Three Films Make A Post: Ghoulish Delights

Halloweenville (2011): Gary P. Cohen, of Video Violence fame, and one Paul Kaye, document the intense Halloween shenanigans in Lambertville, New Jersey, which turns into a giant, tacky and lovely piece of Halloween kitsch for a week a year. Embedded in cheesy commentary and the cheapest default editing tricks the directors’ editing suite can provide, are interviews with various local Halloween enthusiasts and many a verité (or awkwardly framed, if you prefer) scene of the place’s insane Halloween festivities. It’s enough to make any ghoul cry tears of joy.

While this is certainly not done artfully, there’s so much genuine enthusiasm here, presented fully in the cheesy version of the spirit of the season, it’s impossible not to love this.

The Raven (1963): This adaptation of Poe’s poem as a comedy has never been a particular favourite of mine among the films of Corman’s Poe cycle. On this recent rewatch, I actually fell in love with the film. Price, Lorre and Karloff mugging it up in this tale of duelling wizards, Hazel Court doing a femme fatale bit, and young Jack Nicholson looking confused in front of Daniel Haller’s gorgeous gothic sets, filmed by Corman with the élan they deserve – what’s not to love?

Particularly when I’ve actually grown old enough to find the general silliness rather diverting, find myself actually laughing at jokes I’ve shrugged at a decade ago, and enjoy how much Corman and company make fun of a style they themselves put a lot of effort into creating.

Plus, the climactic sorcerous duel is one of the prime moments of pure, silly, imagination in cinema.

The House of Usher (1989): Speaking of Poe adaptations that don’t exactly keep to the text, Alan Birkinshaw’s bit of late 80s cheese is pretty fun if you accept it as what it is and what it isn’t – there’s certainly joy to be had in Donald Pleasence running around with a drill hand pretending not to be mad, Oliver Reed being dastardly while chewing scenery, some tasteful mutilation and decapitation, a rat eating a guy’s penis, and come curiously fine set design that goes for some sort of modernist gothic. All of this doesn’t make terribly much sense, but certainly looks pretty great.

Dracula (1979)

A word of warning: for quite some time, director John Badham insisted on having the home video versions of the film at hand released in a colour-“corrected” version that borders on the monochrome. By now, there are fortunately versions of the film available that give it back the rather gorgeous colours of its initial theatrical run. I suggest anyone interested in viewing (or re-watching) the film to pick up one of those colourful, aesthetically much more pleasing and visually effective, versions. I have no idea what Badham was thinking.

It’s particularly exasperating in a film whose main qualities are visual, namely the incredible art direction and production design, and camera work. These elements of the film create a lush world of fog, picturesque ruins and asylums, and some of the most attractive rot and decay ever to grace a cinema screen. In combination with a somewhat pompous but gloriously, loudly, moody John Williams score, there’s something to be said for just letting those beautiful Gothic pictures wash over one while one is dreaming of dying roses or something equally appropriate.

It’s all the more important to focus on this aspect of the film because its script certainly isn’t great. By now, we’ve all grown used to cinematic adaptations of Stoker’s “Dracula” (and that cursed play) wildly mixing up elements of the original, removing important bits and keeping less interesting others. Often, this sort of thing makes sense when going from one medium to the next, so I’m all on board with the film making one of the female main characters the daughter of Dr Seward (Donald Pleasence), and putting the doctor’s asylum thusly much more front and centre. Why you’d swap the roles of Mina (Jan Francis) and Lucy (Kate Nelligan), on the other hand, I have no idea. But then, this may very well have something to do with the misguided decision to cast Dracula as a “great lover” character and pose Lucy’s attraction to him and all that he stands for as some sort of attempt to escape the stifling Victorianism of her surroundings. Which is all well and good, until you remember that this Dracula is still a mass murderer who turns women into baby-drinking monsters; not exactly a romantic proposition where I come from. And how much a woman liberates herself by just tying herself to a different, objectively much more horrible, guy then her fiancée is a question that comes to mind as well. Unless, of course, you want to argue that Badham is on the side of Victorian paternalistic repression, something that works with what we got on paper, but seems rather not at all like the director.

It doesn’t help that Frank Langella is just not up to the task, neither as a romance character or as a vampire. Sure, his hair is great in a disco era idea of great, and he’s doing his best to smoulder through the overblown, overdirected romantic sequences, but he mostly ends up looking like he is trying hard instead of achieving. When it comes to the character’s cruel side, he’s simply not convincing at all; he kills his victims with all the conviction of a politician.

Still, even with its limp Dracula, whenever the film goes fully into Gothic horror mode, it becomes much more convincing and interesting. The sets and Badham’s direction come to the sort of fake, stylized un-life I love so much about this kind of horror. The actors – particularly Pleasence and Olivier but also Nelligan who is also much better at pretending that Dracula is incredibly hot than Langella deserves – play things up very nicely indeed. From time to time, Dracula even finds a moment of true horror or two – particularly Van Helsing’s encounter with his undead daughter is wonderful, as is the early sequence in which the vampire murders the crew of the Demeter during a particularly dramatic looking storm.

Kidnapped (1971)

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing Underneath (1985)

Original title: Sotto il vestito niente

Wyoming park ranger Bob Crane (Tom Schanley) has a sudden vision of the murder of his sister Jessica (Nicola Perring). Jessica’s working as a model in Milan, but still, Bob jumps into the next plane to Europe to perhaps save her, hoping for the whole deal having been a premonition. Bob and Jessica are twins, you understand, so twin telepathy is a thing between the two, so why not clairvoyance, too.

In Milan, there’s not a trace of his sister to be found. She simply seems to have disappeared, and nobody seems to think more about her disappearance than that she’s a model being a model. That’s not enough for Bob, of course, so he starts an investigation of his own. He also pretty quickly manages to convince police commissioner Danesi (Donald Pleasence) that there’s an actual criminal case to investigate here. And this even before more models of Jessica’s acquaintance get murdered and/or disappear.

A model-based mid-80s giallo shouldn’t really be my cup of tea, threatening the dreaded mix of pure sleaze and boring modelling scenes (nearly as boring as underwater scenes in most movies), but Carlo Vanzina’s Nothing Underneath turns out to be a pretty great giallo from the late phase of the genre I often feel empty of anything deserving even the word “good”.

The film of course isn’t sleaze free, but Vanzina does manage to hit the sweet spot where the titillation doesn’t harm the rest of the movie – some of it is even pretty important to the plot – but there’s enough on screen to sell the film through it. The handful of modelling sequences aren’t superfluous filler either, but indeed part of the plot and so get a pass from me, too.

