In short: Atrocious (2010)

It takes a certain type of filmmaker to call his movie "Atrocious", for there's more than just a small risk of lazy or dissatisfied reviewers using exactly this word to describe it if they don't like it. In the case of Fernando Barreda Luna's Atrocious, it's also a rather unfitting title. On the other hand, who would call his movie more honestly yet certainly less excitingly "Quite Effective" or "Pretty Good"?

Plotwise, this Spanish/Mexican co-production concerns a family going on holiday in the mother's country family mansion. Right next to it, and locked off by a gate, is a labyrinth of wood paths. There's a ghost story about the woods in the area too. A ghostly girl named Melinda is supposed to haunt them, either - depending on the variation of the story - leading people traversing the woods at night astray or showing them the way.

The family's teenage children, Cristian (Cristian Valencia) and July (Clara Moraleda), are fascinated by ghost stories, so it's not much of a surprise when they disregard parental warnings and spend a day exploring the labyrinth with their trusty cameras, whose footage is of course the basis of the film. As one might expect, terrible things will soon enough start happening, and our protagonists will have good reason to make the mistake of visiting the labyrinth by night.

Surprisingly enough, Atrocious isn't completely going where you'd expect it to after a very Blair Witch-ish beginning. The film isn't exactly pioneering new ground for the POV style horror movie, but it's far from being one of those films of the sub-genre whose only ambition is to copy the films that came before it, but worse. Right now, POV horror can be easily divided into two groups: the films that want to be Blair Witch and those that want to be (Cthulhu protect!) Paranormal Activity, with the few films that want to be neither (because hey, they already exist) usually the ones worth watching. Atrocious has one foot in the territory of the first group of films, and one in the third, and it's exactly that point where one of its strengths lies. I've been so inundated by films without any ambitions of their own that something like Luna's film that uses the semblance of a Blair-Witch-alike to make its own simple story more effective works by virtue of not ending exactly like I expected or feared.

What sounds quite a bit like me damning it with faint praise isn't the film's only strength, though. Luna also shows a good hand for pacing, knows when and how to escalate the plot, how to keep things pleasantly, sometimes even suspensefully, tight, and even finds space to have a rather timeless big fear lurking in the thematic background. It's more than enough to make for a clever, entertaining little movie.

Technorati-Markierungen: spanish movies,mexican movies,in short,horror,fernando barreda luna,cristian valencia,clara moraleda

The Devil's Nightmare (1971)

Original title: La plus longue nuit du diable

aka Vampire Playgirls

A group of seven travellers (a glutton, a seminarist, an unfaithful husband and his rich and greedy wife, an old grump, an oversexed young woman and another one who really likes to sleep a lot) on a bus tour lose their way and have to spend the night in the castle of Baron von Rhoneberg (Jean Servais). While the baron is welcoming the seven with open arms, they soon realize something's not right with the place. The creepy butler Hans loves telling the guests about the violent deaths that happened in each room, all connected with the von Rhoneberg family curse that turns the firstborn daughter of every Rhoneberg generation into a succubus. So it's probably for the better the film showed the present Baron murdering his infant daughter in the pre-credit sequence.

The castle has a curious influence on the guests: they all indulge in their various obsessions - all part of one particular Deadly Sin - a little more openly, and suddenly, than people usually do. Most everyone's behaviour turns from strange to downright crazy once Lisa Müller (Erika Blanc), another tourist in dire need of a room, appears. It's pretty obvious Lisa is a servant of the Devil (Daniel Emilfork) himself, so it will not come as much of a surprise when the tourists die one after the other by her hand while indulging in their favourite sin. But will Lisa be able to bag herself a seminarist, too?

Leave it to a cooperation between Belgium and Italy to make the most Catholic 70s European horror movie I've seen that isn't about possession but about a succubus really doing very traditional devil's work by enabling people to indulge in their sins and then killing them before they can be absolved of these sins. How serious director Jean Brismée and his writers take the theological content of their film is of course questionable, for Devil's Nightmare is an exploitation film through and through, which means it is a film very much in the business of tut-tut-ing at people indulging in behaviour it tells us is morally corrupt while spending all of its running time showing us this behaviour with great enthusiasm.

I have seen sleazier movies made in Europe in the 70s, but The Devil's Nightmare still has more than enough room for close-ups of a guy over-eating, mock-lesbian shenanigans, Erika Blanc's attempts at seducing a seminarist, infidelity, Erika Blanc in simple yet effective demoness make-up, breasts (though it has to be said that the film's sex scenes, at least in the cut I watched, are rather on the harmless side and only interested in showing off a little naked actress rather than in the simulated sex they have), and a wee bit of violence.

Devil's Nightmare isn't quite as stylish, or crazy, or sleazy as some of its (especially Italian) counterparts in the European horror game of the era. I wouldn't call its aesthetics exactly conservative, but from time to time, I wished it would indulge its own flights of fancy a little more. Some of its sleaziness just feels a bit awkward, especially in the lesbian sex scene and the final seduction attempt of our seminarist hero Blanc indulges in, rather than like it should feel - an attempt to be sleazier, or cruder, or more tasteless than all films that came before, and certainly sleazier than the audience expects.

As it stands, the film is at its best whenever it comes closest to the feeling of a dream (which is especially appropriate for this particular film for plot reasons), or involves some actual fairy tale tropes. There's a scene of a deal with the devil right out of a (Catholic) fairy-tale that I found particular effective in that regard.

Taken as a whole, Brismée's film is taking up the middle ground of this particular type of European horror movie. The Devil's Nightmare is not quite outrageous or colourful enough to win my heart completely, but contains enough of the good stuff to be worthy of my time.

Technorati-Markierungen: belgian movies,italian movies,reviews,horror,jean brismée,erika blanc

Music Monday: Letter Edition

Technorati-Markierungen: music,music monday,roddy frame

Berlino - Appuntamento per le spie (1965)

aka Spy in Your Eye

A death-ray inventing scientist is shot while trying to leave East Berlin for greener pastures. Now everyone is after the scientist's daughter Paula (Pier Angeli), assuming she knows her father's final - and probably awesome - formula. The Americans send in Bert Morris (Brett Halsey), an agent with only minor smugness problems, to free Paula from Russian hands.

But even after he's rescued/caught her (an American agent wearing a fake hunchback kitted out with in-built blade for a novel interpretation of backstabbing and a radio, and construction equipment are involved), Paula still assures Bert and his buddies, as she did with the Russians, that she knows nothing at all about any formulas. Why, she can't even remember telephone numbers. Of course, nobody believes that, so the Russians, the Chinese (whose agents all wear bowler hats for some reason, and whose boss of course is named Ming - Fu Manchu wasn't available that day, I assume) and the Americans take turns in kidnapping, re-kidnapping, freeing, torturing and trying to sweet talk Paula. The poor woman changes hands so often, you'd think it's a handball match. When the various agents aren't treating Paula as their favourite object, they're jetting around the globe to follow up on other hints regarding the formula.

Curiously, the Russians always seem to know what the Americans are going to do next. The explanation is as simple as it is ridiculous: they've implanted a camera with integrated microphone in the eye of Bert's boss Colonel Lancaster (Dana Andrews), and are now listening in on him out of the reddest and most conspicuous vehicle they could find. You can't even trust doctors putting experimental artificial eyes into your eyeholes anymore, it seems.

Yes, Berlino (a film that does not spend much time in Berlin, by the way) is another case of a Eurospy movie that lives from and dies of its ability to press as much excellent nonsense into its running time as possible.

Structurally, the film is a total mess, so episodic the things that happen on screen never cohere into an actual story, with characters appearing for ten minutes or so only to never be mentioned again, and plans and motivations changing on a moment's notice. Fortunately, my cult movie addled brain has long since given up on a need for coherence, so if I encounter a film like this where every second scene seems to stand alone, I just attempt to enjoy what these barely connected scenes have to offer.

