At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (1964)

Original title: À Meia Noite Levarei Sua Alma

Zé do Caixão (José Mojica Marins) – better known as Coffin Joe in English-speaking countries – is an undertaker in a Brazilian country town. He’s also an inveterate bully half of the town is afraid of, sadistically violent, a misogynist of the highest order, an atheist and unbeliever in all things supernatural in a deeply religious and superstitious community, a man with his very own sartorial ideas, as well as someone given to long rants somewhere between Nietzsche, LaVey and John Wayne Gacy.

If he weren’t so murderously dangerous and brutal in his retribution of every slight he himself deliberately provokes, he’d probably already have been driven out of town or lynched. Right now, at least when he’s not violating someone somewhere, Zé is obsessed with the question of continuing his bloodline – given his philosophy, it’s the only way a man has towards immortality, or so he monologues. Since his live-in lover has not been able to get pregnant for years, Zé really is in need of a new breeding option – obviously, in his mind, the possibility he might not be able to have children because something’s biologically wrong with him doesn’t even come up. He already has another candidate for the position in mind, the virtuous Terezinha (Magda Mei). There’s a problem there, or rather three problems: firstly, Zé doesn’t truck with his old girlfriends running around potentially getting pregnant by other men (his logic, not mine), so he really needs to get rid of the old model woman rather more permanently. Secondly Terezinha is the fiancée of his friend – the film never explains how Zé managed to acquire one – the totally normal Antônio (Nivaldo Lima); thirdly, Terezinha really isn’t into Zé at all. Who could imagine why?

Of course, problems one and two can easily be solved with murder, while number three just needs a total disinterest in consent, so they aren’t all that difficult to solve for our protagonist.

The deeply uncooperative Terezinha decides to commit suicide after Zé rapes her, though, and from then on out, the unbelieving Zé is haunted by ghosts and portents that might very well end in supernatural vengeance.

Being a very poor country, Brazilian’s film industry in the early 60s was a small and struggling thing; being an at the best of times very conservative one, it lacked in horror movies completely. That is, until José Mojica Marins, who at this point had already made a small handful of films in other genres, came upon the brilliant idea on how to get horror through censorship, while also keeping it extremely critical of large parts of the country’s culture: just put all of your criticism, and all of your ideas into the mouth of the most outrageously exalted villain you can come up with.

As an added bonus, this also provided Marins with the opportunity to get as much exploitational value into his film as possible. The violence and the blasphemy and the sex are, after all, the misdeeds of a villain who will be rightfully punished by supernatural forces (though, one can’t help but notice, not the power of Christ), so this is not a way to criticize the way things are and get behinds in seats by being as outrageous as possible, but really a tale told to keep people honest citizens, Mister Censor. Censors being censors, they did apparently buy this argument, and Marins was off to the races, producing a series of increasingly psychedelic and bizarre movies featuring versions of the Zé do Caixão figure, always embodied by Marins himself with the glee of a guy who is getting away with it.

Marins’s portrayal of Zé here truly is a sight to behold. His improbable get-up and style, his long, soul(?)ful rants about often utterly horrible ideas, his mean-spiritedness and his love for often surprisingly gory violence are what holds the film together instead of a more traditional narrative. Marin’s direction and Giorgio Attili’s photography are a little rough around the edges, but they have such a sense for the dramatic, and the macabre money shot technical polish is replaced by the sheer energy of what they are doing. This is the how it looks when a group of people do something new, and exciting, and can even allow themselves jokes like Zé using the crown of thorns of a Jesus statuette to beat a guy up without getting dragged to court for it.

There isn’t only joy in the breaking of taboos on display here, though. The climax in which Zé is dispatched by ghosts looks very much schooled on the way classic kaidan cinema would have realized the same sort of ending – just with a bit more ickiness here – and there are rather a lot of little visual flourishes that suggest a filmmaker who is rather well-informed about what is going on in the rest of the world, incorporating what fits into his aesthetics and discarding the rest.

Music Monday: Serial Killer Edition

The Boxer’s Omen (1983)

Original title: 魔

When his brother Wing (Johnny Wang Lung-Wei) is so badly hurt in a ring fight against a rather evil Thai Boxer (Bolo Yeung) he’ll never be able to walk again, gangster Chan Hung (Phillip Ko Fei) swears vengeance. Before he can do much about it apart from setting a date with the villain, his daily life of fighting and tough-guying is interrupted by a glowing buddha-like figure who spouts water like a rather improbable water fountain. Said figure wants Hung to come to him, for reasons he’s not going to explain.

As luck will have it, when Hung comes to Thailand for his grudge match against the Thai Boxer, he stumbles upon a temple whose abbot the glowing figure apparently is. Said abbot was close to achieving either nirvana or bodhisattva status when he was cursed during an extensive long range magic duel against a black magician. Now, instead of attaining a glorious state, he’s starting to slowly rot away.

Which is a problem for Hung as well, because in a former life, he was the abbot’s twin; they are still spiritually connected, so the curse will kill Hung as well, eventually. The only way out is for our very reluctant protagonist to become a monk (abstaining from sex is a real problem for this friend of the female breast) and learn some proper Buddhist magic. And even if Hung should manage to beat the magician, there are further complications in front of him.

This bare description of its first forty minutes or so does not in the least do justice to the incredible amount of macabre craziness Kuei Chih-Hung’s The Boxer’s Omen gets up to. Much of the film is taken up by a series of magical duels that take place on black sound stages with mood lights, during which an incredible amount of some of the weirdest stuff ever put to screen takes place. Heads rip themselves from bodies, eyes turn to maggoty holes, little bat skeletons slow-motion hop away, and so on, and so forth until one is overwhelmed by the film’s sheer focus on being weird. Once things have gotten going, which does not take long at all, there’s no stopping Kuei’s – or screenwriter Szw-To On’s – imagination when it comes to body horror, strange uses of body parts, and whatever you might imagine belongs into a film like this.

I’ve seen enough black magic and Buddhist horrific folk magic in movies to actually recognize quite a few of the tropes and magical basics on display here, but The Boxer’s Omen uses their more traditional weird only as a springboard for flights of wild and macabre visual fancy that are peculiar even for the weirdest stage of horror filmmaking in Hongkong. Despite the film mostly consisting of a couple of – pretty great – martial arts fights and drawn-out magical duels, there’s really never a dull moment here. That’s not only thanks to Kuei’s willingness to make every idea he encounters weirder, but also because he has such a great eye for creating a mood of the truly outré throughout, a hand for the exalted camera angle as well as for the most bizarre lighting choice for any given scene. The film seems to set out to stretch the concepts of the folk magic concepts it uses to such extremes, they leave the actual logic underlying them behind and become a form of pure free-floating weirdness. It is an exhausting joy to watch.

Reflecting on the film afterwards is rather more like trying to remember a vivid and utterly bizarre nightmare than thinking about a movie I’ve seen, which either is a huge recommendation or a terrible insult, depending on who is reading this.

Three Films Make A Post: Murder is so 1987.

Apparently it’s “movies I liked a lot more than the critical consensus” week this late October around here, as these three films prove.

Pet Sematary: Bloodlines (2023): So yes, I did indeed like Lindsey Anderson Beer’s prequel to the (horrible) Pet Sematary Remake quite a bit. Not as a logical extension of that other movie’s world, nor of that of the novel (one of Stephen King’s very best, if you ask me), but as a very atmospheric horror movie that may not treat its tale about the horrors of familial responsibility with any subtlety, but certainly knows what it is talking about. A palpable sense of dread and doom runs through much of the film, and an acceptance of that dread and doom by the older generation as a fact of life, a feeling that’s occasionally broken by downright nasty violence of the type that really doesn’t care whether characters deserve what happens to them. The third act becomes a bit unfocussed for my tastes, but otherwise, this is the only Pet Sematary movie I genuinely like.

