A group of film makers go missing in the jungle where they were working on a documentary about some of the last remaining cannibal tribes. Some time later the footage they shot is screened before the excited and shocked group of television executives who commissioned the film.
It could be Cannibal Holocaust, but it is actually Bruno Mattei's 2003 digital reboot, alternately known as Cannibal World and, arguably more honestly, Cannibal Holocaust 2. This said, it would perhaps be better thought of as Cannibal Xerox, both for a nod to Umberto Lenzi's Cannibal Ferox in the form of a penis-ectomy scene and on account of the way in which Mattei and his co-scenarist Giovanni Paolucci all but plagiarise numerous scenes and lines from Ruggero Deodato's film in lieu of writing their own script from scratch.
Maybe Cannibal World gets away with it on being less a remake of Cannibal Holocaust than a contemporary re-interpretation or maybe Deodato was simply disinclined to engage with the subject matter again at this time, here remembering both the reaction his film had provoked and the alternative approach to primitive world ultra-violence seen in Cut and Run compared to its two predecessors in Cannibal Holocaust and Last Cannibal World. (As of August 2008, Deodato was however working on a new Cannibal themed film.)
Whatever the case, with the notably old-school exception of gutting a lizard on camera, the departures from the original source are where Mattei's film tends to get things more wrong than right.
The two key differences are in structure of the narrative and, following on from with this, the composition and dynamics of the film-making team. Though the bulk of the film comprises flashbacks to the documentary film-makers at work and the results, the film within the film structure of Cannibal Holocaust, wherein the first half of the film concentrates on the rescue mission and the second on an exploration of their what they found of the missing film-makers, is not really in evidence.
In particular, the Professor Monroe character, as the one who provided a more moral, anthropological voice on the mondo film-maker's excesses, is here positioned as one of the documentary team, Bob Manson. While he initially serves as something of a counterpoint to his Alan Yates like counterpart, in professing to be more concerned about the wider environment than with viewer ratings – or at least can justify his excesses if they help spread his message more widely – he soon succumbs to an ecofascistic / survival of the fittest / law of the jungle type amorality.
Reference to Cannibal Holocaust's Yates brings us on to the film's second major departure in terms of the group's composition. Their leader, the one who recruits the initially reluctant rival Manson as best man for the job, is actually a woman, Grace Forstye [sic]. The rest of the team is rounded out with Cindy Blair, whose role in the proceedings generally proves to be similar to that of Faye Daniels in Deodato's film, and the less noteworthy pairing of men analogous to Jack Anders and Mark Tomaso.
While the team also have two cameras like their Cannibal Holocaust counterparts, Mattei fails to satisfactorily introduce this detail nor to make use of the apparently different properties of the two cameras within his actual mise-en-scene. Rather there are too many images that do not accord with either camera-person's point of view and instead come across as being staged for the benefit of and recorded by an external, non-diegetic, camera. The impact of this is particularly significant when it comes to the gore scenes: whereas Deodato made impressive use of pseudo-documentary techniques and downright 'mistakes' to prevent us from noticing how unconvincing a given effect might have been, Mattei's comparatively conventional approach makes such shortcomings all too apparent.
Connected to this is Mattei's decision not to use stock footage and the Grace's comments within the film as to the datedness of such practice, that today's more sophisticated audience are sure to notice it. If the distancing from Mattei's own practice within the likes of Hell of the Living Dead is ironic, it is also a strategy that proves less effective than Deodato's admittedly morally problematic re-contextualisation of real atrocity footage as being a put-on for the camera in the infamous 'Road to Hell' sequence of his film. Similarly and paradoxically, Mattei's approach makes it that bit harder to suspend our disbelief that we are watching anything other than a film here.
In a similar vein, the film also lacks that palpable sense of psychosis one gets from its model, of not knowing just how far the film-maker was willing to go in his pursuit of authenticity. Instead, it comes across as a more calculated product, as the work of someone intent on giving his target audience what they wanted, but in a no more and no less manner. If this is no such bad thing in itself, as demonstrated by Deodato's Cut and Run, the issue is that Mattei is not quite as good a film-maker as Deodato and does not have the same resources at his disposal here.
As already mentioned in reference to the figure of Manson, Mattei's characters are also less satisfactorily drawn. Alternatively, however, we might also see this as one of the film's developments / departures from its model, in terms of emphasising that today it is less viable to hold Monroe's doctrine – i.e. that academic would-be detachment from the rest of the corrupt world / system – than it is to succumb to the inevitable.
Cannibal World's rape scene is also of interest in this regard because of its dynamics. While Grace expresses her displeasure at the scene, framing it as wasting film on a porno in a reprise of Faye's critique of the analogous scene in Cannibal Holocaust, Cindy encourages the men. The conflict within the group seems here more about power directly and less about power in relation to gender, of Cindy temporarily asserting her position with the men against Grace in decidedly un-feminist manner perfectly in keeping with the film-makers' we-are-all-complicit post-reality-TV world-view.
