giallo fever

Argento Dracula - to 3D or not to 3D, that is the question

2012-01-26T04:52:00.002Z

As you are probably aware, a 3D version of Dracula directed by Argento is due to come out soon The teaser footage that has been released predictably shows some "comin' at ya'" type images -- Dracula throws a sword at someone and it pins them to a door, following which there is a cut to the other side showing how far the blade has penetrated the wood, or instance.

Where I think the film will stand or fall as a 3D experience is in how well Argento manages to incorporate and integrate the more subtle kind layered images that have long been a staple of his 2D productions -- the endemic curtains and screens, the shattering glass, or the killer standing immediately behind his victim at the end of Tenebre. It would also be interesting/weird seeing some of those prominent mirror-based compositions in Deep Red and Suspiria with 3D except the flat mirror image...

Some random 4.30 AM Jesus Franco questions

2012-01-13T04:28:00.001Z

What are your favourite and least favourite periods of Franco's films? And why? Do you find that there are individual films within them that you like and don't like / like less? Is it just an all-encompassing Francoverse where the more you watch, the more you see the connections, perhaps a bit like Frank Zappa's xenochrony and conceptual continuity in his music?

Framing in Argento -- fragment of a Deleuzean reading

2012-01-13T04:08:00.001Z

Like Leone, Argento used 2.35:1 widescreen Techniscope until commercial considerations of television and video sales encouraged use of the 1.85 ratio on Inferno and Tenebre. While Argento's compositions perhaps do not draw attention to the shape of the 2.35:1 frame as often as Leone does, the effect on those occasions where he does so is thereby arguably heightened. In Leone's films the use of the all areas of the frame, the out of field/frame and quasi-split screen effects generally does not serve any obvious purpose beyond making the conventions of classical cinema evident. In contrast the likes of the widescreen composition in Deep Red when Marc, on the far left, and Carlo, on the far right, shout to one another across a space dominated by the central statuary, also have a pedagogical role. For in conjunction with Carlo's remarks on the distinction between what Marc thought he saw and what he actually saw this image draws attention to Marc's reading of the image of Carlo's mother in the bottom left of the frame as a face in the painting she was reflected into. This image also establishes a crystal-image circuit between the actual - Carlo's mother - and the virtual - Carlo's mother as mirrored into the painting that confuses Marc.

Some Fulciana

2012-01-06T21:42:00.004Z

Two Polish posters for Fulci films; see if you can guess which:

And a Shark vs Zombie garage kit:

Fantastikal Diabolikal Supermen

2012-01-06T01:52:00.005Z

Matt Blake, who runs the excellent Wild Eye website and wrote the essential Eurospy Guide a few years back has recently published this book on Italian fumetti neri style films of the 1960s and 1970s.

Extensively illustrated with posters, lobby cards and stills from the films and featuring quite a lot of interview and review material that hasn't been previously available in English (at least to my knowledge) it's an essential purchase for anyone with an interest in this comparatively under-explored area of Italian cult cinema.

Taking a comprehensive but not all encompassing approach, Blake looks at films that were made by Italian directors – so no Modesty Blaise or Mr Freedom – and which either presented direct adaptations of fumetti characters (Diabolik, Kriminal, Satanik, Isabella, Valentina etc.) or were clearly influenced by the comics (The 3 Supermen series, Vittorio De Sica's contribution to the anthology film The Witches, the Johnny Dorelli vehicle How to Kill 400 Duponts and so on).

The films are discussed in chronological rather than alphabetical order, allowing the reader to better chart the development of the filone as a whole and particular series within it. This is especially helpful when it comes to the likes of the long-running 3 Supermen series, since the personnel involved often changed from one film to the next, for better or worse.

Thankfully there's also a comprehensive index of titles for those wondering whether a specific film is one of the better, worse or average examples of the form.

While the reader will inevitably disagree with some of Blake's evaluations of the films, his reviews are invariably intelligent, informative and insightful, indicating why he rates or does not rate a given film, filmmaker or performer.

So, for example, of the 3 Superman films, Blake identifies those directed by Sabata's Gianfranco Parolini as ranking above those by Black Emanuelle's Bitto Albertini, with both in turn preferable to those directed by their usual producer and writer Italo Martinenghi – precisely the kind of stuff you need when, like me, you've got a whole load of them in your virtual to-watch pile and were not sure of where to begin.

Page for Fantastikal Diabolikal Supermen on The Wild Eye.

Fulci Zombie kits

2012-01-06T00:56:00.006Z

I got these a while back and my friend painted them up for me:

They're from Gargoyle Creations, who also do Living Dead at Manchester Morgue and Zombie Holocaust ones.

Deadly Blvd

2012-01-06T00:49:00.003Z

A duo from from Montréal who've just released their first EP, Giallo, as a digital download.

As they explain: “We created this music with a mixture of our inspirations, that is horror and sci-fi film music, eighties cartoons music, rock, new wave, etc.... There is no label, no distribution company, we are totally independant and this EP album makes us really proud.”

Check it out at:

http://deadlyblvd.bandcamp.com/
http://www.facebook.com/DeadlyBLVD

Heavy stuff

2011-11-09T17:02:00.001Z

My cat, Bebert, the image that I have as my icon here, has died.

I woke up this morning and found him dead outside the door.

It was completely unexpected. He was about eight years old and was his usual self last night and early in the morning, even up to a couple of hours before.

This was not what I needed at this point, when the new anti-depressants I was taking and whose dose had then been increased seemed to be working; when I was back on track PhD wise, and when things (sleeping, eating, alcohol consumption, self-harming) were generally getting under control.

Hope you will understand if there are no more posts for a bit...

Contrasting posters for The Designated Victim

2011-11-07T23:35:00.002Z

I think I prefer the top one, because of the bolder colours. Your opinions?

Aska susayanlar seks ve cinayet / Thirsty for Love, Sex and Murder

2011-11-06T16:37:00.005Z

One of the criticisms frequently leveled against Italian genre cinema is that it is derivative or imitative. As Luigi Cozzi said, producers and backers didn't want to know what your film was about but rather what films it was like. Yet few went as far down the copyright infringing route as Patrick Lives Again, that unofficial sequel to the original Patrick. The more usual approach was that taken by the various zombie films that appeared in the wake of Dawn of the Dead: It was clear what their inspiration was, but there was enough that was different and sometimes even original.

From what I've seen, Turkish exploitation cinema is another thing entirely. Most notoriously the so-called Turkish Star Wars uses footage from George Lucas's film, intercut with new material, and large chunks of score from Raiders of the Lost Ark. And then there are the Spiderman, Superman and Batman films.

What we have here, meanwhile, is a Turkish version of Sergio Martino's 1970 giallo The Strange Vice of Signora Wardh, with both plot and scenes lifted wholesale.

Even so, the filmmakers do make some changes and additions:

The maniac in the opening scene is more clearly visible, and identified by his victim before she dies as having a scar. This makes the Mrs Wardh character, Mine, suspect that he could be her ex-lover, the Jean one, Tarik, with whom she had an intense sado-masochistic relationship.

The Mr Wardh character, Metin, is sexually incapable, thus providing a further justification/rationale for his wife's falling for the George Corro one, Yilmaz, when she's introduced to him by her friend, the Carol Brandt one, Oya, at a party.

When Mine is blackmailed over this relationship and Oya goes to meet the blackmailer she isn't killed, merely chased and forced to drop the money.

In final third, the identities of the conspirators against Mine are also different, as is the ending.

The film is also differently paced, in that it runs barely an hour rather than 90 minutes. There's less emphasis upon drama and suspense and more upon action, with the general approach being to get straight into, through and out of each scene via the fastest route possible. Hollywood-style visual grammar and decoupage are conspicious by their absence. While it's not intentionally avant-garde, the effect is often just as jarring. This is particularly evident in the approach the filmmakers take to scoring, where a few bars culled from Morricone and Nicolai crime scores or an original chord, riff or beat almost sound like experiments in sampling, looping and layering.

The killer...

attacks...

there's going to be a lot of this...

what the... oh, it's a subjective shot from the victim's POV of a plane coming in to land...

and re-uniting Mine and Metin

You can also see that the filmmakers are trying to emulate their model(s) and inject a touch of visual inspiration, with zooms; odd angles; rapid cutting; or the likes of shots partly through liquid-filled glass or the maniac's dark glasses in the foreground; taken at ground level from behind a car; or of Mine framed through the gap between the handle and body of an old-style telephone.

More importantly in terms of their target audience -- read young Turkish men wanting Meral Zeren more than Edwige Fenech or to be Kadir Inanan rather than George Hilton -- the filmmakers don't skimp on the exploitation goods. Just about every woman quickly get undressed down to her underwear, often naked -- though, it should be noted, with no full-frontal nudity -- and, undoubtedly more disconcertingly for more sensitive types, abused, threatened or slashed up.

The scene that best exemplifies this is when a woman comes home, takes off her coat, revealing that she is naked beneath it, goes into the shower and is then slaughtered. Perhaps she was one of the women at an earlier party who was wearing a paper dress that got torn off. But there was no mention of a paper bra and panties.

For today's audiences, the film also has the attraction of providing cultural and historical insights, in terms of showing modern, swinging post-1960s Turks, along with no mentions whatsoever of Islam and little sense of moral disapproval. A lot of this stuff, whether fashions, decors, hairstyles, vehicles or dialogue is also, of course, highly entertaining from a kitsch/camp/trash perspective, if you're not interested in that sort of thing: “You smell of alcohol and cigarettes.” “A man should smell of alcohol and cigarettes.”

If you've never seen any gialli - unlikely for a reader of this blog, I know - then this probably isn't the Turkish exploitation film for you, but if you have and want to start exploring then its an intriguing and entertaining introduction that may well leave you wanting more...

Two latest posters

2011-10-05T13:57:00.002+01:00

Both of them are actually the locandine rather than the 2/4 sheets, and have the same artwork but in a different format with the usual space above the image for the cinema to include the screening date / time information.

Torso

The Killer Must Kill Again

Trhauma

2011-10-05T06:28:00.002+01:00

No that isn’t a typo and no this isn’t the 1993 Argento film.

Rather, Trhauma is the actual title of this 1980 giallo-slasher entry from Gianni Martucci and Alessandro (“Al”?) Capone.

The story begins with a prologue, recalling Halloween, Friday the 13th and, indeed, Nine Guests for a Crime: One boy convinces another, who seems to be be blind in one eye, to climb a tree, which he then falls out of with apparently fatal results.

Following this we cut to the present as a group of bourgeois types arrive at a holiday home in an isolated area. Soon two of them, a photographer and his model, wander off to do some shooting. After they become separated, she’s killed by one-eyed jack, now a man.

Less than ten minutes in and we have a naked woman

The others are concerned about her absence, but don’t do anything about it until it’s too late and the phone lines have been cut. As the killer closes in and the body-count rises, we learn some of their secrets, including gambling debts, lesbian affairs and blackmail.

Franco Diogene prepares to enter the pool and the water prepares to leave

Eventually a final girl/woman is identified and a tense extended stalk and chase scene ensues. The abrupt resolution and closing epigram, however, seem more giallo than slasher, bringing things back full circle.

An unpretentious and effective little film that doesn’t outstay its welcome and delivers on suspense, shocks and sleaze and sees the filmmakers make good use of their locations.

Der Henker von London / The Mad Executioners

2011-10-04T16:45:00.004+01:00

The main weakness of this adaptation of Bryan Edgar Wallace's The White Carpet is that it's really two stories in one, both having enough in them to make a single film.

The Mad Executioners title refers to a group of hooded figures who try, judge and hang those who would otherwise have evaded justice. As the noose they use comes from the Black Museum, it is highly likely that someone within Scotland Yard is party to this conspiracy. Worse, some in the the underworld quickly see the potential for establishing their own copycat courts within their gangs.

The court

A Phantom Carriage

Meanwhile, a mad scientist carrying out experiments into trying to keep heads alive sans bodies by connecting them up to mechanical lungs and hearts. His modus operandi is to abducts young women, take what he needs and then dump the rest across London.

While the narratives do intersect somewhat on account of the sister of one of the investigators falling victim to the madman and the female heroine then going undercover in a bid to ensnare him, its notable that this latter scene does not actually provide the climax to the film as it would undoubtedly have done so had it been a single narrative.

Modern art is equated with madness, this painting being done by an artist under the influence of opium

Despite being produced by Artur Brauner's normally frugal CCC the film looks to had a decent amount of money spent on it, with some particularly impressive sets for the executioners' base and the mad scientist's home-cum-laboratory.

Edwin Zbonek's direction likewise pleases, as does Richard Angst's crisp black and white widescreen cinematography. One scene sees them present an otherwise tedious bar-room musical number in a long take that performs a 360 degree circuit of the set.

The performances are variable. Dieter Borsche is nicely sinister and driven as the mad scientist, whereas Chris Howland's investigative reporter Gabby Pennypacker is more annoying than funny in the Eddi Arent type comic relief role. Maria Perschy makes for an engaging female lead on account of being a bit more active and less of a screaming victim type than usual, with the sparring between her and Borsche as he tries to drug her drink and she tries to avoid this another delight.

Striptease Extravaganza / Mary Millington's Striptease Extravaganza

2011-08-21T20:29:00.003+01:00

Or the uses and abuses of montage...

One of the key divisions in film theory is between proponents of the long take and proponents of montage. The use of the long take is usually associated with realism, and entails the presentation of blocks of space and time where the relationships between images emerge 'naturally'. Montage, by contrast, is associated with formalism, and entails the construction of relationships between otherwise disconnected images, perhaps in the service of another (higher) reality.

I mention this because Striptease Extravaganza / Mary Millington's Striptease Extravaganza is an exercise in the latter, albeit one which few montage theorists would likely want to take as an illustration of their idea(l)s.

First of all, there are those titles: Millington friend / exploiter / enabler John M. East introduces the film, proclaiming that Millington was a great striptease artist who made a profound impression on the form. As evidence he presents some scenes from Queen of the Blues, the last film that she made before her 1979 suicide.

But, if you don't care about Millington, or don't find dead women sexually attractive, it's then on to the main attractions of the other, sans Millington, title: Comedian Bernie Winters and 16 women supposedly competing for the stripper of the year title, £1000 and a movie contract.

Then there is the complete dissociation between what is happening on stage and the reaction shots of the audience. The latter, you see, have also been taken from Queen of the Blues, although unlike the introduction this is not stated. If you look carefully there are never any establishing shots which show the performers and the audience together, nor any pans or tracks from one to the other.

Then we have the complete dissociation between the pianist and drummer on stage and the music we hear, reinforced for those familiar with other David Sullivan product of the time by the re-use of cues from Emmanuelle in Soho. (Some of the cues do have a pleasing Nico Fidenco type vibe to them, though, and wouldn't be out of place in a Laura Gemser vehicle)

Turning to Emmanuelle in Soho, we also have its two female leads, Mandy Miller / Quick and Julie Lee, amongst the 16 strippers. The former is introduced as Vicky from Sweden, the latter as Julie from Hong Kong. Neither wins through to the semi-finals, though Winters does announce Julie as one of the semi-finalists even if she isn't actually present on stage.

Nor does either speak. In Lee's case this is presumably because her Yorkshire accent would have demolished the lie that she was from Hong Kong.

Not, however, that any of those we do hear speak make any attempt to present themselves as being from Turkey, France or wherever else 'exotic'.

A reason why they wouldn't is that not being white British often means being subjected to racist 'humour': Vicky from Turkey is a 'Chapati' while Maxine “from Botswana” can be distinguished from Cathy “from South England” by being “the darker one”.

In fairness, however, Winters also does some self-deprecating/hating Jewish jokes.

Then we have the incogruity of some of the strippers doing paired routines despite this supposedly being a competition.

Then there is the sudden injection of some cynical realism when one of them, Cathy, proclaims in a voice-off that she had better win since she had given the main judge a blow-job. This leads to further re-use of outtakes from Emmanuelle in Soho.

Cathy does, however, win the competition.

Art imitating Life?

The losers, meanwhile, must also include anyone who ever went to see the film on its original release, for entertainment...

Black Emanuelle UK quad

2011-07-27T23:35:00.001+01:00

Just a little something I picked up on Ebay:

Note how it does not actually mention Laura Gemser, in contrast to later films in the series she appeared in.

Caramelle da uno sconosciuto / Sweets from a Stranger

2011-07-19T22:35:00.004+01:00

We open with the murder of a prostitute by a black gloved, razor wielding killer.

Soon after a second lady of the night is murdered, but manages to whisper a vague, fragmentary clue to a colleague before dying.

With the police both unconcerned and ineffectual, the prostitutes take it upon themselves to unmask the killer...

An evaluation of the situation that may prove to be of particular significance

Around about this point the film moves into more of a dramatic mode, to examine the womens’ lives more generally. It’s an interesting shift in focus and not intrinsically negative, but does make for a lack of stalk and slash thrills if these are what you were expecting and after, although it does return to more generic territory towards the end.

If however you want a quasi-documentary look at a collective of prostitutes, or just something different, then it might appeal.

This assumes, however, that the sleaze and exploitation won’t cut against the serious intent too much, though the film is quite light on these counts compared to Rino Di Silvestro’s Red Light Girls and Carlo Lizzani’s Teenage Prostitution Racket from the mid-1970s – or, indeed, the third part of Massimo Dallamano’s schoolgirls in peril trilogy, Rings of Fear, to which director and co-writer Franco Ferrini also contributed in the latter capacity and which ultimately proves most intertextually significant here.

A Bava-style angel and some symbolic yellow

Ferrini is best known as an Argento collaborator, of course, with that director’s long-time editor of choice, Franco Fraticelli, also handling duties here.

With a tongue of fire?

Arthouse favourite and two-time Bava favourite Laura Betti has a small role as an old-time, independent prostitute who falls victim to the killer.

002 Agenti Segretissimi

2011-07-19T17:01:00.004+01:00

On the advice of a computer, our two heroes are secretly recruited by the Italian secret service to serve as decoys while the real agents go about their business unmolested; Franco also has a false formula implanted in a filling in his teeth. The complication is that he and Ciccio prove surprisingly elusive and effective, perhaps precisely because they don’t have a clue...

As usual Ciccio is the smarter of the two, but that isn't saying much; besides being Bondian the 002 refers to their low intelligence levels

Highlights include a visit to a health farm, with some amusing double-entendres and with a couple of gay-coded peplum type bodybuilders; a scene at a club where confusion over who is wearing the jackets with the X marked on them leads to the assassins from different enemy powers inadvertently killing one another; and the duo’s being taken as subjects for female agents to practice their seduction skills on – one getting the aged teacher rather than a beautiful young student.

