Eglima sto Kavouri / Death Kiss / The Rape Killer

We start off in what seems like Torso territory as a masked, black-gloved figure stalks a couple in a car in order that he may indulge in a spot of rape and murder. There's a difference, however, inasmuch as we first see the masked killer donning his gear and that he's wearing a regular stocking mask that doesn't particularly obscure his features anyway.


The masked killer, sort of

As such, it's not too much of a surprise when we then move onto something more reminiscent to The Killer Must Kill Again with the introduction of playboy ship captain Dimitris/Jim (Larry Daniels / Lakis Komnikos), his wife Eleni (Dorothy Moore) and mistress Laura (Jane Paterson).


Sure you don't want to call it Eastwoodcolor?

Dimitris likes Eleni's wealth and willingness to spend her money on him. He doesn't like her nor being dependent on her. Knowing that the maniac, Mikos/Mike (Vagelis Seilinos), is an ex-colleague, Dimitris thus concocts a plan:

“Ellen is going to be the next woman to be murdered. The police are expecting another murder. And there's going to be another one. He'll kill her and give me a flesh wound. It'll follow the same pattern as the other two murders. It's the only way I could think of to be rid of Ellen and keep my hands on the money.”


The killer is on the phone

The film's main weakness is that the set-up for this murder is a touch too elaborate to really be believable. Given that Dimitris knows Mikos is also a psychopath and a drug user and that Mikos already suspects Dimitris will betray rather than pay him off, is it really plausible that Dimitris would request Mikos shoot him in the shoulder and then beat him about the head with a rock? Isn't there a rather large chance of something “accidentally” going wrong, of receiving a mortal rather than a flesh wound?


The Killer Must Kill Again featured a similarly iconic 'Dracula carrying his victim into the castle' shot, if one remembers correctly

The Killer Must Kill Again was more convincing in this regard. George Hilton's playboy Giordio Mainardi did not try to overcomplicate things and took more opportunistic advantage of Antoine St John's unnamed killer, whom he had happened upon in the middle of disposing of a previous victim, without giving much thought to whether he had really found the ideal man for the job.

“A psychopath's not a professional,” to paraphrase Reservoir Dogs's Mr White.

Professional, however, is unquestionably what the filmmakers themselves are. Eglima sto Kavouri / Death Kiss is a well-crafted, suspenseful little thriller which keeps you engrossed as the conspirators attempt to double cross one another and the police seek to figure out what is really going on. Put another way, it's the kind of film where potential plot holes are sufficiently stitched up and the viewer stitched in – or “sutured” if we want to use theory-speak – until afterwards.

Some measure of their success can perhaps be gleaned from the fact that, if you ignored the characters' names and that of director Kostas Karagiannis along with an otherwise unnecessary folk dancing interlude, you could easily be fooled into believing this was an Italian rather than a Greek production. The requisite details are there: the subjective camera; self-reflexive use of voyeuristic devices like camera and binocular shots; the nightclub/disco scene and lots of modish, if now dated, 70s styles and designs.




Laura and Dimitros

It clearly worked, insofar as the film also secured international distribution thanks to Joseph Brenner Associates, who retitled it as The Rape Killer and unleased it on US grindhouse and drive-in audiences along with the likes of Autopsy, Eyeball and – to bring us right back to where we started – Torso.

Epigram for discussion of Tenebre?

"Sometimes I like to say that to read a book is to consider its author as already dead and the book as posthumous." (Hans-Georg Gadamer)

The Bad Old Days

Earlier this week I got the Tony Anthony spaghetti western Comin’ At Ya! The problem was that the film is shot in 3D and thus requires red/green lenses to really be experienced properly.

Yesterday I was tidying up and found an old issue of Video World from 1992, which a friend had given me because it had an article on Lucio Fulci in it. The same issue also turned out to have a 3D Freddy’s Dead poster and glasses: Result!

