Here:
http://www.corabuhlert.com/ewgerman.pdf
Saturday, 30 August 2008
Wednesday, 27 August 2008
La Mansión de la niebla / Quando Marta urlò dalla tomba / Maniac Mansion / Murder Mansion
This is one of those Spanish-Italian co-productions where the preponderance of Spanish names amongst the cast, including actors Andrés Resino, Analía Gadé, Alberto Dalbés and Edouardo Fajardo, and crew, most prominently director Francisco Lara Polop, leave one in little doubt as to who were the dominant partners.
The impression is further enhanced by small details like the pouring of a whisky from a Cutty Sark rather than a J&B bottle, if not the prominence given giallo regular Evelyn Stewart / Ida Galli amongst the performers.
Reading the signs
While somewhat slow to get started, the credits being followed by a five-minute, dialogue-free driving sequence, it's not padding, instead serving to neatly introduce some of the characters and something of their respective personalities, as we witness a macho competition between a young motorcycle riding vaguely counter-culture type, Fred, and his older sports coupe driving counterpart, Mr Porter, soon centring around their rivalry for the attentions of attractive hitch-hiker Laura.
Meanwhile, the middle aged Mr and Mrs Tremont calmly continue on in their VW beetle, declining to get involved.
Following some more introductions and exposition involving the pre-existing relationships between philandering husband, Ernest, and his neurotic, father-fixated wife, Elsa, everyone then finds themselves lost some way from their mutual destination, Milen.
Fortunately a mansion house is nearby. Even more fortuitously the house's owner, Martha, happens to be there. This is an especially lucky coincidence given that she was herself only visiting to do a spot of work on the dilapidated property.
As everyone introduce themselves attention turns to the portrait of Martha's grandmother above the fireplace. The woman, a well-known occultist who looks curiously like her granddaughter, apparently died alongside her chauffer in a car accident some 30 years before, but is rumoured to haunt the area, with the nearest village having been abandoned as a result of a wave of mysterious deaths.
Combined with the Bosch and Eliphas Levi style images all around the mansion, it hardly makes for a terribly reassuring place to spend the night – especially for Elsa, who had a terrifying encounter with the selfsame chauffer in the cemetery just beyond the mansion only a few minutes before.
Elsa encounters the chauffeur and the witch / vampire
Though himself almost run over by the chauffer's phantom car Fred proves more skeptical and, accompanied by Laura, adopts the role of investigator determined to get to the bottom of the mansion's many secrets...
Murder Mansion is one of those old-fashioned horror-thriller crossovers that hedges its bets around supernatural versus naturalistic explanations for most of its running time before ultimately plumping for the latter in the manner of the giallo. The most relevant reference points thus emerge as the likes of Something is Creeping in the Dark, with its similarly ill-matched group of travellers stranded in a remote “old dark house” location, and The Night Evelyn Came out of the Grave, with its tomb-using noir-style conspiracy of passion and wealth.
Against giallo convention this black glove is worn by the film's hero, Fred, as part of his motorcycling get up
Given Fred's role and apt name, the film is also clearly one of those “Scooby Doo” gialli identified by Mikel Koven, where the bad guys – don't worry, I won't reveal he, she or they are – would have “gotten away with it” were it not for the “pesky meddling kids”
Grandmother Martha and her reincarnation?
Though certainly featuring traditional horror devices like creepy music and shock zooms, Francisco Lara Polop's direction is also surprisingly subtle at times.
He often blurs the image to transition from one scene to the next rather than making a straight cut – a simple technique but undeniably also effective in imparting a oneiric sense to proceedings, especially when used both for routine changes of scene and as a route into the flashback sequences around Elsa and her father, played by familiar giallo film face Jorge Rigaud, and with whom she seems to have something of a Jocasta complex, if we want to be psychoanalytic about things.
Similarly Polop sometimes opens a scene on a detail rather than with an establishing shot, to momentarily make us that bit more confused as to our location and whose perspectives we are sharing.
The film's colour schemes is also interesting. The mansion interiors are dominated by orange, the exteriors of its surroundings by blue, thus creating a striking visual contrast between the two and a subtle recurring theme of the blurring and / or encroaching on these boundaries – further echoing the fantasy and reality theme – as when, for example, Martha and Elsa, the two most sensitive characters in the piece, don bright blue dresses.
