Plot of Fear (1976)

Original title: E tanta paura

Various, mostly rich and influential, people are killed in gruesome ways. The killer always leaves a page of German old-timey sledgehammer education picture book “Struwwelpeter” at the scene of the crime.

When he isn’t sleeping with his model girlfriend, Inspector Lomenzo (Michele Placido) does some actual, proper, investigative work – and acquires a new model girlfriend in form of Jeanne (Corinne Cléry) during it. From Jeanne, Lomenzo learns that all the victims were involved in the sex and violence parties hunter and dealer in wild animals Hoffmann (John Steiner) held at his estate when he was still alive, and all of them were there the day a prostitute died under highly dubious circumstances.

It’s nearly as if someone were trying to punish the people involved through brutal violence as also happens to be the tradition of old-timey German picture books for kids.

Paolo Cavara’s Plot of Fear is definitely one of the better attempts at mixing elements of the giallo with those of the Italian cop movie, and making pretty successful attempts at subverting both of them while also delivering the genre thrills an audience would expect.

On the giallo side, while this is certainly a stylish and well-shot film, Cavara shows little interest into stylizing the violence as someone like Argento or Martino would (though he does clearly have some heterosexual guy kind of fun with the nudity). Where the often sexually non-binary identities of the killers in your typical giallo can suggest a rather conservative world view (if these aspects are meant that way is a very different question), the killer here comes out of a thematic concern about vigilantism, the misuse of surveillance and the misuse of power that reads very directly left-wing to me.

Police film-wise, Lomenzo is a very different proposition to the two-fisted – depending on your view point fascistically coded (though I would often not read them this way) – action copper as exemplified in someone like the great Maurizio Merli. While he does get into a couple of scraps (the genre demands, and Cavara is clever enough to accede), Lomenzo approaches the case with his head instead of his fists, though he is no Sherlock Holmes, either. He’s a softer, more thoughtful proposition, easily flustered but just as determined and uncorrupted as his more brutal antipodes – he just clearly does believe in due process and proper procedure as the basis of actual justice.

All of which is nice and interesting on paper, but wouldn’t be worth much if Plot of Fear weren’t an engaging genre mix. Fortunately it is, providing the expected genre beats with verve and enough style to keep my sleazier nature happy while pushing two genres into directions they not often go. Hell, Cavara even manages to add humorous interludes that are actually drily funny, which is not a sentence you’ll find me writing about many giallos.

Knight Moves (1992)

Chess grandmaster Peter Sanderson (Christopher Lambert), of the tragic genius asshole type, takes part in a chess tournament on a very rainy Canadian island. When a serial killer starts murdering blonde women and doing bad makeup jobs on their corpses, Peter quickly becomes the police’s main suspect, his case certainly not helped by the fact he was (casually, as he explains) sleeping with the first victim and lying to the cops about it.

But then, one of the cops, one Detective Wagner (Daniel Baldwin), is an even greater dick than Peter is, so telling the truth to that guy wouldn’t be anyone’s first impulse. The island’s new chief of police Frank Sedman (Tom Skerritt) is rather more competent, and is not so sure about Peter’s guilt. He’s calling in help in form of psychologist Kathy Sheppard (Diane Lane). As all psychologists in thrillers, Kathy will have her problems keeping away from having sex with the guy she’s supposed to help investigate.

Even once someone claiming to be the killer starts phoning Peter as part of a “game” whose rules the mystery caller doesn’t bother to explain, the cops still don’t quite believe in his innocence, while also involving him in their investigation as if he were their favourite amateur detective. Go figure.

German director Carl Schenkel’s Knight Moves regularly lands on lists of non-European giallos, and it’s not difficult to see why. Some might argue this to be rather more of a post-Silence of the Lambs serial killer thriller, but then, that genre’s DNA is certainly shared with that of the giallo, too – and in the case of the Demme film, that’s hardly by chance.