In this particular case, these offers are ridiculous and manifold.There's the usual number of bad martial arts fights, punch-ups, chases and shoot-outs, of course, all realized by director Vittorio Sala with somewhat bland professionalism.

At the very least, I can't complain about a lack of variety, be it geographically or otherwise, for there's some actual location work on display in material that might even have been shot for the film at hand. Large parts of the movie do take place on Italian soundstages, though. These aspects of the film are okay enough, though would make it nothing to write home about if not for the film's real strength.

That strength is of course a love for - often quite inexplicable - nonsense. There are not only the whole camera business, the particularly cheap yet silly gadgets, and the final explanation for the location of the formula to stare in delighted disbelief at, Berlino includes so much more. Take for example the Russian plan to kill Brett by letting him activate the knifing modus of a wax figure representing Napoleon; or the fact that the Russian agents seem to carry Napoleon around with them wherever they go, even after their fiendish attempt failed. One would assume more than one of the film's five scriptwriters to had realized neither the plan nor the whole Napoleon wax figure mascot thing make any sense at all, but somehow wax Napoleon still made his way in to put a smile on my face; possibly even to induce me to giggle.

This is symptomatic for the whole film: nothing ever makes sense, and when the writers find a way to shovel in stuff like the Russian's final secret lair whose interior moves about awkwardly, slowly and very loudly when things need to be hidden (that feature is of course controlled by an eminently visible row of buttons, and will cost the female Russian agent her life when it turns out she doesn't know how to jump about fifty centimetres upwards onto a slowly moving piece of furniture) instead of something sensible or logical, they will.

It's all more than enough to let the willing viewer get over little things like that lack of coherence or sanity.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,reviews,eurospy,vittorio sala,brett halsey,pier angeli,dana andrews

In short: Upperseven (1966)

Original title: Upperseven, l'uomo da uccidere

aka The Spy With Ten Faces

aka The Man of a Thousand Masks

British super agent Paul Finney aka Upperseven (Paul Hubschmid) and freelance agent of evil Kobras (Nando Gazzolo) have been clashing repeatedly, even though poor Kobras doesn't even know his best enemy's face thanks to Upperseven's love for those spy movie rubber masks that perfectly simulate real faces.

Their enmity comes to a head when Kobras and his equally evil girlfriend Birgit (Vivi Bach) get involved in the plans of "an oriental country" to prevent the creation of Pan-Africa. These plans for some reason involve the poisoning of a Swiss water reservoir, the theft of US money, and the building of a rather fantastic missile base in Ghana.

Of course, Upperseven is on the case soon enough, using his ability to dress up as whatever seems appropriate or fun, and his other ability of being quite good at punching people in the face to save world peace. Our hero is assisted by CIA agent Helen (Karin Dor), an expert in needing to be rescued. Together, there's no trap they won't stumble into but survive. Will Rosalba Neri pop up in an inconsequential role? Will Upperseven disguise himself as Kobras and seduce Birgit while Helen waits for him in a cell during the course of the movie? Will the villains' lair explode? You bet.

Upperseven is a fine demonstration that the right director can make even the most threadbare Eurospy movie (this is an Italian/German co-production fortunately and obviously creatively dominated by the Italian side) a fun time for its audience.

And threadbare the movie really is: Italy has to stand in for half a dozen countries including Ghana, the film's secret spy lairs are made out of soundstages, warehouses and blinking lights, and the plot makes particularly little sense even in a genre that is based on turning the utter nonsense of the Bond movie plots into even greater nonsense.

On that surface level, the only thing Upperseven has going for it is a very game cast. Sure, one could argue that Hubschmid is a bit too suave, and Dor her usual pretty but totally boring self, but then one would have to find time for thoughts like this in a film as hell-bent on entertaining its audience with every Eurospy movie cliché available.

Director Alberto De Martino (a typical Italian genre director with a filmography containing much of the ridiculous and the boring, yet also of the sublimely ridiculous and the fun) obviously realized that the one thing standing between his film and a bored and frustrated audience was his willingness to never let his film stop throwing something cheaply entertaining at his audience for a single second. Consequently, De Martino bombards us with one enthusiastic fistfight, mock martial arts battle, car chase, motorcycle chase, scene of rubber mask wonder, change of country while actually staying in the same country, and so on and so forth after the other, all driven by an archetypical - and therefore wonderful - Bruno Nicolai score. Taken isolated from each other, there's nothing special about any of the film's elements, but De Martino presents them with so much conviction, sometimes with what feels like a barely held in check desperation to entertain, they can't help but add up to a hundred minutes of pure Eurospy fun.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,german movies,in short,eurospy,alberto de martino,paul hubschmid,karin dor,vivi bach,nando gazzolo,rosalba neri

On WTF: The Pact (2012)

One of the true pleasures in horror of the last decade or so for me has been a resurgence in tales of ghosts and hauntings. Sure, not all of these films are great, but regularly, one will stumble upon a fantastic example of the sub-genre.

Case in point is Nicholas McCarthy's The Pact. Click on through to my column on WTF-Film and hear me gush!

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,horror,nicholas mccarthy,caity lotz,casper van dien,other places

In short: Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita (2012)

aka Humanity Has Declined

As the title of this twelve-part anime show states, in its nearly post-technological future, mankind has entered a state of stagnation and decline, with the remainders of humanity living a rather bucolic and peaceful looking life. It's a very soft apocalypse, where no punky raiders ride around in dune buggies to rape and pillage. Instead, what's left of humanity takes its own end with a slightly melancholic shrug of their shoulders.

The new dominant species (or as the show calls them "the new humanity") on Earth are the Fairies, weird yet probably well-meaning little creatures with a thing for hats and sweets and horrifying and/or cute ever-smiling holes where their mouths are supposed to be. Oh, they also can do magic. And science. Or something.

The show's nameless, pink-haired protagonist returns to her home village (humanity can't do the whole "city" thing anymore) to work as an UN mediator between humans and fairies. She's really rather good with the fairies, but she still gets into a bunch of strange, hair-raising and often wickedly funny (on more than one level) adventures, like having to thwart the world-domination plan of naked chickens, or becoming trapped in a manga where she has to survive the horrors of actual Japanese manga magazine culture, or surviving the the mandatory "Groundhog day" time vortex episode (which does not take up ten episodes, and includes a most curious tea party). It all ends up in a surprisingly poignant and complex boarding school adventure that would be the stuff of a whole season in most other shows.

As the show merrily jumps around in its internal time line, there's no major plot developing. Storylines usually take up two episodes and merrily take from the part of otaku culture the show's producers want to explore, send up, or work in this week. These genre detours get plenty crazy, but they never lead to a show that only consists of pieces of other shows or cultural artefacts. Instead, Jinrui manages to take these bits and pieces and make them intrinsic parts of itself; I'd even say it could stand on its own for a viewer who doesn't even get half of its winks and nudges.

Still, that structure should by all rights lead to a rather random show, and if you only look at its very surface, Jinrui is rather random (like its fairies). On a thematic and emotional level, though, there is more than one through-line to the show, with melancholic yet hopeful acceptance the emotional tenor between all the craziness the show can come up with.

Surprisingly, all that randomness also manages to add up to the sort of somewhat coherent worldbuilding where even the more bizarre elements begin to make sense once you put them in context with each other. Of course, the show expects its viewers to do large parts of that effort themselves, so if you don't, it's just adorably random, which is also well and good.

The show's main director Seiju Kishi and composer (aka lead writer) Makoto Uezu belong to the type of contemporary commercial anime workers who seem to be doing just about any kind of show, with no philosophical through-line I could find, so it's impossible to position Jinrui in the context of a body of work, seeing as most of what they have done lacks any personality of its own as far as I can tell . Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita on the other hand, is all personality.