Of course, not mishandling these aspects doesn’t make a film necessarily a good one, it just provides it with the opportunity to be one. The director does grip this opportunity pretty hard, though, presenting a giallo that is – if you can overlook or better yet enjoy the very silly set-up – actually pretty effective as a mystery, setting up Bob’s investigation so that he is always involved in something fun and interesting that also provides clues to the life and death of his sister.

The climax does of course descend back into classic giallo madness, but it does so with a lot of style, a reveal that probably was pretty surprising in 1985 (and might read as offensive to some today, but then what doesn’t), and the kind of macabre craziness at least I am bound to enjoy.

On the way to the climax, Nothing Underneath (a title meant ironically, by the way, even if it sounds pretty softcore) sets some stylishly staged murders, and quite a few side characters for Bob to interact with. Bob, as is tradition, isn’t a terribly interesting guy, so the film uses him as a foil for the rest of the cast, and in that role, he’s really rather effective. And then there’s the film’s secret weapon: beloved Donald Pleasence in his Italian phase, when he brought class and quite a number of different ironic looks to all kinds of continental European movies that probably should have been below his dignity. Pleasence appears to have a whale of a time with his Italian accent, his smartarse dialogue (yes, the dialogue is often pretty good here, too, quite against the rules of the giallo), even giving Danesi quite a different body language to many of his usual characters, including quite a bit of very un-British touching of shoulders. That the cop is neither unlikeable nor an idiot nor the killer is another interesting change for the genre, but then the script (by the director, his brother Enrico Vanzina and Franco Ferrini) really does seem quite a bit more interested in what’s underneath the surface of its characters than many films of the genre.

In the case of Nothing Underneath, this approach works very well, turning it into a film that’s really good at doing all the things you want and expect from a giallo, but also diverging from them in way that enrich instead of weaken it.

In short: The Monster Club (1981)

Horror author R. Chetwynd-Hayes (disappointingly not Chetwynd-Hayes himself, but at least he’s played by John Carradine) offers a an ailing stranger (Vincent Price) whatever he may need. Turns out the guy’s a vampire called Eramus, who is very thankful for the spontaneous blood donation. He does leave the man alive, though. Because Eramus is a big fan of the writer and feels he owes him something, he takes him to a club visited exclusively by monsters. Between bouts of painful comedy and full musical New Wave-y numbers, the writer gets told three stories.

But, unlike with other horror anthology movies, I’m not going to talk about them in any detail, for if you inflict these lame ducks of stories on yourself, you do at least deserve to get a pained surprise out of them. Which is pretty much the best you can hope for, for the film wastes the considerable talents of many of the people involved in it very efficiently.

The Monster Club is sometimes treated as the last of the Amicus horror anthologies but since it isn’t an actual Amicus production, I find it better to treat it as some sort of sad epilogue made after the fact that pretty clearly suggests the time of the somewhat gentle horror anthology in the Amicus style was over when this was made. That it had to be some of the old Amicus talent – producer Milton Subotsky, director Roy Ward Baker, various actors – doing another Chetwynd-Hayes anthology to deliver this unwanted proof is rather sad.

In this context, I can’t even bring myself to make jokes about the film’s numerous failings – which still makes me funnier than the film’s jokes are – but let’s at least list some of them. There’s the terrible inclusion of the musical numbers in what feels like a desperate attempt at selling a soundtrack album nobody asked for that has no point, fits Ward Baker’s generally old-fashioned direction style not at all, and sucks the bits of interest out of the film the tediously told stories themselves couldn’t quite destroy. The film also shows a terrible fascination with the worst part of Chetwynd-Hayes as a writer: charting the various ways in which monsters might mate and giving the products idiotic names, categorizing things that can only suffer from too much categorization, as if the man were his own August Derleth. Even for someone like me who does enjoy a bit of hokeyness in his horror, this is just too much.

The actors are mostly wasted; the mugging contest between Carradine and Price is theoretically the film’s best feature, but the writing’s so terrible (script by Edward and Valeria Abraham), even the indefatigable Price seems to barely contain embarrassed giggles.

Well, at least somebody got some laughs out of this.

Past Misdeeds: Tales That Witness Madness (1973)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

Some middle-aged guy (the body of Jack Hawkins and the awkwardly dubbed voice of Charles Gray) visits the high-tech - by way of what looks a bit like a set from a cost-effective (but awesome) SF TV show – psychiatric clinic of one Professor Tremayne (Donald Pleasence). Tremayne shows off his four favourite patients while mumbling something about how his deep research into the cases and the truth about them will change everything.

This being a British horror anthology movie, with each patient lies a tale. There’s little Paul (Russell Lewis), who has a pair of permanently warring parents (Georgia Brown and Donald Houston), a nice private tutor (David Wood), and an imaginary friend who just happens to be an invisible tiger cleverly named “Mr. Tiger”. The obvious thing happens.

Next up is Timothy Patrick (Peter McEnery). His tale involves the inheritance of quite a few antiques, among them the (soon to be moving) picture of one Uncle Albert (Frank Forsyth) and a penny-farthing that once belonged to the man. The unicylce or the picture or both have telekinetic powers that violently draw Timothy onto the cycle, make him cycle quite hard and transport him into the unicycling past where he takes the place of Albert and repeats a scene or two from a doomed romance (his past adventure love and present day love both being played by Suzy Kendall, the former one in a hilariously melodramatic manner) while being observed by what looks like mud zombie Uncle Albert. Obviously, past and future catastrophe looms.

Patient number three is Brian (Michael Jayston). Brian lives peacefully in a large house in the woods with his mildly irascible –she’s being played by Joan Collins after all – wife/girlfriend Bella until he finds an about human-sized and vaguely woman-shaped piece of a tree in the woods. Obviously, he’s dragging it home and putting it in his living room. Soon, the age-old tale of a man’s affections split between a piece of wood and a woman repeats again.

Last but not least, we witness the tale of Auriol (Kim Novak), a literary agent who’s rather fond of her best client, the “Polynesian” – or maybe “Hawaiian”, going by the whole luau thing - writer Keoki (Leon Lissek, obviously neither Polynesian nor Hawaiian but then it is rather difficult to imagine somebody with the appropriate ethnicity taking on this particular role). Little does she expect that Keoki is in the process of fulfilling the last wish of his dear old mum, namely, to sacrifice a virgin to their favourite god and have a nice cannibalistic get-together afterwards. As luck will have it, Auriol’s daughter Ginny (Mary Tamm) just happens to be a virgin. And wow, isn’t it quite the coincidence Auriol is actually planning a little luau for him! Accidental inter-family cannibalism just might ensue.

