Music Monday: The Inevitable Monster Mash Edition

El Vampiro Y El Sexo (1969)

aka Santo in the Treasure of Dracula

aka Santo en El tesoro de Drácula

This is based on the version of the movie with added nudity and sleaze that was long thought lost, but recovered some years ago by some heroes of our times.

Santo (El Santo), idol of the masses, the man with the silver mask, and so on, and so forth, has taken a time-out from fighting crime and smiting evil – as well as from his wrestling career, one supposes – to follow his muse as a genius scientist. Like Doctor Doom before him, Santo has developed a method for time travel. Apparently, you only need to bombard a person with radiation in just the right way to physically throw them back into the life of a historical ancestor. Which does sound quite reasonable, of course. Curiously enough, Santo is still looking for a human test subject. He knows it would be best to use a woman there, for, Santo informs us, women’s resistance against radioactivity is four times that of men; the female sex can also cope much better with the mental strains of time travel, so suck it, incels. As luck will have it, our hero’s need for radioactive material has led to him living as a house guest in the home of nuclear physicist Dr Sepúlveda (Carlos Agostí) for a time, where Santo’s immense charm and personality have hit Luisa (Noelia Noel), the daughter of the house, so hard, the two are now engaged, to be married once Santo has the science bug worked out of his system.

Of course, Luisa volunteers to become Santo’s guinea pig. After a bit of hemming and hawing, the great man agrees to her suggestion, and irradiates her, until she dies a horrible…No, wait, until she does indeed travel back in time. For reasons of science, Santo, Luisa’s dad and unspeakable comic relief Perico (Alberto Rojas) can now watch Luisa’s adventures on a little TV screen.

Turns out Luisa’s ancestor was a renamed Mina Harker in a compacted version of Dracula. This version of the Count (Aldo Monti), likes eye-liner, female nudity and very large breasts, apparently, so the film now tells us a sleazy, shortened vampire tale that ends with Luisa’s ancestor’s and Dracula’s death, and the revelation of the existence of Dracula’s treasure.

Because we’re now just at the half-way mark of our movie, Santo has forgotten to invent the video tape while he was at it, and is now in desperate need of physical evidence for the things he and the gang saw happening in the past. Clearly, finding the treasure of Dracula should do the trick. Because all of this isn’t far-fetched and complicated enough, an evil mastermind going be the moniker of Black Hood has gotten wind of the whole affair by judiciously spying on the greatest crime fighter in Mexico, and now puts various evil plans into play to acquire the treasure for himself. That Dracula is eventually going to be revived as well hardly needs mentioning.

Santo’s stint as – somewhat mad, if you ask me – scientist certainly isn’t one of the most straightforward lucha movies, seeing as it contains the narrative of at least two normal lucha movies as well as a mini vampire movie in its perfectly reasonable run time. Structurally, this of course turns it into a total mess, but it’s the sort of very fun mess that keeps boredom away with the power of Santo’s mighty fists, lots of sleazy vampire business, and so much pulp energy and nonsense, there’s even only space for a single ring fight in the movie left – and that one follows the old trope of Santo honourably fighting things out against a villain to become an actual part of the plot.

The sleaze and nudity our family-friendly hero usually doesn’t encounter are kept at arm’s length from him – most probably inserted without his knowledge after the fact – and completely belong to Dracula. So expect a small army of vampire women who have exchanged the traditional flimsy nightgowns for breast-free robes, and biting scenes that contain nearly as much moaning and sexual writhing as those in a non-pornographic Jess Franco movie. All of the sexual subtext of vampirism is turned obvious and clear text in a manner that makes this version of Dracula look like even more of a creep than usual. His love for branding his brides with a little bat tattoo doesn’t improve his case there.

Because much of this is so clearly inserted into the more stodgy vampire business and the lucha adventures, there are some lovely disconnects between the sexy (well) bits and the rest of the movie. The best – and most telling moment – is after we watch Luisa in the body of her ancestress (who of course looks exactly like her) having very moan-y sex with Dracula that clearly ends with an orgasm (subtle, the film ain’t). The cut back to Santo basically has the guy shrugging his shoulders and going “huh, so vampires are real”.

Which is a lot funnier than the movie’s actual comic relief. One has to congratulate Perico for dressing as if he time-travelled into the future and learned about the Daisy Age before being thrown back to his own time by an angry mob, but otherwise, his “I’m such a comical coward” bit gets old very fast indeed. Ironically, his supposed friend Santo does seem to think so as well, and so bullies and berates him incessantly. It’s as if the film itself were agreeing about Perico’s unfunniness, but instead of getting rid of him decides to use him to make its hero look like an asshole, too.

Otherwise, the film is high lucha fun, with some very spirited vampire acting by Monti and the mysterious Black Hood, more rubber bats than you ever wanted to see, embarrassing amounts of nudity, pulpy scenarios and fights that are on the varied side for a single lucha film, and a narrative that may not make a lick of sense but certainly shows forward momentum that is for once not stopped for musical numbers and pointless wrestling. And because director René Cardona had a very good week while shooting this, it even looks pretty good. If that doesn’t recommend El Vampiro Y El Sexo (or its sleaze-free version), I don’t know what does.

Three Films Make A Post: VHS Goes to Hell

V/H/S/99 (2022): I was pleasantly surprised to find that even this epitome series of bro horror has become a more diverse project behind and in front of the camera. This apparently doesn’t change my traditional reaction to all VHS films, where I find all but one segment of any given movie insufferably uninteresting. It’s all epileptically wobbling cameras, overdone fake VHS artefacts, and tales of asshats I don’t care one whit about being killed off in not terribly interesting ways by not terribly interesting monsters. Until, finally, the last segment, “To Hell and Back”, by Vanessa and Joseph Winter (also responsible for Deadstream), stabilizes the camera a bit and goes on to create a preposterous and absolutely awesome low budget hell dimension out of very little but sheer creative force and the imagination most of the other segments lack; that imagination is overflowing enough to design monsters for one single shot. The narrative drive as ridiculous as it is inspired. Reappearing from Deadstream is Melanie Stone in another awesome over the top performance that suggests somebody has found her niche.

