moments trying to evoke light sabres and Jedi.

On the acting side, Starcrash is a series of inexplicable yet awesome casting and acting decisions. See Joe Spinell as the awkwardly overweight big bad from what I can only assume to be Space New York! Be astonished at the way Caroline Munro goes through most of the movie in what amounts to fetish gear (particularly the colour-changed Vampirella costume is quite the thing, what little there is of it) and makes the costumes look like clothes a woman would actually wear! Puzzle at whatever Marjoe Gortner is doing in his role as Han Skywalker Wan, and at whatever any of his facial expressions mean! Gaze in awe at Christopher Plummer’s heroic attempts at suppressing the giggles by speaking very, very softly, attempting to project great personal charisma and sleepiness at the same time (whose flow he can hold, by the way, because of course he can)!

There are glories to behold in Starcrash.

In short: When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970)

Escaping the grand opportunity of being sacrificed by her native tribe, stone age woman Sanna (Vicoria Vetri) finds shelter with a neighbouring tribe. There, she falls in love with the strapping young hunter Tara (Robin Hawdon). Alas, the jealousy of a rival and the local tendency to blame her for every sun storm, mild earth quake or dinosaur attack, drive her into exile, where she bonds with a single dinosaur mom and her somewhat adorable dinosaur kid.

Reading official plot synopses of this Hammer production, directed by Val Guest, in the old, undervalued People vs Dinosaurs genre is quite the revelation. So that’s what these people were babbling about in their badly made up stone age language! The sun god? Huh. There also seems to be some business about our heroine being thought a witch because of her blonde hair (with scenes of other blondes dying their hair black): the evil magic of peroxide! Let’s try and imagine what these crazy kids would have thought about Botox.

As it happens when people talk in a ridiculous language that never actually existed, and the filmmakers decide to leave us without subtitles, it’s difficult to keep up any interest in characters or the human drama bits (whatever they are actually about) of the film – most of the actors’ inability and/or unwillingness to actually emote in ways other than often quite hilarious scenery chewing doesn’t help – so it’s left to the dinosaur action to keep an audience interested. I’m happy to report that there’s a regular feed of said dinosaur action, most of it realized via decent to great stop motion (though there is one bit featuring one of those unfortunate real lizards with glued-on dinosaur bits that always make me a little angry). This is a film that promised us stone age people versus dinosaurs, and by gawd, it’s going to deliver early, often, and with a certain élan.

Guest does of course know the adventure movie biz, so things stay lively despite the dialogue and not giving a toss about the characters problems. When in doubt, he adds dinosaurs, a bit of nudity, as well as a completely inexplicable scene of a whole tribe of fake stone age people having some kind of religious freak-out. In a delicious turn of events, this is apparently based on a treatment by J.G. Ballard. Alas, most Ballardians speaking to that great author later on don’t seem to have wanted to get into his involvement with this particular masterpiece, so it’s anybody’s guess how involved this treatment was or what was actually in it. But hey, at least we’ll always have the dinosaurs, the bonus giant crabs and the man-eating mushroom plant thingie (?).

Music Monday: Flood Edition

The Bermuda Depths (1978)

After an abbreviated education, mental health problems and some time of wandering around the globe on a budget, Magnus Dens (Leigh McCloskey) returns to Bermuda where he spent parts of his childhood, as well as the place where his father died under somewhat mysterious circumstances. He connects with his old buddy Eric (Carl Weathers), who is now on his way to a Masters degree in marine biology, at the moment working as the assistant of an old friend of Magnus’s father, Professor Paulis (Burl Ives).

Early on, Magnus also meets the mysterious and beautiful Jennie Haniver (Connie Sellecca), a woman with the habit of appearing and disappearing out of and into nothing, a rather great love for swimming, and a soft spot for our protagonist. She also may be the very same girl Magnus played with when he was a child nobody but him believed existed, or a hallucination, or a ghost right from a folk tale taking place in the 1800s. But then, the romance between Magnus and Jennie is also very much out of a folk tale.

While Magnus is growing increasingly confused, Eric and Paulis discover hints suggesting the existence of some form of gigantic (as in kaiju-sized) marine animal. It will later turn out to be a giant turtle, alas not one called Gamera. There’s a strange connection between the turtle, Jennie and Magnus, as well.

Because Rankin/Bass already had great contacts to Japanese studio circles through their habit of farming out of large parts of the animation work for their regular and at the time highly popular TV specials to Japan, most of their attempts at making live action fare happened in collaboration with Japanese studios as well. For production values, this must have been quite the bargain – most other US TV movies of the time certainly couldn’t afford extensive location shoots in Bermuda like these Rankin/Bass films tended to. On paper, cooperating with Tsuburaya Productions as happened in this case must have looked like something of a coup, as well, for there was hardly any company better at making giant monsters on a TV budget than the makers of the various Ultraman series (not to speak of Eiji Tsuburaya’s past as the great special effects artist who brought us Godzilla).