V/H/S/85 (2023): This entry in the traditional bro horror anthology series is not terribly bro at all anymore. In fact, most of the segments, as directed by David Bruckner, Scott Derrickson, Natasha Kermani, Mike P. Nelson and Gigi Saul Guerrero, seem rather more interested in doing cool things with the POV horror set-up of the series. I thought Derrickson’s “Dreamkill” was a particularly strong entry – as well as a nice sibling piece to The Black Phone – with some particularly clever use of found footage as parts of its plot, but there’s not a single segment here that doesn’t do something clever, or freakish, or interesting with its part of the anthology.

Totally Killer (2023): Back to the Future+Happy Death Day+The Final Girls=Totally Killer, and strangely enough, I’m perfectly okay with the equation of Nahnatchka Khan’s movie. More than okay, actually, for I found this slasher time travel comedy often surprisingly funny (the great comical timing of particularly Kiernan Shipka helps a lot there), the jokes never getting so meta-genre I’d lose patience with them, even though there’s a lot of genre consciousness visible during the slasher bits. The emotional beats hit very well as well, so much so that I’d suggest this bit of horror arithmetic has some actual heart.

Short Film Friday: Corvidae

Silver Bullet (1985)

The peaceful US small town of Tarker’s Mills is suddenly hit by a series of incredibly brutal murders. Curiously enough, the killings always take place on the night of the full moon. The local sheriff (Terry O’Quinn) isn’t terribly successful at finding the killer, and soon enough, the natives are growing restless enough to start on acts that will go on to influence some of the most idiotic bits of the pretty damn idiotic Halloween Kills; also, these acts will get some of them killed in unpleasant ways.

Paraplegic kid Marty Coslaw (Corey Haim) figures out that the killer is a werewolf, and will eventually even find out the monster’s true identity, but he’s not exactly in a position to convince anyone to believe his wild tales. Eventually, he finds allies in his sister Jane (Megan Follows), who gives up some fine times of mutual sibling hate for it, and even an actual grown-up in form of his eccentric Uncle Red (Gary Busey). But then, Red is the kind of guy who turns a kid’s electric wheelchair into a motorcycle, so he’s not exactly firing on all cylinders, unlike the wheelchair.

After this, his only feature film, Silver Bullet’s director Daniel Attias would go on to a successful TV career that still continues today. From time to time, there’s a whiff of mediocre TV about this Stephen King adaptation, mostly when it comes to its treatment of the more emotional moments between the Coslaw kids. There’s something too treacly and pretty unconvincing about those scenes, which isn’t helped by a King script that feels stilted and uncomfortable in those moments in ways his books aren’t when treating comparable material.

Tonally, the film is somewhat inconsistent, at least on first thought. There’s the afterschool special feel of the sibling scenes, the love for the mild gore gag of the werewolf attacks, and, for most of the film’s running time, a love for broad and curiously artificial performances and writing that can suggest a live action cartoon. Or, going by King’s influences, pre-Code Horror comics read as a live action cartoon. Fortunately, this broadness is laid in the hands/on the shoulders of a cast of character actors (apart from those already mentioned also Everett McGill, Bill Smitrovich, Lawrence Tierney and a host of not quite as well known names) well capable of making an approach that could be annoying in lesser hands interesting and fun to watch, turning things from the cartoonish towards a dream-like feel that has never been typical of US horror filmmaking beyond the regional level.

In the context of a dream, even prime 80s silliness like the motorcycle wheelchair makes a degree of sense, or rather, fits into the curious world where this takes place, where a town can have a prolific serial killer, yet nobody from the outside, neither press nor law enforcement, shows any interest whatsoever in proceedings, thereby turning the dreaded plot hole into parts of the mood.

Once having accepted this about a movie I’ve never clicked with in earlier attempts at watching, I’ve suddenly grown enormously fond of the whole thing, its genuine willingness to go with dream instead of real world logic in telling its werewolf tale. When he’s not doing teen melodrama, Attias is a pretty effective director – not one visually inventive enough to reproduce the feeling of the Berni(e) Wrightson illustrations for the original book (which were my first conscious encounter with Wrightson’s work when I was a kid), but certainly willing and able to find a creepy, comics-like/dream-like (take your pick, I choose both) way to present any given scene.

Carlo Rambaldi’s effects fit into this perspective on the movie as well; while they are beautiful and lovely in the way of good practical effects, they also do tend to look broader and feel more performative than is typical of the work of his peers. In a film whose point clearly isn’t naturalism, this potential weakness turns into a strength, so much so that I can’t imagine a Rick Baker werewolf fitting into the surroundings of Silver Bullet as perfectly as Rambaldi’s creature does.

Crypt of the Vampire (1964)

Original title: La cripta e l’incubo

As tradition holds it, centuries ago, the witch Scirra (Ursula Davis) cursed the noble family of the Karnsteins. Today, as of 18xx, Laura (Adriana Ambesi), daughter of the contemporary Count Karnstein (Christopher Lee), suffers under terrible nightmares during which various family members are killed, perhaps by herself. Unable to watch his daughter suffer, and fearing the old curse might be real, Karnstein sends for the scholar Friedrich Klauss (José Campo) hoping Klauss might find the truth about the life and death of Scilla, thereby either debunking the whole curse business or discovering a way to lift it.

Klauss isn’t the kind of scholar who spends a lot of time in the stacks, though, and seems to spend most of his days trying to flirt with Laura and his nights having mildly spooky encounters.

Things turn rather more dramatic once Laura and Klauss encounter a mother and daughter who were involved in a coach accident. The mother (Carla Calo) needs to get wherever she’s going badly, but her daughter Ljuba (Ursula Davis, hmm) is clearly in no state to travel with her now. Laura does of course offer for Ljuba to stay in their creepy old castle with the Karnsteins until her mother comes back, and so they have a new houseguest.

Laura falls for Ljuba in the least sub subtextual bit of lesbian attraction imaginable, and soon the two young women have hardly an eye for anyone but each other, throwing the heaviest of heavy looks, and spend much time in each other’s bedrooms at night. Klauss certainly has lost all attraction for Laura. At the same time, the young woman’s nightmares turn ever stranger. Eventually, members of the Karnstein family do indeed start dying like they do in her dreams.

Her father and Klauss soon begin to suspect Laura of being the killer, though they dare not quite express it; they are not terribly bright.

Camillo Mastrocinque’s Crypt of the Vampire is one of the more curious adaptation of Le Fanu’s “Carmilla”. It puts the core of the tale into a very different Gothic horror tale about the kind of witchy revenge the makers of Italian Gothics were more than a little obsessed with. The filmmakers do realize that the lesbian angle is somewhat important to the tale, but I’m not too sure they understand how and why, so Le Fanu’s thematically much richer lesbian vampire tale becomes rather diluted between this and the witch angle. However, the film’s portrayal of the intense, clearly sexual infatuation between Laura and Ljuba is highly effective, carrying erotic tension as well as an undercurrent of danger.

