British Horror Cinema

Published in 2002 this anthology is part of the British Popular Cinema's series on British genre cinemas, with other volumes discussing science fiction and crime films.

Like most collections it's a bit hit and miss, with certain chapters likely to be more or less relevant depending upon your own particular interests. Similarly, there's also inevitably a degree of overlap and boundary making with those texts that potentially fall into multiple categories or sub-categories – more on which later.

Nevertheless, the chances are that if you have an interest in British horror cinema you will get something out of this volume. The academic essays which form the bulk of the book are uniformly well-written and well-researched, with the reader all but guaranteed to come away with some new facts, ideas to test out, or texts to seek out.



The first essay by Mark Kermode charts the history of horror film censorship in Britain, from the H certificate in the 1930s through the 1960s and 1970s onto the video nasties in the 1980s and the fallout from the Jamie Bulger case in the 1990s. Though containing nothing really new, it's a useful primer.

Julian Petley then discusses the relationship between critics and censors, finding it to be a close one whereby critics' negative opinions have often encouraging censorship. What makes his analysis more interesting is that he works back from 20th century cinema to 19th and 18th century fiction, showing that the critical preferences for realism over fantasy, suggestion over showing and terror over horror are historically well-established, with works repeatedly being attacked for what they were not rather than being considered in their own terms.

This is followed by Bridgit Cherry's empirically study of female horror fandom, in which she points out some of the differences between the genders in their approach, such as the importance of trivia to male fans. Interestingly in the footnotes Cherry explains the way in which a chi-squared test works, hinting at a difference in knowledge realms between audience and text based research, with none of the other authors employing statistical techniques to demonstrate the confidence they have that some finding is not merely by chance.

Next Ian Conrich examines the horror film in 1930s Britain, foregrouding the absence of horror per se insofar as alternative labels were repeatedly used, with US productions being labelled as horrific and domestic productions with horror components being identified in the first instance as thrillers (The Ghoul) or melodramas (Tod Slaughter's films). Also of interest here is the way in which the H certificate initially operated: Like the US R-rating today, it did not prevent children from going to see H-films if they were accompanied by a parent or adult guardian.

Following this Kim Newman discusses the British psycho-thriller, which he distinguishes from the psychological thriller, in his typically exhaustive genealogical manner, with a useful check-list of titles linked by theme, but comparatively little detailed mise en scene analysis. The difficulty I had here was that the boundary between the two sub-genres – a psycho-thriller must feature a psychopathic killer whereas a psychological thriller need not – seemed a somewhat 'angels dancing on pinheads' one.

The problems inherent in any exercise in boundary drawing were brought further to the fore by Leon Hunt's examination of the British occult film: Given that The Wicker Man features no supernatural manifestations, might it be said that Lord Summerisle is a psycho-thriller killer? Or, casting things into the terms of Charles Derry's distinction between the “horror of personality” film and the “horror of the demonic” film, what happens if we have a human occultist committing murder on account of their beliefs, without any definitive manifestation of the demonic? These questions and overlaps aside, Hunt's is a useful discussion, which brings out the distinction between two phases of the British occult film, the first – the 1950s and early 1960s – marked by a not-quite British quality (Night of the Demon, Night of the Eagle etc.) and the second – the late 1960s and 1970s – more British (Virgin Witch, Satan's Slave) and marked by the increasing correlation between magic(k) and sex. What Hunt gains in detailed analysis compared to Newman, he loses in completeness: There is no mention of Michel J. Murphy's (admittedly later) Invitation to Hell, for instance, although with its to the devil a daughter theme, it clearly engages with occult sex.

I didn't get much from Michael Tibbets's discussion of architecture in The Innocents and Turn of the Screw, but that's perhaps because my own understandings here been shaped by other influences, particularly Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space.

Nor was I particularly enthused by Stephen Schneider's discussion of female madness in British horror cinema, in part again because of that awkward sense of individual texts, here Repulsion, being arbitrarily discussed more within one essay/context than another.

Things picked up with Peter Hutchings's chapter on Amicus, always one of the problem entities in British horror because of the transatlantic / Mid-Atlantic nature of its productions. Although providing detailed analyses of key scenes and images from The Skull and The Psychopath among the company's single-subject features – with the latter film identified as having affinities with Argento's Deep Red that make me want to seek it out – Hutchings identifies Amicus's portmanteau films as its most important product. Usefully establishing the history of the form and noting the similarities between the films' masters of ceremonies and the parallel figures in EC horror comics and US television horror film screenings, he also begins to disentangle them from Dead of Night and the inevitable negative comparisons that ensue.

