has tragically died from his liver condition, the one that allowed him to play the role of the Yellow killer in Giallo without the need for make up.
RIP Byron Deidra, you had a promising Rondo Hatton-esque career ahead of you, having almost stole the film from your better known co-star...
Monday, 29 June 2009
Sunday, 28 June 2009
Il castello dei morti vivi / Castle of the Living Dead
Castle of the Living Dead is famous for two main reasons.
First, Donald Sutherland took his son Kiefer’s name from the film’s writer and co-director Warren Kiefer AKA Lorenzo Sabatini
Second, it represented the first credit for Michael Reeves, who co-wrote the film and apparently functioned as more than just second unit man; producer Paul Maslansky subsequently backed Reeves’s official directorial debut The She Beast the following year.
The Reeves connection is immediately apparent, as a scene-setting voice-off establishes a somewhat disordered situation that prefigures Matthew Hopkins: Witchfinder General.
First, we are told that Napoleon may have been defeated, but that demobbed soldiers have turned to banditry and made the roads unsafe.
Then we are told that executions of bandits are thereby commonplace, and presented with what seems to be one such scene. The incongruities are the victim’s dress – a harlequin’s motley, rather than a soldier’s uniform – and the souvenirs being sold by a dwarf.
The harlequin then contrives to have his would-be executioner put his own neck in the noose and kicks away the stool, much to the (anti-authoritarian) amusement of those gathered.
Next it is revealed that executioner and executee, along with the dwarf, are in fact part of a theatrical troupe and the whole thing was a gag.
They collect their money and go to the inn.
There, the leader of the troupe, Bruno, and the harlequin, Dart (Luciano Pigozzi), argue over money – another trope whose mundane quality seems very Reeves if we think of the impoverished circumstances of Karloff and Lacey’s couple in The Sorcerors or the discussions between Hopkins and Stearne – another arguing (homosexual) couple, perhaps – in Witchfinder General.
Eric (Philippe Leroy) intervenes as Dart is about to kill Bruno, leading to Dart fleeing on the ex-soldier’s horse. (Ian Ogilvy’s Richard Marshall is also a soldier in Witchfinder General.)
Turning a bad situation into an opportunity, Eric decides to join the troupe, just as they have been offered the chance of doing a private performance for Count Drago for three gold pieces – a tidy sum, apparently.
Watching this, and the similiarity with what unfolds, I wondered if the makers of the 2000 French fantastique entry Deep in the Woods had also seen Castle of the Living Dead.
The troupe travel to Drago’s castle, en route encountering a witch, played in drag by a young Donald Sutherland, who had earlier played a soldier/policeman at the hanging, who foretells doom should they go there.
Since the film wouldn’t get much further if they heeded said warnings, the troupe continues on, greed outweighing other considerations.
There they meet Drago, (Christoper Lee) who makes his entrance in the approved Dracula-esque manner and who proves to be equally suspicious in his behaviour, as when he offers Bruno a pre-performance drink:
Bruno: "Aren’t you having any?"
Drago: "Alas, no. I give it only to my guests."
Indeed, having imbibed the concoction, Bruno suffers a fatal ‘accident’ whilst performing the hanging routine…
More character driven than most 1960s Italian horrors, Castle of the Living Dead is unusual for its relatively low-key approach to evil. Drago has no grand designs for revenge or ruling the world. Instead, he just wants to be able to perform his dubious experiments in peace. His victims, meanwhile, are neither particularly heroic nor bent on vengeance. Instead they just want to make it out alive in one piece.
Adequately directed and nicely shot in black and white (Luigi Kuveiller was camera operator), the film is atmospheric and benefits from wry performances from Leroy, Lee and Mirko Valentin (as Lee’s henchman, Hans), while Gaia Germani as Laura makes for an unusually active and level-headed love-interest cum victim.
First, Donald Sutherland took his son Kiefer’s name from the film’s writer and co-director Warren Kiefer AKA Lorenzo Sabatini
Second, it represented the first credit for Michael Reeves, who co-wrote the film and apparently functioned as more than just second unit man; producer Paul Maslansky subsequently backed Reeves’s official directorial debut The She Beast the following year.
The Reeves connection is immediately apparent, as a scene-setting voice-off establishes a somewhat disordered situation that prefigures Matthew Hopkins: Witchfinder General.
First, we are told that Napoleon may have been defeated, but that demobbed soldiers have turned to banditry and made the roads unsafe.
Then we are told that executions of bandits are thereby commonplace, and presented with what seems to be one such scene. The incongruities are the victim’s dress – a harlequin’s motley, rather than a soldier’s uniform – and the souvenirs being sold by a dwarf.