I think Mary Arden from Blood and Black Lace plays the student seductress here

A visit to a Chinese restaurant, where the orders lead to plates of worms, bowls of beetles and suchlike, is perhaps a bit un-PC, but in keeping with our heroes limited view of the world – at another point, while burgling a house, they reject a Da Vinci as worthless in favour of an unknown painter with a Sicilian name.

The Italian cultural context is important in these films, which were more for domestic consumption (especially in the south) than international distribution.

Lucio Fulci directed, in that anonymous, professional, efficient way that tended to be the case for anyone working with the two comedians. An issue here, much as with the Bond films it spoofs in fact, is that the franchise was more important than the filmmaker. (This is why Tarantino, despite his avowed desire to do a Bond film, will probably never get the chance.) Basically it was don’t get in the stars’ way and let them do their thing.

Neither the best or the worst of its type, it moves along at a decent pace and is good natured enough, with Piero Umiliani’s breezy soundtrack a further plus.

Special thanks to Merlin for the custom subs.

Brillantina Rock / Disco Crazy

2011-07-15T23:30:00.003+01:00

This Italian musical looks to have had an eye to establishing Monty Ray Garrison as the filone cinema's answer to John Travolta, at the time riding high on the success of Saturday Night Fever and Grease; note here how the Italian title references rock and a hair styling product, the English one disco.

Monty Ray plays Roberto, or as he prefers to be called Robbie, a young dancing enthusiast.

He and Rick, a member of a rival gang -- Robbie's wear colourful outfits, Rick's dress all in black -- become rivals for the affections of Cindy, a visiting American girl from a rich family and a talented dancer to boot.

Cindy

Cindy and Rick

With Monty Ray never appearing in any other films, the main cult interest lies elsewhere.

Among the cast, Cindy is played by Auretta Giannone, better known as Auretta Gay and who appeared under that name as the ill-fated tourist Susan in Zombie. Fiamma Maglione, who appeared in Cannibal Ferox and a few others as Meg Fleming and composed as Budy Maglione, has a small part as Robbie's pregnant sister. She does not contribute to the score here, however, which is instead credited to Gianfranco Reverberi. Jimmy Il Fenomeno makes a cameo appearance as a gas station attendant.

Top Jimmy

Comedy specialist Michele Massimo Tarantini co-wrote and directs. He handles things competently but unexceptionally, with the inclusion of motorbike race and a car chase scenes alongside the dance numbers highlighting the film's crowd-pleasing approach of something for everyone -- comedy, romance, musical numbers, and even a bit of social commentary in the contrast between the privileged Cindy and Robbie's old friend Sandra, like him from a less advantaged background.

A similar opportunistic eclecticism is apparent in Reverneri's musical numbers, which include a phonetic English disco version of the Rolling Stones' Satisfaction, some rock numbers, and a weird disco-country and western combination. All very cheesy, but infectious -- in fact, a good summation of the film overall.

Invasion

2011-07-15T00:13:00.005+01:00

An alien spaceship lands in rural England. One of the inhabitants wanders off and in front of a car. Taking his ''funny clothes'' to be fancy dress, the driver (now minus his mistress, one of those nice little touches that grounds the story) take him to the local hospital for treatment.

The staff, led by Dr Mike Vernon (the ever-dependable Edward Judd), soon realise that their patient is not of this earth, beginning with a blood sample that does not look normal and followed by the discovery of a metal disc in the man's head. Meanwhile, two other (female) aliens search for their missing compatriot and soon track him down to the hospital, which is then discovered to be sealed off from the rest of the world by an invisible barrier...

The aliens, later designating themselves as Lystrians, all look Oriental, though any racist subtext to this is rendered less likely by the casting of Tsai Chin as one of the hospital nurses and, as such, a fully integrated member of the local and by extension national communities. Moreover, before the alien's true otherness is revealed, her character is also asked if the alien man is Chinese or Japanese, but she does not think he is -- there is something not quite right and she's never seen clothes like his before; all very much contra the racist cliche “They [we] don't all like alike”

Edward Judd, Tsai Chin and the alien

More importantly, the Invasion title itself is actually somewhat misleading, insofar as the aliens are more concerned with their own matters than earthly ones, namely the recapture of an escaped prisoner (or two).

The film's writer, Robert Holmes, had earlier worked on Dr Finlay's casebook and would later become a prominent contributor to Dr Who. It is easy to see Invasion as a combination of the two. The hospital setting equates to the Earth-centred 'base under siege' scenario that were becoming especially common during Patrick Troughton's tenure as the Time Lord. More directly, other aspects of the story prefigure the introduction of Jon Pertwee in the Holmes-scripted Spearhead from Space, as the newly regenerated Doctor is taken to hospital and it gradually becomes apparent that he is not human, although the other aliens there are more predictably malign and actually intent on invasion. Beyond this, there are also UNIT-like military men, an unsympathetic, narrow-minded man from the government, and a competent pre-Liz Shaw female scientist. (The film as a whole has an unusual, if sometimes more obviously pre-feminist, take on gender issues.)

Fans of the Quatermass (E)xperiments or Terence Fisher's Planet triumvirate, especially the slightly later Night of the Big Heat (Island of Terror also starred Judd), will also find much that is comfortably familiar and oh-so-very particularly British. In other words, while the special effects aren't up to much this is somewhat beside the point: Rather, it's about the ideas, the performances, and the generation of an atmosphere of unease.

They don't make them like this anymore, more's the pity...

Emmanuelle in Soho

2011-07-14T22:44:00.005+01:00

Young couple Paul and Kate (Julie Lee) and their bisexual flatmate Emanuelle (Angie Quick, billed as Mandy Miller) are short of money. Paul and Emmanuelle try their hand at glamour photography, while Kate gets a job as a stripper at a nude review, Hang About Sebastian. Paul takes his photos to Bill (John M. East), who tells Paul that they are not really what the punters are after and kindly offers to take them off his hands for £50, then sells them for several times this. After Bill has worked this scam several times, Paul realises he is being conned and schemes his revenge. He invites Bill and his secretary cum mistress Sheila to a party, also attended by the cast and artistic crew of Hang About Sebastian. Inevitably, several of the guests pair off, including Bill. Paul secretly films Bill, then blackmails him...

Released to cinemas thirty years ago this month, Emmanuelle in Soho pretty much marked the death of the British sex film as a theatrical form.

The once proud Tigon tiger-lion...

British Cinema: From Blow-Up to this in the span of 15 or so years...

Blackstone and Hooper should be familiar names to students of the genre, with the latter also having some surprise Italian connections...

The film was bankrolled by porn baron David Sullivan as a vehicle for Julie Lee. She was a half-Chinese model who was being groomed as the successor to Mary Millington, who had committed suicide two years earlier and whose legacy it was becoming harder for Sullivan to exploit.

Keep it on!

Lee was originally cast as the Emmanuelle character. This could have suggested more of a connection, however tenuous, to the unofficial Emanuelle cycle from Italy insofar as these had similarly stressed the exotic appeal of 'Black' Emanuelle and 'Yellow' Emanuelle. Any sense of Oriental(ist) fantasy is however immediately dispelled when Lee opens her mouth and reveals her broad Yorkshire accent; had it been an Italian film, shot silent and post-synchronised, this could of course have been avoided.

East and some publicity for other Sullivan product

Lee and Miller swapped roles when it became apparent that she really could not act. Think about that: One model in a sex film being replaced by another because the quality of her performance was not up to scratch!

It is not, however, that the rest of the cast are much better. The actor playing Paul -- I use the term loosely -- performs primarily through raising his eyebrows, while producer and co-writer East reprises his Max Miller comedy routine from the Millington cash-in Queen of the Blues, firing off gag after gag, mostly unfunny.

The direction from first and only timer David Hughes is perfunctory. There is however the odd moment, such as the rack focus from Paul and Emmanuelle in a potentially compromising situation to Kate as she enters the room positioned in the back of the frame, in between them, which suggests someone making an effort.

The version under review ran barely an hour, with much of the running time padded out by the various performance and softcore numbers -- or, depending on your point of view, there is not enough of these and too much of plot stuff.

Signs of the times

Internationally it was also released with a documentary type introduction to Soho and with hardcore inserts. For the present day viewer, meanwhile, its interest is more as a classic piece of trash and for the incidental historical, social and cultural details, ranging from dialogue indicating a pre-AIDS fashionability of bisexuality (though other lines predictably suggest this was exclusively for women); to the giant top-loading VHS machine that was killing off this kind of cinema; to the size of flat the three supposedly impoverished friends have; to Paul's massive bouffant cum mullet.

Lee tragically died less than two years later after crashing her car and suffering massive burns. She was on her way home from a beauty contest in which, as the Monopoly card has it, she won second place...

Rabies

2011-06-24T10:36:00.000+01:00

First things first: The English title for this Israeli horror film has absolutely nothing to do with its content. There are no rabid dogs or people on display, at least in the literal sense. What we get instead is a dark comedy/gross out/horror hybrid with a decidedly nightmarish (lack of) logic to it. This gives the film an edge, in that we never know quite what to expect, but also makes it more difficult to identify with or care about any of the characters and what happens to them.

The story begins in a more generic fashion, as a brother and sister encounter a maniac stalker type in the woods. The sister is captured, while the brother escapes and seeks help. He encounters a group of four tennis players – well, they accidentally run him over – who have become lost. Recovering, brother persuades the two guys to go help him find his sister, while the two girls stay with their vehicle and call the cops.

Around about this point, the curveballs really start flying. The cops arrive, the older one being preoccupied by his own relationship issues and younger proving a creep who enjoys the opportunity to grope the girls on the basis of searching them...

At times it seems the bright, overly lit land land is itself inimical to the characters, that anyone who enters the area loses their grip on reality or encounters their own particular reality, a bit like the Zone in Tarkovsky's Stalker.

Maybe there is also an Israel-specific subtext to this – in most countries national parks you probably aren’t going to inadvertently wander into an old minefield, as happens here – but if so it is one that is likely to be lost on international audiences.

Still, at least the filmmakers have tried to do something different...

Ghosted

2011-06-24T10:02:00.000+01:00

To be “ghosted” is to be secretly transferred from one prison to another. Is a move which incurs suspicion as to why the transfer occurred – was it for the prisoner’s safety, indicating vulnerability, or because they were an informer?

The term is also one of the few new things perhaps learnt from this British prison drama from cinematographer turned director Craig Vivieros, whose script relies heavily upon such well-worn prison film clichés as the vulnerable young inmate; the not-really homosexual wing boss; and the weights room work out, shower room male rape and courtyard blade shanking scenes.

Paul (Martin Compston, Sweet Sixteen) has just been transferred from a Young Offenders institute having become too old to stay there. Career-criminal and manipulative wing boss Clay (Craig Parkinson) takes a dubious interest in him. Older prisoner Jack (John Lynch), who is nearing the end of his sentence is persuaded by his own mentor Ahmed (Art Malik, who also served as executive producer) to take Paul under his wing. This obviously threatens Clay’s and puts them on collision course. Clay’s problem is that Jack is not afraid of him, while Jack's is that he's afraid of what he knows he could do to Clay if he ever lost it.

Jack explains that there are three rules to prison life. First, never ask or take anything from anybody – a prohibition Paul has already been forced to violate by Clay. Second, never lie, since you will always be found out. Third, never ask someone what they are in for.

As Jack and Paul's surrogate father/son relationship develops – Paul never knew his father, while Jack’s son died in a tragic accident during his time inside – they breach the second and third commandments, leading to a powerful denouement.

Again, however, while the actor’s performances and Vivieros’s visual sense are hard to fault in these scenes, the writing is decidedly less successful. While Ahmed muses on whether Jack and Paul have been brought together by coincidence or fate, the viewer may very well feel their real connection is contrived, improbable. There's nothing wrong with this as such, just that it does not easily fit with the kind of gritty, realistic approach Vivieros otherwise goes for.

Bleak Night

2011-06-22T11:31:00.000+01:00

The Korean title for Bleak Night translates more literally as Lookout. It’s a word which works better than the English title, insofar as it both connotes a major theme within the narrative, in terms of the attempts by some of the characters to look out for the others, and the need for the viewer to pay attention.

The biggest complication in this regard is the film’s complex narrative structure, one which recalls other contemporary Korean classics such as Peppermint Candy and Poetry – the latter another film which suggests a Korean high school to be one of the most dangerous places on earth.

We begins in the middle of things with a fight between some schoolboys at a railway line. Who is fighting? Why? With what consequences?

The image is deliberately unclear, unstable. The physical location, however, is one that will be returned to time and again, as the narrative thereafter begins to jump both back and forwards in time and things gradually become clearer.

The key proves to be a photograph of three friends, namely Ki-tae, Dong-Yoo and ‘Becky’ .

One of the three is now dead. His hitherto distant father (mother is dead, likewise reduced to a photographic memory) wants simply to know why. The others, one of whom transferred to another school shortly before and the other who failed to attend the funeral and has since attempted to avoid contact, know.

To say much more about what is revealed, other than that things are not always as might be expected, would probably spoil things.

The direction is especially impressive, particularly when you consider that this is a first feature by a 29-year-old and started off as a film school graduation project. Almost every shot conveys something above and beyond what is contained in the dialogue and the performances, whether through the decision to use handheld camera; the use of a two-shot or shot-reverse-shot; or the careful deployment of mirrors, such that it will reward repeat viewings by revealing new subtleties.

Recommended, as long as you are up for the challenge.

Weekender

2011-06-22T11:30:00.002+01:00

At last year’s EIFF there was a film called SoulBoy, a coming-of-age drama set against the backdrop of the Northern Soul scene of the early 1970s. It was an utterly predictable and formulaic piece of work which benefited from the infectious nature of the music itself and the energy conveyed in its dance scenes.

This year’s EIFF has Weekender, which takes much the same story – including cartoon-like bad guy and romantic will they / won’t they subplot – and sets it against the backdrop of the rave scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

It suffers by comparison for the fact that the music and dancing aren’t that interesting unless you’re in the same state as the participants, namely tripping out on MDMA.

Worse, even when taken on its own terms, it never really manages to articulate its own would-be distinctions – MDMA and cannabis good, cocaine bad; acid house good, hardcore house bad; illegal raves for fun and profit good, illegal raves for profit bad – nor to generate much sympathy for its naïve bordering on terminally stupid protagonists.

It also feels like there’s one reel missing from the narrative because Europe-spanning scenes would have been too expensive to film, while there’s a glaring plot hole where you wonder why the sort-of good guy secondary character didn’t just kill the bad guy early on and save everyone a lot of bother; presumably that summer of love vibe affected his business sense.

The shame is that there’s the potential for a good film in here, one which avoided sentimentality and showy displays of vacant technique and that didn't pull its punches as much.

Meet Monica Velour

2011-06-20T16:35:00.001+01:00

Tobe is a 17-year-old self-identified dork, with a fascination for the cultural detritus of past decades and an especial interest in late 1970s-early 1980s porn star Monica Velour (Kim Catrall), the star of such titles as Saturday Night Beaver (the title of a real-world porn film), New Wave Nookie and Pork and Mindy (both made up, though the former parodies another real-world porno rather than a mainstream production).

Though Tobe is a dork, even he considers his female counterpart Amanda as being too dorky – until, that is, he notices the Faster Pussycat Kill Kill and Switchblade Sisters posters on her walls.

However, by this time, they’ve graduated and Tobe has been given a somewhat unwelcome gift by by grandfather Pops Pops (Brian Dennehy), namely the family weenie van.

Not wanting it, Tobe puts it up for sale. Almost immediately he has a buyer, in the form of kitsch collector Claude (Keith David). There’s one snag, however: Claude lives in Indiana and would need Tobe to drive the van to him from his Oregon home.

At first Tobe declines, but then discovers via a Monica Velour fan site that she’s due to be performing in a nearby Indiana strip club.

Checking the map, Tobe he discovers that Claude’s and the strip club are not far apart and thus decides to go sell the van and meet the woman of his dreams.

Predictably things don’t go smoothly, before turning out all right in the end. The good guys are rewarded and the bad guys punished – the usual stuff.

Part road-movie, part coming-of-age story, part drama, part comedy this might well be summed up as one part Napoleon Dynamite, one part Ghost World and one part the Boogie Nights subplots dealing with Amber Waves’s custody battles with her husband and the characters’ struggles to live down the stigma of their porn pasts. (Those wanting a more obscure reference point may also wish to refer to the 2002 documentary Desperately Seeking Seka, in which Swedish filmmaker Christian Hallmann set out to track down his adolescent lust object, 15 or so years after her retirement)

The problem is that in terms of writing and direction it thus fails to do anything that hasn’t been done before or better.

The exceptions are the chance to see a distinctly de-glamourised Kim Catrall demonstrate her acting abilities as Velour and the sight of Brian Dennehy’s naked arse – the kind of once seen never to be unseen image that shouldn’t have been included, not out of any sense of propriety or gross-out value, but because with it he completely upstages the nominal star.

Almanya - Willkommen in Deutschland

2011-06-19T17:16:00.002+01:00

Six-year-old Cenk has a problem, precipitated by a teacher’s unthinking questioning of where he really comes from: Is he German, Turkish, Turkish-German, German-Turkish or what?

Though more secure in her identity, Cenk’s cousin Canan also has a problem: She’s just discovered she’s pregnant by her British boyfriend. Her mother is not likely to approve

And now their entire family has a problem, as patriarch Huseyin unexpectedly announces that he has bought a house in Turkey and wishes to take all of them to visit and work on it...

Thus the set-up for this this comedy about ethnic (mis)understandings from sisters Yasemin and Nesrin Samdereli is established.

Thereafter, the filmmakers confidently interweave two parallel narratives, one taking place in the present as the family sets off on their journey to their old homeland, the other in a part-imagined past as Canan retells Cenk the story of how their grandparents and parents came to West Germany in the 1960s and encountered such strangeness as giant rats being taken for walks on bits of rope; that man on the cross whom the Christians eat every Sunday, and flush toilets.

Through these and other gags German and Turkish cultural stereotypes are paraded and gently mocked, although more substantive issues of the type addressed in Against the Wall are largely evaded or left implicit.

Nevertheless, it is undeniably well put together at all levels, particularly for a first feature from someone with a television background. The performances are credible, the child actors not too annoying, and a mixture of German, Turkish and made-up nonsense language cleverly used to telling effect to indicate the different levels of cultural assimilation and separation.