As a narrative, Crypt leaves rather a lot to be desired – the pacing is often curious and somewhat plodding, things never quite seem to come together logically, and characters never seem to have much character. However, as a bit of Italian Gothic horror, little things like a logical narrative and thematic depth really aren’t what the film is aiming for – this really is best seen as a pure evocation of mood through the play of light and shadow, the vigorous use of tropes and clichés as anchors to cling to in a narrative that doesn’t provide for the more typical expectations of logical narrative development. Like most good pieces of Gothic horror – and this is certainly good, perhaps even great – the film’s great strength is is ability to create a mood of the eerie and the macabre, its ability to feel like a very peculiar dream, where you won’t remember silly things like a plot the day after having watched it, but will find some scenes – Laura’s final dream, the moment when Laura draws Ljuba into her darkened chamber and both women disappear into darkness, Christopher Lee’s face during the climactic staking, the curious doppelganger/mirror business with Klauss – returning to your mind’s eye from time to time for years to come.

House (1985)

Horror writer Roger Cobb (William Katt) is having a hard time. His new book about his experiences in Vietnam doesn’t come together however hard he stares at an empty page. This is a particular problem since his publisher really wasn’t happy with him leaving the horror bestseller field in the first place. But then, Roger has reasons to be blocked: some time ago, his little son disappeared without a trace from the house where Roger was raised by his aunt, which in turn has led to the end of his marriage to soap opera actress Sandy Sinclair (Kay Lenz).

When news arrive about his aunt having committed suicide in the old house, Roger at first only goes there to take care of its sale. Some curious experiences convince him to change his mind right quick, though, and he moves in, at least subconsciously hoping to find out what really happened to his son. What follows is an intimate exploration of grief through his supernatural experiences in the house. No, wait, this is a mid-80s horror movie, so there’s none of this thoughtful stuff. Instead, the house harbours some kind of dimensional breach, through which monsters slip and attack Roger, and generally fuck with him.

Coming at Steve Miner’s House from today’s perspective, when even the dumber end of the horror spectrum is all about metaphor, trauma and particularly exploring grief, can be a somewhat dislocating experience. Like the titular house, the past this was made in is another country, where horror didn’t have to prove quite so hard it was about serious grown-up business. It’s a particularly curious effect because the film features all the elements you’d need for a contemporary grief horror movie: Roger’s multiple traumata, the grief about the loss of his child, the broken marriage are all prime material for psychological depth, but House goes out of its way to not treat any of this seriously or with any emotional weight.

So Vietnam only becomes an occasion for some pretty terrible studio-bound war flashbacks that’ll set up one gag of the film’s climax; Roger’s grief is only there to give him a reason to stay in the house and fight monsters and weird hallucinations instead of running away screaming like a sensible chap, and Sandy is only another convenient narrative contrivance. It’s a very different approach to this sort of material than you’d see today, enough so that I honestly felt somewhat discombobulated by it.

And, once I got used to the way things were done in The Past, actually pretty amused and well entertained, as well. The creatures – designed by James Cummins and executed by a team of seventeen people, apparently – are the stars here, created through lovely grotesque craftsmanship. The creatures are just funny enough to be horrible, which fits the generally zany style of humour the film prefers.

In tone, that humour feels like a kind of dry run for what Sam Raimi would do a couple of years later in Evil Dead 2, just with a less well-developed comical timing – Miner is no Raimi, and Katt most certainly no Bruce Campbell not just because of his deplorable lack of chin – and much less blood. In fact, I wouldn’t blame anyone watching this thinking the film at hand to be tonally inspired by Raimi when going in blind. Clearly, it’s just a case of directors having comparable ideas of what’s funny, though.

As a horror comedy, House is simply a fine time. It never overstays its welcome or rides one joke for too long, and while it is neither subtle nor deep, it makes up for that by its energy and commitment to dumb fun.

Music Monday: Monster's Holiday Edition

Panic Beats (1983)

Original title: Latidos de pánico

Warning: there will be spoilers!

Paul de Marnac (Paul Naschy) is the descendant of noble family, but has grown up in what he calls poverty. That’s not what we call living in a mansion and having enough money to go to university around here. Anyway, he has managed to marry rich Geneviève (Julia Saly), and has apparently worked pretty hard in her family’s company.

When Geneviève is diagnosed with a dangerous heart condition, Paul convinces her to leave her beloved Paris with him and go live in his old family mansion. There, they are supposed to live a quiet life with Paul’s old housekeeper Mabile (Lola Gaos) and Mabile’s young, sexy niece Julie (Pat Ondiviela), who Mabile has taken in after some unpleasantness at reform school.

There’s a gothic pall hanging over the house, though. Mabile and Julie both dive into the tale of Paul’s ancestor Alaric de Marnac (also Paul Naschy, of course), who brutally murdered his wife when she was unfaithful to him. Alaric is said to return every century or so to kill any de Marnac wife he encounters. And wouldn’t you know it, his hundred years are nearly over.

Geneviève takes the tale rather seriously, and soon begins to see Alaric in his plate mail whether she’s awake or asleep. Snakes appear and disappear in her room as well whenever she is alone, and someone does just love to put something into Mabile’s tea that makes her very sleepy indeed, so she is of little help. Why, you might think someone’s trying to induce a fatal heart attack in Geneviève.

So yes, this entry into the body of work of house favourite Paul Naschy starts out as one of those thrillers in which the villains attempt to kill or drive crazy their rich wives to better get at their victim’s money. Making matters morally even worse, it’s not as if Geneviève were keeping Paul on a short leash – she’s clearly very much in love with him; he, is very much in love with that guy as well.

Which does of course make Paul a typical Naschy protagonist in his darker period beginning in the 80s. Where Naschy’s various versions of wolfman Waldemar Daninsky in earlier years always had a whiff of gothic tragedy around them, Paul is an utterly despicable bastard who is only pretending to have any kind of moral core when it fits into his plans, and instead of tragedy, Paul has put some irony in his way. Namely, that he encounters a partner in crime in Julie who is even worse than he is – as well as more patient.

So the film turns into a different kind of thriller in the middle, one where the villains first have to cover up their deeds by committing further murders – there’s a brilliantly sharp and brutal bit where Julie kills Paul’s other lover – and then eventually turn on each other.

That’s not enough for Naschy, however. Just showing terrible people being terrible to one another is all well and good, but letting the final survivor stumble into a horrible supernatural end by exactly the force they pretended to be earlier is a delight. Particularly since Naschy – also in the director’s chair this time around – decides to realize this bit in a pitch-perfect scene of EC comics imitation, with the grim, grinning delight in dramatically ironic carnage the best – and most of the other – EC horror stories had.

Before Panic Beats gets there, Naschy also delivers a mansion-load of gothic atmosphere, obvious but still highly effective twists, and some moments of the kind of bitter misanthropy that increasingly began to dominate his films without ever quite hiding the big, monster movie loving heart of our hero.

In short: Lorna the Exorcist (1974)

Original title: Les possédées du diable

Because a mysterious woman named Lorna (Pamela Stanford, making up for her lack of eyebrows with the most extreme eye make-up the 70s have to offer) says so, rich guy Patrick Mariel (Guy Delorme) takes his wife Marianne (Jacqueline Laurent) and his nearly eighteen year old daughter Linda (Lina Romay) to some brutalist looking nightmare city in the Camargue instead of St. Tropez as he promised them. He doesn’t have much of a choice, for Lorna is a demon (or something), and eighteen years ago, Patrick made a pact to beget Lorna’s daughter and future replacement in the soul buying biz on his wife – don’t ask about the technical details, please – in exchange for the usual prosperity and power.

Now, Lorna wants Linda, her kinda-sorta daughter. Patrick isn’t willing to actually give away his beloved daughter to Evil, but he will have little choice in the matter.

