Giallo Fever is two years old

Just noticed that I started this blog two years ago. As long as you keep reading it, I'll keep writing it...

Immagini di un convento / Images in a Convent

With the titles proclaiming Images in a Convent to be an adaptation of Denis Diderot's La Religeuse, Joe D'Amato/Aristide Massaccesi's 1979 naughty nun entry initially suggests that it may be offering something a touch classier than his usual fare; the novel having previously been adapted most notably by Jacques Rivette in 1965.

The Diderot reference, however, soon proves little more than pretext or justification for that familiar D'Amato melange of sex, sleaze and sadism, though proceedings remain comparatively tame, tasteful and softcore until a gratuitous hardcore porno-rape sequence relatively late on.

The action centres round a convent built upon pagan ruins, whose legacy remains in the form of a horned statue that some believe to exert a malefic influence, and the impact of two new arrivals upon its inhabitants.

The first of these, Isabella, played by D'Amato regular Paola Senatore, is a rebellious young noblewoman whose wealthy and influential uncle wants her safely out of the way for less than spiritually pure reasons.

The second is a mysterious young man, found wounded in the grounds one day, who may or may not be the devil himself.

Under the influence of this unholy trinity events quickly get out of hand until it is time to call in the exorcist, as incarnated by Eurotrash stalwart Donal(d) O'Brien.

While not quite reaching the high standards set by Walerian Borowczyk's Behind Convent Walls or Gilberto Martínez Solares's Satánico pandemonium, Images in a Convent emerges as a superior example of nunsploitation, benefitting in particular from an effective score by frequent D'Amato collaborator Nico Fidenco that merges quasi-religious chanting with eerie synthesiser drones, attractive cinematography by Massaccesi anduninhibited performances by a cast who just about manage to be convincing as nuns with their abundant pubic bushes and natural breasts.

Released by Shriek Show on R1 NTSC DVD a few years back, Images in a Convent looks and sounds pretty decent overall, although the company's quality control problems continued to haunt them somewhat in the form of a straight 1.85:1 presentation instead of the 16x9 indicated on the case.

Likewise, while the notion of an authentic version of a D'Amato film may be somewhat oxymoronic given his penchant for inserting or excising material in accord with audience and other requirements, it can be noted that a short sequence around quarter of an hour in, where the horned statue takes possession of Sister Lacinia before she visits and makes love to Isabelle appears to be missing, according to Midnight Video ( http://www.midnight1.com/dvd.asp.)

These minor flaws are almost compensated for by the presence of an edited version of Roger Fratter's 1999 documentary Joe D'Amato: Totally Uncut on the second disc of the set. Running just over an hour, it charts the progression of D'Amato's career from his early days as a stills photographer (his first credit was on Jean Renoir's Le Carrosse d'or) to camera operator (including work on Mario Bava's Hercules in the Haunted World) and in-demand cinematographer to director and producer, with the genial, forthright and self-deprecating D'Amato's direct-to-camera observations on his business - focus on the audience and the box office, not the critics his essential mantra - illustrated by numerous excerpts from his extensive filmography.

With the rough look of the documentary excusable on budgetary grounds my only criticism - speaking here as a Eurotrash more than a porn aficionado - is that it gives more attention to the latter and less to the former.

Completists will thus also want the other part of the documentary to give a fuller picture; thankfully it is included on the Anthropophagous DVD.

L' Isola dei morti viventi / Island of the Living Dead

Whatever you may think of his oeuvre, there can be no questioning of the Bruno Mattei / Vincent Dawn's commitment to low-budget popular filmmaking.

How many other directors in their 70s would have been willing to go to the Philippines for work and adapt to using digital video? Jess Franco certainly meets the second condition, but hasn't ventured outside more familiar territories of late as far as I'm aware.






The shit is burning show


Vincent Dawn of the Dead

But far from being a case of too little, too late from someone who many may feel should never have made the transition from editor to director in the first place, Island of the Living Dead is a pleasing return to the give them what they want school of gore. It also manages, by way of filone expert Antonio Tentori's script, to throw in some allusions to the likes of Zombie, Erotic Nights of the Living Dead and the Blind Dead films whilst apparently taking on board more modern influences in the unlikely seeming form of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise given the name of the production company, La Perla nera - i.e. the black pearl.

We begin with a prologue set during the colonial era, in which a group of Zombie-referencing Conquistadores are overwhelmed by voodoo-using native, slave and pirate forces.


1600 / 1980 / 2006

Following this we cut to the present day as a mixed group of treasure hunters, led by one Captain Kirk, find their vessel developing engine trouble. As (mis)fortune would have it, an uncharted island is nearby, allowing them to limp into shallow waters and apparent safety.