Troll Hunter

2011-06-18T20:54:00.001+01:00

Seeking a subject for a project, three film students -- presenter Thomas, cameraman Kalle and sound recorder Johanna -- decide to investigate apparent incidents of bear poaching. To their surprise, the man they choose to follow turns out to be a member of a top-secret troll hunting team.

Comparing Troll Hunter to the likes of The Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield and Diary of the Dead is inevitable given that the filmmakers present it mockumentary style as having been constructed from found footage shot by their diegetic counterparts.

The conceit is believable, with the single hand-held camera based aesthetic working well barring a few moments where the cameraman’s point-of-view seems more about getting that shot than staying alive. The CGI trolls are seamlessly integrated, the human performers believable, and the illusion strengthened by the filmmakers avoidance of non-diegetic music.

While they don’t shy away from showing the monsters, much of the running time is spent searching for and learning about the trolls, with their ecology and the reasons no-one believes they exist surprisingly plausible.

This said, the film has certain essential problems: It isn’t doing anything that hasn’t been seen or done before, beyond the use of Norwegian locales and myths. This in turn may limit its acceptance by the sort of mainstream cinemagoers who might otherwise appreciate it, especially as it isn’t particularly scary or gory for a horror film. The chances for a Hollywood remake are likewise less likely because it is so culturally specific.

The Man in the White Suit

2011-06-18T17:17:00.002+01:00

Whether any connection with the Festival's Martin Bell event was intended, this fashion-themed screening at Inspace was very welcome.

Alec Guiness is the title character, a chemist by the name of Sidney Stratton whose experiments with long chain polymers result in the development of a fabric which is incredibly strong – notably the pattern for his suit has to be cut with a oxy-acetylene torch – and repels dirt and stains.

Naively Streeter expects to be lauded as a genius and his fabric to sweep the world. He fails to reckon, of course, with the fact that once you have one or two such suits you will never actually need any more. Accordingly both the mill owners and their workers seek to suppress Streeter’s discovery before it becomes public and threatens their way of life.

Crucially director Alexander Mackendrick avoids taking sides and instead takes pot-shots at capital, labour and the ideal of the detached, disinsterested scientist alike.

It’s the last aspect that also makes the film rather unconventional in its avoidance of heroism and romance. While there is the woman who is interested in Stratton he never returns her interest, nor sees her as a viable substitute to his scientific goals.

Mackendrick takes a no-nonsense approach to his direction, leaving it the writing, Guinness and a brilliant supporting cast including the likes of Joan Greenwood – the two having also made a memorable double-act in that other Ealing classic, Kind Hearts and Coronets – Ernest Thesigner and Michael Gough scope to carry the film.

The director does however make the sound an unusually important part of the production through the amusingly musical nature of Guinness’s experimental apparatus.

If The Man in the White Suit has a flaw when viewed retrospectively it is that its too much the product of the post-war austerity period to foresee the possibility of a consumerist future in which advertising could encourage a desire for ever more everlasting suits, whether we needed them or not.

The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye

2011-06-17T14:41:00.004+01:00

According to her self-penned IMDB profile The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye writer-director-editor Marie Losier makes unconventional films about unconventional artists and views the subject of this film, Genesis P-Orridge, as a “musical genius”.

If you agree with and Losier, then you will probably enjoy this documentary, although it may not tell you much you do not already know about the artist born Neil Andrew Megson, better known for his work with Throbbing Gristle in the 1970s and Psychic TV in the 1980s under his new legal name.

If you don’t then you are unlikely to have your opinions altered and will probably find the film somewhat tedious and self-indulgent, characterised by often-predictable experimental tropes and images.

Personally I’m somewhat in the middle: Some of P-Orridge’s work is certainly interesting, but like many transgressive artists there’s a tendency for shock for its own sake to override other concerns. The danger of exhibiting a used tampon as part of an ICA exhibition is of being forever labelled as that tampon artist and of having to constantly live up to your reputation c(o)um past.

Correspondingly the “pandrogyny” project, by which Genesis and his wife Lady Jaye had plastic surgery that made them look like one another, could be considered as creating a body (of) work somewhat derivative of if still recognisably distinct from that of the French performance artist Orlan.

Likewise, we might wonder about the limits Genesis and Jaye set for themselves, in that this pandrogyny seems more about secondary than primary sex characteristics.

Unfortunately P-Orridge doesn’t really raise these questions here, nor Losier ask them.

Part of the issue, one suspects, may have been that the film appears to have had a long and somewhat troubled genesis of its own, maybe beginning as a film about pandrogyny but then becoming more about Genesis and his/her relationship with Jaye after her 2007 death.

Best enjoyed while “drinking German wine”

Project Nim

2011-06-16T20:33:00.002+01:00

The title of this documentary from Man on Wire and Winconsin Death Trip director James Marsh refers to a five-year project into whether a chimpanzee could be taught to use sign language to communicate with humans.

Nim Chimpsky – the name is a pun on Noam Chomsky, whose ideas on language acquisition underlay the project, which began in 1973 – was the chimp, taken away from his mother at age two weeks and raised by a succession of human parents.

The director of the project was a Columbia University psychology professor, Herb Terrace. He however took a largely hands off approach, leaving the day to day work of rearing and educating Nim to a succession of research assistants, predominantly attractive young women, many of whom he had relationships with.

The first of Nim's parents was Stephanie LaFarge, a wealthy hippie type with a large family of her own. Lafarge treated Nim much like her human children, with considerable indulgence and little discipline, including letting him smoke marijuana and drink alcohol. Terrace soon decided that a more rigorous, disciplined and scientific approach was needed and transferred Nim over to the first of a number of students.

After five years the results were inconclusive. Terrace believed that all Nim was doing when he used sign language to say something like “give Nim banana” was effectively begging, whereas some of Nim's more hands-on teachers appear to believe that there was more to it than this.

Marsh uses a mixture of rich archive material, dramatic reconstructions and interviews with those involved in the project and with Nim. He tells his story in strictly chronological order, going from Nim's birth to his death in 2000. As such, a fair bit of the running time is actually devoted to Nim's post-project life, the research having had to end by the point he was fully grown and it became too dangerous to continue working; we're told that an adult male chimpanzee weighing 150 pounds is as strong as five or six men, while a number of the researchers bear scars from where Nim bit them.

By turns funny, sad, disturbing and thought-provoking, Project Nim's only weak point is a sometimes overly intrusive and insistent musical accompaniment.

Bobby Fischer Against the World

2011-06-15T14:17:00.002+01:00

The trajectory of Bobby Fischer’s life is a difficult to put an upbeat fimic spin upon. In 1972, aged just 30, he was a national hero for defeating the incumbent Soviet chess champion Boris Spassky in their World Championship Match. But by the time of his death in 2008 his anti-US, anti-Semitic and other remarks had led to his being a zero living in exile.

That Fischer was able to find a home in Iceland in the 1990s, after an extradition warrant for his arrest was issued by the US government for his breaching sanctions against Yugoslavia by playing there during it civil wars nevertheless raises questions as to the objectivity of the film’s title: Was it really Bobby Fischer against the entire world, or was it ‘merely’ Bobby Fischer against the US government and – admittedly far, far more problematically – the international Jewish conspiracy that he perceived?

The filmmakers never really get to grips with this side of Fischer. Maybe they could not, but the formal approach they have chosen, that comfortable and familiar mix of talking head interviews and archival footage, frequently overlaid with period-setting music, does not help. Fischer’s grandmaster contemporaries like Larry Evans and Anthony Saidy are better at explaining his chess than their own responses to his eccentricities even in the 1960s, where there (and others’) pop psychologising is frequently in evidence. The musical choices also seem arbitrary – What does Gary Glitter have in common with Fischer, other than also becoming a pariah figure? Did Fischer listen to glam rock or to Booker T. and the MG’s or Isaac Hayes?

A contrast with another film about a troubled genius who retired at the height of his powers, namely 32 Short Films about Glenn Gould is instructive here: Its filmmakers seem to have had the sense that they could not explain everything about the enigmatic Canadian pianist, and so chose a more consciously fragmentary approach to convey an appropriate sense of otherness or even otherworldliness.

Here, by contrast, we belatedly learn of Fischer’s involvement with an Evangelical Christian group only at the point he decided to leave them in the mid-1970s, but not at the point when he first joined them over a decade earlier. It’s fragmentary, yes, but not in a clearly worked through, properly articulated way. Perhaps it could be a reflection of Fischer’s increasingly paranoid dislocation, but if so we again come back to the fact that the filmmakers make no attempt to explore how the ideas he came to hold made sense to him.

Two moments stand out here. The first is a talking head piece from Henry Kissinger. Undoubtedly his presence was a coup for the filmmakers and he was obviously a major player in the geopolitical chess games of the Cold War that form the backdrop to the Fischer’s story. But Kissinger’s presence also inadvertently makes it clear that Fischer’s anti-Americanism was never going to be seriously engaged with and also offers anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists proof of what they are looking for in that “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you” manner. The second, is a fragment from a US television news programme at the time of the Fischer-Spassky match. It is the first item on the agenda. Watergate is relegated to second.

Fisher may have been the greatest chess player ever and the man most important for raising its profile, particularly in the west, but ultimately I was left wondering how important chess itself is in the grand scheme of things and whether the tragedy presented might be attributed to too little rather than too much chess. Had Fischer literally lived solely for chess and shown absolutely no interest in anything else, most notably politics, would he have been okay? Obviously it would be wrong to expect the filmmakers to answer this question in a serious way, but taken on its own terms Bobby Fischer Against the World raises too many questions and offers too few answers.

Fase 7 / Phase 7

2011-06-14T21:32:00.002+01:00

In a 1959 Cahiers du cinema essay entitled Little Subjects, critic and new wave filmmaker Claude Chabrol contrasted two imaginary films, on ‘The Apocalypse of Our Time’ and ‘The Quarrel Between Our Neighbours’, or on big and the small subject. Chabrol suggested that the two paradigms were structurally more similar than might first be apparent and that, contrary to appearances, the small subject was actually the richer, in that it allowed the filmmaker scope to explore form and content alike.

I mention this because Fase 7 could be taken as a test case for Chabrol's thesis some half a century on. For while being about a big subject, namely a mysterious plague sweeping the globe and bringing about the end of the world as we know it, it takes a small subject approach by focusing upon a young couple expecting their first child and four or five other families living in their Buenos Aires apartment block.

In terms of content, it thus has obvious affinities with the likes of [Rec] and Shivers, but downplays the horror angle and plays up the human drama. It is also somewhat more plausible in terms of the details of the plague itself: Those who contract it seem to sicken and die, but don't turn into homicidal maniac zombie-types in a matter of minutes.

This also contributes to the deliberate weakening of the horror film's traditional us/them human/monster division. These are all just more or less ordinary people trapped in an extraordinary situation, understandably suspicious of one another's equally understandable motives. Everyone has their reasons, as Renoir’s The Rules of the Game famously puts it.

The most interesting characters amongst the small ensemble are father-to-be Coco and the enigmatic Horacio. Depending on perspective, Horacio is either a conspiracy-theory advancing survivalist paranoiac or the one who best understands the situation and how to deal with it.Coco, meanwhile, displays an understandable scepticism at his neighbour’s seemingly far-fetched theories and is, particularly by generic standards, unusually reluctant to become a gun-toting survivalist type.

The relationship between Coco and his wife Pipi is less developed over the course of the narrative, however. Being heavily pregnant, she remains in the family’s apartment for most of the duration, deliberately kept apart from what is going on elsewhere in the block; here, however, it should be noted that no-one really knows what is going on in the wider world as communication quickly break down.

This is mirrored formally by the transformation of the interior spaces as they become increasingly dark and threatening, occasionally lit only with eerily glowing blue-purple ultraviolet and green glow-stick lights. While the film is not devoid of gore, the latter also allows for a nicely parodic action scene as characters blaze away at one another apparently ineffectually – or at least ineffectually by conventional film standards, if not those pertaining within the film’s particular world.

There are a few flaws. The opening scene of the couple’s quiet supermarket trip suddenly being replaced with panic-buying mobs seems a bit sudden, for instance, as does a jump of a number of days signalled by Coco's suddenly acquiring a beard. But thanks to the general levels of intelligence evident behind and in front of the camera, it works far more often than not.

The comfortable-enough middle class world presented helps internationalise the production, beyond its global pandemic narrative, while the presence of Guillermo Del Toro favourite Federico Luppi and a John Carpenter-esque soundtrack are further plusses.

Weird cover versions #190

2011-06-11T20:42:00.002+01:00

The Ukelele Orchestra does the theme to The Good, The Bad and the Ugly:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLgJ7pk0X

Some spaghetti western badasses

2011-06-11T20:32:00.002+01:00

1. Angel Eyes Sentenza -- Lee Van Cleef -- The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

"That your family? Nice Family" [Sneers]

2. Frank -- Henry Fonda -- Once Upon a Time in the West

"What are we going to do with this one, Frank?"
"Now that you've called me by name?" [Kills child]

3. El Loco -- Klaus Kinski -- The Great Silence

"Now say good-bye to your husband. Always respect the dead. Now pack your husband in the snow. That'll keep him fresh till I collect his bounty. So don't you bury him, you hear? What times we live in. Blacks worth as much as a white man."

Yours?

Movie Matters Giallo Podcast

2011-06-11T10:14:00.001+01:00

Movie Matters 'Giallo Special' podcast:

On iTunes: http://tiny.cc/b84kn
Or their blog: http://tiny.cc/com9r

Enjoy!

Japanese posters for Italian cannibal films

2011-06-08T16:18:00.002+01:00

Cannibal Holocaust

Cannibal Apocalypse

Cannibal Ferox

The Cannibal Apocalpyse image, of Morghen's chest with a hole blown in it showing Saxon's character behind him, would make a cool T-shirt design.

Giallo mood mixes

2011-05-21T20:12:00.000+01:00

From here:

http://purplezombiedj.blogspot.com/2011/05/giallo-moods-music-for-murder.html

Coming soon from FAB Press

2011-05-20T17:31:00.002+01:00

THE EURO-WESTERN BEYOND LEONE

The success of Sergio Leone's 'Dollars' trilogy in the '60s sparked a gold rush, as a legion of European film-makers - many of them sharing the get-rich-quick mentality of Leone's mercenary anti-heroes - followed the master's lead to create some of the wildest Westerns ever made.

Cynical and stylish, bloody and baroque, Euro-westerns replaced straight-shooting sheriffs and courageous cowboys with amoral adventurers, whose murderous methods would shock the heroes of Hollywood Westerns. These films became box-office sensations around the world, and their influence can still be felt today.

Any Gun Can Play puts the phenomenon into perspective, exploring the films' wider reaches, their recurrent themes, characters, quirks and motifs. It examines Euro-westerns in relation to their American ancestors and the mechanics of the Italian popular film industry, and spotlights the unsung actors, directors and other artists who subverted the 'code' of the Western and dragged it into the modern age.

Based on years of research backed up by interviews with many of the genre's leading lights, including actors Franco Nero, Giuliano Gemma and Gianni Garko, writer Sergio Donati, and directors Sergio Sollima and Giuliano Carnimeo, Any Gun Can Play will satisfy both connoisseurs and the curious.

Complete with a foreword by Euro-Western legend Franco Nero, this stunningly illustrated reference guide takes aim at the lingering notion that the genre has little to offer beyond the 'Dollars' films and a fistful of others, exposing the full, vibrant history of the Euro-western.

CONTENTS:

FOREWORD
By Euro-western legend Franco Nero, star of Django, A Professional Gun and Keoma, among others.

INTRODUCTION
An overview of Euro-westerns, their origins and characteristics, plus the major professionals whose careers they launched, prolonged or transformed.

TARGET PRACTICE
Early Euro-westerns were hit-and-miss affairs, but A Fistful of Dollars is not the only film from the genre's formative period worthy of recognition.

A BULLET SPENT, A DOLLAR EARNED
In the wake of For a Few Dollars More, the genre matured and broadened its horizons, presenting a misanthropic world-view, leavened with irony, that perfectly matched the tenor of the times.

RELATIVES AND RELIGION
Many Italian Westerns skewed their stories towards the home market, serving up stereotypical stories of troublesome females, feuding families and a satirical or critical treatment of religion.

'GOD FORGIVES... I DON'T!'
Euro-westerns posit a world where betrayal is rife and violence ever-present, taking the theme of revenge to extraordinary extremes.

'DON'T BUY BREAD, BUY DYNAMITE'
Euro-westerns were unashamedly populist, and many of them adopted a left-wing stance in the late Sixties, reflecting the influence of radical film-makers and the political atmosphere of the times.

BEWARE OF FAKE GUNS
While American Westerns had Jesse James, Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid, European film-makers invented a pantheon of their own, populated by the likes of Django, Ringo, Sabata, Sartana and Trinity.

COWBOYS, COMEDIANS AND KUNG FU STARS
Many Euro-westerns were hybrids not just of cultural traditions and film-making styles, but also tones, subjects and settings, with elements such as mystery, comedy, horror and martial arts not uncommon.

DESOLATION AND DECONSTRUCTION
The genre burned brightly but briefly, and by the early Seventies it was in decline. This chapter examines what these latecomers have to offer, and whether they have been dismissed too lightly.

WHO'S WHO IN EURO-WESTERNS
A biographical A-Z of the most important and prolific actors, directors, composers, etc.

EURO-WESTERN FILMOGRAPHY
A chronological listing of European Westerns.

[Sounds like a good, comprehensive guide for the most part IMO]

Movie Matters Podcast

2011-05-15T13:39:00.001+01:00

A film podcast by some friends of ours ;-)

http://moviematterspodcast.blogspot.com/

A one-off

2011-05-11T00:43:00.002+01:00

Well, one of two: an original prop from Fulci's City of the Living Dead, currently on Ebay.

Something for the Fulci fan who has everything?!

The Best of Spaghetti Westerns

2011-05-07T12:59:00.003+01:00

This ten disc set features 20 films, two to a disc:

No Room to Die
Lone and Angry Man

Rope and the Colt
In the Colt's Shadow

Shanghai Joe
The Return of Shanghai Joe

Charge! Dirty Dogs
Shoot Gringo Shoot!

