Trhauma

No that isn’t a typo and no this isn’t the 1993 Argento film.

Rather, Trhauma is the actual title of this 1980 giallo-slasher entry from Gianni Martucci and Alessandro (“Al”?) Capone.

The story begins with a prologue, recalling Halloween, Friday the 13th and, indeed, Nine Guests for a Crime: One boy convinces another, who seems to be be blind in one eye, to climb a tree, which he then falls out of with apparently fatal results.

Following this we cut to the present as a group of bourgeois types arrive at a holiday home in an isolated area. Soon two of them, a photographer and his model, wander off to do some shooting. After they become separated, she’s killed by one-eyed jack, now a man.


Less than ten minutes in and we have a naked woman

The others are concerned about her absence, but don’t do anything about it until it’s too late and the phone lines have been cut. As the killer closes in and the body-count rises, we learn some of their secrets, including gambling debts, lesbian affairs and blackmail.


Franco Diogene prepares to enter the pool and the water prepares to leave

Eventually a final girl/woman is identified and a tense extended stalk and chase scene ensues. The abrupt resolution and closing epigram, however, seem more giallo than slasher, bringing things back full circle.

An unpretentious and effective little film that doesn’t outstay its welcome and delivers on suspense, shocks and sleaze and sees the filmmakers make good use of their locations.

Teenage Wasteland

The author of Teenage Wasteland J.A. Kerswell, has run the excellent Hysteria Lives website for many years. That's a reason to encourage you – i.e. cult film fans – to buy this book. For, in the unlikely event that you're unawares of it, Hysteria Lives is an excellent resource on obscure slasher type films and Kerswell is one of those who deserves to get something back from our community.



Within the book, the author shows his in-depth knowledge of the subgenre by referencing not just the obvious titles and film historical points, but also such obscurities as the David Hess directed To All a Goodnight (1980) and the Swedish models-meet-a-maniac entry Blood Tracks (1985).

He starts with the Theatre du Grand Guignol and progresses through silent and classic horror, onto proto-slashers of the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s, taking in the German krimi film and the Italian giallo en route.

Beginning with 1978's Halloween, he then examines the slasher “golden age” of 1978 to 1984 – or Halloween to A Nightmare on Elm Street – on a year-by-year basis, before turning to international and north American developments in the interregnum period before Scream and the rise of the postmodern slasher film.

Crucially, Kerswell also recognises that the self-referential slasher parody was not invented in the late 1990s, but only brought into the mainstream by it.

Teenage Wasteland is attractively put together, with an embossed cover; plenty of illustrative stills and, posters and is even on coloured rather than white paper, with different chapters in different colours (the giallo chapter is, naturally, yellow) and good use of design elements such as pull quotes and boxed facts/trivia.

My main criticism is that I wanted more that was off the beaten track. This is, for me, one of the delights of the Hysteria Lives site: It's watching a film like Derek Ford's Sex Express and looking for further information, and coming across Kerswell's review of it, or reading about the Hugo Stiglitz vehicle Cemetery of Terror on his site and adding it to your 'to see' list.

The difficulty, I suppose, is that broader one between doing a website, where you are not really constrained by space, print costs, considerations of target audience and so on, and a book, where these factors come into play.

After all, your average Waterstones / Amazon customer isn't going to know or care who a Derek Ford is, whereas they will (still) recognise the names John Carpenter and Wes Craven.

Still, give the young slasher fan Teenage Wasteland and, once they get past Michael, Freddy and Jason, they will have plenty of useful places to go next. For myself, meanwhile, it's adding To All a Goodnight and Blood Tracks to that ever-expanding to watch list.

April Fool's Day / Slaughter High

As a late, cheap and derivative entry in the original slasher film cycle, the essential challenge that Slaughter High presents the reviewer with is that of saying something original.

The opening gambit is itself a cliché: The traumatic scene in the past, on a significant calendar date, as class nerd Marty Rantzen (Simon Scuddamore) is horribly disfigured by his jock and cheerleader classmates when one of their April Fool's Day pranks goes wrong. (Haven't these kids seen Pranks or Terror Train?)


