In short: Macabre (1980)

Original title: Macabro

Warning: spoilers ahead!

Bad luck apparently comes in twos to Jane Baker (Bernice Stegers). After her lover is decapitated in a car accident and her little son is drowned by his sister Lucy (Veronica Zinny) in the bathtub – though everyone believes that to be an accident as well – Jane spends some time in a mental institution.

When she is released, she moves into a room in the mansion of blind Robert Duval (Stanko Molnar). Robert is attracted to his new tenant, though, surprisingly enough, only in a mildly creepy way. Jane seems to come on to him regularly as well, but generally in ways that suggest she doesn’t understand the concept of “blindness”. However, whenever intimacy seems to threaten, Lucy is visited by a mysterious man who invokes the loudest sex noises imaginable from her. Of course, we the audience have also witnessed her masturbating with the same wattage, so we will not be quite as surprised as Robert when we eventually learn the mysterious lover is actually the head of her dead lover she keeps in her icebox.

Things come to a head (tee-hee) because Lucy can’t stop torturing her mother.

Lamberto Bava’s first effort as a feature director after years of experience as an assistant director for his father, the great Mario Bava, and the great Dario Argento, is a bit of a mixed bag. It is certainly an at times stylish giallo, but not stylish enough to cover up how little is actually happening in much of its first acts. Everything and everyone seems to at least be established twice, so that things move at the slowest possible pace at any given moment.

The final act is a different thing: here, Bava junior very suddenly loses all inhibition. Not only is the narrative suddenly moving like a freight train crashing down a cliff, the film now leaves sense and good taste so far behind, they are somewhere in another dimension. It’s impressive, so much so I can’t even fault the first two acts too much anymore. Their slowness still isn’t necessary, mind you, but the contrast between them and the final act feels like one of those Insidious ghosts suddenly jumping out and screaming in your face turned into a movie.

To skew my critical faculties even more in Macabre’s favour, it ends on a final shot so ludicrous and awesome its existence could be justified by it alone.

Three Films Make A Post: Some Live to Climb. They Climb to Live

Sherpa (2015): What starts as a bit of a picture postcard paean to the Sherpas – particularly the nearly record book touching mountain guide Phurba Tashi Sherpa - doing all the hard work for the hordes of hardcore tourists packaged by professional climbing businesses, turns serious after the great avalanche of 2014 kills sixteen Sherpas. Growing anger and frustration with the danger and exploitation inherent in the work lead to what’s really a strike movement. Director Jennifer Peedom raises to the unplanned occasion and turns out to be just as good at getting people who really aren’t into sharing their inner feelings to talk and to explain, showing how capitalism ruins everything – even the ability for some decent people to be honest to themselves - as she is at filming spectacular climbing scenes. Much of the film suggests the filmmakers truly care about the Sherpas and their situation.

The only element of it I’d criticize is its overuse of a clichéd and treacly emotionally manipulative score by Antony Partos that’s so over the top, it sometimes sounded like satire to my ears.

Slash/Back (2022): Nyla Innuksuk’s Inuktitut teen horror movie is a little wonder. Wearing some of its influences proudly on its sleeve – or rather, it feels like on its heart – it uses these influences to make the kind of horror film that has all the good qualities of local/regional horror filmmaking of decades ago. So expect the local applied to genre tropes, on one hand, to make both strange and new, on the other to be able to talk about things – here the lives and feelings and divisions between young Inuktitut girls living in the kind of small town at the polar circle where a solstice dance is pretty much the most exciting thing their parents generation experiences in a year.

Innuksuk touches her scenes with a light hand, never letting them getting swallowed by the horror tropes, but also never going the other way either. So things stay fun but never dumb, unless dumbness is point of the fun.

Alta tensione: Il gioko aka School of Fear (1999): The late 90s were not a good time to make horror or giallo in Italy. Still, Lamberto Bava did from time to time manage to get some money for a mini series anthology or two from Italian TV, like the series this fine TV movie is part of. It is often cleverly written (by Roberto Gandus and of course Dardano Sacchetti), using creepy kids tropes as well as a discomfort with conservative institutions to great effect, finishing ambiguous and dark, and surprisingly coherent.