I also re-read the Fulci piece, which is by Allan Bryce and was written to coincide with the UK video releases of four Fulci video nasties – Zombie Flesh Eaters, City of the Living Dead, The Beyond and The House by the Cemetery – by the notorious VIPCO.

It’s an intriguing time capsule of the bad old days, both for the heavily cut product and for showing what passed as horror film writing in the more mainstream media at the time:

“Nobody in their right mind could make the case for Fulci being a great film-maker. It’s just the opposite. His pictures are usually very poorly written, woodenly performed and clumsily directed. Their sole saving grace is the gore content, which is usually as high as Oliver Reed’s bar bill.”

I’m sure Stephen Thrower and most of us who have bothered to investigate Fulci’s wider filmography would beg to differ on this count.

Fulci may not have been a great film-maker (whatever that means) but nor was he as devoid of talent as Bryce seems to think. Indeed, in contradistinction to the “poorly written” line a few paragraphs later Bryce actually remarks on Fulci’s “sterling efforts at writing” comedy scripts in the 1960s.

What’s more amusing from a contemporary perspective is Bryce’s identification of The Psychic as Fulci’s “first brush with out-and-out gore,” in the form of the face smashing off cliff face sequence. Bryce does not, that is, recognise the origins of this in the earlier Don’t Torture a Duckling (which he refers to as The Long Night of Exorcism, as a translation of its French title) nor seem to recognise that Schizoid – i.e. Lizard in a Woman’s Skin – was originally released considerably earlier than 1979.

Thank $deity that Video Watchdog, European Trash Cinema, Giallo Pages and all the rest provided an alternative – even if, not having the backing of Richard Desmond’s Northern and Shell, they couldn’t get into newsagents in the way a Video World could.

Così sia / They Called Him Amen

Has anyone seen the 1972 western Così sia / They Called Him Amen, directed by and co-starring Alfio Caltabiano? Dario Argento has a co-writing credit on it, which I would guess must be for an old script dating back three or four years. Intriguingly one of the keywords to describe the film on IMDB is 'gay,' leading me to also wonder if there are any quirky gay characters along the lines of those in the Animal Trilogy.

Bueller?

La Rossa dalla pelle che scotta / The Red Headed Corpse / The Sensuous Doll

Written and directed by Renzo Russo, this is one of the stranger gialli out there – if, that is, it can actually be called a giallo. It certainly features a number of characteristic giallo tropes: an alienated, artistic protagonist; a femme fatale figure or three; conspiracy and mystery and, above all, lots of mannequin action and imagery.

It's the last aspect which also, however, offsets the others to some extent, insofar as we're never too sure what's actually going on and what to make of the femme fatale, the conspiracy and the mystery which seem, instead, to have just as much in common with an E T A Hoffmann fantastique.

At one point a Mr Gonzales goes to the police station to report a missing person. Asked to name her, he hesitates, tellingly opening with the remark that “to me she was my doll, my sensuous doll,” while the direction focuses on his hands to the exclusion of his face. As he confesses to breaking into a house in search of the missing woman we get what would otherwise be a classic giallo subjective camera stalking scene, except for the fact that we know the identity – yet still not the face – of the stalker.




Living, bleeding doll?

It's possible that the version of the film I saw, with the title of Sweet Spirits, had been re-edited so that this scene appeared out of sequence. Nevertheless such changes would appear to have only added to a weirdness that was already there, with a blending of past and present, dream and reality throughout that demand an active involvement in making sense of the film.

What is clear is that Farley Granger plays an unsuccessful, alcoholic artist by the name of John Ward. The dealers don't want his paintings and he refuse to change his style or subject to meet the tastes of the market.

One day while out walking in the woods he happens upon a group of hippies, one of whom gives him a mannequin. “She's better than the real thing – she's always there and she'll never talk back to you,” he explains. Ward takes the mannequin home and repairs its damaged face: “I'll fix you up. You'll see.”


