In short: In a Silent Way (2020)

Even though there are some moments when I think this music documentary by Belgian director Gwenaël Brees gets a bit carried away with a very French artsy way of crawling up one’s own arse – and that despite being Belgian - there’s much more to admire here than to roll one’s eyes at, even if you’re a cynical old bastard like me.

At the very least, you have to admire the special kind of guts and drive it takes to make a documentary about Talk Talk and Mark Hollis when most of the subjects of your movie – whose works are clearly as important to the filmmaker as a godhood to a religious person – won’t talk to you, and even go as far as to lawyer up so you don’t use any of their music in this film about their music, fair use be damned. Brees not only does not let this distract him from his love for the music (I don’t think I could have been so relaxed) but seems to take this as an invitation to shape his film differently from other music documentaries (watching this, I can’t help but believe he’d done that in any case) and to try to approach his subject with methods that parallel the way the later Talk Talk operated.

So the film turns into a travelogue, trying to understand music we never get to hear in the movie through the places that – perhaps - shaped Hollis, chance encounters with contemporaries, and a handful of interviews with the few people out of Talk Talk’s artistic bubble willing to talk. Sometimes, this approach does get a bit precious for my tastes, but more often than not, Brees manages to broaden the possibility space surrounding the music he’s talking about, showing different approaches to understanding and living with music that just might open up for his viewers as well.

The Spell (1977)

Rita Matchett (Susan Myers) is bullied by her peers as well as by her much more mainstream-compatible sister Kris (a very young Helen Hunt) for being mildly overweight as well as because of her general vague “weirdness”. Her family is of little help: father Glenn (James Olson) neither likes her nor seems to give a crap about his less easily relatable daughter’s wellbeing, and her mother Marilyn (Lee Grant) is theoretically trying to help but is in practice at best not actively harmful, and really, for most of the film way nearly as egotistical as her husband, which is saying something.

Things begin to change with the accidental yet strange death of a classmate who was a particularly nasty bully. Rita – to the horror of particularly her dad – seems to start to take pride in being different (oh, the horror!). Soon, other people who give her trouble begin having accidents as well.

Lee Philips’s The Spell is an – appropriately – unholy mixture of formalistically shot family drama with arthouse ambitions, overheated 70s occult horror tropes, and oh so many scenes of absolutely terrible parenting the film seems to believe are at least somewhat okay. Also appearing are a bunch of very funny made up “parapsychological” concepts and terms, and a shock ending that has sod all to do with anything else the movie cares about.

As is painfully obvious, this is one of those movies that attempt to use horror movie tropes to express the fear of clearly freaking rich “middleclass” people of having nonconforming children. The better movies of this type – be they about witches or young female telekinesis practitioners – tend to show the story from the perspective of the maltreated child that eventually explodes, putting an emphasis on the destructive power of the society around them awakening a different kind of destructive power in them as a form of psychic self-defence.

This film at hand is told from Marilyn’s perspective, however, and really doesn’t seem to know what exactly it is trying to do with this, wavering between conservative hand-wringing, compassion with Rita and bouts of apparently believing that being a shit parent is a-okay because of some 70s “finding oneself” bullshit. The film makes little effort actually getting inside of Rita’s mind; which is particularly problematic since there’s very little of interest going on in her parents’ heads, even though Marilyn who is at least trying to do right by her more difficult offspring, is the somewhat more sympathetic of the two.

The film’s largest problem, however, is that Philips really doesn’t seem to know what he wants to do with the metaphorical elements of the narrative, nor how to make this part of the script work in tandem with the film as a horror film. Consequently, the metaphorical level seems to have little resolution and meaning while the horror plot stops and starts and goes nowhere fitting.

From time to time, the heated family discussions suddenly ring true in a more realistic manner, and two of the horror sequences are surprisingly effective. But that’s really all there is to The Spell.

In short: Seized (2020)

Our typical Man with a Violent Past who nobody calls by his old name of Nero anymore (Scott Adkins) works as a security expert somewhere in Mexico, trying not to be driven insane by his very teenage son Taylor (Matthew Garbacz) while trying to teach him better than he himself learned. There’s clearly a bit of guilt concerning the death of Taylor’s mother involved in the relationship, too, and we all can imagine what kind of thing must have gone done via obvious genre tropes.

As you’ll probably expect, Nero will have to fall back into some of his old bad habits when a mysterious guy in a cowboy hat (Mario Van Peebles, who is supposed to be Mexican, by the way, and seems to have a lot of fun) kidnaps Taylor to press our protagonist into his service. Nero just needs to massacre various Cartel heads and their men, and afterwards he’s going to get Taylor back, or so he is told.

I wish this reunion of director Isaac Florentine and low budget action king Scott Adkins could have involved a slightly more interesting script than the one Richard Lowry delivered. The pair really doesn’t need much more than a reason to set-up a series of fights – chases weren’t in the budget – but the series of clichés that makes up the film’s plot still could have used something to make them a bit more interesting, if only dialogue that’s either better at being cheesy or less cheesy. The only truly fun idea the script has is to have Van Peebles’s character stage a murder party where he and his partners and underlings watch live footage of Nero murdering his way through many a nameless thug, cheering every kill while getting drunk. That’s pretty fun and funny in a meta way, even though the film is not actually using this for anything else but as a diversion.

There’s nothing exactly wrong with the movie’s structure, though, so at least things flow well enough from action scene to action scene. The fights are all fine. They don’t exactly show the Florentine/Adkins combo at the height of their powers of creativity – there’s a sad lack of goofy martial arts movie humour here as well as a dearth of interesting places in which to beat guys up in – but middling Florentine/Adkins is still more energetic, more elegantly choreographed in its brutality than the best of what most other direct to home viewing filmmakers can deliver.

Music Monday: Sunrise Edition

Offseason (2021)

Following a letter that informs her the grave of her actress mother Ava (Melora Walters) has been desecrated in some way, and that her direct and personal involvement is needed, Marie Aldrich (Jocelin Donahue) and her on-again off-again friend George (Joe Swanberg) make a long cross-country drive to the island where Ava is buried. It’s Ava’s birthplace as well as the one place in the world she never wanted to return to – not even dead. Strangely, her testament said otherwise.

During the summer months, the island is a tourist paradise but now, it’s just in the process of being completely shut down for the off-season. Even the bridge connecting it to the main land is going to be closed in a few hours, so Marie should finish her business as quickly as possible. Alas, that’s easier said than done, for the graveyard keeper who wrote to her is nowhere to be found, and the rest of the island population that’s still there is in turns weird, creepy, and somewhat threatening, or all three together. There’s clearly something wrong with the place beyond the feeling of desolation that comes with near-empty places that should be full of people, and worse: something seems to have lured Marie here for a reason.