As the observant reader might have noticed, the stories contained in this not Amicus produced - despite being directed by dear old Freddie Francis and featuring a structure and actors you might know all too well from the Amicus films - British horror anthology are utter, preposterous tosh, ending on notes as obvious as moonlight, while still managing to be flat-out crazy.

If you’re looking for something moody, thoughtful or just vaguely believable, you’ve come to the wrong film. Like a lot of these anthologies, this one’s a horror comic made flesh, but – apart from tale number four – it’s less EC style horror than the sort of thing Charlton Comics would have put out in comics code times (with perhaps a bit more blood than would have been allowed there on screen), stuff that at the best of times distracts from how pedestrian it should be by being outright crazy. Which is pretty much exactly what Tales That Witness Madness does after the somewhat useless first story, adding utterly peculiar elements to the stories that would seem ill-advised in a film actually out to scare its audience. Seriously, a haunted penny-farthing? And let’s not even talk about the whole of story number three, which just might be one of the major achievements of human arts.

Talking of ill-advised, it is rather difficult not to realize – even if you pretend very hard not to notice - how much of a racist fever dream the film’s last tale is, with its evil brown people killing a white virgin and feeding her to her own mother, and there’s really nothing I can find to excuse it, barely anything to explain it, so if that sort of thing offends you (and good on you), you’ll probably loathe the rest of the film for it, too, I suppose. On the other hand, I found this tale so preposterous and silly in tone while also being gloriously lurid I couldn’t help but enjoy it more than a little, despite it being racist claptrap. It’s just very difficult for me to look at this sort of thing (particularly in a film made more than forty years ago) and take it seriously enough to get angry or even very annoyed at the dead people responsible; not that I approve of it, mind you, nor would I want to see any contemporary movie that descends into these depths.

Be that as it may, Francis is pretty much the ideal director for this whole beautiful mess, combining his usual wonderful sense of visual style with the appropriate shamelessness to actually bring these deeply stupid tales to glowing life. Francis has just the right sense for movement and colour to turn this into a moving comic strip, clearly realizing that attempting to add class to this stuff would be a fool’s errand and opting for being as lurid and peculiar as possible, a task he fulfils with aplomb (as well as, one assumes, on time and on a not very large budget). Despite being quite so silly, the film also shows a wonderful sense of the telling (yet weird) detail that is best demonstrated by how the tree thing in tale number three is a bit more shaped like a woman in every scene, until the rip-roaring denouement that suggests a piece of a tree is preferable to poor Joan Collins.


Clearly, it pays off putting effort even into the silliest things.

Past Misdeeds: Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

Warning: spoilers will happen, yet little will make sense anyhow.

This write-up is based on the theatrical cut of the film, because it’s the one I’ve got. Given what I’ve read about the producer’s cut, it should actually improve heavily on some of the problems of the theatrical version when it comes to the whole cult/druid/whatever angle but seems to be cursed with an ending that would annoy the living crap out of me, and might drag considerably.

Apparently, not only was everyone’s favourite slasher movie killer Michael Myers freed by the mysterious man in black who shot up the police station where Mickey was being held in in the last film but he and his brethren – all belonging to some sort of cult seemingly only populated by people of the medical profession(?) that wants to help Michael finish his murder spree because druids or something - also kidnapped the Mickster’s niece Jamie. Six years later, Jamie (grown up to be J.C. Brandy because the production apparently couldn’t afford the 5000 dollars needed to get Danielle Harris back) escapes her captors together with a baby that is clearly supposed to be Michael’s child. Michael follows her and manages to kill his Jamie after a bit of stalking, but not before she can hide away her daughter.

Remember little Tommy Doyle from the first movie? He has grown up to be played by Paul Rudd, and has turned into quite the Michael Myers conspiracy theorist. Thanks to a call for help Jamie left in a Howard Stern style asshole radio personality show before she left the franchise forever, Tommy manages to find the child. Listening to the radio isn’t Tommy’s only hobby either. He lives right across the street from the old Myers house where now a bunch of Strodes (whose actual connection to Laurie Strode remains uncertain) make their home, and spies on them, or guards the family, or the house, or whatever. The only family members that need interest us (aka the only ones in the film to not just be killed off as soon as a kill scene is needed) are Kara Strode (Marianne Hagan) and her little son Danny (Devin Gardner), because both will soon – and rather improbably – fall in with Tommy and therefore become particularly interesting not just to Michael but also to the cult that is helping him. Nature and sense of this cult this version of the film never really explains. We learn their interest in Michael has something to do with seeing him as continuing an ancient Celtic tradition of blood sacrifices of one’s own family, but the film never makes clear why these people want to be involved in that sort of thing, what they get out of it, or why they are also dabbling in incest.

As if that wasn’t enough, Doctor Loomis (still Donald Pleasence, again sadly underused as well as cursed with the true curse of Michael Myers, a bad script) – now retired, friendly, without facial scars and not once pushing his burned hand into somebody’s face while explaining the horrible price he had to pay for hunting Michael – has also heard Jamie’s call for help and involves himself in the whole affair too. Oh, and certain young people in Haddonfield want to instate Halloween again, which was banned after the events of the last five minus one movies, and who could blame the authorities?

Now, reading over what I’ve just written, one might ask oneself what exactly Halloween number six is about, apart from Michael hunting a baby, and really, I haven’t mentioned abortive sub-plots like the one about Kara’s abusive father which, in classical slasher sequel fashion all end in deaths before anything about them is resolved on a dramatic level, and for whose inclusion there seems to be little reason. Sure, you could see these things as attempts to give Kara more character than just “the newest female lead” but if that was the plan, it doesn’t really work, and instead just adds another bit of ballast to a film that really could have used losing some.

