Scorpion with Two Tails (1982)

The American archeologist Arthur Barnard (John Saxon in a tiny cameo) is on an expedition in the wilds of Italy. He's searching for an unopened Etruscan tomb that supposedly contains an unimaginable treasure.

He even finds what he is looking for, the trouble is that he's murdered in old Etruscan sacrificial style just as he is telling his wife about it on the phone.

His wife Joan (Elvire Audray) has had nightmares and visions about Etruscan rites as well as about the death of her husband (and also about a lot of maggots, charmingly) for some time. A combination of this, her dubious intelligence and some very ineffective persuasion attempts by her stinking rich father not to fly to Italy can obviously only lead to her flying to Italy at once. At least her friend Mike (Paolo Malco) accompanies her, and he will turn out to be indespensible when our heroine stumbles from one bad situation into the next into bouts of hysteria.

I admit that the script doesn't make her life any easier - she not only turns out to be the reincarnation of an Etruscan semi-goddess, but also stumbles into a quite nonsensical (the script is by Sacchetti and Gastaldi who have a reputation to hold up) web of drug-smuggling, tomb raiding and just plain killing.

 

I may be something of an admirer of Scorpion with Two Tails' director Sergio Martino, still I have to admit that this isn't one of his stronger efforts.

A lot of the problems the film shows are certainly caused by its nature as an Italian TV movie. The film's budget must have been quite constrained (I shudder to think of a production that can afford John Saxon only for one day, as is obviously the case here), so Martino's usual slick visuals aren't as hypnotic as I am used to. The violence also has to take some steps into a more casual-friendly direction, which shouldn't be that much of a problem for someone as technically excellent as Martino, but turns out to be a major stumbling block nonetheless. It looks like Martino didn't have the time or the imagination to think of a better substitute for blood than lots and lots of maggots.

Fortunately there are enough well-staged and interestingly filmed scenes to keep the jaded viewer with a healthy interest in the giallo watching.

And those scenes are bitterly needed: I'm willing and able to cut the acting in these films a lot of slack, but Elvire Audray's performance as our very blonde heroine is just atrocious. In fact, she is so bad that she's standing out in an ensemble of actors who at best look too bored to even try and at their worst seem to be simply unable to emote. John Saxon's cameo is nice enough, but does not help to make the rest of the cast any more believable. The abysmal quality (again keeping in mind the usual standards of Italian dubs) of the dubbing certainly is no help at all.

The script is the usual nonsense one expects from supernaturally spiced up giallos with most of the plot just a thin excuse to get the characters from one set piece to the next, which is perfectly alright in this kind of production if you don't watch movies only for the plot - in that case, you're beyond help anyway.

The ending even contains two very nice pieces of "what the fuck!?" I am not going to spoil here. Let's just say they are the kind of non sequiturs that can let me fall in love with bad movies all over again.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,giallo,sergio martino,reviews,john saxon

In short: Splinter (2008)

The young couple of Polly (Jill Wagner) and Seth (Paulo Costanzo) probably had something a little different in mind than they get on their camping trip.

First they are taken hostage by an escaped convict (Shea Whigham) and his drugged-out girlfriend (Rachel Kerbs), only to then have to hole up with their kidnappers in a gas station in the middle of nowhere when a delightful new organism attacks. A parasite that attaches itself to its victims in the form of black splinters and has a certain affinity to make moving art out of dead body parts surely is a wonderful thing to discover, especially if it would very much like to infect you too.

 

Well, I think I have seen all characters in this film already in other movies of the same type (would you believe the convict has a good heart and the science student is rather impractical?), but the actors are good enough to lend the clichés just enough life to stop them from being too annoying. The direction is rather tight, if somewhat too much in love with fast cuts and the ole shaky cam, while the script is far from being original.

Fortunately, I don't watch films like this for their originality and am more than willing to tolerate minor plot holes (and even silly ideas like the body temperature scene) when the movie in question is a fun enough ride. Splinter most certainly is.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,horror,toby wilkins,in short

The Children (1980)

A warning right at the start: Don't let yourself be fooled! This is not a film about a school bus full of zombie children as some suggest, but a movie that uses elements of the apocalyptic zombie film to build a different creature out of them, a creature more insidious than a flying zombie head in a fridge.

It all starts when the school bus of an American rural community called Ravensback drives through a cloud of gas that has evaded the high security standards (read: there are none) of a nuclear plant.

As we all know, exposure to radioactive gas is seldom a good thing. Promptly, all six children of Ravensback turn into grinning, hug-loving fiends wearing black nail polish whose touch kills their victims with something I think looks like the producers of this fine film thought radioactive burns look like. Very soon, only the winner of my highly sought after "Worst Sheriff ever" medal, Sheriff Billy "the Toupet" Hart (Gil Rogers) and John "local guy with a child" Freemont  (Martin Shakar) are all that stands between the town's at least ten inhabitants and the death hug. The heroic everyday guys even manage to find the children's weak point: The only way to kill them is...no, not decapitation, that would be crude, dehandification is what's called for here.

 

Friends of American local filmmaking rejoice! This fine piece of crap is surprisingly not brought to you from far away Florida. This time the beautiful state of Massachusetts is the one responsible.

But don't be sad, people from Massachusetts can also have a finely developed sense for making bad movies. On a technical level, The Children is somewhat more competently made than films of its ilk usually are. There's not a single boom mike in view, the sets are filmed so efficiently that the illusion of looking into very boring houses is never in any danger and even the film stock looks like real film and less like it's cobbled together from the rests of reels that weren't put to full use by another production.

This kind of visual brilliance comes with a price, of course, namely a certain unwillingness to move the camera (which is in some scenes overcome to startling effect - shaking the viewer awake with a vengeance!) and a great fondness for long shots.

The first half of the film can be something of a drag, what with not much happening in excruciating detail. I hope you like seeing cars drive down a road. And watching people standing around. Or watching the Sheriff search for missing children by not searching for them and definitely not using a telephone.

Fortunately, my career in surviving bad movies has taught me that patience with a slow-starting film sometimes pays off nicely, and so I am happy to report about the sudden change in entertainment value (if not in quality - it's a film about death-hugging children who can only be stopped by hacking off their hands, for god's sake!) I experienced. As soon as the "dramatic" part of the film starts, the acting performances transform from boring-bad into hilariously inept hamming of the highest degree. I was especially fond of the way Gil Rogers' performance suddenly blossomed into a flower of pure ham with some choice bug-eyedness (supposedly suggesting panic?) thrown into the mix.

