This is the proverbial curate's egg of a film: Good in parts.
The story is straightforward: In the 1970s A British soundman, Gilderoy, is hired by an Italian director to work on his film, where the dialogue (we never see the images) suggests something akin to Dario Argento's horror films Suspiria or Inferno, but which the director insists is an auteur rather than a genre work.
Peter Strickland's direction and writing initially impress. He clearly knows his stuff, whether the faux solarised and rotoscoped titles (think A Bay of Blood); the close-ups of reel to reel tape recorders (think A Lizard in a Woman's Skin and Deep Red); the black leather gloved hand (think just about any giallo) that starts the projector running, or the red telephone (think Blood and Black Lace) used by a receptionist.
If you're a fan of gialli and horror all'italiana (likely for readers of this blog) you'll enjoy playing spot the possible hommage or intertext , whether Clap You're Dead, Closed Circuit, Watch Me When I Kill. If you're not a lot of the imagery and dialogue will simply go past you.
The big problem with the film (besides the absence of the J&B or Punt e mes bottle) is that that it doesn't really go anywhere. Weird shit happens to Gilderoy, much as weird shit happens to Suzy Banyon in Suspiria, but it is not developed.
The two things that rescue the film are the performance by Toby Jones, as someone far removed from the typical male lead, and the attention paid to sound design. Michel Chion would love this film, with its exposure of tricking the ear techniques.
Showing posts with label horror. Show all posts
Showing posts with label horror. Show all posts
Tuesday, 26 June 2012
Tuesday, 14 June 2011
Fase 7 / Phase 7
In a 1959 Cahiers du cinema essay entitled Little Subjects, critic and new wave filmmaker Claude Chabrol contrasted two imaginary films, on ‘The Apocalypse of Our Time’ and ‘The Quarrel Between Our Neighbours’, or on big and the small subject. Chabrol suggested that the two paradigms were structurally more similar than might first be apparent and that, contrary to appearances, the small subject was actually the richer, in that it allowed the filmmaker scope to explore form and content alike.
I mention this because Fase 7 could be taken as a test case for Chabrol's thesis some half a century on. For while being about a big subject, namely a mysterious plague sweeping the globe and bringing about the end of the world as we know it, it takes a small subject approach by focusing upon a young couple expecting their first child and four or five other families living in their Buenos Aires apartment block.
In terms of content, it thus has obvious affinities with the likes of [Rec] and Shivers, but downplays the horror angle and plays up the human drama. It is also somewhat more plausible in terms of the details of the plague itself: Those who contract it seem to sicken and die, but don't turn into homicidal maniac zombie-types in a matter of minutes.
This also contributes to the deliberate weakening of the horror film's traditional us/them human/monster division. These are all just more or less ordinary people trapped in an extraordinary situation, understandably suspicious of one another's equally understandable motives. Everyone has their reasons, as Renoir’s The Rules of the Game famously puts it.
The most interesting characters amongst the small ensemble are father-to-be Coco and the enigmatic Horacio. Depending on perspective, Horacio is either a conspiracy-theory advancing survivalist paranoiac or the one who best understands the situation and how to deal with it.Coco, meanwhile, displays an understandable scepticism at his neighbour’s seemingly far-fetched theories and is, particularly by generic standards, unusually reluctant to become a gun-toting survivalist type.
The relationship between Coco and his wife Pipi is less developed over the course of the narrative, however. Being heavily pregnant, she remains in the family’s apartment for most of the duration, deliberately kept apart from what is going on elsewhere in the block; here, however, it should be noted that no-one really knows what is going on in the wider world as communication quickly break down.
This is mirrored formally by the transformation of the interior spaces as they become increasingly dark and threatening, occasionally lit only with eerily glowing blue-purple ultraviolet and green glow-stick lights. While the film is not devoid of gore, the latter also allows for a nicely parodic action scene as characters blaze away at one another apparently ineffectually – or at least ineffectually by conventional film standards, if not those pertaining within the film’s particular world.
There are a few flaws. The opening scene of the couple’s quiet supermarket trip suddenly being replaced with panic-buying mobs seems a bit sudden, for instance, as does a jump of a number of days signalled by Coco's suddenly acquiring a beard. But thanks to the general levels of intelligence evident behind and in front of the camera, it works far more often than not.
The comfortable-enough middle class world presented helps internationalise the production, beyond its global pandemic narrative, while the presence of Guillermo Del Toro favourite Federico Luppi and a John Carpenter-esque soundtrack are further plusses.
I mention this because Fase 7 could be taken as a test case for Chabrol's thesis some half a century on. For while being about a big subject, namely a mysterious plague sweeping the globe and bringing about the end of the world as we know it, it takes a small subject approach by focusing upon a young couple expecting their first child and four or five other families living in their Buenos Aires apartment block.
In terms of content, it thus has obvious affinities with the likes of [Rec] and Shivers, but downplays the horror angle and plays up the human drama. It is also somewhat more plausible in terms of the details of the plague itself: Those who contract it seem to sicken and die, but don't turn into homicidal maniac zombie-types in a matter of minutes.
This also contributes to the deliberate weakening of the horror film's traditional us/them human/monster division. These are all just more or less ordinary people trapped in an extraordinary situation, understandably suspicious of one another's equally understandable motives. Everyone has their reasons, as Renoir’s The Rules of the Game famously puts it.
The most interesting characters amongst the small ensemble are father-to-be Coco and the enigmatic Horacio. Depending on perspective, Horacio is either a conspiracy-theory advancing survivalist paranoiac or the one who best understands the situation and how to deal with it.Coco, meanwhile, displays an understandable scepticism at his neighbour’s seemingly far-fetched theories and is, particularly by generic standards, unusually reluctant to become a gun-toting survivalist type.
The relationship between Coco and his wife Pipi is less developed over the course of the narrative, however. Being heavily pregnant, she remains in the family’s apartment for most of the duration, deliberately kept apart from what is going on elsewhere in the block; here, however, it should be noted that no-one really knows what is going on in the wider world as communication quickly break down.
This is mirrored formally by the transformation of the interior spaces as they become increasingly dark and threatening, occasionally lit only with eerily glowing blue-purple ultraviolet and green glow-stick lights. While the film is not devoid of gore, the latter also allows for a nicely parodic action scene as characters blaze away at one another apparently ineffectually – or at least ineffectually by conventional film standards, if not those pertaining within the film’s particular world.
There are a few flaws. The opening scene of the couple’s quiet supermarket trip suddenly being replaced with panic-buying mobs seems a bit sudden, for instance, as does a jump of a number of days signalled by Coco's suddenly acquiring a beard. But thanks to the general levels of intelligence evident behind and in front of the camera, it works far more often than not.
The comfortable-enough middle class world presented helps internationalise the production, beyond its global pandemic narrative, while the presence of Guillermo Del Toro favourite Federico Luppi and a John Carpenter-esque soundtrack are further plusses.
Monday, 22 June 2009
Vinyan - Edinburgh International Film Festival review
Or Emmanuelle [Beart] and the Last Cannibals?
Horror films have never been that big in the Francophone world. One suspects that the reason, besides the competing discourse of the fantastique, is that they are seen as somewhat déclassé, not serious enough.
As such, Fabrice Du Welt’s previous genre entry Calvaire / The Ordeal was especially welcome for being an intelligent yet unpretentious all-out anti-fantastique horror film.
Sadly the director’s new venture, made in English with an eye on the larger marketplace, proves a disappointment. Maybe it’s mis-marketing, that it’s less a horror film than a character study and an exploration of loss, but if so it’s also a piece of marketing that drew me to see it with expectations that were not fulfilled.
The set-up is simple, and exploitative of real-world tragedy: In the 2004 Tsunami, aid-workers Jeanne and Paul Behlmer lost their son Joshua. Six months later at a fund-raising event Jeanne thinks she sees him in a video surreptitiously recorded across the Burmese border and convinces Paul that they should go find the child. He agrees to the expedition, less from hope than the prospect that failure will give his wife a sense of closure.
The problem is equally simple: Besides being a distaff version of Nic Roeg’s Don’t Look Now in the jungle rather than Venice, there’s really nowhere left for the narrative or the filmmakers to go once the expedition has gotten under way, except towards the inevitable.
Vinyan – a title which refers to lost souls or spirits – is dominated by two visual styles.
The first, seen in the pre-expedition scenes in Phuket, Thailand, is expressionistic-impressionistic man-over-nature stylisation, with obvious symbolic use of red in the manner of its ‘official’ model and the ‘unofficial’ likes of Dario Argento’s Suspiria. (Cinematographer Benoit Debie, who first came to prominence through his work for Argento-fan Gaspar Noe, later shot Argento’s The Card Player). It works.