The Arrival from the Darkness aka Príchozí z temnot (1921): This Czech silent movie by Jan S. Kolár ends on the worst explanation for the supernatural known to mankind, but before everything was a dream, there’s quite a bit to like: the visuals are often more naturalistic than expressionistic – though there is a pretty great alchemist’s lair in the Black Tower – but it’s the reality of old and half-ruined castles, so the film still has a certain uncanny gothic power. It is also an early example of the trope where some kind of reawakened evil from the past decides some poor woman to be the reincarnation of the love of his life, features the very Czech combo of Rudolf II and alchemy, and is generally an interesting entry into the sadly sparse number of silent films of the fantastic we can still see today.

The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959): This tale of an artist and mad scientist (Anton Diffring) who has become immortal thanks to gland transplantations is a usually ignored, and certainly very minor, bit of Hammer horror. It is still directed by Terence Fisher, shot by Jack Asher and written by Jimmy Sangster, so it’s certainly a technically well made film. There is even quite a bit of clever psychological business going on below the somewhat too melodramatic plot. Also of note are a couple of scenes of Diffring growing green in the face and a bit murderous as well as some pleasantly unpleasant business about his ideas about romance as exemplified by his relationship to a character played by Hazel Court, all situated between scenes of perfectly appropriate ethical deliberation between Diffring and an old friend played by Arnold Marlé. It is also interesting to see Christopher Lee in what amounts to a for him very uncommon role as the romantic lead – which is to say, he has very little to do in this one, in classic Hammer tradition.

Still, there’s just something missing that would turn this from “interesting” to “good” or “great”, though I can’t quite put my finger on what it is.

How We Rock (Or Do Not Rock) At This Time Of The Year

In short: Ghost Story (1974)

McFayden (Murray Melvin), a product of the British upper class if ever you’ll see one, has invited two former college friends to an old mansion. I say friends, but as a matter of fact, McFayden, Duller (Vivian MacKerrell) – the unpleasant product of the “sportsman” archetype – and the middle-class and clearly still suffering from bad memories of his school days Talbot (Larry Dann), didn’t really run in the same circles way back when. McFayden and Duller, connected by class if nothing else, start bullying and “teasing” Talbot in ways subtle and blunt.

Instead of simply exploding, or going somewhere else where a perfectly nice guy like him might be appreciated, Talbot begins seeing ghosts and visions about the mansion and its past, reliving a tale of cruelty and madness that slowly unfolds and attempts to envelop the man trapped in it whole.

This British film directed by Stephen “I made two movies about the tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and they are both terrible in completely different ways” Weeks, with a script by Philip Norman and Rosemary Sutcliff (whom I know as the author of well-regarded historical novels for teenagers like “The Eagle of the 9th”, written before YA existed as a label or the genre it is today) is quite a pleasant surprise to me. Despite its title – and some knowing nods towards M.R. James – this is not a traditional ghost story in the antiquarian – nor the Victorian – manner,  but a film that uses its ghostly apparitions metaphorically to confront the sins of the past, in this case the psychological fall-out of the British class system, colonialism and the repression of women.

I’m not typically a fan of the “ghost as a metaphor” approach, yet the script simply makes it so engaging – if in a somewhat theatrical manner – there’s really no arguing against it. Characters are deeper and more complex than the stand-ins for their class they at first appear to be, and even the more melodramatic elements of the plot always feel organic and absolutely appropriate, earned by the film’s intelligence.

And even though Ghost Story really isn’t so much about the supernatural as the supernatural, and more like someone from the Pinter school of British stage writing trying their hand at a ghost story, there is still room for delightfully creepy moments in it; in a couple of scenes, this even seems to evoke the careful and ambiguous strangeness of British writers of the Weird like Aickman and de la Mare, not something one encounters on screen very often, and certainly not done as well as it is here.

The Twilight People (1972)

Great white diver (and hunter, one presumes) Matt Farrell (John Ashley) is kidnapped and brought to the private island of one Dr Gordon (Charles Macaulay), mad scientist. Gordon dwells on the island with his daughter Neva (Pat Woodell) and a small security detachment led by Steinman (Jan Merlin), a really unpleasant kind of guy – quite obviously meant to be a Nazi - Farrell will lock horns with repeatedly.

Gordon needs Farrell as another specimen for his mad science plan of creating an improved human race able to survive the harshness of the catastrophic future the good doctor is convinced is coming. Apparently, you do that by turning people into animal persons. Gordon has quite the menagerie of those by now, but is unhappy with the anipeoples’ tendencies to develop highly animalistic behavioural patterns and to flee further experimentation whenever the opportunity arises. Which is rather often, for Steinman may be brutal, but he’s not actually good at jobs more complex than simply gunning someone down.

Neva isn’t happy at all with her dad’s work – there’s also some shady business about her mother hinted at – and when she hits it off with Farrell, she decides to help him and the already transformed anipeople to stage an escape.

Even though I love the man’s project of making Filipino movies as exploitation fare for the international market to bits, I’m often not terribly happy with the actual films Eddie Romero directed. I have no problems with a certain sloppiness in the filmmaking that does tend to come with the territory doing things on the fly and on the cheap, but many of Romero’s films have a tendency to drag their feet for large parts of their running time I don’t enjoy.

Not so in the case of The Twilight People, a clear attempt at adapting H.G. Wells’s “Island of Dr Moreau” while carefully excising every single thought, philosophical idea or moment of intellectual depth the original novel had, and adding a smidgen of The Most Dangerous Game. Romero and co-writer Jerome Small do this curiously well, so that this piece of Wells without a brain is nearly perversely great at what it does.

What it does is mainly present us with the misadventures of the animal people, a group of actors (Pam Grier!, Ken Metcalfe, Tony Gosalvez, Kim Ramos and Mona Morena) fitted out in ridiculous but also wonderfully grotesque make-up jobs, doing some improbably strange animal impressions that by all rights should be patently ridiculous in their earnest intensity but do in practice turn out to be pretty wonderful as well as somewhat creepy.

Best in show isn’t even Pam Grier, who can Panther Woman as well as anyone, or Ken Metcalfe, who is one weird antelope, but Tony Gosalvez. His portrayal of the, well, Bat Man (looking a lot more like Man Bat, actually) is so gleefully over the top, I can’t imagine anyone watching it not just feeling at least a smidgen of pure childish joy. The scenes where he learns to fly on his ramshackle wings, screeches joyfully and begins biting out the throats of bad guys clearly too flabbergasted to hit him with their guns, are absolute pearls of the funny and the grotesque. It’s no wonder he gets to fly off into the sunset at the end of the film, whereas the other anipeople die tragically.