A part of the reason for the confused state of plot and logic of this version of Curse of Michael Myers is one of those horrifying production histories that starts with a different script to the one the actors signed up for actually being shot and continues through various struggles between producers, director Joe Chappelle (who had a bright future in TV with shows like The Wire and Fringe before him) and who knows who else that seem to have left various people involved hating each other to this day, which does of course also make anything they say about each other utterly dubious. The push and pull behind the scenes resulted in a film that does not at all seem to know what it is about beyond Michael Myers looking for a baby and randomly killing off characters, be they actually involved in the plot or not. Even here, I still have no idea why Michael kills the shock jock, for example, a character he hasn’t met and who is only just planning to go to the Myers house, particularly since the film shows Michael to be somewhere else right before the murder. Or, as already mentioned, what the cult wants with “pure, uncorrupted [huh!?] evil”, or why anybody involved in the theatrical cut thought it was a good idea to neither think about these things nor to provide an actual ending to the proceedings. And let’s not even mention how the film does the typical slasher sequel thing of first hinting at something really interesting - like the way Tommy Doyle’s childhood encounter with Michael shaped his future - and then not doing anything interesting with it at all.


Having said all that, I now have to come to the point where I need to admit I enjoy (at least this version of) Curse of Michael Myers quite a bit, not as a dignified sequel to Halloween but as a pretty and illogical bit of 90s horror that seems closer related to Italian horror of the 80s in how it mixes bizarre randomness with violence, in its insistence of not using logic even when that might turn out well for it, in its generally highly moody photography, and in direction (or editing) that might not be able to stitch single scenes together to a coherent whole but that sure as hell can make these single non-cohering scenes work very well as a series of nightmare pictures about blood, murdering shapes, and threatened babies with a bit of nonsense about druids thrown in. Of course, the best of the Italian films also knew how to apply a degree of thematic coherence to their dream-like worlds, so a film as clueless about anything as Curse of Michael Myers isn’t quite on their level. However, for a production this troubled, managing to get this close to actual class is some sort of an achievement I believe.

Past Misdeeds: Paganini Horror (1989)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


The career of 80s synth rock monstrosity/siren Kate (Jasmine Maimone) seems to come to its natural end. At least if you ask her producer Lavinia (Maria Cristina Mastrangeli), who has turned into quite a bitch from suffering through hours and hours of Kate's "music" during the years, and so really doesn't mind telling her charge how much she sucks. To make a long story short - Kate really needs a hit, and she needs it soon. Fortunately, her drummer Daniel (Pascal Persiano) knows a simple solution to his friend's complicated problem, and buys a lost, never published and never publically performed song of possible devil dealer Paganini from a certain Mister Pickett (Donald Pleasance). The song, obviously being called "Paganini Horror", just happens to be a really crappy 80s synth rock of the sort Lavinia deems a surefire hit.

Now Kate and her partners in crime just need to make a video ("just like Michael Jackson's fantastic Thriller"). For that, they hire famous horror director Mark Singer (Pietro Genuardi), who works alone, just like Wolverine. But where to shoot? Oh, right, in a derelict house in Venice that once belonged to Paganini where he supposedly made his pact with the devil and made violin strings from his girlfriend's guts. It's going to be quite a cost-efficient shoot - apart from Singer, Kate and her three co-musicians and Lavinia, there's only the house's owner, Sylvia Hackett (Daria Nicolodi), on set. Soon enough, the mandatory horrible things (and I don't just mean Kate's music) start happening.

The house is caged in by a cartoon lightning forcefield, and Paganini (he of the golden mask and the golden violin with the in-built blade) does a bit of killing and time-and-space-bending. Lots of running around in the dark, splitting up, and screaming ensues. Who will survive until the twist ending?

After experiencing the major ecstasy of his The Black Cat/Demoni 6/etc., I couldn't help but pounce on this other late-period horror film directed by Luigi Cozzi as soon as possible. Now, I'm even more convinced that I underestimated Cozzi quite heavily. When the man was on, he was quite capable of making a film of the sort of nonsensical beauty and intense, lovingly presented stupidity more typically found in the works of Bruno Mattei and Claudio Fragasso. Paganini Horror isn't quite the mind-blowing experience that other movie (which may or may not have been produced in the same year) turned out to be, but it is still chockfull of the sort of insane delights I always hope for in Italian horror movies.

Apart from the obvious (and pretty wonderful, of course) dumbness of the film's set-up - and the charming idiocy of its twist ending (note to directors: nobody will complain your twist ending ruins your whole film when your plot never made any sense anyway) - there's at least one excellently stupid thing a minute on screen, starting with Paganini's (whose violin quite expectedly sounds like a synthesizer and not like a violin) hobo-Phantom of the Opera outfit, and the violin knife and most certainly not ending with one of the best deaths in crappy horror cinema - death by "special fungus". Connoisseurs of this sort of thing can also look forward to some drunkenly rotating camera to visualize moments of disorientation and a very funny blood fountain when Lavinia is pressing her face against a piece of glass, um, is squashed to death by an invisible Paganini, I mean. Not to mention Kate's "music" (or the fact that the song that is supposed to be Paganini's when they shoot the video sounds nothing like the song Daniel played to them), the "dancing" and the eye-destroying costumes.

Visually, the film's all blue, green and red lights and rather shaky camera, with Cozzi doing everything in his budget to let the audience forget most of the film is taking place in the same five or so rooms (to be fair, there are also a handful of scenes taking place in Venice). I most certainly didn't forget, but I was much too occupied with giggling about the director's shrugging disregard of the nature of time and space (that's even a plot point), characters (that's not really a plot point), or plot (naturally, there isn't much of one).

I don't think I was the only one giggling about the whole affair, either. At least the always wonderful Donald Pleasence (in his "one day of shooting only and a trip to Venice, please" phase) looks for most of his sparse screen time as if he could barely hold his amusement in, making his devil (oops, spoiler) intensely endearing, like one's favourite uncle. Amusement is of course the natural reaction when one's biggest scene in a movie sees one throwing down money from a high balcony in Venice, shouting "Fly, my little demons!".

The rest of the actors don't seem of one mind about how to take on their roles. Daria Nicolodi goes for a quiet dignity that is completely at odds with the merrily deranged tone of the film - which is a bit ironic given that she's also billed as the screenplay's co-writer - while Maimone and Mastrangeli seem to be caught in a competition concerning who is better when it comes to hysterical overacting; Maimone's probably slightly more consistent there - her facial contortions when she talks about Michael Jackson and Thriller alone would be worth the price of admission. As you can imagine, these quite divergent acting approaches in combination with the incredibly loopy dialogue only add to film's very special (quite like the fungus, yes) charms.


As a whole, Cozzi's movie feels like one of the last great "hey, I have a thousand dollars, a script written by a semi-cult actress, an old house, and one day of shooting time with Donald Pleasence, so let's make a horror movie and get rich!"-films the Italian exploitation film industry popped out. As such, Paganini Horror not only produces tears of laughter and delight, but also leaves one with the melancholic feeling of witnessing the end of an era of the right kind of shoddy, somewhat desperate, yet weirdly enthusiastic filmmaking.