The second, seen in the jungle scenes in Thailand and Burma, is naturalistic nature-overwhelming green inferno-ism, with minimal ability to use red, is more reminiscent of an Italian cannibal film. It also works, with greater qualifications.
But – that BIG but – there’s little connection nor segue between them. The characters are first in one environment then the other. What thus emerges is that the former was one which could be controlled by the filmmakers, whereas the latter is one that – an impressive Tenebre-style crane shot in a ruined temple possibly an exception, depending on the degree of post-processing trickery involved – could only be endured and responded to.
Beart and Sewell do their best, but their characters’ relationship lacks the sexual(ised) tension of their counterparts in Don’t Look Now, with more T&A from Beart (and / or Julie Dreyfus) also being needed if the film is to work qua (s)exploitation and more cannibal splatter if it to work as an exercise in gore.
The denouement, with its (s)mothering maternal monster and white goddess allusions to the likes of Mountain of the Cannibal God and Zombie Holocaust also proves more laughable than anything else. “The horror, the horror,” indeed...
In sum Vinyan is a film which, contra Calvaire, sees pretension override generic intelligence.
Horror films have never been that big in the Francophone world. One suspects that the reason, besides the competing discourse of the fantastique, is that they are seen as somewhat déclassé, not serious enough.
As such, Fabrice Du Welt’s previous genre entry Calvaire / The Ordeal was especially welcome for being an intelligent yet unpretentious all-out anti-fantastique horror film.
Sadly the director’s new venture, made in English with an eye on the larger marketplace, proves a disappointment. Maybe it’s mis-marketing, that it’s less a horror film than a character study and an exploration of loss, but if so it’s also a piece of marketing that drew me to see it with expectations that were not fulfilled.
The set-up is simple, and exploitative of real-world tragedy: In the 2004 Tsunami, aid-workers Jeanne and Paul Behlmer lost their son Joshua. Six months later at a fund-raising event Jeanne thinks she sees him in a video surreptitiously recorded across the Burmese border and convinces Paul that they should go find the child. He agrees to the expedition, less from hope than the prospect that failure will give his wife a sense of closure.
The problem is equally simple: Besides being a distaff version of Nic Roeg’s Don’t Look Now in the jungle rather than Venice, there’s really nowhere left for the narrative or the filmmakers to go once the expedition has gotten under way, except towards the inevitable.
Vinyan – a title which refers to lost souls or spirits – is dominated by two visual styles.
The first, seen in the pre-expedition scenes in Phuket, Thailand, is expressionistic-impressionistic man-over-nature stylisation, with obvious symbolic use of red in the manner of its ‘official’ model and the ‘unofficial’ likes of Dario Argento’s Suspiria. (Cinematographer Benoit Debie, who first came to prominence through his work for Argento-fan Gaspar Noe, later shot Argento’s The Card Player). It works.
The second, seen in the jungle scenes in Thailand and Burma, is naturalistic nature-overwhelming green inferno-ism, with minimal ability to use red, is more reminiscent of an Italian cannibal film. It also works, with greater qualifications.
But – that BIG but – there’s little connection nor segue between them. The characters are first in one environment then the other. What thus emerges is that the former was one which could be controlled by the filmmakers, whereas the latter is one that – an impressive Tenebre-style crane shot in a ruined temple possibly an exception, depending on the degree of post-processing trickery involved – could only be endured and responded to.
Beart and Sewell do their best, but their characters’ relationship lacks the sexual(ised) tension of their counterparts in Don’t Look Now, with more T&A from Beart (and / or Julie Dreyfus) also being needed if the film is to work qua (s)exploitation and more cannibal splatter if it to work as an exercise in gore.
The denouement, with its (s)mothering maternal monster and white goddess allusions to the likes of Mountain of the Cannibal God and Zombie Holocaust also proves more laughable than anything else. “The horror, the horror,” indeed...
In sum Vinyan is a film which, contra Calvaire, sees pretension override generic intelligence.
Monday, 30 March 2009
Un Fiocco nero per Deborah / A Black Ribbon for Deborah / The Torment / Deborah
This is one of those more aspirational examples of the supernatural thriller which, while welcome for generally eschewing the usual black-gloved elements in favour of character driven drama, never quite manages to amount to more than the sum of its parts.
We open in a circus, the ideal introductory location for its combination of the spectacular, the carnivalesque and the uncanny. Here it is established that Deborah Lagrange (Marina Malfatti) has some sort of supernatural powers as she predicts, or more ominously precipitates, a trapeze artist's fall.
The theme of science versus magic is neatly developed over the next few sequences, as we learn that Deborah is desperate to have a baby but cannot conceive - according to her gynaecologist, it would need "a miracle" - and are introduced to her husband Michel, a physicist who apparently refuses to believe that God would play dice, and their friend, a parapsychologist more attuned to such possibilities.
The theme soon becomes more than just a matter for friendly discussions between rivals as, following an car accident involving a pregnant woman and her husband, Deborah falls pregnant. While Michel is naturally overjoyed at - not least because what he has felt to be his wife's obsessive and impossible desire has threatened to drive a rift between them, as evidenced by his remarks to his conveniently young and attractive assistant - the gynaecologist insists that the pregnancy is not real and merely a phantom, a self-delusion brought about by Deborah's will to believe...
There's not getting away from the fact, as immediately established by Marina Malfatti's pixie style cut, that A Black Ribbon for Deborah owes a lot to Rosemary's Baby in its paranoid exploration of pregnancy.
If this palimpsestic phantom haunting the text in itself isn't anything unusual within the Italian cinema if we also think of the likes of Francesco Barilli's The Perfume of the Lady in Black and Sergio Martino's All the Colours of the Dark, the issue is that writer-director Marcello Andrei's work can't quite compete with Barilli's film as art nor with Martino's as an example of the filone.
Nevertheless, these are also two films which set the standard relatively high - Barilli's film possibly even managing to exert an influence on Polanski's The Tenant and certainly rising above the level of mere imitation - with Andrei also clearly trying his hardest to do something out of the ordinary.
Though it's hard to be sure how well the version under review reflected the original's framing, with the aspect ratio, at somewhere between 1.77:1 and 1.85:1 could have been correct but looked more likely to have been cropped from a wider screen source, the compositions still made good use of the screen space to convey the emotional closeness or distance between characters.
Andrei also makes nice symbolic use of the colour yellow and of more showy techniques - dissolves, canted angles, circling and hand-held camera etc. - to effectively convey Deborah's subjective states.
While readable as a more or less textbook application of Koven's notion of a vernacular poetry of the giallo, this is also an unusual example in not being connected to the giallo or horror "violence number" specifically and, in conveying a shared neurotic rather than psychotic state, is arguably closer to Pasolini's original model.
That Andrei should have striven to do something different and succeeded, albeit to a limited degree, is perhaps not surprising when we look at his somewhat mysterious filmography in a bit more detail: making his debut with the documentary Archipeligo di fuoco in 1957, he scripted and directed his first fiction film, Eye of the Needle, in 1963. Nothing further was forthcoming until 1974 when he wrote and directed what was to be the first of four films in as many years, Verginata. Then, after the 1977 western El macho, he disappeared from view until 1988, when his last film, another documentary, Aurora Express was released.
Nor is the film without other points of interest.
It's pleasing to see Marina Malfatti, normally cast as a supporting character - she plays a victim of the satanic cult in the Edwige Fenech vehicle All the Colours of the Dark, and villains in Emilio Miraglia's gothic giallo diptytch of The Red Queen Kills Seven Times and The Night Evelyn Came out of the Tomb - tackle the lead role for a change. It's still more pleasing that she makes the most of the opportunity and demonstrates that she was deserving of larger and more demanding parts than the eye-candy ones she was more routinely given.
Elsewhere, we also get a nice Cat People derived zoo visit sequence - useful as a reminder that Polanski's film was hardly the first to connect female sexuality to the demonic nor to use suggestion rather than showing wherever possible - and are treated to a unusually diverse score courtesy of Alberto Verrecchia (another somewhat enigmatic figure with only five film credits, all between 1973 and 1975, to his name) that makes the most of free-jazz styled sax squalls and honks as counterpoint to the animal noises in the selfsame zoo sequence.
We open in a circus, the ideal introductory location for its combination of the spectacular, the carnivalesque and the uncanny. Here it is established that Deborah Lagrange (Marina Malfatti) has some sort of supernatural powers as she predicts, or more ominously precipitates, a trapeze artist's fall.