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese tv,anime,in short,sf,comedy,seiji kishi,makoto uezu

Three Films Make A Post: IN BLOODY PANIC COLOR

Prometheus (2012): I was going into this completely willing not to believe any critical word I've read about Ridley Scott's Alien prequel, for when have mainstream film critics ever gotten genre films? Unfortunately, this one really is as dumb and ill-thought out as they say, with some basic plot ideas that could have made for an interesting piece of visionary SF/horror, like Arthur C. Clarke meets Lovecraft, if any of the lavish detail that went into the production design had found its way into the script. Instead, there are character who aren't even clichés (wasting a great cast) acting like idiots, characters who also are not even vaguely believable as people, ideas that are never explored, a plot that's driven by everyone being an idiot, random crap that just came into the writers' heads and a painful willingness to be as tedious and uninteresting about everything as possible, and dialogue that could be improved by having the actors make farting noises instead. I'd go into more details, but then I have already wasted two hours of my life on this.

Chernobyl Diaries (2012): As far as horror movies about stupid, self-centered American tourists visiting Eastern Europe and dying of stupidity and because All Eastern Europeans Are Evil™ go, this one's kind of watchable. It just suffers from a way too slow build-up, with long long minutes of getting to know the main characters - turns out there's no reason to give a crap about them -, useless exposition (or do Americans really not know about Chernobyl?), and being co-written by Oren Peli, who, as I by now know, could not write a sympathetic or interesting character or an ending that's not absurdly dumb to save his life. But some of the pissed-off mutant stalk (get out of here, Stalker!) and attack scenes are realized quite well by director Bradley Parker and the locations are mildly creepy, so there is some entertainment to be had here.

I also have to give the film credit for going for a very bleak ending, even though it stretches the limits of my belief even more than the radiation mutants do.

Storage 24 (2012): A handful of people find themselves locked in with a very rude alien in a 24 hour storage facility. Unfortunately, before any monster movie fun can be had, lead actor and co-writer Noel Clarke aka Mickey from Doctor Who will have much space for a love triangle with two equally annoying partners, and many dispiriting soap operatics will occur. That part of the movie would be easier to stomach if the film bothered to make its characters interesting or even just give them actual character traits beyond "Noel Clarke is straight, and whines a lot, but he also wrote the script, so he will be our hero". As it stands, the film already had burned through all of my goodwill once the theoretically fun bits started, and just annoyed me with its alien monster by numbers, its drama by numbers and its plot by numbers, all told without any verve.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,british movies,sf,horror,in short,ridley scott,noomi rapace,michael fassbender,bradley parker,noel clarke

There Was A Little Girl (1981)

aka And When She Was Bad

aka Madhouse

aka Flesh and the Beast

aka Scared to Death

When she was a kid, Julia (Trish Everly) was abused by her twin sister Mary (Allison Biggers) so heavily, it comes as a bit of a surprise she actually managed to grow into a sane and caring teacher for deaf and hard of hearing children. One suspects her breaking off all contact with her sister as soon as she was able helped there.

But a few days before their shared twenty-fifth birthday, Julia's uncle, the priest James (Dennis Robertson), convinces her to visit Mary in the hospital where a now disfigured and deathly ill sister will probably spend the rest of her days. The meeting doesn't go well, to say the least. Mary's still crazy as a loon and promises Julia she'll make her birthday as horrible as she and her dog did when they were children.

The very next night, Mary and a security guard disappear from the hospital - actually, the security guard is killed by a dog, but that's a fact only the audience and the killer is privy to - and someone sneaks into the empty apartment above Julia's.

Soon, people around the teacher begin to disappear, and her new secret neighbour threatens her in circumspect ways. Of course, the father figures in her life - Father James and her boyfriend Sam (Michael MacRae) - don't believe Julia when she reasonably assumes that something very bad is up, and this something most probably has something to do with her sister. Otherwise, things couldn't culminate on her birthday.

I'm not sure if Ovidio G. Assonitis' There Was is an attempt to giall-ify the slasher or one to slash-ify the giallo. What I do know is that the result of the director's fiendish experiment in unholy movie genre surgery suggests the crossing of the two sister genres is one of those Things Man Isn't Meant To Do.

The film begins rather promising, with many a well-photographed scene, decent acting, and just the right note of hysteria in the way the plot develops. It's not exactly "believable" in the naturalistic interpretation of that word, but the film's early stages work well as one of these "your worst fears come to life" deals for our poor, beleaguered protagonist. Though the first cracks begin to show early on too: Riz Ortolani's soundtrack starts out like a standard giallo/thriller deal, but whenever the killer stalks his/her victims, the music turns into an unending series of decidedly videogame-y pew-pew noises that suggest the children Julia is teaching aren't the only ones deaf here. Needless to say, it's a highly original way to sabotage a film's suspense scenes.

The longer the movie goes on, the worse its pacing becomes. What begins sprightly enough turns tedious at about the halfway mark. After the killer is unmasked for the audience (as if there ever was any doubt), the stalking scenes become longer and longer but not more inventive. The film's special low point is an endless cat and mouse game between the killer and Julia's landlady that isn't just tedious, but also suggests both the killer and the landlady to be the two stupidest persons alive.

And while I'm talking about the killer, the final nail in the film's coffin is the fact that, once he's unmasked, Assonitis decides to give him endless space to ramble, sing (oh, the singing) and play crazy until a character that should be relentless, menacing and creepy turns into a pure annoyance. It's never a good sign when the first thing a viewer wants from a killer in a movie is to just finally shut up and kill someone. But hey, at least there's a scene concerning a door, a badly faked dog head and Sam wielding an electric drill.

It's a bit of a shame that particular ridiculous set piece is the film's only late act highpoint, for its early stages suggest Assonitis would have well been able to make a suspenseful giallo/slasher hybrid; it's even more of a shame how much of the film's final breakdown is self-inflicted by the inability of its director to realize when a character really needs to shut up.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,reviews,giallo,slasher,horror,ovidio g. assonitis

Music Monday: Fortress Edition

Technorati-Markierungen: music,music monday,pinback

Crypt of Dark Secrets (1976)

Crypt of Dark Secrets' director/writer/producer Jack Weis is one of my personal favourites among regional US independent filmmakers - may the appropriate Godhood have mercy on me - but even I have to say that Crypt (by the way not a movie containing any crypts, unless "crypt" is now the word used to describe one awkwardly fake gravestone), unlike Weis's masterpiece Mardi Gras Massacre, is predominantly a masterpiece of awkwardness. But a masterpiece is a masterpiece, so there's that.

To call the film's plot loose would be pretending it to be quite a bit tighter than it actually is. As it stands, a Korea and Vietnam War vet (as the film's characters never tire to explain, he was a Ranger) named Ted Watkins (Ronald Tanet) whose particular talents include never moving a facial muscle, showing off his chubby chest, and keeping his money in a bread box, moves into a house on a haunted island in the Louisiana Bayous. Said haunting is an immortal woman named Damballa (Maureen Ridley). Damballa likes to spend her time jazz-dancing (when in doubt naked), swimming a lot, awkwardly levitating, and turning into a snake.

From particularly awkward flashbacks and awkward cop exposition we learn she's an Aztec (from an Aztec culture that has nothing whatsoever to do with actual Aztec culture, of course), spending a few thousand years on the island until a man will appear there on whom she will practice naked jazz-dancing and to turn him into someone moving between life and death as herself, which will certainly have some sort of effect on, um, something. Anyhow, did you know the Aztecs invented voodoo?

There are also some local yokels trying to kill Ted for his money after they learned of his bread-boxing habits in a bank so excellent, its owner asks a new customer where he stores his money right in front of other customers, but that only ends in them being voodoo-ed to death by a voodoo priest servant of Damballa's who for some reason first sends them looking for (and finding) the treasure of Jean Lafitte. And to an inexplicable scene of Damballa nakedly and somewhat obscenely jazz-dancing over a sarcophagus.