Blurring the boundaries – sexual orientation, living and dead, past and present, reality and nightmare, orange and blue
Another major strength of the film is the sheer tangibility of its fog. Rather than looking all too obviously like the artificial, cliché, product of a smoke machine situated just off camera it has the cloying, obscuring physicality of the real thing, further helping location and studio material blend seamlessly and adding to the believability of the supernatural or otherwise manifestations, such that we don't immediately dismiss them as the obvious products of smoke and mirrors which our onscreen surrogates are curiously unable to see through.
Amongst the performers no one really stands out positively or negatively, the women being glamorous and threatened, the men heroic and shifty, all very much in accordance with types. Curious as it may sound this also contributes to the effectiveness of the film as a whole, precisely because there is thereby a uniformity of style and approach by which no-one stands out, in sharp contrast to some Italian or Spanish productions starring out of place ex-pat Americans. (As with many films of its type the setting is somewhat unclear, the names of the places and people – Soren, Milen, the Clinton family – serving instead to indicate that we're in that mythic Eurotrash land where “any reference to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental”. )
Marcello Giombini's music is characteristically idiosyncratic, blending traditional horror pipe organs and the like with strange noises, laughter and screams, but generally works and further contributes to the atmosphere.
The impression is further enhanced by small details like the pouring of a whisky from a Cutty Sark rather than a J&B bottle, if not the prominence given giallo regular Evelyn Stewart / Ida Galli amongst the performers.
Reading the signs
While somewhat slow to get started, the credits being followed by a five-minute, dialogue-free driving sequence, it's not padding, instead serving to neatly introduce some of the characters and something of their respective personalities, as we witness a macho competition between a young motorcycle riding vaguely counter-culture type, Fred, and his older sports coupe driving counterpart, Mr Porter, soon centring around their rivalry for the attentions of attractive hitch-hiker Laura.
Meanwhile, the middle aged Mr and Mrs Tremont calmly continue on in their VW beetle, declining to get involved.
Following some more introductions and exposition involving the pre-existing relationships between philandering husband, Ernest, and his neurotic, father-fixated wife, Elsa, everyone then finds themselves lost some way from their mutual destination, Milen.
Fortunately a mansion house is nearby. Even more fortuitously the house's owner, Martha, happens to be there. This is an especially lucky coincidence given that she was herself only visiting to do a spot of work on the dilapidated property.
As everyone introduce themselves attention turns to the portrait of Martha's grandmother above the fireplace. The woman, a well-known occultist who looks curiously like her granddaughter, apparently died alongside her chauffer in a car accident some 30 years before, but is rumoured to haunt the area, with the nearest village having been abandoned as a result of a wave of mysterious deaths.
Combined with the Bosch and Eliphas Levi style images all around the mansion, it hardly makes for a terribly reassuring place to spend the night – especially for Elsa, who had a terrifying encounter with the selfsame chauffer in the cemetery just beyond the mansion only a few minutes before.
Elsa encounters the chauffeur and the witch / vampire
Though himself almost run over by the chauffer's phantom car Fred proves more skeptical and, accompanied by Laura, adopts the role of investigator determined to get to the bottom of the mansion's many secrets...
Murder Mansion is one of those old-fashioned horror-thriller crossovers that hedges its bets around supernatural versus naturalistic explanations for most of its running time before ultimately plumping for the latter in the manner of the giallo. The most relevant reference points thus emerge as the likes of Something is Creeping in the Dark, with its similarly ill-matched group of travellers stranded in a remote “old dark house” location, and The Night Evelyn Came out of the Grave, with its tomb-using noir-style conspiracy of passion and wealth.
Against giallo convention this black glove is worn by the film's hero, Fred, as part of his motorcycling get up
Given Fred's role and apt name, the film is also clearly one of those “Scooby Doo” gialli identified by Mikel Koven, where the bad guys – don't worry, I won't reveal he, she or they are – would have “gotten away with it” were it not for the “pesky meddling kids”
Grandmother Martha and her reincarnation?
Though certainly featuring traditional horror devices like creepy music and shock zooms, Francisco Lara Polop's direction is also surprisingly subtle at times.
He often blurs the image to transition from one scene to the next rather than making a straight cut – a simple technique but undeniably also effective in imparting a oneiric sense to proceedings, especially when used both for routine changes of scene and as a route into the flashback sequences around Elsa and her father, played by familiar giallo film face Jorge Rigaud, and with whom she seems to have something of a Jocasta complex, if we want to be psychoanalytic about things.