The Twilight People’s more verbal actors don’t fare as well as the film’s true heroes: Ashley is the blandest, least lively manly man imaginable, Woodell is just kinda there, and Macauley only occasionally hits the proper note of ranting and raving. Only Merlin with his Nazi impression seems to get the kind of film he is in, and acts accordingly. The Filipino side actors are all pretty great, of course, as they always are.

Fortunately, Romero is pretty clear about which side his bread is buttered on, and only cares about the characters without special effects makeup as much as he needs to keep the plot rolling. So there’s rather a lot more rollicking monster movie nonsense and running through the jungle to enjoy in The Twilight People than scenes of John Ashley looking wooden.

Carry on Screaming! (1966)

Henpecked and sexually frustrated DC Sidney Bung (Harry H. Corbett) stumbles upon the work of – dead yet occasionally revived – Dr Orlando Watt (Kenneth Williams) and his flirtatious sister Valeria (Fenella Fielding). Apart from trying to revive a mummy and creating the delightful monster Oddbod (Tom Clegg) – whose Frankenstein’s monster plus werewolf thing truly is odd – the good doctor occupies his time with turning young women into mannikins, which apparently also earns him a pretty penny. Will Bung manage to not have his two braincells be distracted by the highly distracting Valeria for a second or two so he can solve the case?

It had to happen sometime. I blame Edgar Wright’s appearance on a recent episode of the Pure Cinema Podcast for finally pushing me into watching one of the many, many Carry On! movies. I even enjoyed this October outing into the world of formerly super popular British comedy, so more of this stuff might be in the future of this blog, for better or worse.

As you know, Jim, the Carry On! movies were the British idea of their time about what sex comedies were supposed to be. Not the sort of thing featuring copious nudity and jokes about crabs, but films you’d probably describe with adjectives like “naughty”, or “a bit raunchy”. Apparently, it’s the sort of humour used on naughty postcards, but I’m from Northern Germany, so couldn’t possibly comment. This is the sort of comedy where perpetually horny men’s desires are often frustrated, usually by their own inefficacy, where double entendres tend to the absurd – or to the utterly bizarre – and where the potential unpleasantness of the humour is counteracted by its very pleasant weirdness.

And there’s weirdness aplenty in Gerald Thomas’s (who was the series main director) parody of Hammer Horror (with nods towards Universal, The Munsters and the Addams Family), as well as puns so horrifying the film often threatens to turn into a proper horror film by virtue of them. It’s the sort of absurdist affair where Valeria takes a break in her hair-raising seduction of Bung by asking if he’d mind if she smoked. Bung acceding, her body indeed very literally starts smoking. If you find this funny when delivered with perfect comical line readings and timing, you’ll have about as much fun with Carry on Screaming! as I did. If not, carrying on running away from the series screaming seems perfectly appropriate.

Even though all of this is of course grandfather’s idea of naughty humour, there’s a wildly imaginative and anarchic bend to proceedings, with ideas that would land on the mental cutting room floor of lesser comical minds mined for all they are worth, bizarre asides that suggest a deep and abiding strangeness at the core of a perfectly mainstream (of its time) series, a subversive quality to the silliness.

There’s also, at least here, a clear, visual understanding of what the film is parodying. The colours and the sets look just right, and even the monster design, ridiculous as it is, demonstrates insight into what makes the original versions sent up here tick.

That’s rather more than I would have expected from a naughty comedy of fifty-five years ago.

Music Monday: Mercy Seat Edition

Two Episodes of “Monsters”: “The Match Game” (1989) & “Far Below” (1990)

Because it is the season (or even the Season), I found myself drawn to revisit some episodes of an old teenhood favourite. “Monsters” was the Laurel Entertainment production anthology series that followed “Tales from the Darkside”. Even more so than the older show, this was made on the cheap. So cheap, the twenty minute episodes tend to take place in only one or two sets – sometimes locations – and seldom feature more than five actors including the guy in the monster suit. There’s always a guy in a monster suit, at least, so don’t worry. Every week’s a bottle episode, basically.

This, in combination with the short running times, does lead to rather sparse and simple stories for the show to tell, but the better episodes make clear everyone involved understood what they were doing and perfectly willing and able to work effectively in the rudimentary style needed to simple get an episode done.

“The Match Game”, directed by Michael Brandon and written by David Chaskin, Christopher Orville, and Richard P. Rubinstein himself, is the rather more costly looking of these two episodes. A quartet of young people (including Ashley Laurence and Tori Spelling) come to a supposedly haunted house to play a game of relay race style ghost story telling. Of course, they awaken something nasty that dispatches some of them gorily.

It’s a moody little tale that uses the possibilities of an actual location in addition to the house interior set nicely, with some rudimentary but effective suspense created by cutting between the ghost stories by matchstick light and the feet of the thing they awaken coming nearer and nearer. There’s decent acting, moody lighting, and even a neat gore gag. The plot is obviously nothing to write home about, but the whole thing works as the simple and straightforward tale of horror it is supposed to be.

Our second episode, “Far Below”, is an adaptation of Robert Barbour Johnson’s minor Weird Tales classic about the measures taken against Lovecraftian ghouls in the New York subway system. It was adapted by the late, great Michael McDowell – among other things the screenwriter of Beetlejuice but also a fine horror novelist – and is one of only two directing credits of the great Debra Hill, one of the major producers and sometimes writers responsible for so much that’s central to the cinema of the fantastic. The resulting episode about the guy (Barry Nelson) running the secret anti-ghoul program of the subway trying to convince a very commanding young auditor of the importance of his work is not a masterpiece, exactly. It looks even cheaper than the other episode – particularly the subway set looks like something out of late period classic Doctor Who – so much so that there’s very little camera or editing magic Hill could have done to make anything look any better. The monster suit’s pretty bad as well.

So Hill focusses mostly on Nelson’s scenery-chewing performance and the increasingly sardonic tone of McDowell’s script,  and on keeping things moving to the inevitable twist ending. Which does end up turning this into a satisfying bit of horror, if not exactly the thing one might dream up out of the combination of Hill, McDowell and a very fun classic weird tale.