Or, maybe not, insofar as it is the TV network executive who emerges as the film's admittedly muffled moral voice, as he asks the inevitably “who are the real cannibals” question to the camera and the spectator...
Longer term fans will want to note that amongst the English dubbing voices can be heard Ted Russoff and Susan Spafford, two voice artists whose careers dated back to the glory days of the filone cinema and can be heard on the likes of The Strange Vice of Signora Wardh, while newcomers may want to check out actress and model Cindy Matic's portfolio.
Showing posts with label cannibals. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cannibals. Show all posts
Sunday, 14 December 2008
Wednesday, 30 July 2008
Zombi Holocaust / Zombie Holocaust / Zombies unter kannibalen / Dr Butcher MD / La Regina dei cannibali
This is a film which offers a challenge to auteurism, an approach which I often take in attempting to bring out the stylistic and thematic continuities in the work of Italian filone directors generally recognised, if at all, as mere metteurs en scene.
For the driving force behind Zombie Holocaust is plainly producer and co-writer Fabrizio de Angelis who, having bankrolled Zombie a few months earlier, clearly hoped that lightning would strike twice with this rehash / remake that uses some of the same cast, crew, locations and even, on occasion, footage.
The idea being to make as much money as possible out of the zombie and cannibal filone before public interest waned
This wouldn't in itself necessarily be an issue but for the fact that de Angelis's motivations are clearly 100% financial, of the 'leave messages to Western Union' type, and that in selecting Frank Martin / Marino Girolami as director he has a journeyman helmsman concerned with nothing more than giving the audience what they want, in the form of Alexandra Delli Colli's frequent gratuitous nudity and plenty of crude, unconvincing gore, whilst getting the film in the can as quicky and efficiently as possible.
The first victim is disovered
A somewhat obviously latex human torso, curiously devoid of a ribcage
Put differently, it's filone cinema at worst, where hybridisation of ideas, most particularly from the post-Romero zombie and indigenous cannibal sub genres in particular, results less in progress than patchwork / pastiche / failed bricolage; the last term tying in with the film's dubious anthropological elements.
A pointless establishing shot of a car driving off
We opens in New York city, that frequent mecca for Italian filmmakers seeking to take advantage of US locations at the time, with what first appears as a series of unexplained corpse mutilations at a city hospital.
Another victim...
and a nurse's understandable reaction shot
Doctors Dreylock (Walter Patriarca, who also served as production designer) and Ridgeway (Alexandra Delli Colli) lay a trap for the perpetrator, catching an orderly as he is about to take a bite out of a freshly removed heart. Rather than be taken alive, the orderly then leaps out a window, leading to another one of those plummeting dummy moments we all so know and love, complete in this case with an arm flying off only to be reattached when we cut back to the actor lying in a pool of stage blood.
Dr Ridgeway notices a distinctive tattoo on the man's chest, which she recognises thanks to not only holding another degree in anthropology but also having spent her early years on the same islands, the Moloccas, as the man came from!
A static tableaux shot of Delli Colli undressing; the filmmakers don't bother making use of the mirrored surfaces in the room to add a bit of visual interest
The tattoo is the symbol if Kito, the name of a Moluccan island and its deity, whose cannibal cult was thought long extinct; even more coincidentally Ridgeway also has a sacrificial knife with the same symbol in her apartment, that is stolen soon thereafter by a burglar who suspiciously takes nothing else.
Note the detaching / reattaching limb and the mark of Kito on the man's chest
The two doctors learn that theirs was no isolated incident, with similar incidents at other hospitals. In each case the perpetrator was from the Moloccas and bore the mark of Kito.
In light of these discoveries Dr Chandler (Ian McCulloch) plans an expedition to the islands and invites Ridgeway along on the basis that her knowledge of the islanders and their culture will prove useful. Also accompanying them are Chandler's colleague George Harper and – in yet another contrivance – his girlfriend, Susan Kelly (Sherry Buchanan), a scoop-hungry newshound who has already gotten on Ridgeway's wrong side with her invasive approach.
A familiar image from Zombie
The plan, Chandler explains, is to first go to see Dr Obrero (Donald O'Brien), an old acquaintance who has spent the past five years in the islands with his medical mission. If anyone knows what is going on it will be Obrero, who should also then be able to provide the expedition with a boat and a guide to take them to the island of Kito itself.
On arrival in the archipelago they are treated courteously by Dr Obrero, though the placing of a severed human head in Ridgeway's bed serves as a reminder that this is hardly safe territory for the white (wo)man.
Obrero's servant Molotto (Dakar, who had performed a similar role in Zombie) is charged with guiding the expedition's boat to Kito.
Engine trouble forces a landing on a nearby island for the night with the plan being to continue on towards Kito come morning. An attack by the cannibalist natives and the discovery of Kito's mark soon indicate, however, that this island is Kito, suggesting that Molotto is either less than competent or has been instructed to try to lead the expedition astray.