Similarly Polop sometimes opens a scene on a detail rather than with an establishing shot, to momentarily make us that bit more confused as to our location and whose perspectives we are sharing.
The film's colour schemes is also interesting. The mansion interiors are dominated by orange, the exteriors of its surroundings by blue, thus creating a striking visual contrast between the two and a subtle recurring theme of the blurring and / or encroaching on these boundaries – further echoing the fantasy and reality theme – as when, for example, Martha and Elsa, the two most sensitive characters in the piece, don bright blue dresses.
Blurring the boundaries – sexual orientation, living and dead, past and present, reality and nightmare, orange and blue
Another major strength of the film is the sheer tangibility of its fog. Rather than looking all too obviously like the artificial, cliché, product of a smoke machine situated just off camera it has the cloying, obscuring physicality of the real thing, further helping location and studio material blend seamlessly and adding to the believability of the supernatural or otherwise manifestations, such that we don't immediately dismiss them as the obvious products of smoke and mirrors which our onscreen surrogates are curiously unable to see through.
Amongst the performers no one really stands out positively or negatively, the women being glamorous and threatened, the men heroic and shifty, all very much in accordance with types. Curious as it may sound this also contributes to the effectiveness of the film as a whole, precisely because there is thereby a uniformity of style and approach by which no-one stands out, in sharp contrast to some Italian or Spanish productions starring out of place ex-pat Americans. (As with many films of its type the setting is somewhat unclear, the names of the places and people – Soren, Milen, the Clinton family – serving instead to indicate that we're in that mythic Eurotrash land where “any reference to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental”. )
Marcello Giombini's music is characteristically idiosyncratic, blending traditional horror pipe organs and the like with strange noises, laughter and screams, but generally works and further contributes to the atmosphere.
Monday, 25 August 2008
Fright
Or the night before the night he came home...
For what we have here is a film that, released in 1971 and thus a good seven years before John Carpenter's seminal Halloween, plays out a somewhat similar babysitter in peril scenario, albeit in a lower key, almost kitchen-sink manner more in keeping with its British origins.
The babysitter in question is Amanda (Susan George), a childcare student at the local technical college who agrees to babysit for Helen and Jim (Honor Blackman and George Cole), a middle-aged, somewhat shabbily genteel couple who have recently arrived in the village.
Helen proves to be somewhat on-edge, though her concern at this point seems explicable as nothing more than that of a slightly neurotic mother leaving her young child, Tara, in the care of an unfamiliar babysitter in an unfamiliar place:
Amanda: “Is there anything I ought to know, Mrs Lloyd?”
“No!”
“About Tara, I mean.”
It is only later, as the couple drive to what passes for the town's most glamorous night-spot – and, given the drab reality of much of early 1970s Britain quite possibly its only night spot – and meet with their friends that the truth begins to emerge:
Jim: “Do you think she knows?”
Helen: “Why should she?”
“I don't know – something she said about everyone knowing everything.”
That Helen and Jim are not in fact husband and wife and that she is celebrating her divorce hardly seems to warrant this concern, even given the villagers' apparently conservative attitudes...
The maniac's first appearance, reflected in a kettle
Meanwhile Amanda is unnerved by a presence outside, though when her boyfriend Chris (Dennis Waterman) arrives she naturally takes this as one of his horror buff his practical jokes, the practical side of it as far as he is concerned that of getting into her pants in time-honoured slasher film manner.
While the film's discourse around sexual frustration leading inexorably to violence has parallels with Halloween's, we never definitively learn whether Amanda is or isn't a virgin unlike Laurie and her friends in Carpenter's film:
Chris attempts to persuade Amanda to go to bed with him
Chris: “You can't stay a virgin all your life, you know”
Amanda: “How do you know? I might not be one.”
“Ah, well, if you're not this is your big chance.”
“With you?!”
It was not Chris who was lurking outside earlier, however, but rather Helen's estranged husband Brian (Ian Bannen), who has escaped from the asylum where he was being held – yet another echo of Halloween, along with his taking a car to get here and killing the driver in the process, though this is kept off-screen– and is determined to get back his wife and child, whatever it takes...
It is also this aspect that gives Fright more of a slasher than a giallo feel, in that as there's no real mystery or conspiracy angle. We soon realise that Brian is insane, while Jim, Helen and their Doctor friend are only acting in everyone's best interests rather than seeking an inheritance and / or revenge as would typically be the case in a comparable Italian scenario such as The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave.