In short: The Freakmaker (1973)

aka The Mutations

University professor Nolter (Donald Pleasence putting on what I think is supposed to be a German accent that comes and mostly goes) is maybe a tiny bit mad. His fascination with genetic mutations and plants has led him to the belief that natural mutations are dangerous - and probably somewhat disquieting to the ordered mind, one assumes – and that humanity truly needs a bit of controlled mutating – and plant genes.

To further the cause of scientific (ha!) obsession, Nolter has brought circus freak show boss Lynch (Tom Baker) under his thumb by promising to some day cure his acromegaly with his future genetic super science. So now, Lynch acquires students (predominantly some going to Nolter’s own classes, because master criminality is hard) for Nolter to experiment on, and Nolter sometimes uses Lynch’s show to park his failed experiments. Which isn’t ideal when some of these experiments still got faces and friends in town, but then, these villains are idiots.

I have no idea what went wrong here. By all rights, The Freakmaker should be a perhaps silly but enjoyable piece of mad science horror. After all, it features Pleasance, Baker, and even good old Brad Harris as the nominal romantic lead, and was directed by Jack Cardiff, who has some excellent and a lot of competent work in his filmography.

Alas, nobody seems to have told the people involved about their talents, so Pleasence seems bored, Baker is hindered by his stupid make-up, and Harris goes through his scenes with a perpetual expression of embarrassment . And Cardiff? Well, he spends about half of the film dragging his feet with filler. This is a movie that starts with five minutes of archive footage of plants, continues with another five minutes of a dubious lecture by Pleasence, and often seems much more comfortable not actually showing anything of interest. Then there’s a sub-plot that’s a completely incompetently handled and misguided rip-off of Browning’s Freaks, just without feeling the need to include any of that film’s humanity.

There are a few scenes that show potential for a slightly uneasy bit of exploitational fun, like the short bit where Baker visits a prostitute (whom seems to have suspiciously low rates) and pays her to tell him she loves him, or the hilarious yet macabre man-plant thing that just happens in the film’s final twenty minutes. Not surprisingly, a couple of promising scenes do not a good film make; in The Freakmaker’s case, they also don’t make an entertaining one.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,in short,jack cardiff,donald pleasence,tom baker,brad harris,horror

On ExB: Tales That Witness Madness (1973)

Amicus wasn’t the only company making British horror anthology movies during the 70s, of course. Where there’s money to be made, there’s an imitator, particularly if said imitator can just hire a lot of the same people in front of and behind the camera.

Read all about how this particular Freddie Francis film turned out over at my column on the penny-farthing-riding website for the tasteful set, Exploder Button.

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In short: Night Creature (1978)

aka Out of the Dark

While hunting a man-eating leopard, Great White Hunter – and in a turn absolutely telegraphing the film’s idea of subtlety also former war photographer, race car driver and so on – Axel MacGregor (Donald Pleasence, for reasons only known to him acting his ass off in a film that really doesn’t deserve him) is nearly killed by the beast, and mauled enough for a decoratively stiff leg. For the first time in his life, MacGregor has to admit he is feeling fear, so he does the obvious thing to restore his manhood: he pays various hunting parties to catch the animal alive, so he can let it loose on his private island and either kill it to restore his manhood or die in a really stupiddignified manner.

Alas, his half-estranged daughters Leslie (Nancy Kwan) and Georgia (Jennifer Rhodes), Georgia’s little daughter Peggy (Lesly Fine), Georgia’s bed buddy (and soon to be Leslie’s boyfriend) Ross (Ross Hagen), use just this moment for a nice family visit. So, while MacGregor is wandering through his island wilderness, the leopard has rather more tasty targets set before it, with a Yorkshire terrier as an aperitif, even.

On paper, Lee Madden’s Night Creatures does sound like a rather good idea, for the deconstruction of the Great White Hunter by confronting him with his failure as a father might not be the newest idea, but certainly is one that by all rights should be a decent base for an animal attack thriller with a bit more going below the surface.

Alas, that’s not this film, because the idea of keeping themes or ideas where someone in the audience might miss them seems to have been anathema to the people involved in the production. Consequently, the actors are permanently telling each other their inner states and the film’s themes beside the whole Pleasence/leopard duel in impossibly wooden dialogue full of bad 70s pop psychology, empty melodramatics and the kind of therapy speech that to me always suggests a complete disconnect with actual human psychology, not to speak a total absence of either believable, or beautiful, or simply effective dialogue writing.

It doesn’t help that only one of the three core actors – Pleasence, obviously - is actually good enough to deliver this dross with conviction and style, while Kwan in particular drones the nonsense with all the emotional involvement of robot, and Hagen’s only there to show off his chest and a lot of hair.

Whenever Pleasence is alone, or just stalking through the jungle, the film nearly becomes worthwhile, though Madden does his best to sabotage even these moments via judicious over-application of stylistic elements like freeze frames as well as random slow-motion and meaningful editing that is on the same level of intelligence and subtlety as the writing. Only from time to time, Madden stumbles upon a moment that actually is meaningful and effective (like the first major character death), but these moments of poignancy are, as is Pleasence’s effort, buried under so much dross I quickly found myself actually annoyed at the film’s empty gestures that only ever destroy the depth they are supposed to create.

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On ExB: Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)

Oh yes, or rather OH NO!, not even the venerable and classy Exploder Button is spared my seasonal slasher mania, so just click on through to read quite a few words more than you ever wanted to read about Halloween 6.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,horror,slasher,joe chappelle,donald pleasence,paul rudd,marianne hagan

Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989)

To nobody’s surprise, Michael Myers (this time around Don Shanks) has survived the events of the last movie and – that part is rather surprising - has spent the year until the next Halloween cohabiting with a hermit or something. His niece Jamie Lloyd (Danielle Harris), on the other hand, following her attack on her adoptive mother at the end of the last movie, is now mute, and has spent the same time in a mental health facility for kids, in part guarded, in part observed as a Michael seismograph by an increasingly crazed Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence) who wavers between genuinely nice and caring and ruthless bastard depending on what the script needs in any given scene.

