I Racconti della camera rossa

Some of you are probably wondering what an apparent Hong Kong Category III film is doing in a blog about European exploitation cinema.

The answer lies in that title. It's not a translation from the Cantonese, but the original title. For Stories from the Red Chamber is actually an Italian production, being directed by Joe D'Amato / Aristide Massaccessi under yet another of his multitudinous pseudonyms, namely the made-in-Hong Kong sounding Robert Yip.


Note that 'Heijin Lab' is an Italian company

In interview Massaccessi freely admitted to copying the then-in vogue Sex and Zen films and hoping to pass it off as an authentic Hong Kong product. While those more knowledgeable about Italian or Hong Kong productions could probably identify the film as a counterfeit – where are the otherwise familiar Hong King cinema faces and names and who is hiding behind the pseudonyms being used? – one wouldn't be surprised if the casual viewer was taken in by the ruse.

Yet, I don't think it matters too much, since a number of the episodes presented, such as the man who disguises himself as a woman in order to infiltrate the master's house and then has his comeuppance when he discovers a hermaphrodite engaged in a similar kind of deception, or of the wife who is fitted with an locked chastity belt on the instructions of her untrusting husband before he goes away for a time, prove to be somewhat universal, the differences emerging more at the level of the costumes and setting.






Up the chastity belt

Indeed, for anyone more familiar with Italian exploitation of the 1970s than Hong Kong exploitation of the 1990s, the thing that the film may prove most reminiscent of is a Decamerotic. There is, after all, that same basic combination of bawdiness and earthiness juxtaposed with moral tale wrap up found in the likes of Ubalda: All Naked and Warm – a Fenech vehicle that tellingly also features a chastity belt scenario – and D'Amato's own Novelle licenziose di vergini vogliose / Le Mille e una notte di Boccaccio a Canterbury, the latter title also foregrounding the actual and purported literary origins of both the Italian and Hong Kong forms.


We can explain everything, honest...

The abundance of nudity and softcore fumblings amongst the Chinese-looking cast and corresponding absence of hardcore material and Europorn types further distinguishes the film from the bulk of the D'Amato's 1990s output, including – just to bring things full circle – the two Decameron Tales entries he lensed for frequent partner-in-porn Franco Lo Cascio a couple of years later.

As such, the film is also revealing of how far the tide was turning against the old-style of Italian exploitation film by this time, that Italian filmmakers were now seeking to imitate their Hong Kong counterparts rather than the other way around when we think of the likes of Tsui Hark's The Butterfly Murders and We are Going to Eat You.

This also extends to the soundtrack where Piero Montanari delivers a rather obvious and repetitive pseudo-Oriental synth based score; at least when Hong Kong filmmakers borrowed Morricone or Goblin cues and placed them in all sorts of unexpected places and contexts they were stealing something worthwhile.

Giallo Trailers

Eric Smit emailed me about his Giallo Trailers project:

http://www.youtube.com/user/GialloTrailers

As he explains, "I wanted to present these movies from a different perspective - focusing on the style and the ambiance, rather than on the story and violence. It's difficult to find quality trailers on the net (trailers are never restored and rarely in the original aspect ratio), I'm trying to change this!"

Enjoy :-)

La Polizia brancola nel buio

After her car breaks down, a model asks an unseen figure for help. He or she then pursues the model through the woods and kills her with a pair of scissors.

Though we're immediately got a likely suspect / red herring in the form of the mentally retarded, lurching figure introduced moments before alongside a piece of text about the importance of intelligence as the thing which distinguishes man from animal, the police apparently have not got a clue.

Following this we're introduced to some of the other denizens of the area, a village some 30km outside of Rome, a motley assortment which suggest the investigators' problem might be a surfeit of other potential killers – a blind innkeeper; a wheelchair bound scientist who according to rumour keeps his wife prisoner; and the scientist's butler, a “strano tipo” according to the folks at the inn.


The professor

Parallel with this is we also meet the next likely victim, in the form of another beautiful woman whose car breaks down, leaving her stranded in the village. She takes a room at the inn for the night, only to be stabbed to death and have her body removed.

In the morning the woman's friend, Giorgio D'Amato – an in-joke surname, one wonders – arrives to collect her, wondering where she has got to. Being dissatisfied with the answers he receives, he starts to investigate...

La Polizia brancola nel buio is a difficult film to analyse. By any conventional criteria it's an abject failure, yet exerts a strange fascination that recalls the likes of Crazy Desires of a Murderer or wide tranches of the work of such idiosyncratic auteurs as Jess Franco and Jean Rollin.