Honestly, I have no idea what I just watched, but I do know I now have a better opinion of jazz-dancing.

But let's talk about Crypt's awkwardness a little, or rather, let me explain my two favourite bits of awkwardness from the movie (not including all the awkwardness I already mentioned, for repeating that would be rather awkward). Firstly, there are various forms of incredibly awkward acting, reaching from the "aw shucks I was born in the swamp" mock-naturalist acting of the yokels, to the Joe Friday stiffness of the cops who won't ever stop expositing things they've either already told us or we've already seen (or both), the Jim Caviezel facial paralysation stylings of Ted, to Maureen Ridley's inexplicably slow and pause-heavy line delivery that suggests she's reading her lines from some helpful cards but alas can't read very well. It's all very inspiring in a "everyone can act" kind of way.

Secondly, there's the dance choreography for Ridley (and sometimes for what we must call her voodoo ballet). Now, it's pretty clear Ridley knows much more about shaking, shimmying and writhing than she does about acting, and in that regard, being the kind of guy I am, I find it difficult to criticize her. Yet all of her dance sequences are so, well, awkwardly and weirdly choreographed it's difficult to find them as erotic as they are probably supposed to be. Perhaps Weis was going for a Jess Franco effect here, where the bizarreness of a given dance is often meant to emphasise and enhance its fetishist aspects. The dancing in Weis's film mostly had me staring at the screen with my patented "what the hell" face I usually reserve for French gore movies from the 80s and Weird Fu films from Taiwan.

It's obviously all enough to make a boy like me ponder if "awkward" and "awesome" aren't interchangeable, and that's before I have even mentioned the excellent (though awkwardly placed) swamp photography of the film that provides the always important local colour, or explained that I felt amused, befuddled and confused for the film's whole awkward seventy minutes.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,jack weis,ronald tanet,maureen ridley,horror

In short: Alien Factor 2: The Alien Rampage (2001)

Somebody has stolen some uranium and a Porsche from a nuclear plant somewhere in Maryland. A pair of FBI agents (soon-to-be dead Joe Ripple and Patrick "My character name is Agent Love" Bussink) are hot on the thief's trail through the backroads, but when they catch up with him in the woods near an idyllic small town, they learn that he's a) female and b) an alien (played by LauraLee O'Shell) who is very good at playing possum. Because Agent Love plays with the alien's spaceship remote, a deadly force field surrounds the woods and the town, and a bad-tempered cyborg (Bill Ulrich) soon goes on the titular rampage.

Will the local Sherriff's department (George Stover, Shannon Butch, Steven King) and their boss Allison Smith (Donna Sherman), a couple of tourists (Jaime Kalman and Jonas Grey), and Agent Love manage to protect the free world from the alien menace?

In the early 00's, Baltimore's greatest son Don Dohler, king of the provincial rubber suit monster movie, must have gotten bitten by the movie bug again, for he wrote, produced, and in two cases directed, another handful of horror films.

Alien Factor 2 is a non-sequel sequel whose plot has nothing to do with the film it's supposedly following up on; even the returning actors play different roles. In spirit, Alien Factor 2 is a true sequel, though, filled to the brim with all the things you love or loathe about Dohler's films. Firstly, the film is full of the expected stiff and awkward acting, with many cast members enunciating their (generally silly and stiff) lines as if they were afraid the words would bite them, and others indulging in various versions of off-beat scenery chewing or acting as if they'd prefer themselves to be part of the scenery. Character-wise, the film has the usual assortment of curious local stereotypes (there's little less threatening than Dohler-style bikers) acting oddly, suggesting the film's alien and her cyborg to be not the only ones not from planet Earth on screen.

Secondly, Dohler's sense of the dramatic didn't much improve in the intervening years between his classic phase and this one. The film is still full of non-sequitur scenes of people doing nothing of import and little interest, jumpy transitions, and a general feeling of awkwardness, as if the script were barely held together with spit, chewing gum, and good intentions. From time to time, the Very Dramatic™ synth score attempts to convince the audience how exciting the things happening on screen are, but always finds itself deserted by the slightly awkward staging of the action scenes and the general laid back feeling of the film.

On paper, all these Dohlerisms make for a terrible movie, but in truth, Alien Factor 2 is as charming and amusing as the movies Dohler made in his prime. The film's inability to be slick, the way it turns a (sort of) alien invasion into something manageable on the scale of a handful of small-town police, two tourists and a useless FBI agent, the way it smells and feels like a particular place and time, all are characteristics generally frowned upon in filmmaking, but they give Alien Factor 2 a personality and an individuality I find impossible to resist.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,sf,horror,don dohler,donna sherman,george stover

On WTF: Der Fälscher von London (1961)

aka The Forger of London

Perhaps the greatest problem the German Edgar Wallace adaptations made by Rialto Film had was the intense family resemblance of many of the films. Once you've seen enough of them, they become a confusing mass of masked villains, smirking detectives, bowler hats, fog, Eddi Arent, evil reform schools, Klaus Kinski and young heiresses in need to be kidnapped.

That's not a problem Der Fälscher von London shares with the rest of the series. What the film puts in the stead of many of the usual elements, I'll tell you in my column over at WTF-Film.

Technorati-Markierungen: reviews,other places,german movies,krimi,harald reinl,karin dor,hellmut lange,siegfried lowitz

Three Films Make A Post: Half-man half-beastbird... swooping on his human prey... drinking blood... mutilating flesh!

Blackaria (2010): This is the other low budget homage to Italian horror cinema and the giallo by French directors Francois Gaillard and Christophe Robin, but where Last Caress was mining the totality of the giallo and Lucio Fulci-style horror, this one is a love letter to Dario Argento from Deep Red to Phenomena. Unlike Last Caress, this one also has an actual plot, but given the roughness of the script, the - how shall I say? - problematic intelligence of said plot, not to speak of what I can only read as its rampant misogyny, that's not necessarily a good thing. Again, you'll also need a high tolerance for amateurish acting and a non-professional feel, but just might be compensated for your patience by the film's cheap yet loving art direction, the excellent editing and a lot of style. This is clearly again a film made by fans of Italian horror for other fans of it exclusively, so you'll probably already know if Blackaria is for you or not.

Gun Crazy: Episode 2 - Beyond the Law (2002): Atsushi Muroga is one of the better directors of Japanese 90s/00s direct to video action fodder, and while this concoction about a cute, idealistic female lawyer (Rei Kikukawa) finding herself trying out the at first rather more simple seeming law of the gun isn't exactly a hidden gem, it's among the more watchable films from this part of the Japanese movie industry. The problem with these films is often that they're produced so cheaply they can't actually afford all that much action - which is a bit of a problem in supposed action films - and have to replace it with weirdness (if you're lucky), melodrama, and empty warehouses. Muroga generally knows how to handle these things with a certain degree of style, and here avoids the genre's all too typical boredom by judicious application of slow motion, entertaining pseudo-philosophy, and choice moments of leather and guns porn. It's not great filmmaking, but it's entertaining enough.

Cosmopolis (2012): Not to sound like one of those people who hate any movie with intellectual ambition, but nearly two hours of expressionless puppets declaiming stiff (I'd bet taken one to one from DeLillo's novel) dialogue that confuses depth and obtuseness are nothing to endear a movie to me, particularly when nothing the film has to say is all that complicated or deep. In fact, I can't help but suspect this is a case of a film hiding its lack of intellectual rigour behind gestures to suggest DEEP ART. My disillusionment with Cronenberg continues apace. At least the soundtrack is pretty great.

Technorati-Markierungen: french movies,japanese movies,canadian movies,horror,action,girls with guns,sf,atsushi muroga,francois gaillard. christophe robin,rei kikukawa,david cronenberg,in short. italian movies

In short: A Noite do Chupacabras (2011)

Somewhere in the Brazilian countryside (that is to my German eyes, the jungle), a violent family feud between the Silva and the Carvalho families has been smouldering for a few years even though both families have gone into a truce after the Silva's pretty much lost the fight.

