Joe D'Amato's follow-up to Anthropophagous opens much as its predecessor had finished, with George Eastman's hulking man-monster literally spilling his guts.
The similarity ends there, however, as rather than consuming his own entrails and thus bringing about his demise, Eastman's character, Mikos Stenopolis, has the capacity to regenerate just about any damage he may sustain within a remarkably short period of time, much to the surprise of the staff at the local hospital.
This ability, it seems, is the result of some experiments carried out on Mikos in his Greek homeland, a plot device clearly intended to further link the character to the previous film, which had actually taken place on a Greek island.
If the experiment has left Mikos's near immortal - he cannot regenerate damage to his brain, leading to a variant on the time-honoured aim for the head scenario - it has also left him even more psychotic than he already was.
Mikos's nemesis, who was responsible for his initial gut-spilling, is a Greek Orthodox priest, played by Edmund Purdom with dubious accent. His role in the experiment is equally unclear. As he tries to explain to Charles Borromel's unsurprisingly uncomprehending police chief, "I serve god with biochemistry."
What is certain, however, is that Purdom's priest is Dr Loomis to Eastman's Michael Myers, with the bulk of the film - scripted by Eastman and possibly Bruno Mattei, under his Jimmy Matheus alias - playing out as a homage / rip-off of the first two Halloween films in setting and incidents. Mikos, an unstoppable force of evil, is even referred to as "the boogey-man" a number of times.
Rather than the occasion being Halloween, though, it is the big game between the Rams and the Steelers for "the championship". Whilst the intention here was clearly to Americanise the film, the attempt fails. First, as Kim Newman noted in Nightmare Movies, since the adults gathered for the game - conveniently leaving their children alone with the babysitter to face the monster - incongruously snack on pasta. Second, because the filmmakers' representation of the game is more like soccer or rugby than gridiron, going from end to end at a frantic pace. (It may also be noted that at one point the supposed quarterback according to the voice-off is clearly a running back from the hand-off play that is made and the jersey number he is wearing; in another a touchdown is scored just before half-time but there seems to be no point-after attempt.)
Whereas Carpenter had his characters watch The Thing from Another World, D'Amato has the children, played by William Berger's daughter Katya and son Kasimir, watch one of his Dominican Republic films. Thankfully, however, Mark Shannon and Lucia Ramirez are dubbed as for an innocent romantic drama rather than a horror-porn hybrid.
If D'Amato skips on the sex and nudity that represents one of the two major components of his film-making approach, he more than compensates for this with horror and gore, whether Mikos holding in his entrails at the start; drilling one victim through the head; subjecting another to an involuntary trepanation with a band-saw, or putting a third in an oven. In other words, the film is just as worthy of its Rosso sangue - Red Blood - name as its Absurd one.
Though D'Amato would be the first to admit he is no John Carpenter, he is also a better director than many would give him credit for, generating plenty of atmospheric and a particularly suspenseful final act in which the kids - one bed ridden - must somehow defend themselves against the unstoppable boogey-man.
Other points of note include an early role for Michele Soavi, as an ill-fated member of a motorcycle gang; a practical joke playing, mask-wearing kid, and on-screen role for dubbing-artist Ted Russoff.
Carlo Maria Cordio provides an eerily effective soundtrack of swirling and droning synthesiser-led themes that build to intense, percussive crescendos in a manner somewhat reminiscent of Goblin or Fabio Frizzi's work on City of the Living Dead, but which ultimately lacks their subtlety and imagination.
In sum, better than you might think.
Wednesday, 31 December 2008
Tuesday, 30 December 2008
I Ladri
Much like Contraband 20 or so years later, Lucio Fulci's feature debut is a culture clash crime story set in Naples. The similarity ends there, however, since I Ladri is not a blood-drenched gangster tale but rather a comedy in the vein of the director's mentor Steno.
Events are set in motion by the arrival of Italian-American gangster Joe Castagnato in Naples. He is rightfully suspected of having masterminded a multi-million pound heist in the USA, but nothing has been found to definitively connect him to the crime to date.
The head of the Naples police, Commissario Di Savio, brings Joe in for a friendly chat and indicates that he has finally met his match. His faith in his own and his men's abilities seems somewhat misplaced however, with the QDN - Questura di Napoli - seeming to lack anything comparable to the FBI's high-tech scientific methods whilst Di Savio himself constantly forgets his underling La Nocella's name.