Jamie is useful as a seismograph because her implied mental connection to her uncle from the last film is now a genuine thing that will see her writhing and mumbling a lot until someone puzzles out where the attack she describes happens, and nobody gets saved by it. In theory, Michael is out to kill Jamie but unlike the slasher mastermind he was in the last outing, he’s now drifting pointlessly through town, from time to time killing people connected to Jamie, without actually getting any closer to her through it. Then there’s a mysterious guy who dresses like the Exorcist sneaking through town who is only there to set up the thoroughly stupid ending, and really, nothing much that adds up to a plot happening at all. Loomis has a “plan” to catch Michael, but said plan makes even less sense then the rest of the film.

So yeah, all the goodwill the series won through the very decent fourth entry quickly evaporated in Halloween 5 once it became clear to me that Swiss director Dominique Othenin-Girard really didn’t know what story he wanted to tell, or how to tell it, or even just what the point of any given scene was, with characters changing traits from scene to scene for reasons of plot convenience, and many scenes that look as if they were setting up something that never get any follow-through.

I can’t even gush about Donald Pleasence this time around, even though he and a Danielle Harris who has seriously improved in the short time between the last film and this one, are clearly the best thing Halloween 5 has to offer. Unfortunately, like with anything else in the film, it doesn’t really seem to know what it wants to do with Pleasence, so it’s just wavering, dragging its feet and wasting him.

This is also another slasher sequel that contains a lot of elements that, if treated by talented scriptwriters, or writers who cared, could have made a wonderful movie – the psychic connection between Jamie and Michael, the fear she will turn into him or something very much like him, the toll the eternal hunt for an indestructible enemy has taken on Loomis are all elements that scream for a script that explores concepts like evil or innocence (or the price of trauma) via the nastiness of horror. Unfortunately, Halloween 5 isn’t that film. In fact, I find it difficult to pretend this is much of a film at all. Apart from lacking niceties like plot and character. the film doesn’t even succeed as a delivery machine for killing scenes, mostly because it prefers dragging its feet and boring its audience to anything else, blowing forty minutes of plot up to a hundred.

This is particularly frustrating because the final fifteen minutes or so suggest that Othenin-Girard would well have been able to at least make an effective conventional slasher, for the final confrontation with Michael may make little sense on a logical level but is an excellent example of tense suspense that works a bit like a nightmare.

Too bad there’s the rest of the film to get through before it.

 

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Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)

It’s ten years after the occurrences of Halloween and its sequel, and Doctor Loomis (Donald Pleasence) and Michel Myers (given shape by George P. Wilbur who isn’t one of the great silent slasher bodies but serviceable enough) have both survived film number two.

Michael has spent the time in a coma, but of course wakes up while being moved to a different facility behind Loomis’s back, and starts killing his way to Haddonfield, with a bent but not broken Loomis quickly following on his trail. For Michael is still attempting to do what film number two has established as his modus operandi – killing off his relatives. Poor Laurie Strode has died in a car accident in the meantime – together with whoever her husband was – leaving behind her daughter Jamie Lloyd (Danielle Harris already practicing for her future in horror movies). Loomis knows that Jamie will be Michael’s main victim of choice.

Jamie has found a rather good home with the Carruthers, including a teenage step sister named Rachel (Ellie Cornell) who will turn out to be willing and able to step between Jamie and someone like Michael. However it’s questionable if Rachel, a damaged psychiatrist and the reasonably competent yet completely outgunned police force of Sheriff Meeker (Beau Starr) will be enough to stop Michael.

After the last few Friday the 13th films, Halloween 4 is classing up the joint here, featuring a script that is generally sensibly building on what came in the first two movies, hitting some of the first two films’ favourite beats yet not feeling slavishly beholden to just repeating what came before. The film is at its best when it makes clear the first two movies actually happened to the people in its world, leaving Loomis half-broken and obsessed, and having had an influence on the society of Haddonfield as a whole. Sure, the latter is mostly in the movie to provide a plot relevant lynch mob (no torches, alas) once Michael has taken out the police force, but it’s more thought than ninety percent of slasher sequels ever put into this sort of thing. It does at least give a decent explanation for things like spontaneous lynch mobs in a contemporary small town, or cops willing to trust a crazy old man like Loomis.

Even though I’ve never been a fan of the second film’s revelation of Michael having an actual motive for his deeds, turning him into something much less frightening than the boogieman of the first film because he becomes understandable to a degree, I do like how Halloween 4 runs with these now established facts, and makes Michael not just frightening and dangerous but also conniving in the way he effectively destroys the parts of Haddonfield’s infrastructure most dangerous to him. If you can’t make your monster irrationally frightening anymore, it’s a good idea to make it threatening by having it act intelligently, even if won’t keep for further sequels (which it doesn’t).

Because I’m a sensible guy, I am of course wildly in love with Pleasence’s performance as Loomis here, the way he manages to squeeze real pathos out of at times stupid dialogue (“evil on two legs!”), creating a tragic figure whose whole life has been spent in a fight he just doesn’t seem to be able to win, a fight that has cost him a lot physically, mentally and in his chosen career, and that has left him determined and afraid and painfully human. Most of this isn’t as much in the script as a result of Pleasence being an actor who only very seldom let his audience see when the material he was working with was below him, adding a veneer of truth to the silly and the dubious. If Pleasence can believe in this Loomis, so can the audience.

Consequently, one of the film’s main weak spots are the various contrivances the script makes for his frequent absences from the plot, even at moments when Loomis’s absence really doesn’t make a lick of sense, with Harris just not the kind of child actor who can carry a scene on her shoulders alone, and nobody else involved quite interesting or good enough to step into Pleasence’s shoes.

However, even when Pleasence isn’t on screen, Halloween 4 is never less than an entertaining, often atmospheric slasher movie, with director Dwight H. Little surely no John Carpenter yet at the very least someone who knows how to build a mood before the killing starts as well as able to make the traditional stalking and slashing suspenseful beyond the (nice enough) bloody effects. It helps Little’s case that Halloween 4 isn’t very interested in the killing of teenagers (we already had the in the first film and dozens of epigones, after all) and does its best to set up some variety in the victims of its violence. Why, this is even a slasher sure enough of itself it doesn’t feel the need to show the audience every single kill.

On the negative side, the film’s pace drags a little in the twenty minutes or so before the climactic confrontation with Michael, there are one or two really stupid moments of false scares present and annoying, and the final twist has little – if anything at all – to do with what came before. But hey, for the kind of film Halloween 4 is, it really is as good as anyone could reasonably have expected.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,horror,slasher,dwight h. little,donald pleasence,ellie cornell,danielle harris

The Eagle Has Landed (1976)

It’s 1943, and people like German general Canaris (Anthony Quayle) already see the writing on the wall. Hitler, on the other hand, still has plans, like, for example, kidnapping Winston Churchill. Himmler (Donald Pleasence, because why not), recognizes a nice way to put one over on the competition and boots the whole stupid project over to Canaris, who in his turn orders his Colonel Radl (Robert Duvall, because really, why not) to at the very least produce a feasibility study.