The harlequin then contrives to have his would-be executioner put his own neck in the noose and kicks away the stool, much to the (anti-authoritarian) amusement of those gathered.
Next it is revealed that executioner and executee, along with the dwarf, are in fact part of a theatrical troupe and the whole thing was a gag.
They collect their money and go to the inn.
There, the leader of the troupe, Bruno, and the harlequin, Dart (Luciano Pigozzi), argue over money – another trope whose mundane quality seems very Reeves if we think of the impoverished circumstances of Karloff and Lacey’s couple in The Sorcerors or the discussions between Hopkins and Stearne – another arguing (homosexual) couple, perhaps – in Witchfinder General.
Eric (Philippe Leroy) intervenes as Dart is about to kill Bruno, leading to Dart fleeing on the ex-soldier’s horse. (Ian Ogilvy’s Richard Marshall is also a soldier in Witchfinder General.)
Turning a bad situation into an opportunity, Eric decides to join the troupe, just as they have been offered the chance of doing a private performance for Count Drago for three gold pieces – a tidy sum, apparently.
Watching this, and the similiarity with what unfolds, I wondered if the makers of the 2000 French fantastique entry Deep in the Woods had also seen Castle of the Living Dead.
The troupe travel to Drago’s castle, en route encountering a witch, played in drag by a young Donald Sutherland, who had earlier played a soldier/policeman at the hanging, who foretells doom should they go there.
Since the film wouldn’t get much further if they heeded said warnings, the troupe continues on, greed outweighing other considerations.
There they meet Drago, (Christoper Lee) who makes his entrance in the approved Dracula-esque manner and who proves to be equally suspicious in his behaviour, as when he offers Bruno a pre-performance drink:
Bruno: "Aren’t you having any?"
Drago: "Alas, no. I give it only to my guests."
Indeed, having imbibed the concoction, Bruno suffers a fatal ‘accident’ whilst performing the hanging routine…
More character driven than most 1960s Italian horrors, Castle of the Living Dead is unusual for its relatively low-key approach to evil. Drago has no grand designs for revenge or ruling the world. Instead, he just wants to be able to perform his dubious experiments in peace. His victims, meanwhile, are neither particularly heroic nor bent on vengeance. Instead they just want to make it out alive in one piece.
Adequately directed and nicely shot in black and white (Luigi Kuveiller was camera operator), the film is atmospheric and benefits from wry performances from Leroy, Lee and Mirko Valentin (as Lee’s henchman, Hans), while Gaia Germani as Laura makes for an unusually active and level-headed love-interest cum victim.
Katalin Varga - Edinburgh International Film Festival review
Katalin Varga: it’s the kind of title that, beyond telling you its subject is a woman, gives nothing away and encourages you to look more closely at the synopsis and credits. You then discover it’s a Rumanian-Hungarian-UK co-production, with a first time English-speaking writer-director, Peter Strickland, at the helm. You also discover that, at its core, it’s a rape-revenge film.
If the film is more The Virgin Spring than Last House on the Left in its art-house rather than exploitation trappings, its nevertheless still a daunting combination of film-maker and material that’s far easier to get wrong than right.
As an outsider Strickland one obvious advantage: he can engage with subject matter the insider cannot. But he also thereby suffers from an obvious disadvantage: can he really understand this subject matter as an insider would. (And, if so, perhaps we then might ask which insider’s perspective that we are we talking about, that of the male perpetrator, the female victim or some third party?)
Happily Strickland proves more than adequate to the challenge he has imposed on himself, as he exposes male and female attitudes that seem both universal and the product of specific historical circumstances; draws nuanced and believable performances from his cast; and reveals an eye for landscape and place that for me recalled early Werner Herzog – perhaps not a surprising connection when we consider Katalin Varga’s Transylvanian setting and the at times Popul Vuh quality of its ambient score.
In particular, we see how the importance of honour and vendetta, coupled with a distinctly unforgiving notion of Christianity, lead to tragedy:
Katalin has concealed the secret of her rape from her husband for ten years. He thinks he is the father of (t)he(i)r child, Orban. When Katalin finally confides in a trusted friend word nevertheless gets to her husband, who orders that they leave for shaming him. Telling Orban that his grandmother is ill, Katalin sets off in search of revenge on the men who have wronged her…
But if the story thus suggests a timelessness, the omnipresence of the mobile phone – the sole piece of (post-)modern technology present, indicates that the film is set in the post-revolutionary present. The further tragedy, if we think about the implied resurgence of Christianity post-communism and the officially atheist situation during communist rule, is how little the position of women seems to have changed over the course of two or three generations.