The newest film by Mickey Keating seems to be rather divisive. I’m not all that surprised about this, for it’s a calm movie that only seems interested in its narrative as a framework to hang a series of moods and evocative set pieces on. So this is a film much more dominated by long shots of Donahue walking through foggy empty small town streets, or along a desolate beach right out of a BBC Ghost Story for Christmas or Messiah of Evil than it is by its minimalist horror plot. Which doesn’t mean there’s nothing at all to the handful of more straightforward sequences, nor that there’s no emotional resonance to Marie’s flashbacks to her mother’s deathbed confessions she took for delirium; rather, all of this feels part of Offseason’s evocation of mood through place.

This sort of thing is pretty much catnip to me, and even more so in a film that evokes (which really seems to be the central verb here in more than one way) films like the ones I’ve already mentioned as well as the mood of Fulci’s mid-period without the gore, the framing techniques of John Carpenter, and those parts of US local filmmaking from the 70s that found places like this film’s beach and small town for their stories to play out in. Offseason is part of a very specific lineage of films and books of the fantastic where islands and beaches are liminal places where the fantastic and the horrific enters human lives; Lovecraft’s “Shadow over Innsmouth”, Messiah of Evil or Carpenter’s The Fog are just a part of this type of horror.

Because the desolate and the creepy often are, this is a rather astonishingly beautiful film (even more so given a small budget), framed and shot with a calm and elegance that I’ve not seen in Keating’s earlier film. These earlier films – as this one is as well - were all wonderful examples of how to make different aesthetic approaches a director’s own, but they were also usually intense to the border of hysteria, whereas Offseason seeks and finds a calmer way towards its own form of dread, one I find personally rather more enticing.

Donahue is pretty fantastic, too, not just because she’s suggesting a 70s indie horror heroine through look and style, but also because she’s so genuinely good at being present in the weirdness and desolation of Offseason’s world, moving through it and witnessing it with the appropriate confusion and horror but also with a certain poise that seems to suggest a kinship between her and these places. Which does make sense on a plot level, as well.

The only thing about the film that doesn’t quite resonate with me as strongly is that it explains slightly too much of what we’ve witnessed in the final couple of scenes, making the weird ever so slightly more mundane in the process. But that’s not a major problem, because it’s not a major kind of explanation, and so Offseason really leaves me a bit giddy about how good a film it is; at least for someone with my very specific tastes.

Three Films Make A Post: Just how far will a government go to hide the truth?

Defence of the Realm (1985): This British conspiracy thriller by David Drury makes an interesting contrast to comparable American films where journalism beats a government conspiracy in that the British view on journalists is much less heroic than the American one – at least once the 60s rolled in - often is. Which is what a press dominated by various models of scandal rags will do to one’s opinions. Our protagonist, wonderfully embodied by Gabriel Byrne, is a bit of a shit, perfectly willing to lie, cheat and probably steal, to then turn what he writes into melodrama; but as it turns out, he’s also – to his own surprise - unable to let the lies and injustices committed by those in power go, and turns heroic despite of himself. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have much of a movie.

And it’s a bit of a classic, probably a bit slow-paced for many, I’d assume, but very good at portraying the process of research, and the looming understanding of how big and at once petty this thing that’s being violently suppressed actually is. Drury’s dry but effective direction works very well with the material, and the cast includes greats like Greta Scacchi, Denholm Elliott and Ian Bannen even in the smallest roles.

Bell Book and Candle (1958): For its first two thirds, Richard Quine’s fantastical romantic comedy is pretty much the sort of delight you’d expect this sort of thing to be, with so many clever script and staging ideas one can get a bit drunk watching it. Yet it also turns into a film that seems to be not too fond of its own supposed happy ending, something that equates romantic love with pain, and can see the process of an independent woman becoming part of a couple only in a way where the woman becomes lesser. There’s certainly a feminist perspective at the way this time and place treats women and romance buried rather shallowly in the film, but it’s also too conservative a thing (plus, a big studio movie from the late 50s) to go somewhere different than the times tell it to go.

Which leaves us with a film that tries selling a woman losing her magic, her fashion sense, and her taste in exchange for tears and fifty year old James Stewart as an actual happy end, something that leaves this heterosexual male viewer rather sceptical.

Death Comes at High Noon aka Døden kommer til middag (1964): If you want to look at it that way, you can find the influence of the giallo – or influences on the giallo – everywhere. Case in point is this Danish mystery directed by Erik Balling, where an amateur detective (Poul Reichhardt) – he’s a crime writer – stumbles upon a corpse and then a whole series of other crimes committed by a very honourable citizen indeed. Its political subtext, its stylish production, and the intense way Sander flirts with female lead Helle Virkner’s character – and vice versa, in a way that would have had contemporary censors in my native Germany screaming in horror – all seem to parallel developments elsewhere in European film while also having enough regional specificity to delight friends of the regionally specific like me.

Short Film Friday: Wilderness Survival Guide - Gemini Home Entertainment

 Apparently, the Gemini Home Entertainment series is a bit of thing in certain parts of the Internet. Me, being old, out of the loop, and so on, never encountered it before last week.

I can't speak for all of the shorts, but this one's a fine example of the Weird meeting the children of creepypasta.

In short: Rest in Pieces (1987)

aka Descanse en piezas

Helen Hewitt (Lorin Jean Vall) inherits all money and property belonging to her estranged aunt Catherine (Dorothy Malone), facts presented to Helen in a jaunty video message recorded right before auntie’s suicide. The bequest includes what appears to be a whole housing block of villas. Or is it a street of mansions? Obviously, Helen and her husband Bob (Scott Thompson Baker) move right into the main villa.

There, they learn that Catherine has a whole bunch of weirdos and loonies (among them characters played by Jack Taylor and Patty Shepard) living rent free on her property. Weirdos who, the audience quickly learn, do like to end an evening of a string quartet playing the German national anthem with murdering the players. Which isn’t crueller than the choice of music, really. They also may be the living dead. Other complications include the possible return of aunt Catherine from the dead, a hidden cache of eight million dollars that may or may not exist, a bit of the old mutilation and murder, and a shovel duel.

The easiest way to explain Rest in Pieces to myself is to imagine its director, the great José Ramón Larraz, waking up one day believing to be Juan Piquer Simón. At least, Rest feels a lot more like the work of Larraz’s differently esteemed colleague than what you’d expect from its true director, even in the late stages of his career when things got weird, or rather, even weirder than was Larraz’s normal. So don’t look for the director’s particular sense of the perverse, or the strange elegance of his filmmaking, but be prepared for the typical goofiness of European genre films in the 80s at least pretending to be made in the US, where everything – the way people walk, talk and emote - feels inauthentic in the most peculiar, and typically very entertaining, way.

One should probably also go in prepared for some mind-bogglingly horrible main performances by Vail and Baker, where neither facial expressions nor line delivery suggest more than the tiniest knowledge of human behaviour. These two are so stiff, your usual typical piece of wood would be embarrassed to be associated with them; consequently, the performances are also very funny indeed, particularly once the plot goes off into its particularly weird last act full of plot twists and character reveals even a great thespian would have a hard time selling.