Alien brand beer


Blood


Boobs

One of the cheerleaders, Carol (Caroline Munro), then wakes up from this scene just as she is pleading Marty for forgiveness.

It's a spark of inspiration, useful for situating her as a probable final girl alongside placing the film's oft-criticised shock ending within a wider narrative context.

The phone rings. Her agent, Manny (Dick Randall) has a job, but it sounds suspiciously like a porn film. Accordingly she declines and goes to her ten year class reunion instead – on the night of the 31st March and 1st April...

In this we again see the film playing to its strengths, or at least doing what it can to acknowledge and neutralise its weaknesses:

The filmmakers seem to be saying that, yes, they know that their cast are way too old to be playing high-schoolers, and are thus now keen to move things on to their late twenty-something present.

Then there's that Randall was the film's co-producer, got his start in nudie films, and has his office walls lined with posters for the trashy likes of Pieces and Supersonic Man.

Then there's that Munro's shower scene, which allows for the obligatory nod to Psycho and some early use of the stalker cam, is itself devoid of nudity.

Randall and his frequent co-production partner at the time, Steve Minasian, obviously weren't paying her enough for that. (Anyone wanting a giallo/slasher/trash triple threat triptych could do a lot worse than watch this film, Pieces and the Santa Claus slasher Don't Open Till Christmas.)

This said, we have already had some full frontal male nudity courtesy of Simon Scuddamore as Marty. Likewise, before the hour and a half is out we will get also get some exposed breasts courtesy of a couple of the female no-names later on.

As Carol and the others arrive at the now-abandoned high school someone watches them from inside.

With a storm erupting outside, they decide to break into the building to take shelter and have a look around.


Marty as he was - bad hair, glasses, desperate to be one of the cool kids


Marty as he is, with jester's cap, mask and psychosis

One of the jocks jumps out wearing a hockey mask, a la Jason (Minasian was involved with the Friday the 13th series, as was composer Harry Manfredini, who contributes a rather sound-alike score) while someone else makes comments about Halloween.

Again, no sense in pretending that you're original seems to be the message.

The group find a copy of their yearbook and are thus reminded about Marty. They never worry about the fact that no-one else from their year has shown up, but that's pretty much par for the course. After all, the now abandoned school also still has a caretaker on its grounds, or rather had – as he's Marty's first victim, being impaled on a coat hook. Again the inconsistent logic – why does the revenge seeking nerd kill someone who didn't do anything to him – doesn't really matter.

The next to die is one of the group, a jock who drinks some acid-spiked beer and promptly suffers from an exploding chest, Alien style.




Maniac Meets Dawn of the Dead?

While one of the girls goes to have a bath – cue beginnings of idiot plot wanderings around in the dark, getting picked off one-by-one – the others look for a way out. They find they have been locked in. One of the guys manages to get out and to his car, but is then speared from behind by Marty, following which he tops up the bath with acid...

By now we're forty or so minutes in, with an equal number to go and can pretty much predict the shocks and splatter and so forth by the clock: Couple go off to have sex, get electrocuted via metal bed frame; guy goes off to try to fix car, gets a rotor blade to the chest, etc., etc., until the slightly more extended final showdown (most quotable line: “April Fucking Fool, You Motherfuckers!”) and sequel-raising coda.

It was not to be, however, with Scuddamore committing suicide shortly after the film's completion. One very much hopes that it had no bearings upon his actions.

Though US-set the film was clearly made in the UK, with some of the accents veering from one side of the Atlantic to the other. The effects are satisfactory given the era and budget. While the cinematography is perhaps a bit dark in places, this adds atmosphere. The stalker cam work is plentiful and pretty decent, while the direction as a whole is better than might be thought considering that three men are credited with it. Certainly the production values as a whole are at least those of a 'proper' movie, unlike, say, Michael J Murphy's Last Night.

Fright

Or the night before the night he came home...