However, in this case as in the other Rankin/Bass-Japanese co-productions, something seems to have been lost in translation, for the effects are never even a tenth as effective as they should be coming from Tsuburaya’s company, with little of the focus on the important detail that usually makes the model and suitmation work so great in their own productions.

Someone involved in the productions also had a tendency to hold to people behind the camera who had already proven not to be great: so most of these movies – including the one at hand - were directed by the plodding and ineffective Tsugunobu Kotani, and were based on bland scripts by William Overgard that take a kernel of good ideas but never manage – I’m not even sure they try – to turn them into an engaging narrative.

This is particularly annoying in The Bermuda Depths’s case, for here’s a wonderful opportunity for turning this into a modern romantic folktale that just happens to also include a giant monster wasted because neither Kotani nor the script show any of the imagination and ability to create the proper mood that would have been needed to pull it off. Instead, this is the sort of inoffensive TV pap US TV movies of this era surprisingly often weren’t.

Three Films Make A Post: Watch Your Eyes!

Voice of the Eagle: The Enigma of Robbie Basho (2015): At times, this documentary about the great, weird acoustic guitarist, composer and esoteric stranger Robbie Basho by Liam Barker is very insightful, speaking with many of Basho’s surviving friends and companions, attacking the music from angles as varied as the artist’s ever-changing cultural interests. Those speaking about he music who didn’t know him do so with insight and love, having things of actual interest and meaning to contribute instead of soundbites.

Only two things mar the film: there’s no distance at all to Meher Baba and Sufism Revisited (the film even tends to call SR members “Sufis”, which is just wrong), which do straddle the line between cult and religion. And using a clearly ailing Country Joe McDonald and his dementia or Alzheimer-caused inability to remember things correctly as a sort of comic relief is just nasty and unpleasant in a way neither Meher Baba nor Robbie Basho would have approved of.

Il medium (1980): This is one of the last movies directed by the sometimes brilliant Silvio Amadio, and concerns clairvoyance, hauntings, potential possession and ghosts, all presented in a slow yet increasingly unhinged and irrational manner like only Italian filmmakers of the 60s to 80s knew to do. It’s not quite as mind-blowing as some of its siblings, and certainly doesn’t look as great as even Amadio’s own best films, but it does have the intense charm of watching a group of filmmakers (Claudio Fragasso is of course one of the writers) turning standard tropes and clichés increasingly strange.

Der Hund von Baskerville aka The Hound of the Baskervilles (1929): At least a third of this German silent adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s best Sherlock Holmes novel by Richard Oswald has been lost to the ravages of time and bad archival practices. The newest restauration and reconstruction uses still shots and synopses taken from censorship documents to fill the viewer in, and given the popularity of the book, and how much the first three of five acts where most of the missing material would be situated follows it, there’s little difficulty in following the proceedings.

Visually, the restauration looks fantastic, throwing Oswald’s expressionistically influenced staging into the proper shades of shadows, lights, weird angles, and improbably yet deeply atmospheric sets. There’s a lot to simply see and immerse oneself in here, as is only proper for the most Gothic of the Holmes tales.

The script does tend to get further away from the book the longer the film goes on, usually in less interesting and less effective directions, though everything ends in a pretty fantastic suspense set piece that also wasn’t in the book this way.

Short Film Friday: Shadow

In short: Il fascino dell’insolito: La stanza numero 13 (1980)

An elderly professor (Tino Scotti) returns to a small town inn where he spent some time when he was a student. We will eventually learn that this was the place where he met, loved and left the great – only – love of his life, Assunta (Carmen Scivittaro), who died young and without him from an illness.

The professor is assigned room number fourteen; on his very first night, he is awoken by party noises from what at first appears the room next to his – number twelve – but which actually turn out to come from a room that hasn’t existed for a long time, room number thirteen.

This is the second adaptation of an M.R. James tale for the Italian series of short TV movies of the supernatural called “Il fascino dell’insolito”. Like the adaptation of “The Mezzotint”, I talked about before, this also takes James’s concise tale of a haunting and does something with it that has nothing whatsoever to do with style, tone, or theme of the original story. Here, there’s even less left of James, for where the TV Mezzotint was at least still a horror story at heart, this one uses the spookery exactly for the sort of things James objected against in ghost stories: it’s a friendly tale of an old man being forgiven for past misdeeds by the ghost of his former lover, with whom he’ll dwell forevermore happily in a mirror.

So as a James adaptation, this leaves rather a lot to be desired, what with the total absence of Jamesian wallops, the strange, or the macabre. As a supernatural tale standing in the tradition of the European Romantic era, it’s not half bad. Director Paolo Poeti manages to use relatively sparse sets and simple effects to create a considerable sense of place for the inn, a place populated by a handful of broad strokes characters given life by clearly experienced actors. I also like the way the supernatural encroaches, again with simple camera effects and some clever lighting – the print I’ve seen is in black and white, though my Italian isn’t good enough to tell if the series was actually shot this way – used with a degree of intelligence. That this isn’t really the kind of supernatural tale I enjoy, and certainly not one I’m looking for in a James adaptation, isn’t fully the film’s fault.