You cannot blame Larraz for making a boring film, at least. There’s hardly any scene going by that isn’t at least mildly bonkers in the Piquer Simón way. Add a smidgen of gore, and plot twists – well, also a plot - so nonsensical it boggles belief, it’s difficult not to love the film, even though it is not the sort of thing one hopes for from its director.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022)

A group of young Austin hipsters have great plans to commit their own version of gentrification on the near ghost town of Harrow in Texas (as we are going to call Bulgaria this week). It’s all the plan of chefs Dante (Jacob Latimore) and Melody (Sarah Yarkin), so they, Dante’s girlfriend – let’s call her Dies-too-early-for-me-to-remember-her-name – and Melody’s sister Lila (Elsie Fisher) are something of the vanguard of the project. They are visiting the town they bought apparently without ever having gone there just hours before a busload of investors is supposed to arrive. As the traumatized survivor of a school shooting, Lila has all the makings of a final girl, of course, for trauma has replaced virginity in contemporary slashers as the Sign of the Final Girl™.

Which will turn out to be useful, for a series of unfortunate events reactivates good old Leatherface (Mark Burnham), who had been living here peacefully with his mother (Alice Krige). And the years clearly have turned the guy into more of a traditional slasher, so Austin hipsters beware.

The filmmakers responsible for TCM ‘22 could have spared themselves a whole load of vitriolic criticism if only they had changed some names, filed off some elements of the script, and called this an homage to “films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”. Given that the film at hand has very little to do with text, subtext, context, style or mood of the original movie, and is rather shit seen as the direct sequel it purports to be, it really wouldn’t have lost out on anything but a marketable name. Without the TCM millstone round its back this could have happily survived as a fun, dumb, gory and pretty silly throwback slasher that superficially tacks on some modern social concerns.

It still is that, mind you, it’s just that much more difficult for many a horror fan to overlook what it purports to be, but is much too dumb to actually manage to be. Fortunately, while I believe the original TCM to be one of the greatest horror movies ever made, I have zero interest in TCM as a franchise, so it is surprisingly easy for me to treat this as the movie it actually is and just ignore the stuff that should never have been in there in the first place.

Seen as a series of dumb, bloody, and fun set pieces following established slasher formula - with some awkward borrowing from the first neo-Halloween thrown in because being derivative seems to be a bit of a way of life for this one – David Blue Garcia’s film is actually a success. There is many a fun and highly unlikely chainsaw kill, including what is certainly the best bus chainsaw massacre ever put to film (seriously, the scene is pretty incredible), excellent suspense sequences, and character writing so bad (screenplay credit goes to Chris Thomas Devlin) it does tend to be rather funny, particularly with a – perfectly decent - cast who treat this nonsense as earnestly as possible. It is all shot and edited with improbable gloss and care, suggesting Garcia could direct the hell out of a proper script, but is perfectly willing and able to put effort into whatever this thing he’s been hired for is supposed to be.

As something of a bonus, there are also quite a few moody scenes of characters wandering through the very atmospheric empty town lot, which is the sort of thing that’ll always delight me to no end in a horror movie; particularly since it means we don’t have to suffer through another warehouse and corridor walker.

In short: Dune: Part One (2021)

As regular readers will know, I’m not as big of a fan Canadian director Denis Villeneuve as most of the critical caste seem to be. Instead of the intelligent and deep filmmaker others see, apart from the Blade Runner film I’ve mostly encountered movies I found pompous, painfully slow and self-serious, and lacking a spark of humanity, exclusively populated by characters who never smile or laugh and really love staring off into the distance dramatically. And please don’t ask me about what Arrival did to its source novella.

However, this time around, I’ve come to praise Villeneuve and not to make fun of him. Ironically, you can still use most of the points of criticism above against Dune: the characters certainly seem to be lacking in any sense of humour whatsoever, the film moves slowly, and Villeneuve takes things so very seriously indeed it could border on the ridiculous. It’s just that all of this works in the context of Dune in a way it very much didn’t in something like Sicario or Arrival. For once, the heightened tone is actually perfect for the source novel’s still peculiar and wonderful mixture of very old and very new (at least at its time) ideas and themes, something that aims for the mythical while at the same time trying to show how myth is a constructed thing.

Villeneuve is certainly better when it comes to constructing myth than criticising here, but then, pulling things down to Earth was really the job of the second novel and need not concern us with this film (or its sequel).

The film is most certainly a masterpiece of visual worldbuilding, creating the mood and feeling of its far future made out of things taken from many different pasts through fantastic production design, an often pleasantly peculiar Hans Zimmer score, and camera and editing rhythms that take their time to create the heft of reality.

Really, the only thing I’d wish I could change about this Villeneuve movie is the casting of Thimothée Chalamet as Paul; his range seems to lie exclusively between mopey, super mopey, and extra special mopey, which could become a bit of a problem in the second film when the kid’s supposed to be charismatic.

But then, nothing’s perfect.

Music Monday: Greater Expectations Edition

Lady in White (1962)

Original title: Vita frun

With his last will, a rich arsehole industrialist (as if they were any other kind) manages to snub rather a lot of people, starting with his nurse and certainly not ending with composer of pompously melodramatic piano tunes Eva (Gio Petré) and colonialist Roger von Schöffer (Jan Malmsjö), the children of his first wife. The only winners in the bequest lottery are his second wife Helen (Anita Björk) and her daughter (Elisabeth Odén, I believe) – whom he had adopted, unlike the children of his first wife. These two get everything, even the mansion that once belonged to Eva’s and Roger’s family. Helen graciously allows Eva to keep living in the mansion, but in the most hurtful manner she could come up with.

A bit later, Eva drowns herself in the nearest swamp. Afterwards, Roger returns from his stint in Brazil, and curious things start happening that surely won’t have anything to do with the typical crime-causing passages all wills in mystery movies contain.

In any case, a mysterious Lady in White – who may or may not be a ghost – portends evil, apparently ghostly hands play Eva’s horrible music on a harpsichord, and there’s fun with a life-sized doll, too.

Eventually, Helen calls in private detective John Hillman (Karl-Arne Holmsten). He’s not bringing his rather more interesting wife, alas. However, comic relief assistant Freddy (Nils Hallberg), now having left the Hillmans trying to get his own detective agency going, has been hanging around since the beginning of the movie to pump his aunts for some starting capital. Which is great for people who like comic relief characters, I suppose.

This is the final Hillman mystery by Arne Mattson, and despite what the title’s closeness to the first one in the series might make one belief, this is not a re-tread of that one, but has a plot all of its own; apart from the inclusion of a potentially ghostly lady, of course, but I’m certainly not going to complain about that sort of thing.

Hillman only arrives at the halfway mark through the film. Before that, Mattsson and his audience spend quite some time with a cast of characters right out of the nastier arm of the manor house mystery that would bear its most beautifully poisoned fruits a couple of years later in its own corner of the giallo. Everybody here has dirty secrets, is unpleasant, a liar, a drug addict, a cheat, a money-grubber or of the bizarre belief that being titled is anything but a reason for shame for the oppression one’s ancestors grew fat on. In other words, it’s a fun time to be had with these pretty stains on humanity that gets even better with everybody’s love for hand-wringing melodrama. Though I’m not terribly sure the film finds its characters quite as reprehensible as I do.