For what we have here is a film that, released in 1971 and thus a good seven years before John Carpenter's seminal Halloween, plays out a somewhat similar babysitter in peril scenario, albeit in a lower key, almost kitchen-sink manner more in keeping with its British origins.

The babysitter in question is Amanda (Susan George), a childcare student at the local technical college who agrees to babysit for Helen and Jim (Honor Blackman and George Cole), a middle-aged, somewhat shabbily genteel couple who have recently arrived in the village.

Helen proves to be somewhat on-edge, though her concern at this point seems explicable as nothing more than that of a slightly neurotic mother leaving her young child, Tara, in the care of an unfamiliar babysitter in an unfamiliar place:

Amanda: “Is there anything I ought to know, Mrs Lloyd?”
“No!”
“About Tara, I mean.”

It is only later, as the couple drive to what passes for the town's most glamorous night-spot – and, given the drab reality of much of early 1970s Britain quite possibly its only night spot – and meet with their friends that the truth begins to emerge:

Jim: “Do you think she knows?”
Helen: “Why should she?”
“I don't know – something she said about everyone knowing everything.”

That Helen and Jim are not in fact husband and wife and that she is celebrating her divorce hardly seems to warrant this concern, even given the villagers' apparently conservative attitudes...


The maniac's first appearance, reflected in a kettle

Meanwhile Amanda is unnerved by a presence outside, though when her boyfriend Chris (Dennis Waterman) arrives she naturally takes this as one of his horror buff his practical jokes, the practical side of it as far as he is concerned that of getting into her pants in time-honoured slasher film manner.

While the film's discourse around sexual frustration leading inexorably to violence has parallels with Halloween's, we never definitively learn whether Amanda is or isn't a virgin unlike Laurie and her friends in Carpenter's film:


Chris attempts to persuade Amanda to go to bed with him

Chris: “You can't stay a virgin all your life, you know”
Amanda: “How do you know? I might not be one.”
“Ah, well, if you're not this is your big chance.”
“With you?!”

It was not Chris who was lurking outside earlier, however, but rather Helen's estranged husband Brian (Ian Bannen), who has escaped from the asylum where he was being held – yet another echo of Halloween, along with his taking a car to get here and killing the driver in the process, though this is kept off-screen– and is determined to get back his wife and child, whatever it takes...

It is also this aspect that gives Fright more of a slasher than a giallo feel, in that as there's no real mystery or conspiracy angle. We soon realise that Brian is insane, while Jim, Helen and their Doctor friend are only acting in everyone's best interests rather than seeking an inheritance and / or revenge as would typically be the case in a comparable Italian scenario such as The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave.


A nice two plane composition with a fake split screen effect

Whatever the plusses and minuses of this approach, there's little question that the film's makers knew their business and goals.

Director Peter Collinson and co-producer Harry Fine had worked together on the earlier woman-in-peril thriller The Penthouse in 1967, with Collinson again mining similar psycho-on-the-loose territory with Straight on Till Morning in 1972.

This, in turn, was produced in conjunction with Hammer films who had worked with Fine and Michael Styles company Fantale Films on the Karnstein trilogy comprising The Vampire Lovers, Lust for a Vampire and Twins of Evil. Each of these was also made from a Tudor Gates script and featured music by Harry Robertson / Robinson. Editor Spencer Reeve also worked on two of the three Karnstein films, along with a further five earlier Hammer productions.


The Plague of the Zombies

All this is telegraphed by the inclusion of clips from The Plague of the Zombies as the film within the film that Amanda, perhaps unwisely given her state, watches on television – a neat little in-joke that also prefigures Carpenter's interpolation of clips from The Thing from Another World into Halloween.

Joining the dots still further around the British-Italian-US horror circle, The Penthouse starred Suzy Kendall prior to her women-in-peril roles for Dario Argento and Sergio Martino, whilst in between Italian excusions such as The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Torso she also appeared in Sidney Hayers's Assault, a film that with its mystery aspect – who is the rapist and killer haunting the woods near the girls' school? – is as much British giallo as proto-slasher.