More signs of Kito
A series of encounters with the cannibals then thin out the party's numbers faster than Ian McCulloch's hair, before the survivors are saved thanks to a timely intervention by the zombies – creatures created by a certain mad scientist who is also behind the natives' return to their old ways...
Zombi(e) Holocaust is one of those films that was released under an at times bewildering array of titles, including Zombies unter Kannibalen in German speaking territories; the alternate Italian AKA of La Regina dei cannibali; and, of course, the US Dr Butcher MD edit, which cannibalised some footage from yet another film, the aborted horror anthology Tales That'll Tear Your Heart Out. What's most significant here is the way in which these titles emphasise different aspects of the film, presumably to increase its appeal to audiences less interested in zombies than cannibals or mad scientists depending on what happened to be in vogue at any one point in circa 1980-82.
Some of the crude gore and zombie makeup effects
As further evidence of the film's derivativeness we also get the Mountain of the Cannibal God and Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals deus ex machina of the white / non-native woman as primitive goddess motif, allowing for yet more gratuitous nudity from Delli Colli, and composer Nico Fidenco actually reusing some cues from his Black Emanuelle scores.
Despite the title Zombie Holocaust is one of the less apocalyptic example of the filone, with the survivors apparently able to return home pretty much unscathed all things considered and the 'natural' order of things restored. As such the implicit message comes across as a less revolutionary, more reactionary one than most of its ilk, namely that some degree of western exploitation of the primitive is justified by our superiority, but that mad scientist type experiments in creating zombie labourers are going a little bit too far...
Delli Colli appears in the same pose in The New York Ripper
It's also worth noting here that 'obrero' means worker in Spanish. Were the good doctor's enterprising experiments thus a misguided attempt to pull himself into the ranks of the bourgeoisie, to establish himself as master rather than slave? Could there be a longer paper / essay on the Italian zombie film as proletarian revenge fantasy and / or expression of Nietzschean ressentiment or somesuch in this?
[The screengrabs here come from the UK Stonehaven DVD release]
For the driving force behind Zombie Holocaust is plainly producer and co-writer Fabrizio de Angelis who, having bankrolled Zombie a few months earlier, clearly hoped that lightning would strike twice with this rehash / remake that uses some of the same cast, crew, locations and even, on occasion, footage.
The idea being to make as much money as possible out of the zombie and cannibal filone before public interest waned
This wouldn't in itself necessarily be an issue but for the fact that de Angelis's motivations are clearly 100% financial, of the 'leave messages to Western Union' type, and that in selecting Frank Martin / Marino Girolami as director he has a journeyman helmsman concerned with nothing more than giving the audience what they want, in the form of Alexandra Delli Colli's frequent gratuitous nudity and plenty of crude, unconvincing gore, whilst getting the film in the can as quicky and efficiently as possible.
The first victim is disovered
A somewhat obviously latex human torso, curiously devoid of a ribcage
Put differently, it's filone cinema at worst, where hybridisation of ideas, most particularly from the post-Romero zombie and indigenous cannibal sub genres in particular, results less in progress than patchwork / pastiche / failed bricolage; the last term tying in with the film's dubious anthropological elements.
A pointless establishing shot of a car driving off
We opens in New York city, that frequent mecca for Italian filmmakers seeking to take advantage of US locations at the time, with what first appears as a series of unexplained corpse mutilations at a city hospital.
Another victim...
and a nurse's understandable reaction shot
Doctors Dreylock (Walter Patriarca, who also served as production designer) and Ridgeway (Alexandra Delli Colli) lay a trap for the perpetrator, catching an orderly as he is about to take a bite out of a freshly removed heart. Rather than be taken alive, the orderly then leaps out a window, leading to another one of those plummeting dummy moments we all so know and love, complete in this case with an arm flying off only to be reattached when we cut back to the actor lying in a pool of stage blood.
Dr Ridgeway notices a distinctive tattoo on the man's chest, which she recognises thanks to not only holding another degree in anthropology but also having spent her early years on the same islands, the Moloccas, as the man came from!
A static tableaux shot of Delli Colli undressing; the filmmakers don't bother making use of the mirrored surfaces in the room to add a bit of visual interest
The tattoo is the symbol if Kito, the name of a Moluccan island and its deity, whose cannibal cult was thought long extinct; even more coincidentally Ridgeway also has a sacrificial knife with the same symbol in her apartment, that is stolen soon thereafter by a burglar who suspiciously takes nothing else.
Note the detaching / reattaching limb and the mark of Kito on the man's chest
The two doctors learn that theirs was no isolated incident, with similar incidents at other hospitals. In each case the perpetrator was from the Moloccas and bore the mark of Kito.
In light of these discoveries Dr Chandler (Ian McCulloch) plans an expedition to the islands and invites Ridgeway along on the basis that her knowledge of the islanders and their culture will prove useful. Also accompanying them are Chandler's colleague George Harper and – in yet another contrivance – his girlfriend, Susan Kelly (Sherry Buchanan), a scoop-hungry newshound who has already gotten on Ridgeway's wrong side with her invasive approach.
