Mirror Mirror 2: Raven Dance (1994)

After a prologue in which a Catholic nun, Sister Aja (Veronica Cartwright), is blinded by the demonic mirror from part one and a crazy lady is eaten by it (or something), we find ourselves an undisclosed number of years later in the same nunnery.

Actually, it’s not a simple nunnery anymore, but an orphanage. An orphanage of a kind, at least, for this is one of those peculiar movie orphanages lacking orphans. Well, apart from dancing-mad Marlee (Tracy Wells) and her (probably) autistic brother (name of the actor withheld to protect bad child actors). For, ahem, reasons, an industrial punk group rehearses a jaunty little number in front of the mirror. In the nunnery/orphanage, while Marlee and brother are watching, oh, yes. The impatient music critic mirror zaps the band to ashes and does something (?) that connects it to Marlee and sibling and leaves Marlee either blind, practically blind, or with reduced vision, depending on the needs of any given scene.

From here on out, things become less strange, though not more comprehensible: Marlee is apparently heiress to a fortune, but her evil step sister Roslyn (Sally Kellerman) teams up with one Dr. Lasky (Roddy McDowell) to drug her insane, the local handyman (William Sanderson) providing practical help to provide her with more effective “hallucinations”. At the same time, Marlee and the mirror fall in love. Our heroine dances a lot, excitedly, terribly. A young Mark Ruffalo appears to earn his “I was in horror movies at the beginning of my career” boy scout badge by getting into a love triangle with the mirror and Marlee. He may be a ghost, or the grown-up child of Nikki from the first movie, or both, or something. He’s doing the rebellious lover thing, badly, and ends up wrestling the mirror demon (I assume) for five second in the incomprehensible climax.

Reading my attempt at a plot synopsis, you’ll probably think “what the hell is going on?”. Watching Jimmy Lifton’s (also composer of the synth noodling score and “writer”) Mirror Mirror 2, the same question came up repeatedly in my head, as well. The only part of the script that makes any narrative sense is the whole, not terribly interesting, “drive the relation” insane business. It doesn’t make much logical sense, of course, but then, the basic situation Marlee is in with the orphan-less orphanage (because that’s where rich heiresses end up, right?) makes little sense either. The supernatural elements are even more incomprehensible. In general, motivations and emotions seem to shift from minute to minute, whereas plans are too stupid to comprehend.

Which really sounds like rather good fun if you are like me: usually of the persuasion that mood, worldbuilding and an air of strangeness are the most important thing about many a movie. Alas, large parts of Mirror Mirror 2 are no fun at all, but feel like an endless slog through badly copied Hitchcock, unconnected supernatural shenanigans and terrible dance routines. The beginning is fun enough, and the climax, while still making not a lick of sense, at least has the good sense to be bizarre and goofy enough to distract one from the pains of existence. The in-between - what the layman might turn “most of the film” – however, is excruciatingly dull nonsense, as if our writer/director had confused some doodles he made on a napkin with the finished script and just shot the napkin. It’s so bad, even the on paper very fun cast can’t turn it entertaining; let’s not even dream of “coherent”.

In short: The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft (2022)

aka Die innere Glut

In some ways, Werner Herzog’s documentary about volcanologist documentarians Katia and Maurice Krafft is a bit of a series of our hero director’s greatest hits: there are the artists descending into the abyss to wrestle the devil for some great shots of film; the awe and terror of nature (and what expresses this view of nature more honestly than a volcano?); people walking the tightrope between artistic/scientific (which are clearly much closer related in Herzog’s world view than in many other people’s) truth seeking of the highest order and simple suicidal obsession, or truth and madness; the filmmakers looking for the poetic truth more than the factual one.

This is not a complaint: there’s nothing wrong with having themes and interests - obsessions, actually - and a philosophy of the world. Nor is there anything wrong with sticking to expressing them, and certainly not in the case of a filmmaker quite as intensely interested in finding these things in actually very different people and places. And very particularly not in the case of an artist as interested in his obsessions as he is in the way his subjects see themselves, how they think and feel, and are in the world.

In The Fire Within, Herzog finds all of this not in his own footage, but the footage the Kraffts shot over the years, finding kindred spirits in the archive, editing their material into a film they themselves didn’t end up making; out of what they found, into the kind of tribute only very few of us will get (though, if you ask me, most of us would deserve).

Music Monday: Flood Stage etc Edition

Satan’s Slaves: Communion (2022)

Original title: Pengabdi Setan 2: Communion

1984. Having soured of country life and fallen on financial hard times, the surviving members of the Suwono family are now living in a large, ugly and dreary apartment building. Daughter Rini (Tara Basro) has taken on the role of the family’s replacement mom, putting her own future on the backburner to take care of her brothers Toni (Endy Arfian) and Bondi (Nasar Annuz), who seem to have grown into very typical teenage boys. So Toni is infatuated with an older, hot pants-affine neighbour Tari (Ratu Felisha) and Bondi does love some youthful farting around. Only father Bahri (Bront Palarae) seems to visibly suffer from the trauma of the first film. At least, he’s acting very strangely indeed: he doesn’t tell his kids what and where he is working, locks up his briefcase as if it were full of secrets, and has an in turns shifty and absent manner. He clearly loves his family, though.

Given what happened in the first movie, it’s really no surprise Bahri has grown strange, and living in mid-80s Indonesia, with its dictatorship and the daily disappearances that were part of it can’t have helped. There are also police reports about a sniper shooting tattooed men, adding even more tension.

Said tension increases around the time when a heavy storm hits the apartment building – it’s literally built too close to the water in the middle of nowhere – and locks in the place’s inhabitants. Obviously, quite a few strange and horrible things begin happening in that night (and shortly before), and it is all connected to the pasts of Rini’s family.

If you ask me, Communion’s director Joko Anwar is one of the best directors working in horror today. After the incredible Impetigore und his rethinking of the Indonesian classic Satan’s Slaves, this sequel to the latter shows someone working at the height of his power.

Ironically, given how tight those other two films are, Anwar’s script this time around is the weakest element of the affair. On paper, there are just too many moving parts, too many characters moving around independently, and there are rather a lot of scenes where they act exclusively after the kind of horror movie logic following which it makes total sense to fart around with a body of electrified water, to crawl through holes in walls, or look for the hidden upper floor of a building that’s haunted as hell. The set-up for a sequel isn’t terribly well integrated into the film either; one might also ask if having half of the film consist of various characters walking through the same dark apartment complex really is that great of an idea.