Ironically, Radl realizes the mad project might actually be feasible, for it just so happens that a German spy in Britain has just radioed in Churchill’s plans for a weekend stay in a small village neighbouring a practically undefended beach. After a bit of political back and forth – one has to blow up the film to a running time of more than two hours after all – Radl acquires the always dangerous help of Himmler for the project and sends out disgraced – like every German not in the SS in the movie, he’s not a real Nazi, you know – paratrooper commando Colonel Steiner (Michael Caine), his men, and Irish revolutionary Liam Devlin (a man so Irish he could only be played by Canadian Donald Sutherland) to do the deed in beautiful Norfolk. The men are disguised as Polish paratroopers and a marsh inspector, respectively, so whatever could go wrong?

If for some mysterious reasons it hasn’t become quite clear already, let me just emphasize that the plot of The Eagle Has Landed (based on a novel by Jack Higgins, which never bodes well), is utterly, preposterously stupid. Not necessarily because it is lacking in historical veracity (which it sure as hell does) but because the script’s (and I very much assume the book’s this is based on) handling of the whole affair just too stupid to bluff its way through. A lot of films get away with a stupid basic idea by thinking the results of that idea through in a logical and coherent manner; The Eagle Has Landed prefers to load stupid idea on improbability on ridiculous nonsense.

This is, after all, a film that finds Sutherland’s character, who is supposed to be some sort of vanguard for the Germans, one supposes, landing in Norfolk and at once romancing Jenny Agutter, in the sort of romance that goes from meeting someone to the willingness to murder for him in the course of about half an hour, or a day in movie time. Even worse, as much as I like Agutter, the subplot really has no business at all to be in the movie, and most certainly not in the completely pointless form it takes. To make matters sillier, there’s improbable crap like that happening in nearly every scene, as if writer Tom Mankiewicz had never heard of concepts like theme, or tonal coherence, or even pacing. For of course the film does stop and start early and often, sometimes meandering from one scene to the next, sometimes drunkenly jumping, leading to a structure you can’t even call episodic because that word suggests that there’s actually something happening, which is not how I’d describe at least The Eagle’s first half.

And still, watching the film I found myself not at all bored but enjoyed myself quite a bit. Not only because I wanted to see what stupid nonsense the film would come up next but because everyone involved not responsible for the script actually put a lot of effort in. Director John Sturges, a man who made much worthier and just plain better films to be sure, doesn’t exactly bring his A-game here, but a Sturges just doing his job (I cannot assume any real personal involvement in the film at hand, at least) is still a director bringing dignity and a degree of style to material that frankly doesn’t deserve it, even managing to turn the script’s absurd ideas about pacing into something that can look like charming distractibility.

The actors, for their part, bring a bunch of underwritten clichés to life in efforts a film that sees a predominantly British and American cast playing Germans speaking English among one another with bad German accents (except for Sutherland, of course, who does a bad Irish accent, and Caine, whose character studied in England and therefore doesn’t have an accent at all, which of course only makes sense if you actually assume these Nazi – and yes, sorry, Wehrmacht soldiers were Nazis too, just ask their victims – are indeed talking English among each other), and who are incapable of pronouncing German names like “Hans” with even minor correctness probably doesn’t even want, far less warrants. Duvall is particularly good here, bringing a mix of irony and subtlety to his role that I’m quite sure wasn’t in the script. The only negative stand-out among the cast is Larry Hagman as a US Colonel in a performance that is actually as bad as the script deserves.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,reviews,war,john sturges,michael caine,donald sutherland,robert duvall,jenny agutter,donald pleasence

Will Penny (1968)

Aging cowhand Will Penny (Charlton Heston) has just ended a trail somewhere in the colder parts of the West at the beginning of winter. Together with two of his colleagues, Dutchy (Anthony Zerbe) and Blue (Lee Majors), who are probably as close to friends as the rather shy Will ever comes, Will’s planning on finding work at a nearby ranch.

Before that can happen, though, the trio encounters the crazy family of crazy “Preacher” Quint (Donald Pleasence). A pointless altercation about an elk leaves one of Quint’s sons dead and Dutchy badly wounded. Quint swears vengeance, but because there’s a river in the way, it’ll probably have to wait a bit. While Blue and Dutchy end up in the closest town, with Dutchy probably dying, Will goes on to that ranch they were looking for. There, he hires on as a line rider, a cowhand living at the edge of the ranch’s areal, keeping cattle from wandering off.

Unfortunately, while out and about in the increasingly snowy mountains, Will encounters Quint and his family again. They quickly overwhelm him and leave him to die, bleeding out in the cold. Fortunately, Will’s mountain cabin is being squatted in by Catherine Allen (Joan Hackett) and her little son Horace (Jon Gries) who have been left behind by a guide supposed to bring them to California and Catherine’s husband. Catherine saves Will’s life, and slowly, a romance develops between the unhappily married woman and the sensitive, even fragile, cowboy. Things might develop into a direction that may be good for both of them, as well as for the boy, but alas Quint isn’t finished with Will yet.

This description does make Tom Gries’s Will Penny sound like a more concise film than it actually is, when it is in fact, particularly during its first half, a rather meandering and episodic one. Most of these episodes do come together to make a whole later on, though, if you have the patience to follow the film where it leads. The meandering feel of the early film is of course also just a clever mirror of Will’s life, a slow, directionless drifting from no place special to no place special, something that is only focused through Will’s work, sudden bouts of violence one encounters in the place where Will lives even if one is as basically peaceful as he is, and finally his encounter with Catherine and her boy.

In what I can only call a completely unexpected turn of events, Heston plays Will, the absolute opposite of the larger than life grimacing assholes he specialized in and, in the end, seems to have turned into in real life, exceedingly well. I really didn’t think Heston had something like this in him, a character as believably sensitive, even shy, and emotionally pained as Will is, a man who is quite conscious of the fact that he’s going nowhere, the place he’s coming from not much worth mentioning either. There’s, believe it or not, a subtlety to Heston’s performance of Will that suggests he could have been a much better actor than he ever was a star. It is really Heston’s performance that carries the film through its necessarily slow parts, until what actually is his second encounter with Catherine after an earlier episodic moment starts the actual plot, and quite possibly the first great emotional upheaval Will has undergone in years, or ever.

