Asylum of Satan (1972)

Lucina Martin (Carla Borelli) finds herself very suddenly and unexpectedly confined in the titular asylum. There’s something very wrong indeed with the place, even by the standards of early 70s psychiatry. Inmates - calling them patients does not seem fitting – are treated with highly curious methods; a group of people in hooded white bathrobes pop up repeatedly; and inmates seem to disappear without anyone minding. Well, as the audience soon enough learns, these people are actually murdered in various bizarre ways. The place’s interior regularly shifts to something rather more rundown, and the medical professionals working here are generally weird and/or creepy, while the big boss, one Dr Specter (Charles Kissinger) dresses like a stage magician without his hat.

While Lucina becomes increasingly bewildered and panicked in her attempts to get out or at least make contact with the outside world, we regularly pop in with her Porsche-driving fiancé Chris (Nick Jolley). This owner of various turtlenecks and some of the most 70s pants imaginable is simply flabbergasted how his beloved ended up where she did after he was away for just a week or so. Until he acquires a half-decomposed head, he’s pretty terrible at convincing the police of there being any problem whatsoever, though.

Which, to be fair, could have something to do with his habit of not actually telling the main cop (Louis Bandy) the not inconsiderable number of clues pointing at something criminal going on and instead telling the guy about his angry feelings. It would be a short film otherwise.

Chris’s inability to remember pertinent facts from a scene ago that would actually help his case in the next is rather typical of the loose idea of logic and narrative connective tissue William Girdler’s debut Asylum of Satan (shot and produced in Girdler’s native Louisville, Kentucky) demonstrates, things the director never really got to grips with in his short life and career. If you’re looking for even a smidgen of sense, it’s best to take your business as a viewer elsewhere.

Because this is a film made by a young guy with little experience, using whatever local talent he could get his hands on in Kentucky, there are also copious technical flaws to get through, like the too often nailed on camera, editing that wavers between crude and effective, acting that’s all over the place (though Borelli is as pleasantly naturalistic as anyone could get in this sort of thing), or simply the terrible quality of the rubber insects and related effects. Well, of most of the effects, really, for Satan will turn out to look perfectly adorable, and some of the creature and sort of gore design is certainly imaginative, if not effective.

Of course, all of these flaws, as well as the leaden pacing of the whole affair, are pretty much what you expect going into a local production of this level; those of us who know what they are doing to themselves when inflicting these things upon ourselves just hope for something clever, something energetic, or something plain bizarre to make up for the technical flaws, or in fact believe that all of these fun things can often be enabled exactly by these technical flaws.

And wouldn’t you know it? There’s actually quite a bit to like here when you get through the film’s jungle of technical problems. There’s the aforementioned Satan taking part in a very redly lit attempt at a big sacrificial ceremony in the finale, which is pretty great, and even better when it is repeatedly intercut with the same shot of police cars driving to the rescue to dramatic 70s cop show music. Particularly once it turns out that our rescuers are not going to do much rescuing, because Satan has become somewhat disappointed in Specter for reasons nobody appears to be able to make out on the audio track and which the film certainly didn’t suggest before, making this set-up as bizarre as it is funny.

On a more serious level, some of the shifts between the cleaner interior of the hospital and its more dilapidated true self are rather effectively shot and edited – particularly Lucina’s first encounter of the phenomenon is genuinely creepy and bewildering. Nobody would probably call the murder scenes genuinely creepy, but they are so strange and illogical they seem to be aiming for the same kind of irrational undergrowth you find in the best Lucio Fulci films, though most probably end up so by sheer chance rather than directorial fiat.

And if there’s one thing I really like in my very cheap horror movies, it’s accidental strangeness that suggests the qualities of dreams, nightmares and the effects of apple pie gone bad, so Asylum of Satan turns out to be one of Girdler’s films I genuinely enjoyed, even though it’s not as incredible as Day of the Animals.

Past Misdeeds: Day of the Animals (1977)

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.


It's the late 70s, and the ozone layer has become thin. So thin, in fact, that animals living in higher altitudes begin to act rather strangely. Our former furry friends become more aggressive, begin to hunt in packs even when they're not pack animals, and also develop the sort of fiendish intelligence that leads to things like dogs driving people into cars full of snakes, and what looks like a non-aggression pact between all non-human species. As further developments during the course of the movie will show, the phenomenon - except for the "becoming more intelligent" part - does not stop with animals; the lowest form of human life on the planet - ad executives - can be influenced by it too.