A Bullet for a Stranger
10,000 Dollars for a Massacre

A Pistol for Ringo
The Return of Ringo

Ringo: Face of Vengeance
Blood for a Silver Dollar

Deep West
Seven Dollars on the Red

Bandidos
Forgotten Pistolero

A Noose is Waiting for You Trinity
A Sky Full of Stars

Not bad for £15 or so from Amazon marketplace.

I've got Seven Dollars on the Red on at the moment and it looks damn good, in the proper aspect ratio, with vibrant colours, a pretty immaculate print and with no artefacting or pixelation thus far. Hope the other films are equally impressive...

Some new posters

2011-05-03T23:54:00.003+01:00

US one-sheet for Lizard in a Woman's Skin, as Schizoid

US one-sheet for Psychomania, as The Death Wheelers

US one-sheet for Death Line, as Raw Meat

Not the best pictures, I know.

Swedish Sensationsfilms

2011-04-28T23:32:00.004+01:00

Although author Daniel Ekeroth gives no precise definition, sensationsfilm can broadly be understood as Swedish vernacular or exploitation cinema for the most part. It was a type of cinema that lasted around 40 years, from the early 1950s to 1990s, when industrial and other changes rendered it redundant.

A complication is that at times the sensationsfilm and the art film are difficult to distinguish, particularly in the period before the hardcore porn boom of the 1970s.

Bergman’s Summer with Monika was, after all, distributed in a shortened, dubbed, rescored version in the US as Monika: The Story of a Bad Girl while the same director’s rape-revenge horror The Virgin Spring not only famously inspired Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left but has also been identified by John Waters as the first film to feature scenes of vomiting.

Nevertheless, it is also clear that the sensationsfilm took the particular form it did due to particularities of Swedish culture and censorship. For instance, whereas male nudity in particular is a rarity in US exploitation films, it emerges as a commonplace in the sensationsfilm.

Contrariwise the Swedish censors tended to take a harder line as far as violence was concerned, with mitigating circumstances and exceptions for social engineering purposes.

Here, Ekeroth discusses the film which inaugurated the “kicker” cycle of the 1980s. This youth group got their name from their liking for kicking things, including phone booths. An official film with the intention of discouraging such activity had, perhaps predictably, the opposite effect.

An aspect of certain sensationsfilms which may be more problematic today in some territories are sexualised images of adolescents in some titles; as Ekeroth notes the child pornography laws introduced in the late 1960s were comparatively lax.

Following a useful introductory overview, Christina Lindberg (the most recognisable name, face and body associated with the genre) provides her memories of the genre. This is followed by a longer alphabetical reviews section. Each film gets a page to itself, punctuated by individual pages of black and white poster, lobby card, video box and still reproductions and colour sections. The reviews generally have the format of a synopsis followed by a commentary and points of interest, along with a typically dismissive contemporary review from a respectable critic. Ekeroth is unsurprisingly more positive, but is thankfully not blind to the considerable variations in the films’ levels of ambition and accomplishment.

The alphabetical approach has its pluses and minuses. On the one hand it makes it easier to find a particular title should it crop up somewhere. On the other hand it makes it more difficult to chart the development of particular filmmakers and performers careers, such as they were.

On balance, however, it works, thanks to a generous degree of cross-referencing and shorter sections after the reviews giving profiles and filmographies for some of the most important names (besides the aforementioned Lindberg these include US-expat Joe Sarno, whose shift from the softcore productions of the late 1960 to harder fare ten years later is characteristic, and Bo Vibenius, whose little seen Breaking Point sounds like an outré must see comparable with the likes of Alberto Cavallone) along with a listing of the top 20 sensationsfilms (also often the ones which are easiest to access internationally, including Vibenius’s Thriller: A Cruel Film, starring Lindberg)

A valuable guide to one of the hitherto uncharted areas of world exploitation that comes highly recommended. Where else would you learn about the 'Lingonberry' western or a series of five colour-referencing detective films including the pre-Bava and apparently Blood and Black Lace like Mannequin in Red?

The Shrieking Sixties: British Horror Films 1960-1969

2011-04-27T22:14:00.004+01:00

Edited by Darrell Buxton of Pass the Marmalade, this new volume from Midnight Marquee is a comprehensive guide to British horror films of the 1960s.

The bulk of the 220-page book is comprised of year by year listings of titles, each of which gets one or two detailed reviews.

Horror is defined in broad terms, such that some science-fiction and fantasy films like Dr Who and the Daleks and Jason and the Argonauts are included, along with certain sui generis entries including Girly and The War Game.

British horror is defined in terms of being a UK production with the consequence that the likes of Jess Franco’s films for Harry Alan Towers are included whereas Michael Reeves debut The She Beast is not.

An appendix lists numerous problematic or borderline titles.

Although the usual suspects from Hammer, Amicus and Tigon are well represented, the real strength of the book lies in bringing less well-known films and filmmakers to light.

Some names and titles that are prominent in this regard are Vernon Sewell, with House of Mystery, The Man in the Back Seat and Strongroom; Robert Hartford-Davis, with The Black Torment, Corruption and Incense for the Damned and an abortive Titus Andronicus; the self-explanatory pre-Reptile The Snake Woman; the British Sign Language film The Return of Dracula, and the apparently woeful The Vulture.

This aspect is also to the fore in the appendix of short films, which includes early entries from the likes of Michael Armstrong, the odd Harrison Marks skin-flick and some even more obscure sex films.

The reviews are informative and manage to raise some interesting points without getting bogged down in over-analysis. So, for example, a queer subtext to Gorgo is brought out, without ignoring the fact that it is first and foremost a monster movie.

In his introduction, Buxton identifies a number of inspirations and models – Fragments of Fear, English Gothic, Ten Years of Terror and A Heritage of Horror. His book can stand tall in this company and is a must read for fans of British horror cinema.

Cannibal Holocaust almost uncut

2011-04-13T18:49:00.003+01:00

Interesting things are afoot at the BBFC it would seem.

Ruggero Deodato is currently working on a director's cut of Cannibal Holocaust that will feature less animal cruelty. It seems a copy of the film was submitted to the BBFC and the only one of animal cruelty scenes that was going to require cuts was the killing of the small rodent type animal. A reason this was unacceptable was that whereas the other animals killed on camera were consumed for food, this was not.

There's something of an irony here in that within the diegesis of the film this animal is one which is eaten (the guide who kills it actually remarks 'tonight we eat meat' or something like that) whereas a pig that gets shot later is presented as not being eaten ("that pig would have been food for those people').

Context based guidelines just get harder to understand the longer you think about them contextually...

[There's loads more on the topic at the Cult Labs forums]

Stephen Thrower's blog

2011-03-28T20:59:00.001+01:00

The title makes sense, to those who know...

http://7doorshotel.blogspot.com/

Red Circle

2011-03-28T19:58:00.002+01:00

The British comic Hotspur featured a story 'Red Circle School'.

There is an Edgar Wallace krimi Der Rote Kries - i.e. The Red Circle

Then there is the Bava / Margheriti film Nude... si muore, set in a girls' school.

It all ties together, somehow...

A decidedly Ugly poster

2011-03-28T13:29:00.003+01:00

New Zealand playbill for Once Upon a Time in the West, which looks like it was sketched from the US poster, by a non-artist...

Spanish The Good, The Bad and the Ugly poster

2011-03-28T01:50:00.003+01:00

A Spanish (?) The Good, The Bad and the Ugly poster, presenting Tuco but neither of the others.

Interesting to compare with the West German poster, in terms of how particular actors / characters were emphasised and downplayed.

West German The Good, The Bad and the Ugly poster

2011-03-28T01:41:00.003+01:00

Under the Two Magnificent Rogues title, but note that the faces shown are not those of the two rogues - i.e. Eastwood's Good and Tuco's Ugly - but Eastwood and Van Cleef, i.e. The Bad.

Teenage Wasteland

2011-03-27T22:34:00.006+01:00

The author of Teenage Wasteland J.A. Kerswell, has run the excellent Hysteria Lives website for many years. That's a reason to encourage you – i.e. cult film fans – to buy this book. For, in the unlikely event that you're unawares of it, Hysteria Lives is an excellent resource on obscure slasher type films and Kerswell is one of those who deserves to get something back from our community.

Within the book, the author shows his in-depth knowledge of the subgenre by referencing not just the obvious titles and film historical points, but also such obscurities as the David Hess directed To All a Goodnight (1980) and the Swedish models-meet-a-maniac entry Blood Tracks (1985).

He starts with the Theatre du Grand Guignol and progresses through silent and classic horror, onto proto-slashers of the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s, taking in the German krimi film and the Italian giallo en route.

Beginning with 1978's Halloween, he then examines the slasher “golden age” of 1978 to 1984 – or Halloween to A Nightmare on Elm Street – on a year-by-year basis, before turning to international and north American developments in the interregnum period before Scream and the rise of the postmodern slasher film.

Crucially, Kerswell also recognises that the self-referential slasher parody was not invented in the late 1990s, but only brought into the mainstream by it.

Teenage Wasteland is attractively put together, with an embossed cover; plenty of illustrative stills and, posters and is even on coloured rather than white paper, with different chapters in different colours (the giallo chapter is, naturally, yellow) and good use of design elements such as pull quotes and boxed facts/trivia.

My main criticism is that I wanted more that was off the beaten track. This is, for me, one of the delights of the Hysteria Lives site: It's watching a film like Derek Ford's Sex Express and looking for further information, and coming across Kerswell's review of it, or reading about the Hugo Stiglitz vehicle Cemetery of Terror on his site and adding it to your 'to see' list.

The difficulty, I suppose, is that broader one between doing a website, where you are not really constrained by space, print costs, considerations of target audience and so on, and a book, where these factors come into play.

After all, your average Waterstones / Amazon customer isn't going to know or care who a Derek Ford is, whereas they will (still) recognise the names John Carpenter and Wes Craven.

Still, give the young slasher fan Teenage Wasteland and, once they get past Michael, Freddy and Jason, they will have plenty of useful places to go next. For myself, meanwhile, it's adding To All a Goodnight and Blood Tracks to that ever-expanding to watch list.

Patrick vive ancora / Patrick Lives Again

2011-03-27T15:11:00.006+01:00

One of the defining features of the Italian popular cinema of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s was the filone or tributary approach: Take a successful film, or one that you expected to be successful, and produce an unofficial sequel, remake or reinterpretation hopefully close enough to the original to fool audiences whilst sufficiently different to avoid legal issues.

As its title suggests Patrick Still Lives / Patrick vive ancora is a classic example of the filone principle in action, its specific inspiration being Richard Franklin’s Australian production Patrick.

For those unfamiliar with the original it’s the story of a man named Patrick who is 1) in a coma, 2) has telekinetic powers, and 3) uses these to force his nurse to love him and 4) kill anybody else who gets in his way of his schemes.

Although not a big hit internationally, it must have presumably been a success in Italy; certainly the Italian distributors found it worthwhile enough to replace the original soundtrack with one by Argento associates and soundtrack specialists Goblin.

Director Mario Landi, writer Piero Regnoli and producer Gabriele Crisanti’s film cannot really be considered a sequel to Patrick, however. For English and Italian titles aside, it doesn’t follow on from Franklin’s film but rather takes the first three core elements from Patrick; adds a revenge plot justification to the fourth by way of Ten Little Indians.

Above all, it also ups the sleaze and splatter to levels that are extreme even by the standards of Italian exploitation, if also consistent with such other Crisanti productions as Giallo a venezia and Zombie Nights of Terror / Zombie 3.

Patrick vive ancora begins with Patrick (Gianni Dei) and his father Professor Herschell (Sacha Pitoeff) stuck in the middle of nowhere, their car having broken down. Patrick tries to flag down a passing vehicle for assistance, and gets a bottle in the face for his troubles.

We then cut to an operating theatre as a surgeon operates to save his Patrick’s life. He succeeds after a fashion – Patrick (still) lives (again), but in a comatose state.

Although it is never explained exactly how, Patrick then develops telekinetic powers, further fuelled by some of the other patients Professor Herschell has taken on at his private clinic, the interior and grounds of which should prove familiar to any student of Italian trash and which also feature prominently in Zombie 3.

During this time, the professor has also discovered the identities of six possible bottle throwers, whom he has now invited to spend a few days at the clinic in order that he and his son may extract their revenge...

For now, however, the filmmakers wisely allow for a spot of character development, in order that we know the guests are all hateful bourgeois figures who deserve to die in nasty ways – even if at least five of them are innocent in Patrick’s specific case.

This also affords them the opportunity to have the female cast members parade around in states of nakedness or threw something on and nearly missed-ness, and for everybody to down copious quantities of J&B and bitch at one another.

The obligatory catfight and one of a number of J&B bottles

The first to die is the improbably named Mr Cough, a politician. Going for a night swim, he is boiled alive by Patrick. Cough’s J&B consumption then becomes relevant, as Professor Herschell (Sacha Pitoeff) explains away Cough’s death as having been brought on by his alcoholism; the other guests seem to accept this.

Caused by drinking, apparently.

There’s a certain irony here in that, according to Argento, who worked with Pitoeff on Inferno, the actor was himself something of a drunk at this point in his life and career; brave souls may wish to suggest a double-bill of Patrick vive ancora and Last Year at Marienbad to Pitoeff fans.

Next up is Mr Davis, who gets a hook through his neck as he is hung up over a well.

Davis is soon discovered by Stella Randolph (Mariangela Giordano – Crisanti’s wife and a regular in his films). She flees in terror to the kitchens, where she finds a flayed cat in the fridge (a nice inversion of Giallo a Venezia, where Giordano’s character’s torso was left in a fridge for her cleaner to find) and is then menaced and killed by a long poker which, well, pokes her through the vagina and exits out her mouth.

The flayed cat

The reaction shot

An understandable response to being penetrated by a poker

The result

Another reaction shot

But while the sex-violence-sleaze interface is a constant in Crisanti’s productions, it seems more determined by shock value than anything else; certainly the ridiculousness of the special effects here creates a markedly different impression than the rather more plausible looking impaled woman in Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust.

Professor Herschell informs the other guests that the police have been called and that they will have to stay at the villa until the authorities arrive.

Next we get another bit of character and plot development as Patrick uses his powers to force secretary Lidya to strip and masturbate for him.

This is character and plot development in that it later transpires that Lidya is amongst the suspected bottle throwers, and that her fate is a source of potential conflict between Patrick and his father. Not, of course, that you can expect any exchanges of dialogue between them over this...

Lydia and Patrick, and the purple and green

Before we get to the denouement, however, there are still other suspects for Patrick to remorselessly, relentlessly dispose of: One woman is guillotined by her car windows, while another (again servant rather than a guest) has her throat torn out by her Alsatians.

The hint of a connection to Argento’s Inferno and Suspiria is further reinforced by the neo-expressionist purple and green lighting that signify Patrick’s presence and power within his own chamber and the set-pieces. This is, however, about the only evidence of directorial flair in the film, which is otherwise efficiently and functionally – read cheaply – put together.

Curiously, however, we don’t see what happens to the man who discovers the woman’s severed head.

Does he live or die? Or was he never a suspect, which is possible given that by now we’ve got more potential bottle throwers than we need? Or did the filmmakers just run out of budget and/or ideas as far as presenting another imaginatively gory demise?

Certainly there is a sense of anti-climax to what follows, particularly given that we still don’t know who in fact threw that fateful bottle...

The Whip and the Body UK poster

2011-03-20T01:07:00.002Z

Undoubtedly rare, but pretty ugly IMO:

Queen of the Blues

2011-03-14T23:51:00.006Z

Even by the low standards of the 1970s British sex film this is a bottom of the barrel production. Bankrolled by porn magnate David Sullivan as a star vehicle for Mary Millington, who plays the title role, it was produced and directed by Willy Roe.

It's a sixty-minute piece that’s too long to work as a short, yet is too short to be a feature.

Rather than presenting a narrative punctuated with strip and comedy routines, it's more strip and comedy routines punctuated by a narrative, one that doesn’t really develop before abruptly ending with a deus ex machina.

Basically gangster Roscoe sends two of his heavies (one played by the inimitable Milton Reid, the other by future Hi-De-Hi fixture Felix Bowness) to extort protection money from the Blues club, not realising that it is owned by another gangster (Fawlty Towers' Ballard Berkeley) who duly makes this known.

Reid and Bowness

Another subplot, invoking a ghost haunting the place, is even less developed.

We get eight or so minutes of backstage chatter and strip routines before the first couple of minutes of plot. Then we get another couple of minutes of stripping, followed by John M. East doing a Max Miller impersonation as the club’s compere, followed by Millington doing her first number, admittedly intercut with the first proper exchange between the compere and the would-be extortionists, followed by some more routines.

Can't act, can't dance, can't sing about sums it up

25 minutes have elapsed by this point and the total story content is probably about four minutes tops.

There are some points of interest nonetheless: The strip routines make the connection to the cinema of attractions clear, as do the constant cutaways to the diegetic audience (curiously the same despite the action supposedly taking place on different nights) and the Music Hall nature of East's routines (see also Come Play with Me).

East does Max Miller

The strippers' remarks backstage are also oddly at odds with the illusion of glamour: “What’s the fascination? Surely when you’ve seen one set of tits you’ve seen them all?!”

Argento fans may also care to note that Geraldine Hooper, who plays Massimo Ricci in Deep Red, is credited as the club’s receptionist.

The pressbook for the film, distributed by Tigon, describes scenes that are not actually present and, one suspects, were never filmed either.

Giallo and Gothic connections

2011-03-14T11:48:00.001Z

Bava’s The Girl Who Knew too Much has certain affinities with Austen’s Northanger Abbey. In Bava’s film Nora Davis is an American thriller aficionado who travels to Rome and finds herself embroiled in a murder mystery much like those presented in her favourite reading material. In Austen’s novel Gothic enthusiast Catherine Morland visits the titular abbey which, from her reading of The Mysteries of Udolpho, she expects to be a place of Gothic horror and mystery.

Step Right Up!...I'm Gonna Scare the Pants Off America

2011-03-08T23:43:00.002Z

Just found out this was republished at the end of last year; should be a lot more affordable than a 1976 original, unless you luck out and get an ex-library copy or similar.

European haunted house films

2011-03-08T23:12:00.002Z

What are your top six European horror/fantastique films featuring haunted houses, loosely defined? I'm thinking of things like:

Castle of Blood
The Virgin of Nuremberg
Bloody Pit of Horror
Queens of Evil
Lisa and the Devil
Malpertuis
The House by the Cemetery
The Beyond
Suspiria
Inferno
A Blade in the Dark
Nude for Satan

Basically anything in which a house / hotel / castle is fairly central as a bad place, with a malign presence or influence being associated with it.