The scenes of badly faked violence are getting more hilarious as the film goes on; it is rather endearing seeing the badly panic faking adults fight against the "terrifying" children (who look like their having the time of their lives), like an anti-Who Can Kill A Child.

Some of the actors also provide very creative death screams that make the Wilhelm Scream sound plain boring.
And yes, two or three scenes manage to be a little creepy, as usual in films like this.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,reviews,horror

Someone seems to like Halloween a lot

Technorati-Tags: music,bruce springsteen

Linking my ten readers to Boing Boing

is more than a little silly, but it's the Tokyo Kappa Project (kind of)!

 

Technorati-Tags: links,stuff

In short: Love Ghost (2001)

Sometimes I act like the hero of a classic Romantic novel: I sigh, sink into my living room chair and ponder deep philosophical questions like "Why is Japanese pop culture so weird?".

Today an answer to said question came to me. It's all the ghosts' and ghoulies' fault! As I have learned by watching countless Japanese horror films (I've even seen Shinjuku Ghost Story, though only the first part - I am not infinitely strong), every nook and cranny of every village, town and city (let's not start talking about the countryside) in Japan is stuffed full with ghosts, curses, demons, giant flying turtles and spirals.

The only possibility to keep sane when confronted by this kind of danger every waking hour (and I'm not sure about dreams and sleep) is to distract oneself by as much bizarre shit as possible. Well, that or tentacle rape.

This grand realization came to me while is was watching Love Ghost. In it, some poor high school kids can't even consult their favorite love oracle, Tsujiura (basically standing in front of a road-side shrine and asking the next passerby the question one wants to have answered by oracle), without coming into contact with a supernatural entity called "The Handsome Boy of Tsujiura", whose predictions of course end in premature teenage death.

All trouble starts with the arrival of Midori (Risa Goto) in a new school, back in the town she left ten years ago. The film makes a big secret of something that happened when she left, but most viewers will have solved the "puzzle" about half an hour in, although some of the later twists just don't make enough sense to be too easily predicted. And yes, you guessed it, the secret has something to do with the "Handsome Boy".

Soon after Midori's arrival, teenage hormones run amok while Midori herself has to solve the riddle of her own past.

 

Love Ghost really isn't that good of a film. The script is, as I said, predictable, the pacing overtly sedate and the whole thing at least fifteen minutes to long, but if you are able to be very, very patient, you'll find a few worthwhile ideas. I'd even call the middle part of the film quite successful, not as a horror film, but as a quiet portrait of teenage heartbreak that for once does not try to glamorize the crappy time that many have at a certain age. Unfortunately, the film throws away any goodwill it might have created in its final twenty minutes when it suddenly tries to transform itself into a story of redemption its first hour just can't support.

At least nobody can blame the film for wanting to be just another Japanese horror movie about a female ghost with long black hair - it's trying hard to be something different.

 

Technorati-Tags: in short,japanese movies,horror

Everybody likes a ghost story

And Juno Books, home of the paranormal romance, has a PDF with "Five Classic Ghost Stories" (by female writers) as a Halloween gift.

It aren't even the usual five stories, so what are you waiting for?

Here's the book!

 

Technorati-Tags: free fiction,books,horror,ghosts

Zipang (1990)

Japan during the Tokugawa Shogunate (don't worry, this will be the only sentence today related to any piece of history as we know it). The delightfully named Jigoku (Masahiro Takashira, sporting a most awesome 80s samurai hairdo) is Japan's most wanted criminal. Virtually hundreds of bounty hunters are on his trail, but nobody is able to catch him. What exactly it is that has made him so popular we're never told. He is the head of a small troupe of wandering entertainers - of course counting among their members a dwarf and a dwarfish latex elephant - who provide him with support in all the things he can't do for himself. So one of them has the useful ability to think (you bet he's wearing glasses), while others provide him with the suppressive fire of their portable cannons. Especially important is the man who carries Jigoku's nine swords in a kind of golf bag around with him. Our hero, you see, loves variety and is a true believer in the idea of having the right weapon for every enemy, even if that means he needs someone to throw his swords to him. Sometimes a man just needs his boomerang sword, or his dagger shooting sword, or the very special blade for killing Frenchmen.

Our hero may kill bounty hunters by the hundreds, but he's not cruel, he even entertains them with dancing, flute playing and ear wiggling before he kills them, as befits a good sportsman.

Alas a new and dangerous enemy has decided to try her aim on him - Yuri the Pistol (Narumi Yasuda), as efficient a bounty hunter as Jigoku is a...whatever he may be.

Fortunately, the flower of love blooms between Yuri and Jigoku as soon as the lay eyes on each other (in a "you're cute, baby!" kind of way), so their first meeting ends at an impasse.

Jigoku and his troupe now decide to go on a little treasure hunt, evading the usual death traps in a fashion certain American archeologists/grave robbers would approve of (which is to say: just barely), and acquiring a sword made of pure gold. As things like this go, the sword is even more popular than Jigoku's head.

The shogun himself (Chiyonosuke Azuma) wants it as the key to Zipang, the kingdom of gold he's read about in his edition of the diaries of Marco Polo. Seeing that he is the shogun and likes to laugh an especially evil laughter, he's not going to try to buy the sword (also, there wouldn't be a fight scene in it). Instead, he sends Hattori Hanzo (Yukio Yamato) and his portable ninja army to steal the sword.

The ensuing fight between Hanzo and his lots and lots of ninjas, Jigoku, Yuri and the nearly naked tattooed guy who jumped out of the place where Jigoku found the sword soon after our hero left, somehow activates the magic power of the sword.

Hanzo and Yuri are sucked into the sky in the best UFO fashion, while Nearly Naked Guy stands below and screams to be taken too, very much like a nearly naked, tattooed Japanese version of Fox Mulder.

While Nearly Naked guy starts a ritual that will help him and Jigoku follow to wherever Yuri went, the bounty hunter and Hanzo materialize in the Sunless Land, a place ruled by a king made entirely of gold, who likes to ask philosophical questions about the nature of love just as much as taking Yuri prisoner and sending his guard of stone armored weirdos against Hanzo.

And those guards are as tough as they are weird. Even Hanzo's bag of tricks that contains such ninja-typical weapons like a rocket launcher could possibly not be deep enough.

From here on, there are still a lot of fights to watch (personal favorite: the king's mecha-like armor), strange people and gods to meet, until we can finally learn an important lesson about the meaning of love. And that Jaws was popular in Japan, too.