Consequently a merry little - unarmed, foodless - hiking trip of professional hiking trip leader Steve "let's send the hurt woman and her husband alone to the ranger station" Buckner (Christopher George) and a whole load of disaster movie fodder characters through the Sierra soon turns rather unpleasant. Steve really should have known better than to make a trip with a bunch of city slickers consisting of a couple going on an extreme hiking trip to fix their marriage, a freshly divorced woman from Beverly Hills (Ruth Roman) and her son (Bobby Porter), a former professional American Football player dying of bone cancer (Paul Mantee), a professor of exposition (Richard Jaeckel), a TV anchor-woman (Lynda Day George), a racist asshole of an ad executive (Leslie Nielsen shortly before he transformed himself into a deadpan comedian forever), and a random young couple (Andrew Stevens and whoever that actress is). Even with the tempering influence of Native American - of course wise to the ways of the woods and the heart - Daniel Santee (definitely not Native American Michael Ansara), it wouldn't need raving animals to lead these people into a disaster.

But as it stands, disaster in form of raving animals does strike soon enough, with animals attacking in the least typical manner, the group splitting up, bickering and then splitting up some more, and the people in the best position to help having their own animal troubles. It's the sort of thing that can only climax (in what is the film's actual climax even though the film's nominal one comes afterwards) in a shirtless Leslie Nielsen mud-wrestling a bear in a thunderstorm after ranting and raving about "Melville's god" and having tried to rape a woman.

Ladies and gentlemen, even though Day of the Animals may not conform to many people's concept of a good film, it very well may be director William Girdler's magnum opus. While all Girdler films recommend themselves to people of taste with moments of utter lunacy (see for example the Grizzly versus Helicopter fight in Grizzly, or the indescribable finale of The Manitou), the sympathetic viewer usually has to cope with quite a bit of boredom and scenes without much of a function beyond bringing a film to feature length to get to them. Here, however, Girdler has found his sweet spot of all nonsense all the time. The director provides his audience with every 70s eco horror shenanigan he could think of, only to stop from time to time for always amusing classic disaster movie non-characterisation  with a side-line of the most horribly wrong "romantic" dialogue this side of the 50s. Regarding the latter, let's just say that Buckner's way of romantic banter is based on inviting the TV anchor into his "woodsmen course".

Girdler could of course not afford the ménage of Hollywood has-beens and nearly-beens a disaster movie usually needs so had to go with actors with a bit or a lot of TV experience instead, but as it turns out, TV actors are just as good at eating up the scenery as Michael Caine when he needs to pay for his yacht.

As is probably quite clear by now, sensible pacing and plot logic are completely out of the question for Day of the Animals. I don't think there's any need for me to go into the film's plot holes, nor the idiocy of all characters involved, nor the bizarre logic of the way the animals act. However, a logical or well-structured movie could not contain (and I have to repeat that) a scene of middle-aged, shirtless Leslie Nielsen mudwrestling a bear in a thunderstorm after ranting about "Melville's god", nor various scenes where our heroes are outwitted by dogs, nor one where Walter Barnes's Ranger Tucker is attacked by what can only be described as flying rats, which provides further fuel for my theory that logic and structure are just terribly overrated.


However, this kind of 70s cheese is not the only thing that makes Day of the Animals worth watching. To my great surprise as someone who has never had anything good to say about Girdler as a director, the film also features a handful of scenes where it actually works as a horror film. Those among the animal attack scenes that aren't completely ridiculous (so about half of them) are actually quite tense to watch. Even better, whenever the film puts its mind to treating its animal attack story as an apocalyptic event, it develops some of the bleak and pessimistic air so typical of 70s horror, with some effective scenes of disturbed characters wandering through a deserted small town. It is quite possible, not to say probable, that Girdler arrives at the points where his apocalypse actually works despite of himself, just because that sort of thing was in the air at the time. For my tastes, every even just slightly effective moment of world-ending doom in a movie is to be treasured, for whatever reason it comes to pass, so Day of the Animals provides me with double the joy.

On WTF: Day of the Animals (1977)

If you ever wanted to see a shirtless Leslie Nielsen mud-wrestle a bear, you've come to the right film. Also making an appearance are flying rats, the snake/dog-gang, the 70s, and some rather bizarre characters.