In Franco's and Rollin's cases the viewer can at least understand what they're getting and what the filmmaker is doing, that there is a method to the seeming madness. Here, however, you wonder exactly what the filmmakers were thinking when they made it and are left without other reference points in that it's director Helio Columbo's one and only credit. Just what were he and his collaborators thinking when they made it? Who did they think it would appeal to beyond those so starved for the sight of breasts and blood that they would watch just about anything?




Will victims to be never learn?

Part of the answer, I suspect, lies in the film's distinctive provenance. It was an Italian-Turkish co-production, with Cuneyt Arkin – billed in the Italian version under review as Joseph Arkim – in a prominent role. And, if there was one audience with a higher tolerance for 'bad' cinema than the Italian terza visione, it must surely be their Turkish counterparts; doubters are advised to check out the Killink films or the Tarkan vs the Vikings / Deathless Devil double bill, the latter part of which makes this close to a masterpiece of cinematic art by comparison.

The title – literally the police are blundering around in the dark –is also both revealing and misleading. Many gialli present the police as incompetent or hampered in their investigations in one way or another. It's a convenient device in a number of ways. It allows the filmmakers to make politicals points if they desire whilst the usual corresponding move, that of bringing the amateur investigator in in the professional's stead, allows for greater audience involvement and suspense, in that we're now following someone more 'like us', ill-trained and equipped to deal with the situation. Here, however, the police aren't so much in the dark as almost completely absent, not just ineffectual in solving the series of murders of young women that has plagued the area but also seemingly somewhat uninterested in them full stop. This wouldn't matter if someone had clearly been put in their place. The first thing here is that Arkin's investigator proves a somewhat unsatisfactory substitute. Introduced refusing to pick girlfriend A up after her car breaks down because he's in bed with girlfriend B at the time, he might be a model of macho virility but is hardly a heroic or particularly sympathetic figure. The second is that the other investigator, the one who eventually solves the case, has hitherto been presented as just another suspect.




Black gloves, bared breasts and blood – what more could a man want?

Under the circumstances the main pleasures are thus in the incidentals – the gratuitous tits out for your killer scenes; the antics of the wheelchair bound mad scientist type and his blinkenlights laboratory and mind-reading / control device; lines of dialogue that its impossible to take with the straight faced seriousness the filmmakers seem to expect, the guess-when-there's-going-to-be-a-zoom direction, and the heard-it-all-before-but-it's-still-enjoyable scoring.

[The film is available for download from Cinemageddon with custom English fansubs; thanks to the uploader and subber for giving us the opportunity to see this rarity.]

Two types of exploitation?

Earlier this evening a fellow student and I introduced an intended double bill of exploitation all'italiana comprising Mattei's SS Girls, which we didn't show due to unforeseen technical difficulties, and Vari's Sister Emanuelle, which we did.

In her discussion of Sister Emanuelle, my co-host mentioned the article on Italian nun films in the Alternative Europe collection. She noted how it drew a distinction between those films that engaged with the figure of the nun specifically and those which were more exploitation films that just used the nun rather than, say, the prisoner in jail or a concentration camp, but did not address anything specific to her situation. There are, as it were, nunsploitation films and nunsploitation films.

Besides making me want to revisit the Alternative Europe essay, this got me thinking about these ideas more generally.

Obviously nun, WIP and Nazi themed Italian films have a lot in common, like the period with which we most associate them, primarily the 1970s; their tendency towards 'total institutions' settings; their emphasis on corrupt authority; sexual perversity and the various ritual scenes / sequences.

But there are also certain more specific features that the better filone filmmaker might engage with: in the case of the nun films it is Catholicism / religion; in that of the Nazi films fascism and resistance, and, in the case of the WIP film, perhaps a focus on the official corruption in the present rather than the past.

Going beyond this, it also makes me think of what I've previously referred to as the “hat” theory of filone, following the remarks of screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi and critic Christopher Wagstaff on how the difference between a film in one filone cycle and other could often be reduced to the paradigmatic choice of this or that hat or other prop.

What I'm wondering is whether the distinction between the best directors in any given filone and the rest is that the best directors do something more than just make the same old film within a particular genre in also bringing out or introducing other themes more specific to it.

In the case of the western it's maybe the difference between Leone's distinctively Italian westerns, which responded to the Hollywood western and its myths rather than merely emulated them, as had the 25 or so previous entries within the cycle made by Italian filmmakers, or of westerns all'italiana compared to westerns all'italiana.