Still, like with all of the better “Monsters” episodes, I can’t help leaving this one with a smile, because the show’s successes feel very much like the product of people winning out against terrible odds.

Three Films Make A Post: Will Haunt You!

My Best Friend’s Exorcism (2022): Unlike most of the internet, I liked this snarky teen horror comedy about – well, you guessed it, with its completely overdone attempt at an 80s vibe just fine. But then, I did find the Grady Hendrix book this is based on as superficial and self-congratulatory as most of the author’s books I’ve read, so I just might be looking for something very different from this sort of thing as many of my peers.

Don’t get me wrong here: Damon Thomas’s film certainly is no masterpiece. The pacing is just ever so slightly off, tonal shifts work only about half of the time and the film’s humour is something of an acquired taste I’m not sure I care to acquire. The 80s emulation is so over the top, this nearly becomes a satire on contemporary attempts at The 80s™. Still, there are also some perfectly decently realized moments of actual horror, the young cast do their best with what they have to work with, and things do at least look glossy at all times – it’s the sort of brainless entertainment I can work with on a day I don’t want to watch anything with proper human emotions, meaningful themes explored in meaningful ways or even just decent jump scares.

Grimcutty (2022): John Ross’s Grimcutty contains one great idea that by all rights should have made this a clever and fun little picture: reversing the poles of the usual Internet and social media horror (hi, “Black Mirror”!) by suggesting the kids are perfectly alright, but the grown-up hysteria against a way of life and communication they can’t understand is the main problem.

While I – being an old fart myself – would at least partially disagree, this is definitely a good basis on which to comment on social mores in a scary and interesting way. Alas, there’s little else that’s good about the film. Its plot can’t wait long enough to actually define the baseline normality things are supposed to deviate from, characterisation is so flat I’m not quite sure the script is actually by Ross and not a bad AI, and the scary parts don’t just lack any imagination, they aren’t even good at the very basic jump scare biz of modern mainstream horror. Visually, this is professional enough, apart from the ridiculous and childish design of the titular creature, but professionality does not a good movie make.

Where Evil Lives (1991): I have to admit that, in comparison, I enjoyed this cheap, tacky and generally artless early 90s anthology movie in which Claude Akins presents three extremely generic – in the US post-EC style - tales about very traditional monsters, as directed by Richard L. Fox, Stephen A. Maier and Kevin G. Nunan (middle initials are mandatory), quite a bit more. At least, the tales do seem to know the kind of cheap and cheerful horror nonsense they want to be, present the little they have going for them in a short and efficient manner, and then simply disappear into the video aether.

Short Film Friday: The Tip of the Spear

In short: Hauntedween (1991)

Twenty Halloweens or so ago, season fan Eddie Burber spiked another kid in the family’s haunted house business, cleverly named “The Burber Haunted House”. His mother fled with Eddie, apparently to raise him in a cabin in the woods.

Today, the nitwits of the Phi Beta Whatever fraternity need to come up with a lot of money to avoid getting struck from the Big Book of Fraternities (or something of the kind). First attempts at saving the fraternity via a big party fail thanks to everyone’s inability to do basic maths while drunk or sober. All the while, the chief frat boy and his girlfriend have relationship problems you really don’t want to hear about, but will, again and again and again.

Eventually, a mysterious stranger offers the gang of alcoholic youths the key to the old Burber House where they quickly – at least in context of the narrative pace of this film – open up their own, ahem, “Hauntedween” house. Once the the Hauntedween business is started, some heroic figure in a somewhat creepy mask begins murdering the frats sadistically, and sometimes in front of an adoring public who think it’s all just an act. Or who just had to spend an hour watching the victims and are now on the lowest ebb of their empathy.

This Kentucky-made local production by director (writer, producer, and so on, you know the drill by now, imaginary reader) Doug Robertson, starts out and continues as a bit of a chore to get through. After a perfectly okay slasher prologue, deeply unlikeable, unpleasant and frankly boring characters do little more than to get drunk and go through endless – and horribly written – relationship troubles. Then, they do the same somewhere else. Rinse and repeat for what feels like an eternity. The viewer’s eyelids droop, hands repeatedly reach for the remote control, and a certain degree of bitterness sets in.

Suddenly, once the whole gang moves on to the Hauntedween house, things quickly and markedly improve. Idiots and walking annoyances are dispatched in sometimes surprisingly clever gore gags; blandness turns into a delightfully grimy and nasty mood; pacing exists; even Robertson’s camerawork and editing improve. It’s as if we were suddenly transported into the movie this thing was trying to be for the last hour, a really great, pleasantly unpleasant backyard slasher made with macabre delight and a grin on its pumpkin face.

If the delights of the finish make up for the long, long, painful time of the first hour is probably something everyone needs to decide for themselves, pondering the value of time and patience compared to cheap yet awesome murders. Thus, HauntedWeen even does something for the philosopher in us.

Devil’s Curse (1988)

Warning: some spoilers to follow!

aka Devil Curse

aka Devil Curse Country

Original title: 猛鬼咒

Hong Kong cop Chan Che (Sun Xing) accompanies a group of his police buddies on a Thailand trip. He’s a bit of the party pooper of the operation, or simply the only one who isn’t a total creep, for he is happily married to Wai (Emily Chu Bo-Yee), and not interested in picking up Thai girls with the lads – particularly since the couple now has a baby on the way.

Alas, things turn into a darker direction when Chan helps a local woman named Chuma (Yip Yuk-Ping) get her wallet back from a pickpocket (and beats up the pickpocket’s buddies, because we need at least a martial arts scene early on). Though he doesn’t show more than polite interest, the young woman is very smitten with Chan. So smitten, she jumps at the offer of a statuette that purports to be a god placed in a cage in her wizard father’s wizard den to help her out by teaching her a fitting spell. Chan is soon ensorcelled and seduced, yet still returns to Hong Kong and his wife.

That is of course not going to be that, and Chan soon finds himself beset by visions, spirits and apparitions sent by Chuma and her patron, all as part of a highly dubious campaign to win him over and – eventually – to get rid of his wife.