In between this, we regularly pop in with a Madwoman (Catherine Lafferière) who likes to wear no panties and rave about Lorna. She’s under the care of a Doctor played by Uncle Jess Franco himself, so I’m sure everything will turn out well for her.

Why she is in the movie at all is anybody’s guess – she might be meant to be just another victim of Lorna jacking up the nudity and writhing quota, or the rest of the film may be her hallucinations. We don’t know, Jess doesn’t tell, as is par for the course with him.

As regular readers of this blog know, I have a high tolerance for Jess Franco’s style of bullshit – at least in his films made before 1990 or so – but this movie – decidedly not about an exorcist named Lorna – is a bit of a drag. Despite being on the pornier side of Franco’s output, until its final twenty minutes or so, this lacks the languorous perversity of many of the director’s better films, but keeps the usual tedium. What is laughingly called the plot takes ages to actually reach the point I’ve described above, and there’s not much else going on.

The moments of weird visual poetry that are a large part of the draw of Franco’s films for me are few and far between, and much of the expected copious full frontal nudity with dollops of the macabre feels curiously perfunctory and definitely un-erotic. Lorna really only comes into its own as something of interest in its final twenty minutes or so, when Franco doubles down on the perversity – nothing says class like Lina Romay sucking Stanford’s breast while Stanford repeatedly moans “my daughter! my daughter!”, not to speak of the dildo – and things become a bit more lively than they were before.

For the Franco initiate like me, that’s at least enough to make this supposed attempt to jump on the possession movie bandwagon worth watching once; sane people should probably avoid the experience.

Short Film Friday: Henwick

In short: Taxi Hunter (1993)

Original title: 的士判官

Mild mannered insurance salesman Ah Kin (Anthony Wong Chau-Sang) seems to have regular run-ins with Hong Kong taxi drivers. As the film portrays them, taxi drivers are basically a gang of greedy scammers and rapists, and Ah Kin is so good-natured, he is an obvious victim for any bully. When his pregnant wife (Perrie Lai Hoi-San) dies in a brutal taxi driver caused incident, Ah Kin at first falls into a deep hole of depression and alcohol not even his best friend, hero cop Yu Kai Chung (Yu Rongguang) can get him out of.

He gets somewhat better when he throttles yet another asshole taxi driver in a spur of the moment loss of sanity. Made somewhat happier by the deed, Ah Kin starts on a new side-line as a serial killer, punishing taxi drivers with bad professional ethics whenever he encounters them. He’s rather realistically not really great at physical violence, so much so he’ll eventually buy a gun to make kills meet.

If you go into Herman Yau’s serial killer movie Taxi Hunter expecting something as dedicated to the gross-out as the director’s The Untold Story (made in the same year as this one, also starring Wong) or his later Ebola Syndrome, you might be somewhat disappointed by this one’s often consciously awkward and comparatively quiet violence. Yau actually has quite a talent for staging more awkwardly realistic action in a dramatic and exciting way, and he uses this ability to pull the serial killer thriller down on the level of the human.

In fact, Taxi Hunter’s greatest strength does not lie in its moments of suspense and mild horror – expertly as Yau works them – but in the way the film has a humanizing view on each of its main characters, showing so much – often unexpected - compassion for Ah Kin, his best friend who is of course the cop tasked with catching the taxi hunter, Kai Chung’s comic relief partner (Ng Man-Tat), and the partner’s reporter daughter (Athena Chu Yun), the whole film ends up playing like a tragedy much more than your typical serial killer or revenge movie. Unless you’re a Hong Kong cab driver, then you’re apparently just an asshole (though killing you is still wrong, as Kai Chung will explain).

This unexpected amount of humanism is packaged inside of a fast-paced Hong Kong thriller that flows so well, for once even the comedic interludes fit.

Ghost With Hole (1981)

Original title: Sundelbolong/Sundel Bolong

Indonesia in the early 80s. Former prostitute Alisa (Suzzanna) has found love with ship’s captain Hendarto (Barry Prima) – apparently his only name. But just after they have gotten married, Alisa’s luck changes for the worst. On the day of their marriage, Hendarto is commanded to go on a voyage that’ll keep him away from home for nine months without any possibility of seeing or hearing from Alisa in that time apart from the occasional letter. I’d suspect Hendarto is Indonesian for Kirk, but we get to see his perfectly normal looking ship, so I have no idea what’s going on there.

Alisa is a bit bored and sad alone at home, but her job search meant to alleviate that only leads to an even nastier development. Her former madam Mami (Ruth Pelupessi) teams up with a sleazy fashion shop owner (Rudy Salam) to get Alisa back into the prostitution biz. When that doesn’t work, Rudy and some henchmen rape Alisa. Even though this is an even more difficult thing in Indonesia at this time and place than it would be today, Alisa goes through the horrors of a rape trial. Before that can end as badly for her as you would suspect, she realizes she is pregnant; attempts to get an abortion end with a judgmental preachy physician (who also informs us that miscarriages are the main cause of disability in children) and visions of disfigured children floating in the air around Alisa.

On her very last rope, Alisa tries to abort the foetus herself, and dies in the process. Because this woman clearly can’t catch even the tiniest break, and she died very angry and bitter indeed, she very quickly returns as a ghost, a so-called sundel bolong, a woman with no feet (unless she wishes to be seen otherwise) and a rotting hole in her back. In a somewhat more socially acceptable looking form, she spends half of her nights romancing the now finally returned Hendarto while, in an early Daredevil move Stan Lee would be proud of, pretending to be her own, actually dead, twin sister Shinta.

Looking rather more frightening, the other half of the night is time for taking vengeance on the rapists and human monsters responsible for her sad fate. Well, and for some comic relief when she terrorizes some night workers for reasons.

The villains are not going to take this lying down, so there are attacks on Hendarto that provide Prima with the opportunity to show off some of his screen fighting skills, and even an evil exorcist shooting a laser finger.

Ghost with Hole is one of the many cooperations between Indonesian horror maestro Sisworo Gautama Putra and the country’s great horror star Suzzanna. The film does a fine job when it comes to shifting the folk tales it uses as a basis into contemporary Indonesia. As in most of the director’s films I have seen, Indonesia becomes a kind of liminal place, where the very modern and the very traditional, as well as very Western and very – to my very Western eyes – traditionally Muslim ways of looking at the world and being in her collide. This liminality is not po-faced and intellectualised, thank the gods, but rather a side effect of what at its core is very traditional exploitation filmmaking of the kind where certain universal tropes – the rape revenge, the opportunity to show off as much female nudity as the censor allows, the love for crude and imaginative violence and so on – are seen through a more individual and local lens. This is a movie made mostly for the local Indonesian market but of course influenced by everything from the rest of the world that made its way there, leading to that joyful mix of the very universal and the very specific I love so dearly in a movie. As it should be.

The film’s early stages are somewhat heavy going. The melodrama is absolutely necessary for the ghost story to work, but tastes of the time and place do lead for this part of the film to drag on a little long, with ever more troubles and horrors ladled onto Alisa’s plate until it becomes a bit exhausting to watch; it’s also not exactly pleasant, but then, it’s not supposed to be.

I find it rather interesting how easy it is to read the whole movie, like many melodramas, as a feminist film. Sure, there’s the obligatory scene of Alisa getting prayed away at the end, but you couldn’t have sold this to the censors any other way. Otherwise, the film is completely on Alisa’s side – even the ranting doctor and the deformed baby visions don’t feel like an attempt at attacking Alisa by the movie, but rather like another moment when the melodrama hones in on the enormous pressure society puts on this woman, until she desperately breaks.