When wayward Silva son Douglas (Joel Caetano) returns to the family home with his pregnant girlfriend Maria Alicia (Mayra Alarcón) in tow, he couldn't have come at a worse time; there's a story hanging on this return having to do with Maria Alicia's drug problem and his study of medicine, but that sort of thing is harmless compared to what the couple finds at home.

Something has been attacking and killing the family's goats for the last few weeks, leaving the father convinced a chupacabra (played by Walderrama Dos Santos with a well-developed body language that often manages to make the monster suit threatening and always manages to make the monster feel alien) is at work in the area. The old man's right, too, but that truth will only be revealed once circumstances consisting of chupacabra-spoiled meat, projectile vomiting, his own death by exploding ancient gun, and all-around insanity reignite the family feud with the added complication of a really ill-tempered monster.

When last we met Brazilian director Rodrigo Aragao, he made the flawed yet entertaining Mangue Negro (please excuse the quality of that particular review) for obviously little money but with a lot of enthusiasm. It doesn't look as if Aragao's budget has risen much for his second feature A Noite do Chupacabras, yet neither has the obvious enthusiasm declined.

The film has some of the typical problems of independent horror cinema from all around the world in form of amateurish (but at least enthusiastic) acting, problematic pacing (the film's at least twenty minutes longer than it needs to be), and a plot that is more ambitious than the production circumstances actually allow it to be. Of course, I do prefer a film that is ambitious yet can't fulfil its ambitions to one that doesn't ever bother to have any ambitions, but there is something to say for actually pulling off one's more ambitious ideas.

Much of what we see in the film's first half or so is a curious combination of horror movie clichés, said ambitions, and moments that actually work, and if the film had continued in this manner, I would probably not even have written any of this, for the film up to that point is too much of a likeable effort with too little pay-off to write even a grumpy piece on it. But then the film and its characters basically lose their shit for forty minutes or so beginning with the projectile vomiting scene. From then on, it's all people screaming, killing each other in home-made gory ways, high melodrama, sudden cannibal black magician appearances (that guy is actually part of the backstory, but that's just another case of the film being too ambitious for its own good), chupacabra birth dream sequences, cursing, and chupacabra carnage. It's certainly not high art, but it's also always far from being boring.

Add to that the fact that some of the film's jokes are actually funny (favourite moment: the teachable moment about the uses of religion), some good camerawork, an unconventional percussion soundtrack, the excellent use of locations (tickling my old love for horror films making use of the local instead of trying to appear universal), and again the feeling of enthusiasm, and you have yourself a flawed yet fun horror movie.

Technorati-Markierungen: brazilian movies,in short,horror,rodrigo aragao,mayra alarcon,joel caetano,walderrama dos santos

On WTF: Arena (1989)

Sports movies are kind of boring, aren't they?

But what a about a sports movie taking place in true space opera outer space, about an Earthling proving once and for all that humans are the best when it comes to physical violence?

That's a question this week's column on WTF-Film and Arena are going to answer.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,peter manoogian,paul satterfield,hamilton camp,claudia christian,marc alaimo,shari shattuck,sf,sports,other places

Music Monday: Hearse Edition

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Satan's School For Ghouls: The Devil Rides Out (1968)

This October, the agents of M.O.S.S. are digging deep into the heart of Halloween, taking a look at films about demons, the devil, and every kind of fiend (with a particular emphasis on devilish fiends). You can find our collected annals of evil here.

Since my last stint with Satanists left me quite disappointed with the actual Satanic content of the movie, I decided to dig into the piles of DVDs in my den and grab the most Satan-inclusive movie I could find. That turned out to be Hammer's The Devil Rides Out, which certainly doesn't say much for my luck or my taste.

Initially, the Duc de Richleau (Christopher "I'm not Dracula, damn you! And where is my money, you peasant?" Lee), and his old friend Rex Van Ryn (Leon Greene) only want to celebrate a reunion with their younger friend Simon Aron (Patrick Mower). But Simon has removed himself from his friends - which seems to be a natural step once one has met the two, to be honest. The Duc is wary of his young friend's near-disappearance, though, so off he and Van Ryn go to visit him in the gigantic mansion he just bought. There, a small party is going on, but the Duc quickly realizes (the number of guests - 13 -, a few astrological charts, a devil head mosaic and a white and a black chicken in a cupboard are his clues) that Simon has become a junior member of a Satanic cult led by a certain Mocata (Charles Gray).

De Richleau attempts to convince Simon that his new lifestyle is not proper, but apart from causing a lot of perspiration in the young man, he is not very successful at it. So he does the obvious thing, punches Simon out, kidnaps him, and hypnotizes him for a good night's sleep.

Mocata is more powerful than the Duc expected, though. He uses his awesome mental powers to get Simon to flee the lair of his kidnappers while the Duc tries to convince Van Ryn - who remains curiously sceptical for someone who just took part in several crimes - of the reality of the occult.

Getting Simon back before he can be fully inducted into the service of the goat-footed means a lot of work for our heroes: they have kidnap Tanith (Nike Arrighi), another junior member of the cult, to find out where Simon might be held, have to disturb the most polite Satanic orgy, and will even have to take on the lamest embodiment of Satan ever.

However, even once Simon and Tanith are both in our heroes' (such as they are) hands, Mocata still has a couple of tricks down his sleeves, like doing giant spider special effects like Bert I. Gordon and sending out the lamest angel of death ever.

As you may have surmised, Terence Fisher's The Devil Rides Out is far from being a highpoint of the Hammer movie catalogue or its director's filmography. Being based on a novel by Dennis Wheatley, bestseller author, communist eater, and self-declared expert in the occult, provides the movie with some rather well-researched bits and pieces of occult knowledge. Unfortunately, the film - as scripted by Richard Matheson who could do much, much better - does not seem what to actually do with the occultism trivia. It also inherits all of Wheatley's flaws, like the hilariously earnest believe in the dangers of all things occult that is as unconvincing as anything a true believer ever says, the writer's painfully humourless conservatism, and pacing that is actually too breathless for the story the film is trying to tell, leaving no room for minor things like characterisation or motivation for much of what happens on screen.

It doesn't help the film's case that its nominal heroes, the Duc and Van Ryn, are often grotesquely bad at their jobs, just jumping head over heels into every dangerous situation, never planning anything and wilfully putting other people in danger without making any believable attempts to keep those people safe. Especially great is the Duc's tendency to absent himself just shortly before the next dangerous situation happens, without ever putting any effort into protecting his partners, or - you know - just actually returning with anything worthwhile from his expeditions; if one were of a less pleasant nature than I, one might think he flees whenever he thinks things will get dangerous. In this respect, the Duc reminds me of Le Fanu's Martin Hesselius. Christopher Lee's performance makes the behaviour of his character even more funny, for this time around, he actually bothers to act, imbuing every word and gesture of the Duc with an intensity and seriousness bordering on hysteria. His grand gestures make for a lovely contrast to how ineffectual he is in anything he does. Note to scriptwriters: if ninety percent of the dangerous situations in your film occur because your heroes act like very dramatic fools, you might have a problem. And, you know, if the only way for them to conquer their enemies is to wait for an anti-climactic deus ex machina (though it is more a Jehovah ex machina here), you might try and look for better heroes.

Although it's not as if the film's Satanists were much better. Even though Charles Gray has some nice moments of hypnotic glowering of nearly the same intensity as Lee's performance, it's difficult to find his cult all that threatening (and really, I'm somewhat tempted to read the film as Christopher Lee and his cronies fighting against two young persons' rights to a free choice of religion). After all, their idea of an orgy does not even contain semi-nude dancing (it's in fact the most clothed Satanic ritual I can remember seeing in a movie), their goat-headed Satan is a passive gentleman easily repelled by a tiny cross, their biggest ritual can be easily disturbed by two idiots in a car, and when they send out the angel of death, it turns out to be an utter disappointment. It's really a bit embarrassing that our heroes need the hand of God to win the day.