Up until the point I’ve left the synopsis of To Man-Bo’s Devil Curse, the film is a pretty typical example of the sub-genre of Hongkong CATIII horror about men from Hongkong cheating on their wives while travelling in Thailand or other parts of Southeast Asia, and then getting beset by black magic problems instead of Glenn Close doing nasty stuff to their cats. It’s a bit milder than many CATIII movies of the type: Chan’s not a shitheel played by Anthony Wong, and the black magic business uses a minimum of centipedes and other creepy crawlies. Even our villainess isn’t quite so villainous, but more the naïve victim of a more dangerous power.

Then, once Chan has lost the fight against his own possessed hand and his wife and unborn kid are dead, the movie takes a sudden left turn into a much weirder, goofier and entertaining direction, when Wai’s cousin (she might be Chan’s cousin, because these are typical HK subtitles) decides to use her dangerous half-knowledge of Taoist magic she has picked up from books her Taoist priest daddy (Kwan Hoi-San) leaves laying around. Quickly, the ghost of Wai and her child are put into a mannequin and an incredibly ugly doll, respectively, and things escalate into sudden vampirism, several magical duels in the inimitable Hong Kong style, and other particularly enjoyable things.

That’s not exactly what I came for or expected from Devil Curse, but when mannequin possession, a wire fu fight between a ghost (in the usual white gown) and a demon guy with an impressively fake moustache, and many a shot of priests and sorcerers shooting drawn lasers out of every orifice are offered, I’m not the boy to complain, nor one to decline.

Director To dips the ever increasing madness into lots of blue dry ice fog, green spotlights and whatever other colour seems to be appropriate at the moment. When he can’t afford a special effect, he vigorously edits around the problem via triple reaction shots; when he can, he’s making sure the audience really notices the effect. Bonus points to whoever chose the music to needle drop, particularly in the finale: going from John Carpenter to John Williams is as bold as it is awesome, and really hits home the main feeling I left Devil Curse with – that this is a film going all-out to entertain you in its increasingly crack-headed and wonderful way.

In short: The Girl in Room 2A (1974)

Original title: La casa della paura

Margaret (Daniela Giordano) has just been released from prison, where she was held a few weeks for some light drug related thing she says she didn’t do. In need of a new place to live, she ends up in the pension of Mrs Grant (Giovanna Galletti). The lady comes with one of those creepy/nice sons (Angelo Infanti) you usually get in movies with this sort of constellation. The good lady does tend to waver between the creepy and nice poles herself. Little does Margaret suspect that young women with a chequered past tend to disappear from the pension, or rather, from room 2A. Which just happens to be her new room. The viewer learns early on that these victims are tortured and killed by the cult of one Mr Dreese (Raf Vallone), whose ideas about Christianity make “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” look downright progressive. There’s also someone in a fetching red, hooded torturer outfit involved in this business.

Of course our heroine soon finds herself threatened by the cult; her only allies are the brilliantly named Alicia Songbird (Rosalba Neri) and the brother of one of her predecessors, Jack Whitman (John Scanlon).

I have no idea how occasional American sexploitation director William Rose (also billed as Warner Rose or Werner Rose, or as Bill Rose as a bit part actor) came to make this giallo in Italy, but I do congratulate him for adapting to the language of the genre very well. So there’s some comparatively stylish – this is still a lower rung giallo, so don’t expect Sergio Martino, and certainly not Argento – camera work and editing (though the latter can become a bit disjointed as often as it is inventive), with a couple of good if weirdly constructed suspense scene, as well as the expected dollop of sleaze and violence. Keeping to the same tradition, the plot only barely makes sense and is populated by a cast of characters who act shifty for no discernible reason, as if all of this took place in a world with slightly different – and more exciting – rules and values than those of our own. Brad Harris also pops in for a couple of scenes to hit some cultists in the face and break down a huge door, which probably goes to show that one should take care whose girlfriends one kidnaps, tortures and murders.

The Girl in Room 2A is certainly not a classic of the giallo, not even a minor one, but does belong to that part of the genre that’s fun to visit after one has spent time with the genuine classics, the semi-classics, and the outsider classics. It’s a comfy experience, if you’re of the proper mindset for it.

Music Monday: Witch Burning Edition

El Pueblo Fantasma (1965)

aka Ghost Town

Old Mexico. A mysterious gunman calling himself Rio Kid (Fernando Luján) strikes fear in the hearts of of the best gunslingers roaming the country, for he is seeking them out and killing them one by one with shooting skills that seem to border on the supernatural. There is something truly strange about the man, though. He has been working as a killer of killers for decades now, but still looks like a young man. And the bodies of the men he kills don’t stay buried, but simply disappear.

Manuel Saldívar (Rodolfo de Anda) is searching for Rio Kid. Not like the fools who seek the man out to test their mettle at gunplay and end up dead, but to learn the truth about his father, whom Rio Kid knew decades ago. Manuel’s father, also called Manuel, was a well-known, apparently particularly murderous, bandit. He even has his own corrida damning him, so he was probably a truly special kind of villain. Manuel seems to believe that hearing what Rio Kid has to say about his father will bring him some kind of closure and help him to tolerate the very special treatment most people give the son of a well-known, dead monster; Manuel’s upright, white hat personality isn’t doing the trick.

Our young protagonist manages to find the Kid’s hometown. San José was once a prosperous place but has been taken over by an air of doom, gloom and gothic decay. Only a few people live there still; they tend to avoid their famous co-inhabitant. Manuel does get a foot in the proverbial door of the town when he helps out Don Néstor Ramírez (Carlos López Moctezuma) in the desert. Néstor is just returning from a ten year stint in jail for a crime he didn’t commit and for which he holds Rio Kid responsible. He plans on taking vengeance on the man, but clearly doesn’t have a prayer against him.

While he’s in town, Manuel discovers that the case of Rio Kid might be even stranger than it appears on first view. Not only does the man not age, he is also bulletproof, can appear and disappear without a noise or trace, and only comes out at night. He’s also as malevolent as they come, so Manuel is bound to get into trouble with him.

Despite some flaws, Alfredo B. Crevenna’s El pueblo fantasma (which translates as “The Ghost Town”) is a nice entry into the Weird Western – or Weird Ranchero – genre. There are certain parallels to the US Weird Western Curse of the Undead in the nature and some of the habits of its villain, but this does turn out to be very much its own thing.