A familiar image from Zombie
The plan, Chandler explains, is to first go to see Dr Obrero (Donald O'Brien), an old acquaintance who has spent the past five years in the islands with his medical mission. If anyone knows what is going on it will be Obrero, who should also then be able to provide the expedition with a boat and a guide to take them to the island of Kito itself.
On arrival in the archipelago they are treated courteously by Dr Obrero, though the placing of a severed human head in Ridgeway's bed serves as a reminder that this is hardly safe territory for the white (wo)man.
Obrero's servant Molotto (Dakar, who had performed a similar role in Zombie) is charged with guiding the expedition's boat to Kito.
Engine trouble forces a landing on a nearby island for the night with the plan being to continue on towards Kito come morning. An attack by the cannibalist natives and the discovery of Kito's mark soon indicate, however, that this island is Kito, suggesting that Molotto is either less than competent or has been instructed to try to lead the expedition astray.
More signs of Kito
A series of encounters with the cannibals then thin out the party's numbers faster than Ian McCulloch's hair, before the survivors are saved thanks to a timely intervention by the zombies – creatures created by a certain mad scientist who is also behind the natives' return to their old ways...
Zombi(e) Holocaust is one of those films that was released under an at times bewildering array of titles, including Zombies unter Kannibalen in German speaking territories; the alternate Italian AKA of La Regina dei cannibali; and, of course, the US Dr Butcher MD edit, which cannibalised some footage from yet another film, the aborted horror anthology Tales That'll Tear Your Heart Out. What's most significant here is the way in which these titles emphasise different aspects of the film, presumably to increase its appeal to audiences less interested in zombies than cannibals or mad scientists depending on what happened to be in vogue at any one point in circa 1980-82.
Some of the crude gore and zombie makeup effects
As further evidence of the film's derivativeness we also get the Mountain of the Cannibal God and Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals deus ex machina of the white / non-native woman as primitive goddess motif, allowing for yet more gratuitous nudity from Delli Colli, and composer Nico Fidenco actually reusing some cues from his Black Emanuelle scores.
Despite the title Zombie Holocaust is one of the less apocalyptic example of the filone, with the survivors apparently able to return home pretty much unscathed all things considered and the 'natural' order of things restored. As such the implicit message comes across as a less revolutionary, more reactionary one than most of its ilk, namely that some degree of western exploitation of the primitive is justified by our superiority, but that mad scientist type experiments in creating zombie labourers are going a little bit too far...
Delli Colli appears in the same pose in The New York Ripper
It's also worth noting here that 'obrero' means worker in Spanish. Were the good doctor's enterprising experiments thus a misguided attempt to pull himself into the ranks of the bourgeoisie, to establish himself as master rather than slave? Could there be a longer paper / essay on the Italian zombie film as proletarian revenge fantasy and / or expression of Nietzschean ressentiment or somesuch in this?
[The screengrabs here come from the UK Stonehaven DVD release]
Friday, 11 July 2008
Virus / Inferno dei morti viventi / Hell of the Living Dead / Zombie Creeping Flesh / Apocalipsis caníbal
We open to the strains of Goblin's driving prog rock, playing over images of a chemical plant. Something is wrong at the euphemistically titled “Hope Project” in New Guinea.
Das blinkenlights
Just how much becomes evident as two technicians discover a dead rat in what is supposed to be a sterile area, before the creature reanimates, climbs inside one of the men's protective suits and bites him to death.
The reanimating agent and the zombies that result sweep through the facilty with alarming celerity until no-one is left alive.
Zombie technicians / technocrats and natives
Professor Barrett does, however, manage to put out a final message, indicating that “Operation Sweet Death” must be considered a failure and pleading “may God forgive us and pardon us for this evil that we have created.”
The next sequence presents a stand-off between a “terrorist” group, who have taken the US consulate hostage, and the authorities, who are preparing to send in an elite four man SWAT team, comprising Lieutenant Mike London and his men, Osborne, Vincent and Santoro to deal with the situation.
The SWAT team
They do so, without particularly worrying about whom they are killing nor the terrorist's demand that the Hope Centres be shut down and dying delivery that they are all doomed, their attentions being more focused on New Guinea vacation they are given as a reward.
The team soon have cause to doubt their masters, find themselves deposited in the middle of nowhere without radio contact: “You can always count on the government for a perfect example of organisation,” as London says. (Coincidentally the SWAT team then proceed by “dead reckoning,” the same name as is given to the battle-bus in Land of the Dead.)
Meanwhile investigative journalist Lia Rousseau – a reference to the enlightenment philosopher and through Romanticism and Emile the notion of the noble savage? – her cameraman Max, and the family with whom they are travelling – the child having been bitten and succuming rapidly to zombification – encounter some of the flesh eaters in an otherwise deserted settlement.
