In short: Puppet on a Chain (1970)

Because a trio of drug dealers are murdered in the USA, some US drug-centric law enforcement agency sends their agent Paul Sherman (Sven-Bertil Taube, who is about as American as I am), and extra secret undercover agent Maggie (Barbara Parkins) to Amsterdam to put a stop to that part of the drug trade once and for all. The Dutch colleagues aren’t terribly impressed by him, or enamoured by the idea, and don’t know about Maggie.

From then on, Sherman tortures and murders his way through Amsterdam, following leads and clues in the least effective yet most violent manner imaginable.

Say what you will against Geoffrey Reeve’s Alistair MacLean adaptation Puppet on a Chain, but it is most certainly a film ahead of its time, prefiguring the asshole on a rampage movie style by someone like Michael Winner for quite a few years. Sherman is a deeply unpleasant hero, a law enforcement agent who seems to go out of his way to break ever law imaginable, all of the time, even in situations where going by the book would make rather a lot more sense. He’s usually more violent than he needs to be and lacks in any actual investigative skills. Much worse for my sometimes rather amoral tastes when it comes to this kind of movie, he’s no fun at all, with no character traits apart from a badly written love affair with Maggie (who is of course killed off to motivate him to further violence), and played by Taube with all the verve and charisma of a concrete pillar.

It would be enough to make a boy rather cranky, if not for a couple of saving graces that eventually do make the adventures of an unpleasant prick doing unpleasant things for little reason at least decently entertaining. For one, there’s a certain degree of weirdness running through much of the plot, with villains who occasionally seem to think they are in a giallo, and so tend to rather creative corpse presentations and plans that make even less sense than Sherman’s investigative techniques. Corpses just look better in traditional Dutch garb.

Secondly, some of the action sequences are pretty decent too. The film’s major claim to fame is a long and pretty great motorboat chase scene; that one’s not directed by Reeve, but by Don Sharp, who also did some other trouble shooting. If I were a cynical man, I’d suggest all the good bits were Sharp’s responsibility.

In short: Amsterdamned (1988)

A rather creative serial killer is terrorizing Amsterdam. Thanks to the city’s abundance of canals, he gets around town by diving through said canals wearing SCUBA gear, from time to time pulling people in and slaughtering them in various unpleasant ways. The head of the investigation, Eric Visser (Huub Stapel), doesn’t have much to go on, and since the only investigating he’s ever going to do is going through a list of citizens with diving licenses, he has ample time to romance museum guide Laura (Monique van de Ven).That subplot is going to be important for the finale because writer director Dick Maas clearly couldn’t be arsed to come up with a way of unmasking the killer that doesn’t result in a yawning viewer.

But then, the script to Amsterdamned really isn’t any great shakes anyway: the killer is exactly who you think it is once the character has been introduced thanks to the film not providing any alternatives, yet still Maas pretends the whole thing to be a big surprise; the characters have zero defining traits among them (Visser is hairy and drinks a lot, I guess?); and the first hour of the film’s too ample nearly two hours of running time is mostly spent on little of interest apart from the murders.

The murders are admittedly pretty great. There’s not just the silly yet fresh SCUBA killer angle, but Maas has also put some thought into keeping the murders diverse - which is one hundred percent more thought than went into the rest of the script. An additional feather in Amsterdamned’s cap is Maas’s lovingly scuzzy outlook on Amsterdam, turning the place into the only thing on screen whose characterization isn’t taken from everyone’s favourite film school course “cliché characters without personality 101”. Add to that the actually brilliant and insane motorboat chase late in the film, and you have a rather frustrating experience.

Amsterdamned is a film that could have been brilliant, and does in fact feature quite a few incredible scenes when it comes to murder and chases, but that also gets into its own way with deeply boring characters, and plodding plotting that often goes nowhere to follow red herrings and detours for way too long. For my tastes, all this overwhelms the delicious slasher/action movie hybrid Amsterdamned’s good bits try their best to deliver.

In short: The Windmill Massacre (2016)

aka The Windmill

A handful of tourists go on a bus tour around the windmills of Holland. As it goes with groups like these, everybody on board the bus has a dark secret – each and every one of them concerning MURDER. The group soon finds itself stranded in the Dutch wilderness (insert sarcasm tag here) and seek shelter in an abandoned windmill.