Mattsson’s handling all of the talk needed for the sort of film this is rather excellently, posing everybody in the most effective way for maximum hand-wringing, using reflections and shots made from knee-height to make things visually more interesting (and weirder, too), really going as all-out visually as I’ve by now begun to expect of the man’s often pretty astonishing looking films. Mattsson is particularly great at the spooky bits, so much so I’m rather disappointed he apparently never made a straight-up piece of supernatural horror (though this comes pretty damn close for spoiler-y reasons). Particular highlights in that regard are Eva’s suicide in the swamps by night, the final appearance of the Lady, and a climactic séance that ends with a proper mad scene – all shot in ways that would have fit perfectly in an Italian Gothic (which is the highest possible compliment for this sort of thing), all drenched in shadow.

Three Films Make A Post: From the Executive Producers of

Actually Happened! Most Terrifying Psychic Phenomena. Psychic Research Team Report. Relived. (2004): Its title is clearly the most exciting thing about Jun Tsugita’s short in minutes but long in tedium attempt at POV horror. If you like watching paint dry, you’ll just love watching a guy in an apartment doing nothing while nothing happens. Well, alright, there’s a ringing doorbell and various things only our protagonist can see, and the very end of the thing has a decent jump scare, but this material would maybe add up to a ten or fifteen minute short. Fifty minutes of additional nothing are not great.

The Free Fall (2021): I know, Adam Stilwell’s weird, twisty little movie is not to everybody’s taste, but I found myself buying into this tale of amnesiac shenanigans, dreams, and Shawn Ashmore being creepy. Andrea Londo’s protagonist reacts entertainingly to the increasingly bizarre shit surrounding her, while Stilwell uses his – clearly very small – budget to create a mood of the very peculiarly dream-like out of little more than creative camera work, consciously strange acting from his cast, and some very bizarre ideas. I also really loved the sub-genre twisting (or is it revealing?) shift for the final act that’s just too fun to reveal.

Pronto (1997): You need to put a lot of effort into screwing up a crime movie based on an Elmore Leonard novel. Fortunately, this Showtime movie doesn’t make this wrong kind of effort, and writer Michael Butler and director Jim McBride get by nicely on Leonardisms and a very nice main cast that consists of Peter Falk (who seems to have a lot of fun, as he so often looked in the latest stage of his career), the always underappreciated Glenne Headly and James Le Gros as the first screen version of Leonard’s Marshal Raylan Givens. The plot skips along nicely, character traits and foibles become important for the plot in ways one wouldn’t necessarily expect, and there’s a very Leonardesque sense for the complicated morals of people living outside of the mainstream of law and morality. Plus, it’s often very funny indeed.

Short Film Friday: The Tall Man

In short: Psychos in Love (1987)

Bar-that-is-actually-a-strip-joint owner Joe (Carmine Capobianco) is a serial killer utilizing a harmless exterior to lure in his female victims. He’s mostly killing women who annoy him, apparently, but he’s oh so very easily annoyed. And please don’t mention grapes.

As the gods of love will have it, he meets a kindred spirit. Manicurist Kate (Debi Thibeault doing some sort of murderous low budget Molly Ringwald bit, with a vengeance) is also a serial killer, dispatching fools, sad cases and assholes alike. She is also set against grapes.

They meet, they sort of plan on killing each other, they confess their hobbies, they fall in love. Basically, it’s a textbook romance. But will their love survive the ennui that comes with years of murder?

Gorman Bechard’s black indie horror comedy/dubious romance Psychos in Love is the sort of film that most viewers will either find incredible endearing and charming, or loathe with a true passion. It is certainly an acquired taste for anyone who doesn’t cope well with low production standards, incessant breaking of the fourth wall (in fact, it’s so incessant, the film seems to be looking for a fifth one to have a go at), and jokes that run the gamut from tasteless to very tasteless to incredibly goofy. The performances are rough but endearing, while the filmmaking is trying to make all kinds of visual gags the filmmakers barely can afford to pull off.

There’s also a lot of improbable gore to chase away even the last person with good taste in the audience (because that’s the audience watching a movie about a serial killer romance, I assume) and delight us weirdos, and rather a lot of scenes that seem to be based on people on and off camera just screwing around in the hopes of it being funny.

To my own surprise, I found myself rather loving a lot of it, laughing about quite a few of the bad jokes as well as the good ones, and having a good time waiting for the next bit of goofy nonsense Bechard (who also co-wrote with Capobianco) would come up with.

In short: Schatten aus der Zeit (1975)

aka H.P. Lovecraft: Schatten aus der Zeit

The genres of the fantastic have generally played a tiny, nearly non-existent role in German-made TV programming. Before the advent of the “Privatfernsehen” (“privately owned TV channels”, about the German equivalent of what was cable in the US) with their early thirst for any content whatsoever, even getting to see imported genre fare outside crime series was a bit of crapshoot, though the situation was by far not as dire as with homegrown product.

German TV and streaming production companies – despite a handful of pleasant positive surprises – still haven’t quite developed the knack or the interest getting these things right. In 1975, when future soap opera director George Moorse made this somewhat experimental, fifty minutes short, and surprisingly close to the text adaptation of Lovecraft’s novella “The Shadow Out of Time”, these things simply weren’t done at all. I’d love to tell you how Moorse managed to get the ZDF (Germany’s second publicly funded TV channel) to finance this piece, but my sources are dry and the – obviously still very important – DVD version doesn’t tell. It was quite the find when the disc came out a couple of years ago in any case, for the film hasn’t been available in any form since its last TV showing in 1981, when your humble blogger was all of five years old.

Moorse’s approach to this adaptation suggests a direct influence by La Jetée, because this is shot as a series of stills of mostly actor Anton Diffring accompanied by Diffring’s voice narrating the action. For the most part, this works curiously well for the material; Moorse has a fine sense for an editing rhythm that gives the film the impression of heft and movement, creating a strange and rather strong pull that adds a feeling of true weirdness to the tale, as is only right and proper. Schatten is particularly effective when it treats the peculiar “dreams” its protagonist has about the time when he was quite literally not in his own mind. Moorse managed to hire the artist Waki Zöllner for these scenes, and Zöllner provides a series of collages, drawings, abstractions and found bits and pieces that do via the non-naturalistic and staunchly non-realistic what no special effect at the time (and most certainly not at the budget this must have had) could have achieved by creating a feeling of true, dream-like strangeness.

It’s all rather evocative and brilliant, and not at all the sort of project you’d expect of German TV of this era – and most certainly not one ending up quite this artistically successful and satisfying.

In short: Shadowman (1974)

Original title: Nuits rouges

A mysterious criminal mastermind who likes to either wear silly costumes or a red ski mask, and therefore goes by the moniker of Man Without a Face (Jacques Champreux) gets wind of a way to acquire the lost treasure of the Knights Templar. While attempting to find the treasure, he tortures the uncle of sailor and obvious protagonist Paul de Borrego (Ugo Pagliai) to death, making himself an enemy who will team up with a beleaguered cop (Gert Fröbe), a “poet detective” (Séraphin Beauminon) – because this is still a French movie - as well the sailor’s sort of girlfriend (Josephine Chaplin) to get at the villain’s faceless hide.