The theme of science versus magic is neatly developed over the next few sequences, as we learn that Deborah is desperate to have a baby but cannot conceive - according to her gynaecologist, it would need "a miracle" - and are introduced to her husband Michel, a physicist who apparently refuses to believe that God would play dice, and their friend, a parapsychologist more attuned to such possibilities.
The theme soon becomes more than just a matter for friendly discussions between rivals as, following an car accident involving a pregnant woman and her husband, Deborah falls pregnant. While Michel is naturally overjoyed at - not least because what he has felt to be his wife's obsessive and impossible desire has threatened to drive a rift between them, as evidenced by his remarks to his conveniently young and attractive assistant - the gynaecologist insists that the pregnancy is not real and merely a phantom, a self-delusion brought about by Deborah's will to believe...
There's not getting away from the fact, as immediately established by Marina Malfatti's pixie style cut, that A Black Ribbon for Deborah owes a lot to Rosemary's Baby in its paranoid exploration of pregnancy.
If this palimpsestic phantom haunting the text in itself isn't anything unusual within the Italian cinema if we also think of the likes of Francesco Barilli's The Perfume of the Lady in Black and Sergio Martino's All the Colours of the Dark, the issue is that writer-director Marcello Andrei's work can't quite compete with Barilli's film as art nor with Martino's as an example of the filone.
Nevertheless, these are also two films which set the standard relatively high - Barilli's film possibly even managing to exert an influence on Polanski's The Tenant and certainly rising above the level of mere imitation - with Andrei also clearly trying his hardest to do something out of the ordinary.
Though it's hard to be sure how well the version under review reflected the original's framing, with the aspect ratio, at somewhere between 1.77:1 and 1.85:1 could have been correct but looked more likely to have been cropped from a wider screen source, the compositions still made good use of the screen space to convey the emotional closeness or distance between characters.
Andrei also makes nice symbolic use of the colour yellow and of more showy techniques - dissolves, canted angles, circling and hand-held camera etc. - to effectively convey Deborah's subjective states.
While readable as a more or less textbook application of Koven's notion of a vernacular poetry of the giallo, this is also an unusual example in not being connected to the giallo or horror "violence number" specifically and, in conveying a shared neurotic rather than psychotic state, is arguably closer to Pasolini's original model.
That Andrei should have striven to do something different and succeeded, albeit to a limited degree, is perhaps not surprising when we look at his somewhat mysterious filmography in a bit more detail: making his debut with the documentary Archipeligo di fuoco in 1957, he scripted and directed his first fiction film, Eye of the Needle, in 1963. Nothing further was forthcoming until 1974 when he wrote and directed what was to be the first of four films in as many years, Verginata. Then, after the 1977 western El macho, he disappeared from view until 1988, when his last film, another documentary, Aurora Express was released.
Nor is the film without other points of interest.
It's pleasing to see Marina Malfatti, normally cast as a supporting character - she plays a victim of the satanic cult in the Edwige Fenech vehicle All the Colours of the Dark, and villains in Emilio Miraglia's gothic giallo diptytch of The Red Queen Kills Seven Times and The Night Evelyn Came out of the Tomb - tackle the lead role for a change. It's still more pleasing that she makes the most of the opportunity and demonstrates that she was deserving of larger and more demanding parts than the eye-candy ones she was more routinely given.
Elsewhere, we also get a nice Cat People derived zoo visit sequence - useful as a reminder that Polanski's film was hardly the first to connect female sexuality to the demonic nor to use suggestion rather than showing wherever possible - and are treated to a unusually diverse score courtesy of Alberto Verrecchia (another somewhat enigmatic figure with only five film credits, all between 1973 and 1975, to his name) that makes the most of free-jazz styled sax squalls and honks as counterpoint to the animal noises in the selfsame zoo sequence.
Sunday, 31 August 2008
Qualcosa striscia nel buio / Something is Creeping in the Dark / Something is Crawling in the Dark
We open on a dark, stormy night on an isolated road that is seeing an unusually high amount of traffic.
Feuding couple Sylvia and Donald Forrest (Lucia Bose and Giacomo Rossi-Stuart) are en route to a party at her friend Helen's, prompting Donald to naturally assume that the two cars which race past them must be other guests.
Director Colucci constantly reverses the angles here, framing Sylvia and Donald in the eerie blue light that dominates much of the film
In fact they are occupied by Inspector Wright (Dino Fazio) and Detective Sam and their quarry, the psychopathic Spike (Farley Granger).
Farley Granger as a rather old juvenile delinquent
Spike reaches the bridge and discovers it has been washed away in the storm and is thus apprehended by Wright. He then starts to turn back towards town with his quarry, advising Sylvia and Donald to do likewise.
They encountering another car heading in the opposite direction, occupied by Dr Williams and his assistant Susan who, despite being on the way to perform a vital operation, nevertheless had time to stop and pick up Professor Lawrence after his car broke down.
With the road back flooded and the water level rising all around, attention turns to a mansion house on the hill nearby.
The old dark house, plus ca change
Once inside, Wright and Williams go to make their urgent telephone calls, only to discover that lines are also down.
Sylvia and Donald continue to argue, with Sylvia also proposing that the group all make the most of the night via an anonymous orgy.
Spike then proves himself to be more than your average psychopapthic killer by improvising an etude on the piano. This has a powerful effect on Sylvia as we segue into a slow-motion fantasy sequence situated in an as yet unidentified room; later on it will prove to be the guest bedroom Sylvia and Donald are allocated.
In the fantasy Spike strikes Sylvia, who then stabs him repeatedly as he grins, undoubtedly plenty of material for anyone wanting to interpret the characters' repressed desires through the lenses of psychoanalytic and / or feminist theories: is this what men are really like? what women are really like? what men really think about women? what women really think about men? what men think women are like?
Intriguingly, however, the ensuing exchange of dialogue again hints at something beyond all this, insofar as both Spike and Sylvia seem to have somehow shared this fantasy and, through it, something of their respective inner secrets and desires:
Sylvia: “Tell me, how does it feel to kill?”
Spike: “Do you think you could really understand? Tied to a thousand fears, a thousand prejudices, a thousand superstitions? No, you live a life full of vanity and compromise. You could be able to understand what it really means to free yourself from all the hypocrisy and stupidity of this decadent world. You couldn't understand that.”
“And why not?”
“Because you're swimming in it.”
As the night continues the irrational and magical side is further foregrounded as discussion next turns to the house's former owner, whose initially covered portrait dominates the room. Apparently Lady Sheila Marlowe died in mysterious circumstances a year ago, not long after being acquitted for the murder of her husband. The information that she was also an occultist and held regular séances prompts Sylvia to suggest trying to contact Lady Marlowe.
The only true mystery is that our lives are governed by dead people?
Needless to say this soon proves to have been a less than good idea given the circumstances...
This 1971 supernatural horror / thriller was one of only two films directed by Mario Colucci and the only one which he both wrote and directed; his other directorial credit is on the 1968 spaghetti western Vendetta per Vendetta, while his list of writing credits is surprisingly, encompassing a total of seven films in nine years.
With Something is Creeping in the Dark also being Colucci's final film credit, one wonders whether he died shortly afterwards; had invested most of his own money in the film in the hope of launching his career, or simply responded to the indifference that met its release by turning his attentions elsewhere.
Yet while the film may not be particularly outstanding or memorable is it not the exactly the worst example of its kind on any count.
Colucci uses all manner of techniques – including slow motion, freeze-frame, superimpositions, rapid-fire edits and subjective camera alongside the more usual zooms and extreme close-ups – and demonstrates a firm grasp of how to generate atmosphere and effect and of ways in which to tell a story visually.
At one point Colucci even turns the camera upside down
Technically the film is likewise accomplished, with production design and lighting dominated by cool blues and brilliant reds, while the presence of Lucia Bose, Giacomo Rossi-Stuart and Farley Granger in the cast imparts a degree of quality and name recognition there as well.
Angelo Francesco Lavagnino – who also makes his only on-screen appearance in the film, minus the Angelo, as the Professor – contributes a simple but effective series of cues, ranging from the percussive polyrhythmic mix of bongos and hi-hat overlaid by shock stabs that heighten the excitement of the opening car chase; through Spike's suitably lush and swooning piano piece, to the piano chords that accompany the séance and sound like they could well be emanating from the pits of hell itself.