George, meanwhile, had earlier appeared in Peter Walker's Die Screaming Marianne, a film also features some giallo-isms of the sort that would become still more pronounced in his later The Flesh and Blood Show – as a British take on The Assassin Reserved Nine Seats or Stagefright locked theatre murder scenario – and Schizo.




Classic 70s rack focus action

And then there's the fact that Cole and Waterman had both recently made appearances for Hammer, the former in The Vampire Lovers and the latter in Scars for Dracula. Indeed, the horror movie episode Chris recounts to frighten Amanda, of a girl being decapitated sounds almost like an out-take from The Vampire Lovers, while Waterman's apparent inability to enter the Lloyd house until invited resonates with Stoker's original formulation of the rules of vampirism and the fate that befell his character's brother in Scars of Dracula.

All this genre pedigree doesn't necessarily mean anything beyond an inherent interest in terms of trivia of course. Fortunately, cast and crew alike deliver on the promise it represents with the result an entertaining and suspenseful thriller that's worth watching in its own right.




Shot and reaction shot, enhanced by sharp editing

Cole and Blackman are the kind of solid professionals that the British theatre and cinema system was so good at producing in its hey-dey, adept at taking any character and presenting them with the same professional finesse.

George, though representative of a more contemporary approach where the female actor's abilities sometimes seemed to count for less than her willingness to strip off, nevertheless likewise acquits herself well.

In this she is also helped by the characterisation provided by Gates, as one that allows for her to express not only one-dimensional scream queen-isms but also an emergent sense of resolve, beginning with the brush-off she gives the too-cocky Chris and continuing, albeit intermittently, to rhw finale with its final girl-style shift from passive to active defence.

The stand-out performance for me, however, was that of Bannen as the madman. By turns terrifying and pathetic, he is always utterly credible, a far remove in this regard at least from the unstoppable, supernatural, archetypal “boogeyman” figure represented by Michael Myers in Halloween.




Bannen at his most threatening; note also the skilful lighting effect

Even more amazing, however, is that it isn't necessarily Bannen's best performance of this type, as anyone who's also seen his turn as the suspected child-molester in Sidney Lumet's The Offence could attest.

Collinson expertly builds the tension up through devices such as the unmotivated cut, camera set-up and movement – why that shot from the top of the stairs, looking down on Amanda at the door? why those hand-held shots in the already cramped space of the kitchen? – and a well developed eye and ear for picking out and exaggerating unnerving details, be it a giallo-style broken doll, a loudly rattling water pipe, or a tapping whose source modulates from a leaky tap to the dark outside and thus prompts Amanda to go investigate.

He also knows when to spring a Lewtonian “bus” rather than a more graphic shock, as in the following scene when a ghost-like sheet suddenly blows across Amanda's face. As an objective image it may not make sense, but as a subjective one it works beautifully to create the desired effect, whilst also hinting at her distracted state and the ease with which someone could have snuck past her whilst her attentions were otherwise occupied.

Not that gorehounds will necessarily be disappointed, with the brutal bludgeoning of Chris following shortly afterwards to demonstrate that Collinson could deliver the goods here as well if he wanted to.

The director also makes interesting use of more obvious subjective camera elsewhere in the film, sometimes presenting things from Brian's point-of-view with Amanda being replaced by his ex-wife, recalling the bizarre masks worn by the killer's victims in Lamberto Bava's Delirium: Photos of Gioia, but considerably more accomplished.

Robinson's music is satisfactory, with no emetic style balladry of the “strange love” sort, though the Ladybird, Ladybird title theme, with its subtle fairytale allusions to the events about to ensue, is sung by one Nanette, perhaps a British equivalent to all those Minas, Olympias and Christys' who so often did the honours in Italian product of the period. There's even a nice bit of Hammond-heavy party music that plays as Jim and Helen get down on the dancefloor, though whether this is Robinson's work or comes off a KPM library sessions album I wouldn't presume to say...