As it happens, this windmill stands right next to a gate to hell, and an undead miller goes about punishing everyone for their sins while pretty lame hallucinations run around.

Sometimes, slasher films just can’t do right by me: if they’re traditional, I complain they’re lacking in ambition and originality, if they are like Nicke Jongerius’s Windmill Massacre and try to freshen things up by mixing the more traditional bits and pieces (of human meat) with elements from a different horror genre that’s just as tired as the slasher, I complain about that, too. Of course, seeing as this approach drags the film from a genre that is subtextually – and very often not on purpose – moralizing into one that’s explicitly moralizing, providing the audience with the valuable insight that murder is bad (unless an undead miller commits it, I suppose?) in the process, I don’t see a reason to apologize.

Apart from its moralizing streak, The Windmill Massacre also suffers from characters whose travails are painfully clichéd and just not very interesting or fun to watch. Adding insult to injury are some abhorrent fake accents, some dubious ideas about Shintoism (though I have to give the film points there for originality, or just for a nod towards Jigoku, a moralizing horror film that’s actually good), and a generally lackluster script.

On the positive side, the gore’s not too bad, and Jongerius’s direction is generally competent. But then, these things don’t exactly add up to much.

In short: The Forbidden Quest (1993)

Ireland, 1941. A filmmaker (the voice of Roy Ward) stumbles upon elderly, melancholic ship’s carpenter J.C. Sullivan (Joseph O’Conor). Sullivan tells the tale of a strange and doomed secretive Antarctic expedition he took part in, an attempt to find a passage leading from the South Pole to the North Pole. Sullivan has the battered up films shot on the expedition to prove his story too, so The Forbidden Quest intersperses Sullivan’s curious narrative of the expedition with the silent footage of it.

Said footage Peter Delpeut, the film’s actual director, took from actual films shot on polar expeditions, lending his film’s tale a degree of authenticity, yet also a dream-like quality that comes with the territory of footage shot in the silent era. The colorization of the films, their speed, and the unreal aura silent movies can so easily take on even when they are – as is the case with the material here – as authentic as cinema can be put what we see as close to a filmed dream state as the movies can get. Which may just say something about the whole concept of authenticity.

Be that as it may, Sullivan’s narrative and the footage Delpeut chose come together beautifully to create a tale very much in the spirit and tradition of that part of the genre of the Weird Tale that uses the polar areas of the globe (still our best bet when we want to think about a place unknown and unknowable to humans, though we’re doing our best to destroy them) in its search for the numinous. A search which, I believe, the actual arctic and antarctic explorers were on in their own ways. It’s an idea that still has some pull and watching a film like this can still draw one’s mind into these directions, particularly when it is a film so consciously in dialogue with these traditions, and so focused on its own quest for the numinous and the horrors and beauties connected to that quest.

The resulting film is really rather wonderful, feels unpretentious yet takes on a certain glow I connect to the traditions of the weird, as much as to the silent movie era.

In short: Sint (2010)

aka Saint

aka Saint Nick

Turns out the original Saint Nicolas (Huub Stapel) wasn't the cuddly bishop of wherever but a renegade with murdering and pillaging as his main hobbies. That is, until some heroic peasants from Amsterdam made use of pitchforks and fire and sent the murderous bastard and his gang to hell.

Saint Nick is something of a sore loser, though, so every time the night before the 6th of December - the Christmas Eve version of the Dutch - falls on the night of a full moon, Nick and his gang of Zwarte Piets (black being the colour one's skin takes on when one gets burned) visit Amsterdam for a bit of a blood bath.

This being a horror film, the authorities have kept Nick's massacring ways hidden for no discernible reason for centuries and not made any effort to get rid of the supernatural menace, which must make his job quite a bit easier.

Anyhow, it's 2010, and it's time for Nick and the Petes to do their thing again. Because the police is mostly left in the dark about their ways, and those in the know are in the business of hushing things up, it falls to shlubby college boy Frank (Egbert Jan Weeber), freshly suspected of some of Nick's murders, and cop and survivor of another Saint Nick massacre Goert (Bert Luppes) to get rid of the red-coated menace. Most probably, there will be blood.