In practice, I found that none of these nominal problems mattered at all, because Anwar is utterly on top of his game in creating an atmosphere of dread, in pacing shocks and set pieces small and large, and in evoking the atmosphere of a very specific time and place with small, well chosen details where lesser directors would go all out and thus overshoot the mark. I’d argue that the time Communion takes place in is incredibly important for it. As much as the film actually seems to underplay it, its underbelly is all about a time in Indonesia’s history when paranoia and a hidden yet daily threat of violence must have done terrible things to the psyches of the people living through it. The barely parsable Satanic (perhaps Jinn) conspiracy running through the film feels like the logical embodiment of such feelings. Consequently, much of the film takes on the quality of a nightmare where neither home, nor family, nor the world itself seem as safe and consistent as they should be, where all social structures and their products are on the verge of complete breakdown, and logic applies to very little in life.

Even though Anwar uses a lot of classic horror tropes, and plots very loosely indeed, he on the other hand also seems to trust in his audience’s ability to put together a surprisingly large number of hints about what is actually going on strewn throughout the film. There’s certainly nobody going to explain anything in long, expository scenes here; we are apparently expected to correlate quite a few hints shown only for a moment or two, and to understand what they mean. There’s a total commitment to showing things and providing enough information to understand them but not explaining them that’s utterly admirable, and works very well indeed for me. This adds a dimension of mystery and thoughtfulness to a film that at first looks like a very tropey series of set pieces, and certainly keeps it in the mind longer.

Of course, those set pieces are absolutely incredible, realized by Anwar with an off-handed sense of stylishness, and created with a sense of the absurd as well as of the creepy, edited to perfection, and utterly engaging. The relatively early elevator sequence is an obvious example for the director’s abilities, but things stay suspenseful, tight and creepy, with actual pay-offs throughout the film, until the peculiar and inspired finale accompanies us out.

Three Films Make A Post: Satan Has Returned For Her!

The Devil’s Daughter (1973): I’m not usually in a mind to enjoy movies for their camp factor, but Jeannot Szwarc’s unofficial, “twenty-five years later” TV move sequel to Rosemary’s Baby has some moments in this regard that make it very, very difficult to stick to my guns there. I blame the combination of delicious scenery chewing by Shelley Winters and – of all people – Abe Vigoda as middle-aged Satanists with the glorious words of “Hail Diana, Princess of Darkness” and the very sensible looking orgy full of old people, as well as the hysterically melodramatic tone in which the tiniest little problems are presented. Also of note is an incredible final shot of Joseph Cotton as the Big Demon Daddy himself.

The Brasher Doubloon (1947): This John Brahm adaptation of a Philip Marlowe story by Chandler is not generally canonized as one of the great ones, but it is a rather delightful hard boiled detective tale, with the mandatory extremely convoluted plot and central mystery, and many a scene of our hero coping with the very peculiar people he encounters. Unlike in many other Chandler adaptations, there’s a certain sardonic humour to the film’s sense of the grotesque; it also features a romance – between Marlowe and a character played by Merle Davis – that permanently wavers between what we’d read as “problematic” today and something quite interesting and original. I could take or leave George Montgomery as Marlowe, but he certainly has his own idea of how the detective works; that it’s not always an idea I share isn’t his fault, and doesn’t negate his performance.

Cha Cha Real Smooth (2022): On one hand, I understand the general praise this Apple TV original wavering between comedy and coming of age drama has acquired. Writer/director/lead actor Cooper Raiff certainly knows what he’s doing in all three of his roles, presenting surprisingly complicated ideas in a very slick and entertaining way while also subverting some of the tropes of the romantic comedy (and his audience’s knowledge of them) in a controlled manner. Plus, Dakota Johnson again proves that she’s rather woefully underpraised by most critics.

On the other hand, I despair at a world where young filmmakers don’t make blistering paeans to Big Romantic Love anymore, but argue for bourgeois domestication as the one and only way to properly grow up; hell, I’m not happy with a world where young filmmakers believe properly growing up is a good thing. These kids really should leave that particular kind of nonsense to their elders.

Short Film Friday: Laura Hasn't Slept

In short: Hellhole (2022)

Original title: Ostatnia wieczerza

Warning: given the twist-heavy plot of the movie, I’ll have to spoil at least a couple of them!

Poland, 1987. A priest named Marek (Piotr Zurawski) joins a Gothically creepy looking monastery clearly far away from the next city to help out in the place’s main business. Officially, the place is a sanatorium for the mentally ill, but in truth, the monks there are specialized in exorcisms, and everyone inside not wearing a cassock is possessed.

Apart from this open secret, the place has quite a few rather more hidden ones, and our protagonist clearly feels very uncomfortable there very soon. Of course, he has some secrets of his own, for in truth, he’s not a priest but a cop and has come to the monastery undercover, looking for a number of women who have disappeared in the area. If you believe a number of anonymous letters, the monks have something to do with these disappearances. Marek’s first discovery is, however, something else: the monks are only faking the exorcisms with the help of drugs and technology. Which certainly isn’t going to be the last surprise he’ll have; things are going to get a bit more personal.

Bartosz M. Kowalski’s Netflix movie Hellhole hasn’t exactly been a hit when it comes to its critical reception. That’s not a complete surprise, really, for after a fast and furious beginning – the exorcism is pretty spectacular – the film quickly settles into a groove of slow mood building, and not much else. Because characterisation is mostly perfunctory, there’s at first not terribly much to hold onto as a viewer apart from the fine monastery set and the thick mood of creepy Christianity. The audience, like the protagonist, is slowly fed a series of curious, inexplicable things to chew on without much explanation; the film asks for quite a bit of patience, perhaps too much for many a viewer.

However, all of the seemingly random elements actually do belong together, and the final act turns into a series of increasingly bizarre and wonderfully macabre twists that may be preposterous, yet also compelling, fun and more than just a bit bonkers. I found myself having a huge amount of fun with these revelations, as well as the film’s increasingly sardonic sense of humour – there’s a bit connected with a somewhat disappointing ceremony that’s absolutely perfect. Then the final five minutes happened, and I found myself absolutely in love with the visual language used as well as Kowalski’s willingness to just go there.

Which certainly doesn’t make Hellhole a perfect movie, but if you bring a bit of patience with you, it may very well reward you with blowing your mind just a little bit in the end.

Mirror Mirror (1990)

Very LA goth teenager Megan (Rainbow Harvest, a name that brings up so many questions) and her mom move to a small town in nowhere, Iowa. Megan, being from the big city, shy, and a bit weird, does not hit it off with most of her new classmates. Only prospective class president Nikki (Kristin Dattilo), a friend of strays and weirdos, or so her vacuous boyfriend suggests, befriends her. Because Megan is not one to make her own life easier, she develops quite the crush on the nice-jock boyfriend of the school’s resident bitch queen (Charlie Spradling, only credited as “Charlie” for some reason), which does not make her social life any easier.