But let me count the film’s giallo ways: there’s the interest in dubious yet fun psychological trauma motivating the killer in a way which clearly comes down from 70s pop psychology more than those books in which former real FBI profilers lay out how awesome they believe they are; the plot that’s convoluted and delightfully nonsensical, preferring any good excuse to show a highly stylized murder scene to sensible plotting; the Lambert-shaped amateur detective trying to solve the case for reasons of his own (at the beginning, mostly Sheppard needling him) and because the police are either violent bullying idiots with even worse manners than he has (Wagner) or not allowed to do proper police work by the script (Stedman), dragging in the female lead one way or the other; the love for style as the most important kind of substance a movie can have, even when it makes as little sense as the half-flooded hotel foundations the police use as the case’s centre of telephone operations. Really, the only things missing are a dozen or so bottles of J&B’s, a pair of black gloves and more nudity, though the film does have more sex in it than most US or Canadian thrillers not carrying the word “Erotic” in front of the thriller.

This is of course not the kind of thriller anyone expecting logic or a sensible narrative will find terribly satisfying. As with the giallo, it’s best to adapt one’s expectations towards understanding the aesthetic pleasures at the film’s surface, enjoying the ways they entwine with themes and mood, while ignoring any ideas about proper narrative and plain sense one may or may not be cursed with. Schenkel is making this particularly easy, too, for he makes a good case for himself here as a director who might have played in the league of the better giallo second-stringers if he had been born a couple of decades earlier.

If this is the sort of thing you might enjoy, you’ll probably find this one very fun to watch. It also has a hell of a cast, Lambert doing the sort of pretty asshole role typical of the male giallo protagonist better than most anyone else (for better or for worse), Lane putting much more effort in than the character work in the script actually deserves, regularly turning into the actual protagonist of the movie; also looking rather incredible, which is of course par for the course, for Lane and the giallo-alike genre. Baldwin is so punchable he makes Lambert’s character more likeable than that guy deserves through his sheer testosterone dickishness, and Skerritt is Skerritt (that’s not a complaint).

Insert some check mate based joke, here, imaginary reader.

Poltergeist III (1988)

After their experiences in Poltergeist II (which I’m not going to write up because I just can’t cope with quite this much Magical Native American), the Freelings must have turned into assholes, for they have left their ghost magnet daughter Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke) with her aunt Pat (Nancy Allen), her hubby, rich architect Bruce (Tom Skerritt) and Bruce’s daughter Donna (Lara Flynn Boyle) in a high rise building in Chicago that is apparently some kind of arcology. Carol Anne is going to a school for talented but weird kids, where the chief psychologist, one doctor Seaton (Richard Fire), holds regular hypnosis sessions with her to prove that what happened in the first two movies was “mass hypnosis” somehow induced by Carol Anne. Which sounds even more ridiculous than poltergeists, so he at least deserves credits for countering the bat-shit insane with the even crazier.

Of course, the whole thing somehow calls back ole Reverend Henry Kane (Nathan Davis) and his crew of ghosts, who have suddenly developed the habit of exclusively centring their hauntings around mirrors, reflections, cold and evil doppelgangers. That’s going to become a bit of a problem, for Bruce’s high rise is hyper-modern and built in the 80s, therefore it is full of mirrors.

Gary Sherman’s Poltergeist III generally has a rather bad reputation but I enjoy it quite a bit more than the second film in the series. It’s not at all on the level of the original, of course, but at least the new things it is trying are more interesting than embarrassing, unlike what happens in film number two.

Characterisations aren’t terribly inventive – apart from the fact that Bruce who isn’t a blood relation clearly loves Carol Anne much more than the sister of her mother does. Pat learning to love the girl despite Carol Anne’s intrinsic weirdness (which you can read as a metaphor for illness or disability, if you’re so minded) is actually pretty much what part of the film seem to want to be about but the final twenty minutes of Poltergeist III are such a chaos of bad writing, characters saying and doing things that make no sense whatsoever, and plain bullshit that there’s no real pay off to the theme.