In the case of the thriller, it's perhaps the way in which a specifically modern world of science and technology is foregrounded by the likes of Argento's animal trilogy, Bazzoni's The Fifth Cord and Questi's Death Laid and Egg where more routine filmmakers often seem to use these elements primarily as backdrop.

Or, in the case of the crime film, it's maybe the way someone like Di Leo explores the meaning of the criminal code in an age of anonymous, impersonal, 'only business' relationships, compared to the good cop vs bad robbers type entries from some other directors.

Thoughts on other directors and / or cycles and counter-examples welcome...

[If anyone in the Edinburgh area is interested, next week is a follow-up double-bill of Mattei's Hell of the Living Dead and Fulci's Zombie; send me an email if you want more details]

Edgar Wallace - Der Frosch mit der Maske / The Fellowship of the Frog / Frøen med masken

To quote Frank Booth: “This Is It!”

The it in question being the beginnings of the modern krimi film, the first of some 40 odd works based on the work of Edgar Wallace and his son Bryan Edgar Wallace to be made in West Germany between 1959 and 1972.

But whilst many such European genre film firsts are necessarily somewhat tentative, as with the 25 or so Italian westerns made before A Fistful of Dollars that imitated rather than transformed the pre-existing American models, it emerges as a surprisingly confident production whose imprints can still be felt in many a later entry in the series.

Certainly the missing elements, such as stock footage establishing that the film was 'really' shot in London – or more to the point wasn't – the colour credits sequence, and the twelve gunshots followed by the “Hier spricht Edgar Wallace” announcement are in the minority and only really become evident when the film is considered in the light of hindsight.

To itemise what we do have: a strangely attired master criminal; professional and amateur investigators, the former from Scotland Yard; a Soho nightspot, complete with singing femme fatale; a damsel in distress; a would-be avenger; a comic-relief butler; a blind peddlar who isn't all that he seems; a country house; the criminals' secret base; some neat self-referential touches – one investigator goes undercover as a lighting man and records a crucial crime scene with a concealed camera; a distinct propensity for British bobbies to seemingly carry firearms as a matter of course; and a confusingly large number of somehow interconnected characters to provide intrigue, victims and suspects as and when required.

The master criminal is the titular Frog, the head of a three-hundred strong gang identifiable by their numbers and the brand they all wear. His own identity is unknown, with the quest to unmask him propelling the story onwards at a characteristically breathless Wallace pace, wherein one year of undercover work by Inspector Higgins is telegraphed into a single sentence and a brief scene in which he tries, unsuccessfully, to apprehend the Frog.

As Higgins' body is found, complete with a couple of potential clues, footprints which do not match and a reside of cement dust in the dead man's mouth, the true investigators are revealed in the form of Inspector Hedge of the Yard and Richard Gordon, an American of independent means who affects the manners and lifestyle of an English gentleman – he is also the employer of the butler – and might as well be one.

Gordon and his butler are played by Joachim Fuchsberger and Eddi Arent, soon to become typed as the definitive hero and comic relief figures respectively, although Fuchsberger's heroes would hereafter tend more to be offficial representatives of the law.

With the man with the non-matching footprints soon identified as Mr Bennett we are next introduced to his son Ray and daughter Ella, whom the more attentive viewer might already recognise as one of the Frog's next targets, Higgins being the other.

While Ella is the dutiful daughter, concerned for her father's and brother's well-being – Mr Bennett always seems pre-occupied by his trips into London on unspecified business – Ray is somewhat wayward, with a desire for an easy life that leads him into trouble as in a short space of time he goes on to ignore the advice of the avuncular Mr Johnston at his work; anger their employer, the fearsome permanently be-gloved Mr Maitland, and winds up in a Soho club where he falls for the resident singer, named Lolita.

Sure enough, she is also involved with the Frog; even if we're still no clearer as to his identity – though Gordon suspects he may be wearing the mask to conceal his identity as missing master criminal Harry Lime, on the grounds that some sort of disfiguring mark would be too obvious / straightforward – we at least now have a number of suspects to work through.

Lime, of course, is also the name of the post-war profiteer in Graham Greene's story memorably brought to the screen by Carol Reed, with that Anton Karas zither score and Lime / Orson Welles's speech about cuckoo clocks and the Borgias; there was also a TV series around the time of the film in which he was reinvented as a detective hero.