Because teen hormones and soap operatics are best taken with a bit of violence, an antique mirror left over from the earlier owner of the house Megan and her mom (Karen Black, alas not doing much) moved into turns out to be possessed by demonic forces. At first, it seems to react to Megan’s subconscious – and quite understandable – rage by magically murdering whosoever tortures or annoys the kid. Soon, however, Megan seems to control the destructive forces herself, while taking a nasty twist to her personality. Eventually, she’s outright possessed by the mirror and its powers. Only Nikki realizes something strange is going on, and tries her best to find out what exactly is up with Megan and her mirror, and get her friend back. There is, of course, a somewhat tragic story of sister love and murder connected to the mirror, and Megan and Nikki seem bound to repeat a variation on it.

Marina Sargenti’s only feature film – she did a bit of TV work later on, but only a couple of TV movies and a handful of episodes of various TV shows – is a perfectly decent entry into that horror subgenre concerning teenage misfits gaining some sort of supernatural power to take vengeance on the world that has treated them so badly. Its main problem is a certain lack of originality, so much of the character work feels a bit routine. So, Mirror Mirror goes through its well-worn motions, tropes and plot beats in an effective but not exactly riveting manner.

Of course, these tropes are well-worn because they are so relatable to many of the misfits at heart who have always made up large parts of the hardcore of horror movie fans (typically the people who stay with the genre no matter if it is in one of its cyclical upswings or downswings), and there’s nothing wrong with their presentation here. It’s good enough for what the film is doing, as faint as that praise may sound.

Also good enough for a decent time are the murders committed by the – mostly - invisible demon force; again, there’s nothing here that’s terribly original, but Sargenti’s direction is capable enough. As everything else about the movie, the horror set pieces are perfectly decent.

Really, Mirror Mirror’s main flaw is just that it’s so decent, competently made and keeping to the safest parts of horror country there’s very little about it you’ll remember as being actually exciting or weird. There is one scene of Megan dry-humping the mirror (who can hug back) that’s misguided and weird enough to please and so will in one way or the other reappear in the film’s three(!) sequels, but otherwise, this is very much the most average horror movie imaginable.

In short: The Grapes of Death (1978)

Original title: Les raisins de la mort

Élisabeth (Marie-Georges Pascal) is on her way by – a nearly empty - train to reunite with her fiancée, who is working in a vineyard in the country. When she’s nearly there, she is attacked by a somewhat unhealthily and a bit rotten looking gentleman, who kills her best friend.

Élisabeth manages to escape the train and makes her way through a French countryside that has turned into a bit of a madhouse. People are infected with some sort of illness that turns them homicidally mad while their bodies slowly appear to decay. Well, that goes for the men at least, women seem to rot slower and go crazy in more interesting ways, because this is a Jean Rollin movie. Later, Élisabeth will learn that it’s all on account of a pesticide her own fiancée used on his grapes, but before she gets there, she will have various, often somewhat surreal and nightmarish, encounters with the mad, the sick and their victims.

Quite a few people seem to see The Grapes of Death as one of the films the great Jean Rollin made exclusively to get money for his more personal projects, but to my eyes, this is certainly no Zombie Lake nor like one of Rollin’s porn movies but the work of a director genuinely attempting to infuse the budding zombie apocalypse genre with his own sensibilities. For me, at least, Rollin does so quite successfully as well. In a couple of scenes, he’s grazing the more direct socio-political concerns you’d find in a Romero movie – and at least the bit with the infected wine is a satirical masterstroke – but mostly, he’s interested in what Rollin’s films are always interested in: Gothically romantic shots of landscape and buildings in decay he here finds in empty fields and a half-destroyed village and in some incredibly shots of the vineyard, where it always seems to be early November; violence that is broken and framed through a sense of the surreal; actresses with particularly expressive eyes, though you can’t always be sure what they express; an idea of madness that’s taken half from the literature of the macabre and half from what feels like a very personal place to me; and of course doomed (or undead) love.

In Grapes, Rollin fits all of this into a slowly – Élisabeth is on foot, after all – evolving picaresque of the macabre, a couple of moments of light gore, and at least one sequence (the burning village and a truly crazy Brigitte Lahaie performance) that feels like an authentic, if peculiar, nightmare, shooting everything with the eye of a painter of dream landscapes.

Music Monday: What He Said Edition

Shadowhunter (1993)

Los Angeles police detective John Cain (Scott Glenn) is suffering heavily under the circumstances of his divorce. He’s clearly depressed, and so hollow inside he is barely able to function in his job. His boss, not unsympathetic to Cain’s psychological plight, believes that getting a change of air would be just the right thing, so he sends Cain off to fetch a murder suspect arrested on a Navajo reservation. The reservation police under Frank Totsoni (Robert Beltran) suspects the man, one Nakai Twobear (Benjamin Bratt), to be guilty of some murders in their jurisdiction as well, but they don’t have the amount of evidence the LA cops have for their murders. They don’t seem completely unhappy to let Cain drive off with the man, anyway, for as we will soon enough learn, they believe Twobear to be a coyote man or skin walker.

There may very well be something to that idea, for Cain gets into a very curious accident while transporting the suspect through the desert, the sort of thing that suggests magic. Unless one doesn’t believe in such a thing like our protagonist, of course. But then, he has a point in so far as his own psychological state could very well cause a man to drive off a road. In any case, Twobear uses the accident to escape, taking with him Cain’s gun and badge, and some of the last bits of the man’s self-respect.

Cain hasn’t quite given up on himself, though, and decides to take an active part in arresting Twobear again, even if it means travelling through the desert with Totsoni, tracking expert Ray Whitesinger (Angela Alvarado) and a small posse. Obviously, Cain will have to confront his own failures and his psychological breaking points, and may very well need to rethink what he believes about magic and how the world functions.

The 90s were a point in time when a good handful of – predominantly white – not Native American filmmakers started making more serious attempts at films that take place on somewhat realistic depictions of reservations, usually featuring an honest interest in – typically Navajo – parts of their cultures and beliefs. For some of today’s tastes, this will of course smack of “cultural appropriation” but watching a film like Shadowhunter, I can’t help but find the attempts at portraying parts of Native American cultures genuine and honest. How correct director J.S. Cardone everything gets is most probably (I’m not an expert on Navajo culture, either) up to discussion, but then, the way for example Catholic exorcisms are portrayed in horror movies made by not always Catholic filmmakers isn’t exactly authentic, either. When in doubt, a filmmaker will change things to work better in a film; thrillers don’t have to follow the rules of the documentary.