Whilst the engineer - thankfully not named Scott, but Max - stays on board to carry out repairs, Kirk and the other five crew disembark and, splitting up into two groups, go to explore the island. Needless to say they soon encounter the zombies along with their mysterious supernatural masters...

If the use of digital technology benefits Island of the Living Dead in terms of scale, the computer game-ish quality it imparts to some of the effects perhaps doesn't sit too well with the physical abjection so important to the zombie idea, with the more traditional exploding heads and ripped entrails working better in this regard.


An old school make a mask and blast it with a shotgun type exploding head effect

Otherwise the main departures from the old school likes of Hell of the Living Dead are the absence of Ed Wood-esque use of stock footage (thank $deity) and a more progressive seeming mixture of characters. The females not being reduced to tits and a scream figures, instead kicking as much ass as the males, while the ethnically diverse nature of the crew - like related to the film's production and future markets - helps preclude the reduction of the non-whites to comic relief and / or outright racist ignominies.

Indeed, if there's anyone one feels particularly sorry for here it's the actors who formed part of Mattei's stock company in the last years of his life and career. In particular Ydalia Suarez and Yvette Yzon are the kind of 'exotic' beauties who could well have enjoyed Laura Gemser type careers had they just been around 30 years earlier, Yzon also tellingly appearing in Mattei's late WIP film, Anima Persa.

[Twitch Film discussion of Mattei's late films: http://twitchfilm.net/archives/008021.html]

Dottor Jekyll e gentile signora / Doctor Jekyll Likes them Hot

Like the other couple of Steno films I've seen, the not dissimilar horror themed comedy Uncle was a Vampire and the anti-Magnum Force styled poliziotto La Polizia ringrazia, Dr Jekyll Likes them Hot incorporates a higher quotient of direct social commentary than is usual for filone cinema.

Indeed, incorporates is precisely the word here, with our Dr Jekyll (Paolo Villaggio) being the top troubleshooter for multinational oil and chemical corporation Pantac, with his and its every action - legal, illegal or borderline - motivated by the search for profit.

Though there is a lot of low humour here, as with the various nameplates listing the chairmen's qualifications including the extent to which they are figli di puttana in a sight gag borrowed from Villaggio's Fantozzi series, the board's subsequent discussions of of instigating regime changes in (fictitious) African countries and what to do with some otherwise unusable chemicals already known to have harmful side effects, have a more serious edge to them.






Some of the signs


One of the side effects of the chemical

Jekyll's ambitious new secretary Barbara Wimply (Edwige Fenech), who hangs on his every word, provides the answer to the latter: why not make the chemicals into chewing gum?

If the gum immediately corrodes the consumer's teeth, so much the better since Pantac can then sell them dentures.

The conspirators hit upon the idea of compelling no less than the queen to endorse the gum and accordingly summon and dispatch corporate mercenary Pretorius (Gordon Mitchell) and his team of hand-picked cut-throats to carry out the mission.

It is at this point that Dr Jekyll's grandfather throws a spanner in the works, by encouraging his evil nephew to take some of the old family recipe, the effect of which is to bring out the hitherto repressed nice side of his personality.


It's that man again...

This inverted Mr Hyde, complete with angelic countenance, then proceeds to scupper his alter-ego's plan, leading the other members of the board to want him dead. He also attracts the amorous attentions of Barbara...

Fenech doesn't really have a great deal to do in the first half of the film, which is very much dominated by the antics of Jekyll and Hyde, other than showcase her beauty in a number of outfits, some somewhat dated - her late 70s secretary with big glasses - and others more appealing - the maid outfit with which she infiltrates Buckingham Palace.

Though she is more prominent in the second half, she still keeps her clothes on most of the time, only briefly exposing her breasts before being saddled with a unflattering curly blonde wig and ditzy dubbing voice after her own inevitable transformation...

Really, however, it is clearly Villaggio's show. Not being familiar with his work and persona, I must reserve judgement on how well or badly Dr Jekyll Likes them Hot represents him compared to others, but certainly found his antics to pass the basic comedy test of being funny.

The film is relatively functionally shot, though this is perhaps better attributed to the general tendency of the comedy film, where the director is often better keeping things simple in order to showcase the performers, than any lack of imagination or ability on Steno's part. We may also note the relatively extensive use of location shooting rather than just stock footage combined with Cinecitta or Incir de Paolis studio sets, indicative that the veteran director was working with a decent rather than poverty-row budget.

Armando Trovajoli provides yet another quirky and endearing score.

Shocking Representation

Much like Joan Hawkins's Cutting Edge, this is one of those academic studies of the horror film that seeks to position the genre in a more central, less peripheral position within film studies and to challenge some commonly held distinctions around high and low cinemas.