A nice two plane composition with a fake split screen effect
Whatever the plusses and minuses of this approach, there's little question that the film's makers knew their business and goals.
Director Peter Collinson and co-producer Harry Fine had worked together on the earlier woman-in-peril thriller The Penthouse in 1967, with Collinson again mining similar psycho-on-the-loose territory with Straight on Till Morning in 1972.
This, in turn, was produced in conjunction with Hammer films who had worked with Fine and Michael Styles company Fantale Films on the Karnstein trilogy comprising The Vampire Lovers, Lust for a Vampire and Twins of Evil. Each of these was also made from a Tudor Gates script and featured music by Harry Robertson / Robinson. Editor Spencer Reeve also worked on two of the three Karnstein films, along with a further five earlier Hammer productions.
The Plague of the Zombies
All this is telegraphed by the inclusion of clips from The Plague of the Zombies as the film within the film that Amanda, perhaps unwisely given her state, watches on television – a neat little in-joke that also prefigures Carpenter's interpolation of clips from The Thing from Another World into Halloween.
Joining the dots still further around the British-Italian-US horror circle, The Penthouse starred Suzy Kendall prior to her women-in-peril roles for Dario Argento and Sergio Martino, whilst in between Italian excusions such as The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Torso she also appeared in Sidney Hayers's Assault, a film that with its mystery aspect – who is the rapist and killer haunting the woods near the girls' school? – is as much British giallo as proto-slasher.
George, meanwhile, had earlier appeared in Peter Walker's Die Screaming Marianne, a film also features some giallo-isms of the sort that would become still more pronounced in his later The Flesh and Blood Show – as a British take on The Assassin Reserved Nine Seats or Stagefright locked theatre murder scenario – and Schizo.
Classic 70s rack focus action
And then there's the fact that Cole and Waterman had both recently made appearances for Hammer, the former in The Vampire Lovers and the latter in Scars for Dracula. Indeed, the horror movie episode Chris recounts to frighten Amanda, of a girl being decapitated sounds almost like an out-take from The Vampire Lovers, while Waterman's apparent inability to enter the Lloyd house until invited resonates with Stoker's original formulation of the rules of vampirism and the fate that befell his character's brother in Scars of Dracula.
All this genre pedigree doesn't necessarily mean anything beyond an inherent interest in terms of trivia of course. Fortunately, cast and crew alike deliver on the promise it represents with the result an entertaining and suspenseful thriller that's worth watching in its own right.
Shot and reaction shot, enhanced by sharp editing
Cole and Blackman are the kind of solid professionals that the British theatre and cinema system was so good at producing in its hey-dey, adept at taking any character and presenting them with the same professional finesse.
George, though representative of a more contemporary approach where the female actor's abilities sometimes seemed to count for less than her willingness to strip off, nevertheless likewise acquits herself well.
In this she is also helped by the characterisation provided by Gates, as one that allows for her to express not only one-dimensional scream queen-isms but also an emergent sense of resolve, beginning with the brush-off she gives the too-cocky Chris and continuing, albeit intermittently, to rhw finale with its final girl-style shift from passive to active defence.
The stand-out performance for me, however, was that of Bannen as the madman. By turns terrifying and pathetic, he is always utterly credible, a far remove in this regard at least from the unstoppable, supernatural, archetypal “boogeyman” figure represented by Michael Myers in Halloween.
Bannen at his most threatening; note also the skilful lighting effect
Even more amazing, however, is that it isn't necessarily Bannen's best performance of this type, as anyone who's also seen his turn as the suspected child-molester in Sidney Lumet's The Offence could attest.
Collinson expertly builds the tension up through devices such as the unmotivated cut, camera set-up and movement – why that shot from the top of the stairs, looking down on Amanda at the door? why those hand-held shots in the already cramped space of the kitchen? – and a well developed eye and ear for picking out and exaggerating unnerving details, be it a giallo-style broken doll, a loudly rattling water pipe, or a tapping whose source modulates from a leaky tap to the dark outside and thus prompts Amanda to go investigate.
He also knows when to spring a Lewtonian “bus” rather than a more graphic shock, as in the following scene when a ghost-like sheet suddenly blows across Amanda's face. As an objective image it may not make sense, but as a subjective one it works beautifully to create the desired effect, whilst also hinting at her distracted state and the ease with which someone could have snuck past her whilst her attentions were otherwise occupied.