Anyway, the film at hand is usually called an action film, but if one goes into it looking for many punch-ups and shoot-outs, or Scott Glenn ripping off his shirt to scream while shooting a machine gun, one will be sorely disappointed, for Cardone uses the old evergreen plot about a man and his companions chasing after a potentially supernatural threat to explore Cain’s brittle interior life, and how he comes to a kind of faith and a reawakening belief in himself and perhaps in others, while Twobear very literally attempts to fill the emptiness inside Cain with his own evil. So expect a lot of loosely paced scenes of people trekking and riding through the desert, dream sequences and explorative dialogue before any action happens. The climactic confrontation is pretty great, mind you, because Cardone is certainly an old pro at suspense and budget action, but it is also the outward culmination of Cain’s inner struggles. All of this works very well indeed thanks to Cardone’s intelligent and calm script and some fine performances by Glenn and Alvarado, and Bratt managing to project Evil and menace throughout (perhaps even when he’s not on screen, which does take some doing).

Shadowhunter is also a fine example of how to keep the supernatural in a film ambiguous without getting ridiculous about it. There’s nothing here that couldn’t be explained through Cain’s mental state and the fear of a man quite as destructive as Twobear is. Yet reading everything that happens through a supernatural lens makes complete sense as well, which to me seems a surprisingly good portrayal of how different frameworks of looking at the factual world can draw very different conclusions from the same facts.

Three Films Make A Post: How to fail in the music business and succeed as a legend.

Blaze Foley: Duct Tape Messiah (2011): I’m not completely sold on the jumping about Kevin Triplett’s Duct Tape Messiah does in the chronology of legendary – and legendarily unlucky – Texas songwriter Blaze Foley’s life; it doesn’t really add anything, and seems to obfuscate things rather than make them clearer. On the other hand, the film is such a labour of love about a figure at once intensely influential and obscure, full of interviews with friends, lovers, family and peers, as well as some incredibly valuable archive material of the man itself, I can’t find it in me to pick formal nits for too long. Particularly not in a film that’s also not pretending the bad, self-destructive elements of its subject’s character didn’t exist; it just knows this changes nothing about the love (or the great songs).

Travelling for a Living (1966): For the British folk revival and folk rock, the subjects of this short documentary, The Watersons, as well as the work they did afterwards, were an incredibly important and influential group. Here, in Derrick Knight’s grainy verité footage, you can witness the group as working musicians, at the cusp of reaching something new via the traditional, following a very personal idea of freedom and individual expression. If you’ve listened to music by or influenced by the Watersons and their peers for a few decades like I have, you’ll probably be shocked/delighted by how young and hopeful they were here, how very much of their time in the very best way; how much these people feel like their voices, coming from more years away than I’ve been alive.

Tenebrae (1982): These are just a couple of thoughts after a recent re-watch of this Argento giallo. I don’t need to reiterate my love for the man’s visual powers as a director, or how much he manages to turn an absolutely improbable plot believable in so far as it seems to fit the visual world he creates so perfectly. Rather, what was going through my head this time around is how much Argento must have been bothered by the accusations of misogyny and idolation of violence thrown at him regularly, seeing as they are mirrored rather exactly in what his writer protagonist Peter Neal here has to hear. Like Neal, Argento’s not terribly good at defending himself here; but then, given that Neal is also an insane murderer, he’s probably not supposed to, and may very well be meant as a way for Argento to poke fun at himself (or at least his public image) as well as his detractors.

Short Film Friday: Pinki

In short: Terrifier 2 (2022)

I thought Damien Leone’s first Terrifier was a surprisingly great microbudget slasher that mixed pretty damn extreme gore with a clear love for the traditional slasher, some clever twists on traditional slasher tropes, and a great slasher in Art the Clown. Terrifier 2 is made with clearly slightly more money but still has the same indie ethos, and an intense love for the tradition.

This return of Art is full of fantastically created, grotesque and adorably vile gore gags, nods to the tradition of the slasher and twists to its formulas. It also has a surprisingly complex mythology and a clear interest in building the character of its final girl (Lauren LaVera) and her family to be more than just slasher fodder. From scene to scene, there are exemplary moments of blocking and framing intelligently on a budget; the film often looks strikingly good, with gore set pieces that are filmed with as much love and enthusiasm as has been put into the creation of the grimly funny gags themselves. All of this feels very much like an absolute labour of love, and I’m genuinely happy the film has become a bit of a success for Leone and his cohorts.

Yet Terrifier 2 also demonstrates some of the problems that come with a film done very much DIY and as a labour of love, where nobody is there to say “no” to the filmmakers, so they can indulge in whatever they want for how long they want. The film is full of darlings that needed to be killed (or in this context perhaps not killed?) and were instead turned into scenes that go on and on and on because the filmmakers were too much in love with them to cut them down to the actual meat of the matter. An early example is the first dream sequence, which goes on twice, thrice the time it needs to, and includes a whole bunch of details that are of no use to the movie at hand whatsoever, the sort of cool little ideas one should leave on the cutting room floor because they are weighing one’s film wrongly. All of this leads to an exhausting run time of 138 minutes for a movie that really should be a lean 108 or so, and makes many ideas that are inspired and awesome on paper just a bit tiresome.

The Wolf of Snow Hollow (2020)

Snow Hollow, a small mountain community in Utah, is struck by a series of incredibly violent killings. With the ripped apart state of the victims, it isn’t even clear at first if these are animal attacks or products of a really rather mad killer. Given these facts, the wolf-like descriptions coming from witnesses, and the mix of animal ferocity and cleverness in the murders, one might even think the killer is some kind of werewolf.

The local police is ill prepared for this sort of case, and help isn’t even coming once they ask for it. Nominally, the little police department is commanded by Sheriff Hadley (Robert Forster), but the man is ailing in body, mind, and spirit, so the actual work falls on the shoulders of Hadley’s son, John Marshall (Jim Cummings). John, a man barely keeping dry via a twelve step program, fighting against violent urges, a feeling of rage against himself and the world, and all manner of self-destructive behaviour while also attempting to keep the peace with his ex-wife (Rachel Day) and rebuild the cracked relationship with his daughter Jenna (Chloe East), is not actually in any state to withstand the mounting pressures of the investigation. As the number of bodies rises and very few clues that would make any logical sense turn up, he breaks down increasingly. Things aren’t helped by the fact that apart from John, there’s really only one member of the police force qualified for more than writing parking tickets, Julia Robson (Rikki Lindhome). Actually, Julia is rather more qualified and mentally better prepared for the case than John himself, only, she isn’t related to the Sheriff, and woman.

The first time I tried watching Jim Cummings’s The Wolf of Snow Hollow I bounced of it quickly and forcefully. Today, I’d call it one of the best movies of the last ten years or so (at least), so clearly, I can be a bit of a fool sometimes. Of course, the film’s very dry sense of humour, its slow and careful characterisation and its very particular ideas of what can and can not be called a horror movie are the sort of thing not everyone will tune into even on repeated tries, which is neither a failure of the movie nor one of any given viewer.