This does of course also cause the film’s horror half to be rather a lot of fun. Alisa dispatching the nasty bastards responsible for her death in increasingly surrealistic and imaginative ways (personal favourite: the flying four arms technique, though I’m also a fan of the googly-eyed half-rotten corpse look she sometimes shifts into) like a prettier and a lot less morally icky Freddy Krueger is a sight to behold, as are the scenes of her romancing Hendarto again; the latter as something of a bittersweet counter-argument against the basic meanness of the world its melodrama struggled against.

That Suzzanna is great in whatever form the film needs her to be in is a given, once you’ve seen her in a few movies, but let me again emphasise how wonderful she shifts between the serious and dignified sufferer, the angry ghost and the light-hearted lover, and how important she is for holding Ghost with Hole’s disparate elements together.

In short: The Skin Under the Claws (1975)

Original title: La pelle sotto gli artigli

A murderer not just wearing black gloves but also a black stocking over his head stalks the streets of an Italian city. He seems predominantly interested in murdering prostitutes, but there’s something really strange going on with the killings. The state of the corpses, and the time of death never seem quite to match, and the forensics experts “help” Comissario Rinaldi (Ettore Ribotta), the man tasked with getting to the bottom of the case, with results like “the victim must have hugged a corpse shortly before her death”. Which is only of little help to an ongoing investigation, one has to admit.

Does this have anything to do with the nice discussions between physicians Professor Helmut (Gordon Mitchell), Dr Gianni Dani (Tino Boriani) and Dr Silvia Pieri (Geneviève Audry) about all kinds of mad science philosophy we pop into from time to time? Is it a good idea for Pieri to fall for Dani? And can you hypnotize a corpse?

Nobody will ever confuse Alessandro Santini’s The Skin Under the Claws with one of the great giallos. Santini’s direction is just too bland and the script too unfocussed even for a genre not known for its focus or internal logic. The film meanders between scenes for often only the vaguest of reasons, and even once you’ve learned what’s going on (which makes little sense, obviously, but no matter), it is often unclear why Santini decided to show us certain scenes at all. Usually in a giallo, scenes of dubious narrative worth are in because they look cool, or moody, to the director’s eye, or because they are an excuse to get some more nudity into the movie. Here, there’s really not enough style on screen to make this proposition believable, apart from the nudity bit.

Having said this, I also have to admit that I had a perfectly good time with the film. While there’s really very little of actual quality in it, it does try its damndest to deliver all the giallo and all the mad science tropes it can squeeze into its allotted ninety minutes. For the longstanding fan of the genre like me, this sort of thing has a certain draw. So much so, I’d call the somewhat bonkers last twenty minutes or so actually worth watching despite their complete lack of artistic merit, simply for their perfectly misguided attempts at bringing the traditional mad scientist into the giallo.

Music Monday: Deep in the Woods Edition

Santo vs. the Vampire Women (1962)

Original title: Santo vs. las mujeres vampiro

A couple of centuries after they have been beaten by one of those naughty warriors of light, a coven of female vampires decide that now, in these dark times of 1962, it is time for female vampiredom to rise again, and get rid of those oatmeal faces they seem to have acquired while waiting for better/darker times in their coffins.

For that rising to properly work, the vampiresses need to find a woman to replace their current Queen Zorina (Lorena Velázquez), for some occult reasons I never understood, because Zorina seems perfectly well and happy, or rather, happily evil. Vampire priestess Tundra (Ofelia Montesco), who will be the brains as well as the face of this particular operation for the film’s first two acts, already has an eye on a replacement queen. Diana Orlof (María Duval), her candidate, may be the descendant of their last would-be replacement queen. That last time, things did not work out, leading to those centuries of waiting and becoming food-faced, but there are prophecies going around that suggest evil will win out this time. So it’s only a question of waking up three male vampires who are built suspiciously like wrestlers (and one of whom is of course played by the great Fernando Osés) for the strongman parts of the job, and take the win for Evil.

However, Diana’s father, Professor Orlof (Augusto Benedico), is close enough an associate of El Santo (Santo!) to possess his own Santo videophone, so when he finds his daughter threatened by malignant forces, he calls in his famous, ultra-capable and all-around perfect friend. Who will proceed to lurk around the side-lines of the movie for its first half, because this still belongs to that phase of Santo’s movie career when studios didn’t trust him to carry a film on his own. Thus, he shares the male lead duties with the Professor, Diana’s boyfriend and a police Inspector (Jaime Fernández).

Which really is the least fun thing about Alfonso Corona Blake’s Santo vs. the Vampire Women, for less Santo is never a good thing, even if the film at hand does attempt to cast his frequent absence as part of his mystique as a masked luchador and force for Good. This does of course also mean we lose out on scenes of a masked Santo in loungewear, cosy pyjamas, or romancing the ladies.

On the plus side, there’s everything else. The film begins as a lovely pulp gothic concoction with a dramatically lit vampire priestess expositing in a lair full of spectacularly fake cobwebs, upright coffins and improbable shadows, adds rubber bats and the much beloved (by me) vampire cape walk, and never looks back from there. What follows are some pleasantly zippily shot scenes of overcomplicated vampire plots, close-ups of “hypnotic” staring committed by pretty women, and rather more chases than you’d usually get in a Santo movie. The cops and a suddenly appearing caped Santo chase cape-running, woman-stealing vampires, Santo chases vampires, vampires chase Santo, Santo in his sports car chases a lone vampire towards a cross. I get all chased-out just talking about it.

There’s also the time-honoured sequence of a vampire (using deadly karate chops, Santo informs us) pretending to be one of Santo’s ringside foes to kill the great man and a resolution that hinges not on our hero fighting off the vampires, but on him fighting them long enough for the sun to shine through the unfortunate hole in their underground crypt-temple-thingie. Afterwards, our hero sets torches to the coffins, vampiresses screeching in horror, because this is not a film for the faint of heart, even if it is as deeply, infectiously silly as a proper lucha movie is supposed to be.

In short: Elevator Game (2023)

“Inspired” by their new intern, an insufferable crew of luckless and witless YouTube personality caricatures (characters and actor names withheld because when they can’t be arsed to act, I can’t be arsed to look them up on IMDB) plays the Elevator Game in a building where a young woman supposedly disappeared while playing it. Some not very interesting and/or obvious secrets are revealed, and some supernatural murders are committed by the mythical “Woman from the 5th Floor”.

I am a big admirer of Rebekah McKendry’s Glorious, a prime example of how to do a low budget movie with highly limited locations well, intelligently and with verve, and have been having a lot of time for her podcasting work as well.

This thing, however, is not to elevators what Glorious was to public toilets, but an utter mess of a film, the sort of thing where basically nothing works, very little is of any interest, and all talent involved doesn’t make any impression on the resulting film.

For most of the running time, the characters are insufferable one-note bits, who usually acquire their much coveted second dimension right before they are killed – because we can’t spend too much time with slightly less annoying windbags, apparently. The acting wavers between indifferent and actively terrible, but to be fair, what is a young actor to do with the nothing the script gives them?

The pacing is much too slow, with too many scenes that seem to fulfil no function for plot, characters, mood or worldbuilding, but only seem to be in the movie to fill minutes. Once things get going as much as they do here, we get a handful of rote kills, red light working overtime, and very little else – tension, fun, or depth seem to be so beyond the film, it feels absurd even bringing the words up.