Whereas Hawkins focused on the intersection between horror and avant-garde cinemas, Lowenstein's focus is simultaneously both broader and narrower, insofar as he is looking specifically at moments of historical trauma within horror cinema but thereby engaging with the distinct field of trauma studies.

The intersection between his selection of films – Franju's Eyes Without a Face, Powell's Peeping Tom, Shindo's Onibaba, Craven's Last House on the Left and Cronenberg's Shivers, each the subject of one chapter – and trauma studies comes through a dissatisfaction with the kind of binaries that pertain in both disciplines and the desire to seek an alternative approach that goes beyond the limitations of this kind of thinking.

In trauma studies, the key binaries are identified as those of melancholia and mourning, acting out and working through, historically irresponsible and responsible, and of the realist and modernist representational modes. In each case the former part of the pairing is ascribed a negative value and the latter a positive one.

In film the corresponding binaries are those of genre and art cinema and of popular and national cinema. Here Lowenstein notes the tendency for certain art house directors and movements to come to represent their nation internationally with a concomitant marginalisation of the actual popular (we might also say vernacular) cinema that the majority of cinema-goers within the nation actually go to see.

Something of the intersection of the two discourses is represented by serious critical reactions to Lanzmann's Shoah compared to Spielberg's Schindler's List. The representational strategies of the former mean that it is an authentic work that demands to be taken seriously, whereas those of the latter render it less authentic, incapable of being taken as seriously as its director would like.

Lowenstein's key alternative to the binaries that have come to dominate trauma studies and which have hitherto limited its application within the cinema to canonical art cinemas is the notion of the shocking allegorical moment, derived from the German-Jewish thinker Walter Benjamin, that exists as an image without a fixed meaning and between poles.

One weakness in Lowenstein's argument is that at times he introduces binaries similar to those he critiques earlier, albeit at a considerably more specific level. This is most evident in discussion of Eyes Without a Face where, again drawing from Benjamin, he develops the idea of two somewhat distinct surrealisms, one associated with Breton and tending towards the interior world of dreams and the other, which he favours, associated with Bataille and emphasizing towards the external material world; in his earlier discussion of Benjamin, Lowenstein likewise emphasizes the baroque allegory over the romantic symbol and historical materialism over historicism.

This said, it can also be noted that the background against which Lowenstein situates the film is in terms of its own impurity at a time when the Gaullist project was one of reconstructing a true, authentic, pure vision of French national identity as a means of overcoming the historical trauma of occupation in World War II.

Crucially, this project found its cinematic analogue in Truffaut’s manifesto cum essay A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema, in which he argued for the essential / existential falsity of the existing Tradition of Quality and the need for a new true, genuine national cinema to replace it – a cinema which he and his New Wave colleagues would soon supply.

Though Lowenstein’s discussion here gets a bit muddled, insofar as he sometimes situates Franju with the Left Bank filmmakers against the New Wave and at others separates Franju out from both movements – movements which are often, we must note, frequently amalgamated into one, thus minimizing their differences – the basic point that Franju offered a challenge to the New Wave’s ideals in his impure, mixed cinema, is well made.

If Lowenstein makes no mention of Bazin’s writings in defence of a mixed cinema, perhaps because Bazin here represents the negative side of realist theory against Benjamin’s friend Siegfried Kracauer, the contrasts he makes between Franju’s disturbing, disquieting, decentring representation of Paris and Truffaut’s far more reassuring one is also well made. (I also suspect here that a detailed consideration of Bazin’s The Cinema of Cruelty, with its Artauldian title, might add further complications here as well.)

A similar pattern is evident in Lowenstein’s readings of Peeping Tom in relation to The British New Wave, specifically Room at the Top, in relation to post-war class anxieties, and Onibaba in relation to the Japanese New Wave and the legacy of Hiroshima: The analyses of the films are hard to fault, though one feels that there is the occasional striking omission. Thus, being more familiar with the British than the Japanese cinematic context here, I noted that whilst Lowenstein comments on Hammer and the figure of the Teddy Boy, he fails to note their conflation in the studio's The Ugly Duckling, with its Teddy Hyde figure.

A difficulty some horror fans may have is that the horror films Lowenstein discusses, while perhaps marginal in relation to the non-horror national cinema type films they are paired with, occupy rather more central positions in relation to the genre itself.

A notable point of contrast in this regard is Bob Clark's Death Dream, which Lowenstein uses to further illustrate the idea of an allegorical moment that crosses and confuses conventional categorisations, but then passes over in favour of Last House on the Left in relation to Vietnam-era trauma in the USA in his fourth chapter.

While his analysis of the marketing of Craven's film is illuminating – I had never realised that the “It's just across the street from Joe” line on the famous poster referenced another film of the period dealing with the gap between the dominant and counter-cultures – there can be few horror fans unawares of Last House's relationship to Bergman’s The Virgin Spring.