Bava’s direction often creates genuinely suspenseful and creepy moods, usually finding some way to make every scene more interesting and effective. There’s also some fine locations work, which you don’t always get in TV work.

In short: The Ogre (1988)

aka Demons 3: The Ogre

aka The House of the Ogre

Successful horror writer Cheryl (Virginia Bryant), her husband Tom (Paolo Malco) and their son Bobby (Patrizio) have rented a castle in Italy for some pretty special summer vacation time. Well, I say vacation, but Cheryl is so obsessed with exorcising her emotional demons via her writing, she’s still working rather a lot.

The family’s chosen vacation spot doesn’t seem to have been a great idea, either: once they have moved in, Cheryl begins having terrible nightmares and visions of a childhood encounter with a creature she identifies as an ogre. She becomes convinced these dreams are actual memories, and that the castle’s cellar is the place where she really did encounter something terrible back then. She does seem to have awakened something, for mildly strange things do start happening around her, even outside of her nightmares.

Tom, as is horror movie husbands’ wont in situations like this, is of course of little help, and acts in a way that would be less than helpful if Cheryl indeed had the sort of psychotic break he seems to suspect her to have, and is certainly not useful in case of actual monsters, even those perhaps conjured up by Cheryl’s subconscious.

The Ogre is another one of Lamberto Bava’s movies made for Italian TV. It isn’t one of the more exciting ones, going for a kind of psychological suspense with occasional monsters that neither Bava’s and Dardano Saccetti’s script nor the actors can really sustain.

Bava does seem to enjoy the opportunity to shoot in real locations for once a bit too much, so there are a lot of decidedly uncreepy shots of the very pretty castle, an much use of daylight and natural light that doesn’t play to the director’s strengths at all.

Some of the scenes of Cheryl creeping around the cellar or of the ogre doing his ogre business are fine, but the film seems more interested in the pretty castle and in Cheryl’s and Tom’s not terribly interesting rows to make much of those.

It’s all a bit harmless, and certainly lacks a scene or two of people getting killed via the power of golf.

The Prince of Terror (1988)

Original title: Il maestro del terrore

Warning: there’s no way to talk about the good bits of this one without some heavy last act spoilers!

Popular horror movie director Vincent Omen (Tomas Arana), dubbed “The Prince of Terror” by what I can only assume is movie Earth’s version of Fangoria, has an on-set falling out with his regular scriptwriter, Paul Hilary (David Brandon) and gets the man fired rather ruthlessly.

A dinner that very same night in the villa out in the sticks where Vincent lives with his wife Betty (Carole André) and his teenage daughter Susan (Joyce Pitti) is rudely interrupted by prank phone calls and a golf ball on the dinner table. Later, in an ever so tiny escalation, Susan finds her lapdog skinned in her bedroom. So everyone runs to their car and drives off to the next police station. No, wait, of course not. Rather, Susan cries, her parents shrug, and Vincent puts the dead dog into the trash.

Obviously, the dead dog is only the beginning of a night of terror. Vincent has apparently a gift for pissing people off, for Paul the angry writer has teamed up with an actor named Eddie Felsen (Ulisse Minervini) who was injured making one of Vincent’s films and is now your regular movie maniac. Together, they drive the family through various special effects horror set pieces Vincent once excised from Paul’s scripts. In-between, there’s ponderous yet nonsensical musing about the nature of horror, and the old “was it real, or not?” gambit repeated about a dozen times, until Vincent uses his golfing-based superpowers. Also, he might be the devil.

This is one of a series of four movies Lamberto Bava made for Italian television at the end of the 80s. He brought other Italian horror mainstays with him to the project, so here you get a script in the inimitable manner of Dardano Sacchetti (that is, it makes very little sense but seems to make a lot of it in the writer’s mind, and is all the better for it), a score by Simon Boswell, and effects by Sergio Stivaletti. Apparently, Italian TV was surprisingly okay with the gloopy gory bits you’d hope for from Stivaletti, so there’s at least that to look forward to for everyone.