The zombie child; is it just me or are zombie children and elderly under-represented within the genre?
The SWAT team arrive in time to save the filmmakers, although this poses them with a dilemma. For the nature of their secret mission, any notion of a vacation forgotten in what could either be taken as careless writing or anothercomment on official duplicity, is such that they cannot allow any witnesses to live.
Fortunately for Lisa and Max, who are here to investigate the rumours around the Hope Centre, the ever growing number of zombies provide a bigger threat to everyone for the time being...
The greatest difficulty in writing about Hell of the Living Dead is that no description can really be adequate to it, as the kind of special film which really needs to be experienced for oneself.
Directed by Bruno Mattei under his Vincent Dawn alias – the surname of course further cuing us in to the film's main inspiration, Dawn of the Dead – and written by his long-term partner in crime Claudio Fragasso, the film is nothing if not entertaining, albeit with the likelihood that you will be laughing more than anything else.
Combining the zombie and mondo filone, the film's highlights include masses of poorly integrated stock footage of animals not native to New Guinea, like elephants and jerboa, much derived from Barbet Schroeder's documentary The Valley Beyond the Clouds; characters who quickly establish that the only way to stop the zombies is by shooting them in the head Romero-style but nevertheless persistently fail to pursue this approach; a spot of dubious anthropology as Lia strips down to her thong and paints herself in order to befriend a native tribe; and a near-deserted lecture theatre seeing service as a United Nations debating chamber.
The debating chamber
At the same time, however, there's a certain idiot-savant quality to the last of these, suggesting as it does that the first world really does not care about the third except for when it is understood as a problem for the west, in line with film's discourse around population control and the way in which first world's attempts to deal with this via the ironically named Hope centres becomes an issue only at the point when it it threatens to go out of control and cause a fatal PR disaster.
The message seems to be that having the population of New Guinea or other third world country consume themselves is fine, but having the same happen in the US, whose population, per head, consume far more than their equitable share, is not.
In this regard, one also wonders if the film's recycling of ideas, music and footage from other productions could in itself be taken as a gesture in the direction of an ecologically friendly approach to filmmaking or as a comment on the inherently cannibalistic nature of Italian filone production itself. Probably not, in all honesty, but intriguing possibilities nonetheless.
The whole media aspect is also surprisingly well handled, conveying confusion, disbelief, the suppression of information and the dubious self-interest of the reporter in a manner that actually predates the recent Diary of the Dead at times, even as elsewhere – a talking head scientist indicating how a cadaver with all four limbs removed still reanimated – the film's sullo stesso filone Dawn of the Dead origins are again being highlighted.
Given that it was borrowed from other films – Romero's, Beyond the Darkness and Contamination – Goblin's music is actually rather well used, rarely feeling out of place and highlighting Mattei's long experience as an editor.
Yes, this is a man in a top hat and tutu doing a dance routine as zombies close in
The performances are over the top but impossible to assess beyond this on account of the dubbing. It doesn't really matter though, inasmuch as the two combine to impart a live cartoon or comic book like feel, with this impression further enhanced by the frequent what-the moments, the best of which is perhaps one character's donning a top hat and tutu and doing a singing in the rain routine – without regard for the small detail of being in a house surrounded by zombies at the time.
Two acceptable faces of exploitation cinema
And a less acceptable one – how would the filmmaker or viewer feel if this were their child?
Gore fans will not be disappointed by Hell of the Living Dead, though there is a clear split between the harmless comic book zombie splatter material, which culminates in one victim having their tongue torn out and the zombie them forcing their eyeballs out from the inside, and the more exploitative and distasteful footage of native practices, apparently derived from Akira Ide's 1974 mondo movie Nuova Guinea: Isola Dei Cannibali.
Das blinkenlights
Just how much becomes evident as two technicians discover a dead rat in what is supposed to be a sterile area, before the creature reanimates, climbs inside one of the men's protective suits and bites him to death.
The reanimating agent and the zombies that result sweep through the facilty with alarming celerity until no-one is left alive.
Zombie technicians / technocrats and natives
Professor Barrett does, however, manage to put out a final message, indicating that “Operation Sweet Death” must be considered a failure and pleading “may God forgive us and pardon us for this evil that we have created.”
The next sequence presents a stand-off between a “terrorist” group, who have taken the US consulate hostage, and the authorities, who are preparing to send in an elite four man SWAT team, comprising Lieutenant Mike London and his men, Osborne, Vincent and Santoro to deal with the situation.
The SWAT team
They do so, without particularly worrying about whom they are killing nor the terrorist's demand that the Hope Centres be shut down and dying delivery that they are all doomed, their attentions being more focused on New Guinea vacation they are given as a reward.
The team soon have cause to doubt their masters, find themselves deposited in the middle of nowhere without radio contact: “You can always count on the government for a perfect example of organisation,” as London says. (Coincidentally the SWAT team then proceed by “dead reckoning,” the same name as is given to the battle-bus in Land of the Dead.)