Having said that, I also have to say that watching The Devil Rides Out is an enormous amount of fun. After all, it's a film that consists of countless scenes of Christopher Lee uttering pompous nonsense with the greatest intensity, the good guys and the bad attempting to outdo each other in being hilariously ineffectual only to be outdone by the film's "special" effects crew, and everybody involved looking enthusiastically ridiculous while seemingly being convinced of telling a story of great emotional and spiritual impact, which makes for a pretty irresistible movie, though probably not for reasons the filmmakers would have approved of.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,reviews,satan's school for ghouls,horror,terence fisher,christopher lee,charles gray

In short: Espionage in Tangiers (1965)

Original title: Marc Mato, agente S. 077

Finally, world peace is near, for a certain Professor Greff (Tomás Blanco) has invented a death ray for the International Atomic Energy Agency! Unfortunately, before the ray can be used for its true, peace-making, purpose (don't ask me what that may be), evildoers working for mastermind Rigo Orel (Alberto Dalbés) steal the magical little plate responsible for hot death ray action to sell it off to the highest bidder.

The Free World™ sends its smuggest psychopathic spy Mike Murphy (Luis Dávila) to get the item back. The trail leads to Tangiers, but, this being a eurospy movie and all, Murphy will have to do a bit more country hopping before the case is finished. When he's not tussling with Orel and his goons, he has various kinds of fun with his fuck buddy and spy-for-hire Lea (José Greci) who may or may not work for Orel, gets into trouble with a disgruntled ex-girlfriend and her goons, and kills and tortures as many people as he can.

On the surface, Gregg C. Tallas's Espionage in Tangiers is an archetypal eurospy movie that presents all the required elements of the subgenre with a certain degree of low budget verve. There's the ridiculous McGuffin everybody wants to get his or her hands on, the international travel where every country is represented by Spain (this being a eurospy movie where for once Spain and not Italy seems to have been the lead country of the production), various women of dubious loyalties for the hero to bed, and a lot of action scenes that are more enthusiastic than good. On that level, Espionage is quite a decent bit of entertainment.

However, watching the film, I became less and less enamoured with the film's cardboard charms and increasingly bothered by its unpleasant undercurrents. The eurospy genre often has a bit of a nasty undertone to it, which comes as no surprise from films mainly influenced by the not exactly friendly earl Connery Bond movies and each other, but for my tastes, Espionage too often steps over the line dividing the fun, "just kidding", type of unpleasantness and the truly nasty, especially since the film always tries to keep up the appearance of being a fun romp, instead of trying to make a point with its unpleasantness.

When I called Murphy a psychopath I wasn't exaggerating. Our "hero" - and the film absolutely presents him as a hero, ridiculously even letting him talk proudly of his moral code - is the kind of guy whose reaction to killing and torturing people is smirking, smiling and laughing in the most off-handed manner; it's absolutely clear he enjoys inflicting pain and suffering on others. When confronted with women, he really likes to let his fists speak, too (and yes, of course this is the sort of film where women enjoy sleeping with him after he abused them), giving the impression of a sexual sadist well on his way to becoming a serial killer. Weirdly, I find all that to be somewhat off-putting traits in my hero spies.

Again, my problem - obviously, given my tastes in films - isn't so much that Murphy and his enemies are violent and sadistic but that Espionage treats them as if they weren't, as if it, or its director Gregg C. Tallas, didn't actually realize having a laugh after throwing a knife into someone's throat is neither healthy behaviour nor a way to make a protagonist endearing.

Technorati-Markierungen: spanish movies,italian movies,gregg c. tallas,eurospy,luis dávila,josé greci

In short: Entrance (2012)

The film follows the eventless life of a disillusioned Los Angeles working poor (Suziey Block). Escalating events that should be disquieting occur at the periphery of her rather empty life, but they are drowned out by the quotidian until it is much too late for her.

What begins as a mumblecore-y, mostly improvised film shot hand-held and very digitally concerning the special kind of boredom of a very particular type of urban poor in Los Angeles slowly - some might argue too slowly - turns into quite a disturbing piece of horror.

How much a given viewer will enjoy the experience of watching Entrance will probably depend on his or her patience for scenes that are constructed to make the audience feel the central character's (excellently played) disillusionment and boredom with her life, possibly even life at large (this is not the sort of film where characters do much verbal self-analysis); in other words, large parts of Entrance are out to actively bore the audience. As consequently as it is done here, even early disturbances of our protagonist's routine are made to feel quite boring when we should by all rights find them threatening.

Boring one's audience on purpose is a difficult technique, and directors Dallas Richard Hallam and Patrick Horvath are not quite perfect at it. There were moments in the proceedings when I doubted the pay off to be worth the pain, and nearly didn't persevere, but after a scene of pointless tedium usually followed one of pointed tedium, so I did. The slow and boring parts lead into a very tightly done and pretty disturbing climax that would not have worked quite as well without what came before. However, one really needs a lot of patience and some tolerance for some of the particular tics of US non-horror indie filmmaking of the last few years to get something out of Entrance. The jittery camera, the mumbled dialogue, and the willingness to bore work out more than fine in the end, but they aren't exactly aesthetic markers to fall in love with.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,dallas patrick hallam,patrick horvath,suziey block,horror

Three Films Make A Post: For the sake of your sanity, pray it isn't true!

Final Exam (1981): The slasher elements of this campus slasher are as generic as possible, with little gore to distract one from the film's many technical flaws, one of the most teleport-y killers in any movie of the genre and a handful of truly ill advised attempts at copying Halloween directly, which isn't something you should try unless you're a really great director.

However, despite not being much of a horror movie, Jimmy Huston's local (North Carolina, to be precise) film won me over with its other charms. The weird rituals of fraternity culture, some Southern stereotyping done with great pleasure, and many a smile-inducing off-beat idea add up to the sort of homemade appeal regional slashers sometimes have. One could call it "heart". This is how a particular group of people dramatized the life and times and people they knew through the filter of a cheap horror movie, sharing it with a willing audience. That sort of personality is worth ninety minutes of one's time, even though the resulting film sucks as a horror movie.

The Island at the Top of the World (1974): Leave it to mid-70s Disney to make a movie about airship travel through the arctic, lost Vikings and other great elements of the extraordinary voyage school of adventure cinema, and have the results become nearly impossible to enjoy. It's all a matter of having all your characters being infuriating racist stereotypes or jerks the film doesn't want to realize are jerks, ruining every chance for audience immersion through tedious and unfunny humour, and incredibly bland acting throughout the non-humorous moments. Congratulations, you just ruined a sure thing.

Last Caress (2010): This is one of two loving homages by French filmmakers Francois Gaillard and Christophe Robin to the giallo and Italian supernatural horror. The film suffers a bit from cases of amateurishness in the acting department and its narrative structure, but makes up for that by so vigorously and lovingly copying the surface charm of Italian genre cinema (the colours! boots! nudity! the improbable gore! the iconic non-characters! the strange poignancy! the score!) on a budget it's impossible for me not to adore it a little. It's also truly impressive how well this is edited and how good it looks even though it's absolutely clear this was made by enthusiasts and not professionals on an enthusiast budget.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,french movies,in short,horror,adventure,fantasy,giallo,jimmy huston,francois gaillard,christophe robin

Satan's School For Ghouls: El Mariscal Del Infierno (1974)

aka Devil's Possessed

aka Marshall of Hell

This October, the agents of M.O.S.S. are digging deep into the heart of Halloween, taking a look at films about demons, the devil, and every kind of fiend (except US presidents and presidential candidates). You can find our collected annals of evil here.