A composition that would likely look even more impressive in the proper aspect ratio

Later, in a bar, he meets a hooker who, on learning that he is an artist, suggests that she could model for him.

Back home, this seems to cause him to imagine that the mannequin has come to life, though at this point she remains silent and passive.

After some drinks, Ward falls asleep with his model/mannequin/muse. On awakening she has changed into another woman (Erika Blanc) and now talks to him.

After again being told that what the market wants is naked women, the model/mannequin/muse suggests that she might pose for John.


Pictures of Lily, er Erica

Reluctantly he agrees – they do need the money. The resulting painting sells and the dealers want more. So does the model: “Don't forget the chocolate, and the stockings – and bring me a few magazines.” More than this, however, she also takes another lover, in the form of a local huntsman, the aforementioned Gonzales (Venantino Venantini), and attracts the attentions of one of the dealers, Omar Bey.


Erica in seductive mode

It can all only end badly – if, that is, we can even say that there is such a thing as an ending in a film like this.

For taken as a whole it's a bit like that famous mobius strip sequence in Bava's Kill Baby Kill where, walking through the castle in pursuit of the child, Paul Eswai ends up also chasing after himself; perhaps not coincidentally a similar image appeared in The Archers' Tales of Hoffman, in the Antonia story segment, with that film's Olympia segment featuring a similar red-headed mannequin come to life who also meets a similarly disturbing end.

The Granger/Blanc relationship intriguingly recalls that between John and Mildred Harrington in A Hatchet for the Honeymoon, another Bava film which pushed the boundaries of giallo representation, while Blanc's dualistic character has affinities with her role as the succubus temptress in The Devil's Nightmare – indeed at one point she even wears a similar “threw it on and nearly missed” navel-revealing dress.

Gradually, that is, it all starts to make sense...

If, however, working at this isn't your thing there are the incidentals: the pleasing easy listening score; Granger's method-esque performance (the only person I can imagine playing the role better would be Frank Wolff); some nice little directorial touches, like ending a scene and coveng Granger's character's mood by having Granger him walk into the camera; and, of course, all that eye-candy.

A Feast of Fumetti

New forum and site dedicated to fumetti which looks very promising:

http://www.afeastoffumetti.org/

The neo-nasty menace?

[This is another piece for the writing on film class I'm doing which I thought I'd share here; comments and suggestions on improvements / errors welcome]

According to right-thinking types British society is under threat from media violence as never before. “Torture porn,” the Internet, gangsta rap and computer games are breeding a generation of desensitised young men. Unable to distinguish between image and reality they rape, assault and kill without compunction. Just as we need to be saved from them, they need to be saved from these media by more vigilant censorship.

Things recently came to a head with the private members bill by Conservative Member of Parliament Julian Brazier, in which he argued for giving MPs the ability to overrule British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) decisions. Though the bill stood little chance of becoming law and was defeated, the debates within Parliament and the mass media were very interesting for a number of reasons. First, because of the crossing of party lines in the debate, with Brazier gaining his most prominent support from Labour MP Keith Vaz and the bill being criticised by both Conservative and Labour MPs. Second, because the arguments of Brazier, Vaz and their supporters in the media were really nothing other than the same old story that we had seen a quarter-century ago with the original “video nasties” affair. Third, because the response, as expressed in Internet discussions, including comments made on the websites of the same media, showed the extent to which Brazier and Vaz were out of touch with large sections of the public they claimed to represent. This last aspect was somewhat new and shows what the politicians and pundits perhaps most fear: the emergence of an informed population able to use new technology to route around censorship and misinformation.

Brazier singled out a number of different films in the parliamentary debate around his bill, including Gaspar Noé's Irreversible (a glamorisation of rape, according to the MP) and David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises (too violent, apparently). I want, however, to concentrate on something rather less critically respectable than these art house auteurs: Sergio Garrone's Nazi exploitation shocker SS Experiment Camp.