Next, Michelle perks presents an impressive analysis of one of my own favourite 1970s British horror films, Gary Sherman's Death Line. The thing that really impressed me here was the way she went from examining the film's aesthetics and thematics, and the way that they are intertwined, onto relevant psychoanalytic theories, rather than – as is so often the case in this kind of writing – taking the theory and then applying it to the film, regardless of its suitability or otherwise.

Steve Chibnall's chapter on Pete Walker is somewhat redundant if, like me, you've read his book-length study Making Mischief, but presents a useful primer on the director and his work if you have not. In the context of this collection, however, there are again some overlaps and connections that aren't fully drawn out. For example, I didn't realise until now that Walker's Flesh and Blood Show screenwriter Alfred Shaughnessy had earlier directed the similarly theatrical The Impersonator, as mentioned by Newman.

Though Paul Wells's interviews with Clive Barker and Doug Bradley and Richard Stanley's personal memories and opinions of the Scala Cinema and Palace Pictures are perhaps a bit out of place, they also provide a useful views of British horror from film-makers' perspectives.

Overall, British Horror Cinema is itself a bit many portmanteau films with multiple directors: Not always representing the individual authors' best work, a bit uneven, but with enough to be worthwhile.

Cicciabomba / Fatty Girl Goes to New York

Following on from my previous piece, this 1982 comedy from Umberto Lenzi can be best summarised as one of those "I've got to eat" projects.

The star of the show is pop singer Donatella Rettore, billed under her last name in accord with her wishes: "Non chiamatemi Donatella! Il mio nome è Rettore!" / "Don't call me Donatella! My name is Rettore!"

She plays teenager Miris Bigolin, an aspiring disc jockey - albeit on church radio - in a provincial northern Italian town, whose large size prevents her from declaring her love for altar-boy Mirko, who then plays a nasty practical joke upon her.

Depressed, Miris is about to commit suicide when she learns that she has won a competition she had entered some time before. The prize is a trip to New York. There Miris meets Baronessa Judith von Kemp (Anita Ekberg, looking well past her best as far as glamourous star attractions go) who chooses her to test a new slimming treatment.

Miris loses her excess weight and undergoes an extensive makeover, thereby giving Rettore fans the opportunity to see their idol as herself, or at least without the fat suit.



Note how the poster emphasises Rettore as star, with Lenzi and Ekberg getting second billing.

The new Miris-Rettore returns home to learn that Mirko has seduced and abandoned her younger sister Deborah, who is now pregnant by him. She thus proceeds to extract her revenge...

While intermittently funny, Cicciabomba is best described as being for Rettore's fans - there must be some out there - and Lenzi completists, such as myself, but very much in that order.

For Lenzi fans, the issue is that the film is utterly impersonal and could have been made to the same standard by any of a dozen other directors.

Admittedly, comedy can be a difficult genre for the non-specialist to make their mark within, all the more so when working with a star whose name undoubtedly represents the film's main selling point.

Nonetheless, as Lucio Fulci's collaborations with Lando Buzzanca demonstrate, it is also possible for the director to impart something more personal into the proceedings: Dracula in the Provinces and The Senator Likes Women are comedies whose incorporation of elements of surrealism, anti-clericalism and class conflict marks them as of a piece with Fulci's better-known horror and giallo entries.

They may be marginal compared to these films, or a Beatrice Cenci, but they nevertheless confirm the impression that a genuine auteur, someone whose work is marked by the same obsessions, is behind them.

Indeed, by commutating Fulci into Lenzi's place here, we can well imagine what he might have done to make it his own in playing up the anti-clerical angle Lenzi only hints at, or featuring surrealistic food nightmares...

La legione dei dannati / Battle of the Commandos

At the end of the 1960s, the editorial collective of Cahiers du cinema proposed that films could be positioned as politically radical or reactionary depending on where they sat on the axes of form and content.

For a film to be genuinely radical it had to have radical content and radical form. This was a combination which meant that 99% or more of films could be condemned as reactionary, including that five or ten per cent which aspired to be politically progressive.

A key influence here was Berthold Brecht’s theories of epic theatre, with their emphasis upon constantly distancing the audience from the action on stage by making them aware that they were watching a constructed fiction.

Crucially, however, the Cahiers writers also provided a get out clause for their own favourites by suggesting the existence of the famous category E film, the one that seemed to initially be formally and ideologically complicit with the status quo, but which could conveniently be recuperated for radicals like themselves to watch without feeling bad, through various strategies of deconstruction and detournement. The classic case was John Ford’s Young Mr Lincoln.