Short Film Friday: Tunnel

In short: Phantom of the Rue Morgue (1954)

19th Century Paris. Women are killed under mysterious circumstances by a terribly violent killer who also appears to have the skills of a trapeze artist. No, the killer isn’t Batman or Robin. Inspector Bonnard (Claude Dauphin) is on the case, but he likes holding forth about the ear shape of killers (no earlobes, monsieur!), so might not be the best at actually catching the right man. Like a CSI character, he’ll accuse every man he meets of being the killer.

Among the men on his list for, put there for improbable reasons of illogic, will soon be Professor Paul Dupin (Steve Forrest), a guy rather better at the science of deduction than the actual police, and soon motivated to solve the murders himself. Why, do you think Dupin’s not at all shifty colleague Dr Marais (Karl Malden), who is clearly lusting after Dupin’s fiancée Jeanette (Patricia Medina), might actually be a serial killer whose murder weapon of choice is a trained gorilla?

It’ll come as little surprise to anyone who has watched enough of this sort of mystery/horror potboiler when Roy Del Ruth’s rather free Poe adaptation replaces the orang-utan with a gorilla, for in 1954, the dustiest corners of every movie studio warehouse had a handful of ratty gorilla suits mouldering away, whereas that other ape would have meant building a new one. That sort of thing clearly wasn’t in the budget; keeping close to the source probably wasn’t even the beginning of a thought in the mind of an old hired hand like Del Ruth, a place filled with a lot of straightforward technical chops, and the will and ability to make cheap movies on time and on budget.

Seen as a movie working inside of these strictures, Phantom of the Rue Morgue is a rather entertaining time. Its mystery elements are joyfully contrived, with Bonnard’s wild theories and attempts at proving them providing an actual chuckle or three. The murder scenes are surprisingly effective and dramatic, and if you squint at them from just the right angle, Del Ruth’s use of colour and some of the editing actually can be said to prefigure certain giallo techniques. At the very least, the do look somewhat exciting. The general implausible weirdness of the plot in combination with some suggested psychosexual problems of our killer certainly seems to point in the giallo direction as well, even though it really needed the Italians to truly bring these things together into an aesthetic whole.

Other classic low budget movie joys on display are scenes of a spiritedly ranting villain – Karl Malden makes a much more enjoyable mad scientist than I would have expected –, as well as gorilla suit action that even finishes on the thing throwing Jeannette over its shoulder and climbing a tree, in lieu of the Empire State Building, with her until it is shot by the police.

I certainly can’t argue with that.

The Believers (1987)

Following the tragic death of his wife, police psychiatrist Cal Jamison (Martin Sheen) moves to New York with his little son Chris (Harley Cross), for a classical new start. Things don’t begin too badly, despite the lingering grief. Cal even begins to get close to a woman again, his landlady Jessica (Helen Shaver). Not that Chris approves, obviously.

However, when Cal is called in to use his professional expertise on Tom Lopez (Jimmy Smits), a cop who seems to have lost it completely while doing some sort of undercover work nobody really seems to know about, he’s sucked into an occult conspiracy. Lopez believes that a sort-of santeria cult has infiltrated the highest echelons of New York society, using very dark magic for power and influence; his “madness” is no such thing, but actually a curse bestowed on him by the cult to keep him quiet.

At first, Cal believes his patient’s ideas to be delusions, but various hints and coincidences suggest to him there’s more than just a little truth to the man’s tales. Obviously, stumbling onto this sort of conspiracy will put Cal and everyone he loves in danger. And that’s before he learns his family (well, at least the one he married into) is much closer connected to the cult than he ever would have believed.

That last part really is the weakest aspect of John Schlesinger’s occult conspiracy horror movie The Believers, because at the point in the story the family business becomes important, Cal is already as connected to what’s going on around him as the narrative could ever need. Adding backstory connections this late in the movie is really just ladling on twists instead of adding actual narrative tension.

Given how much else the movie does right, I don’t believe the somewhat overcooked feel of its third act is as much of a problem as it could be. After all, once we reach that point of ultimate paranoia, the film has already left the realm of probability far behind and has turned into a perfect mix of urban paranoia, dramatic emotional breakdowns and rather nasty witchcraft.

Sheen copes with all of these elements well, grounding the roles of increasingly obsessed investigator, still grieving father and husband, mental health professional, and ranting maniac in the same kind of intensity so effectively, there’s rarely the feeling of incompatible elements trying too hard to exist in the same character.

Some of the horror and suspense scenes are astonishingly nasty for a rather mainstream production like this, even for a film made in the sometimes less rigid 80s. Schlesinger packages this nastiness into very traditionally grounded forms of suspense and horror, in form and style giving an occult drift to the 70s conspiracy thriller (a genre the director of Marathon Man certainly knows quite a bit about) while keeping that genre’s distrust of authority and the rich and powerful. In fact, The Believers takes this distrust even one step further by making belief/faith itself a thing to be distrusted – or at least belief as embodied in people perfectly willing to sacrifice their own children for these beliefs.

The film’s racial politics, unlike its class ones, will probably be rather problematic for some today. The Believers’ treatment and interpretation of brujeria is certainly not great. The filmmakers clearly realize this, so the film spends some time to acquaint us with morally upright followers of the religion; it never makes any kind of argument there, however, and certainly doesn’t help its case by at least leaving the reading open that its evil rich people were all seduced by the powers of the only black character of note in the film. Which is its own can of worms.

I have no particularly strong feelings about this one way or the other, and found myself rather too involved in the film’s increasingly over the top – that’s a good thing – narrative of paranoia and horrible shit happening to perfectly okay people to be invested in putting the least favourable reading on everything I saw.

Hell, I was riveted enough, I even enjoyed the horror movie bullshit ending for once. Perhaps because it’s not actually bullshit this time around, and instead fits the tone and themes of what comes before so perfectly. Again, at that point The Believers has left the realm of the plausible and the probable so far, yet so elegantly, behind, I would have probably bought whatever Schlesinger was trying to sell.

In short: Godzilla vs Hedorah (1971)

aka Godzilla vs the Smog Monsters

Original title: Gojira tai Hedora

A meteorite drops a mysterious and very dangerous lifeform this movie’s Kenny (Hiroyuki Kawase) will randomly dub “Hedorah” on Earth. At first, the creature appears as a series of large, acidic tadpoles who love to eat toxic material and generally adore industrial sludge, but the more human crap it eats, the larger and more mutated it becomes. Now, one might think having a waste-eating kaiju around would be rather neat for a world drowning in man-made waste, but what Hedorah metabolizes, it spits out as even more toxic and dangerous mist or sludge.

Eventually, Godzilla will come to the rescue, but what’s a giant lizard to do against a toxic, icky waste monster?

Some courageous souls at Toho tried something new with the flailing late era Showa Godzilla by hauling in young director Yoshimitsu Banno and letting him concoct his very own kind of kaiju.

The result of that attempt is a wild mix of the most childish bits of kaiju eiga, random pieces of pop art (including some equally random metaphorical animation), some of the most gruesome and classically horror-style moments you’ll find at this point in the series, some trendy ecological messaging, and half a dozen other elements of no import. Unfortunately, Banno seems to have no control about the movie’s disparate elements whatsoever, leading to a complete mess whose tone and style shifts so wildly and randomly, it doesn’t even manage to make something of its very obvious and clear ecological themes. One would expect the film’s general wildness would at least make it entertaining, but for a a tale that’s as full of everything under the sun as this is, it is nearly absurdly sluggishly paced. A film full of hippies turning into skeletons after being spit at by a sludge monster that features symbolic cartoon interludes really shouldn’t be this dull, but Hedorah manages handily.