Not that gorehounds will necessarily be disappointed, with the brutal bludgeoning of Chris following shortly afterwards to demonstrate that Collinson could deliver the goods here as well if he wanted to.
The director also makes interesting use of more obvious subjective camera elsewhere in the film, sometimes presenting things from Brian's point-of-view with Amanda being replaced by his ex-wife, recalling the bizarre masks worn by the killer's victims in Lamberto Bava's Delirium: Photos of Gioia, but considerably more accomplished.
Robinson's music is satisfactory, with no emetic style balladry of the “strange love” sort, though the Ladybird, Ladybird title theme, with its subtle fairytale allusions to the events about to ensue, is sung by one Nanette, perhaps a British equivalent to all those Minas, Olympias and Christys' who so often did the honours in Italian product of the period. There's even a nice bit of Hammond-heavy party music that plays as Jim and Helen get down on the dancefloor, though whether this is Robinson's work or comes off a KPM library sessions album I wouldn't presume to say...
For what we have here is a film that, released in 1971 and thus a good seven years before John Carpenter's seminal Halloween, plays out a somewhat similar babysitter in peril scenario, albeit in a lower key, almost kitchen-sink manner more in keeping with its British origins.
The babysitter in question is Amanda (Susan George), a childcare student at the local technical college who agrees to babysit for Helen and Jim (Honor Blackman and George Cole), a middle-aged, somewhat shabbily genteel couple who have recently arrived in the village.
Helen proves to be somewhat on-edge, though her concern at this point seems explicable as nothing more than that of a slightly neurotic mother leaving her young child, Tara, in the care of an unfamiliar babysitter in an unfamiliar place:
Amanda: “Is there anything I ought to know, Mrs Lloyd?”
“No!”
“About Tara, I mean.”
It is only later, as the couple drive to what passes for the town's most glamorous night-spot – and, given the drab reality of much of early 1970s Britain quite possibly its only night spot – and meet with their friends that the truth begins to emerge:
Jim: “Do you think she knows?”
Helen: “Why should she?”
“I don't know – something she said about everyone knowing everything.”
That Helen and Jim are not in fact husband and wife and that she is celebrating her divorce hardly seems to warrant this concern, even given the villagers' apparently conservative attitudes...
The maniac's first appearance, reflected in a kettle
Meanwhile Amanda is unnerved by a presence outside, though when her boyfriend Chris (Dennis Waterman) arrives she naturally takes this as one of his horror buff his practical jokes, the practical side of it as far as he is concerned that of getting into her pants in time-honoured slasher film manner.
While the film's discourse around sexual frustration leading inexorably to violence has parallels with Halloween's, we never definitively learn whether Amanda is or isn't a virgin unlike Laurie and her friends in Carpenter's film:
Chris attempts to persuade Amanda to go to bed with him
Chris: “You can't stay a virgin all your life, you know”
Amanda: “How do you know? I might not be one.”
“Ah, well, if you're not this is your big chance.”
“With you?!”
It was not Chris who was lurking outside earlier, however, but rather Helen's estranged husband Brian (Ian Bannen), who has escaped from the asylum where he was being held – yet another echo of Halloween, along with his taking a car to get here and killing the driver in the process, though this is kept off-screen– and is determined to get back his wife and child, whatever it takes...
It is also this aspect that gives Fright more of a slasher than a giallo feel, in that as there's no real mystery or conspiracy angle. We soon realise that Brian is insane, while Jim, Helen and their Doctor friend are only acting in everyone's best interests rather than seeking an inheritance and / or revenge as would typically be the case in a comparable Italian scenario such as The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave.
A nice two plane composition with a fake split screen effect
Whatever the plusses and minuses of this approach, there's little question that the film's makers knew their business and goals.
Director Peter Collinson and co-producer Harry Fine had worked together on the earlier woman-in-peril thriller The Penthouse in 1967, with Collinson again mining similar psycho-on-the-loose territory with Straight on Till Morning in 1972.
This, in turn, was produced in conjunction with Hammer films who had worked with Fine and Michael Styles company Fantale Films on the Karnstein trilogy comprising The Vampire Lovers, Lust for a Vampire and Twins of Evil. Each of these was also made from a Tudor Gates script and featured music by Harry Robertson / Robinson. Editor Spencer Reeve also worked on two of the three Karnstein films, along with a further five earlier Hammer productions.
The Plague of the Zombies
All this is telegraphed by the inclusion of clips from The Plague of the Zombies as the film within the film that Amanda, perhaps unwisely given her state, watches on television – a neat little in-joke that also prefigures Carpenter's interpolation of clips from The Thing from Another World into Halloween.