Meanwhile investigative journalist Lia Rousseau – a reference to the enlightenment philosopher and through Romanticism and Emile the notion of the noble savage? – her cameraman Max, and the family with whom they are travelling – the child having been bitten and succuming rapidly to zombification – encounter some of the flesh eaters in an otherwise deserted settlement.
The zombie child; is it just me or are zombie children and elderly under-represented within the genre?
The SWAT team arrive in time to save the filmmakers, although this poses them with a dilemma. For the nature of their secret mission, any notion of a vacation forgotten in what could either be taken as careless writing or anothercomment on official duplicity, is such that they cannot allow any witnesses to live.
Fortunately for Lisa and Max, who are here to investigate the rumours around the Hope Centre, the ever growing number of zombies provide a bigger threat to everyone for the time being...
The greatest difficulty in writing about Hell of the Living Dead is that no description can really be adequate to it, as the kind of special film which really needs to be experienced for oneself.
Directed by Bruno Mattei under his Vincent Dawn alias – the surname of course further cuing us in to the film's main inspiration, Dawn of the Dead – and written by his long-term partner in crime Claudio Fragasso, the film is nothing if not entertaining, albeit with the likelihood that you will be laughing more than anything else.
Combining the zombie and mondo filone, the film's highlights include masses of poorly integrated stock footage of animals not native to New Guinea, like elephants and jerboa, much derived from Barbet Schroeder's documentary The Valley Beyond the Clouds; characters who quickly establish that the only way to stop the zombies is by shooting them in the head Romero-style but nevertheless persistently fail to pursue this approach; a spot of dubious anthropology as Lia strips down to her thong and paints herself in order to befriend a native tribe; and a near-deserted lecture theatre seeing service as a United Nations debating chamber.
The debating chamber
At the same time, however, there's a certain idiot-savant quality to the last of these, suggesting as it does that the first world really does not care about the third except for when it is understood as a problem for the west, in line with film's discourse around population control and the way in which first world's attempts to deal with this via the ironically named Hope centres becomes an issue only at the point when it it threatens to go out of control and cause a fatal PR disaster.
The message seems to be that having the population of New Guinea or other third world country consume themselves is fine, but having the same happen in the US, whose population, per head, consume far more than their equitable share, is not.
In this regard, one also wonders if the film's recycling of ideas, music and footage from other productions could in itself be taken as a gesture in the direction of an ecologically friendly approach to filmmaking or as a comment on the inherently cannibalistic nature of Italian filone production itself. Probably not, in all honesty, but intriguing possibilities nonetheless.
The whole media aspect is also surprisingly well handled, conveying confusion, disbelief, the suppression of information and the dubious self-interest of the reporter in a manner that actually predates the recent Diary of the Dead at times, even as elsewhere – a talking head scientist indicating how a cadaver with all four limbs removed still reanimated – the film's sullo stesso filone Dawn of the Dead origins are again being highlighted.
Given that it was borrowed from other films – Romero's, Beyond the Darkness and Contamination – Goblin's music is actually rather well used, rarely feeling out of place and highlighting Mattei's long experience as an editor.
Yes, this is a man in a top hat and tutu doing a dance routine as zombies close in
The performances are over the top but impossible to assess beyond this on account of the dubbing. It doesn't really matter though, inasmuch as the two combine to impart a live cartoon or comic book like feel, with this impression further enhanced by the frequent what-the moments, the best of which is perhaps one character's donning a top hat and tutu and doing a singing in the rain routine – without regard for the small detail of being in a house surrounded by zombies at the time.
Two acceptable faces of exploitation cinema
And a less acceptable one – how would the filmmaker or viewer feel if this were their child?
Gore fans will not be disappointed by Hell of the Living Dead, though there is a clear split between the harmless comic book zombie splatter material, which culminates in one victim having their tongue torn out and the zombie them forcing their eyeballs out from the inside, and the more exploitative and distasteful footage of native practices, apparently derived from Akira Ide's 1974 mondo movie Nuova Guinea: Isola Dei Cannibali.
Sunday, 1 June 2008
L'Isola degli uomini pesce / Island of the Fishmen
1891: en route to an island prison, the French transport the Cayenne is sunk, leaving one member of the crew, ship's doctor Claude de Ross (Claudio Casinelli), with six of the convicts on a lifeboat.
After seven days and nights drifting in the ocean a current catches the liferaft and smashes it to pieces just off an island. In the chaos one of the prisoners is killed by a mysterious creature, assumed by the others to be an giant octopus.
Of those who make it ashore one dies as a result of drinking from a poisoned pool, a third after going off alone and being attacked by another one of the creatures, now seen to be some sort of fish-men, while a fourth falls into a spike-filled pit that almost also does for de Ross.
Continuing on their way de Ross and the two surviving convicts – the superstitious, frightened José and the bullying, antagonistic Peter – find a cemetery with empty graves and signs of voodoo rituals:
“There are zombies here”
“Stop it José, you're talking nonsense. Zombies don't exist. They have never existed.”