What does pay off, and what makes the first hour of the film worth watching quite a bit, is how much of a master class on building a variety of supernatural phenomena out of a small number of things – reflections and cold – it is. While there’s more than enough diversity to the phenomena to avoid boring anyone through repetition, they clearly belong to the same supernatural theme where quite a few horror films would just randomly throw supposedly spooky stuff at the audience. The feel of connection between various weirdnesses here is quite effective, and some of them make for really trippy and original little shocks and twists.

Until the film suddenly goes to a bizarre encounter in a frozen parking garage, one of the most stupid fake happy ends in horror history in which I have no idea why the characters are suddenly supposed to believe that things are over, not to speak of the audience, and a series of final set pieces and dialogue sequences that seem to have little connection to what came before, and which are probably the fault of your usual “troubled production history”.

Which puts Poltergeist III into the rubric of interesting but annoyingly flawed films worth watching for the good in them.

In short: Wild Rovers (1971)

Aging cowhand Ross Bodine (William Holden) and his much younger friend Frank Post (Ryan O’Neal) are working on the ranch of patriarchal Walter Buckman (Karl Malden) and his sons John (Tom Skerritt) and Paul (Joe Don Baker), with all the exciting prospects you have in that kind of job gaping before them.

So, Frank out of youthful stupidity and Ross because he’s got nothing to show for his fifty years, the cow hands decide to rob the local bank. The robbery does succeed, even, thanks to a rather ruthless plan, and doesn’t end in any bloodbath whatsoever. As to not leave any bad blood behind, they even leave the money meant for the payroll of their home ranch with the banker. Because the territory line behind which the sheriff (Victor French) has no jurisdiction anymore is so near, Frank and Ross seem to get away scot free despite a few minor troubles.

Unfortunately, the banker and his family embezzle the money, leaving Buckman very angry because of the perceived betrayal (though I’m not too sure his reaction would have been much different otherwise), sending his sons out to go as far beyond the borders as necessary to bring his wayward cowhands back, preferably alive but not necessarily so.

Wild Rovers’ director Blake Edwards is – of course – much better known as a director of comedies but he seems to have made it a point to work in a few different genres in between the comedies. Even though these films generally have their problems they also feel a lot like labours of love to me, Edwards milking his commercial success to get astonishing amounts of money for his dream projects.

The film at hand is a case in point, with its Jerry-Goldsmith-doing-Aaron-Copland score, the lavish photography by Philip Lathrop, and its mostly excellent cast, often looking and sounding like someone’s wet dream of a Western. Unfortunately, it’s at the same time a much too self-indulgent movie for my tastes, the sort of thing where a director seems so in love with parts of his movie he just can’t let them stop, leading to some scenes that barely should be in the film at all going on forever, some ill-advised The Wild Bunch without the punch-style slow motion, and pacing that at times slows to a crawl. Then there’s the musical Overture and Entr’acte (seriously) that has no business at all in a film this slow and long already, something so useless to the film I don’t even know what to say about it.

Less a problem of self-indulgence than one of miscasting is Ryan O’Neal, who isn’t at his worst here, but whose specific kind of blandness and lack of a projected screen personality chafes badly against a William Holden who at this point of his career made things look easy and natural even when they were getting rather theatrical.

On the other hand, Wild Rovers features nearly as many moments of brilliance as it does of self-indulgent bloat, moments when Edwards’s pretensions stop being pretensions and start becoming the real thing, like basically every time Holden opens his mouth, that ill-fated poker game in Benson, or some of the shots of Holden and O’Neal travelling.

As a matter of fact, I found myself enjoying Wild Rovers more often than not, regularly buying into its world building, as well as its attempt at reaching the archetypal by way of the specific, and while I was bored for more than one scene, I can’t help but recommend it for all the parts of it that aren’t boring.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,western,blake edwards,william holden,ryan o'neal,karl malden,joe don baker,tom skerritt