As it so happens Garrone's thirty year old film was one of those which had kick-started the original “video nasties” affair of the early 1980s. A history lesson: to the major studios the emergence of home video in the late 1970s and early 1980s represented a threat rather than an opportunity. Wary of losing theatrical sales, they declined to release big name films onto video or at best released them after a long wait. This created a vacuum for product which was filled by a large number of small scale entrepreneurs who bought up the rights to just about any film they could. Seeking to drum up interest in a marketplace that was thus growing more and more crowded by the day, SS Experiment Camp's distributors Go Video actually sent self-appointed moral watchdog Mary Whitehouse of the National Viewers and Listeners Association (NVLA) promotional artwork for the video, which depicted a near-naked woman suspended upside down on a crucifix alongside a leering SS man, posing as a concerned member of the public. Whitehouse took the bait, the media ran with the story and rentals/sales of the video duly increased. It was classic exploitation film ballyhoo, and exploitation of that exploitation by the NVLA. It would be repeated, with minor variations, by other companies such as VIPCO, with their lurid “the drill keeps tearing through flesh and bone” promotional artwork and copy for Abel Ferrara's Driller Killer, and World of Video 2000, with their guess-the-weight-of-the-damaged-brain competition for Nightmares in a Damaged Brain, with equal effect upon sales. Everyone won, at least for a while. The problem for Go and their competitors was that the lurid advertising campaigns soon proved to have worked that bit too well. Whitehouse and company had sunk their fangs in on the issue and were not going to let go.

Seeing a convenient scapegoat that distracted attention from the effects of her own government's economic and social policies, Margaret Thatcher quickly jumped on the bandwagon and, to cut a long story short, the Video Recordings Act was born and quickly passed by Parliament. Through the provisions of the VRA a relatively small number of films were banned outright. It became illegal to sell or offer them for sale. All other films had to be certificated by the BBFC before they could be legally released on video. As a result, a far larger number of films simply disappeared, because it was prohibitively expensive to pay for the privilege of having them checked by the BBFC examiner, who might also require cuts and resubmission. The (un)anticipated consequence of the former provision was to give the banned films a lasting cachet and create a black market for them. The (un)anticipated consequence of the latter was to take the video industry out of the hands of the small players and return it to the major studios who could afford to take a high-profile film like Rambo back to the BBFC again and again until a satisfactory compromise was reached over its home format content and certificate.

Fast forward 20 or so years or, rather, chapter skip to the late noughties.

The government has changed, though dissatisfaction with Nü-Labour's opportunistic abandonment of its old principles and policies is growing. The NVLA has likewise mutated, becoming Mediawatch after Whitehouse's death but otherwise repeating the same old mantras. New technologies have emerged, most crucially DVD and the Internet, along with new issues of control phrased in the same old terms of new and unprecedented threats to the young and impressionable.

Reacting against the major players' attempts to artificially control the DVD market through the use of Region Coding, which divides the world up into a number of different zones and makes most content region specific, keen film enthusiasts quickly spotted the potential of having region-free players and importing otherwise unavailable releases on-line retailers. After all, it was not against the law to purchase banned films, only to sell them. But, if a retailer is not located within the UK, then UK laws like the VRA do not apply to them. True, the horror fan who sought to import an uncut SS Experiment Camp from abroad was still taking a chance: customs might open their package, declare the contents legally obscene, have them destroyed and issue a fine or court summons. But it was a calculated risk that paid off more often than not. Horror fans were finally getting the chance to see uncut films again and British society could hardly be said to have collapsed as a result.

In truth, the video nasties appealed only to a relatively small and self-selecting audience, perfectly capable of maintaining a critical distance from the films for the most part. Read an online debate about the cannibal films of Ruggero Deodato and Umberto Lenzi, for instance, and it's clear how the fans are capable of saying why the former director's Cannibal Holocaust is a technically, aesthetically and intellectually superior film to the latter's Cannibal Ferox – which to be sure the cynic might say is not exactly difficult – without endorsing the films' putative racism or the killing of animals on screen.