 

The late 80s and early 90s were not a very good time for Japanese genre cinema. Most of its earlier proponents had fled into the financial security of TV or had to cope with the incredibly shrinking budgets the Direct-to-Video market allowed. I'm talking about the real dark ages of Japanese cinema here, the time before mad scientist directors like Takashi Miike invented themselves.

All the more wondrous is it to find a film like Zipang, that starts with an incredible concentration of weird shit per minute and doesn't let up during the whole of its running time. The throw-away fighting styles in the big bounty hunter fight alone would be enough to fuel half a dozen normal movies. Director Kaizo Hayashi just pulls the next bizarre situation out of his hat.

Even more surprising is the change of mood the film pulls off after the protagonists have entered the Sunless Land (whose occupants I suspect of being part of real Japanese mythology). The film shifts from a delightful piece of anything goes fun into the mood and storytelling style of a fairy tale - like a hyperactive Russian fairy tale film without losing its strange but existent internal logic - while still delivering the weird and wacky in unnatural doses.

This kind of film doesn't need acting as we usually know it, of course, but rather as much high-octane mugging and scenery chewing as possible. And by God, the actors deliver that in spades.

I could now proceed to chastise Zipang for some less than believable sets and some very unbelievable special effects, but a fairy tale does not need to be believable to be effective. I'd even say a fairy tale movie has some of its impact precisely because it knows very well that it does not show a version of reality, or another kind of reality, but something that is part of our imagination made visible.

To summarize: You owe yourself to watch this if you have even the smallest interest in things that are awesome.

 

Technorati-Tags: reviews,chambara,fantasy,comedy,japanese movies,kaizo hayashi

In short: The Leopard Man (1943)

Her manager Jerry Manning (Dennis O'Keefe) persuades nightclub singer Kiki Walker (Jean Brooks) to indulge in a publicity stunt with a black leopard as the best method to outdo her main Rival Clo Clo (Margo; whose highly irritating habit of clicking her castanets wherever and whenever she goes did not endear her to me). Not surprisingly, the animal escapes and starts a series of murders. The conscience-stricken Jerry and Kiki soon doubt the leopard's responsibility for the acts. Might there be a more dangerous, human perpetrator?

The Leopard Man is one of the less well known collaborations between producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur and I am not surprised by this.

Of course, the film is well directed, well acted, an obvious product of seasoned professionals who probably were unable to make a shoddy movie. Nonetheless, I couldn't shake the feeling Tourneur and Lewton didn't put as much heart in it as in Cat People. The film just lacks the special spark of creativity I have gotten used to in films produced by Lewton. The film's themes aren't as intelligently developed as one would hope for, and the characters stay rather flat.

In comparison to much of the films the Poverty Row studios produced at the same time its pure competence lets The Leopard Man still look like a minor masterpiece.

Technorati Tags: american movies,val lewton,jacques tourneur,mystery,in short

Another good reason for the coming zombie apocalypse: Death Bell (2008)

Usually I don't like to post negative reviews on here. If I can't find at least a few redeeming qualities in a film, there's not much reason for wasting my time in reviewing it, unless I have either something worthwhile to say about it or it really managed to annoy me.

Death Bell, the new horror sensation from South Korea managed the latter quite easily.

I'll try to keep this short to avoid the unpleasant picture of me foaming at the mouth from pure irritation.

A bunch of students and three teachers are kept prisoner in their school by a mysterious psycho who lets them solve idiotic riddles. If they don't manage that, one of them is tortured to death in a mild Saw-variation. The mysterious killer has an equally mysterious love for using the most stupid methods of killing imaginable. It's especially important for him to ignore the way physics in the real world work. It doesn't matter a lot anyway, because his acts do not even follow the rules the film posits, so why care about physics? And why should they, when the whole plot only works thanks to the fact every character is an idiot?

Like me, you will be awfully surprised by the revelation that the murders have something to do with the supposed suicide of a female student a few years ago, as well as by the "surprising" (if you are as stupid as the characters) twists the film provides. The director, a certain Chang, also manages to add a few moments of the good old longhaired girl ghost, which doesn't make the whole mess more derivative than it already is.

The mixture of stupidity and unoriginality I could take, what fills my mind with stabby stabby thoughts when I think of Death Bell is that each and every idiocy, each moment I have already seen better realized in superior films is presented with the kind of grand gesture that just cries out: "Look how clever I am!", proving the people responsible (the guys with the pitchforks are already waiting for them, by the way) to be just as insipid as their audience.

Avoid at any cost.

 

Technorati-Tags: south korean movies,rants,horror,please kill me

The Twelve Gold Medallions (1970)

The Chinese Empire is under attack by the Tartars. While heroic general Yue slowly takes the lost territory back piece by piece, the traitorous prime minister plans on selling out to the invaders. Yue's success is a problem for his plans, so he acquires a royal order that will call Yue back from the front and leave the way open for his newly made allies. To make sure the order really arrives, the minister orders it engraved on twelve gold medallions, each of which will be transported to the frontline by a martial arts expert of great talent and dubious morality.

There's more than one patriotic fighter who wants to prevent the order's delivery. Especially effective in getting rid of the mercenaries is Miao Lung (Yueh Huah), a former student of the sword style of Jin Yang Tan (Cheng Miu). Little does he suspect that his master has heard the siren song of power and influence and has just been awarded the leadership of the martial arts school whose main reason for existence is the delivery of the medallions.

As soon as he learns this, Miao Lung's sense of duty and honor compels him to break up his engagement to Jin Yang Tan's daughter Jin Suo (Chin Ping). Her father uses the opportunity to convince the girl that Miao Lung has fallen in love with another woman.

Both men don't know that Jin Suo herself has also gotten into the medallion interception business.

If you think this should be enough complications for one film, you probably haven't seen many wuxias. The film finds time - without breaking a sweat, I must add - to also concern itself with the destiny of many other honorable and dishonorable fighters, betrayal and tragedies and even with a little comic relief.

But it is doubtful that the story will end in laughter and not in blood and tears.

Cheng Kang may not be as well known a Shaw Brothers director as Chor Yuen or Chang Cheh, but this doesn't make his films necessarily less interesting or less individual efforts.

The Twelve Gold Medallions for example is a film that tries to re-invent the classic wuxia formula in a way very different from Chor Yuen. Where Chor opts for conscious artificiality and stylization, Cheng uses a more naturalistic approach with as much location shooting as possible and stages that are (quite effectively) filmed to look as natural as possible.