Otherwise, this is certainly not on the level of Lamberto Bava’s best cinematic outings, but it is a fun enough movie once the viewer has decided to enter the proper mind space for its specific type of Italian horror, which means giving up on ideas of logic or proper causality and opening up to the random void, while holding back the parts of one’s personality that might want to watch this thing ironically. It’s not terribly difficult, actually, for Bava does know how to make his TV budget look surprisingly pretty, putting quite a bit of effort into making the the architecture of Omen’s home at once sexy and strange (or at least somewhat confusing).

I could have lived rather well without the whole “what’s true horror?” angle in the dialogue, though there are some peculiar lines in the English dub that will at least make the viewer ponder the nature of the drugs the writer was on (probably just wine, I know, I know). But then, Bava clearly wants to do some ratcheting up of tension like in a proper thriller, so the film needs its slow moments, structurally, and there’s little filmmakers like to talk about more than the philosophy of filmmaking.

The real meat of the movie is of course its insane climax, when Vincent first golfs Eddie’s brains out (seriously), then breaks Paul’s wrist – and apparently spirit – with a billiard variation on golf, and drives off with his family while Paul encounters Vincent’s supernatural powers beyond golfing. See the dead dog’s trash bag move! See Eddie move and puke out a stream of golf balls! Share Paul’s panicked sense of logical disconnect! Be happier than you were before seeing any of this (unlike Paul, who is now most probably dead)! And if that still isn’t enough, try to imagine this thing as a parallel universe sequel to The Omen, taking place in a world where Damien has become such a big Vincent Price fan, he stole his first name and went to Hollywood.

The Mask of Satan (1990)

aka Demons 5: The Devil’s Veil

Original title: La maschera del demonio

Virginal (that’s going to be important later on) Davide (Giovanni Guidelli) and Sabina (Debora Caprioglio aka Debora Kinski) are on a ski vacation with a group of their decidedly non-virginal and deeply assholish friends. How assholish? These people don’t even stop clowning around like damn fools when the whole group falls into a crevasse in the mountains, leaving Sabina with a broken leg.

Down in their new hole, they also stumble upon the dead body of the witch Anibas (Eva Grimaldi), wearing the titular mask until one of the idiots removes it. Just after that things become really unstable and one of their own is stabbed by a piece of ice. On the plus side, Sabina is suddenly healed of her injury and the movements of the ice open up the way into a half-buried monastery, that is, curiously enough, still inhabited by a – rather creepy – priest and his dog.

Having no way out (and, being Italian horror movie characters, never asking themselves how the priest gets his food), the group moves into the monastery for now. Soon, everyone but the two virgins is starting to act even worse than before, falling into increasing amounts of creepy laughter, violence, as well as a bit of orgying and witchy dancing. This is just he beginning of a very bad time for our two virgins, though.

In 1990, when Lamberto Bava made this movie kinda-sorta based on Gogol’s “Viy” (at least if you squint a little and only watch its climax), and supposedly also loosely based on Bava senior’s Black Sunday, Italian horror as we loved it was pretty much over. Only a few stalwarts like the younger Bava managed to get tiny budgets together to still make films like it. And really, given what Bava had to work with, this is a surprisingly great late example of the genre as it was practiced in Italy, plotted loosely as is tradition, with quite a few scenes of a wonderfully macabre and dreamlike mood and a lot of wild and woolly ideas.

When it comes to the film’s crazier side, my personal favourite is actually the implied death of the priest’s dog, who, having survived quite some crap already at that point in the movie, wanders into a room full of probably demonic cats, who are clearly licking their chops hungrily. Cats, we have never seen before and never will again, obviously. On the less silly-crazy side is a rather wonderful scene that finds the priest holed up in a free standing confessional, that becomes surrounded by the possessed who dance, howl and crash against the thing, until the good old invisible force of evil appears via steadicam and slowly crushes the thing. On a logical level, this sort of thing does of course make little sense, but Bava’s not out for logic here; and on the level of mood and style, scenes like it are pretty brilliant.