If and when one starts to get the movie’s – or really Cummings’s given that he directed, wrote and plays the lead – perspective, one begins encountering a film whose horrors are found in more than just its handful of gory corpses and its tale of a werewolf (or is it a serial killer?) murder series taking place in a small town. Rather, the film’s heart lies in its treatment of John’s struggles, a downward spiral he, like many of us with psychological troubles, can see and experience but feels helpless to break free from even though there is help for him to be had, and which eventually leads in a very traditionally male way to a place of violence that can end up set against himself or against others. The film finds moments of humour in John’s increasing self-destructiveness, but it’s never making fun of the psychological struggles and failures themselves. These, it treats with surprising compassion, never excusing some of the shittiness John gets up to, but treating it with a degree of delicacy and sadness you wouldn’t exactly expect in a werewolf movie. Of course there are clear parallels between John and his behaviour and the wolf, both partaking in the same male coded propensity for violence, just not ending up in the same place, exactly. Since the film treats this aspect subtly, it makes a rather more interesting, or really, more personal argument about men and violence than you usually get in this sort of thing. It also suggests a way to betterment for at least one of its violent men.

Also sad and very subtle is the portrayal of the relationship between John and his father. There’s a well-observed understanding of difficult family relations and the pain that’s part of love under these circumstances on display that’s rare and unexpected in any medium. That one half of the father/son duo is portrayed by Robert Forster shortly before his death adds even more poignancy.

Cummings is just as adept at the larger scale of portraying a community under pressure as he is at the micro-scale of family relationships and personal breakdowns. Snow Hollow quickly feels like a real place with real, if slightly grotesque, people, a place that follows recognizable rules of social connections, that feels lived in and believable. It also feels like a physical space, snow and darkness and blood taking on extra weight by it.

That The Wolf of Snow Hollow’s moments of suspense and gore are also rather excellent feels nearly beside the point in this context.

In short: Deadstream (2022)

Warning: there are spoilers forthcoming!

Deeply unlikable Internet “influencer” and insufferable man-child Shawn Ruddy (Joseph Winter) whose shtick it is to livestream himself fighting his fears while whining a lot aims for a comeback after some past unpleasantness we’ll only learn details about much later. Clearly, the way back into the adulation of the public he believes he deserves is by streaming a night in a haunted house. While whining and fake-shuddering his way through the house, he acquires an unwanted sidekick in the form of a fan called Chrissy who suddenly pops up (Melanie Stone) in a way that’ll only convince an influencer nothing untoward is going on (that’s not a spoiler, surely), lets himself be goaded into an ill-advised ritual, and eventually proceeds to enrage the already rather nasty local main ghost into quite a bit of Evil Dead 2 like horror comedy business, though with a lower body count.

I didn’t enjoy Vanessa and Joseph Winter’s horror comedy quite as much as the rest of the Internet apparently did. Largely, that’s on account of my growing dislike for the “all influencers are horrible and fake” set-up I’ve seen too many horror movies use in the last half decade or so. It’s a bit too pat and too self-congratulatory a set-up, usually lacking nuance, and doesn’t get better by the number of films that simply repeat it. This also leads to films whose first half consists of deeply punchable asshats with one character trait doing little of interest, a problem we encounter here as well.

The first half of Deadstream is admittedly somewhat better paced than these things often are, but it still forces us to spend a lot of time with a single idiot doing little of interest. Shawn isn’t exactly a grower, either, or charming in his idiocy like Evil Dead’s Ash, so even once the film gets going in his second half, I can’t say I was ever on his side instead of the ghosts’.

To be fair, the tour de force parts of the film are typically fun enough to shift the focus from how little I enjoy spending time with its main character, and the pacing of the slightly weird horror comedy set pieces becomes downright great. Stone’s gleefully over the top full body performance is also quite the thing, providing the force Shawn fights with an appropriately extreme personality. There’s also some mirroring between her and Shawn’s motivation going on, but this mostly gets drowned out by the loveable gooey nonsense.

Still, I found Deadstream’s first half or so weak enough to drag the whole film down considerably.

Music Monday: Love Hope Trust Edition

Demon Witch Child (1975)

aka The Possessed

Original title: La endemoniada

Mr. Barnes (Ángel del Pozo) rules his Spanish town with a bit of an iron hand, it seems. When a baby disappears, he suggests (ahem) a group of wandering “gypsies” (I use this term because “Romani” seems to be a completely inappropriate description for what we see in the film) is at fault. As will turn out soon enough, he’s absolutely right, because these aren’t your typical travelling folk, but actually a wandering Satanic cult led by an old woman with a very distinctive face who calls herself Mother Gautère (Tota Alba). The bumbling and ineffective chief of police (Fernando Sancho) and his henchpeople manage to arrest the old gal, surprisingly enough, but during interrogation, she jumps out of a window, committing suicide before she can be injected with pentothal.

Of course, Mother Gautère’s second in command (Kali Hansa) swears vengeance, especially on Mr Barnes and his family. Rather quickly, Barnes’s daughter Susan (Marián Salgado) is possessed by the spirit of Mother Gautère herself, sacrificing babies, imitating voices and strangling men many times her weight. Only the local young priest, Father Juan (Julián Mateos) can help, but he is regularly distracted by some melodrama between him and the woman he left to turn to the priesthood, and her disappointed life as a prostitute.

I’ve repeatedly gone on record with my general dislike for William Friedkin’s The Exorcist. Its fears and theological arguments don’t work for this hard-headed atheist, and it is because it is as serious and well-made a film actually about its themes as it is that it also doesn’t work as a horror movie for me.

Fortunately, there’s a whole load of cheap, trashy and deeply unserious films inspired by/ripping off elements of Friedkin’s film I am able to enjoy. Amando “Blind Dead” de Ossorio’s Spanish example of the form, Demon Witch Child, certainly is cheep and trashy, as well as pulpy, sometimes hilariously mean-spirited, and a lot of fun for my by these virtues. I could have done without the business about the Father Juan’s prostitute troubles (alternatively, this element of the film could have simply been better written, but let’s not be unrealistic here), and the whole “travelling folk as baby murdering Satan worshippers” angle is rather distasteful, but otherwise, what’s not to like?

To whit: apart from the more usual possession business with floating, head rotating and spitting, possessed Susan is a bit more proactive than many of her peers. She regularly takes on the face of Mother Gautère and goes out strangling people, who are properly freaked out by the surprisingly creepy “old face on child’s body” make-up. She also likes to have her little jokes. So an implied after-murder castration (whose beginning even suggests a bit of necrophilia de Ossorio apparently decided to leave to Italian filmmakers), and gifting the nicely packaged, ahem, package to the victim’s fiancée is all in her program, as are voice imitation to confuse all kinds of matters and other general nastiness.

All of which is filmed in a manner rather typical of many de Ossorio films I’ve seen, where about half of the scenes look incredibly shoddily blocked and staged and edited with a hatchet, whereas the other half is full of Dutch angles, threatening camera movements and every other trick to make a scene creepy you can use when you don’t have much of a budget. Thankfully, the film’s general air of unhealthy imagination and its lurid energy are more than enough to help one through the rough patches, and enjoy the weird and inspired scenes of witch-faced children and Dracula-style wallcrawling.