Meanwhile stevedore and petty criminal Vincenzo Scognamiglio, who was working when Joe's ship arrived at the dock, discovers gold hidden in amongst a consignment of pineapple jam from the US. His wife Maddalena soon puts two and two together and realises how Joe managed to get his loot out of the US and into Italy.
A noir-ish moment
She thus makes Joe an offer, not so much of the cannot refuse type as of the accepted to humour variety, setting the stage for all manner of double crosses and, in the case of Maddalena's in-laws, bungling...
Though now Euro-cult interest in I Ladri concentrates more on its director than star, Toto; attractive female lead, Giovanna Ralli; or the not entirely coherently inserted Guys and Dolls-style song and dance number featuring Fred Buscaglione, it's probable that at the time of its release Fulci's name was the least thing attracting audiences to the film.
Specifically no-one in 1959 would be aware that it was to mark the debut of a director who would go on to exert a strong influence on horror cinema worldwide, and if anything would seem likely to have pegged Fulci's career as following that of his mentor or other Italian style comedy figures like Big Deal on Madonna Street's Mario Monicelli or Love and Larceny's Dino Risi in trajectory.
Or maybe Fulci's 1960s career was, with the critical - if not commercial - difference that he ended up making vehicles not for Toto or Alberto Sordi, as respectable / international / art house faces of Italian comedy, but rather Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia, their disreputable domestic-only equivalents.
Fulci's direction here is basically classical, with a preference for two- and medium length shots rather than close-ups and for fluid camera movements over montage style editing. In this regard it's fascinating to watch I Ladri and contrast Fulci's approach here to his later style, with the film serving to demonstrate just how radically Fulci's film-making practice changed over the course of the 1960s with the twin inspirations of new wave explorations of the hand-held camera and the zoom lens and Sergio Leone's experiments with the wide-screen frame and Techniscope process in particular.
The local gangster
The other obvious difference is the aforementioned absence of violence. Everyone, including the gangsters, is presented as basically harmless, preferring outsmarting to rubbing out the opposition. Admittedly this is in tune with the film's generic nature - though here we can also note that the same year's Some Like it Hot indicates that even the St Valentine's Day Massacre could be used as unlikely springboard for comedy - but it is still far removed from what many would expect give Fulci's later work and reputation.
Guys and Dolls
The closest the film gets to a "violence number" is the aforementioned production number, in which Fulci goes out of his way to make what could easily have been a somewhat stagey interlude cinematic. If the relationship between it and the narrative is perhaps something of the inverse of a film like Zombie, where the narrative exists more for the set pieces rather than the other way around, it nevertheless thus confirms that, even at this stage, Fulci had a talent for the big moment. (I would exempt The Beyond from this split, arguing that like Argento's Inferno, it is a film where the set-piece / narrative distinction no longer withstands.)
Those familiar with Don't Torture a Duckling may also see certain precedents in Fulci's position on issues of Italian identity, with the Neapolitans often proving smarter than they let on in using time-honoured cunning against more modern technologies, and the always-ambiguous figure of the Italian-American gangster. Depending on one's point of view, or indeed, who is asking the question, he is an admirable figure and / or a reprehensible one, demonstrating the best and / or worst of Southern Italian character traits.
Those who see the director as an arch-misogynist may be surprised by his treatment of Ralli's independent and resourceful heroine compared to her somewhat dim-witted husband and his immediate famiglia, the one a habitual layabout and the other a religious / superstitious - delete as you see fit - kleptomaniac.
Those not concerned with Fulci's status as auteur, meanwhile, may simply concern themselves with the question of whether or not the film is sufficiently funny, entertaining and worth a watch. The answer on each count has to be a yes.
Events are set in motion by the arrival of Italian-American gangster Joe Castagnato in Naples. He is rightfully suspected of having masterminded a multi-million pound heist in the USA, but nothing has been found to definitively connect him to the crime to date.
The head of the Naples police, Commissario Di Savio, brings Joe in for a friendly chat and indicates that he has finally met his match. His faith in his own and his men's abilities seems somewhat misplaced however, with the QDN - Questura di Napoli - seeming to lack anything comparable to the FBI's high-tech scientific methods whilst Di Savio himself constantly forgets his underling La Nocella's name.
Meanwhile stevedore and petty criminal Vincenzo Scognamiglio, who was working when Joe's ship arrived at the dock, discovers gold hidden in amongst a consignment of pineapple jam from the US. His wife Maddalena soon puts two and two together and realises how Joe managed to get his loot out of the US and into Italy.