Blaxploitation Pride

2011-03-02T22:05:00.001Z

Nice Blaxploitation blog:

http://www.blaxploitationpride.org/

'Can you dig it?!'

PSA

2011-02-26T11:15:00.001Z

Research questionnaire on "Asian Extreme" cinema:

http://www.asianextremecinemaresearch.co.uk/q.html

If you've got five-ten minutes, why not help them out?

Thames Television and the Krimi

2011-02-23T18:09:00.002Z

I've been watching a lot of episodes of the British TV series The Sweeney from the mid-late 1970s. It was a Thames Television production and each episode is preceded by the Thames logo and fanfare, which was first introduced in 1968. It presents a bunch of London landmarks from different parts of the city crammed together and, as such, is a bit like the imaginary geography of the typical West German krimi film.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Television

Bava / Dr Who

2011-02-12T03:30:00.003Z

Mario Bava used the English pseudonym 'John M Old' because he was asked to choose an 'old English' name.

In the Dr Who story The Brain of Morbius (a Frankenstein story) writer Terence Dicks used the pseudonym 'Robin Bland' after his displeasure at rewrites to the story led him to declare that it should go out "under some bland pseudonym".

Night After Night After Night

2011-02-09T16:08:00.002Z

Directed by one Lewis J. Force – actually Lindsay Shonteff, who requested that his name be taken off the credits – Night After Night After Night comes across as something like a hybrid of The Cover Girl Killer and The New York Ripper with a touch of House of Whipcord thrown in for good measure.

Contemporary giallo-type touches include a black leather wearing, knife-wielding killer on the loose; an assortment of suspects and red herrings and an agreeable level of sleaziness.

The more traditional whodunit is meanwhile represented by the focus on a professional rather than an amateur investigator, in the form of Inspector Bill Rowan.

Rowan is, however, given a more personal interest than applies in the usual detective story, when his wife Jenny falls victim to the maniac as she is stabbed to death whilst taking a shower.

The prime suspect in the murders, even before this, was Pete Laver. A misogynistic womaniser, he doesn’t help his case by reciprocating Rowan’s overt hostility by saying what he’d like to do to Jenny...

The duel: Laver vs. Rowan

The other likely candidates, as far as the audience is concerned, are the moralistic Judge Lomax and his smut-obsessed clerk.

The clerk and his favourite reading material

The filmmakers play reasonably fair with us in terms of the story and the characters’ relationships with one another, providing the opportunity to figure out whodunit by the time that, just over two-thirds of the way through, the killer’s identity is revealed and a manhunt scenario then takes over.

The amount of time that passes between the arrest and the trial isn't too clear

The low budget is most evident in the courtroom and police station scenes, both of which feel somewhat cramped through their emphasis upon medium shots and close-ups to the exclusion of establishing shots. Shonteff’s direction is more agreeable when style comes to the fore, whether within the stalking and slashing stuff or the maniac’s freak outs.

A decent time-passer.

Take an Easy Ride

2011-02-04T20:45:00.003Z

One definition of surrealism is “the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table”

Based on this, Take an Easy Ride could almost be classed as an inadvertently surrealist film on account of the way in which it brings together two seemingly incongruous paracinematic genres.

The first is the public information or service film – i.e. a non-profit film, usually made by official bodies, with the goal of modifying behaviour for the good of individuals and/or the collective.

The second is the exploitation film – i.e. a film made by private entrepreneurs with the intention of making money.

How the two came to be incorporated into the one film is reminiscent of a scenario out of Eskimo Nell. It seems that producer, director and editor Kenneth Rowles initially set out to make a serious film about the dangers of hitch-hiking. Then notorious porn/sexploitation mogul David Hamilton Grant, encouraged Rowles to spice things up with some extra sex and violence so the film could also be played on his sex film circuit.

The serious side of things is most evident in the voice-off and on-camera interviews with what seem like genuine members of the public for the most part.

The exploitation side is more to the fore in the three vignettes that make up the bulk of the 40 or so minute running time, which include voyeuristic low angle shots of mini-skirted women climbing into lorries; footage of Soho sex shops, strip clubs and cinema clubs and a selection of mostly inappropriate stock music cues.

The camera actually moves to get a better view here

Probably illegal now...

One of vignette actually blurs the distinction by beginning as an interview and then segueing into a flashback based reconstruction in which a young woman relates how she was picked up by a couple who took her back to their house, plied her with drink, and ultimately forced her into a porno rape styled no-means-yes threesome...

“I decided to take a bath... I was very surprised when I was joined by Margaret...”

The other two vignettes are more straightforward. One presents a cut-down version of Last House on the Left as a couple of young women hitch-hiking to a rock festival are picked up by a black-glove wearing, porn-magazine reading maniac intent on rape and murder...

Black gloves

Some slow motion here

The other presents something of a reversal of this, as another two young women go on a miniature crime-spree that culminates in their turning on one of the men who gives them a lift, almost like a prototype for a Baise moi or Butterfly Kiss...

Crudely made, unpleasant in that way that it often seems only 1970s exploitation can be and absolutely fascinating in that what-the-hell-were-they-thinking way.

Corruption / Laser Killer

2011-01-25T18:30:00.004Z

[Note that this review contains spoilers]

After his fiance Linda Nolan (Sue Lloyd), a model, suffers horrible facial burns in an accident, respected surgeon Sir John Rowan (Peter Cushing) vows to restore her beauty.

The generation gap

This leads him to study Ancient Egyptian texts, which he uses in conjunction with pituitary glands and a laser to effect a remarkable transformation.

Linda after the accident, but before the operation

Its effectiveness proves transitory, however, prompting John into a succession of murders in a bid to meet Linda’s ever more desperate demands...

Scripted by John and Derek Ford and directed by Robert Hartford-Davis, this 1968 British horror obscurity is best known today for presenting Peter Cushing in some of the most extreme situations of his career.

But unlike Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, where Cushing, co-star Veronica Carlson and director Terence Fisher were taken by surprise by Hammer boss James Carreras’s demand they film a rape scene to spice the film up, we may surmise that Cushing knew from the outset what he was letting himself in for.

The script, after all, was by Donald and Derek Ford. Admittedly, the latter hadn’t yet sunk to the levels of the likes of the softcore Sexplorer and hardcore Sex Express AKA Diversions. Nonetheless, a filmography that had already included the likes of Primitive London and The Yellow Teddy Bears hardly pointed to the likelihood of Corruption being restrained, tasteful, well-made horror in the by then classic (if also thereby arguably aging) Fisher manner.

Moreover, the writers obvious source of inspiration was Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face, a film whose unflinchingly rendered real life surgical horrors made the Hammer Frankenstein films look tame by comparison.

As such, I’m tempted to think that there is a hint of Cushing’s wariness coming through in the scene in which Sir John wanders through Soho at night looking for a likely victim. For, rather than being shown on location, we get what look like studio shots of Cushing superimposed over stock or second unit footage.

Cushing superimposed over Nudist Paradise at the Jacey

An uncut version of the film, which included Sir John’s picking up and killing a prostitute, whose head he takes, would probably help clear things up here.

The superimposition is also, however, very much of a piece with Robert Hartford-Davis’s showy direction, in which rack focus, hand-held camera, distorting lenses, shock zooms and rapid-fire editing are the order of the day in a Repulsion / Blow-Up / The Sorcerers type manner.

Cushing in full-on maniac mode

As the synopsis suggest, the story is replete with non-sequiturs: Where did the Egyptians learn about laser beams and the endocrine system, exactly?!

It also suffers from inconsistent characterisation: One minute Linda is expressing horror that John has experimented upon a guinea pig, the next encouraging him to cold-bloodedly murder the seeming innocent who has wandered into their orbit.

In retrospect, however, it all makes sense. The clue here is in the ending, in which it is suggested that most of what we have just seen, from the point of Linda’s injury onwards, has taken place in Sir John’s head.

Yes, it’s a projection of his subconscious...

If this seems fanciful, an excuse for weak writing, consider the aforementioned Diversions: While that film explicitly presents its vignettes as (sexual) fantasies, we are surprised at the end to learn that, rather than being a convicted prisoner she is in fact one of the police officers escorting the prisoner.

Put another way, there is a consistency of theme here, of Derek Ford looking to challenge middle-class respectability in his images.

More coincidentally, there are also thematic links to Fisher’s pre-Frankenstein film The Stolen Face, in which a surgeon believes a young woman’s malignancy is down to her facial deformity, cures her and then discovers that her ugliness was more a manifestation of an evil soul, with this in turn prefiguring Frankenstein Created Woman’s Christina.

All told, then, Corruption is not a good film in and of itself, but it is one that is certainly of interest to the British trash fan for various reasons.

Some good films

2011-01-20T01:46:00.003Z

Not necessarily Eurotrash, but in that marginal, littoral zone between art and non-art...

Malpertuis (Kumel)
Beatrice Cenci (Fulci)
Closed Circuit (Montaldo)
Fear in the City (Vernueil)
Unman, Wittering, Zigo (Mackenzie)
The Offence (Lumet)
Ganga and Hess (Gunn)
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (Greaves)
Cutter and Bone (Ivan Passer)

Il Prefeto di ferro / The Iron Prefect

2011-01-19T22:46:00.003Z

To some extent the Italian crime cinema divides into two.

On the one hand there are the art house films of directors like Francesco Rosi. These giallo-politico films emphasise dietrology. This means the study of looking behind events, or what lies beneath, hidden from all but the investigator. As such, these films have what Burch and Deleuze term a small form structure, in which an action, A, is required to disclose a situation, S, leading to a new action. The narrative revolves around what Deleuze terms the index, the small but revealing detail – in other words, the clue. In films like The Mattei Affair and Lucky Luciano politics is also a key concern, with the stance taken invariably an oppositional, anti-establishment, left-wing one. In these films architecture is often used symbolically, with a constrast being drawn between the clean, angular lines of modernist and brutalist styles and the hidden of the baroque.

On the other hand there are the vernacular films of directors like Umberto Lenzi. These poliziotteschi emphasise action. They have a large form structure, in which an initial situation, leads to an action, leading to a new situation. The narrative revolves around the binominal or duel – in other words, the protagonist’s need to catch his enemy in the act of committing a crime and then bring him to justice. In these films politics is less important, with the stance taken also being more ambivalent in critiquing left and/or right alike. In these films architecture is used more as something that is there to provide a backdrop for chases and shootouts.

But if we then place these two approaches as opposite ends of a continuum rather than as opposites, we come to films like this one.

The first issue for such films is whether they can manage to produce a satisfying cocktail out of their arthouse and grindhouse type ingredients.

The Iron Prefect succeeds here, such that it should have something to offer all but the most narrow-minded of enthusiasts in either camp.

The title refers to its protagonist, Cesare Moro. He was the police chief who was appointed to bring down the Mafia by Mussolini himself, using whatever means necessary.

The notable thing about Moro was that he himself was not a Fascist. Rather he was a pre-Fascist who implicitly agreed with both Liberal and Fascist Italy (and political theorists) that the state should have the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.

What this meant, as portrayed here, is a blurring of the boundaries over what counts as acceptable and unacceptable violence. A potential model here – or at least a film that came to mind – is Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, specifically the sequence in which the new French commander outlines the options (as he understands them) to critical and even hostile French journalists: Do you want Algeria to remain part of France? If so, then this follows.

Here this translates, without the need for a wider national appeal, as: Do you (the good Italian) want to defeat the, the Mafia (the bad Sicilian)? If so, then cutting off the water supply to a Mafia stronghold village until the women are compelled to respond – albeit after a show of piety and/or (misplaced) faith – follows logically.

Moro is played by Giuliano Gemma. His scar makes him recognisable, although he is otherwise obscured beneath a severe haircut and grey dye job.

Gemma’s heritage in the Italian western is however also invoked in a number of tropes – Moro as the Sheriff riding into the corrupt town to bring law and/or order; the Mafia as the figures of campanelosimo, or Bell Tower Loyalty over any wider, more abstract notions of nation state or party; through the set pieces of men on horseback riding across the rugged countryside; and through some man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do duels – this as one facet of the code of honour, of respect, that Moro and his enemies endorse.

Claudia Cardinale plays the Sicilian woman whom Moro tries to help. While her presence isn’t really necessary and was probably down more to the fact that she is Squitieri’s partner than anything else, her role is suitably unglamorous. It’s also refreshing that her character, a widow, doesn’t become Moro’s love interest, as one imagines would have been the case in a more Hollywood-like version of the story. Rather, we see Moro’s wife arrive with him in Sicily, but soon after being forced to leave for her own safety as she is attacked by the local / native women (where is feminism, that all women are in this together...)?

Some of the dialogue also nicely point to misunderstandings: To the Sicilians Moro is a Piedmontese, but Moro asks why when he is not from that province.

Ennio Morricone contributes a fine soundtrack, with his compositions sounding suitably like Mafia songs.

If all of this, making a quality film that is potentially acceptable to both audiences, is accomplished – as I hope has been conveyed is the case here – then the second issue is then one of finding an audience.

That The Iron Prefect was only recently released on DVD, after a large number of other Italian crime productions seems to further testify to its awkward position; it’s worth noting here that whereas Rosi films like Salvatore Guiliano and Hands Over the City are on the prestigious Criterion label, the likes of Lenzi’s Almost Human and Violent Naples are on cult labels.

Give it a go; you won’t be disappointed. Or, put another way: Why is The Godfather so successful? In part as it has an easy to follow narrative, with violent set pieces? In part because it is The Leopard meets King Lear?

Stop, Look, Listen!

2011-01-17T17:01:00.005Z

The PIF (Public Information Film) is one of my favourite types of paracinema. These were films made in the UK between the 1940s and the present, whose purpose is to inform and educate the public, or specific sections of it, on what to do and not do. Many PIF’s were made by the Central Office of Information (COI) although others were made by industrial and other bodies. They would be shown in classrooms, workplaces and on television. The approach was basically do what you are told or you will suffer and/or die.

This BFI collection focuses on safety-based COI productions. It includes some of the longer versions of the form, running to around 25-30 minutes, as well as some shorter examples in the 40 second or minute long range. What it lacks in numerical quantity compared to the two Charley Says volumes it thereby gains in focus. On balance the quality of the PIFs presented is probably higher as well. Certainly the quality of the presentations is an improvement, with the films having been extensively restored. It could also be said, however, that this might not reflect the way in which many will have experienced these films in the classroom, with a scratchy, beat-up 16mm print.

Besides their kitsch, camp and nostalgia values for those of a certain age – you know who you are – the films are of interest for the talent involved and, of course, as sources of socio-cultural insight into the past.

Three of the filmmakers stand out: John Mackenzie, Robert Young and John Krish. Interestingly they came at the PIF from opposite directions. Mackenzie and Young were fiction filmmakers in the first instance. Mackenzie, most famous for The Long Good Friday, had shot various television dramas, while Young helmed Vampire Circus. (A British-horror connection is also present on Never Go with Strangers, with Elizabeth Luytens scoring and Philip Martell conducting; whether coincidentally or otherwise Luytens also scored the similarly themed Hammer production Never Take Sweets from a Stranger) Krish, by contrast, was a veteran documentarian.

Mackenzie’s contribution is Apaches, a notorious 1977 entry about the dangers of playing on a farm. Six children play at being Apaches and die off one by one in an And Then There Were None crossed with the Gashleycrumb Tinies sort of way: One falls under the wheels of a tractor, another drowns in a slurry pit, a third unwisely drinks poison and so on. After the last child – the narrator – has died, the credits give a roll-call of real children who had died down on the farm in the past year – a device that is also used in another of the featured PIF’s, Building Sites Bite.

Horror film dynamics in Apaches

Sadly, however, the compilation doesn’t include Mackenzie’s early 1980s stranger danger PIF Say No to Strangers.

Young is represented via 20 Times More Likely, whose title comes from the fact that motorcyclists are 20 times more likely to be killed in an accident than a car driver. Aimed at young learner motorcyclists, the film features Gillian “Eastenders” Tayforth (she had earlier appeared in another PIF about the dangers of messing about with fireworks) and a with-it punk soundtrack.

Krish contributes another road safety entry with Drive Safely Darling, featuring a young Colin “Sixth Dr Who” Baker and a suitably disturbing ending that plays a bit like HAL’s death in 2001 (“Brain to eyes... brain to eyes!”) and the fire safety Searching, in which the camera disturbingly prowls through the remnants of a burnt-out house.

Krish’s masterpiece The Finishing Line is, however, not included, on account of its being a British Transport Films rather than COI production.

Other high points include the Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water, in which Donald Pleasance provides the voice of the titular spirit who drowns unaware and foolish children, and the self-explanatory and aforementioned and equally nightmare-inducing Never Go with Strangers.

Shock animation to convey some nonce-sense to children in Never Go with Strangers

Highly recommended

Love Thy Neighbour

2011-01-14T12:47:00.004Z

If you ever want to annoy a Hammer fan, one of the surest ways to do so is draw attention to their comedy product from the early 1970s and the fact that it was these films, more than the better known Gothics, which sustained the company for a few more years thanks to their box office success.

The horror, the horror...

This, moreover, was despite attracting absolutely no positive critical attention and an inherently smaller market due to UK television sitcom spin-offs having absolutely no prospect of US distribution.

Seen today, however, there is an obvious difference between Hammer’s horror output, especially in the Bray Studios period, and their comedy work. For while the best of the horror films manage to be both aesthetic and sociologically interesting, the comedies are only worth looking at symptomatically for what they reveal about British culture and society of the time. They are visually flat and largely devoid of style. As 90 minute films based on 30 minute sitcoms they also tend to be quite weak at the structural and narrative levels.

The themes of gender, class, race, and sexuality are however much the same across the generic divide, although the specifics obviously vary film by film. In this instance race is primary and class secondary with the other two hardly featuring at all.

This is a reflection of the source material. For the situation in Love thy Neighbour is one of two couples, one black and the other white, living next door to one another. While the two women, Barbie and Joan, get on well enough, their respective husbands, Bill and Eddie, are at loggerheads.

What makes things interesting here, however, is the way in which race and class intersect. Bill is more (aspiring to become) middle class and a Conservative supporter, while Eddie is working class and a Labour supporter. From a present-day perspective, however, his politics, as expressed in language – lots of use of racist epithets like Sambo and Nig-Nog – and deeds – including painting racist graffiti on Bill and Barbie’s front door and windows – seem more like the things an extreme right-winger would get up to.