Whether intentionally or otherwise Ray and Lolita are vaguely reminscent of characters from Weimar German films such as Asphalt, to recall the era of the first Wallace craze within Germany – one swiftly ended by the Nazis – and the way in which the novels and these films, though now coming across as naïve, harmless kitschy reminders of a more innocent-seeming age, were often shocking and controversial enough in their day.

Lolita's song, entitled “Night and Fog on the Thames,” has some interesting connotations here, in suggesting not only the danger of the area as presumably intended by its authors but also the phrase used by the Nazis when they arranged the “night and fog” disappearances of those they deemed undesirable.

Two other shock moments of note here the dispatching of an unfortunate policeman who happens upon the Frog's gang in the middle of a robbery and the way in which the Frog silences an over-noisy female prisoner. In the first, we don't get any POV shots of the attack as we might get in a later film, nor the actual the moment when throat is slit, but do get a surprisingly graphic hands clutching throat shot. In the second the Frog unexpectedly whips out a submachine gun and somewhat needlessly drills the woman full of holes to shut her up for good.

Away from Fuchsberger and Arent two other krimi regulars making their debut genre appearance are Fritz Rasp and Dieter Eppler, the latter also a familiar face from a number of straight horror productions of the time such as The Head and Castle of the Walking Dead.

Coincidentally or otherwise, Castle was also directed by Fellowship of the Frog helmsman Harald Reinl, who would go on to direct a further half-dozen Edgar Wallace entries, making him the second-most prolific director in the series after Alfred Vohrer.

With most of the camera set ups, angles and movements functional and the editing classical, the Expressionistic aspects of the film come primarily through elements within the frame, as this street or that interior is made darker and more dangerous looking or a light source 'just happens' to cast some suggestive pattern; the one time Reinl does break out some Third Man-esque Dutch angles is when a fist-fight breaks out, with this being a scene that also features some more dynamic camerawork and editing.

Willy Mattes's jazzy score is pleasing if comparatively lacking in the quirky qualities.that would came to the fore in later films.

The Black Glove

An AKA for the Hammer produced thriller Face the Music, directed by Terence Fisher, in which an American trumpeter working in London finds himself thrown into a murder mystery. In addition to the murderer's distinctive attire (only seen at the end, however) the film also features an aural clue, as the trumpeter must work out who played on a record that is left for him. Or, yet another obscure little film with curious echoes of better known ones.

I Lunghi cappelli della morte / The Long Hair of Death

Though the title might suggest a contemporary J-horror, The Long Hair of Death is, of course, a 1960s Italian Gothic. Whilst one of the less well known examples of the form, it serves as an ideal introduction to it through the dense network of intertextual references in Ernesto Gastaldi's script and the iconic presence of Barbara Steele.

Set in the 14th century we open with the impending execution of suspected witch, Adele Karnstein, for the sorcerous murder of the local lord, Franz Humbold. It's the usual damned either way trial by ordeal scenario, whereby death will provide absolution. (“Adele Karnstein the hour has arrived. The lord will save you if you are innocent. Be strong and have faith.”)


An almost unrecognisable Umberto Raho as the local witch-finder, here beautifully isolated by the all-encompassing blackness.

Desperately seeking a stay of execution, Adele's elder daughter Helene (Steele) pleads with the new lord, Franz's brother (Giuliano Raffaeli), for a stay of execution. She has evidence that the killer is one of the Count's own household.

Taking advantage of the situation, the Count demands that Helene first submit to his carnal desires. (“What can a man ask of a beautiful woman like you? There is only one thing that I want.”) She does. Unfortunately her mother is burnt at the stake anyway since the one presiding over the execution, the old count's son and the new count's nephew, Kurt Humbolt (Giorgio Ardisson), is the real murderer. As she dies, Adele swears vengeance on her persecutors.


Burn witch burn!

Later, as the distraught Helene flees, she is ambused by the Count, who murders her and throws her body into the river to conceal his own crimes. Helene's death is duly adjudged a suicide.

Left orphaned but exonerated through the deaths of her mother and sister, the young Elisabeth Karnstein adopted by the Count as one of his household in a display of magnanimity which further helps to conceal his family's crimes whilst also allowing him to feel that he has made amends for his own. Unfortunately for the Count, Elisabeth is reminded of her family's heritage by the family's housekeeper, Grumalda (Laura Nucci), who also lets her in on the secret of where her mother and sister's remains are hidden.

Time passes and Elisabetta (Halina Zalewska) grows into a beautiful young woman. Unable to come to terms with his crime and Kurt's revelation of his guilt, the Count has become ill, leaving Kurt in the position where he can do more or less as he wishes, including forcing Elisabeth to marry him.