The living dead don't appear, which is probably just as well given the range of dangers the island has already presents and those soon to emerge as the real story gets underway after de Ross is saved from a poisonous snake by the timely intervention of the beautiful Amanda Marvin (Barbara Bach).
Contrary to appearance, not a zombie hand
Keeping her distance, she advises the men leave the island immediately. It is the property of one Edmund Rackham (Richard Johnson), who does not take kindly to intruders.
This is easier said than done, however, with the men having little choice but to continue on their way regardless, eventually happening upon Rackham's plantation style house. He proves surprisingly welcome given Amanda's warnings, inviting De Ross to join him at their table while accommodating the two convicts in an outbuilding.
After Amanda leaves, Peter follows after her with rape on his mind, only to be himself attacked and slain by one of creatures.
One of the fishmen
The next morning José decides he has had enough and flees. Rackham says to let him go, but de Ross goes off in pursuit. He doesn't find José but is knocked unconscious by one of the creatures and only saved from certain death due to Amanda's intervention. Awakening back at Rackham's estate, he finds her denying all knowledge and saying he must have been suffering from hallucinations – an interpretation Rackham also seems keen to foster, but which doesn't accord with de Ross's physical wounds.
Just what is going on? Let's just say it doesn't really get much clearer, though with a mad scientist and his experiments (think The Island of Dr Moreau in reverse); the lost continent of Atlantis; a fortune in treasure; a volcanic eruption, and all manner of pulp villainy and derring do still to come, there's is plenty more to keep you entertained.
Johnson's Rackham is a great villain, sadistic, superior, sneering and seemingly relishing every moment of it. Maybe not appearing on stage for Royal Shakespeare Company as Iago or Richard III but somehow comparable in its own little way...
Cassinelli again impresses as a thinking man's action hero, equally adept at using brain as brawn. The one noteworthy exception is when he destroys the mad scientist's greatest / most questionable achievement, where instinctual revulsion takes over and ironically makes him into just about as much of a criminal as those he was once transporting. (“In one moment you've destroyed the results of a lifetime's work. That was the only specimen with full human intelligence!”)
Bach is primarily there as eye candy and love interest and proves adequate to both tasks. At the level of prurient interest the absence of nude scenes, as distinct from wet, diaphanous dress ones, may however disappoint the male members of the audience – especially compared to Mountain of the Cannibal God, where Ursula Andress again displayed her charms.
Note the way in which Martino and Geleng co-ordinate the primary colours of the test tubes to provide a nice little visual touch; it's the kind of thing which shows they care and which helps elevate the film that little bit
Sergio Martino's direction is assured, helping, along with Eugenio Alabaso's crisp editing and Massimo Antonello Geleng's designs (including the fishmen, made with Rocchetti Carboni make-up) to overcome most of the obvious budgetary limitations. There are also some nice underwater sequences, along with a bit of model work and some stock volcano footage.
The dynamics of Rackham's black servants (including Beryl Cunningham as a Haitian voodoo priestess, Shakira) and the fishmen strongly resemble those of the cannibals and zombies in Zombie Holocaust, with 'primitive' practices in both cases having been encouraged by the white colonial master intent on exploitation. (Rackham's boat is ironically titled The Enterprise.)
Zombie, of course, presents a neat through line connecting them thanks to the presence of Johnson there and its sets in Zombie Holocaust. The key words, in line with the origins of the fishmen themselves, are perhaps mutation and hybridity, the thinking presumably that of refusing to stay confined and defined by one filone when three provide a wider palette of ideas and images to draw from.
The film also features some curiously forward thinking / anachronistic remarks for 1891 about the neo-malthusian threat of population outstripping food supply, a theme also seen in the contemporaraneous Hell of the Living Dead with decidedly more apocalytic consequences.
The future of mankind?
The soundtrack further suggests zombie or cannibal connections, with plenty of percussive jungle / voodoo drum type cues reminiscent at times of Nico Fidenco's work.
Mention must finally be made of the film's complicated distribution history in the US: Initially receiving a limited released in a dubbed version, the film was later bought by United Pictures Organisation who, together with Roger Corman's New World, recut it and added in new scenes featuring Mel Ferrer and Cameron Mitchell. This version, released as Something Waits in the Dark, wasn't a success, however, prompting the Screamers retitling and a more exploitative advertising campaign promising that viewers would actually “see a man turned inside out”.
Though they didn't, in truth there was already more than enough for it not to matter. If exploitation cinema is about selling the sizzle and not the steak, as David Friedman puts it, Island of the Fishmen was already a steak, with side dish of onions.
After seven days and nights drifting in the ocean a current catches the liferaft and smashes it to pieces just off an island. In the chaos one of the prisoners is killed by a mysterious creature, assumed by the others to be an giant octopus.
Of those who make it ashore one dies as a result of drinking from a poisoned pool, a third after going off alone and being attacked by another one of the creatures, now seen to be some sort of fish-men, while a fourth falls into a spike-filled pit that almost also does for de Ross.