The fight choreography is in part done by Sammo Hung and has a certain grittiness even in its more wacky moments. Most of the fights are relatively short, but bloody and intense. The high amount of different fighters helps to keep each battle unique, while Cheng's dynamic and fast camera work adds a further dimension of intensity to the proceedings.

The action is of course not all that's important in a wuxia. The Twelve Gold Medallions is not stingy with its melodrama and entwines it nicely with the action. Where weaker genre entries too often keep the emotionally tense moments and the action divorced from each other, here the melodrama lends additional tension to the action and is used to up the stakes so that more interesting things than the fate of a nation are in the center of the movie.

Acting and production values are as good as one can expect from a Shaw Brothers film. I must say I would have preferred less hissy fits by Jin Suo, whose childish behavior is unfortunately not untypical for women in films like this, but if it says something very positive about a film when that's the worst criticism I can come up with.

 

Technorati-Tags: reviews,shaw brothers,cheng kang,hong kong movies,wuxia,yueh huah,ching ping

I just knew

my knowledge of Lovecraftian videogames wasn't complete.

An FPS for the Virtual Boy, no less!

 

Technorati-Tags: games,lovecraft,links

In short: The Masks of Death (1984)

An elderly Sherlock Holmes (Peter Cushing) returns from his beekeeping duties to help his old associate Inspector MacDonald (Gordon Jackson) - the only policeman he doesn't outright despise, though he still treats him like a rather stupid child - unravel the mysterious case of three seemingly causeless deaths. The only visible marks on the bodies of the victims are expressions of abject fear on their faces.

While Holmes and Watson (John Mills) are somewhat stumped by the case, the Home Secretary (an embarrassingly drunk Ray Milland) urges the detectives to take on the "more important" case of the disappearance of a high ranking German personality from a locked room, which puts the Secretary's secret efforts for a peace treaty with the Germans into peril.

Annoyed as he is, Holmes still follows the call of the motherland and uncovers a conspiracy with possibly dreadful consequences. There is also a the return of Irene Adler (Anne Baxter) to awaken the old woman-hater's curiosity.

 

This short British TV movie reunites Cushing (in his last leading role) and John Mills in roles that weren't exactly new to them to nice effect.

Neither the script by Anthony Hinds nor Roy Ward Bakers very pedestrian direction are anything to write home about, but the two lead actors don't seem to mind. Cushing and Mills (whose Watson is not of the dreaded "bumbling idiot" variant) have a beautiful rapport as old friends who are too much in love with classic British stiffness to be all that emotional, yet whose small gestures and friendly bickering betray their closeness all the same.

Especially Cushing provides some telling acting details that seem to come much more from him than from the script (that just ignores how being old must feel to someone like Holmes) and give a glimpse into Holmes as someone who doesn't take to age well - it hasn't made him any milder and now even provides him with ample opportunity to turn his irritation onto his own growing slowness.

I need hardly mention that the idea of an old Holmes played by Cushing (whose calm professionalism I'd take about egomaniac horror icon Christopher Lee any day) at the end of his career brings with itself a certain melancholy even when the script doesn't do a lot with the concept.

The Masks of Death is the actors' film anyway. Besides the quite wonderful Cushing and Mills, Anne Baxter and Anton Diffring are also doing a lot to let one forget the film's slightness, making it a worthy final bow (and yes, I am ignoring Biggles here, even I have standards) for Cushing.

 

Technorati-Tags: british movies,in short,mystery,sherlock holmes,peter cushing,roy ward baker,john mills,ray milland,anton diffring,anne baxter

In short: The Silent Stranger (1968)

A nameless gunman (Tony Anthony) tries to safe an Asian man from three thugs. His help comes a little too late, and the dying man begs him to bring a small scroll to Japan. His master there will pay well.

So the Stranger and his horse "Pussy" get on the next boat to Japan. Having hardly even arrived, the gunman stumbles into the battle between two shady characters and their small private armies, both very interested in his scroll, and a festival of double-crosses, triple-crosses and quite a few fights. That's what happens when you don't speak the language.

There's a book waiting to be written on the connection between the Spaghetti Western and the Chambara and about the way these genres influenced each other. One of the chapters of this imaginary book would have to be about The Silent Stranger and would hopefully explain how this Italian-Japanese co-production came to life.

The Silent Stranger is one of the better movies that try to combine the Spaghetti Western and one or the other form of Asian action cinema. Thanks to the involvement of actual Japanese money, we have Japanese characters played by Japanese actors speaking actual Japanese - a cornucopia of authenticity. The biggest difference between this and many other Italian/Japanese cross-over films is that it's set in Japan, though, affording director Luigi Vanzi to have a lot of fun with a hero who basically doesn't have a clue what the things going on around him mean.

Tony Anthony's Stranger is obviously based on a certain character from some Leone films, but he looks and acts more like Clint Eastwood's goofier brother. A man who's not as clever as he thinks himself, he mostly gets by on a certain charm and a softer heart than other Italian Western heroes can afford. Anthony's muggy way of playing the role seems a little too over the top at first, but soon his slightly dopey grin turns out to be the ideal embodiment of what the film is trying to do.

While there are certainly enough dead bodies and moments of brutality here, the film mostly tries to be (and even is!) good fun. It certainly lacks the depth of a film by Leone or Corbucci, but it makes up for this through charm and playfulness.

I very much liked the way Vanzi plays out the disorientation that comes with Anthony's inability to communicate, perfectly shown in a scene where he uses a drawing to discern if he is actually paid in the right kind of coin, all the while trying to keep from looking as clueless as he really is.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,japanese movies,spaghetti western,chambara,in short,luigi vanzi,tony anthony

Earth vs. the Spider (1958)

The daddy of sweet 50s teenager Carol (June Kenney, who might even still be somewhat young) disappears when he should be returning home to his family. Her jerky teenage boyfriend Mike (Eugene Persson, age 24 and looking older) thinks the man has just gone on one of his drinking binges, but Carol knows better.