Joining the dots still further around the British-Italian-US horror circle, The Penthouse starred Suzy Kendall prior to her women-in-peril roles for Dario Argento and Sergio Martino, whilst in between Italian excusions such as The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Torso she also appeared in Sidney Hayers's Assault, a film that with its mystery aspect – who is the rapist and killer haunting the woods near the girls' school? – is as much British giallo as proto-slasher.
George, meanwhile, had earlier appeared in Peter Walker's Die Screaming Marianne, a film also features some giallo-isms of the sort that would become still more pronounced in his later The Flesh and Blood Show – as a British take on The Assassin Reserved Nine Seats or Stagefright locked theatre murder scenario – and Schizo.
Classic 70s rack focus action
And then there's the fact that Cole and Waterman had both recently made appearances for Hammer, the former in The Vampire Lovers and the latter in Scars for Dracula. Indeed, the horror movie episode Chris recounts to frighten Amanda, of a girl being decapitated sounds almost like an out-take from The Vampire Lovers, while Waterman's apparent inability to enter the Lloyd house until invited resonates with Stoker's original formulation of the rules of vampirism and the fate that befell his character's brother in Scars of Dracula.
All this genre pedigree doesn't necessarily mean anything beyond an inherent interest in terms of trivia of course. Fortunately, cast and crew alike deliver on the promise it represents with the result an entertaining and suspenseful thriller that's worth watching in its own right.
Shot and reaction shot, enhanced by sharp editing
Cole and Blackman are the kind of solid professionals that the British theatre and cinema system was so good at producing in its hey-dey, adept at taking any character and presenting them with the same professional finesse.
George, though representative of a more contemporary approach where the female actor's abilities sometimes seemed to count for less than her willingness to strip off, nevertheless likewise acquits herself well.
In this she is also helped by the characterisation provided by Gates, as one that allows for her to express not only one-dimensional scream queen-isms but also an emergent sense of resolve, beginning with the brush-off she gives the too-cocky Chris and continuing, albeit intermittently, to rhw finale with its final girl-style shift from passive to active defence.
The stand-out performance for me, however, was that of Bannen as the madman. By turns terrifying and pathetic, he is always utterly credible, a far remove in this regard at least from the unstoppable, supernatural, archetypal “boogeyman” figure represented by Michael Myers in Halloween.
Bannen at his most threatening; note also the skilful lighting effect
Even more amazing, however, is that it isn't necessarily Bannen's best performance of this type, as anyone who's also seen his turn as the suspected child-molester in Sidney Lumet's The Offence could attest.
Collinson expertly builds the tension up through devices such as the unmotivated cut, camera set-up and movement – why that shot from the top of the stairs, looking down on Amanda at the door? why those hand-held shots in the already cramped space of the kitchen? – and a well developed eye and ear for picking out and exaggerating unnerving details, be it a giallo-style broken doll, a loudly rattling water pipe, or a tapping whose source modulates from a leaky tap to the dark outside and thus prompts Amanda to go investigate.
He also knows when to spring a Lewtonian “bus” rather than a more graphic shock, as in the following scene when a ghost-like sheet suddenly blows across Amanda's face. As an objective image it may not make sense, but as a subjective one it works beautifully to create the desired effect, whilst also hinting at her distracted state and the ease with which someone could have snuck past her whilst her attentions were otherwise occupied.
Not that gorehounds will necessarily be disappointed, with the brutal bludgeoning of Chris following shortly afterwards to demonstrate that Collinson could deliver the goods here as well if he wanted to.
The director also makes interesting use of more obvious subjective camera elsewhere in the film, sometimes presenting things from Brian's point-of-view with Amanda being replaced by his ex-wife, recalling the bizarre masks worn by the killer's victims in Lamberto Bava's Delirium: Photos of Gioia, but considerably more accomplished.
Robinson's music is satisfactory, with no emetic style balladry of the “strange love” sort, though the Ladybird, Ladybird title theme, with its subtle fairytale allusions to the events about to ensue, is sung by one Nanette, perhaps a British equivalent to all those Minas, Olympias and Christys' who so often did the honours in Italian product of the period. There's even a nice bit of Hammond-heavy party music that plays as Jim and Helen get down on the dancefloor, though whether this is Robinson's work or comes off a KPM library sessions album I wouldn't presume to say...