If anyone was losing out here it was the UK based DVD distributor or retailer whose hands were effectively tied by the VRA. Yet over the course of the last few years the majority of nasties have in fact been re-released, sometimes with significant cuts by the BBFC – the animal cruelty of the aforementioned cannibal films contravenes earlier animal welfare legislation, which few would presumably wish to oppose – but more and more with only minor cuts or on a number of occasions none whatsoever.

In this the BBFC was responding to public opinion, canvassed through a number of high-profile consultation and research exercises, and a growing body of effects research based on more sophisticated models of the audience-text relationship. Adult audiences increasingly wanted to be treated like adults and be allowed to watch a film such as SS Experiment Camp if they so desired.

Indeed anyone over 18 had actually already been free to buy or rent the film, which had been passed by the BBFC uncut and released on DVD at the end of 2006 for over a year by the time it came to Brazier's attention. It could hardly be said that society had changed significantly for the worse in this time as a result of the film's availability nor that there had been any clear upsurge in anti-Semitic incidents that could be traced to the film.

So why bother with it? The answer should be obvious: it was an easy and obvious target: what sort of sick individual would watch a film called SS Experiment Camp, never mind attempt to defend it. Now, as it so happens the film is ineptly made and often outright laughter inducing, hard to take serious at any level – never more than when one recently castrated male victim utters the immortal line “you bastard, what have you done with my balls?” The “horrifying experiments of the SS” are more camp than anything else. They may be stupid and distasteful, but when has either ever provided an adequate reason for censorship? Just ask Eli Roth, the Jewish director of another Brazier target, the so-called “torture porn” films Hostel and Hostel II, who recently contributed a spoof “Nazisploitation” trailer to Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's homage to trash cinema, Grindhouse.

Indeed, if there's the hint of exploitation attaching to anyone here, I would suggest that it is to Brazier and politicians like him, with their characteristic singling out of deviant minorities such as trash film fans, practitioners of BDSM or players of 'violent' video games like in the expectation that few will prove willing to stand up for them.

Yet this is another place where things are changing as a result of new technology. And, more importantly, changing for the better. While there were certainly dissenting voices at the time of the original video nasties campaign, it was difficult for them to be heard. Newspapers could only publish so many letters to the editor and would exercise a greater degree of control over which were selected. Today, by contrast, comments such as that by Dr B Flaks in response to a Times online opinion piece, “Stop this debasing film,” can find a place:
“In a free and civilized country there should be no need for any argument to stop the kind of censorship that we endured twenty years ago. I lived through the despicable 'Mary Whitehouse' period and have no wish to see that repeated. In order to watch such films people have to make the effort to go out and buy them – they will not see them by accident. If anyone does watch it and is disturbed by it, that says more about the viewer than the film.

The protection we do need is from venal and stupid politicians and from activists who would like to dictate to their compatriots what they can see or read.”

The politician's response to arguments like this is often predictable: it is fine for educated, middle class types to watch a SS Experiment Camp, but it needs to be kept out of the hands of the plebian masses who can't be relied upon to take care of their children. The problem with such arguments, besides what amounts to a patronising class-based racism, is that absolutely anything can and does inspire the psychotic individual. Take the case of Pierre Williams, sentenced to 38 years in prison for the murder of his former partner and her children. The text which Williams drew inspiration from was however not SS Experiment Camp or any other ex- or neo-nasty but the Bible. As the Times online reported:

“A container of cocoa butter at the crime scene became significant when a Bible was found in Williams’s possession: three pages were underlined in ballpoint pen and the words “special oil” high-lighted in three places. Detectives also found several other significant passages underlined, including: “Moses took some of the special oil and some of the blood which was on the altar and he sprinkled them on Aaron and Aaron’s clothes.””

So can we expect to a call for banning the Bible next?