After more jerkiness I began to hope Mike would be eaten by a giant spider soon, instead he caves in, borrows the car of his teenage friend Joe (Troy Patterson, with a birth year of 1923 the oldest teenager I have ever seen) and goes on the search for Daddy with Carol. They soon find his wrecked car and calculate he must have gone into a nearby cave. A cave with a real bad reputation - people enter, but they never leave. Nonetheless, the two waddle into the cave, and enter a world of very special effects gone even more wrong than one expects. Somehow someone involved in the production (and I'm looking at Bert I. Gordon) thought it prudent to enhance a mediocre cave set with something that looks very much as if said someone had scribbled a few cave-like lines onto the screen. From time to time we also see a few shots of the good old Carlsbad Caverns - of course without any actors in them. Our intrepid heroes stumble through this weird place and find some typical cave stuff (skeletons, the desiccated corpse of Carol's father) and a net right out of a gymnasium, um, I mean a giant spider net.

While they are climbing about on the net (and really, who wouldn't?) a giant tarantula - played by a normal tarantula badly, really badly superimposed - attacks them. No, it's never explained where the giant spider learned to make nets, but the poor thing isn't using them in the rest of the film anyway.

They get away and run straight to their science teacher Mr. Kingman (Ed Kemmer), who is something of a two-fisted scientist, and so not predisposed to completely believe their story, but at least interested enough in their story to phone the sheriff (Gene Roff) - whom I very soon christened Cletus - and urge the man to help him and a few others search the cave. Kingman also convinces Cletus to get as much DDT as possible. Just in case.

I don't know how, but the sheriff manages to acquire a whole truckload of the stuff. It certainly comes in handy when they encounter the spider (and also as a way to prevent the characters from procreating - a very good thing for our gene pool).

A short cancerous and kind of boring fight later the spider is dead and the sheriff bound to blast the cave entrance shut. Kingman has different plans, though - he wants to study the reason for the animal's abnormal size. So he uses his savings(!) to pay for the transport of the corpse into his school's gymnasium(!!), in the hope of selling the corpse to a university, it seems.

The thing he didn't account for is the power of Rock'n'Roll. The local student band (led by none other than our old friend Joe, who is their lead dancer and conductor) sneaks into the gym to practice for a coming dance, awakening with their sounds of joyous abandon the not quite dead spider. A very mild form of rampage ensues - it's not easy to go on a rampage when you're a special effect that can't interact with anything.

Fortunately, our heroic science teacher and the dopey sheriff are there to save the day with the help of much talking and the power of electricity.

 

I usually love giant monster movies, be they bad, good or in between, but Earth vs. the Spider (which should have been called One American Small Town vs. the Spider) doesn't make it easy. It may have a very bad reputation, yet it really isn't all that bad. Sure, the acting is atrocious, the effects laughable and the script vapid as can be, but there are still many films that are much worse than it.

On the other hand, one would be hard pressed to call it good, especially when one adds to its list of flaws the simple facts that it's kind of slow, and kind of boring, and doesn't even include a real monster rampage. So Earth vs. the Spider sits there in a place of total mediocrity, neither good nor bad enough to be of real interest - the most terrible destiny a film can suffer.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,horror,bert i. gordon,giant monsters,reviews

Possibly the creepiest thing I've ever seen

via Jeffrey Ford.

 

Technorati-Tags: the creeps

Begotten (1991)

So this is what the director of Shadow of the Vampire did when he was young.

The official story here is this: God kills himself slowly with a razor and gives birth to Mother Earth who impregnates herself with his seed to give birth to a son. Other things happen.

But the truth is: You absolutely do not have to use this interpretation of the film. Like with much of really out there art, its creator's interpretation isn't better than your own.

Shot in high contrast black and white without speech but with a disconcerting soundtrack of noises and darkened ambient, Begotten looks influenced by expressionist silent movies, David Lynch, surrealism and God knows what else, yet it effortlessly creates a disconcerting voice of its own out of its influences.

The experience watching this is a lot like watching the base myth of some kind of ritual one of Lovecraft's pre-human races might have practiced. If it's a ritual of creation or destruction or both isn't quite clear. It is also possible that we are witnessing an apocalypse and the following re-birth of life, told by the way of a nightmare.

It's very much like looking into a place somewhere else where time and space don't follow the same rules as they do here, although there still remain enough parallels to our world to make all that we're watching supremely discomforting.

 

Technorati-Tags: e. elias merhige,experimental,american movies,reviews,the very weird

The Minutemen!

 

The Horror!? 100: The Demons of Ludlow (1984)

A surprise return of my series of incoherent ramblings about Public Domain films? You betcha!

Ludlow is a small town somewhere in North America. As is so often the case with American small towns, it has a dreadful secret that has already cost many of its inhabitants' lives over the course of two centuries. The town's bicentennial will turn out to be even worse.

Yet it all starts so promising with a dreary barn dance and the gift of a white piano-harmonium (the characters aren't willing to decide what type of instrument it is; I for my part can only say that it does sound a lot like a synthesizer to me) by the descendants of Ludlow's founding father, a certain Ethan Ludlow, who was exiled from the town for some misdeed or the other. How strange that the first notes of the mysterious instrument are the starting shot for a new series of puzzling deaths.

The local Reverend (Paul von Hausen) and reporter Debra (Stephanie Cushna) are doing their best to make sense of the curse that obviously lies on the town, but the mixture of poltergeist activities, people in bad period costumes with a certain love for murder, demonic hands and bad special effects is hard to understand.

 

The Demons of Ludlow is the first film of not exactly much-loved ultra-low budget director Bill Rebane I have seen, and I must say, it didn't hurt all that much.

Sure, the acting is pedestrian at best, the special effects are bad, the direction at TV movie of the week level and the supernatural menace not coherent in the least, but at least the film is moving at a certain pace (if you are able to ignore the long minutes of the preacher and/or the journalist looking puzzled by the frigging obvious), without incorporating a single second of stock footage.

There are also one or two moments I'd nearly call creepy, as well as many more moments (especially in the latter half of the film) that deserve at least a chuckle.

And really, how many films does one see in one's life that feature a hopping, ghost-pregnant pianonium?

 

Technorati-Tags: bill rebane,the horror!?,horror,in short

In short: Red Wolf (1995)

Ah, luxury cruises. What a great way to celebrate the new year. That's also what a merry band of gangsters thinks, so they infiltrate the crew and the house band of a luxury liner. While they're at it, they might as well steal the uranium that's kept hidden in a highly secured safe - it's the modern way of uranium transportation. Oh, and they're gonna have to kill everyone on board.

To their very lethal dismay, Alan (Kenny Ho), an Ex-Cop With A Tragic Past, is part of the ship's security detail and doesn't take to slaughter all that kindly. Well, slaughter he doesn't commit himself, so he goes on a hitting, kicking, shooting and macgyvering rampage to show the evildoers how it's really done. His only help is the supremely annoying Christy Chung, who - I am sorry to say - just isn't funny at all.