My column on WTF-Film will inform you exactly how much I loved William Girdler's greatest achievement.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,horror,william girdler,christopher george,leslie nielsen,lynda day george,richard jaeckel,michael ansara

In short: The Manitou (1978)

One day, Karen Tandy (Susan Strasberg) discovers a strange growth on the back of her neck. It is growing at an inexplicable rate, much faster than Karen's doctors are able to understand. What's even more strange - the growth doesn't seem to be a tumor but a fetus.

There's nothing strange that couldn't be cut away with a scalpel, of course, but the first try at cutting the thing off ends with Karen murmuring something in Hollywood Injunese and poor Dr. Hughes (Jon Cedar) cutting into his own hands.

Karen had at this point already gotten back in (very close) contact with her ex Harry Erskine (Tony Curtis), a professional tarot reader and wearer of fake facial hair. Harry's next tarot session with one of his elderly clients ends with the old woman murmuring the same Hollywood Injunese words, levitating along a hallway and falling to death down a flight of stairs.

While Karen lies unconscious in her hospital bed, Harry does a little research on their problem. A séance and a visit with guest star Burgess Meredith later, he is convinced that Karen is possessed by the spirit of an ancient Hollywood Injun medicine man trying to get reborn through a nice female neck.

Logically minded as he is, Harry seeks out the shaman John Singing Rock (Michael Ansara) and talks the man into helping him to fight the dead medicine man. All is set up for an awesome duel of occult powers in Dr. Hughes hightech hospital.

One of the great mysteries in my career as an observer of the weird, the crappy and the outright insane has always been the question: why did people give William Girdler money? The Manitou doesn't really answer that question, but deepens it to "why did people give a director as talentless as William Girdler money to adapt a book written by as terrible a hack as Graham Masterton?".

I certainly don't know the answer to that one, grasshopper. Well, at least the film's an entertaining catastrophe, full of the sort of bullshit everyone should love.

Of course, The Manitou suffers from every problem it could possibly suffer from - there's absurdly bad acting from Strasberg, alternating bored and scenery-chewing acting from Curtis, a script in total ignorance of actual Native American culture and reality, Girdler's "let's point the camera at it and wait" style of directing, puzzling dialogue, etc.

The first hour is also more than just a little boring, but at about the hour mark something strange happens - the idiocy and the silliness turns from boring to fun, the cliched stupidity turns into creative stupidity until we are bombarded with awesome stuff like the evil ancient midget bodybuilder form the evil spirit takes and a scene in which a naked Susan Strasberg floats on a hospital bed in space and shoots laser beams at Yog-Sothoth while meteorites whoosh in the direction of the camera.

The latter is one of those pictures that will stay with me for the rest of my life, at least I hope that it will, forever being an irrefutable proof of the genius of humanity.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,horror,wtf,william girdler,tony curtis,susan strasberg,in short

Revenge of Three Films Make A Post

Django Shoots First (1966): One of the dozens of Djangos who roam the Italian West (played by Glenn Saxson) takes vengeance for his murdered and double-crossed father and gets rich in the process. The film is a bit too lighthearted for my tastes in Spaghetti Western and lacks emotional resonance even in the moments when it should have it. None of the actors are all that memorable (especially not the zero sum of a Django) apart from Evelyn Stewart in the sort of femme fatale role she could probably do in her sleep. But director Alberto De Martino does have enough of a knack for action scenes to make for a passably diverting little movie. Unless you dislike bar brawls, that is.

 

Devil Species (2004): A scientist turns into a snake monster thanks to the combination of the poison of the Devil Snake and a new experimental serum. He of course goes on a very cost-conscious rampage, while some (okay, one) of his victims turn into snake person zombies. This mildly entertaining Thai monster movie (directed by someone with the most excellent name of Poom Opium) would feel right at home on the SciFi Channel, if it didn't eschew crappy CGI for not completely ineffective practical effects and if not for the American mainstream's fear of non-white people playing the lead roles in a movie.

 

Three On A Meathook (1972): William "Grizzly" Girdler's debut film meanders between proto-slasher and 70s independent psycho killer movie. Too bad that it's so boring in every aspect. Girdler's static and unimaginative direction can't even milk shots of the less savory parts of Louisville or terrible crimes of interior decoration properly for mood or life. The title's great, though.

 

Technorati-Tags: in short,thai movies,american movies,italian movies,horror,spaghetti western,william girdler,alberto de martino