The satisfactoriness of the script is more dependent on how generous one is willing to be. For example, we're told that Professor Lawrence was picked up by Dr Williams after his car broke down. Given that Williams were supposed to be racing to an emergency it seems unlikely that he should have stopped – unless this selfsame contrivance is read as another indicator that no-one present here as quite the control over their actions they think, albeit in terms of the supernatural rather than the unconscious.
What this in turn clues us into is that, to the extent it is an example of the European fantastique, the film should theoretically be working via a cinematic rather than a narrative logic. The question here is whether this is successfully and consistently conveyed. While the aforementioned dream sequence certainly works in fantastique / cinematic terms, the mundane nature of the conflict between the police and Spike doesn't, with the filmmakers also failing to make the most of the rational detective type figures encountering a supernatural mystery angle or the Terror Express / Assault on Precinct 13 one of the two coming together against a mutual foe.
Beyond this, it's perhaps also that, for all the technique, the film also feels curiously old fashioned compared to Bava's Five Dolls for an August Moon, as another group of unpleasant characters stranded in an isolated location thriller, and Freda's Tragic Ceremony, as another occult themed horror-thriller. Colucci's direction lacks the sense of irony and self-parody we get in Bava's film, while his set of characters and séance are that bit less hip and happening than their counterparts in Freda's.
The one other area where the film is modern, namely its avoidance of an obvious protagonist with whom we can identify – Sylvia or Donald?, Spike or Inspector Wright? – also hurts it, because we're not given sufficient information to approach them the other way, that they aren't supposed to be rounded flesh and blood characters with whom we might identify as much as the pieces in some cosmic game.
One final point of note is that Something is Creeping in the Dark contains one of the more memorable credits within the Italian horror and thriller cinema, that of Lorenda Nusciak. Appearing as Lady Sheila Marlowe, the actress has a role recalling Gene Tierney's debut in Laura, in that she too only appears on screen in a still photograph. Nice work if you can get it?
Feuding couple Sylvia and Donald Forrest (Lucia Bose and Giacomo Rossi-Stuart) are en route to a party at her friend Helen's, prompting Donald to naturally assume that the two cars which race past them must be other guests.
Director Colucci constantly reverses the angles here, framing Sylvia and Donald in the eerie blue light that dominates much of the film
In fact they are occupied by Inspector Wright (Dino Fazio) and Detective Sam and their quarry, the psychopathic Spike (Farley Granger).
Farley Granger as a rather old juvenile delinquent
Spike reaches the bridge and discovers it has been washed away in the storm and is thus apprehended by Wright. He then starts to turn back towards town with his quarry, advising Sylvia and Donald to do likewise.
They encountering another car heading in the opposite direction, occupied by Dr Williams and his assistant Susan who, despite being on the way to perform a vital operation, nevertheless had time to stop and pick up Professor Lawrence after his car broke down.
With the road back flooded and the water level rising all around, attention turns to a mansion house on the hill nearby.
The old dark house, plus ca change
Once inside, Wright and Williams go to make their urgent telephone calls, only to discover that lines are also down.
Sylvia and Donald continue to argue, with Sylvia also proposing that the group all make the most of the night via an anonymous orgy.
Spike then proves himself to be more than your average psychopapthic killer by improvising an etude on the piano. This has a powerful effect on Sylvia as we segue into a slow-motion fantasy sequence situated in an as yet unidentified room; later on it will prove to be the guest bedroom Sylvia and Donald are allocated.
In the fantasy Spike strikes Sylvia, who then stabs him repeatedly as he grins, undoubtedly plenty of material for anyone wanting to interpret the characters' repressed desires through the lenses of psychoanalytic and / or feminist theories: is this what men are really like? what women are really like? what men really think about women? what women really think about men? what men think women are like?
Intriguingly, however, the ensuing exchange of dialogue again hints at something beyond all this, insofar as both Spike and Sylvia seem to have somehow shared this fantasy and, through it, something of their respective inner secrets and desires:
Sylvia: “Tell me, how does it feel to kill?”
Spike: “Do you think you could really understand? Tied to a thousand fears, a thousand prejudices, a thousand superstitions? No, you live a life full of vanity and compromise. You could be able to understand what it really means to free yourself from all the hypocrisy and stupidity of this decadent world. You couldn't understand that.”
“And why not?”
“Because you're swimming in it.”
As the night continues the irrational and magical side is further foregrounded as discussion next turns to the house's former owner, whose initially covered portrait dominates the room. Apparently Lady Sheila Marlowe died in mysterious circumstances a year ago, not long after being acquitted for the murder of her husband. The information that she was also an occultist and held regular séances prompts Sylvia to suggest trying to contact Lady Marlowe.
The only true mystery is that our lives are governed by dead people?
Needless to say this soon proves to have been a less than good idea given the circumstances...
This 1971 supernatural horror / thriller was one of only two films directed by Mario Colucci and the only one which he both wrote and directed; his other directorial credit is on the 1968 spaghetti western Vendetta per Vendetta, while his list of writing credits is surprisingly, encompassing a total of seven films in nine years.
With Something is Creeping in the Dark also being Colucci's final film credit, one wonders whether he died shortly afterwards; had invested most of his own money in the film in the hope of launching his career, or simply responded to the indifference that met its release by turning his attentions elsewhere.
Yet while the film may not be particularly outstanding or memorable is it not the exactly the worst example of its kind on any count.
Colucci uses all manner of techniques – including slow motion, freeze-frame, superimpositions, rapid-fire edits and subjective camera alongside the more usual zooms and extreme close-ups – and demonstrates a firm grasp of how to generate atmosphere and effect and of ways in which to tell a story visually.
At one point Colucci even turns the camera upside down
Technically the film is likewise accomplished, with production design and lighting dominated by cool blues and brilliant reds, while the presence of Lucia Bose, Giacomo Rossi-Stuart and Farley Granger in the cast imparts a degree of quality and name recognition there as well.
Angelo Francesco Lavagnino – who also makes his only on-screen appearance in the film, minus the Angelo, as the Professor – contributes a simple but effective series of cues, ranging from the percussive polyrhythmic mix of bongos and hi-hat overlaid by shock stabs that heighten the excitement of the opening car chase; through Spike's suitably lush and swooning piano piece, to the piano chords that accompany the séance and sound like they could well be emanating from the pits of hell itself.
The satisfactoriness of the script is more dependent on how generous one is willing to be. For example, we're told that Professor Lawrence was picked up by Dr Williams after his car broke down. Given that Williams were supposed to be racing to an emergency it seems unlikely that he should have stopped – unless this selfsame contrivance is read as another indicator that no-one present here as quite the control over their actions they think, albeit in terms of the supernatural rather than the unconscious.
What this in turn clues us into is that, to the extent it is an example of the European fantastique, the film should theoretically be working via a cinematic rather than a narrative logic. The question here is whether this is successfully and consistently conveyed. While the aforementioned dream sequence certainly works in fantastique / cinematic terms, the mundane nature of the conflict between the police and Spike doesn't, with the filmmakers also failing to make the most of the rational detective type figures encountering a supernatural mystery angle or the Terror Express / Assault on Precinct 13 one of the two coming together against a mutual foe.
Beyond this, it's perhaps also that, for all the technique, the film also feels curiously old fashioned compared to Bava's Five Dolls for an August Moon, as another group of unpleasant characters stranded in an isolated location thriller, and Freda's Tragic Ceremony, as another occult themed horror-thriller. Colucci's direction lacks the sense of irony and self-parody we get in Bava's film, while his set of characters and séance are that bit less hip and happening than their counterparts in Freda's.
The one other area where the film is modern, namely its avoidance of an obvious protagonist with whom we can identify – Sylvia or Donald?, Spike or Inspector Wright? – also hurts it, because we're not given sufficient information to approach them the other way, that they aren't supposed to be rounded flesh and blood characters with whom we might identify as much as the pieces in some cosmic game.
One final point of note is that Something is Creeping in the Dark contains one of the more memorable credits within the Italian horror and thriller cinema, that of Lorenda Nusciak. Appearing as Lady Sheila Marlowe, the actress has a role recalling Gene Tierney's debut in Laura, in that she too only appears on screen in a still photograph. Nice work if you can get it?
Saturday, 5 July 2008
Zibahkhana / Hell's Ground
[This is a review I was writing for another site; though its of a Pakistani film rather than a European one, I thought it was worth posting here because many of the questions it raises are similar to those I often return to again and again in the Eurotrash entries.]
This is a film which poses the reviewer problems. On the one hand, its all too familiar horror morality play territory, as a group of teens go off the beaten track and are punished for their transgressions. On the other, it's from Pakistan, a country not particularly known for its cinema, least of all for its horror cinema.