Thematically, the film is clearly out to do something with ideas about the problem with male sexual desire or the fear of commitment, as seen in the pretty incredibly made scene in which an attempt at a first sexual encounter with the increasingly deranged Sabina finds her turn into the most frightful looking rubbery witch (with chicken feet), the special effects team could come up with while she’s lying on top of Davide. It’s not clear what the film actually wants to say about male sexuality, mind you, for this more intellectually modern business comes up hard against the parts of the film that are about demonically possessed trying to press a virginal guy into a sexual encounter that may or may not be a way to free their demon witch boss. Which may be thematically related but is not really the same.

However, given how enthusiastically the film mixes the freakish side of Italian horror with the younger Bava’s effective sense for lighting and mood (the monastery makes no sense as a real place but quite a bit of it as a visual representation of a feeling of things buried, for example), and quite a bit of genuine weirdness, I’m not too bothered that The Mask of Satan makes more sense as a mood put into moving pictures than anything else.

In short: Body Puzzle (1992)

Rich widow Tracy (Joanna Pacula) is having a bit of a hard time. Someone is sneaking around leaving her rather disturbing presents, things like a  human ear, a hand, or a “finger” (“it’s not a finger”), like a kitten gone bad. These body parts belong to the victims of a series of murders shaking the town. Apart from his habit concerning Tracy, the killer (François Montagut) likes to put a bit of Mussorgsky on his walkman while he’s working, so expect to hear the same bit of “Night on Bare Mountain” again and again and again.

Cop Michele (Tomas Arana) is on the case, yet despite the killer’s fixation on Tracy, he has a lot of trouble catching his man, or finding the bizarre secret behind the murders.

As a rule of thumb (there are of course obvious exceptions to this rule), the more time a giallo spends following a cop on a police procedural (but with everyone involved being pretty darn dumb) style investigation, the less enjoyable it becomes. Lamberto Bava’s Body Puzzle certainly is a pretty great example for this rule. But it goes even further to demonstrate it: while the scenes of the killer slashing his victims are generally entertaining enough (and sometimes even a little bloody), and those of Tracy being stalked by him are even downright suspenseful, whenever our hero Michele starts investigating – usually slowly and badly – the film turns into a void of utter boredom that suffers from the blandness of Michele, the general – there is one terrible gay stereotype which isn’t enjoyable but at least memorable – lack of distinction of the characters he interviews, and what looks like an inability by Bava to film these investigations in any interesting, stylish or even just economical manner.

Unfortunately, at least half of the film is taken up by Michele’s non-adventures, always slowing things down in the worst possible moment. This state of affairs is made even less interesting by the perfunctory romance between Tracy and our man Michele in scenes that feel so pointless and disinterested, I can’t help but ask myself if the producers strong-armed Bava into including them.


Of course, as this was made in the early 90s, long after the genre had faded away, it was certainly not easy for Bava to get a giallo made at all; going by the results, I’m just not sure it was worth his effort.

In short: Graveyard Disturbance (1987)

After stealing food and assorted stuff from a grocer, a group of horror film young people races away in their airbrushed van o' doom. Somewhere in the country, their vehicle decides that it's time to stop working.

Followed by mysterious animals making mysterious animal noises, our heroes soon find some ruins and decide to spend the night there. Nobody around here is all that bright, so nobody thinks it strange when some sort of medieval tavern (although with a neon sign and a TV) suddenly teleports in and opens. It can certainly only be a good idea to take a bet with the tavern owner with the blinking red eyes to spend the night until the break of day in the local cursed crypt to win a pot of gold.

Our nincompoops are surprised that the crypt is full of ghosts and ghoulies and that it is far more difficult to escape the crypt than it should be. At least the grim reaper will turn out to be not all that he's said to be.

I have to admit that I like most of the films Mario Bava's less talented son Lamberto made. While most of them aren't exactly art, the younger Bava usually manages to make his films fun.