Sunday, 24 August 2008
American risciò / American Rickshaw / American Tiger
How many films about a rickshaw driver can you think of?
Well, chances are that unless it's your chosen specialist subject, American Rickshaw will probably increase your total by an either infinite amount, or somewhere in the region of fifty to one hundred percent.
Therein lies the first of many questions about Martin Dolman / Sergio Martino's 1990 film. Why make a film about a rickshaw driver? Was he hoping to start a new franchise along the lines of the American Ninja series by taking advantage of those who would watch anything with the magic word 'American' in its title?
It might make sense, although I can't recall rickshaws exactly being big in the 80s, unlike ninjas. There were no Teenage Mutant Rickshaw Drivers, after all.
Whatever the motivation, there's certainly a strong east-meets-west aspect to the production, not only in the hero's occupation but also the mysterious old Chinese woman who, as we will eventually learn, represents the forces of good in opposition to Donald Pleasance's televangelist, Reverend Mortom
If this combination suggests that Martino and company might have been drawing some inspiration from John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness, which also starred Pleasance, and Big Trouble in Little China, these also seem somewhat odd choices for models given their relative lack of box office success at the time and somewhat belated cult recognition. (Thinking back to my own teenage years, I can remember catching up with Halloween, The Fog, Escape from New York and The Thing, but never thinking about seeing Big Trouble in Little China and Prince of Darkness, either in the cinema or on home video; my loss.)
Regardless of its inspirations American Rickshaw emerges as a somewhat confused film, with the list of supporting characters including the televangelists son, who has a penchant for hiding behind one-way mirrors and filming people having sex; the stripper-cum-hooker who ensnares our hero, Scott, for one such film; Reverend Mortem's murderous minion, played by ex-Fists of Steel cyborg Daniel Greene, and Scott's friends and colleagues, including an amusingly / offensively camp gay rickshaw driver.
The plot meanwhile veers uneasily between the mundane and the magical, with Scott having to worry about his college exams one day and the fate of the world the next, with curious coincidences and mystical Mcguffins.
Though it might be argued that this serves to make the protagonist easier for us to engage and also places us in a position somewhat comparable to his – what exactly the hell is going on? – it proves hard to really care when athlete Mitchell Gaylord's suffers from a severe lack of charisma as Scott and Martino's direction is utterly flat and uninspired.
If American Rickshaw has any value it's as a time capsule of late 80s fashions, technologies – check out those mobile phones – and attitudes. Fine if you're a historian or sociologist but not so good if what you want is to be entertained.
Well, chances are that unless it's your chosen specialist subject, American Rickshaw will probably increase your total by an either infinite amount, or somewhere in the region of fifty to one hundred percent.
Therein lies the first of many questions about Martin Dolman / Sergio Martino's 1990 film. Why make a film about a rickshaw driver? Was he hoping to start a new franchise along the lines of the American Ninja series by taking advantage of those who would watch anything with the magic word 'American' in its title?
It might make sense, although I can't recall rickshaws exactly being big in the 80s, unlike ninjas. There were no Teenage Mutant Rickshaw Drivers, after all.
Whatever the motivation, there's certainly a strong east-meets-west aspect to the production, not only in the hero's occupation but also the mysterious old Chinese woman who, as we will eventually learn, represents the forces of good in opposition to Donald Pleasance's televangelist, Reverend Mortom
If this combination suggests that Martino and company might have been drawing some inspiration from John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness, which also starred Pleasance, and Big Trouble in Little China, these also seem somewhat odd choices for models given their relative lack of box office success at the time and somewhat belated cult recognition. (Thinking back to my own teenage years, I can remember catching up with Halloween, The Fog, Escape from New York and The Thing, but never thinking about seeing Big Trouble in Little China and Prince of Darkness, either in the cinema or on home video; my loss.)
Regardless of its inspirations American Rickshaw emerges as a somewhat confused film, with the list of supporting characters including the televangelists son, who has a penchant for hiding behind one-way mirrors and filming people having sex; the stripper-cum-hooker who ensnares our hero, Scott, for one such film; Reverend Mortem's murderous minion, played by ex-Fists of Steel cyborg Daniel Greene, and Scott's friends and colleagues, including an amusingly / offensively camp gay rickshaw driver.
The plot meanwhile veers uneasily between the mundane and the magical, with Scott having to worry about his college exams one day and the fate of the world the next, with curious coincidences and mystical Mcguffins.