We open with sights and sounds that could easily be from a Hollywood film: a full moon, a lonely road late at night, a car racing along, hard rock blaring from the speakers.
Yet, looking and listening closer we notice the little things: the Islamabad license plate on the car, the less recognisable language of the song's lyrics.
Something appears in front of the car, causing the driver to swerve and crash. Lightly injured, he gets out and tries to find his bearings. Something attacks and everything goes black...
It's another death on this ill-starred road, but nothing for anyone to be overly concerned about, not least our high school and college age protagonists, a mixed group of four boys and two girls with various types present and correct including the spoilt, privileged Roxy; good girl Ayesha, stoner and horror fan OJ and - least familiar and most interesting - the Christian Simon, a poor boy hoping for a scholarship.
Having scored tickets for a rock concert they've concocted a story about a school trip to get round the more conservative and protective parents like Ayesha's and, equipped with plentiful supplies of dope and music - techno and traditional, depending on personal taste - for the trip, pile into the van and set off on the road to hell.
After being delayed by environmental protestors for a while, the group stopping at a roadside tea shack for some refreshments. The proprietor warns them of the mortal danger should they continue on their current course, but in time-honoured fashion, ignore him until it's too late...
Taken as a horror film Zibahkhana / Hell's Ground is easy enough to judge. The question is simple: do it deliver the shocks, suspense and splatter one would expect? With the filmmakers quoting from the likes of the Evil Dead, Zombie, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Pieces and the Italian giallo, the answer is an unequivocal yes.
Moreover, they also crucially reach beyond these necessary but not sufficient elements, by also giving us credible dialogue and characterisation and performances that actually make us care something about the characters and their fates.
Taken as a cultural document - which, underneath, I would argue that most horror films are, with some of the richest subtexts to be found anywhere in cinema - Hells's Ground is a whole lot more difficult to get a handle on.
Even with - or maybe partly because of - a set of relatively westernised characters such as these, each of whom slips easily between English and Urdu and some of clearly spend more time out of the Pakistan than in it, the contours of the culture and society are just that bit less discernible to the typical Anglophone viewer.
It's difficult to know how far the filmmakers stance is conservative, progressive or a combination of both, and whether this is related - if at all - to the apparently controversial nature of the film within Pakistan, or whether the simple act of making a horror film was itself felt to be a challenge by the establishment.
We're certainly given a set of juxtapositions - traditional and modern, indigenous and foreign / hybridised, rural and urban, religious and secular, Muslim and non-Muslim, science / technology and magic / belief - that offer a route in, but what the non-Pakistani viewer really needs is more of a basic primer and set of comparison points with more familiar western slasher film models.
Thus, to give a list of examples, does telling ones parents that one is going on a study excursion rather than to a rock concert count as a mortal transgression? Does smoking dope? Does failing to go to mosque or to say one's prayers? Does being together unchaperoned with a member of the opposite sex? Does the notion of a masculinised / asexualised final girl apply, especially given that the film's most striking monster, a Leatherface type male figure dressed in a burqa, is clearly transgressing of conventional gender boundaries in the opposite direction the manner of his Hollywood counterpart.
In a sense, however, it's not the filmmakers fault that they cannot provide the answers we might seek: it has again to be borne in mind that this is an experimental movie, doing something no-one had attempted within Pakistani cinema before and that, as such, that it is more about raising questions than answering them.
Moreover, it could be argued that in an age of increasing globalisation, internationalisation and hybridisation of identity that the more important thing is to emphasise the process of working and thinking through these questions instead of pretending we know the answers.
One thing that is clear, however, is that the filmmakers have a genuine knowledge and appreciation for their chosen form, that they have not merely made a Pakistani gore movie to be sold on the basis of its exotic otherness nor gore and grue.
The proof comes from the quoting of the first ever Pakistani horror film, Zinda Laash AKA Dracula in Istanbul and an amusing cameo from its star as the tea shack prophet of doom, along with an extra-diegetic awareness of where Hell's Ground's western backers, Mondo Macabro, are coming from.
Though avowedly celebrating the weird and wonderful of world cinema and marketing their product in those admittedly exploitative terms, Mondo Macabro's genuine commitment to and knowledge of their cinema, their ability to contextualise it so that it makes anthopological and sociological sense, is clear to anyone who has ever watched one of their Eurotika, Mondo Macabro or DVD featurette documentaries.
If the difficulty here is that they and we don't have the hindsight to be able to historicise what Hell's Ground may mean, who's to say that in 20 years time it won't be celebrated as the Zinda Laash for a new generation or as the film which ushered in a new wave of Pakistani horror in its own right?
Recommended for the adventurous horror fan with a willingness to look beyond Hollywood or the current waves of J-, K- and Spanish horror.
This is a film which poses the reviewer problems. On the one hand, its all too familiar horror morality play territory, as a group of teens go off the beaten track and are punished for their transgressions. On the other, it's from Pakistan, a country not particularly known for its cinema, least of all for its horror cinema.
We open with sights and sounds that could easily be from a Hollywood film: a full moon, a lonely road late at night, a car racing along, hard rock blaring from the speakers.
Yet, looking and listening closer we notice the little things: the Islamabad license plate on the car, the less recognisable language of the song's lyrics.
Something appears in front of the car, causing the driver to swerve and crash. Lightly injured, he gets out and tries to find his bearings. Something attacks and everything goes black...
It's another death on this ill-starred road, but nothing for anyone to be overly concerned about, not least our high school and college age protagonists, a mixed group of four boys and two girls with various types present and correct including the spoilt, privileged Roxy; good girl Ayesha, stoner and horror fan OJ and - least familiar and most interesting - the Christian Simon, a poor boy hoping for a scholarship.
Having scored tickets for a rock concert they've concocted a story about a school trip to get round the more conservative and protective parents like Ayesha's and, equipped with plentiful supplies of dope and music - techno and traditional, depending on personal taste - for the trip, pile into the van and set off on the road to hell.
After being delayed by environmental protestors for a while, the group stopping at a roadside tea shack for some refreshments. The proprietor warns them of the mortal danger should they continue on their current course, but in time-honoured fashion, ignore him until it's too late...
Taken as a horror film Zibahkhana / Hell's Ground is easy enough to judge. The question is simple: do it deliver the shocks, suspense and splatter one would expect? With the filmmakers quoting from the likes of the Evil Dead, Zombie, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Pieces and the Italian giallo, the answer is an unequivocal yes.
Moreover, they also crucially reach beyond these necessary but not sufficient elements, by also giving us credible dialogue and characterisation and performances that actually make us care something about the characters and their fates.
Taken as a cultural document - which, underneath, I would argue that most horror films are, with some of the richest subtexts to be found anywhere in cinema - Hells's Ground is a whole lot more difficult to get a handle on.
Even with - or maybe partly because of - a set of relatively westernised characters such as these, each of whom slips easily between English and Urdu and some of clearly spend more time out of the Pakistan than in it, the contours of the culture and society are just that bit less discernible to the typical Anglophone viewer.
It's difficult to know how far the filmmakers stance is conservative, progressive or a combination of both, and whether this is related - if at all - to the apparently controversial nature of the film within Pakistan, or whether the simple act of making a horror film was itself felt to be a challenge by the establishment.
We're certainly given a set of juxtapositions - traditional and modern, indigenous and foreign / hybridised, rural and urban, religious and secular, Muslim and non-Muslim, science / technology and magic / belief - that offer a route in, but what the non-Pakistani viewer really needs is more of a basic primer and set of comparison points with more familiar western slasher film models.
Thus, to give a list of examples, does telling ones parents that one is going on a study excursion rather than to a rock concert count as a mortal transgression? Does smoking dope? Does failing to go to mosque or to say one's prayers? Does being together unchaperoned with a member of the opposite sex? Does the notion of a masculinised / asexualised final girl apply, especially given that the film's most striking monster, a Leatherface type male figure dressed in a burqa, is clearly transgressing of conventional gender boundaries in the opposite direction the manner of his Hollywood counterpart.
In a sense, however, it's not the filmmakers fault that they cannot provide the answers we might seek: it has again to be borne in mind that this is an experimental movie, doing something no-one had attempted within Pakistani cinema before and that, as such, that it is more about raising questions than answering them.
Moreover, it could be argued that in an age of increasing globalisation, internationalisation and hybridisation of identity that the more important thing is to emphasise the process of working and thinking through these questions instead of pretending we know the answers.