Three Films Make A Post: The mission that changes everything begins.

No Time to Die (2021): This very long final entry in Daniel Craig’s stint as James Bond – by far my favourite Bond version – as directed by the often great Cary Joji Fukunaga is a pretty dignified note for the series to end on, continuing, varying and actually finishing the themes that have run through the whole of the Craig Bond cycle while also delivering highly entertaining crazy SpyFy nonsense, a large handful of great, usually imaginative and fun action set pieces and even quite a bit of character work that actually, well, works on the heightened level this sort of blockbuster needs to get up to.

The film really has only two problems in my eyes. First, there is Rami Malek’s inexplicable decision to play his villain as a mediocre Klaus Kinski imitation; but then, Malek is one of these actors whose ego bark to my eyes often promises more than his acting bite can deliver. Secondly, the way the script telegraphs the film’s ending beforehand is glaringly obvious even for the world of the blockbuster where things for understandable reason do tend to be telegraphed with the dumbest parts of the audience in mind.

Castle Freak (1995): Despite featuring house favourites Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton, this is by far my least favourite Stuart Gordon film. Sure, the castle location is a pretty fantastic looking setting, and some of the suggested and portrayed nasty gruesomeness is somewhat diverting, but otherwise, this simply lacks the energy, the spirit, and the depth of the director’s other films.

In the Devil’s Garden aka Assault (1971): From time to time, this Sidney Hayers thriller seems to suggest a malign influence from some kind of outside force on its somewhat sordid tale of rape and serial murder. It mostly creates this mood by shots of the – always female – victims staring at the woods, the sky and overland electric lines in desperation. The rest of the film never turns these suggestions into part of the narrative and plays out as a plodding police procedural with some stiffly realized social criticism and skirts the edges of exploitation cinema via theme and very mild sleaze, but not with its storytelling. It’s not a terrible film – Hayers was nothing if not a pro – but one of those films that always seems to shy away from its most interesting impulses.

Short Film Friday: Behind

In short: The Ghostmaker (2012)

aka Box of Shadows

Warning: some spoilers ahead!

On his house clearing job, Kyle (Aaron Dean Eisenberg) stumbles upon a curious device. At first glance, the thing looks like a coffin with a whole load of clockwork added to it, as well as coming with a nice, creepy Christopher Young melody. In actuality, it’s a device developed by a 15th Century occultist/inventor that separates a person’s spirit from its body for a while. The spirit is able to roam free, walk through walls and invisibly spy on whatever it wants. Using the device may also awaken the interest of forces one might not want to be noticed by.

Of course, even without that particular problem, Kyle and the friends he’s using the coffin with are not ideal material for even this tiny amount of power. Kyle’s quite far on his way to becoming a proper meth head, which puts a lot of strain on his relationship to his girlfriend Julie (Liz Fenning), and even minor superpowers are not a great idea in a case like his. Kyle’s wheelchair bound friend and roommate Sutton (J. Walter Holland) is an even worse candidate, seeing as he uses the opportunity to now finally be able to better stalk Julie. Obviously, things will escalate.

Mauro Borrelli’s The Ghostmaker is an interesting variation on elements of Flatliners, with a much more interesting background to the occult experiments and a quite a bit more screwed up cast of characters. It does suffer visibly under its tight budget, though, with effects that work better as ideas than as what you actually see on screen, and the usual pitfall of many lower budget films made in the last decades of scenes generally going on much longer than they need to or should.

For a character-based piece of horror, the writing’s a bit too broad as well: I absolutely appreciate where the film wants to go, but it is not really making the right moves for me to be able to follow.

Savageland (2015)

Someone – or is it somethings? – wipes out nearly the entire population of the small town of Sangre de Cristo, on the US-side of the Arizona-Mexico border area. The local police force arrests the only survivor when he is trying to cross the border towards Mexico, covered in blood, bites and barely able to speak coherently.

Because Francisco Salazar (Noe Montes) is Mexican, “illegal”, and in no mental or financial state to present any kind of defence against the racist good old boy Sheriff (George Lionel Savage) and the procedures of law that back him, he is declared a serial killer and rather quickly sentenced to be murdered by the state. Rather a lot of disturbing and curious facts about the case notwithstanding. There are questions like, how exactly could a single man have killed a whole small town of 57 people in only a few hours, only using some tools and his teeth apparently? Why do the teeth marks on the victims not fit his own? And why do the photographs Salazar himself took throughout the night tell a very different, much more disturbing tale about what happened?

Phil Guidry’s, Simon Herbert’s and David Whelan’s Savageland presents its case in the fake documentary sub-style of POV horror. Apart from being a highly effective horror film, this is obviously also a film that has quite a few angry things to say about the racist elements of Arizona border culture, grandstanding sheriffs, the inhuman way immigrants without papers are treated, and the injustices that result from all these things when they are combined with a system of justice that’s all about money and race, and very little about truth or justice. That the film can do this in a graceful manner that lets even the shitty people have some humanity without weakening its own argument is one of its major virtues; that it can be quite this angry and engaged and still be a fun and effective piece of horror filmmaking is another one.

I believe both of these virtues have a lot to do with the directors’ understanding of the importance of nuance and detail, as well as their ability to make a nuanced and detailed film on what can’t have been much of a budget. So there’s a feeling of weight and reality to the proceedings even though the core of what truly must have happened that night in this reality is the stuff of supernatural zombie/vampire horde nightmares about the repressed biting America in the throat.

The film is also highly effective in its fictional imitation of the forms of the better socially engaged true crime documentaries, again adding a feeling of reality and authenticity that makes the generic horror feel as plausible in context as the political one.

What’s particularly great about the more traditional horror movie elements of Savageland’s horror is with how little material it works: there are no film snippets from security cameras or anything of that matter (apart from one ambiguous phone call) portraying the night of horror, but only Salazar’s panicked still photos, a map of the town, and a border patrol officer (Carlos Olivares) walking us through the scenes of the crimes long after most of their traces have gone. So the viewers’ brains are doing most of the work here. We are filling in the spaces between these – very creepy – photos and the places they were supposedly shot in with our imaginations and our knowledge of genre tropes. For me, this approach worked incredibly well, particularly in dialogue with the real world horrors Savageland so clearly cares a lot about, producing the feeling of walking a battlefield with the film, not so much after the fact, but between one battle and the next.

If you’re a fan of American comics, you’ll also enjoy one of the handful of acting appearances by the late, great comics writer and editor Len Wein, which was as unexpected as it was awesome for me.