Continuing on their way de Ross and the two surviving convicts – the superstitious, frightened José and the bullying, antagonistic Peter – find a cemetery with empty graves and signs of voodoo rituals:
“There are zombies here”
“Stop it José, you're talking nonsense. Zombies don't exist. They have never existed.”
The living dead don't appear, which is probably just as well given the range of dangers the island has already presents and those soon to emerge as the real story gets underway after de Ross is saved from a poisonous snake by the timely intervention of the beautiful Amanda Marvin (Barbara Bach).
Contrary to appearance, not a zombie hand
Keeping her distance, she advises the men leave the island immediately. It is the property of one Edmund Rackham (Richard Johnson), who does not take kindly to intruders.
This is easier said than done, however, with the men having little choice but to continue on their way regardless, eventually happening upon Rackham's plantation style house. He proves surprisingly welcome given Amanda's warnings, inviting De Ross to join him at their table while accommodating the two convicts in an outbuilding.
After Amanda leaves, Peter follows after her with rape on his mind, only to be himself attacked and slain by one of creatures.
One of the fishmen
The next morning José decides he has had enough and flees. Rackham says to let him go, but de Ross goes off in pursuit. He doesn't find José but is knocked unconscious by one of the creatures and only saved from certain death due to Amanda's intervention. Awakening back at Rackham's estate, he finds her denying all knowledge and saying he must have been suffering from hallucinations – an interpretation Rackham also seems keen to foster, but which doesn't accord with de Ross's physical wounds.
Just what is going on? Let's just say it doesn't really get much clearer, though with a mad scientist and his experiments (think The Island of Dr Moreau in reverse); the lost continent of Atlantis; a fortune in treasure; a volcanic eruption, and all manner of pulp villainy and derring do still to come, there's is plenty more to keep you entertained.
Johnson's Rackham is a great villain, sadistic, superior, sneering and seemingly relishing every moment of it. Maybe not appearing on stage for Royal Shakespeare Company as Iago or Richard III but somehow comparable in its own little way...
Cassinelli again impresses as a thinking man's action hero, equally adept at using brain as brawn. The one noteworthy exception is when he destroys the mad scientist's greatest / most questionable achievement, where instinctual revulsion takes over and ironically makes him into just about as much of a criminal as those he was once transporting. (“In one moment you've destroyed the results of a lifetime's work. That was the only specimen with full human intelligence!”)
Bach is primarily there as eye candy and love interest and proves adequate to both tasks. At the level of prurient interest the absence of nude scenes, as distinct from wet, diaphanous dress ones, may however disappoint the male members of the audience – especially compared to Mountain of the Cannibal God, where Ursula Andress again displayed her charms.
Note the way in which Martino and Geleng co-ordinate the primary colours of the test tubes to provide a nice little visual touch; it's the kind of thing which shows they care and which helps elevate the film that little bit
Sergio Martino's direction is assured, helping, along with Eugenio Alabaso's crisp editing and Massimo Antonello Geleng's designs (including the fishmen, made with Rocchetti Carboni make-up) to overcome most of the obvious budgetary limitations. There are also some nice underwater sequences, along with a bit of model work and some stock volcano footage.
The dynamics of Rackham's black servants (including Beryl Cunningham as a Haitian voodoo priestess, Shakira) and the fishmen strongly resemble those of the cannibals and zombies in Zombie Holocaust, with 'primitive' practices in both cases having been encouraged by the white colonial master intent on exploitation. (Rackham's boat is ironically titled The Enterprise.)
Zombie, of course, presents a neat through line connecting them thanks to the presence of Johnson there and its sets in Zombie Holocaust. The key words, in line with the origins of the fishmen themselves, are perhaps mutation and hybridity, the thinking presumably that of refusing to stay confined and defined by one filone when three provide a wider palette of ideas and images to draw from.
The film also features some curiously forward thinking / anachronistic remarks for 1891 about the neo-malthusian threat of population outstripping food supply, a theme also seen in the contemporaraneous Hell of the Living Dead with decidedly more apocalytic consequences.
The future of mankind?
The soundtrack further suggests zombie or cannibal connections, with plenty of percussive jungle / voodoo drum type cues reminiscent at times of Nico Fidenco's work.
Mention must finally be made of the film's complicated distribution history in the US: Initially receiving a limited released in a dubbed version, the film was later bought by United Pictures Organisation who, together with Roger Corman's New World, recut it and added in new scenes featuring Mel Ferrer and Cameron Mitchell. This version, released as Something Waits in the Dark, wasn't a success, however, prompting the Screamers retitling and a more exploitative advertising campaign promising that viewers would actually “see a man turned inside out”.
Though they didn't, in truth there was already more than enough for it not to matter. If exploitation cinema is about selling the sizzle and not the steak, as David Friedman puts it, Island of the Fishmen was already a steak, with side dish of onions.
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