Simultaneously, however, the film also significantly indicates that racial prejudice is not exclusively confined to whites, albeit generally with Bill responding to Eddie rather than initiating things. The film also clearly raises the subject in order to attempt at least some sort of critique, however unsatisfactory it may be to today’s sensibilities. In this regard it’s also worth noting that Eddie clearly has designs on Barbie. Love – or at least lust – see no colour, indeed.

The male gaze #271

Given all of this, the most awkward aspect of Love thy Neighbour is probably one of the incidental details, in the form of a white man in brownface wearing a towel-type turban and affecting an 'Indian' accent.

It ain't half racist mum

Fans of Hammer’s horror output might just about justify a viewing on the basis of a scene in which Bill and some of the other black workers make it look like they are going to cook and eat Eddie.

What's cooking?

I Malamondo

2011-01-14T10:11:00.003Z

Having collaborated with Prosperi and Jacopetti on Mondo Cane and Women of the World, Paolo Cavara here struck out on his own with another entry in the then-popular mondo filone.

It is hard to accurately compare the film with his previous work on account of the Something Weird version under review running 80 minutes against the IMDB’s listed runtime of 100.

What is clear, however, is that at this stage Cavara was still playing it comparatively straight and concentrating on delivering the generic goods.

He was not interested in giving the kind of self-referential critique of the genre and its ethics – or rather lack thereof – that would form the core of The Savage Eye three years later.

Stylistically the film emphasises a formalist rather than a realist approach. Rather than the use of the long take and the camera as a device to record reality, it is all about fast cutting, extreme close ups, crash zooms, whip pans, hand-held work and, above all, near constant music and/or commentary.

The last is designed more to entertain than edify, of course, expressing a supercilious superiority alongside opinions and facts that sometimes manage to be near laughable a half-century or so on, as when we visit a club catering to “The Third Sex” – i.e. homosexuals.

Thematically the film is closest to Women of the World, except that its focus is upon Baby Boom-era youth rather than women. This partially explains the relatively narrow geographical focus, with all the segments coming from western Europe – Italy itself, France, the Netherlands, West Germany, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, and the UK.

Budget probably also played a role, however, in that there is nothing comparable depicting US youth. Nor is there the kind of modern/primitive juxtaposition that is otherwise a staple of the filone.

We do however get a repeated contrasting of contemporary and traditional values and practices.

For example, with ‘Prussian’ students having been banned from duelling we are told that they now have their Mensur scar, or schmiss, inflicted by a razor.

Or, in Leicester, England, a mod and a rocker race around town on their motorbikes to see who will win the hand of the women they both court. This becomes moot when the rocker ‘accidentally’ crashes into a delivery lorry with ‘fatal’ results, all this ‘coincidentally’ recorded by a camera that ‘just happened’ to be there at the right moment.

No, not a Black Flag gig circa 1981 but a Dutch student hazing ritual

The shock aspect of the film’s images is relatively muted. There’s a segment early on where a group of bored Italian ‘hippies’ decide to kill and roast a pig. As one of them kills it a young woman ‘faints’ at the shock whilst more generally “no one feels like eating any more”. What we do not see, however, is anything to convincingly demonstrate that the pig has indeed been killed. (Coincidentally or otherwise, the butchering of a pig had also been the subject of a short actuality by the young Bernardo Bertolucci. There, however, the animal's death had a purpose inasmuch as it was consumed.)

Elsewhere another segment shows German youth visiting Dachau. Apparently unsure that mere black and white stills of the camp’s victims will have the desired impact, Cavara repeatedly frames their emaciated and decaying faces of these victims with those of the well-fed sons and daughters (as the voice-off identifies them) of those responsible for their deaths and uses a crash zoom for good measure. Nothing succeeds like excess.

Given what Cahiers du Cinema's critics said about Pontecorvo's Kapo, wonder what they would have made of this segment?

Ennio Morricone provides the score, a mixture of spaghetti western, jazz, experimental classical and Euro-pop cues (one sung by Catherine Spaak). How far these were composed especially for the film or just culled from library and other pre-existing sources is debatable. That the soundtrack ‘works’ is not.

Worth a look for fans of the form.

Italian Film Review

2010-12-28T14:47:00.001Z

I am feeling burnt out at the moment; unable to write. So I will just direct you towards Italian Film Review for now / ever.

Zombie mini-season

2010-12-25T10:12:00.002Z

Yes, it's yet another mini-season idea. As before, the idea is to showcase some of the less well known films out there...

The Zombie
Mention the zombie film to most people and they’re likely to think of George A Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and its ever-increasing list of sequels, remakes, re-interpretations and so on. While Romero’s impact on the zombie film is hard to overestimate, there were zombie films before him and since which have taken a different approach. In this mini-season we showcase something of the history and diversity of the movie zombie, with films from the US, UK, Italy, Spain and France ranging from the 1930s to the 1990s.

White Zombie
Victor Halperin | USA | 1932 | 69 minutes
The earliest zombie film foregrounds the voodoo aspect of the zombie legend, blending German Expressionist inspired visuals and design with a Haitian setting. Bela Lugosi stars as the evocatively named Murder Legendre.

The Plague of the Zombies
John Gilling | UK | 1966 | 91 minutes
Two years before Romero’s epochal The Night of the Living Dead, Britain’s Hammer films presented their take on the traditional Haitian zombie legend, as a Cornish Squire uses voodoo to murder villagers in order to reanimate their corpses as labourers for his tin time. Colonialism, exploitation, the return of the repressed – this one has subtexts galore.

The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue
Jorge Grau | Italy / Spain | 1974 | 95 minutes
One of the first and best films to show the influence of Night of the Living Dead, this Spanish-Italian co-production, set in the Lake District, is felt by some to actually surpass its model in imagination, direction and gore.

The Grapes of Death
Jean Rollin | France | 1978 | 85 minutes
Jean Rollin made two zombie films around the time of Dawn of the Dead. While there is little good that can be said about the Nazi zombie themed Zombie Lake, The Grapes of Death sees the French horror auteur combine personal and commercial concerns to good effect. Horror/porn crossover legend Brigitte Lahaie stars.

Zombie
Lucio Fulci | Italy | 1979 | 91 minutes
Dawn of the Dead inspired numerous imitations in Italy. The most famous of these - although the exact degree to which it is a rip-off has long been debated - is probably Lucio Fulci’s Zombie. Coming across as simultaneously a quasi-prequel to Dawn of the Dead and a return to the voodoo zombie, Zombie features two of the most iconic set piece moments in horror history in a shark vs zombie underwater duel and an enucleation by wooden splinter that was enough to see it banned in the UK as a “video nasty”.

Return of the Living Dead III
Brian Yuzna | US | 1993 | 97 minutes
The 1980s saw the emergence of the Living Dead franchise alongside Romero’s Dead films. Their theme of fully conscious zombies who find some relief from their pain by eating brains reached a point of surprising sophistication in this early 1990s crossover with the teen romance genre from Brian Yuzna: After the girl gets unwittingly turned into one of the living dead she finds that body piercing and self-mutilation provides a way to stave off the cravings for the boy’s brains. No, really.

Other contenders: The People Who Own the Dark, Shock Waves, Bio-Zombie, City of the Living Dead.

RIP Jean Rollin

2010-12-17T16:48:00.002Z

Sad to learn of Jean Rollin's death.

Only last week I was discussing Grapes of Death and Zombie Lake with some friends :-(

Spanish horror film season

2010-12-13T00:12:00.002Z

I am involved with programming films for the Edinburgh Film Guild, my local film society. As part of this we do some Friday night screenings which feature cult and B-movies, the sort of things which film societies traditionally have stayed away from, at least in the UK.

As part of next year's programme, I'm thinking of a Spanish horror season, looking at films produced during the final decade of the Franco regime.

What do you, as fellow cult / horror fans, think of the following? What should be added, and what should be removed?

Spanish Horror, 1969-1976

Following the success of The Mark of the Wolf Man in 1968 (shown last year as part of our werewolves mini-season) it's not too much of an exaggeration to say that Spain went horror crazy. That film's unlikely star, weightlifter Jacinto Molina/Paul Naschy made himself into a one-man horror factory playing almost all the famous monsters. Amando De Ossorio created the figures of the Blind Dead and brought them back for three sequels, while Jorge Grau and Jose Larraz ventured to Britain for the likes of The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue and Vampyres. Back home, Narciso Ibanez Serrador, who had earlier scored a hit with the TV series Tales to Keep You Awake made The House that Screamed and Who Can Kill a Child. Elsewhere more avowedly political figures like of Juan Antonio Bardem, with The Corruption of Chris Miller, and Eloy de la Iglesia, with Apartment on the 13th Floor and Murder in a Blue World, found the genre a useful way to sneak subversive content past the censors. But look more closely at De Ossorio's Tombs of the Blind Dead and you can still see a subtext, given that the undead medieval knights are blind and rely upon their young victims foolishly raising their voices.

With this mini-season we showcase some of the best and most entertaining Spanish horror of the period.

La Residencia / The House that Screamed
Narciso Ibáñez Serrador | Spain | 1969 | 99 minutes
Mrs Forneau (Lilli Palmer) owns and runs a school for wayward girls in France. Her absolute discipline has fostered a social order among the girls with rampant sex, lesbianism and torture the norm. She also has an adolescent son (John Moulder-Brown) she tries to keep isolated from the young women lest he be tainted by sexual relations; he must wait for a girl “just like his mother”. Meanwhile, girls are disappearing one by one, never to be seen again...

La noche de Walpurgis / The Werewolf vs the Vampire Woman
Leon Klimovsky | Spain/West Germany | 1971 | 95 minutes
Elvira (Gaby Fuchs) is scouting the French countryside with her friend Genevievre, looking for the tomb of murderess and possible vampire, Countess Wandessa. She finds a likely site in the castle of Waldemar Daninsky (Paul Naschy), who invites the women to stay as long as they like. As Waldemar shows Elvira the tomb she accidentally causes the vampire to return, hungrier than ever. Daninsky has a hidden secret of his own (note the English title) but will he be able to save her from becoming Wandessa's next victim?

La noche del terror ciego / Tombs of the Blind Dead
Amando De Ossorio | Spain / Portugal | 1971 | 86 minutes
In the 13th century there existed a legion of evil knights known as the Templars, who quested for eternal life by drinking human blood and committing sacrifices. Executed for their unholy deeds, the Templars bodies were left out for the crows to peck out their eyes. Now, in modern day Portugal, a group of people stumble on the Templars abandoned monastery and unwittingly rouse the inhabitants from beyond death...

Non si deve profanare il sonno dei morti / The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue
Jorge Grau | Spain / Italy | 1974 | 95 minutes
A near fascist cop (Arthur Kennedy) chases two hippies (Ray Lovelock and Cristina Galbo) whom he suspects of being behind a series of bizarre Manson family-like murders; unbeknownst to him, the real culprits are the living dead, brought to life with a thirst for human flesh by an experimental pest control device.

Las garras de Lorelei / The Loreley's Grasp
Leon Klimovsky | Spain | 1974 | 85 minutes
The legendary Loreley has been living for centuries in a grotto beneath the river Rhein in Germany. Every night when the moon is full, she turns into a reptile-like creature craving for human blood. When one girl after another of a nearby boarding school is killed by her, a hunter named Sirgurd (Tony Kendall) is engaged to kill the monster.

¿Quién puede matar a un niño? / Who Can Kill a Child?
Narciso Ibáñez Serrador | Spain | 1976 | 107 minutes
A couple of English tourists (Lewis Fiander and Prunella Ransome) rent a boat to visit an island off the southern Spanish coast. When they arrive, they find the town deserted of adults, occupied only by children who don't speak but stare whilst eerily smiling. They soon discover that all the children of the island have been possessed by a mysterious force or madness which makes them attack and murder their elders...

Hammer Films: The Unsung Heroes

2010-12-12T23:56:00.003Z

The volume of publications in recent years on Hammer films is such that you might well wonder whether any more are needed.

Wayne Kinsey has, however, established himself as one of the most talented writers in this crowded field, first with his long-running House that Hammer Built fanzine and latterly Bray and Elstree Studio Years volumes (also published by studio specialists Tomahawk).

As the structuring principle of these indicate, Kinsey’s main strength lies not so much in discussing what is on screen – though this is not to say that he is in any way inadequate as a critic/reviewer – as in looking behind the scenes, at the ins-and-outs of the productions.

This is an approach he has continued here, as he concentrates not upon the films and their main casts, but upon those behind the camera, ranging from the more likes of directors, screenwriters and cinematographers all the way down to the likes of carpenters and props buyers; some appearing on screen, including recurring stuntmen and extras are also profiled.

A number of those featured are not exactly unsung. Indeed, this is attested to by the likes of Kinsey’s conversational-style profile of director Terence Fisher (1904-1980), with its plentiful use of quotations from interviews from the 1960s and 1970s.

Nevertheless, if figures like director Freddie Francis, writer/director Jimmy Sangster, composer James Bernard, and make-up man Roy Ashton (himself subject of another volume from Tomahawk, Greasepaint and Gore) and the information on them, are comparatively familiar to fans of the studio, it is still good for this to all be compiled in one place and placed within a wider context.

Most of those profiled across the span of the book’s near 500 pages are, however, very much unsung. To give a few names at random: Production manager John ‘Pinky’ Green? Art director Ted Marshall? Renee Glynn, responsible for continuity? Effects man Sydney Pearson? Being honest, the only one I could place prior to reading was Glynn.

If you like Hammer – or, indeed, are interested in British cinema from the 1950s to 1970s – you need this book, which not only tells you who did what at Hammer but paints a vivid picture of this time and place in filmmaking more generally.

Last Bus to Bray: The Unfilmed Hammer

2010-12-12T23:10:00.004Z

These two volumes, the first covering up to 1970 and the second from then to the present, are the classic “Curate’s Egg”: Good in places.

The good is the information they provide.

Basically, if you are a Hammer aficionado then you want these. Order them now and come back and read the rest of the review later.

The not so good is the writing and production.

A degree of leeway can obviously be given to any small press or self-published work. But there also comes a point where the number of typographical, grammatical, spelling and other errors becomes a serious hindrance to reading. Last Bus to Bray comes close to it. [I make no great claims about my own writings here, but then they are free.]

Unfortunately the layout and the poor quality of the reproductions (many rare, albeit sometimes reproduced from earlier publications) push it close to being beyond a pleasurable read, even for the fan.

As one such, I had long been intrigued by the way in which the studio would commission poster art for prospective films, in some cases prior to having a script written or any real pre-production work, as a means of gauging the interest in them and thereby their commercial viability. What remains less clear, however, is how far this was particular to Hammer.

Author Glen Davies does a fine job in going through the archives and sifting out those productions which were real possibilities, as distinct from those, especially in the 1970s and beyond, which were merely figments of over-enthusiasm or self-delusion.

What is lacking is much sense of how the unfilmed Hammer compares to the unfilmed output of other studios, especially genre specialists of the time. Did Tigon and Amicus likewise have all manner of possible projects, particularly in the the early and mid-1970s, a period when the British film industry as a whole was in crisis? Or was there something special about Hammer that meant they tended to attract more interest – or, indeed, be able to attract that bit more interest?

The dominant picture that emerges, reinforcing that of earlier studies, is one of a basic tension at the heart of the studio. Long-term studio head James Carreras was a hard-headed businessman. He felt no particular attraction to horror, but was happy to concentrate the company’s efforts upon the genre, as long as they remained profitable. His son Michael was more artistically inclined. He was keen to diversify the company’s output away from horror – or, in actuality, back to the more varied kind output they had produced prior to the success of The Quatermass Xperiment, The Curse of Frankenstein and Dracula.

With Michael Carreras’s own attempts at non-horror productions generally failing, he was compelled to come back to his father’s studio with his tail between his legs. The rift with his father, however, was perhaps never really to be healed, with James Carreras not handing over the business in a family way but instead almost selling it to an old rival before his son bought him out.

But by this time the Hammer = Horror association was also one which was proving problematic, in that the kind of horror Hammer were associated with was ever more passé.

This tension is one that would remain: On the one hand, the very fact that there can be a publication like this attests to the brand value attached to the name. On the other hand, this brand value remains associated with a particular kind of horror that belongs in the past.

The history of abortive Hammer revivals in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s proves telling in this regard.

So, indeed, does the discourse around the recent remake of Let the Right One In. Depending on who is asking the question and who is answering its Hammer associations may be played up or not mentioned. Regardless, it seems fair to describe it as a Hammer film in name only – and indeed, only those who care about such things.

The Hammer Vampire

2010-11-26T14:44:00.002Z

Written by Bruce Hallenbeck and released as part of Hemlock’s ongoing Hemlock Film series, this 2010 publication analyses the Hammer vampire in its various manifestations from 1958’s Dracula through to 1974’s The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires.

The films are discussed chronologically and thematically across six main chapters, with a prologue and epilogue bookending things by outlining the pre-Hammer situation and post-Hammer developments respectively.

The first chapter, entitled The Terrifying Lover, looks at Dracula and The Brides of Dracula. The second, The Nature of the Beast, encompasses Kiss of the Vampire and Dracula: Prince of Darkness. The third, The Vampire as Antichrist, examines Taste the Blood of Dracula, Dracula has Risen from the Grave and The Scars of Dracula. The fourth, Sin, Sex and Sadism, focuses on The Vampire Lovers, Lust for a Vampire and Twins of Evil. The fifth, The Vampire in Society, discusses Dracula AD 1972 and The Satanic Rites of Dracula. The final chapter, Variations on a Theme, looks at Countess Dracula, Vampire Circus, Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter and Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires.

I didn’t always find these groupings convincing on account of the overlaps and interconnections between films in some of them – the reworking of Brides of Dracula’s planned climax for Kiss of the Vampire; the way in which Dracula’s resurrection in Prince of Darkness (and, indeed, that subtitle) already position the character as antichrist; or the vague Karnstein references that were in Captain Kronos’s script at one point.

I was however convinced by Hallenbeck’s overall thesis. This is that over the course of 15 or so years Hammer’s films went from radical to reactionary in their treatments of the vampire myth. This is conveyed not only through a consideration of the pre- and post-Hammer vampire films but also those films whose releases run parallel to them.

Simply put something like 1970’s The Loves of Count Iorga Vampire would not have been possible without Hammer, whilst at the same time they themselves were struggling to come to terms with the new more sexually (and, on occasion, politically) explicit films they had given rise to.