Adding insult to injury, the movie also doesn’t know how to be a kaiju. Even if you ignore Riichiro Manabe’s terrible score replacing proper Ifukube monster action music, there’s something a bit embarrassing about a movie that really thinks having Godzilla fight a monster whose only fighting techniques are slithering away and spitting sludge at our hero kaiju could work in any way, shape or form.

Music Monday: Michael Myers (and Fanvids) Resplendent Edition

Die Pest in Florenz (1919)

Some time during the renaissance. The beautiful courtesan Julia (Marga Kierska) comes from free-loving Venice to stuffy Florence, a town dominated by the church on one hand and a deeply conservative council of elders on the other. Her beauty inflames the already existing frictions between the old and the young, particularly putting the lord of the town (Otto Mannstaedt) and his son Lorenzo (Anders Wikmann), who both fall for her instantly, against each other.

Lorenzo kills his father when the old man attempts to rape Julia, and makes himself king of Florence, driving away the churchmen and the elders. With Julia, he starts a reign of incessant partying and what goes as orgies on screen in 1919, getting the intertitles all in a tizzy about their immorality while the 2023 audience whistles a happy tune.

Only a hermit monk named Medardus or Franziskus (depending on which version of intertitles you watch this with, in any case played by the grandly gesturing Theodor Becker) sets himself against the horrors of people fucking. But Julia is so beautiful! And into weird looking monks! And still hot even when they visit hell together in a vision! So Medardus is set up for a bit of a fall, to be portrayed through ever more gesturing and bugging of eyes, of course. Though, to be fair, Becker is rather brilliantly in the scene in which he murders Lorenzo in cold blood. Eventually, God gets so annoyed by the scenes of people frolicking drunkenly, or perhaps the murder, he sends the plague in the direction of Florence.

Otto Rippert’s silent movie epic Die Pest in Florenz may not be an obvious choice as part of my October two-step of horror love on this blog, what with much of it being a historical costume drama with what I can’t help but read as a lot of high-handed conservative moralizing and hand-wringing. It does, however, contain quite a few seeds that would in the future grow into the dark woods of gothic horror on screen. Medardus’s vision of a hell that includes a river of writing bodies and a fire-breathing (one-headed) dog certainly belongs into the realm of the macabre, and there’s a sense of true eeriness surrounding the film’s deeply medieval personification of the plague as an emaciated figure strolling, sometimes dancing, while all around it its victims fall down in pains of death. Medardus’s flight through the catacombs is another moment you’ll find repeated in different forms again and again in the future, as if writer Fritz Lang (in one of his last attempts at writing for someone else) had stumbled upon and scratched free some of the cornerstones of horror, but couldn’t quite bring himself to focus on them. An influence of the macabre was of course part of the zeitgeist of the 1910s and 1920s, so it might simply be Lang living in is time and place.

Parts of the film are often called an adaptation of Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death”, but really, there’s only a tiny bit of inspiration from the tale on screen when Medardus crashes Julia’s last party in a locked down Florence.

In general, there’s a mood of the eerie and the macabre running through the film particularly in its second half, a sense of supernatural doom hanging over its characters. Interestingly, Rippert realizes this mood without using many of the techniques of expressionism; Rippert is more of a naturalist, often positioning his astonishing number of bit players in large arrangements that amount to moving versions of picture puzzles, to be gawked at in the just as astonishing production design.

So, while this isn’t exactly a horror movie as we’ve come to know them, it is certainly of interest to anyone interested in the roots of the genre, like rather a lot of early silent movies.

Three Films Make A Post: Don't rush, die slow.

Slotherhouse (2023): Only a hopeless optimist would go into a movie about a slasher sloth (sloth slasher?) hoping for much of that elusive quality normal people describe with the word “good”, but Matthew Goodhue’s film still manages to disappoint the hardened cynic. Sure, you’ll expect the lame, would-be self-referential humour, the “irony” (where irony is defined as not giving enough of a shit about your film to come up with decent jokes), the harmless kills.

What you might not expect is that about half of the film’s running time is spent not on a slasher sloth but on the race for the role of sorority house president, and the bad moral influence this race has on the good girl trying to beat the generic bitch character; or how much that part of the movie feels like a modern Lifetime movie in all the worst ways.

The trailer’s pretty fun, though.

Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose (2023): Also pretty underwhelming is Adam Sigal’s movie about one of my favourite bits of Forteana, the mysterious talking mongoose its friends call Gef (the voice of Neil Gaiman, for some reason). Despite a pretty fine cast (Simon Pegg, Minnie Driver, Christopher Lloyd and so on), there’s just very little here, mostly because the filmmakers can’t seem to be able to decide what exactly they’re trying to do here. Is this a broad comedy? A comedy about a man being confronted with his failings and only half-way learning anything? One of those insufferable movies about The Power of Belief™? The film never seems to be willing or able to decide, and so never quite arrives at anything you might want to call a point. Plus, the real Nandor Fodor was much more interesting than the one the movie concocts. And Harry Price was, not to put too fine a point on it, a damn liar.

Bones and All (2022): Luca Guadagnino’s cannibal romance, on the other hand, wants to be more than one film at the same time and has not problems at all coping with that. So this is a doomed teen romance, a sometimes surprisingly nasty cannibal film, a serious movie about falling in love badly and with the right wrong person, a road movie, and one of its directors slick pseudo-artsy endeavours like Call Me By Your Name, just with a lot more blood. But then, after his fantastic Suspiria project, I’ve grown to expect surprising shifts in Guadagnino’s body of work from the mid-brow towards the interesting.

Somehow, all of these different approaches to the material at hand feel as if they belonged to each other in Guadagnino’s hands, characters and tone subtly gliding from one to the next, resulting in a film that shouldn’t work at all, but does so wonderfully.

Short Film Friday: Skin & Bone

In short: No One Will Save You (2023)

A young woman we’ll never really get to hear called Brynn (Kaitlyn Dever, carrying the whole movie on her shoulders effortlessly), lives in her own private fantasy at the outskirts of a small town where she’s ostracized for reasons the movie will get into eventually. Her dubious peace is disturbed when grey aliens begin invading her home.

Despite her pretty harmless appearance, our heroine is a fierce fighter against alien home invasions, but the aliens are no slouches, either, so escalation ensues.

Brian Duffield’s No One WIll Save You will probably be a bit of a marmite movie for most viewers thanks to the writer/director’s insistence on doing a few things that are thematically deeply appropriate but will drive the kinds of people who insist on their movies about alien invasions to be “realistic”, as well as those whose incessant search for “plot holes” doesn’t really care if a film is actually being true to its thematic concerns, batty.

And if this movie is one thing, it is being true to its themes. Even if it doesn’t quite seem so at first, there’s basically no decision on a script or direction level here that hasn’t been made in service of an emphasis on Brynn’s isolation, her ostracism and what comes out of it. Many things that feel like small, disconnected eccentricities, or artsy film school type gestures – like the decision to have basically no dialogue whatsoever even in a couple of scenes where people speaking would be more “realistic” – are actually feeding into the film’s central concerns.

This doesn’t mean No One Will Save You isn’t good as an alien home invasion movie. In fact, many of the scenes of Brynn’s struggles against her alien attackers are highly suspenseful, cleverly staged and only suffer somewhat from very mediocre CGI, and Duffield builds up a great deal of tension with simple measures. However, the film is perfectly willing to drop much of this for a final act and an ending that only make sense if you’re buying enough into its thematic interest you understand why and how the film’s ending is a happy end for Brynn, unlike for the rest of the world.