A noir-ish moment
She thus makes Joe an offer, not so much of the cannot refuse type as of the accepted to humour variety, setting the stage for all manner of double crosses and, in the case of Maddalena's in-laws, bungling...
Though now Euro-cult interest in I Ladri concentrates more on its director than star, Toto; attractive female lead, Giovanna Ralli; or the not entirely coherently inserted Guys and Dolls-style song and dance number featuring Fred Buscaglione, it's probable that at the time of its release Fulci's name was the least thing attracting audiences to the film.
Specifically no-one in 1959 would be aware that it was to mark the debut of a director who would go on to exert a strong influence on horror cinema worldwide, and if anything would seem likely to have pegged Fulci's career as following that of his mentor or other Italian style comedy figures like Big Deal on Madonna Street's Mario Monicelli or Love and Larceny's Dino Risi in trajectory.
Or maybe Fulci's 1960s career was, with the critical - if not commercial - difference that he ended up making vehicles not for Toto or Alberto Sordi, as respectable / international / art house faces of Italian comedy, but rather Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia, their disreputable domestic-only equivalents.
Fulci's direction here is basically classical, with a preference for two- and medium length shots rather than close-ups and for fluid camera movements over montage style editing. In this regard it's fascinating to watch I Ladri and contrast Fulci's approach here to his later style, with the film serving to demonstrate just how radically Fulci's film-making practice changed over the course of the 1960s with the twin inspirations of new wave explorations of the hand-held camera and the zoom lens and Sergio Leone's experiments with the wide-screen frame and Techniscope process in particular.
The local gangster
The other obvious difference is the aforementioned absence of violence. Everyone, including the gangsters, is presented as basically harmless, preferring outsmarting to rubbing out the opposition. Admittedly this is in tune with the film's generic nature - though here we can also note that the same year's Some Like it Hot indicates that even the St Valentine's Day Massacre could be used as unlikely springboard for comedy - but it is still far removed from what many would expect give Fulci's later work and reputation.
Guys and Dolls
The closest the film gets to a "violence number" is the aforementioned production number, in which Fulci goes out of his way to make what could easily have been a somewhat stagey interlude cinematic. If the relationship between it and the narrative is perhaps something of the inverse of a film like Zombie, where the narrative exists more for the set pieces rather than the other way around, it nevertheless thus confirms that, even at this stage, Fulci had a talent for the big moment. (I would exempt The Beyond from this split, arguing that like Argento's Inferno, it is a film where the set-piece / narrative distinction no longer withstands.)
Those familiar with Don't Torture a Duckling may also see certain precedents in Fulci's position on issues of Italian identity, with the Neapolitans often proving smarter than they let on in using time-honoured cunning against more modern technologies, and the always-ambiguous figure of the Italian-American gangster. Depending on one's point of view, or indeed, who is asking the question, he is an admirable figure and / or a reprehensible one, demonstrating the best and / or worst of Southern Italian character traits.
Those who see the director as an arch-misogynist may be surprised by his treatment of Ralli's independent and resourceful heroine compared to her somewhat dim-witted husband and his immediate famiglia, the one a habitual layabout and the other a religious / superstitious - delete as you see fit - kleptomaniac.
Those not concerned with Fulci's status as auteur, meanwhile, may simply concern themselves with the question of whether or not the film is sufficiently funny, entertaining and worth a watch. The answer on each count has to be a yes.
Monday, 29 December 2008
Sunday, 28 December 2008
Quando le donne avevano la coda / When Women Had Tails
This prehistoric comedy might perhaps be glossed as a live action version of The Flinstones done in the style of the commedia all'italiana meets The Marx Brothers and The Three Stooges, with an effective mixture of physical and visual humour, which comes across regardless of the language one is watching it in, and wordplay, which obviously requires a knowledge of Italian - at least in the version under discussion here.
The always-welcome Senta Berger plays Filli, a thoroughly modern looking cavewoman dressed in figure-accenting furs.
Berger
Frank Wolff, Guiliano Gemma, Aldo Giuffrè and company play the five cavemen who adopt her - or are adopted by her, insofar as they are that bit more primitive, wielding clubs whereas she uses a parrot as an opener in true Flintstones style and being made up so as to be almost unrecognisable. (Indeed, her Cheetah-like companion chimpanzee is smarter than the cavemen as well, placing coconuts beneath their dinosaur-bone framed hut so that they will break the shells when they land.)