He is also particularly good at challenging some of Christopher Lee’s more exaggerated and self-defensive claims as cases he protesteth too much: It appears not so much to have been that Lee refused to say anything in Dracula: Prince of Darkness as that Jimmy Sangster had not written any lines for Dracula. Similarly, Lee’s constant protests to Hammer about his remuneration seems as much a negotiating strategy or ritual as anything else.

In the end, I think the value of Hallenbeck’s book will depend on where you fit as a Hammer fan: If you are a completist, like me, then you obviously need it. If you are a selective completist or on a limited budget, then you might find that too much of the material overlaps with what you already have by the likes of Wayne Kinsey. If you are neither of these then it is weighing up the volume’s more detailed discussion of its subject against the absence of other subjects. Of course, the Hammer = Horror association also likely means that you are not aware of many of these selfsame subjects.

This itself actually leads to a question: Can we ever expect to see an in-depth study of Hammer’s non-horror films, either as a whole or by genre in the same way? Will Hemlock do 'British Cult Cinema: The Hammer Comedy' at some point in the future?

Whatever the answer, Hallenbeck’s book is well-written, informative and does what it sets out to.

The Video Nasties: The Definitive Guide

2010-11-26T13:51:00.003Z

The time: The early 1980s

The place: Britain

The greatest threat to the British way of life, it emerged, was not Thatcher and the divisive ideological project associated with her name but a new technology, home video.

As videos were not required to go before the BBFC (British Board of Film Censors) and as the major studios regarded the new medium as a threat and hesitate to put out their own films, all manner of material suddenly became available from Europe and that has never appeared on British screens.

Somewhere along the line concerns emerged over a particular category of videos, the nasty. The concern was not the traditional one with sex. Films have been prosecuted as pornographic before. Rather it was more about violence and other content for which films had never been prosecuted before.

Some of this concern may have been legitimate. Some was manufactured – sometimes, ironically enough, by distributors lurid packaging and advertising.

The popular press became involved, along with elements of the quality press and others who should have known better. There was the sense that something had to be done. And so an act regulating the video industry was proposed and, with few willing to stand up for the nasties, duly passed into law – or was taken to have been passed into law, as would only become apparent a quarter-century later.

Sadly, the new 2010 VRA (Video Recordings Act) was passed without little debate, although fortunately now it is more or less an irrelevance in the Internet era.

As this summary indicates, the history of the video nasties affair is well-enough known.

The obvious questions are thus whether there is space for and/or a need for The Video Nasties: The Definitive Guide.

To answer this we can begin by itemising what the package contains. The first disc presents a new documentary on the nasties. The second presents trailers and commentary on the 39 films eventually to be successfully prosecuted by the DPP (Department of Public Prosecutions) list. The third does the same for another 33 films which were prosecuted but acquitted. These can be watched either on their own or intercut with commentaries that provide valuable contextualisation and critique.

Including other materials, like a gallery of pre-cert video logos and identifiers (some, like Red Tape, more porn than anything else in their address, others, like Rothmans, not obviously directly relevant to the nasties) there is over 12 hours of material to go through.

It’s not just about the quantity, however. The material is overall of a high quality, the kind of stuff that ranks as an 8 or 9 out of ten.

As such, it’s probably easier for me to begin with the little negatives that remove that final mark or two.

The first of these is the range of fan critics discussing the nasties. Those that are featured – Stephen Thrower, Alan Jones, Kim Newman, Marc Morris, Alan Bryce – are certainly knowledgeable and broadly representative. But there are other figures from the British cult cinema scene who have discussed the nasties before and who conspicuously absent, notably David Kerekes (author of See No Evil) and John Martin (author of Seduction of the Gullible). One hopes that their exclusion was nothing to do with professional rivalries or similar.

The same may be said of the more academic figures like Xavier Mendik and Patricia MacCormack, given that Kate Egan, author of Trash or Treasure, is absent.

Correspondingly the inclusion of Emily Booth amongst the presenters is a bit awkward, particularly when she seems to be reading pre-prepared commentary rather than spontaneously drawing upon her own in-depth knowledge of the subject.

The second are a few errors in the individual commentaries: Discussing Jess Franco’s Devil Hunter, Thrower appears to confuse Sabrina Siani with Ursula Buchfellner. Discussing Umberto Lenzi’s Cannibal Ferox Alan Bryce indicates that it is Lorraine De Selle’s character who has hooks put through her breasts, when in fact it is Zora Kerowa’s.

It might seem pedantic to point these out, but as the documentary itself demonstrates exactitude is required when we are talking about this subject.

The third is the relative lack of discussion of the wider culture that grew up around the nasties. One reason for this is perhaps that it could entail more self-reflection and, indeed, self-criticism on the part of some of the commentators.

One of the more distinctive aspects of British horror fandom testified to by the entire package here is, after all, not only the continuing centrality of the video nasties but arguably their importance in terms of some of these commentators own careers.

Without wishing to become too ad hominem, I do feel, for instance, that Bryce’s The Dark Side was sometimes overly fixated on the nasties and that this inhibited discussion of other aspects of horror cinema.

Likewise, it would have been interesting to see more analysis of a company like VIPCO and how they worked in relation to the pre-VRA and post-VRA climates, or to hear about what the VRA meant in terms of the creation of this documentary itself, given that there must be images in some of the available trailer materials that still could not be passed for certification.

But, again, these are minor quibbles for a package that does what it sets out to admirably.

Brody vs Giallo Producers

2010-11-24T15:20:00.001Z

So, will those in the US just import the Giallo DVD or torrent it?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-11827672

Farewell Ingrid

2010-11-23T17:49:00.001Z

Another of the Hammer greats becomes one of the late greats :-(

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-11823418

Japanese Bad Girl Cinema

2010-11-15T01:15:00.002Z

So, I am thinking of programming a season of Japanese bad girl films - pinky violence type stuff.

What would you screen? My current list, of six films, is:

Zero Woman Red Handcuffs
Sex and Fury
Blind Woman's Curse
Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter
Terrifying Girls High School
Red Peony Gambler

I have avoided the Female Convict Scorpion series because it's readily available on Region 2 DVD. Admittedly Sex and Fury is as well, but it's just so cool...

One of the Rica trilogy? A Girl Boss Guerilla film?

A similar exercise with regard to Spanish horror under Franco will follow soon...

Commuter Husbands

2010-11-12T01:49:00.004Z

This British sex film entry from Derek Ford is not so much a comedy as a drama-documentary. Hosted by Gabrielle Drake’s sexology researcher, Carol, it presents six short vignettes purporting to explore the sexual mores of suburban Londoners in the early 1970s.

I went to drama school for this?

The first sees a husband phone his wife to tell her that he will be away on business for the weekend. In reality, however, he is planning a weekend away with his mistress. As the camera tracks back from the wife we get the first reversal in that she is in bed with her lover and happily takes this news as a chance for them to likewise have a weekend away.

Both couples then unwittingly book into the same hotel, one that is special to both the husband and wife. Things work out very civilly, however, as they go off to talk and come to the conclusion that they are best off together. Reaching a similar conclusion, their opposite numbers have paired off in the meantime...

The next segment plays on the tradesman fantasies so often found in British sex films as a plumber is summoned to a penthouse suite to do some work by a French actress (Claire Gordon) and finds a swingers party in full flow. The route from one set of plumbing to the other is, however, not a smooth and easy one...

Oh yes, not

The most interesting of the segments is also the most fantastical as a slightly long-haired but otherwise eminently respectable looking suited and bowler hatted type imagines himself as a Hells Angel type having his brutal way with any woman that tickles his fancy (innuendo deliberate).

Psychomania Rising

As one IMDB reviewer perceptively remarks, it’s a bit like a heterosexual (and thereby inherently less transgressive) reinterpretation of Kenneth Anger’s gay underground classic Scorpio Rising.

Voyeurism

The next segment is about a middle-aged businessman who regularly visits a brothel in order that he can watch others having sex. Besides the obvious voyeurism theme – us watching him, watching them, but without consequence – the relationship between the madame and the businessman is interesting for its reversals. It reminded me a bit of the sequence in Bunuel’s The Phantom of Liberty in which going to the toilet is a public activity while eating is something shameful to be done in private.

Ford looks to have used a working trip abroad as the basis for an Amsterdam set segment in which another hapless, hopeless male, on another business trip, tries to attract the attentions of his tour guide and blunders into a sex shop in the process...

The final segment features Drake herself and is introduced, with a nod to De Sade, as “the misfortunes of virtue”. It sees her husband being given the responsibility for entertaining an Italian businessman, with entertaining meaning call girls. Knowing that she has a friend who’s up for most things sexually, he wonders if Drake and said friend might pose as the call girls. They can pair off, as can the Italian and the friend. Needless to say it doesn’t quite go according to plan...

None of the sex scenes featured in the film are of the hardcore type, at least in the version I saw. Nevertheless, they appear pretty close to the limits of acceptability for a British film of this time and have the definite look of material that could be tailored to the demands of a particular market and/or the censors. There is a distinction evident here between the legitimate actors and the porn extras, with the former not called upon to do much except bare some flesh sex-wise, and the latter not being called upon to do dialogue, act and react and so on.

Piccadilly Circus

The opening scenes of the film, presenting a drive round Soho – something also seen in Diversions – have the usual inadvertent documentary interest.

It goes without saying that the film’s own value is similarly sociological rather than aesthetic – or, for that matter, erotic.

Fenech fun

2010-11-06T21:13:00.003Z

Justin at Filmbar70 sent me this trailer that he's put together for the Italian book 'Edwige Fenech - Il Corpo dei Settanta', or 'Edwige Fenech - The Body of the Seventies' and relates her career and the sexy comedy filone to the decade's socio-political situation.

Filmbar70 is also showing Lenzi's Almost Human on 18th November, at the Roxy Bar and Screen, London Bridge.

Mystery pictures

2010-11-06T17:40:00.002Z

Gyu in Korea sent me some screengrabs and asked if I knew which film or films they are from. I do not know, but you might...

E. P. Thompson and Eurotrash

2010-11-06T00:13:00.003Z

This may be a somewhat obscure post but...

In his preface to The Making of the English Working Class, E. P.Thompson famously stated:

"I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the "obsolete" hand-loom weaver, the "utopian" artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity."

If you were rewriting this with reference to European cinema who and what would you commutate into the stockinger, Luddite and so forth as filmmakers and cycles to be 'rescued'?

Under the Doctor

2010-11-05T20:36:00.003Z

Starring Adventures of a Taxi Driver's Barry Evans in a somewhat different role, that of a sex obsessed doctor rather than a sex obsessed cabbie, this is a middling example of the 1970s British sex comedy that manages to be of some theoretical interest.

The film is structured around three of Evans's patients, played by Penny Spencer, Hilary Pritchard and Liz Frazer and their respective case histories.

First, Spencer relates how she went for a job interview and had fantasies about her potential employer.

Next, Pritchard first tells how she obtained valuable stock market information from an upper-class broker type only to have difficulties with his lecherous butler, then of her fantasies of being an 18th century noblewoman whom two suitors are duelling over.

Finally, Frazer relates of how she has attempted to reignite the passion of her imagined husband.

The key point of significance in Spencer and Pritchard's cases, along with Fraser's fantasy, is that Evans is present, as the would-be employer, one of the suitors and the imaginary husband respectively. As such, amidst the bums, boobs and bad humour, there is the question of whose fantasies are actually being represented, and of who is projecting or transferring what onto whom.

Put another way, someone with an interest in psychoanalytic film theory really ought to look at this film and what it is 'saying' in a more or less unselfconscious / unconscious way...

For the rest of us there is also the Barry Lyndon parody of the 18th century sequence. (The film's writer, Ron Bareham, was a production accountant on the Kubrick film.)

Giallo & Thrilling All’Italiana

2010-11-03T17:18:00.004Z

This new book from Glittering Images by Antonio Bruschini and Stefano Piselli is somewhat reminiscent of Adrian Luther-Smith’s Blood and Black Lace in that it could be considered something of a viewer’s guide to the form. But while there are necessarily overlaps between the two books, they complement one another, such that the genre fan could do with having both on his or her bookshelf.

The book has four sections: An introductory overview, a filmography, a recent interview with Dario Argento, and a bibliography.

The interview and introduction don’t say anything particularly new, though in the latter case this is because there is only so much that can be said with the same basic facts. To wit: The literary giallo dates back to 1929 and the first publications by Mondadori. The giallo film, in the form we normally understand it, emerged 30 years later, with Mario Bava’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much and Blood and Black Lace. The form then reached its height of popularity in the early 1970s with Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and its successors.

The filmography section is the largest. Whereas Luther-Smith’s book is organised by title – a structure that sometimes causes difficulties with AKA titles – Giallo & Thrilling All’Italiana is arranged chronologically.

Films from the 1930s through to the 1950s are only given credits, likely reflecting difficulties in actually accessing them. Films from the 1960s onwards are also given a review/overview, ranging in length from a sentence to a paragraph, and two ratings, the first pertaining to the overall quality of the film as a giallo and the second to its sexy / kinky value.

The reader will likely disagree with some of the authors’ ratings, although they seem mostly fair and consistent. Blood and Black Lace, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Deep Red and The House with the Windows that Laughed are among the five-star films, What Have You Done to Solange, Don't Torture a Duckling and Who Saw Her Die the four-star films.

On balance, Luther-Smith’s book is probably the better one for those new to the giallo on account of featuring somewhat longer and more detailed discussions of the core group of films (those by Bava, Argento, Martino, Lenzi, Fulci etc.) with both synopsis and review and being originally written in English rather than translated, sometimes awkwardly, from the Italian.

Giallo & Thrilling All’Italiana, however, is probably the better for those venturing further afield, particularly into earlier, minor and crossover releases.

To give but one example, there is nothing about the 1960 film Chiamate 22-22 tenente Sheridan (the big-screen version of a then popular Italian TV detective series set in San Francisco) in Luther-Smith’s book.

The book is also superior when it comes to its bibliography, in that this includes giallo novels adapted for the screen along with fumetti and cineromanzi derived from films. (I had never realised before that Fernando Di Leo’s The Boys Who Killed and Duccio Tessari’s Death Occurred Last Night are adaptations of Giorgio Scerbanenco novels and feature the same detective character.)

Disappointingly the interior illustrations are only in monochrome. They are also somewhat awkwardly placed, usually with a gap of a few pages between the text and the images related to it. For instance, Bloody Pit of Horror is discussed on page 26 but the stills from it do not appear until page 32.

Wild West Gals

2010-11-03T00:10:00.005Z

I must confess to being somewhat tardy in acquiring this volume from Glittering Images, only remembering about it when I became aware of their new book in the same series on the giallo (more on which soon).

The subject of the book is the figure of the female in the western, encompassing genre classics, B-grade exploitation films and the WAI or western all'italiana, better known to most of us as the spaghetti western, and in comics, both North American and European.

Or, to be more precise, it is about the woman in the western when she was assigned a more active role than was traditionally the case in the 1920s and 1930s western – and, indeed, would continue to be the case in the majority of genre entries.

The coverage of films is chronological, beginning with the likes of Destry Rides Again (1939) and My Little Chickadee (1940) and concluding with Bandidas (2006), although the bulk of the films featured are from the 1950s through 1970s.

While some of the texts featured are familiar, the vast majority are obscurities likely only known by the specialist. Yet even here, the author's completist approach, in including – for example – Joe D'Amato productions from the 1990s whose raison d'etre is frankly of the pornographic kind (I speak from experience, having been thoroughly bored by his Calamity Jane) means that any and all readers are likely to discover something new.

This is especially apparent – at least for the film-oriented reader – when it comes to the appendix on comic books / fumetti.

The book is typically well illustrated. The stills featured might be criticised as exploitative, but another way of looking at it, one made more clear by posters and other advertising materials, is that this is the entire point.

Unfortunately all the interior images are black and white. Given that this is also the case in the giallo book, this looks to be representative of a change in Glittering Images' wider policy.

One the one hand it perhaps keeps the price down. On the other hand these are, as the imprint itself used to remind us, highly specialist books, or in other words things that are not particularly price elastic. At some level, you / we / I am going to buy it while the casual browser is not, regardless of price.

French readers should also note that, unlike many of Glittering Images' earlier releases, the text is now only in Italian and English. For Italian and English readers, meanwhile, the more parallel approach within the filmography – a one paragraph précis in Italian, followed by a one paragraph précis in English – makes for a nice parallel text for learning the other language. (Note that ironic use of the French there ;-))

Au Pair Girls

2010-10-31T11:21:00.005Z

One of the things I find fascinating about British exploitation cinema from the 1970s is the existence of an obvious division amongst their personnel.

On the one hand we have those with little or no prospect or at times interest in careers in the mainstream.

On the other hand we have those who might well once have enjoyed mainstream careers but who found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time now that London had stopped swinging and US money coming in.

Au Pair Girls is a film which perfectly illustrates this tendency.

In the former camp we have David Grant, credited as author of the story. One of the biggest figures in the British porn scene as producer, distributor and exhibitor, Grant would later be jailed for distributing the video nasty Nightmares in a Damaged Brain in the 1980s before dying in mysterious circumstances in 1991, the possible victim of a hit.

In the latter camp we have co-writer and director Val Guest. A forty-year industry veteran by this point, he had first made his mark in comedy in the 1930s and 40s before playing a major role in kick-starting the British horror cinema through The Quatermass Xperiment for Hammer. Here, however Guest, veteran of some 14 Hammer productions in total, was working for that company’s more downmarket rival, Tigon.

The mark of quality

Perhaps more interesting, however, is the way in which the film also exhibits something of a tension in its own approach, between presenting exploitation and commenting critically on it. Whether this was a deliberate strategy on someone’s part – the likes of Quatermass 2 and Hell is a City have a critical, realist edge to them – or unintentional is another matter, of course.

This is most evident towards the end of the film.

Never has a place been less appropriately named, though was the intention or not?

In one of the four stories the German au pair, Christa, who is a virgin, is taken to a Ricky Strange gig at Groovers nightclub and offered up as a sacrifice to the rock god by the opportunistic daughter of the family she has been placed with, “a Deutschland dolly where the hand of man has never set foot before”

Whilst no Permissive, it’s pretty sordid, depressing stuff and perhaps provides a hint of why Guest, who also helmed Confessions of a Window Cleaner around this time, was not involved with its sequel, Confessions of a Pop Performer.

Ironic use of phallic symbolism, or what?