The made-for-TV Graveyard Disturbance is unfortunately barely fun. Blame the script by Bava and enemy of logic Dardano Sacchetti, blame the lack of gore or the lack of much of anything happening for most of the movie, the fact is that there's just not much to be found on screen that has any entertainment value. Sure, the crypts are kinda nice in their cheap cardboard way and the monster make-up isn't too shabby, but those are really the only things which recommend the film.

It's like a Scooby Doo version of Bava's Demons, promising the cheesy but fun heavy metal record cover aesthetic of those films (and the van o'doom), yet only delivering scene after scene of non-characters waddling through the sets, from time to time screeching about the cuddly and harmless monsters they meet.

Thanks to the TV-heritage of the film, there isn't even any sleaze to keep the viewer awake, and the only thing shocking on display are a lot of worms and maggots.

I don't necessarily have a problem with harmless films, but Graveyard Disturbance is just too harmless to hold my interest for any amount of time. On the other hand, how often do I have the opportunity to declare a Lamberto Bava/Dardano Sacchetti cooperation to be harmless?

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,horror,lamberto bava,in short

In short: Blastfighter (1984)

Ex-cop Tiger (Michael Sopkiw) has just been released from jail. He was kept under lock and key for a slight case of vigilantism: Killing the man who killed a colleague in front of his eyes and then - when Tiger didn't back down - murdered his wife.

His last friend on the force greets Tiger with giving him a new experimental super shotgun (the kind that also shoots grenades) and admonishing him not to use it against the corrupt D.A. who was responsible for his sentence. Puzzled by this type of mixed signals, Tiger decides to retreat to his old backwoods home somewhere in Deliverance County, where great mock country plays on the soundtrack and the locals spend their time with the mass slaughter of animals - they export their victims to the Chinese medicinal market.

Leader of the pack is a certain Wally (Stefano Mignardo), a natural born psychopath and brother of Tiger's old friend/rival Tom (George Eastman). Tiger's taste for slaughter and violence has died down quite a lot over the years and soon Wally (whose taste for slaughter and violence is a big as is accent is fake) and Tiger lock horns. You really can't blame the ex-cop. He mostly just wants to be left alone; he just has a hard time tolerating people fucking with him.

When his daughter Connie (Valentina Forte) arrives to finally get to know a father she hasn't seen in eight years, things seem to take a turn for the better. Another attack by Wally even leads to Tiger backing down and promising Connie to go away to the big city with her.

Alas, Wally and friends don't really care, and after they kill Tiger's cop-friend, Connie's boyfriend and then Connie herself, Tiger gets kind of angry. And they shouldn't have made him angry.

 

Blastfighter is one of Lamberto Bava's better films and a small classic of Italian action cinema. What stands out in a very solid effort for me is not so much the action as the nice character work. Some of the writing surely is a bit cheesy, but the characters' psychology seems rather sound for a backwoods vengeance flick and the acting is surprisingly effective (if you can ignore the silly accents of the local yokels). Michael Sopkiw is especially good as the sullen loner whom he gives a big enough amount of warmth and humor to actually make you care about him. The scenes between him and Eastman and him and his daughter are giving the action a grounding more action films could use, making the inevitable carnage that much more interesting.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,action,in short,lamberto bava,george eastman,michael sopkiw

In short: Demons 2 (1986)

After the events of the first film, the part of Berlin that was the background for the demon outbreak has been sealed and declared a "Forbidden Zone". A handful of future Darwin Awards winners breaks into that zone and (surprise!) wakes up one of those pesky demons.

While this is going on, the films cuts away from time to time and shows us the boring exploits of a bunch of Yuppies in a high class apartment high rise in Cologne. For some reason (probably a demon who wants to get in on the reality show action), every TV in the building shows the exploits of the intrepid demon tourists.

Soon, the freshly hungry demon steps out of one of the TVs and starts killing and demonizing yuppies (Yay!).

The gentlemen Bava and Argento are trying to cash-in on the success of the first film. Unfortunately, they leave most of the deranged sense of fun of the first film behind, leaving in its place nothing much at all.

Best (I'll be honest, only entertaining) thing in show: The demon child that gives birth to a shrieking demon muppet. So, that's where Cookie Monster comes from.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,in short,horror,lamberto bava