Also rather cranky about some weirdo and his henchies murdering their members and trying to steal their shit are the Knights Templar themselves, who still exist in secret and are well able to stage a commando raid on a villain’s lair when need be.

Our villain isn’t helpless, though, for apart from his own man of a thousand faces shtick, he also has a huge number of masked henchpeople, the mandatory nameless, pretty, and pretty murderous woman as his number two (Gayle Hunnicutt), and a mad scientist tucked away in a cellar who turns normal people into pretty damn hilarious zombie killers. Among other things.

Despite carrying quite a few of the hallmarks of the genre, one really shouldn’t go into Georges Franju’s Nuits rouges expecting something on the lines of Eurospy or the more comics-styled Eurocrime films. They do share a lineage with one another, obviously, but this, as was Franju’s earlier Judex, is very much an homage to the serials of Louis Feuillade, full of attempts to consciously capture the peculiar surrealism and unexpected sense of off-beat poetry of things like Les Vampires.

Usually, trying to create the air of accidental surrealism or to artificially create the strangeness that just happens to some movies is a terrible idea. But more often than not, Nuits rouges achieves what Franju is aiming for, and has an air of individual peculiarity that’s more interested in inhabiting the strangeness of this sort of high pulp realm than in making it genuinely exciting as pulp. How much any given viewer will like this approach to the material is to a considerable degree a matter of personal taste, but if it doesn’t work, Franju’s the last one to blame, for he puts all of his considerable powers as a filmmaker into his project, caring little if anyone watching it might find it misguided. It’s difficult not to at least respect this. I, of course, found myself so charmed by the whole affair, I’m now trying to find the version of this Franju somehow got onto French TV as an eight part show.

Music Monday: Still Life Edition

Double Tap (1997)

Undercover FBI agent Katherine Hanson (Heather Locklear) has been building a huge case against various drug lords by posing as the provider of an effective money laundering service. Apart from her falling apart psychologically – which the movies tell me is perfectly normal in her job – things go well until a mysterious killer we will later learn is called Cypher (Stephen Rea) disturbs one of her business meetings by killing her two customers; though not her, for some mysterious reason.

Cypher apparently has a habit of coming to various US cities to murder the drug lords there and go back on his merry way afterwards like a screwed-up western hero; the man’s got a bit of Punisher thing going on. Unlike Frank Castle, he’s not against letting himself be paid for his murder sprees by shady intelligence people or gangsters, mind you. For reasons, Cypher also likes to talk about proper lawn care etiquette a lot, which does add some educational value to proceedings.

Hanson clearly feels drawn to the guy and his methods, maybe his gardening tips, but she’s also rather miffed he’s getting between her and her job. Obviously, an eventual team up and affair is a given.

Greg Yaitanes’s Double Tap may very well be the most late-90s near-DTV kinda-action, kinda-crime movie imaginable. It’s stylish to a fault, though not all of its style seems to be so much thought through as a means to express something – even if “something” is only a mood – but vomited out by the collective subconscious of its genre and its time, Jungian psychology finally made film.

So expect a movie consisting nearly exclusively of woozy indoor shots, or light-pollution sky-less night shots. Most rooms seem to suffer under the sort of ventilation that leaves the air sticky and nearly foggy, also orange; editing and camera work is erratic and often slow, never shooting any character interaction straight when it can make performances look vague instead of precise; most of the action sequences manage to be unparsable foggy messes without Yaitanes needing to go the Michael Bay route of random fast editing. Here, confusion comes more naturally and organically, like a well fumigated lawn, one supposes.

The dialogue is a mix of cop movie clichés, non-sequiturs, and utterly bizarre speeches with an emphasis on peculiar similes. There is, for example, talk by the big bad of filling a nunnery turned warehouse (all sets look like the same warehouse anyway) with nuns again so that Cypher hasn’t got a prayer, or something equally bizarre. And lawn metaphors, of course.

At the same time, the cast treats the whole thing with utmost seriousness – if you ignore Rea’s attempt at an American accent that can only be meant as a weird joke – going through the plot as if it were just perfectly sensible and in need of proper acting. We can only salute them for that.

If all of this sounds as if I wouldn’t recommend Double Tap, nothing could be further from the truth: while it’s certainly not a good film in the normal person sense of the term, its mood of wooziness and general bizarrerie combined with the pretence of being a completely normal bit of genre filmmaking is absolutely irresistible to me. All the elements that might be meant to come together as a standard genre movie of the slick and stylish persuasion come together into a whole that’s hypnotically strange and individual. Which is all anybody can ask of a movie.

Short Film Friday: Pantser

In short: Scream (2022)

Two and a half decades after the first serial killing spree from the original Scream and three sequels, yet another film-critically interested serial killer puts on the old Ghostface costume. A new bunch of kids – our lead being one Sam Carpenter (Melissa Barrera) who has a very interesting family history – has to go through the old rigmarole of murder and ironic explanation of horror movie tropes, even those among them who have the good taste to prefer The Babadook. Eventually, good old Dewey (David Arquette), Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) and Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) will have to return too, for that’s the rule of the franchise.

As somebody who is not madly in love with the original Scream movies (except for part two, which is pretty damn great), I didn’t go into this Scream Requel (a term taken from the ironic explain-y scene, so blame the writers, not me) with too many expectations; though I am a big fan of directing duo Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s Ready or Not (aka the better Knives Out).

So I was actually pleasantly surprised at how good the film is at fulfilling all the usual sequel wishes fans have for a franchise while being conscious of but not smug about them. Hell, some of the film’s best scenes are directly mirroring scenes from the original Scream - not so much commenting on them ironically but using the audience’s knowledge of them and the resulting expectations as another method to build suspense. Something the film actually manages to do for most of its running time, until it comes to the great unmasking and a climax with way too many running parts. That the killers are mostly lame clichés of mad people you only meet in the movies with non-motives is by now the franchise standard, of course, and apparently not one the directors and writers James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick were willing to change.

Another weakness is the integration of the classic characters into the movie. They are mostly there for the nostalgia factor, to get in a mid-movie kill so that the audience can feel something, and so they can dispatch a mentally ill young woman in the most brutal way imaginable in the final act.

Which doesn’t ruin the film, mind you, but makes me a little sad that this element of the movie isn’t as thoughtful and genuinely clever as the rest of the film but really aims for the lesser goal of fan service. But what can you do?

Grave of the Vampire (1972)

The late 30s, in some US small town. A marriage proposal made at a graveyard – it’s apparently the first place the couple became…close – is rudely interrupted by a vampire (Michael Pataki) who has just dug his way out after a couple of years of coffin time.