When it comes to Christmas-themed horror movies, one can usually be glad if the film at hand is more entertaining than it is atrocious - with the absolutely brilliant Christmas Evil being the big positive exception. Seen from this perspective, veteran genre director Dick Maas's Sint is a success, as it does mildly entertain throughout its running time. Typically for its director, "mildly entertaining" is pretty much where it stops, though.

If you have any ideas about Maas's script using some of the obvious subtext about, say, the dark side of Christianity, or apply some social criticism through the film's idiotic conspiracy theory, you'd best forget them. This is a bread and butter horror film that just happens to have an undead Saint Nick and his burn-faced servants as its monsters, and really doesn't think about it any more than as an opportunity to add some winking and some jokes (it's something of a comedy) to the proceedings. It's all a bit inoffensive and not exactly bursting with imagination, but there's some competent gore and adequate horse riding over roofs action (yes, in this film, magical roof riding is merely adequate instead of awesomely ridiculous). And somebody gets killed at least every ten minutes.

This leaves Sint as the kind of Christmas-themed horror movie you can waste your time on without hating yourself afterwards. It's a perfectly alright movie for what it is.

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In short: Amphibious 3D (2010)

It's impossible for me not to admire Brian Yuzna for the tenaciousness he shows when it comes to getting films financed. After his luck in the US ran out, he went to Spain. After that went dry, he took his leave to Indonesia. And if he then needs to take some money and some horrible actors from the Netherlands on, too, to make a SyFy Channel style monster movie, he'll do it. Movies need to be made, after all, and they're still rather difficult to crowdsource.

Unlike actual SyFy Channel films, Yuzna's attempt at the genre even shows some ambition. Consequently, this isn't just a film about a charming rogue without the charming (Michael Paré, who will sit out important parts of the movie and could have been replaced by a cheaper actor with an equal lack of facial expressions to have more money for the effects) and a marine biologist named Skylar (Janna Fassaert) encountering an amphibious giant scorpion in the surroundings of a fishing platform, but also one where the marine biologist once lost her little daughter and is now merrily projecting onto the child (Monica Sayangbati) of a black magician in indentured fishing slavery. Plus, there are hints of a more mythological background to the whole giant underwater scorpion thing.

Unfortunately, despite its ambitions for being more than the most basic of films, and a surprisingly effective horror movie shock ending, Amphibious spends most of its time going through the motions of all monster films that can only afford showing their monsters for the grand finale, which is to say it spends most of its time with various heavily accented people talking and talking with some sparse scenes of gore thrown in so you don't fall asleep. While I do appreciate Yuzna's attempts at making these non-monster scenes more interesting than usual in this sort of thing, I can't say he actually succeeds at that effort. When it's not the sloppy pacing of the film, it's the mediocre and boring acting - scenery chewers or good actors could have saved a lot here - that gets in the way, and if it's not the acting, it's Yuzna's inability to sell subtlety or ambiguity through his direction. As a director, he never did subtlety well, and that clearly hasn't changed with his ever decreasing budgets.

Once the film gets to the (not very good) giant scorpion in plain sight and the rather ridiculous attempts to fight it, it does become rather fun to watch. Unfortunately fifteen fun minutes hardly make up for over an hour of boredom and character arcs that never go anywhere, as much as I wish it were otherwise.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,indonesian movies,dutch movies,brian yuzna,in short,horror,michael paré,janna fassaert,monica sayangbati

The Johnsons (1992)

Anthropology professor Keller (Kenneth Herdigein) is roped into doing a contract job for a secret branch of the Dutch ministry of education (no to be confused with the secret branch of the ministry of transport most anthropologists work for once or twice in their lives). He's brought to a secret prison lying hidden away in the marshlands that's maintained to keep seven particularly weird murderers out of circulation. Theirs is not a typical case, that much is sure. The men are the first septuplets born in the Netherlands, and have ritually slaughtered the rest of the inhabitants of the orphanage they were living in at the time when they were just seven years old, leaving strange rituals markings in blood on the walls. Right now, Keller doesn't have too much of a clue what all this means, but the peculiarly timed find of the records of a doomed expedition into the South American jungles will soon clue him in that the sign used by the seven boys belongs to the embryo-shaped godhood Xangadix an obscure indigenous tribe was keeping imprisoned. Like every ancient evil, the god comes with a prophecy of doom, too. One day, seven brothers in the service of the god will rape their own sister and the resulting avatar of Xangadix will destroy the world. Seven, huh?