The film’s first half is quite a bit weaker than the rest of it, mostly because Crevenna (or Alfredo Ruanova’s script) has decided to squeeze most of the film’s comic relief and musical numbers into the first couple of acts. Which keeps the more dramatic parts of the film free from this sort of thing, but also makes the narrative’s beginning somewhat slower than it needs to be. Half of the musical bits are at least relevant to the plot – Manuel’s reaction to his father’s corrida is certainly important; there are no such explanations for the supposed comedy to be had.

Once the film gets into its groove, it does show some unique ideas on how to mix its very traditional Western/ranchero elements with its horror heart: there is a late scene that takes place after Rio Kid and Manuel have officially declared their enmity where the vampire (that’s not a spoiler, right?) publicly humiliates our hero by letting a frightened blind singer weakly sing parts of the corrida that doesn’t end in the final showdown but in a truly frightened Manuel getting the local sheriff to lock him up for the night for protection. This is absolutely not how you do this sort of thing in a Western, but works incredibly well in emphasizing how much the film’s vampire breaks the rules of the film world it is moving through, transgressing against genre borders as he does against human beings.

Luján’s portrayal of the vampire gunslinger is atypical and interesting as well. He’s not going for a big, charismatic Christopher Lee approach, but instead turns Rio Kid into a quiet, soft-spoken man, whose capital-E evil nature is hidden under what at first feels like reserve, but later begins to read as the sort of distanced calm you’d expect of a corpse. This does turn our undead gunslinger into an appropriately creepy villain whose malevolent influence on the world – certainly the town he calls his home – is believably hidden in plain sight.

De Anda’s performance works surprisingly well with and against Luján’s performance. Manuel’s acquired Western programmer white hat poise and his genuine fragility make a very human contrast to Rio Kid’s inhumanity.

Crevenna was generally at least a solid director in all of the dozen or so genres he worked in during a long career in Mexican popular cinema. Here, he certainly understands both of his film’s main genres, so there’s a solid foundation of stage bound B-Western filmmaking on which he can build a gothic house of horror (sorry). The film has a couple of very atmospheric moments. An early scene where Manuel crosses the shadow-heavy town at night is a fine example, or Rio Kid’s very traditional way of exiting his sarcophagus. Once the film goes all out on being a vampire movie, things evolve even more: the Kid’s attack on the the singer Carmen (Julissa), with Néstor’s attempt to fight him off that ends in him losing his mind when the vampire doesn’t react to bullet wounds is a very fine injection of Gothic horror into Western tropes indeed.

I’d have been happy with a film about vaqueros against vampires, but I’m certainly not going to complain about El pueblo fantasma adding a degree of thoughtfulness and rather a lot of gothic atmosphere to the proceedings.

Three Films Make A Post: Some connections never die.

Conjuring Spirit aka Hush aka Chung Cu Ma (2014): This Vietnamese movie about a writer escaping her difficult marriage by removing herself into a cheap apartment only to find it haunted by a vengeful spirit, as directed by Van M. Pham, has some interesting ideas seeded into a too standard South East Asian horror tale. I like the way the ghost’s and our heroine Lan’s (played by Phuong Mai) troubles with shitty men mirror one another, as well as how the film suggests Lan is slowly taking on the role her series detective character has in her novels in the real world. Alas, the film is slower paced than the material allows and has some of the most ill-placed odious comic relief I’ve encountered in quite some time. The horror set pieces are decently directed but also suffer from being much too generic to hit.

Shadow of the Wraith aka Ikisudama (2001): Also a bit too sluggish in its pacing is this two story anthology movie by veteran horror (and other things) director Toshiharu “Evil Dead Trap” Ikeda. The tales also suffer under a clearly inexperienced cast with awesome hair and moments where the low budget wins out over Ikeda’s ambitions. While the material in the script and before the camera isn’t great, Ikeda does his best to fight these problems. Particularly in the first story, he does unsubtle but highly effective work with colour tinting, and both stories feature quite a few so wonderfully blocked shots, it’s difficult not to recommend the movie for them alone.

Mr. Harrigan’s Phone (2022): John Lee Hancock’s adaptation of a solid (but certainly not spectacular) Stephen King novella doesn’t only hold itself rather more closely to the story than these things often do, but also breathes the same air of solid, if mostly uninspired competence as the tale. It is well-shot, well-directed in a slightly old-fashioned and conservative way, earnest and serious as a coming-of-age tale with occasional off-screen murder, and a perfectly fine way to while a way an afternoon with a tale of the supernatural. That’s certainly not enough to get excited about the film, but I found myself enjoying this one’s solidness in every aspect of filmmaking and storytelling. At the very least, there’s a fine late period Donald Sutherland performance to enjoy.

Short Film Friday: Stalked

In short: Orphan: First Kill (2022)

Warning: spoilers to come!

This somewhat unexpected – and a lot cheaper looking – prequel to 2009’s Orphan tells of the earlier adventures of child-impersonating little person serial killer Leena (Isabelle Fuhrman, reprising her role). After escaping from an Estonian asylum and a couple of murders, our protagonist manages to convince the authorities of being a lost American heiress.

Impersonating Esther, the daughter of the stinking rich Albrights – painter Dad Allen (Rossif Sutherland), mother Tricia (Julia Stiles) and rich jock son Gunnar (Matthew Finlan) – comes naturally to our murderous heroine, but Leena’s customary love for Daddy only as well as some rather off-beat revelations regarding the family make her life rather more interesting than she probably expected.

For the first forty, forty-five minutes or so, Orphan: First Kill is a pretty terrible movie. It looks more like a cheap TV movie than an actual film (shot for streaming or not), director William Brent Bell bravely striding away from the technical merits of the Jaume Collet-Serra original into the lands of random indoor fog, shoddy lighting and an editing rhythm so generic and lifeless, it’s some kind of achievement. Parts of the visual and direction problems do of course come from the stunt idea of again casting the now fully grown Isabelle Fuhrman as Leena, a young woman who is most certainly neither a Little Person nor a child, so all kinds of cheap and obvious looking camera tricks have to be taken to at least make her look small; she also does a lot of acting on her knees. All of which doesn’t exactly lend itself to improve the visual style. Nor does it ever distract from the little problem that nobody would believe Fuhrman to be nine years old even if she were small, which turns much of the film ridiculous.

That the script does neither hold up to even the tiniest bit of logical scrutiny nor manages to deliver enough cool and interesting murder set pieces to distract from it does of course not improve things at this point, either.