In another of the four stories a Swedish sexpot type, Anita, with a colour TV obsession is recruited by an Arab Sheik to be part of his harem. Though there’s a hint of criticism, in that we’re told the Sheik has magnanimously raised the annual income of his people from £10 to £20, it’s basically played for laughs.

Ferdy Mayne plays the Sheik

Following this, however, Christa, along with the other two Au Pair Girls, Nan and Randi, is herself picked up by the Sheik for what seems a bit of a dramatic transition from virgin to whore and an odd way to end the film on a high.

The story featuring Nan is also a bit off-key as she is placed with a family of eccentric aristocrats and immediately becomes involved with their piano playing child-man son Rupert (A “new playmate” / “It’s beautiful, I like it”), has sex with him and then silently departs.

Yet if there’s perhaps a hint of the inscrutable Oriental stereotype here, that ‘we’ cannot fathom ‘them’, Nan is also the only one of the four girls whose English is perfect and devoid of unwitting innuendo (Anita’s “I work with them all day and in the evening I play with myself. Is no good?” or Randi’s “I am not miss Lindstrom. My friends call me Randi”)

Again, some sort of critical comment ((Me Me Lai, more famous for her roles in Italian cannibal films, is Anglo-Burmese) or just unsatisfactory writing and characterisation?

Taken on its own basic terms, of providing laughs and showcasing female pulchritude, the film is a success.

For some reason the au pairs on the right is not featured subsequently – was there perhaps an export version with extra material?

It also has a very cool theme song, the kind that had it been sung in Italian or in Italian accented English would surely have showed up on a Beat at Cinecitta or Easy Tempo collection.

Le Mesurier's finest moment

And then there’s the immortal sight of none other than John Le Mesurier fondling his secretary’s breast before telling his son – who imagines this – to “Piss off!”

[See also: http://www.thespinningimage.co.uk/cultfilms/displaycultfilm.asp?reviewid=1797
and http://monsterhunter.coldfusionvideo.com/2008/05/au-pair-girls-1972/ ]

Adventures of a Private Eye

2010-10-31T09:06:00.006Z

Bob West (Christopher Neil) is a trainee private eye. He’s also a bit of a mug, the kind of guy who claims to be so much more observant than the average but who nevertheless is immediately recognised as an easy mark by a passing pickpocket and, more importantly, the femme fatale type Laura (Suzy Kendall) who comes into the office when his boss Judd Blake (Jon Pertwee) is on holiday.

Bob can’t resist taking on the case, which involves her deceased husband and someone blackmailing her over some ‘artistic’ photographs taken during days as a model. Soon he is completely and utterly out of his depth, with a body in a trunk to dispose of so that Laura can secure her inheritance...

Producer, director and co-writer Stanley Long later felt Adventures of a Private Eye was the weakest of his three Adventures films on the grounds that his target audience found it more difficult to identify with its ‘glamorous’ protagonist compared to Adventures of a Taxi Driver and Adventures of a Plumber’s Mate.

While there is maybe a bit more laughing at Joe and less empathising with his situation – in part because often as not it is his own fault, rather than that of anyone else – the film really doesn’t depart from formula too much.

Sin in the suburbs

It is, after all, still a sex comedy in which the sex is strictly softcore and the rapid-fire, hit-and-miss comedy based largely around misunderstanding. misidentification and a steady flow of double meanings, from Pertwee’s “You stick with me and you’ll soon become a successful bugger” in reference to contemporary surveillance techniques, to a police inspector’s remark of “What a big Willy I’ve got” with regard to his son.

The cast is the same mix of up and coming and established actors, of varying degrees of talent but undoubtedly equally glad of the chance of some work. Amongst the up and comers there are the likes of Neil, Adrienne Posta, Robin Stewart and Nicholas Young, whilst amongst the established performers Diana Dors, Irene Handl and Harry Corbett showed up for a scene or two.

Here we may also note that Long was presumably satisfied with Neil’s performance – Taxi Driver’s Barry Evans had been offered the role, but declined it – in that the actor again played the lead in Plumber’s Mate.

'Moroni with an I, and not with an E, because Morone would be stupid'

The film also has its own strong points, most notably Posta’s Lisa Moroni character, with her note-perfect impersonation of Liza Minelli’s Sally Bowles from Cabaret.

Note Milton Reid as the leftmost heavy

For the fan of British genre cinema there’s also a nice touch when the Matthew Hopkins: Witchfinder General cue that introduces Hopkins is played as the blackmailer makes his entrance. Given that Long had worked as a cinematographer on Michael Reeves’ The Sorcerers and that co-writer Michael Armstrong made the Witchfinder General-inspired Mark of the Devil, this seems more than coincidental on someone's part.

Diversions

2010-10-28T11:01:00.003+01:00

[Note that this review contains spoilers]

Imagine, if you will, Dr Terror’s House of Horrors being remade as a hardcore porn film and you begin to get an idea of what Diversions is like.

For this 1975 entry from British sex film auteur Derek Ford, understandably only released at the time in the UK in a severely truncated form, uses the same device of a group of passengers in a train compartment as the means for framing and connecting a series of short stories.

The Amicus connection is further enhanced by the fact that one of the five stories features a magic camera purchased from an antiques shop that could easily have been From Beyond the Grave’s Temptations Limited. Another presents a decidedly E.C. Comics-like punchline to a scenario inspired by a Vampirella comic; presumably the film either flew under the radar of Vampirella publishers Warren or they were understandably disinclined to draw wider attention to its existence.

Not, however, that Amicus’s Max Rosenberg and Milton Subotsky would ever have dreamt of making a film with hardcore sex, let alone sex and violence together in two of the segments.

The film manages to just about get away with their combination thanks to their clear framing as fantasy rather than reality, although there is also the inevitable sense of purportedly female fantasies being presented from a male perspective for a presumed male viewer.

We begin with a voice off establishing the fact that a female prisoner, identified only as Brown, is being transported by two officers, one male and one female, to begin a five year sentence for assault.

As the train gets underway we become party to thoughts of the prisoner – or more precisely the woman we are invited to presume is the prisoner – played by Heather Deeley.

Deeley

First, the man opposite offers her an apple – the symbolism is obvious – prompting a recollection of an early sexual encounter on a farm.

Next, the sight of the creepy looking man opposite reading Vampirella leads to a fantasy sequence in which the woman imagines killing and castrating a man in revenge for his having been one of a group of soldiers who gang raped her when she was serving as a nurse in a war. (Though Vampirella is shown, aspects of the scenario and mise-en-scene here seem more like Guido Crepax's Valentina, particularly as filmed in Corrado Farina's Baba Yaga.)

After writing around in bloody ecstasy whilst playing with the severed penis/phallus, the woman cleans herself up and goes to Soho in search of a new victim. She finds an opera-cloaked young man, takes him back to her place and, mid coitus, brings out her concealed knife. This time, however, the blade refuses to sink into his flesh. It is not that its nature as a theatrical prop is now evident – though this could certainly have been the case, given the nightmare logic – but rather that, as his opera cloak get up had earlier hinted at, he is in fact a vampire.

The vampire lovers

Sex, death, penetrating and being penetrated in more ways than one. This is heavy stuff...

Following this, a newspaper advertisement leads into scenario in which the woman imagines moving into an apartment formerly occupied by a call girl and, after getting annoyed about callers inquiring about Miss Whiplash’s large chest for sale, encouraging an apparent misunderstanding with the attractive looking young man who comes to the door.

We then move back into sex and violence territory as the arrival of the ticket collector prompts the woman’s fantasy of torture at the hands of a mixed gender trio of secret police types from an unidenfitied totalitarian state.

The final scenario is considerably lighter. The aforementioned antique camera transports the woman back into to Victorian times where she enjoys a three-way romp with a moustache-twirling villain type and a maid.

Some of those 'Other Victorians'

As the train reaches its destination and the prisoner is transferred there is a nice reversal of expectation as it is revealed the woman whose fantasies we have been party to is not the prisoner but the police officer escorting her. It adds a little extra frisson and ends the film on a nice note, with something extra for us to think about if we are so inclined. (It's also a riff on The Narrow Margin, admittedly.)

Though not entirely successful, within its two sex and violence sequences Diversions achieves an intensity rare, perhaps even unique, within British sex-horror-fantasy cinema. It stands comparison with the kind of thing Jesus Franco and Alberto Cavallone were doing around the same time on the continent with the likes of Doriana Grey and L'uomo la donna e la bestia respectively.

You can take that as a recommendation ;-)

Bay of Blood cuts waived

2010-10-27T14:05:00.003+01:00

The seeming outbreak of common sense at BBFC continues as another former "video nasty" is passed uncut:

http://www.bbfc.co.uk/EVF059583

The new DVD from Arrow looks a pretty good package as well:

http://www.arrowfilms.co.uk/index.php?c=y&s=bd39246dd448ff3a272da060ec280255&art_id=4&tle_id=471&v=

Apocalipsis sexual

2010-10-27T10:28:00.005+01:00

Though written and directed by Carlos Aured this 1982 Spanish entry has something of a Jesus Franco feel to it, thanks to the presence of the iconic Lina Romay and Ajita Wilson and somewhat subversive way in which it approaches its subject(s).

Let's just say it's hard to find screengrabs from this film that are acceptable to post...

The story is one of a group of kidnappers who abduct the daughter of a wealthy businessman and subject her to all manner of abuses. Despite, or more disturbingly because of this, she develops a case of Stockholm Syndrome, particularly in relation to the gang’s leader. This in turn leads to increasing divisions amongst them...

In its presentation the film is more a hardcore porn than crime thriller however, perhaps somewhat reminiscent of a Hot Summer in the City, Spanish-style. For the bulk of the running time is taken up by a procession of sexual numbers. Certainly some of these are integrated, having a narrative function. Much of the time, however, they are simply there, more as the raison d’etre than padding.

This is foregrounded by the way the all-important opening moments play out, with nearly five minutes of faux-lesbian poolside action between Romay and another woman before one of the other gang members cools them down with a bucket of water and announces that it is time to go to work.

The kidnapping takes up the next three minutes or so, following which there are another seven minutes of sex scenes. Then we get the first humiliation of the virgin victim, involving a pool cue being inserted into her vagina and the deliberately awkward blurring of the boundaries of yes/no, pleasure/pain and so forth.

The face of the victim/'victim' during the pool cue scene

Following this, at 23 minutes in – all timings here refer to the Italian dubbed version, which runs a brief porn-like 68 minutes – one of the kidnappers makes their ransom demand, while another exchanges pleasantries with the victim. He then watches as the three women amongst the gang have sex, whilst another of the men rapes the victim.

The two sex scenes are cross-cut, the same porn funk cue and dubbed moans playing over them to again make us wonder how we are supposed to respond, The subversive effect is however somewhat undercut by the porn convention of the external ejaculation being used in both scenes, with the lesbian three way in the first perhaps thereby perhaps also being recontextualised as appetiser to the heterosexual main course.

By now the pattern is becoming increasingly clear: A brief scene in which an exchange of dialogue or looks exposes the changing relationship between the victim and one of her kidnappers, followed by a longer sequence in which bump and grind takes precedence and narrative grinds to a halt.

A reprise of the pool cue scene, this time involving a flick knife, further confirms that this is not a film for everyone; it might however make for an interesting double bill with Paul Schrader's Patty Hearst for anyone feeling especially perverted.

West End Jungle

2010-10-26T20:57:00.003+01:00

Effectively banned on its initial release but now coming across as a quaint time-capsule, this 1961 expose of prostitution in London exhibits the tension between documenting and exploiting its subject matter from the off.

If it's a good film, it's a Miracle!

Though the production company’s name, Searchlight, connotes the documentarian ideal of illumination and enlightenment, those behind the film were none other than Arnold Miller and Stanley Long whose other contributions to cinema the same year, setting the pattern for the kind of exploitation material to follow, were Nudist Memories and Nudes of the World.

More important, though the film purports to show scenes captured from the sordid underbelly of London life, the fact that various performers are credited clearly undercuts its claims to realism. There’s also, however, an amateurishness and ugliness to them, a fact emphasised by the absence of actual dialogue in lieu of a soundtrack comprised of extensive use of needle-drop crime jazz interspersed with authorial voice-off and unidentified responses to interview-style questions in which the participants seem curiously okay about self-incriminating:

Interviewer: “How gay and cheerful do they [the girls] have to be? Enough to go to bed with the customers?”
Club owner: “That is their concern. What they do after they leave here is nothing to do with us at all. “
“When a girl comes to you for a job as a hostess do you ask her whether she has any objections to going to bed with men?”
“Well...”
“Do you?”
“Well, yes.”
“And supposing she does object to sleeping with a client does she get the job?”
“No, not necessarily.”

Dancer: “Men? They make me sick. Look at them sitting there drooling!”
Interviewer: “Then why do you do it?”
“I don’t know the money’s not bad. Better than I got serving in a shop. Besides, I always wanted to be on the stage. You’ve got to start somewhere, haven’t you?”

For the most part Miller’s direction serves to keep up the documentary pretence by being of an unobtrusive and functional sort, though inevitably he is unable to resist the odd jarring subjective shot when it comes to filming a strip routine.

Street prostitution, before the new law

And off the street, sort of, afterwards

Long’s cinematography is crisp and professional, but thereby perhaps likewise a bit incongruous at times – things tend to look that bit too well set-up.

If its depictions can be taken as valid the film had a certain social/moral value. To wit:

If you are a young woman from the provinces then this is how a pimp sizes you up and operates, so beware and don’t be taken in by him: “The transformation, mental as well as physical, is easy. In only a few days the weak willed, glamour hungry bumpkin has become a skilful heartless gold-digger.”

If you are a young man then this is how a clip joint works, so watch out or you may find yourself paying “as much as ten shillings for a glass of blackcurrant juice.”

If you are a businessman and offered companionship, then be forewarned about where this might lead in terms of blackmail.

Predictably, however, these messages are dealt with in somewhat two-faced and decidedly hyperbolic terms: Look at these pathetic figures, male and female alike, and feel superior to them, even as you’ve maybe been taken in the filmmakers.

The inevitable Raymond Revue Bar shot

“Laughable or sordid, perhaps something of both. But really pitiful and depressing” about sums it up.

The Art of Hammer

2010-10-25T17:05:00.003+01:00

This new book from Titan presents a lavishly illustrated guide to the art of Hammer film posters from the days of Exclusive in the early 1950s – examples of work from the 1930s are understandably hardest to come by – through to the company’s last theatrical release at the time of printing, 1979’s The Lady Vanishes.

All told more than 300 posters are reproduced, with the designs on display drawn from the UK, US and various other places around the world. France, Belgium and Italy are particularly well represented, though there are also a number of posters from Poland, Japan and Australia as well.

Though primarily something to browse through and admire, an introductory essay usefully identifies some of the main names amongst the company’s British artists. These include the likes of Bill Wiggins, who worked on the founding trinity of The Curse of Frankenstein, Dracula and The Mummy in the late 1950s, and Tom Chantrell, responsible for many of the company’s most iconic UK posters of the 1960s. (The prolific Chantrell is probably most famous for doing the UK Star Wars poster, which as author Marcus Hearn notes, was the only one to feature Peter Cushing.)

The descriptions accompanying individual posters also highlight points of wider interest, like the increasing use of DayGlo inks in the mid-1960s; the controversy over the original UK The Camp on Blood Island poster with its monstrous looking Japanese soldier and “Jap War Crimes Exposed” strapline; the Warhol inspired pop-art leanings of certain US artists; and the existence of folded and rolled versions of the UK Dracula Has Risen from the Grave poster, with the latter being given away to fans and thus more readily available and presumably carrying a lower price premium.

Also worth noting are the frequent differences in the translated titles, graphic elements and emphases of the posters prepared by national distributors and those of Hammer for the domestic market. For instance, the Danish Brides of Dracula poster came from actor David Peel’s personal collection and was apparently the only one to give him higher billing than Peter Cushing, whilst in Italy Hands of the Ripper was distributed as Barbara: The Monster of London.

Such examples also highlight the rarity value of many of the posters reproduced, even for the Hammer fan such as myself: While trawls on Ebay have certainly made many of those present more familiar than they would have been even ten years ago, I had never seen the likes of the Polish One Million Years BC or the Romanian The Hound of the Baskervilles posters, and doubt that many outwith these territories would have done so until now.

Recommended for fans of the studio, though those fixated solely on its horror output should note that just as much weight is given – correctly in my opinion – to showcasing the diversity of its releases, and anyone with an interest in cinema ephemera.

The Quatermass Experiment

2010-10-22T23:12:00.003+01:00

Or [pedant]it is The Quatermass Xperiment[/pedant] if we are talking about the film, as this is.

As in these things matter, especially in 'cult'; in this case, that Hammer put the emphasis on the X certificate through their alternative spelling, that this was not something the audiences of the time were going to get on BBC television.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b007y4fk/The_Quatermass_Experiment/

Deep Red released uncut in UK

2010-10-21T17:39:00.001+01:00

Or, a lizard impaled on a woman's pin... (well, a lizard maybe impaled on a pin by a girl, but I though a bit of Famous Monsters style punning wouldn't be objected to)

http://www.bbfc.co.uk/EVV108408

Giallo film dispute

2010-10-21T17:34:00.000+01:00

"Oscar-winning actor Adrien Brody has sued the makers of a thriller for more than $2m (£1.3m), claiming he has not been fully paid for the project.

Brody, 37, says he is owed $640,000 (£407,000) for Turin-set film Giallo and that it was released on DVD in the US on Tuesday without his permission."

More: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-11581743

New York Ripper sighted in London

2010-10-13T22:06:00.002+01:00

Comeandsee is a new film screening group in London. They will be showing Fulci's The New York Ripper courtesy of Shameless on 28th October, and hope to also have a videotape swap shop.

More information:

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/event.php?eid=154859387887065

http://www.facebook.com/videotape.swapshop

http://www.facebook.com/videotape.swapshop#!/group.php?gid=161197000566863

Suspiria screening in London

2010-10-08T18:12:00.001+01:00

"A rare London screening of Argento's classic, Suspiria at the Rio Cinema in Dalston on 16th October."

http://www.cigaretteburnscinema.com/
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=41892989996

RIP Roy Ward Baker

2010-10-08T10:21:00.003+01:00

A sad farewell to British film director Roy Ward Baker, director of A Night to Remember and numerous Hammer and Amicus films, including Quatermass and the Pit, The Anniversary, Moon Zero Two, The Vampire Lovers, Asylum, And Now the Screaming Starts..., Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires and Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde.

One of those no-nonsense professionals that rarely get the respect they deserve.