If the film is more The Virgin Spring than Last House on the Left in its art-house rather than exploitation trappings, its nevertheless still a daunting combination of film-maker and material that’s far easier to get wrong than right.
As an outsider Strickland one obvious advantage: he can engage with subject matter the insider cannot. But he also thereby suffers from an obvious disadvantage: can he really understand this subject matter as an insider would. (And, if so, perhaps we then might ask which insider’s perspective that we are we talking about, that of the male perpetrator, the female victim or some third party?)
Happily Strickland proves more than adequate to the challenge he has imposed on himself, as he exposes male and female attitudes that seem both universal and the product of specific historical circumstances; draws nuanced and believable performances from his cast; and reveals an eye for landscape and place that for me recalled early Werner Herzog – perhaps not a surprising connection when we consider Katalin Varga’s Transylvanian setting and the at times Popul Vuh quality of its ambient score.
In particular, we see how the importance of honour and vendetta, coupled with a distinctly unforgiving notion of Christianity, lead to tragedy:
Katalin has concealed the secret of her rape from her husband for ten years. He thinks he is the father of (t)he(i)r child, Orban. When Katalin finally confides in a trusted friend word nevertheless gets to her husband, who orders that they leave for shaming him. Telling Orban that his grandmother is ill, Katalin sets off in search of revenge on the men who have wronged her…
But if the story thus suggests a timelessness, the omnipresence of the mobile phone – the sole piece of (post-)modern technology present, indicates that the film is set in the post-revolutionary present. The further tragedy, if we think about the implied resurgence of Christianity post-communism and the officially atheist situation during communist rule, is how little the position of women seems to have changed over the course of two or three generations.
Nice B movie horror site
B Movies and Beyond:
http://www.bmoviesandbeyond.blogspot.com/
Co-incidentally I was privileged to see Roger Corman, sometimes called the King of the B's, at the EIFF. He indicated that the title was a misnomer, because the B movie referred to major studio productions during the period of the double bill, circa 1930 to 1950, when there would be A films supported by B films. He felt his work for AIP wasn't really a B-movie in this sense, and that if there were two films they would be more B+ pictures of equal stature.
http://www.bmoviesandbeyond.blogspot.com/
Co-incidentally I was privileged to see Roger Corman, sometimes called the King of the B's, at the EIFF. He indicated that the title was a misnomer, because the B movie referred to major studio productions during the period of the double bill, circa 1930 to 1950, when there would be A films supported by B films. He felt his work for AIP wasn't really a B-movie in this sense, and that if there were two films they would be more B+ pictures of equal stature.
Mondo cane oggi / Mondo cane 3 / Savage World Today
As the title Mondo cane oggi indicates, this was an attempt to bring the mondo film up to date for the 1980s, representing as it did the first time the name had been used since 1963's Mondo carne 2
As the sometime subtitle l'orrore continua indicates this also entailed a recognition that the nature of the form had changed since the 1960s, to become closer to the horror film with Faces of Death and Snuff.
Although Mondo cane oggi has a number of unpleasant images, it is debatable whether these qualify it as a horror film, especially as they lack the shock value of their counterparts in Africa Addio.
Specificaly, there is hardly any real human on human violence while much of the animal killing, which includes some snakes and a small turtle, is contextualised as being for food.
This said, there is other footage, most notably of two dogs fighting as the credits play, but also perhaps a Spanish bullfight, which would likely fall foul of the censors insofar as it lacks this defensible context.
The film also exhibits that classic mondo racism, insofar as the majority of the ‘outlandish’ and ‘bizarre’ practices shown are presented as the province of the non-Western other, particularly in India, Japan and the Far East.
In one scene, for instance, we see traditional irezumi tattooing practices associated with the yakuza, along with the ritual amputation of a finger segment. What is lacking, however, is a consideration of what mainstream Japanese society thinks of tattoos through their criminal subcultural associations.
With the softer material being represented by the likes of bodybuilders (!) and joggers (!!) the main harder moments pertaining to man are a couple of autopsies, one which reveals the cadaver as having been filled with bags of heroin; a man being subjected to electric shocks in a bid to ‘cure’ his homosexuality (“donne si, uomini no” explains the narrator) and some time-honoured sex change surgery footage.
The authenticity of much of this footage is questionable, in a classic case of “if it excites you pretend it’s real, if it disturbs you pretend it’s fake”
Accompanied by voice over or vaguely scene setting music throughout, the film has something of a music video quality to it – apt insofar as one of the mutations of the mondo was into the music performance backdrop/accompaniment, as with SPK’s Despair.