So, what does this have to do with Battle of the Commandos, a 1969 Euro-war entry directed by Umberto Lenzi from a script co-authored by Dario Argento?

Well, on the surface not a lot, given that the film sees yet another post-Dirty Dozen special squad of the condemned sent on a suicide mission, is replete with anachronisms and sees the reduction of complex material forces to simple battles between individual characters – including, of course, the obligatory evil Nazis.

Yet what I would argue is that if we look a bit further and consider the film in the light of its director’s avowed anarchism and similar tendencies in its co-author, we might begin to see it as a commentary – now more intentional, now more unconscious – on the awkward interface between popular film and politics, as a kind of Category E film for the Euro-trash enthusiast.


Palance was also in Godard's Contempt, where Brecht is quoted. Coincidence? Maybe...

We begin with Jack Palance’s Colonel Charlie MacPherson marching into his CO’s office to the strains of Marcello Giombini’s appropriately stirring, martial music.

MacPherson has just returned from his latest mission, unlike the 20-odd men serving under him. For MacPherson their deaths are what matters. For his CO it is that the goal of the mission was accomplished: Yes, 20 men died, but their sacrifice achieved the destruction of 75 enemy panzers.

It’s a basic difference in accounting strategies, nicely summarised by Brecht’s poem “General, your tank is a powerful vehicle”:

“General, man is very useful.
He can fly and he can kill.
But he has one defect:
He can think.”

The general knows this, however, and plays upon it to entice MacPherson into a new mission, one that gives him the opportunity to go up against his old enemy Colonel Ackerman.

MacPherson swallows the bait and hastily assembles a team of military prisoners for the mission. While the usual mismatched group, they’re better characterised than some of their counterparts elsewhere and are used by the filmmakers to make further points.

Claudio Undari’s Private Stone is the profiteering individualist, a Mother Courage type who doesn’t care whether the Axis or the Allies win the war.

He’s contrasted with Helmuth Schneider’s Sam Schrier, a German-Jewish anarchist who fought in the Spanish Civil War and bears a concentration camp tattoo. (One here wonders if the film has exerted any influence on Tarantino's forthcoming Inglorious Basterds, with its all-Jewish hit squad.)

In the middle are the likes of Bruno Corrazzini’s Frank Madigan, who invariably compares anything he eats or drinks to the menu of a luxury hotel, which he apparently visited every day in civilian life; the deliciously revealed punch-line is that this was in the capacity of working as a waiter rather than as a customer.

Rounding out the team are Thomas Hunter’s demolitions expert Captain Burke, a happy-go-lucky type from the USA whose womanising marks him out as less professional than the disapproving – but possibly envious – MacPherson, and the Colonel’s sidekick Sgt. Habinda.

Habinda is one of the film’s most awkward characters, his loyalty to MacPherson and, through him, the British Empire implicitly marking him out as a traitor to his own people in India.

This issue is one that Brecht addressed in his own discussions of the Hollywood film of Rudyard Kipling’s poem Gunga Din: Despite his politics, Brecht found himself being drawn into agreeing with the film’s racist, imperialist sentiments and needing to constantly re-assert his critical distance. If it might be argued that this was a testament to the power of classical Hollywood mise en scene, the point I would make is that neither Gunga Din’s form nor its content proved able to successfully interpellate the viewer.

If Brecht was an exceptional viewer in some regards, his freedom to read the text against the grain is not in itself exceptional.

As it so happens, Habinda is played by Aldo Sambrell. This in turn sets up some questions around performance styles and political correctness: As someone who really gets into his characters Sambrell is akin to a method actor, the antithesis of Brecht’s gestural approach. Although there’s a hint of boot-polish to his make up and an awkward incongruity to the removal of his turban revealing short, thinning hair rather than flowing Sikh locks, he’s a reasonably convincing Indian. Yet these same elements also make for a degree of distancing, that he’s a Spaniard playing at being an Indian.

In one way Sambrell is showing the artificiality of identity but in another he’s being politically incorrect, precisely because these selfsame theoretical identity politics often assume only those who are ‘really’ X should play or depict, X without questioning the reality of X when it pertains to the non-dominant other. (Let’s see who can be more anti-essentialist; you go first.)

Similar productive, thought-provoking contradictions emerge as the mission gets underway. MacPherson and his men successfully establish a beach-head, but the boats following them are spotted and destroyed, leaving them stuck behind enemy lines.