Speaking of the devil, what would our old friend Satan be without worshippers? And how awesome would these worshippers be if they were played by Spanish super-wolfman Paul Naschy? Actually, not very, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

It's the middle ages. War hero baron Gilles de Lancré (Naschy) feels his influence on the king dwindling, and decides to concentrate even more than before on his true interest: finishing the Great Work of alchemy, so that he can afterwards replace the king (man why doesn't the guy trust him!?) and rule the world. So let's hope for him that Great Work isn't meant quite a metaphorically as some scholars believe.

Gilles's mad plan is driven on by the occultist (and con-woman) Georgelle (Norma Sebre). The two are lovers with quite a Macbeth-ish relationship, for when Gilles's pet alchemist (and Georgelle's co-con-person) tells him he needs virgin blood - and lots of it - to finish the Work, she's the one talking him out of his mild attacks of conscience ("Even more murders!?"). And she's right, too - surely, there can't be nothing wrong with sacrificing young women to Satan? Though it has to be said the film awakens doubts about Gilles's understanding of the word "virgin", seeing as how the way to the sacrificial altar seems to begin in his bed; at least if he's not inconvenienced in the act by an epileptic fit.

So Gilles begins a reign of terror among his serfs, kidnapping and killing young women and bleeding everyone else financially dry to finance the alchemical experiments. He's so enthusiastic he earns himself the nickname "the Marshall of Hell". But even medieval serfs can only take so much, so Gilles soon has a small peasant revolt going on. The serfs' leader, however, is quite easily captured and gotten rid of. Things change when Gilles's old war buddy Gaston de Malebranche (Guillermo Bredeston) comes home from time spent as prisoner of war. Even though the two men were fast friends, Gilles's and Georgette's love for tactically catastrophic violence soon turns Gaston into the baron's most dangerous enemy.

After a failed attempt on his life, Gaston decides to seek out the remnants of the resistance against his former friend, and soon enough turns what had been the demotivated shells of Gilles's enemies into a sub-chapter of Robin Hood's Merry Men. I'm sure Satan would help Gilles out if he actually existed inside of the fictional world of the film, but as it stands, all hope seems lost for the cause of evil, even though Gilles still has a few tricks up his sleeve.

When I started with my films for this October's M.O.S.S. project, I didn't suspect how difficult it would be to set eyes on films that actually contain the devil, demons, or at least supernatural fiends outside of their marketing material. Il Mariscal is not the film I was looking for, for what tries to look for all the world like a horror film variation of the career of Gilles de Rais, is at its heart a rather lame and tame swashbuckler whose bad guy just happens to sacrifice "virgins" to Satan.

Apart from this core disappointment, the film suffers from all the typical Naschy weaknesses: important, possibly exciting plot developments are talked about rather than shown (the build-up of the rebel army - happens off-screen; that first rebel leader - captured off-screen; and so on); a dubious sense of the way time works; a lack of production values that leaves most sets nearly empty; Naschy's obsession with trying to make his bad guy characters look sympathetic by having them whine a lot about what poor dears they are, which is a bit difficult to buy when talking about a character who mass rapes and murders women. Not that we'd actually get to see much of the depravity, because, unlike most of Naschy's films, this one is rather lacking in nudity and gore to help keep the audience awake.

For most of its running time, the film also lacks the secret weapon that keeps many of other Naschy's other films that share Mariscal's flaws at least watchable, often even brilliantly entertaining: an endearing love for the wrong-headed, the bizarre, and the improbable. Naschy's love for these things seems absolutely stunted in this outing, with little happening on or off screen that I wouldn't call quotidian.

I'd be less down on the film if it were any good as a swashbuckler (after all, "Robin Hood versus Satanists" sounds rather great, doesn't it?), but the swashbuckling is so rote and charmless it's impossible to get excited about it. It doesn't help the film's case how little visual imagination Naschy's regular collaborator León Klimovsky brings to the table here. Everything is very brown and slow and realized without passion, as if no one was even trying to let the film look like anything other than a handful of people in school play medieval garb waddling through brown, depopulated locations and sets without a designer. Just look at the so-called tourney with two horses and twenty guys standing in a row in the middle of nowhere and despair!

Among Mariscal's few positives is an expectedly melodramatic and physical performance by Naschy (his antagonist Bredeston is unfortunately not Errol Flynn, or even Richard Harrison). Naschy-the-actor really gets into his character's increasing mental deterioration; unfortunately, Naschy-the-writer doesn't provide him with much of interest to do. The final fight between (a stuntman clearly standing in for) Naschy and Bredeston is also relatively remarkable, with much better choreography and execution than anything that happens before it. In fact, if the rest of the film's action were of this standard, this could have been a rather more decent swashbuckler than it actually is.

That final fight is also the only point where the film does something actually surprising and interesting. Despite all genre conventions and being the designated noble hero of the piece, Bredeston loses the fight against his enemy, and it's the job of the peasant rebels to shoot the enemy of virginhood with arrows. This scene is staged as the only moment of true Naschy weirdness in the movie, with Naschy ranting about the awesome power the devil has provided him with, and the rebels just shrugging and turning him into a porcupine; the working classes finally asserting themselves.

Technorati-Markierungen: satan's school for ghouls,reviews,spanish movies,argentinian movies,paul naschy,leon klimovsky,norma sebre,guillermo bredeston,adventure,horror

Music Monday: Cry Edition

Technorati-Markierungen: music,music monday,the mountain goats

The Alligator People (1959)

Warning: I'm pretty sure various alligators were hurt for our entertainment during the making of this movie, so if you're sensitive about these things, this might be a film to avoid. It was a borderline case for me

Under hypnosis, nurse Jane Marvin (Beverly Garland), tells her psychiatrist boss a peculiar tale about a time when she was the freshly married Joyce Webster.
The honeymoon trip with her new husband Paul (Richard Crane) was rudely interrupted by a telegraph whose content convinced Paul to jump the train and disappear out of his wife's sight. Before the wedding night. Her husband's sudden and inexplicable flight wasn't something Joyce was willing to tolerate, but her attempts at finding out where her wayward husband got to were less than successful. It's not as if Joyce had much to go on anyway. Paul never did talk about his life before he met her except for mentioning a plane crash he shouldn't have survived and his belongings are strangely devoid of any hints towards his past.

Some off-screen sleuthing eventually led Joyce to Paul's former college fraternity and from there to the place he gave as his home address - a creepy mansion deep down in the swamps of Louisiana. Of course, Joyce made her way there as soon as she was able, finding a certain Mrs Hawthorne (Frieda Inescort) living there with two black servants and hook-handed, gator-hating, alcoholic handyman Manon (Lon Chaney Jr.) in the swamps nearby. Mrs Hawthorne purported not to know anything about Paul, but Joyce easily enough understood the old lady was lying for some reason, and would not be moved until she found out what truly was going on.
One suspects our heroine didn't exactly expect the truth had something to do with a friendly mad scientist (George Macready), the pituitary glands of alligators, and a husband with a very bad case of psoriasis.

Despite pretending to be a horror movie in its marketing material, The Alligator People is a SF melodrama with a slight influence of Southern Gothic for all but the final five minutes of its running time. As expected, it's also patently ridiculous in its set-up - so Paul is absenting himself from his new wife because he might start to look ugly, despite the way his face looks anyhow? -, silly in its science - did you know the best hope against curing the unpleasant aftereffects of alligator pituitary gland serum is radioactivity, or that cobalt 60 is transported in simple wooden crates you leave standing around at a rural train station until a mad alcoholic can get them? -, and not as clever as one would like it to be - after all, the only way the film's writer Orville H. Hampton can think of to produce a meeting between scaly-faced Paul and Joyce is to have the up to that point perfectly capable and sane woman suddenly run hysterically through a swamp full of very laid-back alligators by night, during a storm, and nearly getting raped by Lon Chaney Jr. whose leering she seems completely oblivious towards.