Similarly, while it is true that Deliverance is a respectable, non-horror, rape-revenge and culture-clash film, it is also rather closer to mainstream Hollywood than the three films discussed in the previous chapters. The issue, one feels, is that the US lacks a national cinema in the same way as other nations, as its national cinema is in fact Hollywood.

The final chapter is also different in this regard, though more satisfactory. Lowenstein presents Croneberg as something of an exception to the general divisions found in the previous discussions of trauma cinema, highlighting the way in which he has become internationally recognised as an auteur and as the most famous and influential director to come from Canada's despite the consistently trangsressive qualities of his films. Here Lowenstein compares critical reaction to Shivers, Night of the Living Dead and Crash, noting how Robin Wood's contrasting evaluation of Night as a progressive text and Shivers as a regressive one might be challenged, in suggesting that it is precisely Cronenberg's embrace of radical possibilities inherent in his 'new flesh' and transgression of the art/genre and national/popular cinema distinctions that represents his greatest challenge.

Though this review has perhaps accentuated the negative somewhat, I must conclude that Shocking Representations is a thought provoking book and one that I can see influencing my own readings of certain Italian films by Argento and Leone in my academic work.

Yet, insofar as I am opting for these filmmakers over the less respectable / more obscure / cult likes of Fulci, Di Leo, Bava and Lenzi as providing allegorical moments within Italian cinema, it could be argued that I will end up similarly rescuing some popular, genre filmmakers whilst condemning others to underserved obscurity.

My defence would be that one has to start somewhere, with the relatively low-hanging fruit, before moving on to them pair the Nazisploitation film with its more respectable – if still transgressive – Salo. In the spirit of self-criticism, however, one does wonder if the greatest challenge would be to begin rather than end with the apparently indefensible, and that Leone and Argento just represent a pragmatic choice of far enough out there to shock dominant sensibilites, but not so far as to seem completely other.

Action

Directed by Tinto Brass in the wake of the Caligula debacle and prior to his reinvention as a purveyor of sophisticated erotica, Action comes across in the main as something of a throwback to his more pop / avant-garde films of the 1960s such as Yankee and Cul cuore in gola.

The main difference, however, is that whereas those films engaged with genre and filone cinema in the form of the Italian style western and thriller, Action seems more of an attempt to respond to the such art films of the time as Bertolucci's Partner, Godard's Weekend and Pasolini's Uccellacci e uccellini, infused with a touch of 1970s punk spirit reminiscent – if almost certainly not consciously derived from – Jarman's Jubilee.


Anarchy in the UK

As such, the results are something of a deliberate mess, albeit an intermittently entertaining and provocative one.

Luc Merenda plays Bruno Martel, an idealistic young actor working on a curious looking gangster movie – curious insofar as he dresses and acts like an American gangster whilst the cops pursuing him are London bobbies – who walks off the set and goes wandering through the literal and metaphorical wasteland, searching for existential meaning.

In the course of this ballade or bildungsroman – choose your frame of reference – he encounters Garibaldi; his co-star Doris and her double Ofelia; a group of menacing punks; the inhabitants of a Snake Pit style madhouse; witnesses his co-star being forced to defecate on cue and on camera; and, possibly most memorable of all as an image, a decidedly surrealistic and oneiric group of formally attired men and women with penises and vaginas for noses and mouths respectively.




Brass's genital faced figures


Rene Magritte's Le Viol




Two of the Chapman Brothers' figures

The presence of Adriana Asti references another likely source of inspiration in Bunuel's The Phantom of Liberty – and thus, perhaps, a further vague justification / rationale for the sadistic defecation scene, given its memorable vignette where defectation is public and eating is private – whilst genre fans will delight in John Steiner's appearance as Merenda's manager and the casting of Suspiria's Susanna Javicoli as Doris / Ofelia.

That the viewer must endeavour to tease out such meanings is, of course, the whole crux of how he or she is likely responds to Action beyond simple knee jerk reactions that it is misogynistic or tasteless, as the feminist and bourgeois responses respectively.

Is it just bad?

Is it only bad by the selfsame conventional standards Brass wants his audience to (re-)(re-)re-examine?

Is it a bad example of its particular type of filmmaking, inasmuch as it seems to have little that is particularly insightful or original to actually say?

And then, if the last of these – not entirely incommensurable – possibilities is the case, could this potentially be the point, as a joke targeted at contemporary avant-garde types?

A couple more sites

A couple more sites that cult movie fans may find worth a look:

The Drive-in Connection (how many of the starlets along the top can you name?)

Only the Cinema (now reviewing Privilege, a film by one of my favourite non-Euro cult directors, Peter Watkins)