Though it might be argued that this serves to make the protagonist easier for us to engage and also places us in a position somewhat comparable to his – what exactly the hell is going on? – it proves hard to really care when athlete Mitchell Gaylord's suffers from a severe lack of charisma as Scott and Martino's direction is utterly flat and uninspired.
If American Rickshaw has any value it's as a time capsule of late 80s fashions, technologies – check out those mobile phones – and attitudes. Fine if you're a historian or sociologist but not so good if what you want is to be entertained.
Saturday, 23 August 2008
Three upcoming releases from Shameless
The Designated Victim, Strip Nude for Your Killer and Oasis of Fear, all arriving on 15 September.
Especially nice to see The Designated Victim and Oasis of Fear, which have previously been hard to find.
Especially nice to see The Designated Victim and Oasis of Fear, which have previously been hard to find.
Friday, 22 August 2008
Cinque uomini contro tutti / Cobra Mission / Operation Nam
Obviously taking its inspiration from Rambo, this Fabrizio de Angelis / Larry Ludman entry sees a group of Vietman veterans decide to return to the country after hearing reports that some of their comrades are still being held in prisoner-of-war camps by the Viet Cong, fully a decade after the war's official end; that there's a four- rather than a one-man army is probably explicable by the fact that none of the quartet of Christopher Connelly, John Steiner, Oliver Tobias and Manfred Lehmann could exactly be described as possessing the same physique or star recognition as Stallone, though together they certainly present an attractive proposition for the Eurotrash enthusiast.
Gordon Mitchell also appears as one of the men's former commanding officers, and tries to dissuade them from their self-appointed mission.
After incidents involving an cynical conman who takes opportunity of Americans desperate to be reuinted with loved ones and a militantly anti-communist French colonialist priest – incidents which also allow for some welcome cameo appearances from Ennio Girolami, Luciano Pigozzi and Donald Pleasance to further bolster the film's cult appeal – the four men cross the border into Vietnam and proceed to dispose of what seems like half the Vietnamese army without themselves really breaking much of a sweat.
Exploding huts, trucks and choppers
Although the action remains equally gung-ho in the second half as the Cobra Mission team heads for the border with the rescued POW's in tow, the film also develops a more serious side as it emerges that the US authorities have not only repeatedly denied the prisoners' existence but have also been complicit in the Vietnamese keeping them captive.
If the resulting impression is one of an at times awkward mixture of juvenile action and a rather more adult and cynical approach, vaguely reminiscent of the moral universe of the spaghetti western, it also helps to further distinguish the film from its American model and give it a more distinctively Italian cast.
In particular Rambo's famous question “do we get to win this time” cannot necessarily be answered in the affirmative here – assuming, that is, that it's even possible to definitively identify this “we,” with the early US-set scenes also nicely establishing that the four veterans have not exactly been welcomed back into civilian life with heros welcomes.
One wonder what John Wayne would have thought of his son Ethan's role in the film. It's not The Green Berets, that's for sure...
Gordon Mitchell also appears as one of the men's former commanding officers, and tries to dissuade them from their self-appointed mission.
After incidents involving an cynical conman who takes opportunity of Americans desperate to be reuinted with loved ones and a militantly anti-communist French colonialist priest – incidents which also allow for some welcome cameo appearances from Ennio Girolami, Luciano Pigozzi and Donald Pleasance to further bolster the film's cult appeal – the four men cross the border into Vietnam and proceed to dispose of what seems like half the Vietnamese army without themselves really breaking much of a sweat.
Exploding huts, trucks and choppers
Although the action remains equally gung-ho in the second half as the Cobra Mission team heads for the border with the rescued POW's in tow, the film also develops a more serious side as it emerges that the US authorities have not only repeatedly denied the prisoners' existence but have also been complicit in the Vietnamese keeping them captive.
If the resulting impression is one of an at times awkward mixture of juvenile action and a rather more adult and cynical approach, vaguely reminiscent of the moral universe of the spaghetti western, it also helps to further distinguish the film from its American model and give it a more distinctively Italian cast.
In particular Rambo's famous question “do we get to win this time” cannot necessarily be answered in the affirmative here – assuming, that is, that it's even possible to definitively identify this “we,” with the early US-set scenes also nicely establishing that the four veterans have not exactly been welcomed back into civilian life with heros welcomes.
One wonder what John Wayne would have thought of his son Ethan's role in the film. It's not The Green Berets, that's for sure...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)