 

I don't know why anyone would think it to be a good idea to rip off a Steven Seagal rip-off of Die Hard, but this were the ways of Hong Kong cinema and I hope they always will be.

There are quite a few things that recommend Red Wolf as a rip-off better than the original:

Firstly, director Yuen Woo-ping who has made too many films and choreographed too many action sequences to not be able to deliver a nice pay-off for friends of screaming, kicking, hitting and shooting with creative use of just about everything that isn't nailed down; there's no idea so stupid Yuen wouldn't make an effort to look as cool as possible.

Secondly, there's the combination of slight sadism and not always so slight stupidity of much of the script. Usually, those aren't points one mentions to recommend a movie, but ideas like the uranium on board a cruising ship or the great use the film makes of its child actor (you'll see - and probably applaud) give Red Wolf the over the top feeling that really lets it work.

Thirdly, Kenny Ho might not be the best actor around, but he jumps into the action with abandon and (to compare to the movie's source) does not look like a geriatric hippopotamus.

Lastly, Elaine Lui makes a great sadistic first henchman, whose cure for heart attacks I'll keep in mind as an alternative to more conventional methods.

 

Technorati-Tags: hong kong movies,action,yuen woo-ping,elaine lui,kenny ho,in short

In short: My Friends Need Killing (1976)

Vietnam veteran Gene Kline (Greg Mullavy) is the victim of a heavy case of PTSD. It's not very surprising when you look at his complicity in a small massacre of civilians. One day he just snaps and starts to visit the old members of his platoon, killing one after the other.

 

My Friends Need Killing is - the beautifully exploitative title notwithstanding - more a piece of art house ambition than a typical exploitation movie.

Everything about the film - acting, direction, pacing - is raw, but relatively effective. What the film is missing most of the time is the typical grindhouse meanness, probably thanks to its very earnest wish to say something profound about the state of mind of its protagonist. Sometimes it even manages to do just that.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,in short,exploitation

In short: Horror Hot Line...Big Head Monster (2001)

Ben (Francis Ng) is the producer of a Hong Kong radio show that gives its listeners the opportunity to phone in and tell their own "true" urban ghost story.

Although Ben doesn't believe in the stories, the show is successful enough to warrant the visit of American reporter Mavis (Josie Ho) and her crew. It looks like Mavis is supposed to make Ben's show look bad, but when a strange call about an encounter with a "big head baby" comes in, and even stranger things start to happen around the production, her journalistic instincts set in and she and Ben start to look into things they had probably better ignored.

 

This grandly titled film is very atypical for Horror films from Hong Kong. There are no people puking up insects (actually no puking at all), no necrophilia, no cannibalism and not even a Buddhist exorcist. Instead the film tries its hand at the very un-Hong Kong notion of subtlety, even a little psychological depth, obviously influenced by Japanese films, but foregoing the mere rip-off for a strangely raw tone of its own (raw subtlety? Does this make any sense?).

We are never even getting a clear look at the titular monster, and when it's time for the finale, director Pou-Soi Cheang decides to steal from Blair Witch Project rather than Ringu.

The film should be a good choice for everyone who wants to see a different kind of Hong Kong Horror film.

 

Technorati-Tags: hong kong movies,horror,in short,pou-soi cheang,francis ng

Chamber of Horrors (1966)

Baltimore around the turn of the century. We all know that those decadent Southerners from good families have their mental problems. Problems like Jason Cravette (Patrick O'Neal, giving a workmanlike Vincent Price impression) has, who first strangles his fiancé and then forces a priest to wed him to the corpse. Afterwards, it's off to a wedding night of corpse hair-fondling, the classic stand-in for necrophilia.

Jason is a madman, but he surely isn't a mad genius, so he holes up in one of the better brothels of the town, passing his time with dressing up a blonde prostitute who resembles his dead bride in a wedding gown and fondling the poor woman's hair while she has to play dead.

The police are as ineffectual as usual in films like this, so it is a pair of amateur detectives/house of wax owners (Cesare Danova - as bland as the younger hero is supposed to be & Wilfrid Hyde-White in his usual role) who track Cravette down.

The poor man is sentenced to death, but manages to escape; well, most of him does, he has to sacrifice his right hand to survive.

After a short stint in New Orleans where he acquires the sonic screwdriver of hook hands and an "adventuress" (Laura Devon) as a decoy, he returns to Baltimore and gives up on his old necrophiliac habits, instead opting for the more traditional business of vengeance. Will he be able to kill all those responsible for his death sentence? Will his decoy fall in love with the bland hero? Where will it all end?

 

Chamber of Horrors was initially the pilot episode of a TV mystery show, but the powers that be at Warner Brothers decided the whole thing was a tad too deviant to be shown on TV, and added a few things (including five seconds of Tony Curtis) for a cinematic run.

The best thing they added (sorry Tony) was the HORROR HORN, a visual and acoustic cue for the gullible viewer that is supposed to warn her of the four most terrifying moments of the movie. One might as well close one's eyes as the film recommends - it's not as if it showed anything after the HORROR HORN sounds one hadn't already seen before that. William Castle would have been proud.

William Castle is also an excellent reference point for the good-natured cabinet of horrors mood the film has. It's just a shame that director Hy Averbeck was such a typical TV director of his time, never showing an ounce of creativity when workman-like playing by the book sufficed. It is a little sad to imagine what someone a little more courageous could have done with the script.

This isn't to say it is a bad movie - the script moves along at a nice pace, and while it may be cliched it has a nice sense when to use those clichés for good effect. It also shows decidedly more sympathy for an "adventuress" like Marie than most films of its time would have done. Add this to the (sadly soon dropped) necrophilia of the villain and the quite ironic occupation of the heroes and you get a little more than you initially asked for.

In the first place, House of Horrors is just good old fashioned fun, and while I might lament what could have been done with a little more daring, I can't help but like the film as the entertaining mystery it is.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,reviews,mystery

La Notte Dei Dannati (1971)

(This is based on a cut version of the Italian version of the film; the French version cut down on dialogue and added a lot of softcore lesbian footage; what is missing from the version of the film I have seen I do not know. I do know that this film cries out for a DVD.)