But, as a plague sweeps across the land as Adele had cursed, a new woman comes into the Humbolt family's life in the form of the mysterious and beautiful Mary Karnstein (Steele). Almost immediately, Kurt resolves that she will be his, with Mary reciprocating his advances. This, however, only leads them to a new problem: what to do about Elisabeth. A dose of poison provides the cure, but then Kurt begins to wonder if his ex-wife is indeed ex...




The usual mirrors drawing into question identity and reality

To now itemise some of the intertextual connections:

The land ravaged by plague aspect recalls The Masque of the Red Death and thus the Corman Poe cycle, although the Christian rather than Satanic rituals that ensue are perhaps more reminiscent of Bergman's The Seventh Seal.

The family name of Karnstein and the arrival of Mary recall Carmilla and, through it, Mastrocinque's film Crypt of the Vampire. Though one of those rare-seeming Italian Gothics those in which Steele does not appear one nevertheless also gets the impression that the role of the vampire revenant was written with her in mind by Gastaldi, whose scenario there also incorporated a family curse for good measure.

The relationships amongst the Humbolt family are reminiscent of those amongst the Menliffe family in The Whip and the Body – itself another film featuring a more obvious Steele stand-in in the somewhat similar looking Daliah Lavi – as is the role played by the Harriet Medin White like family servant here. The film, directed by Bava and scripted by Gastaldi, also happened to feature a villainous black sheep of the family named none other than Kurt.

The return of characters from beyond the grave in search of revenge also alludes to Bava's Black Sunday and Freda's Hitchcock diptych of The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock and Lo Spettro – both penned by Gastaldi – albeit with a pre-modern tendency to inherently accept of supernatural in a manner that somewhat alien to these films and others with similar later settings, including Margheriti's own Castle of Blood which, whilst not written by Gastaldi, purports to be a Poe adaptation and even incorporates the author into its telling.

Beyond this, we also have some murderous black gloves, an iron-maiden type device – as per Margheriti's The Virgin of Nuremberg – and some point-of-view shots from behind its mask, a la Black Sunday.




Hands of doom

While the film isn't perhaps as atmospheric as some of these counterparts, in that there are fewer sequences of characters wandering through the castle and its environs that exist as much for their own sake as to advance the plot, the upside of this is a less somnambulistic pace that may appeal more to those who find the Italian Gothic at times veers too far in the direction of style over all else.

Some explary moments here arise when Elizabeth and the Count 'coincidentally' decide to venture into the castle's dungeons and catacombs at the same time: As Humbolt plead forgiveness from his dead brother and sees his skeleton move: as he flees in terror the camera lingers on for a moment to allow us to see the rat which has nested within Franz's remains and caused the disturbance, thus reminding us that we cannot just replace supernatural discourses and explanations for naturalistic ones to raise a degree of ambiguity over the nature of the plague soon to descent on the Humbolt lands. Then, as Elizabeth and the Count move through the darkness, they do so cautiously but also at speed, each wary of the possible presence of the other, their haste further accentuated by Margheriti's rapid tracking shots and relatively brisk cutting. Finally, as Elizabeth exits through a secret passage once the Count has passed, she emerges before the awaiting Kurt, who duly professes his desire to marry her and thus neatly moves the narrative on to its next sequence and plot point.


Dead




Undead

Though Steele's role perhaps doesn't stretch her abilities, in that she's incarnating much the same diva type as she had done before and would do again, rather than a more fully rounded real character as in Volker Schlondorff's adaptation of Rober Musil's Young Torless – as the kind of film you suspect she would like to have moved into making, post 8½ – she again brings that distinctive physicality and intensity to the role.

Giorgio Ardisson turns in an effective performance as the dastardly Kurt, the kind of villain with no redeeming qualities whatsoever whom we can be justified in hating, to further demonstrate that he was capable of being far more than just the pretty boy type showcased in Bava's Hercules in the Haunted World and Knives of the Avenger. (As he and Elizabeth are blessed by the priest on the occasion of their wedding, Kurt mockingly asks: “There are many people dying in the streets. Shouldn't you recite a prayer for them?”)

Technically the film is accomplished, with attractive black and white cinematography, solid production design and fluid camera work. Carlo Rustichelli delivers an agreeable if unexceptional score: if its tropes are at times predictable, they help further fix us within the film's distinctive world, having much the same function as James Bernard's work for Hammer in this regard.