In short: Rest in Pieces (1987)

aka Descanse en piezas

Helen Hewitt (Lorin Jean Vall) inherits all money and property belonging to her estranged aunt Catherine (Dorothy Malone), facts presented to Helen in a jaunty video message recorded right before auntie’s suicide. The bequest includes what appears to be a whole housing block of villas. Or is it a street of mansions? Obviously, Helen and her husband Bob (Scott Thompson Baker) move right into the main villa.

There, they learn that Catherine has a whole bunch of weirdos and loonies (among them characters played by Jack Taylor and Patty Shepard) living rent free on her property. Weirdos who, the audience quickly learn, do like to end an evening of a string quartet playing the German national anthem with murdering the players. Which isn’t crueller than the choice of music, really. They also may be the living dead. Other complications include the possible return of aunt Catherine from the dead, a hidden cache of eight million dollars that may or may not exist, a bit of the old mutilation and murder, and a shovel duel.

The easiest way to explain Rest in Pieces to myself is to imagine its director, the great José Ramón Larraz, waking up one day believing to be Juan Piquer Simón. At least, Rest feels a lot more like the work of Larraz’s differently esteemed colleague than what you’d expect from its true director, even in the late stages of his career when things got weird, or rather, even weirder than was Larraz’s normal. So don’t look for the director’s particular sense of the perverse, or the strange elegance of his filmmaking, but be prepared for the typical goofiness of European genre films in the 80s at least pretending to be made in the US, where everything – the way people walk, talk and emote - feels inauthentic in the most peculiar, and typically very entertaining, way.

One should probably also go in prepared for some mind-bogglingly horrible main performances by Vail and Baker, where neither facial expressions nor line delivery suggest more than the tiniest knowledge of human behaviour. These two are so stiff, your usual typical piece of wood would be embarrassed to be associated with them; consequently, the performances are also very funny indeed, particularly once the plot goes off into its particularly weird last act full of plot twists and character reveals even a great thespian would have a hard time selling.

You cannot blame Larraz for making a boring film, at least. There’s hardly any scene going by that isn’t at least mildly bonkers in the Piquer Simón way. Add a smidgen of gore, and plot twists – well, also a plot - so nonsensical it boggles belief, it’s difficult not to love the film, even though it is not the sort of thing one hopes for from its director.

Edge of the Axe (1988)

Original title: Al filo del hacha

An axe murderer with a nice blank mask is making his way from an introductory murder in a car wash to a small town with the adorable name of Paddock that seems situated in Northern California, the Deep South and New York State at the same time. It’s probably part of the great state of Spain, USA.

Anyway, while the killer is murdering an ever increasing number of women, the local Sheriff publicly declares most of these axe murders to be suicide or accidents, while everybody else calls them axe murders, and the Sheriff himself also investigates them as such, badly. We can’t blame the man for failing, though, for there are a lot of suspicious people around this particular small town, and even more that get a “isn’t that guy suspicious?” kind of close-up from director José Ramón Larraz.

We don’t spend a lot of time with the sheriff, fortunately, but pop in with various characters around town on their daily business, mostly consisting of getting murdered or finding corpses. Among the town’s population are characters played by Jack Taylor and Patty Shepard, so you know we are in good, Spanish genre cinema hands there.

The closest we have to protagonists are new in town 80s computer geek Gerald (Barton Faulks) and his fresh charmed-by-absurd-computer-talk local girlfriend Lillian (Christina Marie Lane). Unlike actual protagonists, they are only kinda-sorta involved in amateur investigating the murders. Mostly, they are around to show off the various suspects, until the film eventually gets up to other business with them when things come to the climax.

Apparently, this is the least-favoured film of its director, the great cult filmmaker José Ramón Larraz, and I can see why. However, it’s also a greatly entertaining film if you’ve got the appropriate sensibilities, and don’t have to defend your own dignity like he did.

At the very least, this is a very interesting film in that it is one of those late period giallos (let’s just call Spanish thrillers in the Italian vein that, too) taking elements from the US slasher genre which took rather a lot from the giallo in the beginning, mixing both genres in strange and not necessarily effective ways. The film’s interest in whodunnit and the actual resolution of the killer’s identity is pure giallo, of course, but the staging of kills, as well as the US small town setting are really coming from the slasher side of things. It doesn’t quite work to make for a good mixture – the investigation is just not terribly interesting or excitingly done, or even an investigation, most importantly – but it is definitely an interesting one. The curious nexus of influences sometimes makes the film feel like an attempt by a non-American to make a US regional movie.

Even though the investigation parts are not all that exciting, Larraz actually manages to milk the Spain-Americana vibe to entertaining effect, doing to the rural US what the German Krimi did to London, turning it into a place of clichés and concepts taken from books and movies and no actual human experience. It’s like a slightly peculiar dream of America (sorry, Greil Marcus), and therefore a place that’s fun to visit for the length of a movie or two.

Plus, while this certainly isn’t the most stylish of its directors’ films, at least the murders are shot quite wonderfully, with some really enthusiastic axing by the actor playing the killer, moody light, and occasional pigs. The rest of the film looks pretty great, too, actually, Larraz making things at the very least attractive, and usually not boring to look at.

Other joys include the utterly ridiculous ways the film talks and thinks about computers, the pleasantly bizarre ultra-giallo revelation of the killer (here coming complete with a childhood trauma that’s only in their mind) leading into a downer ending that’s neither giallo nor slasher but the sound of scriptwriters giggling madly made picture, as well as the general air of watching interactions taking place in a somewhat peculiar neighbouring universe version of the USA. It’s pretty great.