One thing that is clear, however, is that the filmmakers have a genuine knowledge and appreciation for their chosen form, that they have not merely made a Pakistani gore movie to be sold on the basis of its exotic otherness nor gore and grue.
The proof comes from the quoting of the first ever Pakistani horror film, Zinda Laash AKA Dracula in Istanbul and an amusing cameo from its star as the tea shack prophet of doom, along with an extra-diegetic awareness of where Hell's Ground's western backers, Mondo Macabro, are coming from.
Though avowedly celebrating the weird and wonderful of world cinema and marketing their product in those admittedly exploitative terms, Mondo Macabro's genuine commitment to and knowledge of their cinema, their ability to contextualise it so that it makes anthopological and sociological sense, is clear to anyone who has ever watched one of their Eurotika, Mondo Macabro or DVD featurette documentaries.
If the difficulty here is that they and we don't have the hindsight to be able to historicise what Hell's Ground may mean, who's to say that in 20 years time it won't be celebrated as the Zinda Laash for a new generation or as the film which ushered in a new wave of Pakistani horror in its own right?
Recommended for the adventurous horror fan with a willingness to look beyond Hollywood or the current waves of J-, K- and Spanish horror.
Friday, 26 October 2007
Der Fluch der grünen Augen / Cave of the Living Dead
Six young women have died in the same small village, known primarily for the caves nearby, in the space of six months. Suspecting unnatural causes, each death occurring at the same time as a power cut, the police dispatches Interpol man Frank Dorin (Adrian Hoven) to conduct an undercover investigation.
Dorin arrives not a moment to soon – or just a moment too late – as that selfsame night yet another young woman, the serving girl at the local hostelry, is found dead. The symptoms are exactly the same as the previous victims, the kind that might be ascribed to one of the vampires said to haunt the caves, were this not the 20th century...
Warning Shadows...
Gradually, however, Dorin is forced to accept what we and the village wisewoman already know, namely that there is something to that old legend about the caves being haunted by a vampire...
At this point the question for the viewer and Dorin alike becomes who this might be.
The innkeeper, who perhaps contrived to leave the last victim sans protective crucifix on the night she was attacked even as he proclaims his fear of the vampires?
The doctor who has consistently concealed the truth from the rest of the villagers and acts suspiciously before Dorin? (“You're just wasting your time, there were no murders, you hear, no murders at all”; this said in the manner of someone sounding like they're attempting something akin to a Jedi mind trick.)
Some of the locals / suspects, any of whom could be the Vampyr...
Thomas, the deaf outsider, or John (John Kitzmiller), Professor von Adelsberg's servant, the two men having no fondness for one another?
Or Adelsberg (Wolfgang “Dr Mabuse” Preiss) himself, given that his his and John's arrival in the village six months coincided neatly with the first death?
The Mark of the Devil?
In truth, however, anyone familiar with the terrain will have little difficulty in identifying the guilty party, especially when they recoil from mirrors (“In this house we don't tolerate vanity – I thought I made that clear when you first got here”) and spout dialogue straight from Dracula's phrasebook (“Please treat the castle as your own. Two or three of the doors are locked – please respect that.” )
“One doesn't see a thing,” as Dance of the Vampires puts it
An unintentionally near surrealist composition featuring Preiss
This West German / Yugoslav co-production was originally released under the title Der Fluch der grünen Augen, literally The Curse of the the Green Eyes, and picked up by US independent Robert Gordon for English-speaking territories.
This is not the moon – an unconvincing effects shot
Though the absence of the orginal version and dub for comparison purposes makes it difficult to know for sure, the overall impression one gets is of a somewhat inconsistent, by the numbers piece – you just know the professor's attractive young assistant is both love interest and imminent damsel in distress – that has its moments, very much second-hand borrowings to be sure, but fails to amount to much beyond them.
One notes, for instance, the way in which Dorin's investigation never really concerns itself with the mysterious power cuts and that his ventures into the caverns turn out not to require that night vision apparatus, traditional torches and lanterns sufficing, except for that moment when its use allows for some somewhat gratuitous – if Nosferatu referencing – use of the negative image.
It is also the awkward contrast between the approaches of Wolfgang Preiss, who plays the professor straight and Adrian Hoven, with his self-satisfied smugness suggestive of a more tongue-in-cheek approach also evident in the innkeeper's direct-to-camera address after the serving girl has resisted his blandishments once more (“And what am I left with? Just the wine!”)
Ultimately such moments seem to emblematize the gap between the traditional “it's only a horror movie” approach of the likes of Universal and Hammer and the more modern(ist) “what's only about it” approach of the likes of Hoven's future collaborator Jess Franco. It's not a case of one approach being better than the other, with the likes of the Preiss-featuring Mill of the Stone Women and Franco's The Awful Dr Orlof equally valid responses to the Hammer gothic, more that veteran director Ákos Ráthonyi – or his American interlocutors – might have been better clearly setting out their stall in one or the other camp.
[Cave of the Living Dead is available on DVD as part of Image's Euroshock collection]
Dorin arrives not a moment to soon – or just a moment too late – as that selfsame night yet another young woman, the serving girl at the local hostelry, is found dead. The symptoms are exactly the same as the previous victims, the kind that might be ascribed to one of the vampires said to haunt the caves, were this not the 20th century...
Warning Shadows...
Gradually, however, Dorin is forced to accept what we and the village wisewoman already know, namely that there is something to that old legend about the caves being haunted by a vampire...
At this point the question for the viewer and Dorin alike becomes who this might be.
The innkeeper, who perhaps contrived to leave the last victim sans protective crucifix on the night she was attacked even as he proclaims his fear of the vampires?
The doctor who has consistently concealed the truth from the rest of the villagers and acts suspiciously before Dorin? (“You're just wasting your time, there were no murders, you hear, no murders at all”; this said in the manner of someone sounding like they're attempting something akin to a Jedi mind trick.)
Some of the locals / suspects, any of whom could be the Vampyr...
Thomas, the deaf outsider, or John (John Kitzmiller), Professor von Adelsberg's servant, the two men having no fondness for one another?
Or Adelsberg (Wolfgang “Dr Mabuse” Preiss) himself, given that his his and John's arrival in the village six months coincided neatly with the first death?
The Mark of the Devil?
In truth, however, anyone familiar with the terrain will have little difficulty in identifying the guilty party, especially when they recoil from mirrors (“In this house we don't tolerate vanity – I thought I made that clear when you first got here”) and spout dialogue straight from Dracula's phrasebook (“Please treat the castle as your own. Two or three of the doors are locked – please respect that.” )
“One doesn't see a thing,” as Dance of the Vampires puts it
An unintentionally near surrealist composition featuring Preiss
This West German / Yugoslav co-production was originally released under the title Der Fluch der grünen Augen, literally The Curse of the the Green Eyes, and picked up by US independent Robert Gordon for English-speaking territories.
This is not the moon – an unconvincing effects shot
Though the absence of the orginal version and dub for comparison purposes makes it difficult to know for sure, the overall impression one gets is of a somewhat inconsistent, by the numbers piece – you just know the professor's attractive young assistant is both love interest and imminent damsel in distress – that has its moments, very much second-hand borrowings to be sure, but fails to amount to much beyond them.
One notes, for instance, the way in which Dorin's investigation never really concerns itself with the mysterious power cuts and that his ventures into the caverns turn out not to require that night vision apparatus, traditional torches and lanterns sufficing, except for that moment when its use allows for some somewhat gratuitous – if Nosferatu referencing – use of the negative image.
It is also the awkward contrast between the approaches of Wolfgang Preiss, who plays the professor straight and Adrian Hoven, with his self-satisfied smugness suggestive of a more tongue-in-cheek approach also evident in the innkeeper's direct-to-camera address after the serving girl has resisted his blandishments once more (“And what am I left with? Just the wine!”)
Ultimately such moments seem to emblematize the gap between the traditional “it's only a horror movie” approach of the likes of Universal and Hammer and the more modern(ist) “what's only about it” approach of the likes of Hoven's future collaborator Jess Franco. It's not a case of one approach being better than the other, with the likes of the Preiss-featuring Mill of the Stone Women and Franco's The Awful Dr Orlof equally valid responses to the Hammer gothic, more that veteran director Ákos Ráthonyi – or his American interlocutors – might have been better clearly setting out their stall in one or the other camp.