Jean Duprey (Pierre Brice) is a top-notch reporter specialized in weirder crime cases. When Prince Guillaume de la St. Laurent, an old, slightly eccentric friend (and who could blame someone with this name for being an eccentric?) of his writes him a barely understandable letter in which Jean also finds some coded hints leading to parts of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs Du Mal that don't explain the situation any better than the rest of the letter does, but all convey a certain mood of coming doom, the journalist is worried enough to grab his wife Danielle (Patrizia Viotti) and drive out to Guillaume's house for a visit. After all, the letter can be interpreted as an invitation.

Guillaume's "house" turns out to be the most classic gothic castle you will have found still standing in 1971, complete with plate mails and labyrinthine hallways to make Horace Walpole blush. The household also doesn't partake of the delights of electricity.

Guillaume himself does fit into his home nicely with his physical frailty and his vague babbling about a terrible truth that drives all male members of his family mad and then slowly into death once they have reached the age of 35. Instead of explaining to Jean right out what the hell is wrong and what said truth might be, the Prince prefers first mumbling something about the impossibility of believing it, then a falling into a kind of fit that nearly kills him.

Later Guillaume's wife Rita Lernod (Angelo De Leo) explains a little of her husband's troubles. He has been getting weaker and weirder day by day thanks to a psychopathic dementia that will soon kill him.

Jean is not satisfied with the explanation (since when do people die of psychic illnesses?), nor with the less than trustworthy looking doctor who tends to his friend but keeps his peace.

On their first night sleeping at the castle, Danielle has the first of what will become a series of nightmares. She finds herself as a witch being burned at the castle of the de la St. Laurents, just as it is depicted in a drawing on her and Jean's bedroom wall.

The next evening Jean has a second meeting with Guillaume, who still prefers to speak in riddles, only letting on that the library of the house contains the key to the truth. Guillaume also gives Jean his amethyst ring. Some days later, Jean will find out that the ring contains another of his friend's patented "coded messages that aren't helpful at all".

A little later, Guillaume dies and is nearly instantly buried in the family crypt in a ceremony of doubtful orthodoxy but inherent creepiness.

Danielle is quite happy that this means she'll finally get to leave the castle that feels "evil" to her. The night before their planned departure, she has an even stranger dream. A naked Rita presides on a throne over some more naked young women. A shadowy figure carries an unconscious (and of course equally naked) young woman onto a kind of slab. Rita gets closer to the slab and scratches her victim's chest with suddenly claw-like fingernails.

The next morning, a naked young woman is found dead in the vicinity of the castle. There are no discernible wounds on her body, except for the scratches on her chest...

In a twist no regular viewer of any kind of film will have seen coming, the local police ask super reporter Jean to stay at the castle to help them(!) in their investigation. Probably as surprised as we are, he agrees to the proposition. Rita is glad to have him and especially Danielle in the house a little longer, so Jean starts a long and rather circumcisious investigation that leads him to more dead women and the dreaded truth that drove his friend mad.

All the while, Danielle falls more and more under Rita's hypnotic power, helpfully providing more naked breasts and a little lesbian frisson.

As should be clear from the synopsis, neither a tight nor an original plot are strengths of La Notte Dei Dannati (which translates to "Night of the Damned", by the way); the film instead uses every cliché of gothic horror one could wish to see, without any irony to speak of. The exclusion of irony or humor is a very commendable directorial decision. Irony would have transferred the film from the realm of the dream into the realm of the ridiculous.

The castle interior is a little gothic dream, its lack of windows keeping even daylight scenes mostly illuminated by yellow candle light (and the set looking less like a set). The first scene back in the modern world comes as quite a shock - the castle is so much part of a nightmare that it makes the outside world seem unreal. Additionally, the passage of time as seen in the movie seems slightly skewed in a way more cynical people will interpret as a weakness of the script, but that does in fact only strengthen the irreality of everything happening in the castle until we can't be surprised by Danielle's difficulties in distinguishing between dream and reality.

Director Filippo Ratti was no Mario Bava and had probably even less money to work with than Bava usually did, but he artfully creates the kind of slow and -and I must repeat myself here - dreamlike mood one looks for in an Italian gothic, mostly leaving logic behind for atmosphere and getting away with it easily.

My only real gripe with the film is a certain lack of pay-off. The climax is quite weak, the banishing of the witch looks more like an afterthought than like a grand finale. I am tempted to say this is in keeping with the dream state of the whole narrative, but it's probably more based on lack of funds as well as ideas on the side of the producers.

Be that as it may, La Notte Dei Dannati is a very fine film that deserves to be rediscovered. It should satisfy every friend of gothic horror.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,horror,reviews,gothic,filippo ratti,pierre brice

Mary Shelley Overdrive again

The talented, loud and garagey people of the quite wonderful band Mary Shelley Overdrive are at it again.

After giving away their last EP Hideous Sexy for free, they now present us with two more fine EPs (Shock Theatre & Bride of Shock Theatre) as free downloads.

You can find the download links on their web site.

When you're there already (and a bit better off than I am right now), you might as well think about buying their album.

 

Technorati-Tags: free music,mary shelley overdrive,links

In short: Moonchild (1974)

I'm not using this phrase all that often, so: What the hell did I just watch? It's the only film by a certain Alan Gadney, artfully photographed, lit and cut, but very confounding.

A young painter (Mark Travis, looking as puzzled as I must have), arrives at a mission that now is used as the strangest hotel not located in Twin Peaks or Japan. There he meets a bunch of strange people (including a fat and priestly Victor Buono and John "The Walker" Carradine). It seems he is caught in an endless cycle of repeating the same basic acts leading to his death over and over, since the time of the inquisition. That much of the plot is clearly discernible, but underlying it, every single character and every single act here is also highly symbolic of something having to do with the search for perfection in a mystical sense.

As far as I could discern, the symbolism is based on some part of the Western magic(k)al tradition, but not being Alan Moore, I barely understood half of it.

Still, it is a fascinating film: The acting is not bad, but so purposefully artificial and absurdly earnest even in the most ridiculous moments that it defies most concepts of good acting and arrives at a place only the most ruthlessly strange ever visit. The technically very proficient (if you ignore one boom mike smack in the middle of the picture), but highly weird (and of course symbolically overloaded) visuals do their best to make this one of the truthfully most trippy films I have ever seen.

Now, I can understand if someone finds the movie overwhelming and kind of irritating, but one thing it certainly isn't: boring.

 

Technorati-Tags: high weirdness,in short,american movies,john carradine,victor buono

The Vanguard (2008)

It's five years past doomsday somewhere in the English countryside. The attempt of "The Corporation" to kill three quarters of the world's population (to make the world a better place, of course) has badly backfired and instead created creatures called "Biosyns", basically the good old fast zombies. What is left of civilization is dominated by the Corporation and their brainwashed killer commandos.