Until, at about the half-way mark, First Kill turns into the most fucked-up and bizarre Lifetime movie imaginable, a movie where everyone but painter dad is a murderous psychopath and expresses this in the most delightfully overblown way possible, until Leena starts to look like the sane one. Bell’s direction and the whole Furhman not being a child anymore business still get in the way a little, but Fuhrman, Stiles and Finlan deliver a lot of vigorous scenery chewing. Even the script suddenly seems to realize that being (more than) a bit dumb is something that doesn’t have to get in the way of being entertaining in a trashy, twisty, over the top manner and begins delivering preposterous but fun nonsense by the minute.

Saloum (2021)

Warning: there will be spoilers, but I do try to keep them vague this time around!

2003. A trio of mercenaries and occasional heroes (depending on one’s perspective) flee a coup in Guinea-Bissau with a load of gold and a Mexican drug dealer they are a supposed to deliver to Dakar. Chaka (Yann Gael), Rafa (Roger Sallah) and Minuit (Mentor Ba) seem to be running out of luck, though, for the small airplane supposed to get them to Ghana has fuel line problems that cause them to land in the Sine-Saloum Delta. Looking for fuel, resin and relaxation, the trio and Felix (Renaud Farah) their drug lord passenger end up at the small vacation village of Omar (Bruno Henry). Chaka seems to have been at the place before, though Omar doesn’t remember having met him before.

It’s a rather interesting little place: instead of money, guests are expected to trade some chores or service for their food and lodging. These services range from cleaning up to shooting poachers in the behind with BB guns, as it turns out. It’s all quaintly utopian and charming, but trouble does seem to follow our protagonists around. One of the other guests, deaf-mute – interestingly, all three mercenaries speak sign language - Awa (Evelyne Ily Juhen) recognizes them and wants a seat on their plane as the prize for her silence about hem. And the latest arrival turns out to be cop on the hunt for them.

Though, given what happens once supernatural forces awaken after the mid-film plot reveal and a bout of violence, these turn out to be minor problems.

This Senegalese action/horror movie with Western (well, the titles call it Southern) elements by French-Congolese director Jean Luc Herbulot is quite the thing. It takes a simple premise and a straightforward narrative with pretty archetypal characters and adds complexities and depth at the margins of its plots, revealing the depths of its at first broad (though effectively broad) drawn characters in half sentences. At the same time, there’s no fat at all in Saloum’s bones. The pacing never flags, the narrative never stops pushing forward; everything just becomes more interesting and inventive the longer the movie goes on, until it arrives at the conclusion about the nature of revenge that you’d expect. Yet still it finds emotional resonance in the old and the expected, because all of its incessantly smart decisions in handling its characters and plot pay off in the end.

Formally, Herbulot does certainly show a certain affinity for early Tarantino. Unlike a lot of those trying to imitate QT, he seems to have learned more interesting lessons from the  man. So instead of the love for quotes, needle drops and smart(mouthed) dialogue, we witness the ability to draw characters archetypically and sharply and to then fill in all of the actual human bits that go beyond this once the coolness of everyone has been established. Quite a few Tarantino inspired filmmakers miss that last and most important bit, which retroactively tends to destroy the coolness, as well. Of course, Herbulot clearly isn’t setting out to just do the QT, but  fuses influences like Tarantino, Westerns (particularly of the Italian persuasion, though I would certainly not be surprised by a bit of Jodorowsky), the particular sibling of Magical Realism that seems to pop up in very diverse parts of the African continent, the conventions of action cinema as well as Senegalese mythology interpreted as horror, until all of this becomes his very own thing and style. Stylistically, Herbulot does favour a much faster editing rhythm than many of these forebears; his visual approach, particularly in the first act feels rather more pop, in a very conscious and controlled manner.

I’m not talking about the horror parts of the film much here because they are so interesting, inventive (at least when seen by a guy from Germany who knows too little about the entities our protagonists encounter and isn’t in the mood to pretend a bit of googling makes him an expert, at least this week) and surprising, spoiling anyone’s first encounter with them would be churlish. So let’s just say they are creepy, cheaply yet well realized on an effects level, work well when approached from an action horror angle, and also resonate effectively with several characters internal struggles on a thematic level. But don’t worry, even though particularly the ending really doesn’t leave any doubt at one specific way to read what the supernatural entities here mean at least to/for Chaka, they aren’t just metaphors, this being a movie that has some serious things to say but which also likes to have and be a lot of fun.

In short: Wilderness (2006)

Following a suicide in their dorm caused by quite a bit of brutal bullying, a group (among them characters played by Toby Kebbell and Stephen Wight) of juvenile delinquents from an institution badly taking care of violent offenders is sent to an isolated island to learn whatever it is the powers that be believe they can learn there. Since the boys’ only accompaniment is the same guard who already did sod all of use inside (Sean Pertwee), one might be sceptical about the sense of the whole affair. The situation quickly turns out to be even less well thought through than believed, for another institution, this time one for girls, has sent a couple of their inmates (Lenora Crichlow and Karly Greene) and a rather more competent seeming guard (Alex Reid) for a similar outing. Which might lead to the sort of mixer nobody wants.

However, it turns out the two groups have a rather more pressing problem than their own dysfunctionalities and general societal incompetence. A murderous gentleman in a ghillie suit and his attack dogs haunt the island, and he seems to believe there’s hunting season for young offenders and their guards. And because this is a grim and gritty British movie, there’s little hope of the kids coming together instead of apart under pressure.

As the plot should make clear, M.J. Bassett’s Wilderness (last seen here when I talked about Solomon Kane, I believe) is a rather grim little movie whose characterisation ethos seems mostly grounded in ideas coming from British social realism. So there’s a certain hopeless, grimy greyness to emotions and expressions. Nearly every character here is their worst self practically all of the time, which does after a while get a bit tiresome in much the same way a film relentlessly optimistic about human nature can get. To be fair to Bassett, and Dario Poloni’s script, they do take care that character behaviour does make sense and stays coherent – apart from the obvious lead character, the kids do just always make the worst decision for themselves or others they could. It’s not unbelievable given the situation and the lives the characters come from, mind you, just a bit monotonous.