The Toolbox Murders

Though obviously not a European production, this was one of those films which I had long felt was significant from a historical perspective but had never gotten around to seeing until now.

Released in the UK on a double bill with Zombie Flesh Eaters / Zombie it can in retrospect be seen as part of a key moment in the emergence the 'new' horror and of the so-called “video nasty,” with both films subsequently being banned as a result of the 1984 Video Recordings Act.

More recently the 2005 remake / reinterpretation directed by Tobe Hooper – how the mighty have fallen – was of interest for the strange geometry of its apartment block, as something more akin to the witch houses of Suspiria and Inferno than real world architecture, an element which perhaps helps explain how its screenwriters subsequently worked with Argento on The Third Mother.






Ambiguous images of the traumatic incident in the past that compels murder in the present

Returning to the original film, meanwhile, we also have a number of slasher and / or giallo elements.

These begin with the traumatic flashback, soon revealed as motivating the killer on his murder spree, in which a young woman falls out of a car, sustaining injuries that prove fatal; the presentation here is decidedly odd, as the image of the car driving along unexpectedly freeze-frames as the sound of a crash is heard on the soundtrack, following which we get the images of the accident itself.

Significantly the whole is also accompanied by a fire and brimstone type preacher attacking sinfulness and corruption, as the type of broadcast that it seems unlikely the presumably young and fun-loving inhabitants of the car would have been listening to, but which could well express the maniac's attitudes or even be read as part of his subjective reconstruction of this “primal scene”.

Whatever the case, we then return to the more concrete present as the killer, clad in black and wearing a ski-mask, swiftly murders three women in the apartment block that is to serve, like the aforementioned Argento fantasy horrors and Case of the Bloody Iris alike, as the film's predominant location.

The first victim, Mrs Andrews, a boozy middle-aged divorcee, attempts to defend herself with her bottle, but is run through with a power drill.

The second and third, a younger woman, Debbie, and her (girl)friend, Maria, are bludgeoned to death with a claw hammer and stabbed with a screwdriver respectively, Maria also managing to kick the killer in the groin, stunning him momentarily.






Got my black gloves on, got my ski mask on...

Debbie's actions are somewhat strange, perhaps explicable only via the logic of the exploitation film. Arriving home, she prepares to take a shower. Then, having turned the water on, she notices a shape behind the curtain and pauses. It is only some clothes, hanging up. Nevertheless, still clothed, she then steps into the shower to turn it off, then takes off her now wet and clinging white shirt and changes into a different one, apparently completely abandoning the idea of having the shower to thus curiously give us some of what 'we' want to see (i.e. breasts) but not the rest (i.e. bum and bush).

Following this the crimes are discovered and the police, led by Detective Jamison, arrive to investigate, oddly questioning the other inhabitants of the apartment block at the crime scenes and seemingly quite happy for just about anyone and everyone to wander in.

In the process we're introduced to some suspects and red herrings, though compared to the typical giallo there are fewer of both types, with it likely that most viewers familiar with playing amateur detective will have very little difficulty in identifying the guilty party amongst those present; again recalling Case of the Bloody Iris, we've got someone with an intimate knowledge of the building and its inhabitants who has or claims to have a blood phobia, namely the block manager Mr Kingsley (Cameron Mitchell).

As is so often the case in these films the police prove singularly ineffectual however, with a further murder taking place the very next evening along with an abduction.

The fourth murder set-piece provides the nudity that was lacking earlier, as Dee Ann (Kelly Nichols) is attacked with a nail gun after pleasuring herself in the bath (“Take me to your secret world again,” as the man on the love duet playing on the radio sings here). Dee Ann also makes some efforts at self-defence, and at attempting to reason with the killer (“please, put it down – I'll do anything”) though again these are to no avail. (The killer, that is, is not like Leatherface in Texas Chain Saw Massacre 2, for whom sex supplants the desire to kill at a similar moment.)