He brutally murders the man and then drags the woman off into the open grave to rape her, leaving her alive afterwards. There’s also a subplot about a cop becoming convinced that the killer/rapist is indeed a vampire, but that not only leads nowhere but the death of the cop and includes some of the film’s worst acting, so let’s ignore this. Of course, the poor woman is now pregnant. Her baby, it turns out, doesn’t do milk but instead needs to be fed with blood.

Thirty years later, the baby has grown up and sideways into one James Eastman (William Smith), secret eater of raw meat, but like, totally sensitive. James has been hunting his vampire father for years now, but never seems to be able to quite catch up to him. Until now, that is, for bloodsucking Caleb Croft has acquired a new name and is now working as a folklore professor on the night school circuit, where he gives absurdly dramatic speeches while all his female students swoon. And James is part of his new course.

Of course, because nothing’s ever easy, our hero takes his dear time to actually making sure the professor is the vampire he is looking for, or indeed a vampire, and subplots about an aspirational vampire bride (Diane Holden) and a student who just happens to look exactly like Croft’s dead beloved (Lyn Peters) can ensue. Also, son and rapist father share the same taste in women.

John Hayes’s early 70s vampire movie, based on a script by David Chase (yes, it’s the The Sopranos creator’s second writing credit) is a bit of a frustrating experience. There are some excellent ideas here, like the portrayal of the vampire as a true monster that uses a semi-civilized veneer to hide how little he thinks of any individual human beyond of what use they could be in fulfilling his desires; and he’s all desires. It’s also the – in the early 70s not terribly common – version of a master vampire who scrupulously avoids creating other vampires and prefers to brutally slaughter his victims and then suck their corpses dry, really turning him into the ultimate egotistic monster.

While it is not exactly tasteful, turning the rapist subtext that also swirls around vampires into actual text is not a bad idea either, and certainly fits the unromantic idea of vampirism the film prefers. I’m not too sure that Pataki’s a great choice to embody most of these aspects, though. He’s not physically imposing enough to sell the physical threat – especially when his equal number is a pretty mountainous William Smith - and his shouty scenery-chewing is very amusing to watch but makes him feel like even less of the unliving horror he is supposed to be; and Pataki’s not a clever enough actor to make this seeming lack of power be the actual point of what he’s doing.

Of course, William Smith is not a great choice for his role either. He’s certainly trying to give a haunted and Byronic impression, but he’s simply not the kind of actor you buy as a guy hunting his father-monster while fighting his own dark impulses.

Hayes’s direction tends to the bland and the slow, but from time to time, he manages a worthwhile scene or two. Particularly the sequence of James’s mom feeding her baby with blood while sitting in a rocking chair, singing “All the Pretty Little Horseys” is creepy, clever and resonant, but Hayes is also good with some of Croft’s more ruthless murders. The more subtle interpersonal stuff, though, doesn’t work at all; whenever people are supposed to relate like proper human beings, actors, script and direction simply drag their feet and look embarrassed. Which is a bit of a problem when you realize how important this human drama should be for basically everything that’s going on here.

In short: Alice or The Last Escapade (1977)

Original title: Alice ou la dernière fugue (1977)

Alice Caroll (Sylvia Kristel) leaves her astonishingly unpleasant husband one night after listening to him ranting nonsense while he’s lounging in front of the TV eating grapes. It’s apparently because she can’t stand him anymore, which nobody will begrudge her.

So she drives off, at night during a rainstorm. On a lonely country road, something breaks her windshield, and she seeks shelter in a grand if somewhat decrepit manor where she is welcomed warmly enough by its the elderly inhabitant and his servant.

The next morning though, Alice finds herself alone in the house. All her attempts at leaving it – or at least its surrounding acre of land – are thwarted by strange changes in geography and the malice of inanimate objects. Things become ever stranger from then on.

Alice is a usually ignored part of Claude Chabrol’s filmography. It’s not much of a surprise, seeing how much of an outlier in Chabrol’s body of work this is. Instead of using abstracted and intelligently deformed thriller techniques to stick it to the bourgeoisie, Alice is a French arthouse version of ideas from Carnival of Souls, paired with an obvious whiff of “Alice in Wonderland” as expressed by a guy who’d like to be Jean Rollin but is neither as interesting when it comes to the fantastic nor as imaginative.

Which isn’t to say there’s nothing of interest here; at least, if you’re into artfully shot scenes of Sylvia Kristel walking through an empty mansion and it surrounding grounds, from time to time having meaningful (in that very specific French arthouse manner that’s just as clichéd as hardboiled talk if you’ve seen enough of these films, though seldom as funny) and vague conversations with enigmatic men and boys.

Chabrol lacks the obsessiveness as well as the kind of feverish creativity of his obvious models for the film. It’s a sort of energy you will mostly find in people having to work very hard to get even a tenth of their vision on screen, so very far from our director’s world, for better and worse. However, at least for parts of the film, thanks to Chabrol being a genuine and genuinely great filmmaker even outside of his comfort zone, he does manage to create a mood of the strange and the Weird. Certainly also because Kristel is really rather great at turning a sense of distracted abstraction into a very engaging screen presence even in a film that only sleazes on her for a scene or two, and because the director is very apt at using this ability.

Music Monday: New York Edition

Asylum of Satan (1972)

Lucina Martin (Carla Borelli) finds herself very suddenly and unexpectedly confined in the titular asylum. There’s something very wrong indeed with the place, even by the standards of early 70s psychiatry. Inmates - calling them patients does not seem fitting – are treated with highly curious methods; a group of people in hooded white bathrobes pop up repeatedly; and inmates seem to disappear without anyone minding. Well, as the audience soon enough learns, these people are actually murdered in various bizarre ways. The place’s interior regularly shifts to something rather more rundown, and the medical professionals working here are generally weird and/or creepy, while the big boss, one Dr Specter (Charles Kissinger) dresses like a stage magician without his hat.

While Lucina becomes increasingly bewildered and panicked in her attempts to get out or at least make contact with the outside world, we regularly pop in with her Porsche-driving fiancé Chris (Nick Jolley). This owner of various turtlenecks and some of the most 70s pants imaginable is simply flabbergasted how his beloved ended up where she did after he was away for just a week or so. Until he acquires a half-decomposed head, he’s pretty terrible at convincing the police of there being any problem whatsoever, though.

Which, to be fair, could have something to do with his habit of not actually telling the main cop (Louis Bandy) the not inconsiderable number of clues pointing at something criminal going on and instead telling the guy about his angry feelings. It would be a short film otherwise.

Chris’s inability to remember pertinent facts from a scene ago that would actually help his case in the next is rather typical of the loose idea of logic and narrative connective tissue William Girdler’s debut Asylum of Satan (shot and produced in Girdler’s native Louisville, Kentucky) demonstrates, things the director never really got to grips with in his short life and career. If you’re looking for even a smidgen of sense, it’s best to take your business as a viewer elsewhere.