Despite these problems, the film has its moments. Director Roy Del Ruth (a man with a long and varied filmography starting in the early 1920s and nearly ending here) manages from time to time to conquer his workmanlike tendencies and shoot an atmospheric scene or two before it all breaks down in a very badly done bit of last minute monster rampage that only seems to happen because the producers suddenly realized they were selling this as a monster movie and not the science fictionally enabled melodrama they actually had. Plus, when she's not going into uncharacteristic hysterics, The Alligator People unexpectedly gives always theoretically capable (which is to say, as much as the movies she was in allowed her) b-movie actress Beverly Garland much opportunity to shine as the sort of heroine that even comes to her melodramatic moments with honesty. When the script isn't betraying her, Garland is very convincing as the driven, capable (for a 50s genre movie) woman out to understand why the hell her jerk of a husband suddenly disappeared. She gives the character just the right amount of frailty and desperation at the edges of her strength, making her much more believable than anyone or anything else in the movie.

Unfortunately, nobody else in the cast got the memo about Garland's kind of naturalistic acting, and so Inescort, Macready, and Chaney are mugging their roles up with fierce abandon. Chaney clearly has fun with his role (and who wouldn't have - he has a hook hand and rants about the evil of alligators, after all), while Macready speaks every single one of his lines (even "good morning", if he'd ever say something quite as prosaic) with a pathos and overemphasis I can only explain with him assuming every single member of any giving movie audience to be dumb and deaf. Even though I do approve of a good bit of overacting, I don't think these performances do the film any favours at all. They sure as hell don't do Garland's performance the justice it deserves.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,sf,melodrama,roy del ruth,beverly garland,lon chaney jr,george macready,reviews

In short: Beyond The Black Rainbow (2010)

Holy crap!

Actually, I was playing with the idea of a write-up only consisting of these two words, but then I'm trying to be somewhat informative here even about films that could use more being seen and less being read about by people before they have seen it. So I'll just make vague, excited noises, jut down some thoughts, and ask some rhetorical questions (yes, I'll go there) instead of my standard reviewing spiel.

On a plot level, Panos Cosmatos's Beyond the Black Rainbow is about Elena (Eva Allan), a young woman with psychic abilities of the Scanner type who is held against her will in Arboria, the Platonic Ideal of a particular type of late 70s/early 80s dystopian futurism you'll recognize once you've seen it. She's drugged up and supposedly mentally improved by Barry Nyle (Michael Rogers), but it's clear early on that, mostly, Barry gets his kicks from breaking her. And that's the most pleasant thing we'll learn about Barry.

But really - and here's where the film becomes interesting and special - Beyond's plot isn't told in the usual manner, but rather through a series of sequences I'd call trippy if that word didn't imply a certain randomness and vagueness utterly alien to a film as concentrated as a sniper before the shot. Yet the film uses colours, filters and techniques usually only seen in films that are either coded as "trippy" or "experimental cinema", so perhaps "trippy" can mean something different than "the director took some LSD once"?

This is a film where every shot and every sound we hear is strictly and coolly composed and colour-coded, every form on screen consciously imbued with meaning, every element of the production design important. In theory, this should of course describe every movie ever made, but watch this and a less exalted movie back to back and you'll know what I mean.

I can already hear the "style over substance" brigade coming from beyond the horizon out to put the film in its place, for what is more offensive to a certain type of movie fan than a movie simply not interested in saying all it has to say via dialogue and a three act plot structure? That's a type of criticism I have never been able to grasp, to be honest. Isn't the style something is told in an important part of its substance, or else we could just scribble down a handful of sentences for every narrative work of art and have something just as effective as the complete work itself? And isn't understanding the surface of something necessary and part of exploring its depths?

Apart from all that, I also find Beyond very interesting as another movie - Drive comes to mind as the other big example - that uses very particular pieces of 80s film and sound aesthetics in a way nobody would ever call "retro" (I hope), creating its own, contemporary, future and style out of those of the past. There are some clear aesthetic and intellectual influences at work here - Ballard, Cronenberg from a time when he made movies instead of Oscar bait while whining about superhero movies, Argento at the height of his powers, perhaps even John Carpenter, and others obvious and less obvious - but Cosmatos isn't just copying his influences, he's using them to construct something all his own. That "something" is probably the most exciting film I've seen in a long time, at times strangely beautiful and fairy-tale-like, at times disturbing, always hypnotic.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: canadian movies,in short,sf,horror,panos cosmatos,michael rogers,eva allan

Satan's School for Ghouls at WTF-Film: Devil Story (1985)

This October, the agents of M.O.S.S. are digging deep into the heart of Halloween, taking a look at films about demons, the devil, and every kind of fiend. You can find our collected annals of evil here.

Today, I use my precious column space at WTF-Film to take a look at a French film that may or may not have anything at all to do with the devil, but sure as hell contains Halloween costumes, the odd, the befuddling, the bemusing, and the peculiar.

Technorati-Markierungen: french movies,reviews,satan's school for ghouls,other places,bernard launois,horror,wtf

In short: Death Will Have Your Eyes (1974)

aka Savage City

Original title: La moglie giovane

Poor, badly educated working class girl Luisa (Marisa Mell) comes to Rome hoping to find some opportunity for getting by. But the economy's bad, and even the paying jobs don't pay enough to not make a girl think if she shouldn't just make the final step from "just this side of prostitution" to the actual thing. Before it comes to that point, Luisa gets lucky. Random chance leads to her meeting rich and famous surgeon - who always wanted to become a poet - Armando (Farley Granger).

Armando falls in love with Luisa, or so he says. Surprisingly enough he even wants to marry her. Even though she doesn't really reciprocate the feeling, Luisa agrees to finally stop being poor. The class differences, their incompatible temperaments, Armando's impotence and the fact that there isn't much actual love between the two soon turns the marriage into an ordeal. It doesn't help the situation that Luisa isn't actually as mercenary as she pretends to be, so she falls in love with a younger, not impotent and more emotional colleague of Armando.

Even when Armando learns of the affair, he isn't willing to let Luisa go, so she decides to murder him. The whole murder thing starts off well enough. Soon, however, Luisa has a working-class blackmailer in her living room and has to juggle her bad conscience, said blackmailer, her boyfriend, and the police to survive.

Death's director Giovanni d'Eramo only seems to have written a handful of films, and directed two, with the film at hand being the last. It's a bit of a shame, really, for while Death isn't one of the more stylish melodramatic giallos, it's a film with an intelligent script directed with unassuming tightness.

D'Eramo's film is far from the showiness that makes the giallo in generally such a fun genre to watch. There's hardly any painful/awesome fashion, nor much psychedelic camera handling, though the film does play a bit loose with temporal structures, with a few flashbacks to keep the narrative less clear. Instead, d'Eramo uses the melodramatic thriller format to explore questions of class, with several working class characters trying to make it, only slowly realizing that class differences in the society are not just about the money, and everything's set-up to keep them unhappy whether they stay "in their place" or try to climb the social ladder. The bourgeois of the film (as in real life) on the other hand, seem to lack any true understanding of the meaning of being poor, nor do they in the end take much efforts to try to understand. Quite wonderfully, the film manages to pack this thematic baggage in without ruining its effect as a piece of genre cinema with it: it's all very organic, with theme and (simple) plot bolstering each other.

The film also gives Austrian actress Marisa Mell (as friends of Italian cult cinema will know a frequent appearance in these films) a well-deserved opportunity to do a bit more than just to flash her breasts (though we do meet those too, and I, for one won't complain). Turns out Mell is very good at giving an emotionally nuanced performance, and really drives home that her character isn't just a gold digger, or evil, or misunderstood, or a fool in love, or a victim of the class system, but a person; those, as you may have heard, can't generally be described that easily.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,giallo,giovanni d'eramo,marisa mell,farley granger,in short