And while this is very definitely Will’s story, the film leaves space for Joan Hackett to turn Catherine into much more than just someone the cowhand could anchor himself too, a plot device with breasts. Instead the film shows us a woman as complex, complicated and curiously practical as her male counterpart is, with plans, and agency, and a life all her own. Hackett and Heston do work very well with one another, too, making clear what attracts them to each other without any need for the film to ever spell it out, going far beyond the point of lonely people feeling attracted to one another.

The weakest link in the acting chain here is, strangely enough, good old dependable Donald Pleasence who lays his crazy person shtick on a little too thick, going from threatening to cartoony, standing quite in opposition to the rest of the actors. It’s the kind of performance you’d use in a Heston film when Chuck does his usual Moses, but not between naturalistic and subtle performances as they’re found here. It’s hardly enough of a flaw to ruin the film even a little, though, because Quint isn’t the point of the film. It is – very pointedly – not Pleasence’s character that begins or ends the relationship between Will and Catherine, but Will’s own inability to get over a fear that finds an easy confederate in his frontier pragmatism, which is an easy shield against the risks of the heart.

If I haven’t really mentioned anything about Tom Gries’s direction of the film, then it’s because Will Penny, following the suggestion of its title, is very much a film about people and landscape, and Gries’s part of the job in bringing his own script to life is letting the people and the landscape do the talking. Which he does quite perfectly.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,western,romance,tom gries,charlton heston,joan hackett,donald pleasence,lee majors

In short: I Don't Want To Be Born (1975)

aka The Devil Within Her

aka Sharon's Baby

aka The Monster

aka The Baby

Winning the fight for the heavyweight championship for the worst movie about killer babies is clearly this British production directed by Peter Sasdy. The plot, such as it is, concerns Joan Collins as the most horrible burlesque dancer/stripper imaginable getting cursed by a spurned dwarf, and soon enough popping out The Devil Baby after getting together with Ralph Bates.

Hubby Ralph is so disturbed about his offspring that he's talking in an Italian accent so ridiculous it's difficult to imagine he's meaning it seriously (he does). Note to casting directors of the past: Ralph Bates is neither Italian nor able to pretend he is.

The dialogue may regularly inform the viewers that the baby, or rather The Baby, is abnormally large and strong for its age, but the hoped for effect is a bit ruined whenever Sasdy cuts to the actual baby - looking fat, satisfied, totally normal and so completely good-natured it's impossible not to laugh when the next character comments on its size or goes through a bad "oh my god! The devil baby scratched me!" rigmarole. Given how ridiculous baby's physical feats get during the course of the movie, I find it difficult to understand why the script doesn't just give it explicit telekinetic powers or something of that sort. That would have been silly enough, but slightly less ridiculous than a baby that's able hang Ralph Bates on a tree. Of course, it is hardly possible to watch I Don't Want To Be Born without developing doubts about the intellectual capacities, or at least the willingness to give a damn, of everyone involved behind the camera.

Because all this is not dumb enough, the film also sees fit to try to get at some of that sweet, sweet Exorcist money by adding a Catholic nun who works in the animal experimentation field (Eileen Atkins) and is related to Ralphie Bates, so that she can discuss the nature of evil babies with the family's doctor played by the great Donald Pleasence. The latter seems to have a lot of fun in his few scenes and brings some conscious irony and even class to a cast - there are John Steiner as sleazy script club owner and Caroline Munro as Collins's ditzy best friend, too - that should be able to do better, even when having to work with a script like this. Again, it all seems to be a case of nobody willing to give a damn.

I Don't Want To Be Born is a film you either stare at in disbelief and giggle continuously at, or give up on after fifteen minutes, depending on your tolerance for unbelievable nonsense.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: in short,british movies,horror,peter sasdy,joan collins,eileen atkins,donald pleasence,ralph bates,john steiner,caroline munro

On WTF: Paganini Horror (1989)

After the excitement Luigi Cozzi's Il gatto nero provided me with, it was only a question of time until I'd revisit the director.

Turns out the director's Paganini Horror is nearly as glorious as the other film. Listen to me swoon in my weekly appearance on WTF-Film.com.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: luigi cozzi,reviews,horror,wtf,daria nicolodi,jasmine maimone,maria cristina mastrangeli,donald pleasence,other places

Three Films Make A Post: You Are Who You Eat

A Nightmare On Elm Street (2010): Remakes don't have it easy. When they're completely changing their source material, we complain that they are so different from it that we can't see why the producers didn't just make a wholly original film. When they are keeping close to the original movie, we complain that we don't see why there's a need for a remake at all when it's only trying to reproduce the original as closely as possible.

The Nightmare remake tends to the latter version. Sure, the script changes up a few thing (to neutral effect), but keeps most of the iconic dream sequences and much of the basic structure of the original. Even some of the dialogue is the same.

Still, there's a decided difference in feel between the two movies: where Craven's original feels like the work of someone trying to stretch the teen slasher formula by applying intelligence and creativity, the remake is like a third generation photocopy of creativity and intelligence. In theory, it's the same thing as the original, in practice, it's serviceable for times when you don't have the original at hand.

Into The Darkness (1986): British would-be slasher (or is it a would-be giallo) about a shadowy figure stalking and slashing a fashion shoot in Malta while the viewer tries not to fall asleep or go blind from its visual blandness seems to be out to prove we Europeans can produce even worse shot-on-video crap than our North American brethren. In that respect, the film's a fantastic success, as it is in being the only horror film I can remember that's evil enough to torture me with Chris Rea on its soundtrack.

Don't expect the appearance of much blood and nakedness to keep you from drifting off; there's only a small appearance of Donald Pleasence (who is probably only in here at all because his daughter is playing one of the leads) to look forward to, and that only if you like your heroes to look embarrassed.

 

Shadows in the Garden (2002): Extremely neat dialogue-less (but not soundless) short by Wayne Spitzer about two creatures of the night stalking a town with the picturesque name of Cthulhu Gardens. One is a serial killer active during the nights of the full moon, the other a melancholic swamp creature trying to hold on to who he once was. Both do of course cross paths.

This is one of those no-budget shorts that manages to make its technical problems virtues, and so the graininess and imprecision of its pictures evokes a sad and melancholic note. It's the short film treated as a form of narrative poetry.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,british movies,slasher,horror,in short,wayne spitzer,donald pleasence