The cavemen
To differentiate then each of the cavemen has a particular trait: Wolff's werewolf-looking figure combines a more inquisitive nature with a bad temper; another has a propensity to lose parts of his anatomy in accidents, but for a time regrow them, before spending the latter part of the film as just a head; while a third, complete with a Harpo Marx style hairdo, is coded as gay and soon falls in love with a more civilised, trickster-conman type caveman played in characteristic self-deprecating manner by Lando Buzzanca.
Buzzanca
Buzzanca's character, meanwhile, predictably seeks to take advantage of the five cavemen's relative guilelessness to win Filli away from them whilst also ridding himself of his own bride - at least that's what I think he / she was...
When Women Had Tails is a very different experience from the otherwise comparable Hammer prehistoric epics, fur bikinis notwithstanding. As already noted, language is more important. It is also an exclusively studio based project, with all the action taking place in an expansive papier-mache, plasterboard and polystyrene type landscape with painted backdrops of volcanoes and so on.
One major point of note about the film is that it was written by future art-house favourite Lina Wertmuller, though unsurprisingly seems to be the sort of film that she and her supporters would prefer to downplay. Nonetheless, the battle of the sexes aspect is telling, with the imbalance in numbers between them also perhaps hinting at a connection to Seven Beauties, as a later inversion with one more civilised man and seven less civilised / attractive women, whilst the isolated prelapsarian setting recalls Swept Away.
Another point of interest, in relation to the history of gay characters in the cinema, as outlined by Vito Russo in his pioneering study The Celluloid Closet, is the inevitable end that befalls the only gay caveman: suicide.
Might make for a nice double-bill with Themroc.
The always-welcome Senta Berger plays Filli, a thoroughly modern looking cavewoman dressed in figure-accenting furs.
Berger
Frank Wolff, Guiliano Gemma, Aldo Giuffrè and company play the five cavemen who adopt her - or are adopted by her, insofar as they are that bit more primitive, wielding clubs whereas she uses a parrot as an opener in true Flintstones style and being made up so as to be almost unrecognisable. (Indeed, her Cheetah-like companion chimpanzee is smarter than the cavemen as well, placing coconuts beneath their dinosaur-bone framed hut so that they will break the shells when they land.)
The cavemen
To differentiate then each of the cavemen has a particular trait: Wolff's werewolf-looking figure combines a more inquisitive nature with a bad temper; another has a propensity to lose parts of his anatomy in accidents, but for a time regrow them, before spending the latter part of the film as just a head; while a third, complete with a Harpo Marx style hairdo, is coded as gay and soon falls in love with a more civilised, trickster-conman type caveman played in characteristic self-deprecating manner by Lando Buzzanca.
Buzzanca
Buzzanca's character, meanwhile, predictably seeks to take advantage of the five cavemen's relative guilelessness to win Filli away from them whilst also ridding himself of his own bride - at least that's what I think he / she was...
When Women Had Tails is a very different experience from the otherwise comparable Hammer prehistoric epics, fur bikinis notwithstanding. As already noted, language is more important. It is also an exclusively studio based project, with all the action taking place in an expansive papier-mache, plasterboard and polystyrene type landscape with painted backdrops of volcanoes and so on.
One major point of note about the film is that it was written by future art-house favourite Lina Wertmuller, though unsurprisingly seems to be the sort of film that she and her supporters would prefer to downplay. Nonetheless, the battle of the sexes aspect is telling, with the imbalance in numbers between them also perhaps hinting at a connection to Seven Beauties, as a later inversion with one more civilised man and seven less civilised / attractive women, whilst the isolated prelapsarian setting recalls Swept Away.
Another point of interest, in relation to the history of gay characters in the cinema, as outlined by Vito Russo in his pioneering study The Celluloid Closet, is the inevitable end that befalls the only gay caveman: suicide.
Might make for a nice double-bill with Themroc.
Guess the giallo
From the French VHS artwork; I've removed the performer credits to make it a bit more challenging:
The Crypt of Madness
The Crypt of Madness
Friday, 26 December 2008
Bill Landis, RIP
http://www.dreadcentral.com/story/rip-bill-landis
Anyone who hasn't read Sleazoid Express should do so - a great gonzo read and chronicle of the pre-clean up New York grindhouse scene.
Anyone who hasn't read Sleazoid Express should do so - a great gonzo read and chronicle of the pre-clean up New York grindhouse scene.
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