On the other hand, this unrelenting grimness does provide the film with ample opportunity to show kids and Pertwees being killed in pretty gory and gruesome ways. There’s a willingness to go there (where “there” for example means showing Sean Pertwee getting ripped apart by dogs) that’s hard not to admire, an abrasiveness I didn’t necessarily like or love but respect quite a bit. There is something to be said about a film being consistent even when it is the sort of consistency that’s going to make it difficult to market to an audience.

Music Monday: Devil's Fashion Sense Edition

The Coming of the Black Dawn (1965) & The Testament of Caleb Meeke (1969)

In The Coming of the Black Dawn, a young man arrives at the castle of his uncle to bring him a rare tractate that the old man needs to help Cthulhu bring on the end of the world as we know it. At first, our protagonist is into the whole business of graverobbing and letting an ancient evil speak through the thusly acquired corpse, but a vision of the changes that will come to himself after the end of the world do suggest second thoughts may be rather appropriate.

The Testament of Caleb Meeke sees another young men travelling towards yet another uncle’s place. In this case, though, the uncle is dead and the protagonist is attempting to gather his inheritance. Alas, this uncle also dabbled in the occult, as all uncles are wont to do; his diary and grimoire suggest pacts with the Old Ones dwelling in the woods. Obviously, there’s nothing good awaiting our nephew.

From the 60s through the 80s, amateur filmmaker/indie auteur Roy Spence ignored pretty much everything an independent filmmaker in Ireland was supposed to do at the time and produced a singular body of short films. These films mainly belong to the fantastical genres or are documentaries about local craftspeople. In these endeavours, Spence was assisted by his twin brother Neal, now a well-regarded poet. Quite a few of these films are now, happily, available to the public via the Irish Film Institute.

The two shorts movies we are concerned with today obviously belong to the former group of films (unless Irish craftsmen are weirder than anyone could have expected), and seem to be among the first movies Spence made. As far as I could read up on him, Spence was a bit of an americanophile, with a deep and abiding love for the country’s pop culture, especially its B-movies – good, bad and in-between. This influence is rather obvious in these two films, particularly in Spence’s fearless use of cheap and cheerful homemade special effects of the kind Paul Blaisdell cooked up for Roger Corman in the 50s. Like with the best of Blaisdell, the cheapness doesn’t overshadow the conceptual Weirdness (the capitalization is truly earned) but actually helps enhance it; some things are best expressed in cardboard and papier-mâché, it seems.

Another influence on Spence’s style here is silent expressionist cinema – which makes a lot of practical sense with movies shot with one camera, limited technical possibilities and with dubbed sound. Spence’s visual quotations and stylistic parallels to the world of Nosferatu and Caligari create a decidedly non-naturalistic world of big, strange emotions, and shadowed landscapes. In their best moments – and each of these two examples has at least four or five of these in twenty minutes of runtime – the films take on a mood of true strangeness, of things – perhaps some naked dudes in ski masks which stand in as faces without features – lurking in a somewhat disturbing manner in an early winter Irish forest, of the world being out of whack. It’s the sort of strangeness that can only be achieved by talented amateurs who don’t have to take all rules of conventional filmmaking as a given but who do have the spirit, the heart and the intelligence to come up with their own private rules and understand how those are informed by the non-amateurs whose work they have been inspired by.

This sort of thing is of course also exactly what I love in my obscure, somewhat heroic, indie horror movies, so I find myself rather giddy about the prospect of seeing more of Spence’s work. These specific two movies do also recommend themselves to me, personally and specifically, because they are at least somewhat informed by classical Weird Fiction. The Coming does suggest Lovecraft and Derleth through more than just the C-word, whereas The Testament’s dwellers in a pool in the woods do have more than just a slight whiff of Machen about them.

Three Films Make A Post: Want to hear a scary story?

Bring it On: Cheer or Die (2022): Turning this perennial cheerleading movie franchise slasher-wards is a goofy idea that’s also all kinds of brilliant. Alas, the execution of this idea, as directed by Karen Lam with a screenplay credited to Alyson Fouse, Rebekah McKendry and Dana Schwartz, is about as limp, uninspired and un-fun as this could have turned out. The PG-13 rating surely doesn’t help the film, for where other horror sub-genres can survive without getting to gruesome, a slasher without creative kills lacks an important ingredient to work as it should. That the film only does much of anything with its cheerleading core in its final act when it turns out that cheerleading is a type of martial arts is another disappointment. Also not helpful are jokes that don’t hit (this is apparently supposed to be a horror comedy, though it’s difficult to notice), a cast that couldn’t handle funny lines anyway, and direction I’ll politely call uninspired.

Devil’s Workshop (2022): A struggling actor (Timothy Granaderos) in the running for a role as a demonologist spends a weekend at a real demonologist’s (Radha Mitchell) who pulls him into a bit of a supernatural psychodrama. At least half of the time, Chris von Hoffmann’s film actually is the twisty, blackly humorous, psychologically thrilling two-hander it so clearly wants to be, with some clever moments where a character’s inner life is supernaturally brought to the outside. Alas, it is a bit too distractible to quite reach its full potential, wasting too much time on the travails of our protagonist’s arch enemy (Emile Hirsch at his weaselliest); setting up a punchline really shouldn’t take up twenty minutes or so of screen time.

Mitchell does one hell of a job being ambiguous, weird and intense; Granaderos, while no slouch in the scenery chewing business sometimes can’t quite keep up with her.

Scare Me (2020): Speaking of actor’s workshops, this movie about two horror writers – one successful (Aya Cash), one would-be (writer/director of the film Josh Ruben) – acting out horror stories in a cabin during a power failure sometimes has a certain whiff of that sort affair. However, it’s a workshop where both main parties act and imagine their asses off in the best possible way, and whose director may be a bit showy, but also brilliantly effective in his showiness, building tension and mood out of thin air and sheer inventiveness. Unlike in our first entry, the sardonic humour hits nearly every time, and the script is much deeper and more clever than it at first appears; unlike in our second one, both leads are on the same level and wavelength throughout.

I suspect this is going to be a bit of a marmite film: its very specific type of cleverness and its go-for-broke intensity and personal weirdness will rub some people the wrong way. I found myself, unexpectedly, loving this approach to talking about scary stories, success and jealousy, and the kind of human interactions that can only end in tears and/or blood quite a bit.

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.