[Cave of the Living Dead is available on DVD as part of Image's Euroshock collection]
Monday, 27 August 2007
Lo Spettro / The Ghost
Dr John Hichcock is not a well man. Confined to a wheelchair by illness, he survives only due to regular injections from his friend and fellow physician Dr Charles Livingstone. What is worse than his physical condition, however, is his mental one. “Just a living corpse,” and increasingly obsessed with a world beyond this one, Hichcock wears himself out in séances and repeatedly makes suicidal gestures.
Finally tiring of Hichcock's antics, Dr Livingstone and Hichcock's younger wife, Margaret, decide that it would be best for all concerned if he be allowed to die: his suffering will be at an end, while they will no longer have to carry on their affair in secret and will doubtless inherit the considerable estate.
“One day you might regret that you stopped me from killing myself” – Elio Jotta as the sinister Dr Hichcock and Peter Baldwin as Dr Livingstone
One night Dr Livingstone thus fails to give Hichcock one of the drugs he needs, leading to his death. Hichcock's body is interred in the family tomb, and the will read, which presents Margaret and Charles with a nasty surprise, Hichcock having unexpectedly left the majority of his money to the local orphanage.
The two lovers in a not-so secret embrace; the blue light is a recurring visual motif
Worse follows, as the key to Hichcock's safe cannot be found. Housekeeper Catherine, who had earlier acted as a medium for Hichcock during the séances and has a habit of creeping onto the scene at inopportune moments, suggests that it must have been buried with him.
While Hichcock's body is in his coffin (and is in fact decaying faster than usual, on account of his treaments) a series of inexplicable apparitions compel Margaret and Charles to consider the possibility that his spirit lives on and is haunting them...
Despite seeing director Riccardo Freda – billed under his customary Robert Hampton name – reuinted with Barbara Steele and Harriet White and again featuring a character by the name of Dr Hichcock, Lo Spettro / The Ghost is a not so much a sequel to The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock as a reconfiguration.
Compare to the barbershop sequence in The Cat o' Nine Tails
With White again playing the sinister housekeeper that was her stock-in-trade, the main difference lies in Steele's role, less the innocent victim than her more usual victim-or-victimiser role.
The moment of decision – the two lovers' hands and the syringe
The model in this instance, given the Scottish setting, the recurring motif of bloodstains and references into the dialogue to “what's done cannot be undone” would seem to be Lady MacBeth, with Margaret the one who first takes the initiative and makes the fateful decision, but then finding having the greater difficulty in coming to terms with the deed – as much because she is our main point of identification and the primary target of Hichcock's wrath as anything else.
La vedova
While the visible manifestations of Hichcock – the figure at the window that then slowly advances on Margaret, the drops of blood that lead Livingstone to his hanging form and so on – convince, those in which only his voice is heard are less so. This is not, however, perhaps so much a failing of the filmmakers themselves, each manifestation being suitably uncanny / unheimlich, as a combination of the technological limitations upon them at the time and the phenomenological perspective I tend to take here.
In terms of the former, it is the way in which Hichcock's booming voice seemingly emanating from Catherine's mouth as she seemingly speaks in a trance really needs that 5.1 Dolby mix, even as the inclusion of such would then result in further complications if it in fact turns out that Hitchcock's ghost is not “for real” precisely because of the absence of such technology at the time the film it set.
Manifestations of Hichcock's ghost
One point of comparison here is Argento's Trauma, with its exposing the machinery by which medium Aura Petrescu invokes the spirits, as a complex, modern machinery of tape recorders and speakers capable of deceiving the ear in a way that wax cyliners and horns perhaps could not.
Then again, the extent to which we experience sound as naturalistic or artificial is also highly contingent, with it certainly within the realms of possibility that the uncanny nature of the acousmatic voice would be enough of a shock to the Victorian or Edwardian hearing it for the first time for other matters not to enter the equation. One also thinks here of the stories of audiences recoiling in terror from the Lumiere's L'Arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat. The flatness of and absence of colour and sound from the image evidently did not prevent it from seeming real, an indication of the importance of belief that is all the more significant in a fantastique narrative such as the one presented here. (To introduce another relevant Shakespearean reference point, Hamlet, the issue is that of distinguishing between the real and that which only seems to be such, a situation inevitably complicated by the power of belief to here make the supernatural real and / or real in its consequences.)
In terms of the latter, it is all the other sensory information that is not quite brought into play, in that Margaret would presumably have some notion of where Hichcock's voice was emanating from by virtue of her embodiment and the information coming from her entire sensorium – a multi-sensory, cinesthetic approach that the filmmakers elsewhere succeed in evoking / invoking, not least in Margaret and Livingstone's visible and palpable revulsion at the sight and, perhaps just as importantly, smell of Hichcock's decaying flesh.
This is also, however, about the only thing I can really find to criticise about the film.
Production values and performances are good, even with the usual limitations of dubbing, and the filmmakers' evocation of small town Scotland, 1910, surprisingly effective, the shift in locale making it easier for them to convince us of its reality as compared to the London metropolis of The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock or the Paris of I Vampiri.
The character of Canon Owens, the voice of presbyterian morality and a consistent chorus on the action, voicing his and / or the community's disapproval at Hichcock's unorthodox beliefs and experiments prior to his demise, and at Livingstone's staying at the house subsequently, is particularly convincing in this regard.
True, the professional historian could probably find little details that don't quite ring true, but in this it's no different from a Hammer horror film of the same time (are Dracula's Holmwoods in mittel Europe or middle England?), with the general look of the film, with lavish on a budget production design and expressive use of colour and lighting, serving to further strengthen the comparison.
Harriet White's housekeeper creeps up on Barbara Steele yet again
One significant difference, however, is that the physicality of the Hammer gothic would seem to have largely precluded uncanny scenarios. Hammer monsters tended to be (corpo)real and dealt with as such by the savants (i.e. the palpable sexual threat Dracula represents is countered by the prophylactics of stake and crucifix), it being their mechanical thrillers such as Taste of Fear or Paranoiac that are of more interest as a point of comparison for the ontological and epistemological questions of the sort found here.
Do you remember? Is it real or all in her mind?
More importantly for the typical viewer less concerned with such theoretical and metaphysical speculations, there's a care evident in the writing and direction, with scarcely a line or shot being wasted. Note, for instance, how Margaret's admonition to her hisband whilst performing the daily ritual of shaving him, “Don't move darling, or I'll cut you,” prefigures a later razor slashing that still has the capacity to shock. Or take the way in which the opening credits, playing out over a séance, finish up on a skull, as the naturalistic introduction of a symbolic memento mori that will recur, along with a number of other key fetish objects, like the bottle of Dutch gin and the music box, to “bring back memories” in an almost Proustian way.
Again it is not hard to see Freda's influence on Argento, even if the way in which the two filmmakers approach these fetish objects is somewhat different, Freda more inclined to establish significance through words what Argento does through images, the kind of hyper-realistic defamiliarisations found in Deep Red have no obvious counterpart here.
“Out out, damned spot” – will Margaret's hands ever be free of blood?
One question remains: when Canon Owens offers his summing up, that “the Devil is a very real person,” to whom might he be referring amongst the protagonists? Specifically, is the Devil incarnate as woman or man?
The film is available on US NTSC DVD from Retromedia, and comes double billed with Alfred Vohrer's Dead Eyes of London.
Finally tiring of Hichcock's antics, Dr Livingstone and Hichcock's younger wife, Margaret, decide that it would be best for all concerned if he be allowed to die: his suffering will be at an end, while they will no longer have to carry on their affair in secret and will doubtless inherit the considerable estate.
“One day you might regret that you stopped me from killing myself” – Elio Jotta as the sinister Dr Hichcock and Peter Baldwin as Dr Livingstone
One night Dr Livingstone thus fails to give Hichcock one of the drugs he needs, leading to his death. Hichcock's body is interred in the family tomb, and the will read, which presents Margaret and Charles with a nasty surprise, Hichcock having unexpectedly left the majority of his money to the local orphanage.
The two lovers in a not-so secret embrace; the blue light is a recurring visual motif
Worse follows, as the key to Hichcock's safe cannot be found. Housekeeper Catherine, who had earlier acted as a medium for Hichcock during the séances and has a habit of creeping onto the scene at inopportune moments, suggests that it must have been buried with him.
While Hichcock's body is in his coffin (and is in fact decaying faster than usual, on account of his treaments) a series of inexplicable apparitions compel Margaret and Charles to consider the possibility that his spirit lives on and is haunting them...
Despite seeing director Riccardo Freda – billed under his customary Robert Hampton name – reuinted with Barbara Steele and Harriet White and again featuring a character by the name of Dr Hichcock, Lo Spettro / The Ghost is a not so much a sequel to The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock as a reconfiguration.