Stelvio Massi hides as director and cinematographer behind the Max Steel pseudonym.
As the sometime subtitle l'orrore continua indicates this also entailed a recognition that the nature of the form had changed since the 1960s, to become closer to the horror film with Faces of Death and Snuff.
Although Mondo cane oggi has a number of unpleasant images, it is debatable whether these qualify it as a horror film, especially as they lack the shock value of their counterparts in Africa Addio.
Specificaly, there is hardly any real human on human violence while much of the animal killing, which includes some snakes and a small turtle, is contextualised as being for food.
This said, there is other footage, most notably of two dogs fighting as the credits play, but also perhaps a Spanish bullfight, which would likely fall foul of the censors insofar as it lacks this defensible context.
The film also exhibits that classic mondo racism, insofar as the majority of the ‘outlandish’ and ‘bizarre’ practices shown are presented as the province of the non-Western other, particularly in India, Japan and the Far East.
In one scene, for instance, we see traditional irezumi tattooing practices associated with the yakuza, along with the ritual amputation of a finger segment. What is lacking, however, is a consideration of what mainstream Japanese society thinks of tattoos through their criminal subcultural associations.
With the softer material being represented by the likes of bodybuilders (!) and joggers (!!) the main harder moments pertaining to man are a couple of autopsies, one which reveals the cadaver as having been filled with bags of heroin; a man being subjected to electric shocks in a bid to ‘cure’ his homosexuality (“donne si, uomini no” explains the narrator) and some time-honoured sex change surgery footage.
The authenticity of much of this footage is questionable, in a classic case of “if it excites you pretend it’s real, if it disturbs you pretend it’s fake”
Accompanied by voice over or vaguely scene setting music throughout, the film has something of a music video quality to it – apt insofar as one of the mutations of the mondo was into the music performance backdrop/accompaniment, as with SPK’s Despair.
Stelvio Massi hides as director and cinematographer behind the Max Steel pseudonym.
Saturday, 27 June 2009
Nel labirinto del sesso (Psichidion) / The Labyrinth of Sex / Sexual Inadequacies
This 1969 film from trash favourite Al Brescia presents an interesting combination of mondo and “white coater” exploitation forms, apparently using the time-honoured defence of being educational as a means of getting around the censors - as when a discussion of the normalcy of voyeurism provides the justification for an voyeuristic candid camera montage of women in various states of undress.
The film begins with some classic Mom and Dad style birth of a baby footage, as the narrator’s voice-over emphasise the Freudian notion that the infant is already a sexual being.
A montage of clips of children and adolescents then follows, as the voice-over - soon identified as that of a doctor type - emphasises the importance of discussing sexuality openly and honestly with children and adolescents so that they grow up to be normal rather than deviant.
Unsurprisingly the film’s discourses around normal and abnormal sexuality are where its age shows. On the one hand, its defence of masturbation during adolescence as a natural stage in the development of a healthy adult sexuality was probably quite a progressive position for an Italian film to take in 1969. On the other, the lumping together of homosexuality with paedophilia, bestiality and necrophilia as perversions where the wrong object of desire is chosen seems rather dated.
The various vignettes address such themes of nymphomania, understood as a normal desire taken to excess rather than a true deviation; fetishism, featuring Franco Ressell and a mannequin to suggest a giallo connection; gender (re)assignment surgery, focusing on those born with ambiguous genitals; and a man and woman having their physical states monitored by doctors as they purportedly have sex.
An entertaining historical document.
The film begins with some classic Mom and Dad style birth of a baby footage, as the narrator’s voice-over emphasise the Freudian notion that the infant is already a sexual being.
A montage of clips of children and adolescents then follows, as the voice-over - soon identified as that of a doctor type - emphasises the importance of discussing sexuality openly and honestly with children and adolescents so that they grow up to be normal rather than deviant.
Unsurprisingly the film’s discourses around normal and abnormal sexuality are where its age shows. On the one hand, its defence of masturbation during adolescence as a natural stage in the development of a healthy adult sexuality was probably quite a progressive position for an Italian film to take in 1969. On the other, the lumping together of homosexuality with paedophilia, bestiality and necrophilia as perversions where the wrong object of desire is chosen seems rather dated.
The various vignettes address such themes of nymphomania, understood as a normal desire taken to excess rather than a true deviation; fetishism, featuring Franco Ressell and a mannequin to suggest a giallo connection; gender (re)assignment surgery, focusing on those born with ambiguous genitals; and a man and woman having their physical states monitored by doctors as they purportedly have sex.
An entertaining historical document.
The original Yellow Kid
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