Because this is a film made by a young guy with little experience, using whatever local talent he could get his hands on in Kentucky, there are also copious technical flaws to get through, like the too often nailed on camera, editing that wavers between crude and effective, acting that’s all over the place (though Borelli is as pleasantly naturalistic as anyone could get in this sort of thing), or simply the terrible quality of the rubber insects and related effects. Well, of most of the effects, really, for Satan will turn out to look perfectly adorable, and some of the creature and sort of gore design is certainly imaginative, if not effective.

Of course, all of these flaws, as well as the leaden pacing of the whole affair, are pretty much what you expect going into a local production of this level; those of us who know what they are doing to themselves when inflicting these things upon ourselves just hope for something clever, something energetic, or something plain bizarre to make up for the technical flaws, or in fact believe that all of these fun things can often be enabled exactly by these technical flaws.

And wouldn’t you know it? There’s actually quite a bit to like here when you get through the film’s jungle of technical problems. There’s the aforementioned Satan taking part in a very redly lit attempt at a big sacrificial ceremony in the finale, which is pretty great, and even better when it is repeatedly intercut with the same shot of police cars driving to the rescue to dramatic 70s cop show music. Particularly once it turns out that our rescuers are not going to do much rescuing, because Satan has become somewhat disappointed in Specter for reasons nobody appears to be able to make out on the audio track and which the film certainly didn’t suggest before, making this set-up as bizarre as it is funny.

On a more serious level, some of the shifts between the cleaner interior of the hospital and its more dilapidated true self are rather effectively shot and edited – particularly Lucina’s first encounter of the phenomenon is genuinely creepy and bewildering. Nobody would probably call the murder scenes genuinely creepy, but they are so strange and illogical they seem to be aiming for the same kind of irrational undergrowth you find in the best Lucio Fulci films, though most probably end up so by sheer chance rather than directorial fiat.

And if there’s one thing I really like in my very cheap horror movies, it’s accidental strangeness that suggests the qualities of dreams, nightmares and the effects of apple pie gone bad, so Asylum of Satan turns out to be one of Girdler’s films I genuinely enjoyed, even though it’s not as incredible as Day of the Animals.

Three Films Make A Post: War. It's A Dying Business.

Nightshot (2018): This French POV horror piece directed by Hugo König concerns the misadventures of an urban exploration streamer played by Nathalie Couturier, and her camera dude when they do a nightly visit to a creepy old sanatorium and asylum with a history of dubious experiments on its patients. The film does try to stand out from the dozens of other POV sanatorium indies by taking on a one take gimmick. Which also shows an admirable willingness from the filmmakers to put extra work, given that the choreography needed to pull something like that off is considerable.

Unfortunately, the one take/one shot business doesn’t really achieve much for the film; on paper, it’s “more realistic” for what is supposed to be a live stream but in practice, there’s little here that makes much of a difference between this and other POV sanatorium movies, so things never get terribly exciting. To be fair, there are couple of pretty clever shocks, and the practical (and live) effects are certainly fun to behold.

Sleepwalk (1986): This is the tale of a woman whose life is slowly being made weirder thanks to an ancient Chinese manuscript she is translating for a dubious Chinese doctor (whose henchmen is a young Tony Todd). In tone and style, Sara Driver’s movie is a very typical piece of mid-80s New York independent filmmaking, so expect a sense of the surreal, good taste in music, and a lot of beautiful shots of dirty city streets, as well as a floating and meandering plot carried by actors – in this case it’s mostly Suzanne Fletcher doing the work – who love making strange, deadpan acting decisions.

Too Late the Hero (1970): A few years of a wonderfully idiosyncratic career after The Dirty Dozen, director Robert Aldrich returned to the men on a mission style of war movie. Where some viewers – not me, mind you - read the brutal finale of the earlier movie as pure action movie glorification of violence, really nobody will be able to interpret this war movie that way. Too emotionally brutal is Aldrich’s portrayal of a group of soldiers (including Michaela Caine, Cliff Robertson as the mandatory American, Ian Bannen and Denholm Elliott) to get confused about the film’s anti-war stance here. Apart from being honest and bitter about the way war compromises all human ethics, this is very much a meditation on fear, the concept of Cowardice, and the sometimes necessary irrationality of heroism committed by cowardly men.

It’s not a film that judges cowardice and fear like certain old-school war movies would have, but seems more interested in understanding what these words actually mean, and how different the breaking points of different men are.

Short Film Friday: You Don't Want Me Here

Warning: gut munching!

In short: Crowley (1987)

Uruguay in the 80s. A pretty unpleasant looking vampire (director and everything else Ricardo Islas, going all animalistic and unpleasant for his version of a vampire) we’ll later learn is named Crowley digs his way out of his grave and starts right off with killing his first victims in examples of home-made gore. The police in the usually quiet town is rather in over their heads with the case, though they do think about their inhumanly strong killer who leaves his victims drained of blood possibly being an actual vampire pretty quickly.

Fortunately, the local teenage population is very on the ball, with bookish Andres (Juan C. Lazzarini, I believe) doing research that suggests a backstory from colonial times; curiously, one of Andres’s teen acquaintances, Maria (Fanny Bertinat) looks exactly like Crowley’s mandatory lost love. Given this vampire’s very animalistic style, one really doesn’t want to be her in this case.

So let’s hope the cops, Maria’s boyfriend Jorge (Daniel Lacoste?), and Andres will somehow manage to kill the bloodsucker before things become really unpleasant.

For a gory vampire movie shot, directed, and so on, in Uruguay (a country with very little of a film industry) by a teenager with a camcorder and no budget, Crowley is rather a triumph. It does at least demonstrate the raw talent Ricardo Islas has and had, with a script that certainly isn’t high art but mostly hangs together logically and thematically, and doesn’t drag, presented with can-do home made gore that may defy your ideas of realism and good taste but certainly does that with an eye-gouging enthusiasm I absolutely admire. At the very least, the movie shows dedication by everyone involved at all times. This is the sort of project that can and should be proud of flourishes like hand-drawn titles. These are of course an amateurish thing to have in your film, but it’s the sort of amateurism that breathes dedication, enthusiasm and love.

While the film is probably overlit – given how blurry and washed-out the prints of the film I’ve encountered are, I wouldn’t bet money on or against it – there are also more than a handful of clever moments in staging and framing, and a whole lot of clever visual ideas that get Islas and co around the limitations of their locations and non-budget. For my tastes, that’s certainly enough to provide Crowley with a real atmosphere of the strange. It’s not the slick and developed kind of strange you can achieve when you have a budget and technology, obviously, but the sort of thing that can happen with talent and luck, a breathe of mood and a skewed sense of a specific place and time that’s worth a lot to me in a movie.

And that’s what makes a weird camcorder-shot little movie from late 80s Uruguay as worthwhile as many a film made for hundreds of millions of dollars.

Hell Has No Boundary (1982)

Original title: 魔界

On a camping trip with her brother Cheung (Derek Yee Tung-Sing), Hongkong cop May Wong (Leanne Lau Suet-Wah) has a curious nightly encounter with a mysterious voice, a wind so strong it literally blows her away and green lights. After that incident, the formerly mild-mannered woman changes her behaviour rather quickly: she not only begins to act a lot more confidently than before the encounter but also displays a reckless, cruel and somewhat murderous streak. To wit, she nearly drowns a little boy she believes has stolen a can of coke from her and her brother (a reaction that’ll actually make sense as something apart from its obvious wrongness once we’ve learned the backstory), and is only held back from it by Cheung. Why, you might think May’s possessed by an evil spirit of some sort.