In short: Margaux (2022)

A group of college students in their final year try to recapture the closeness of their freshmen time with a weekend together. There’s designated final girl and coding whiz Hannah (Madison Pettis), her eternal crush, nerd turned jock Drew (Jedediah Goodacre), stoner Clay (Richard Harmon, still playing a college kid), and lovers of mildly kinky sex, Kayla (Phoebe Miu) and Devon (Jordan Buhat). To make matters a bit awkward, Drew’s influencer girlfriend Lexi (Vanessa Morgan) has invited herself at the last minute, so we can get influencer jokes and a love triangle in one economic wash.

Because (alas?) these aren’t the 70s anymore, the friends aren’t spending their weekend of getting brutally murdered in a cabin in the woods, but in an incredibly advanced smart home in the woods. Unfortunately, its AI Margaux (the voice of Susan Bennett) doesn’t just torture its clients with awkward uses of cool kids language but is also heavily into serial murder.

If you’re going into Steven C. Miller’s Margaux looking for anything original, deep or intelligent, you’ll probably be sorely disappointed. If, on the other hand, you’re in for a bit of (very) dumb fun, you might have a good enough time. At least, I do have to admire how traditionalist the film is, starting with characters that are just barely modernized updates of slasher victim archetypes, through murder methods which are merrily ignoring logic and physics and ending with horrible one-liners from Margaux even the people writing late-period Freddy Krueger would have been a bit embarrassed by. The only elements here that are truly of our time are the increased number of people of colour in the cast and all of the (bad, typical) jokes about internet influencers and home automation. Which actually might be enough to get this one status as a fascinating time capsule thirty years on. Alexa, set a reminder for 2052!

Miller’s a more than decent director here, usually finding shots that make the cheapish effects (the gore’s good, though) and the low-ish budget look better than they probably deserve. Things keep moving zippily even though Margaux doesn’t really have quite enough victims for its running time and the kind of movie it is. Miller solves this problem with murder attempts and much less complicated – and sometimes pleasantly goofy - variations on traditional suspense tropes that reminded me a bit of a less complicated and clever Final Destination.

Which certainly isn’t the worst thing I could say about a bit of uncomplicated, cheap and cheery fun like Margaux.

Music Monday: Growing Wild Edition

Double Murder (1977)

Original title: Doppio delitto

Police inspector Baldassare (Marcello Mastroianni) has been banished into some particularly boring part of the police archives some years ago, following a monumental screw-up that has become somewhat legendary among his colleagues. He seems to have made his peace with the boring life and spends his free time reading old detective fiction and wandering through his Roman neighbourhood, looking melancholic. Baldassare’s old instincts awaken when he stumbles upon a very curious accidental death by lightning strike that manages – those old metal handrails are dangerous! – to kill two people in the same building, an old palazzo: the prince who owned it, as well as a guy doing some repairs on the building.

Baldassare decides this is a bit too much random chance to be believable and begins poking around the case a little. It turns out the deaths were indeed murders, and they will not be the only ones. Given the number of mildly eccentric suspects, thinning these numbers a little in that way just might be of help to our not always intrepid hero. Among the suspects are a political activist (Agostina Belli) with a side-line in flirting with aging cops, the prince’s wife, a former Hollywood actress (Ursula Andress), their friend, a scriptwriter (Peter Ustinov) writing about the time when the prince was helping to finagle the “Reichskonkordat” between the Nazis and the Vatican, an eccentric bookseller, an artist (Jean-Claude Brialy) of dubious merit, and so on and so forth.

This comedic mystery directed by Steno (apparently a man with little use for a proper name) is a small delight. Unlike a lot of Italian comedies I’ve seen, this doesn’t typically aim for slapstick and broad jokes, though the couple of times it does use them, these land as well. Instead, the film’s humour is character-based, often a thing of wry asides, played with small gestures often more meant to make you smile than to induce belly laughs.

Which does befit Double Murder’s sense of middle-aged melancholia. Most of the characters here have come down in the world in one way or another, and are now stranded in a place that’s also past its prime, making plans for futures they don’t themselves believe will come to fruition, and finding a degree of humour in their own, minor humiliations. While it does seek and find the humour in these situations, the film never looks down on its characters; there’s a sense of compassion intertwined with that of the ridiculous that makes some of this surprisingly touching. But then, that may be my own middle-aged ennui speaking here.

The cast – the international stars as well as the Italian character actors – do very well with this material, but then, I suspect particularly Mastroianni, Andress and Ustinov would have had a certain understanding of their characters’ places in the world taken from their own experiences.

Speaking of their world, Steno manages to create a sense of place as well as one of companionable ridiculousness, so the film takes place in a fully realized quarter of an aging Rome, a place where old bohemians might go to lick their wounds, still beautiful, perhaps because it is losing to time.

That Double Murder is also a decent whodunnit seems to be nearly beside the point, but there’s that, too.

Three Films Make A Post: The scene was the wildest freak-out in Vegas history…and the gig was to grab it all!

The Innocents aka De uskyldige (2021): Eskil Vogt’s horror movie about a group of kids who discover they are developing psychic powers and the pretty horrible things that follow is certainly a future genre classic, exploring uncomfortable ideas about childhood and poverty without becoming dishonest or grimdark or lacking compassion, while also providing some memorable and painfully effective horror set pieces that make most jump scare horror look embarrassing and pointless in comparison.

There’s also fantastic child acting, as well as filmmaking that finds un-kitschy ways to portray the way a child’s sense perceptions might feel when combined with the strangeness of telepathic and telekinetic powers taken seriously.

The Adventures of Arsène Lupin aka Les aventures d’Arsène Lupin (1957): I generally do tend to enjoy French genre movies made in this period, but Jacques Becker’s attempt at everyone’s favourite gentleman thief feels rather too close to the way German filmmakers of the time would have handled the material, which might have something to do with this being a French-German-Italian co-production. So expect only the most obvious kind of humour, a never-ending stint in the world of KuK (treated nostalgically, of course and alas). Not to blame on my native country are Robert Lamoureux’s one-note performance as Lupin, or the script’s difficulties when it comes to at least pretending its plot episodes are actually connected. And it’s not as if the film had any interesting heist set pieces.

The Came to Rob Las Vegas (1968): A criminal mastermind (Gary Lockwood) bites off more than he can chew in a daring (and murderous) armoured truck robbery (not really robbing Las Vegas, despite the film’s title), and soon has to cope not just with the normal police and the owner of the truck (Lee J. Cobb), but also the Mafia, the US treasury department (via Jack Palance), and the fact that his merry band of colleagues is mostly incapable of keeping a clear head or following instructions. At least there’s a particularly attractive Elke Sommer waiting for him, or might that be another problem?