While the SS man, played by the inevitable and inimitable Gerard Herter, is confident that the attack has been repulsed, Ackerman, played by Wolfgang Preiss, is less sure. What’s in play here is not just the conventional contrast between the good German and the bad Nazi – as also seen in another Argento-scripted Dirty Dozen copy, Probability Zero – but also the contrast between the SS ideologue and the Wehrmacht professional.

Viewing the war as all but lost, Ackerman’s goal is the best possible, honourable peace. Having no faith in the Fuhrer nor the master race like his SS counterpart, he’s the kind of soldier who would have supported the July 1944 plot and, had it succeeded, possibly have given the Allies a harder time of things militarily by, for example, not devoting much needed resources to wasteful campaigns of genocide. (Co-incidentally or otherwise, Dirty Dozen II sees the commandos presented with an opportunity to kill Hitler, which they don’t take.)

A game of move and counter-move, bluff and double-bluff between MacPherson and Ackermann thus ensues.

If this gives scope for plenty of battle scenes and set pieces, we can again emphasise their latent contradictions. Clearly dealing with relatively limited resources – albeit still more considerable than he and other filone directors would have to deal with ten or fifteen years later, as evinced by the train-mounted gun that becomes the McGuffin around which MacPherson and Ackerman converge – Lenzi makes extensive use of the zoom lens as an alternative to cutting and, when doing so, frequently presents rapid montages of shots that show little regard for continuity.

While this approach makes it harder to notice the ill-fitting uniforms worn by the extras or the fact that they are wielding Italian manufactured submachine guns not used by the Germans in WWII, it also makes the action sequences that bit harder to engage with for the average viewer. Insofar as this viewer was more likely troubled by difficulties in following the action than with the props – see, for example, some of the comments on the film on the IMDB, this again comes across as something of a distanciating element.

Finally, the theme of food resurfaces again through the ambiguous character of Diana Lorys’s Janine, the erstwhile lover of a collaborationist mayor, who is then taken by MacPherson to be a guide, and is then captured and interrogated by the Wehrmacht and SS in turn. Throughout all this, her motivations are about survival and pain avoidance rather than ideology.

Or, as Ludwig Feuerbach famously put it, “Der Mensch ist was er isst”: “man is what he eats”.

"Food first, then morality."...

UK and Belgian Demons of the Mind posters

Or, the use of similar graphic elements by different artists:





Both with the face behind the keyhole and Michael Hordern's priest with the flaming cross.

Schiave bianche: violenza in Amazzonia / Cannibal Holocaust 2: The Catherine Miles Story / Amazonia: The Catherine Miles Story

Let's get straight to it: The Cannibal Holocaust 2 title is misleading in a number of ways.


More the subtitle than the title

First and most obvious, Roy Garrett/Mario Gariazzo’s film has no actual relationship to Ruggero Deodato's 1979 classic, despite the connotations of Franco Campanino’s Riz Ortolani styled theme and the panoramic aerial shots of the jungle that open the film.

Second, the actual story is more like a cross between Umberto Lenzi's Deep River Savages and Deodato's earlier Lost Cannibal World, albeit told from a female rather than a male perspective.

Third, the main Amazonian tribe featured are headhunters rather than cannibals, with anthropophagous activity the province of their white-faced rivals.

As such, the film is better considered in its own right, in terms of its subtitle, The Catherine Miles Story.

Purporting to be a faithful reconstruction of Miles's experiences, based upon her own account and the records of her trial for murdering her aunt and uncle - an awkwardly presented complication that punctuates the rest of the narrative - the story begins in London.


Animal lovers may want to look away now...

With the school term having ended, Catherine (Elvire Audray) jets out to South America to join her parents on their rubber plantation for the holidays.

We learn that her aunt and uncle, the Vegas, are the poor relations, who lost their own money in some ill-advised speculation and thus now work for Catherine's parents managing the plantation - pretty well, it has to be said.

Aunt and uncle propose a trip into the interior, which leads to an attack by some natives. They shoot Catherine and her parents with curare tipped darts, paralysing them. It's here that the second awkward complication emerges, with the introduction of what will eventually prove a romantic subplot involving a tribesman, Umakai (Will Gonzales).



Catherine comes to finding Umukai crouched over her, his mouth all bloodied. He then proceeds to decapitate her parents...



The viewer is privy to the fact that Umukai has just sucked the poison from Catherine's wound (which he will continue to treat later, with a paste of masticated tree grubs) but are positioned with Catherine in not seeing the attacking tribesmen, who were in fact members of the bad tribe in the service of the now-absent Vegas.