The Dead Inside (2005)

The years following World War II. Lola Morgandy (Bronwyn Lee) and John Katzen (Chuck Depape) have apparently been a team ever since she – working as a spy – saved him from Italian imprisonment. The two work as paranormal investigators in the more pulpy occult detective vein – there’s clearly some backstory there we’re never told.

Right now, they’ve been tasked to explain and more importantly end the disturbing occurrences in a large-ish mansion in Victoria, BC. It’s a really troubled place: people tend to move in, but then rather quickly disappear without a trace – certainly without taking their belongings. And even those who only spend a night or so there are plagued by nightmares too terrible to be normal. The laws of physics also don’t appear to be always working as they should in the house – there’s a gravitational anomaly in a certain corner that would probably break most physicists.

Because there’s science to be done they don’t feel quite up to, our heroes invite physicist Professor Fallstead (Theodore Trout), his assistant Betty (Bettina May), and scientist suffering from heavy SAN loss Dr Koeppler (Chris Tihor) to help them investigate.

Obviously, things will become dangerous rather quickly, because whatever slips through the cracks in our reality in the house is very dangerous indeed, and loves to attack people with nightmares and twisted visions of past traumatic experiences, something most of the characters have a considerable amount of.

This very indie Canadian production directed, written, produced, edited (and so on, we know how this kind of semi-professional production works) by Brian Clement is a rather fun film. Unlike many a movie on this budget and infrastructure level, The Dead Inside has little interest in presenting the holy duality of gore and tits, nor in working through much personal directorial angst. Instead, it attempts to tell a fun occult detective tale with certain Lovecraftian undertones, mixed with a bit of actual character psychology, in as effective a manner as it can get away with under the circumstances of production.

For my tastes, it succeeds rather well at this goal. The Dead Inside is certainly a much better paced film than most of its peers, getting in and out of scenes like a champ - which only sounds like faint praise to someone who hasn’t seen much independent genre cinema. The characters may be archetypes but are also consistent, have the degree of inner life needed for the film, and make sense as parts of the world of the film, while the actors are generally well capable of doing what the script asks of them – a couple, Lee most certainly, probably more.

In general, Dead Inside does have some rough visual edges – the framing tends to be a bit cramped, for example, I assume for production reasons rather than ones of lack of visual imagination. Yet there’s also a much more important sense of filmmakers putting love and effort on screen, an eye for the telling detail and how to get it into your scenes with little money, so there are some clever touches to production design, acting and writing, and a continuity in mood between scenes that makes them feel like parts of a whole.

In tone and style, the narrative does give off a bit of the vibe of a Call of Cthulhu RPG investigation. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that tabletop game had been an influence – Lovecraft is certainly mentioned in the credits and in spirit - though of course, a good dose of Hellboy and 30s and 40s pulp occult detective tales might as well explain it. This isn’t a complaint in any case: there’s nothing at all wrong with these influences, I love them all dearly, as regular visitors and random strangers know. In fact, I found the feeling of those influences to be a not inconsiderable part of the movie’s charm. There are, after all, not so very many occult detective movies in this vein around, and even fewer that are quite as much fun as this one is.

In short: Kune Kune (2010)

A newly minted family comprised of two widowed parents and their respective daughters from their first marriages are going on a camping vacation to force some much needed bonding. The younger (?) of the teen girls, Chisato, isn’t having any of it, of course, so there’s some choice teenage pouting and bickering going on.

That’s not going to be the family’s main problem, however, for they have stumbled into a cursed area for their little trip. There’s a village of eyeless people around the corner. Apparently, they’ve poked their own eyes out not out of hot love for the works of Lucio Fulci, but because there’s a local supernatural entity whose stare – if you meet it - first makes your eyes bleed, and then telekinetically twists your body around until it breaks. Adding insult to injury, victims killed this way turn into crappy zombies as well. True family fun ensues.

Hisatake Kikkawa’s urban legend-based Kune Kune is a fifty minute movie made for the home video market. It’s an expectedly low budget affair, with decent enough acting and effects, directed with straightforward professionalism more than true verve and style, but it is also a film that knows what it wants to do and does so in a straightforward and mostly effective manner.

There’s really no depth to it – unless you count the bits of family melodrama that don’t go anywhere interesting – but as a simple and direct telling of a simple and direct horror story, it is actually a pretty fun little movie that neither overstays its welcome nor seems to suffer from delusions of grandeur or importance.

Music Monday: Season of The Witch

Ghost in the Regiment (1958)

aka The Military Policeman and the Ghost

Original title: 憲兵と幽霊

Imperial Japan during World War II. The vile Lieutenant Namishima (Shigeru Amachi, who does “vile” oh so well) lusts after Akiko (Naoko Kubo), notwithstanding her new marriage to a colleague named Tazawa (Shoji Nakayama). Namishima is a patient man, willing to wait for an opportunity to destroy Akiko’s husband, though. A year or so later, that opportunity comes when important military documents disappear out of the hands of one of Namishima’s underlings. Why not, Namishima suggests, frame the husband of a certain woman for that loss? Underling, only too willing to save his own skin, does of course agree. In truth, it is Namishima himself who is selling secrets to the Chinese, adding double evil to the whole affair.

This being Imperial Japan, the denunciation of Tazawa leads to the torture and execution of Namishima’s rival. Namishima now starts on a campaign of making himself indispensable to Akiko, while at the same time subtly destroying her few remaining prospects. Eventually, he’s going to get her drunk, rape her, play house with her for a while and drop her like a hot potato.

There’s a number of other sins to be committed, of course, but while Namishima is still committing them, he begins to be haunted by the crucified ghost of Tazawa and his increasing number of other victims. This will be an important part of Namishima’s downfall, as will the more worldly fact that Tazawa’s brother never believed in his guilt and has become a military policeman to prove the dead man’s innocence.

Kaidan and horror maestro Nobuo Nakagawa’s Ghost in the Regiment is a sometimes uncomfortable watching experience. There’s nothing at all wrong with the film’s basic idea of putting the narrative of a classic kaidan into more contemporary surroundings, particularly since the kind of kaidan that’s all about a man committing terrible deeds for power and lust until he’s finally brought down either by guilt or ghosts always feels like a timeless mode of storytelling, fitting every society based on injustice.

There’s just as little wrong with Nakagawa’s treatment of the supernatural. Even this early in his career as a horror filmmaker, he is an absolute master at letting filmic reality drift into a weirder space, creating an eerie mood out of simple effects, deep shadows and camerawork that suggests wrongness without hitting an audience over the head with it. He’s so good at it, the possibility of the hauntings only taking place in Namishima’s mind seems to be neither here nor there when thinking about their reality as parts of the movie.

The film’s problem, and what makes it an at times difficult watch, at least in my eyes, is its treatment of its World War II setting. There seems to be at least a tacit approval of Imperial Japan and its culture of “honour” as a whole. It’s particularly unpleasant that the film treats Namishima’s position as a Chinese spy as the worst and most despicable thing ever, even suggesting he’s responsible for Japan losing the war – in a tone that suggests the fascists not winning World War II to be a bad thing.

On the other hand, the kaidan plot does implies that the structures and values which brought us the Axis powers are exactly what enables men like Namishima to come to the power and influence they crave and need to destroy lives (which is as much of an obvious truth as you’ll encounter in history) for their own amusement. There’s never much of an impression of the film seeing the giant gap between these two positions, and most certainly never an attempt to somehow play these positions against one another in any productive manner.

This doesn’t mean Ghost in the Regiment isn’t a highly effective, worthwhile kaidan, but it did leave me at least somewhat sceptical about what it actually tries to say about the setting is chose, and sometimes uncomfortable for reasons other than its tale of ghosts and very bad men.