While Keller is doing his research and fastly transforms from a sarcastic sceptic into a true believer, the audience has already made the acquaintance of teenager Emalee Lucas (Esmée de la Bretoniere) and her mother, the photographer Victoria (Monique van de Ven).

Emalee has been having violent and disturbing nightmares for some time now, but a helpful psychiatrist has convinced her that they are a product of her anxiety about not having had her period yet although she's soon to turn fifteen. That's too bad, really, since one of the girl's nightmares contains visions of seven children, lots of blood and the sign of Xangadix, while another sees her raped by seven men wearing clay masks exactly like those used in rites surrounding Xangadix, so there just might be something more going on with the girl than teenage anxieties.

Out of the blue, Victoria is offered the job to make some shots of an obscure bird that just happens to live in the same region the secret ministry of education prison is situated in. Spontaneously, Emalee decides to accompany her mom. You can imagine that there are no problems at all waiting for mother and daughter on their little camping trip.

Hopefully, the machete of Emalee's dad the film repeatedly points out and Professor Keller will be of some help in their future of fighting off seven cultish maniacs with supernatural powers.

Looking at The Johnson's plot, one can't help but see how utterly ridiculous it all sounds (and I have left out bits like Professor Keller's father being a shaman - alas sometimes a comic relief shaman - who tries to destroy the expedition records his son is working on), but despite this, for most of its running time the film does work surprisingly well. Director Rudolf van den Berg doles out the information about the film's mythology piece by piece, well-timed to let the audience put it together for themselves. This doesn't just reduce the need for too much expositional dialogue, but also makes good use of the fact that most viewers will be quite a bit more tolerant regarding preposterous theories they made up themselves than they would be to theories the film just flat-out tells them to believe in.

The film's mythology shows an obvious and welcome influence of the weird tale sub-genre of fantastic literature, and does make sense inside of its own parameters (for most of the film, that is); Xangadix surely is the sort of evil world-destroying god you'd hope for after Lovecraft and (being a giant embryo and all) automatically more interesting than the usual anti-christ business would have been. Really, the least believable part of the movie's background is the existence of the secret branch of the ministry of education with its own secret prisons and enough power to hide slaughtered orphanages from the public eye. Fortunately, the film puts less emphasis on it than I do here.

Apart from his nice sense for doling out just the right amount of information, van den Berg also has quite a bit of directorial style. The marshlands, Emalee's dreams, and the secret prison evoke a wonderful mood of dread and doom, with just the right amount of archetypical seeming images. Van den Berg has an excellent grip on the creepy effect of small details like the shaved heads of the septuplets that make them look at once more like actual septuplets, strangely baby-like (like the god they worship) and less human. It's very obvious that a lot of love and thought has been put into these aspects of the film. Even the city the film takes place in is in the grip of a garbage collector's strike, making the mostly empty streets parts of the film take place in that much more inhospitable and unreal.

Alas, the film begins to falter once all information has been doled out and all pieces are in place for the finale. Slowly, but surely, The Johnson's transforms into your usual, slightly comedic series of small action/thriller set pieces with a bit more gore than would be necessary and a feeling of utter conventionality that ruins the mood of mythical doom the film's first hour has spent so much care on building up. Don't get me wrong, it's all very competently done and makes good use of a probably very slight budget, but still feels incredibly anti-climactic to me.

The film begins to dare being weird again for its final five minutes, yet also ignores the rules of the mythology it has created. I understand that van den Berg is trying to get something more exciting on screen than just killing off the last of the brothers for his film's grand finale, but lots of white light and a floating embryo puppet aren't really it.

Still, I can recommend the The Johnsons as one of the more interesting and peculiar European horror films of the 90s. Its final act might be disappointing, it is however still competently done, and much of what has come before is quite excellent.

 

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