Compare to the barbershop sequence in The Cat o' Nine Tails
With White again playing the sinister housekeeper that was her stock-in-trade, the main difference lies in Steele's role, less the innocent victim than her more usual victim-or-victimiser role.
The moment of decision – the two lovers' hands and the syringe
The model in this instance, given the Scottish setting, the recurring motif of bloodstains and references into the dialogue to “what's done cannot be undone” would seem to be Lady MacBeth, with Margaret the one who first takes the initiative and makes the fateful decision, but then finding having the greater difficulty in coming to terms with the deed – as much because she is our main point of identification and the primary target of Hichcock's wrath as anything else.
La vedova
While the visible manifestations of Hichcock – the figure at the window that then slowly advances on Margaret, the drops of blood that lead Livingstone to his hanging form and so on – convince, those in which only his voice is heard are less so. This is not, however, perhaps so much a failing of the filmmakers themselves, each manifestation being suitably uncanny / unheimlich, as a combination of the technological limitations upon them at the time and the phenomenological perspective I tend to take here.
In terms of the former, it is the way in which Hichcock's booming voice seemingly emanating from Catherine's mouth as she seemingly speaks in a trance really needs that 5.1 Dolby mix, even as the inclusion of such would then result in further complications if it in fact turns out that Hitchcock's ghost is not “for real” precisely because of the absence of such technology at the time the film it set.
Manifestations of Hichcock's ghost
One point of comparison here is Argento's Trauma, with its exposing the machinery by which medium Aura Petrescu invokes the spirits, as a complex, modern machinery of tape recorders and speakers capable of deceiving the ear in a way that wax cyliners and horns perhaps could not.
Then again, the extent to which we experience sound as naturalistic or artificial is also highly contingent, with it certainly within the realms of possibility that the uncanny nature of the acousmatic voice would be enough of a shock to the Victorian or Edwardian hearing it for the first time for other matters not to enter the equation. One also thinks here of the stories of audiences recoiling in terror from the Lumiere's L'Arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat. The flatness of and absence of colour and sound from the image evidently did not prevent it from seeming real, an indication of the importance of belief that is all the more significant in a fantastique narrative such as the one presented here. (To introduce another relevant Shakespearean reference point, Hamlet, the issue is that of distinguishing between the real and that which only seems to be such, a situation inevitably complicated by the power of belief to here make the supernatural real and / or real in its consequences.)
In terms of the latter, it is all the other sensory information that is not quite brought into play, in that Margaret would presumably have some notion of where Hichcock's voice was emanating from by virtue of her embodiment and the information coming from her entire sensorium – a multi-sensory, cinesthetic approach that the filmmakers elsewhere succeed in evoking / invoking, not least in Margaret and Livingstone's visible and palpable revulsion at the sight and, perhaps just as importantly, smell of Hichcock's decaying flesh.
This is also, however, about the only thing I can really find to criticise about the film.
Production values and performances are good, even with the usual limitations of dubbing, and the filmmakers' evocation of small town Scotland, 1910, surprisingly effective, the shift in locale making it easier for them to convince us of its reality as compared to the London metropolis of The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock or the Paris of I Vampiri.
The character of Canon Owens, the voice of presbyterian morality and a consistent chorus on the action, voicing his and / or the community's disapproval at Hichcock's unorthodox beliefs and experiments prior to his demise, and at Livingstone's staying at the house subsequently, is particularly convincing in this regard.
True, the professional historian could probably find little details that don't quite ring true, but in this it's no different from a Hammer horror film of the same time (are Dracula's Holmwoods in mittel Europe or middle England?), with the general look of the film, with lavish on a budget production design and expressive use of colour and lighting, serving to further strengthen the comparison.
Harriet White's housekeeper creeps up on Barbara Steele yet again
One significant difference, however, is that the physicality of the Hammer gothic would seem to have largely precluded uncanny scenarios. Hammer monsters tended to be (corpo)real and dealt with as such by the savants (i.e. the palpable sexual threat Dracula represents is countered by the prophylactics of stake and crucifix), it being their mechanical thrillers such as Taste of Fear or Paranoiac that are of more interest as a point of comparison for the ontological and epistemological questions of the sort found here.
Do you remember? Is it real or all in her mind?
More importantly for the typical viewer less concerned with such theoretical and metaphysical speculations, there's a care evident in the writing and direction, with scarcely a line or shot being wasted. Note, for instance, how Margaret's admonition to her hisband whilst performing the daily ritual of shaving him, “Don't move darling, or I'll cut you,” prefigures a later razor slashing that still has the capacity to shock. Or take the way in which the opening credits, playing out over a séance, finish up on a skull, as the naturalistic introduction of a symbolic memento mori that will recur, along with a number of other key fetish objects, like the bottle of Dutch gin and the music box, to “bring back memories” in an almost Proustian way.
Again it is not hard to see Freda's influence on Argento, even if the way in which the two filmmakers approach these fetish objects is somewhat different, Freda more inclined to establish significance through words what Argento does through images, the kind of hyper-realistic defamiliarisations found in Deep Red have no obvious counterpart here.
“Out out, damned spot” – will Margaret's hands ever be free of blood?
One question remains: when Canon Owens offers his summing up, that “the Devil is a very real person,” to whom might he be referring amongst the protagonists? Specifically, is the Devil incarnate as woman or man?
The film is available on US NTSC DVD from Retromedia, and comes double billed with Alfred Vohrer's Dead Eyes of London.
Thursday, 3 May 2007
L' Ultimo uomo della terra / The Last Man on Earth
Dr Robert Morgan (Vincent Price) is the titular Last Man on Earth. A plague has swept the world, killing much of the population and transforming the remainder into vampires.
Every day he goes through the same routine, carrying out his undending search and destroy mission against then returning to his boarded up, garlic, mirror and crucifix-festooned home before night falls and the undead, including his former colleague and friend Ben Cortman (Giacomo Rossi-Stuart) gather outside and taunt him to come out...
A faithful adaptation of Richard Matheson's classic 1951 horror novel I Am Legend - the author had a hand in the writing under the pseudonym Logan Swanson - this 1964 Italian-American co-production would seem to have exerted a considerable influence on the imagery of George A. Romero's Dead films and The Crazies, the sequences of gas-mask wearing soldiers pitching bodies into burning pits also being the kind of things that would not look too out of place in a documentary on Nazi atrocities.
Benefitting from a strong performance from a cast-against-type Vincent Price - his sophisticated, suave manner has no place in a world where all that matters is to survive - and good use of the distinctive architecture of the EUR region of Rome, as also seen in Antonioni's L'eclisse and Argento's Tenebrae, The Last Man on Earth is a surprisingly good film that deserves to be better known.
The post-apocalyptic landscape of the EUR
One also wonders if the depopulated world of Tenebrae, as another science-fiction film set a few years into its future - now our past, of course - might not have been affected by a plague like the one depicted here, leading to the emergence of a new, post-human order. (After all, weren't Demons and Phenomena in part Argento's musings on a world where fascism had triumphed and Opera a meditation on the impossibility of love in the era of AIDS respectively?)
Every day he goes through the same routine, carrying out his undending search and destroy mission against then returning to his boarded up, garlic, mirror and crucifix-festooned home before night falls and the undead, including his former colleague and friend Ben Cortman (Giacomo Rossi-Stuart) gather outside and taunt him to come out...
A faithful adaptation of Richard Matheson's classic 1951 horror novel I Am Legend - the author had a hand in the writing under the pseudonym Logan Swanson - this 1964 Italian-American co-production would seem to have exerted a considerable influence on the imagery of George A. Romero's Dead films and The Crazies, the sequences of gas-mask wearing soldiers pitching bodies into burning pits also being the kind of things that would not look too out of place in a documentary on Nazi atrocities.
Benefitting from a strong performance from a cast-against-type Vincent Price - his sophisticated, suave manner has no place in a world where all that matters is to survive - and good use of the distinctive architecture of the EUR region of Rome, as also seen in Antonioni's L'eclisse and Argento's Tenebrae, The Last Man on Earth is a surprisingly good film that deserves to be better known.
The post-apocalyptic landscape of the EUR
One also wonders if the depopulated world of Tenebrae, as another science-fiction film set a few years into its future - now our past, of course - might not have been affected by a plague like the one depicted here, leading to the emergence of a new, post-human order. (After all, weren't Demons and Phenomena in part Argento's musings on a world where fascism had triumphed and Opera a meditation on the impossibility of love in the era of AIDS respectively?)
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