In other words, we're in a confusing situation with regard to Catherine, as our point of identification in the narrative: We know more than she does at this point, but she, via her surrogates behind the camera, has withheld vital information from us.

While not a complete show-stopper, it is a basic structural flaw that suggests an uncertainty on the part of the film-makers as to the kind of film they wanted to make and how to mix the ingredients of survivalist account, courtroom drama and unlikely romance.

On the basis that most potential viewers are likely to approach something entitled Cannibal Holocaust 2 as an exercise in survivalist horror, the film must be considered a failure.

Although there's a decent amount of gore, it's never particularly convincing. Gratuitous human on animal violence is also (arguably thankfully) conspicuously absent. Though we get some stock footage of a big cat killing a hapless herbivore, it doesn't look like the actor playing Umukai, actually chewed real grubs, never mind he or anyone else beheading and gutting an unfortunate turtle or suchlike.


Compare this settlement to those of other Italian cannibal entries

Indeed, the tribespeople as a whole are remarkably clean and civilised looking, with their settlement being a large circular hut around a flat field rather than some huts, trees or caves as seen elsewhere.

While it is true that both Deep River Savages and Lost Cannibal World went some way to representing the cannibal women played by Me Me Lai as being more 'civilised' or 'evolved' than the other cannibals - hence her relative suitability for the western hero but inability to survive to leave with him, one suspects - what we have here are a whole village of such types. Hell, one even conveniently speaks English as a result of having spent much of her childhood with missionaries…

The issue is again one of falling between poles, of their neither appearing as abject-ified others, nor as western extras in bad wigs as in Jess Franco's impossible to take seriously entries.

All told, a failure, but one with a certain inherent curiosity value.

Harry Alan Towers, RIP

http://eronline.blogspot.com/2009/08/legendary-eurotrash-producer-harry-alan.html

British Low Culture

The first thing to say about British Low Culture is that it's an academic rather than a popular book, author Leon Hunt being a lecturer in film and TV studies. The second is that this shouldn't be a deal breaker for the cult film fan, inasmuch as Hunt prefers to build up from the objects themselves rather than imposing a theory upon them from above.

The book, published in 1998, is perhaps now dated in the way that any study looking at one decade from the perspective of another is going to be, in that now we're well into nostalgia for the 80s. It's also perhaps been superceded in some areas by more recent work, such as Steve Chibnall's study of Pete Walker's films or Simon Sheridan's guide to British sex films, while the references to Gary Glitter are obviously before that performers paedophiliac predilections came to light.

Nonetheless, it's still a valuable read on the whole and a useful introduction to a wide range of 70s “low” culture – low being distinguished from the “popular” in terms of its double marginalisation, as neither part of the 'official' high cultural canon nor of the 'alternative' cultural studies canon as it has emerged.



What this means in practice is that Hunt concentrates not so much upon the now-recuperated and respectable likes of Powell and Pressburger and Hammer horror, but upon the likes of the Carry On films, the Confessions series, On the Buses – whose films were Hammer productions, and highly successful ones at that – and the independent post-Hammer productions of Walker, Norman Warren, and James Kenelm Clarke. Or, in that he does actually discuss Peeping Tom, it's more in relation to Pamela Green and Harrison Marks's involvement.

As a consequence, the discussions tend to be more socio-political than aesthetic, as these texts, with their endemically problematic discourses around class, gender and race are read in relation to the various crises and discontents of the time. If much of this is predictable, it's also interesting to read how Carry on at Your Convenience, set in a lavatory factory, engaged with the subject of industrial unrest and unionisation – or, rather, the awkwardness of its engagement as a sign of a collapsing consensus.

The chapter on the New English Library, coming at a time when the Skinhead novels of Richard Allen had been reprinted – and thus perhaps already begun to become part of a cultural studies canon – but Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange not yet re-released again serves as a reminder of how things have changed: What do Anchor Bay's handsome DVD box-sets of Walker and Warren mean for their recuperation? Is it is now possible, or even necessary, to look even lower?

If Hunt's endnotes provide indications for where such a project might go, towards the likes of Harrison Marks's Corporal Punishment magazines or Hellcats Female Mud-Wrestlers, the issue for the potential scholar is precisely there triple marginalisation, that these are things relegated to the sidelines even here. (While Ramsay Campbell has written about CP stuff, he is a successful horror author rather than an academic.)

Another project that suggests itself is looking at British East Asian representations and experiences around this time, with 1970s racist discourses as they are discussed structured very much in terms of 'Blacks' and South Asians. (An essay on Me Me Lai's film and television career anyone?)