Max (Ray Bullock, jr.) has been living alone in the wilderness for some years now, waiting for a man called Hareem Jabbar, who is supposed to help him find his way to a less lethal place without the Corporation or the Biosyns. Years of living completely alone and doing terrible things to survive, as well as fighting against the zombies have taken their toll on him. The competence with which he fights and survives seems to be based in barely controlled self-hate and rage.

Max's life is starting to change when a group of the Corporation's trackers is sent into his domain to neutralize him. They aren't the only survivors that he will meet, though. There are other people who want to get him to safety. If safety even exists...

 

Ah, the IMDb is still able to surprise me - not in a positive way of course. I just can't explain the negativity that place stinks of; the inability to take films for what they are is just puzzling.

User ratings and reviews there for The Vanguard are a great example of the kind of ignorance that turns the friendly guy next door into a hermit and the most self-controlled into a raving lunatic (Warning: I may be exaggerating, a little).

This film was obviously made for next to nothing, yet it still features surprisingly competent to really good acting, even without the mandatory incompetents in smaller roles. The ensemble carries the film in a way you seldom see in low budget films of this style.

The script makes a lot of a smattering of well-known pieces of post-apocalypse and zombie fiction, very conscious of the difficulty to make a film about the end of the world when the only location one can afford is a single patch of wood. Director/writer Matthew Hope avoids the pitfalls caused by this fact by letting his world building develop slowly, through bits and pieces and hints instead of too long expository dialogue. Sure, some of Max's off-screen monologue is bit flowery, but I'll take flowery over stupid any time.

Problematic for some could be the lack of much of a plot in the usual sense. Mood and characters are the points of interest here; it's about why characters are how they are and why they act like they act and less about the actions themselves. Which doesn't mean there's no action at all, there's just not much of a sense of outward progression that is part of a well plotted movies. Personally, I don't care all that much about plot, so I was fine with this point.

Visually, the film tries to create a sense of dynamics through much jittery camera movement and the use of the curse of film making in the digital age, filters. To my surprise, it succeeds most of the time - at least I never got nauseous or too annoyed.

I was also quite pleased with the Biosyns as a variation of the dreaded fast zombie as creatures more animals than walking corpses, something I don't think I've seen quite this way before.

So, if you can find a place in your heart for plot-deficient, character-heavy post-apocalyptic zombie films, I'd highly recommend this to you.

 

(Thanks to Lurple for pointing me into the direction of this movie.)

Technorati-Tags: british movies,matthew hope,sf,zombies,post-apocalypse,reviews,ray bullock jr

In short: Dr. Renault's Secret (1942)

Dr. Larry Forbes (Shepperd Strudwick - best name for the young male lead in a film of this kind I ever saw, to my chagrin billed as John Shepperd) has come to France to take his fiancé Madelon Renault (Lynne Roberts) back to the states with him to get married.

The first night he spends at an inn near the Renault's mansion, another traveling American is murdered there. The trouble is that the man was sleeping in a room that was supposed to be Larry's. It could be a coincidence, or someone could want to see Larry dead.

Dr. Renault (George Zucco) doesn't believe in such nonsense, but what would you expect from a man whose gardener is a convicted felon and whose servant Noel (J. Carrol Naish) is actually the product of Renault's experiments in transmutation - a gorilla who now is neither man nor beast?
Noel is completely infatuated with Madelon, which is no surprise since she is the only one who treats him with any decency; Dr. Renault being just too mad to be human in any way.

"Oh, who might be the killer?" he asked with a puzzled expression.

 

Dr. Renault's Secret was produced by Fox's b-division, compared to Poverty Row productions however it looks absolutely lavish. The script is technically a lot sounder than you'd see on Poverty Row, the higher budget does away with the need to stretch the running time with the help of much pointless dialogue. Instead, the film can afford something amounting to action.

Still, I can't help to think a Poverty Row film would be a lot more fun to watch. This movie's script might be comparatively tight, yet it is also lacking a certain amount of madness. That's the problem with solid craft - it seldom is as interesting as great craft or as surprising as amateur efforts can be.

The same can be said for Harry Lachman's direction. It's very competent but mostly lacking spark or fantasy.

The acting however makes the film worth watching anyway. Zucco is of course a wonderful mad scientist, even if his madness is a lot more low-key than we are used from him. The real star of the film is Naish who makes the ape-turned-man Noel a more tragic and much more believable character than he has any right to be. The apeman make-up here for once is rather effective as well, avoiding most of the silliness inherent in the concept.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,in short,george zucco,j. carroll naish,horror,mystery

In short: The Devil Has Seven Faces (1971)

For some reason she isn't aware of, Julie Harrison (Carroll Baker), an American living in Holland, is suddenly shadowed by, later even threatened by a bunch of gangsters and mysterious strangers from the home country. It seems her twin sister Mary was involved in a diamond robbery and made off with the booty. Her former partners now think Julie to be her sister and won't stop from anything to get it.

Fortunately, Julie can rely on the help of her lawyer Dave Barton (Stephen Boyd) who is infatuated with her and his friend Tony Shane (George Hilton), whom she promptly falls in love with. But is it possible that one or both of the men have other motives for their actions than their macho libidos? And what about the insurance investigator Steve Hunter (Luciano Pigozzi)?

 

The Devil Has Seven Faces is an entertaining if neither original nor aesthetically thrilling giallo of the apolitical criminal conspiracy sub-type. If you have seen a few of these films, you'll probably know how it will all end and which character has what secret just by my short plot synopsis and the actors playing them (come on, it's George Hilton!). But Osvaldo Civirani's direction moves at a nice pace and the main actors are all quite impressive in the same roles they are playing so often, so the film provides a nice enough time without delving into any of the depths other giallos explore or reaching the visual heights of films by Bava, Argento or Martino.

Additionally, the friend of Seventies fashion can find some fine examples of the work of colorblind designers in Baker's costumes, as well as some of the most atrocious wigs I ever had the dubious pleasure to see.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,giallo,carroll baker,george hilton,stephen boyd,luciano pigozzi,osvaldo civirani,in short

The Mountains Goats

aka John Darnielle, not satisfied with producing one of the records of the year, have just made their new EP Satanic Messiah freely available for download (of course with the possibility to donate a little money for the effort).

There's really no reason not to grab it here!

 

Technorati-Tags: music,links,the mountain goats,free music