This is another international co-production, with the late-60s cast to match, competently though not exceedingly well directed by Antonio Isasi-Isasmendi. If it were twenty minutes shorter, this would probably be a great example of the twisty, hard-boiled arm of the heist movie. With over two hours of running time, it does tend to drag its feet from time to time, taking its time with various subplots it doesn’t exactly need. On the other hand, there are some really cleverly staged set pieces taking place in the desert, and a great ending where everybody loses.

Short Film Friday: Wandering Soul

In short: Hellraiser (2022)

Sort-of clean addict’s Riley (Odessa A’zion) decision to follow the plan of her criminal non-mastermind boyfriend to steal something that will turn out to be the Lament Configuration (New Edition) leads to madness and death (mostly death, though) for everyone involved, including her half-estranged brother.

I was rather looking forward to David Bruckner’s version of Hellraiser, given how much I enjoyed – well, I say “enjoyed” but you know what I mean – his The Ritual and The Night House. Alas, the actual film leaves me completely cold. While there are some scenes that are memorable as high technical accomplishments on a design and effects level – just take that van sequence as an example – there’s an abstract, passionless and sexless quality to all of it that is completely at odds with the material and its thematic connotations. It’s a film about obsessions, sex, violence and all combinations thereof where nobody ever seems all that obsessed (even passionate) about anything; perversion’s a cenobite that looks a bit like it was made with the action figure foremost in mind. Bruckner’s usual thematic main concern – the combination of grief and guilt – does appear again, but in comparison with his earlier films, its treatment is so superficial it borders on the offensive.

But then, the character going through the grief is not really a character, but a flat cliché version of a young woman down on her luck, as lifeless at her core as the rest of the film. Turning the cenobites into aggressive tempter figures is not such a great idea either, bringing them much too close to the been there done that of the classic devil, taking away from the feeling of mystery and the uncanny. (And yes, I know, some of the Hellraiser comics did this as well, but those were mostly terrible, so don’t seem to be the greatest source to me).

There is simply no reason for this to be two hours long – the characters are certainly not complex enough to need scenes and scenes of build-up with them, and there’s simply not enough plot to fill the spaces between set pieces.

Blood and Bullets (1976)

aka Knell, The Bloody Avenger

Original title: Sangue di sbirro

Dan Caputo (George Eastman), a giant with a short fuse and a violent disposition who goes by the nickname of Knell (as in death knell) returns to New York shortly after the death of his father. Because this is that kind of movie, Dan single-handedly thwarts an air jacking attempt by half a dozen or so armed guys on his way in. Sure, quite a few of the hostages die during the shoot-out, but apparently, he’s still a big damn hero.

Somewhat more plot-relevant attempts at our protagonist’s life begin when he hasn’t even entered the apartment he grew up in and where his father was killed. Of course, random mooks are easily dispatched. To make Dan’s life a little easier, he’s also greeted by an old associate of his, the avuncular (if one’s uncle is a bit of a killer, at least) gang leader Duke (Jack Palance) who comes with some helpful gunplay and his own free corpse disposal service.

From here on out, barely a scene goes by in which Dan isn’t involved in a brutal beatdown – mostly with him as the delivering party – or a shoot-out with people who really don’t want him to find out who killed his father, or why. The film does manage to squeeze in a couple of flashbacks about the fraught relationship between Dan and his dad, a sub-plot about him reconnecting with an old girlfriend (Jenny Tamburi), and even some detective work. Repeat until all of the bad guys are dead and Duke – spoiler – crowns himself the new king of the underworld, because all of this was apparently part of his evil plan, or something.

Around these parts, Blood and Bullets’ director Alfonso Brescia is mostly beloved for his wild and woolly cardboard and blinking lights space operas, films whose cheapness is only exceeded by their inspired weirdness. Being a working Italian genre director, Brescia was involved in other genres as well, which brings us to this Eurocrime movie. Or truthfully, this endless series of cheaply – though not as cheaply as Brescia’s science fiction – realized yet energetic action sequences. Brescia isn’t one of the great Italian crime action directors, but what he lacks in finesse when it comes to editing, blocking and rhythm, he does make up for in energy. The action is absolutely relentless, even in the context of the film’s time and place. I don’t think I’ve seen many action movies where the sheer number of violent encounters was quite as exhausting as here, apart from some Indonesian films made forty years or so later.

What Blood and Bullets lacks, at least in comparison with much of the rest of Brescia’s body of work is a sense of weirdness. Brescia’s stranger sensibilities are completely replaced by a willingness to hit genre tropes and plot beats like clockwork. To me, that’s a bit of a disappointment, because I prefer my Brescia weird and woolly. Yet it also is what makes this work as well as it does as a straightforward Eurocrime film, made with a total commitment to entertaining its audience with the low-brow but always effective charms of copious violence, tough guy posturing, a bit of sex and a nasty disposition.

In short: Boggy Creek II: And the Legend Continues (1983)

aka The Barbaric Beast of Boggy Creek, Part II

As the long-time regulars among my imaginary readers will know, I am a bit of a fan of hard-working regional Arkansas filmmaker Charles B. Pierce’s original Legend of Boggy Creek. The curiously authentic feel of a 70s documentary about Forteana with added restaging of Beast encounters that can turn out to be surprisingly creepy, the songs that comment on the action, the brilliant swampy atmosphere of the whole business all combine into something truly special that breathes a sense of its time and its place.

A decade and more than half a dozen films later, Pierce returned to the Arkansas swamp well, with decidedly mixed results. There was also a Pierce-less Boggy Creek movie, Return to Boggy Creek, in the meantime but let’s just ignore that one, like Pierce himself did.

At first, Boggy Creek II appears to go for the same mood of mock documentary scenes connected by a nature documentary voice track, but quickly, something of a more conventional plot develops. Gun-toting anthropologist Dr. Brian C. Lockhart (played by Pierce himself), two of his students (Cindy Butler and Pierce’s son Chuck Jr.) and a friend of student number one (Serene Hedin) travel to the Legend’s boggy home because the number of sightings in the last months has increased heavily, and the beast has begun to become rather aggressive. When they are not wandering the swamps, using high-tech of 1983 for their monster hunt, or have a melodramatic fight against a mad dog, Lockhart tells his students some Boggy Creek monster tales. These segments are clear attempts at recapturing the magic of the first movie, but they simply aren’t quite as good or fun as those in the original. They also tend to break up the little dramatic tension Pierce has been able to build in the adventures of Lockhart and company, giving the film a start/stop feeling for no productive reason whatsoever.

This doesn’t mean there’s nothing worthwhile about Boggy Creek II whatsoever: Pierce can still be rather good at producing a feeling of a specific time and place, if now one that has to fight its way through the usual monster movie clichés; and the photography is often pretty. From time to time, Boggy Creek II even reaches small plateaus of actual campfire bigfoot tale creepiness. Which isn’t much when compared to the first movie, but did provide me with enough seasonal chills to make this less of a disappointment than it could have been.