Curious deaths and accidents begin happening around May too. For example, the two female colleagues (going by the most excellent monikers of “Lady Killer” and “Bad Sis”, suggesting how much trust the loving public will have towards them in the wilds) who are competing against her for a sergeant position and are right mobbing bullies about it have a bit of a fall with an elevator; a blind soothsayer specializing in the interpretation of his clients’ bone structures first regains his sight and then grows mad and falls down a flight of stairs while trying to kill his wife.

Her new self and the concurrent reckless behaviour do displease May’s direct superior, Inspector Wong (Yueh Hua), before the change her greatest non-sleazoid fan on the force, so much he’s now trying to block her promotion. Alas, an imaginary Doberman and a just as imaginary snake get in the way of that, as does May’s ability to magically change a written recommendation. On the plus side, Wong doesn’t die from the attack but only has a bit of a minor breakdown that hardly sets him back for more than a day.

Wong also has an aunt, one Madame Chi (Teresa Ha Ping), well-versed in the ways of exorcism and the lore of spirit possession. Madame Chi’s certainly trying to get rid of the troublesome ghost, though it might eventually fall on Cheung and the photographer Koo (Kent Tong Chun-Yip) – who photographed something very strange concerning May and gets a bit obsessed by the whole plot – to solve the spirit trouble.

And at this point, we’re barely halfway through Richard Yueng Kuen’s pretty fantastic Shaw Brothers horror film Hell Has No Boundaries, with a flashback that discloses a pretty horrible back story to the possessing spirit as well as the reason for its killing spree, and many scenes of increasingly heated weirdness still to come.

As you’ll probably know when you’re reading this, at this late point in the history of the Shaw Brothers, sinking commercial success had found the company replacing its typical visual house style of the previous decades with whatever seemed to have potential commercially. Films like Hell do certainly still stand visually in the tradition of the ripped from the headlines exploitation fare that was part of the Shaw Brothers’ output in the 70s, but there’s a very early 80s kind of modernism to Kuen’s approach to the form, as seen in much quicker editing and a direction style that usually seems to go for mix of the documentary and semi-naturalist intensity. Which stands in marked and highly effective contrast to all the wonderfully artificial green lighting, dry ice fog and general peculiarity of the supernatural sequences, and provides Hell with a wonderfully strange mood all of its own, contrasting the strange and the quotidian very well indeed.

Though – and this is certainly not atypical for the way horror throughout various countries in Asia does this in general – most characters here do have at least one foot in a very matter-of-fact approach to the supernatural that treats it as very real indeed. So it is not at all strange for the world of the film that a down to Earth cop like Cheung takes his sister to a bone-reading soothsayer when she’s acting weirdly, or that an Inspector’s aunt just happens to be in the exorcism business. Which sort of grounds the strangeness here in practical reality.

I say “sort of” because the supernatural parts of the film become increasingly insane, the possessed May apparently having a particular fondness of building very complicated murder illusions, including Wong’s ultra-sleazy boss (not surprisingly played by Lo Yuen) getting castrated by a crustacean and then telekinetically wrapped up in blue toilet paper like a very sad mummy, or a fake visit to the very green land of the dead (a place of the ickiest culinary habits) for Koo. Also in the film are an incredible sequence in which a character has MacGyver-ed his car into an exorcism trap, an awesome remote duel between Madame Chi and May, and a pretty incredible doppelganger sequence. The film’s set-pieces certainly never become boring.

There are obviously some rather exploitative elements involved in the film, as well, but Kuen, particularly when you keep in mind that this is the director who also brought us the somewhat infamous Seeding of a Ghost, mostly films the truly nasty (unlike the fun nasty) stuff with a certain distance. So he’s not wallowing in the exploitative possibilities of a backstory that involves the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, a sold little girl, murder, a horrific smuggling operation and cannibalism, but looking at it with a colder eye I wouldn’t exactly call “classy” but certainly more dignified than you’d expect.

The grimness of the backstory – as well as an ending as 70s downer as any film from the 80s had – does stand in marked contrast to the general sense of fun Hell Has No Boundary’s set pieces display, but they’re not overwhelming the film, nor does the fun horror most of the movie is involved in ever seem to be making light of the exploitation version of seriousness of the backstory, leaving this a very fun example of Hong Kong horror indeed. Unless you’re the actor having to eat maggots, of course.

In short: Dead of Night (1977)

This anthology movie was directed and produced by Dan Curtis, the doyen of US TV horror of his time and is, as was often the case with Curtis’s project, particularly the anthology films, scripted by Richard Matheson.

The first segment “Second Chance”, based on a short story by conservative semi-professional nostalgist Jack Finney (ask me privately about that man’s “Time and Again”, if you want to hear a proper rant) concerns a young, highly nostalgic man (Ed Begley) making a trip back through time thanks to a vintage car and inadvertently creating his new girlfriend by saving her grandfather before he can speed himself to death in that same car. It’s a competently enough realized tale, but it is also very slight and frankly not terribly interesting in any way that matters to me.

Story number two is “No Such Thing as a Vampire”. It sees Matheson adapting himself. Some 19th Century village is plagued by what looks a lot like vampire attacks. Particularly Alexis (Anjanette Comer), the wife of local rich man Dr. Gheria (Patrick Macnee) seems to be a victim of the bloodsucker, or at least that’s what the local peasantry believes. Gheria for his part is sceptical, but he still calls in family friend Michael (Horst Buchholz) for help. Until the tale ends with the sort of underdeveloped twist that left this viewer mostly surprised when I realized that this was indeed all twenty minutes of set-up ended with. Before that, it’s a pleasantly atmospheric tale, with fun performances – Comer does some particularly enthusiastic scenery chewing early on, and Buchholz milks being drugged in an utterly delightful way – and semi-gothic photography. Alas, for that terribly bland ending.

The anthology climaxes in “Bobby”, a script which Curtis would recycle a couple of decades later in Trilogy of Terror II. Here, a bereft mother (Joan Hackett) attempts to call back her drowned son with the help of black magic. A little later, her little Bobby (Lee Montgomery) does indeed knock at her door. Something isn’t right with the kid, though, as well as with the mother’s nostalgic remembrances of their time together.

Like twenty years later, this last tale is the high point of the anthology, its set-up using Matheson’s and Curtis’s flair for creating suspense with characters in a physically constrained space excellently and to great effect. The story also recommends itself by having a much harder edge than the first one and by being psychologically much more interesting and satisfying than the middle tale, really showing how dark and intense 70s TV horror could get in the right hands.

As a whole, though, Dead of Night (which one should of course not confuse with all those other films with the same title) is a bit of a disappointment, an anthology film where I’d be tempted to skip two out of three tales on my next viewing.