The abduction meanwhile leads to something of a shift in the narrative, with the identity of the killer and his motivation – the abducted girl, Laurie (Pamelyn Ferdin), reminds him of virginal dead daughter, while all his victims are understood as whores, representing the types who led her astray and precipitated her death – being revealed by the mid-way point of the film.

This is a device unrepresentative of typically more mystery-oriented giallo and slasher films – Halloween an exception here – and one that which provides for a more detailed and sympathetic exploration of the killer's psychology than is often the case usual, even if this still remains at a relatively superficial level.

Meanwhile, Laurie's brother Joey investigates, accompanied by Kingsley's nephew, Kent...

Another slasherism is of course the gender-neutral name of Laurie, although compared to most of her ilk she is a relatively passive and feminised “final girl” character identified by Carol Clover in her seminal study of the form, Men, Women and Chainsaws. This is also a characterisation which it's perhaps worth considering in relation to the more active than usual defences mounted by the earlier victims, ineffective though they may have been.










Some more blatant symbolism than usual

Or, to suggest some classic US slasher rather than Italian giallo binaries, here it seems very much to be the case that active = sexual = bad girl and passive = non-sexual = good girl. While some gialli, perhaps especially in the post-Halloween era do follow this schema, there are many more examples with sexually active female protagonists when we consider the kind of characters habitually incarnated by Edwige Fenech and Susan Scott in films like The Strange Vice of Signora Wardh and Death Walks at Midnight.

If the filmmakers' identification of evil with active female sexuality – note also here the “that's disgusting” remark when one character passes another the dildo he has found in Dee Ann's apartments – is further suggested by the even more obvious than usual phallic quality of some of the weapons with which they are punished for their transgressions, the paradigmatic selection of nail gun and power drill is also unusual given the argument that the typical slasher film weapon is essentially “pre-technological”.

Likewise, there is little suggestion of any gender confusion to the maniac, motivated as he is more by a puritanical, misogynistic morallty.

Though writing, performances and direction each leave something to be desired at times, the film is better put together than its generally bad reputation would suggest, even if still resolutely on the functional side of things most of the time.

Cameron Mitchell – whose very presence establishes another connection to the giallo through his association with Bava and appearance in Blood and Black Lace – contributes a gleefully over the top performance, while some of some of the flash-frame editing is surprisingly adept.

The music is also better than many slashers of the period. While the main suspense theme, a simple piano led motif, is not up there with Halloween it is also pleasingly light on droning synthesiser noodling. The diegetic cues are also used well and, in their middle of the road blandness, providing a ironic counterpoint to the madness and mayhem as they dispassionately, anempathetically play over in a manner curiously reminiscent of Reservoir Dogs. (Or, more generically, the Italian horror films discussed in Kay Dickinson's Troubling Synthesis essay in Sleaze Artists.)

[I watched the film via the Blue Underground DVD]

Slash Hits Volume Three: Mullet Massacre

This third 48-page glossy colour A5 volume in Midnight Media's ongoing Slash Hits series provides a comprehensive overview of slasher and related forms such as the giallo – represented by the likes of Phenomena, Murderock, A Blade in the Dark and Stagefright – over the four years from 1983 to 1987.

The period comes across as one dominated by the continuation of the Friday the 13th series, the emergence of Nightmare on Elm Street and the gradual decline of major US studio interest in the form beyond these properties, but with no let up in independent productions, good, bad and indifferent.

Each film, from the best known franchise entries to the most obscure shot on video regional ultra-low budget independent production, is given a concise and entertaining write up cum evaluation, typically of a hard but fair sort, along with specific ratings on the key fan criteria of breasts and blood, with ratings of between one and five been given in each case.

Crucially, however, the value of the film in its own right and as a genre product are recognised as different, such that the likes of The Stepfather and Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer can be acknowledged on their own distinctive merits, despite a relative paucity of one or the other formula ingredient.

Providing a good checklist of films and themes such as treatments of the final girl and the gender transgressive killer or scenario, another major area where the publication shines is in foregrounding the increasing postmodernism / self-reflexivity of slasher product over this period, demonstrating that Scream was really nothing new except for having a name director and studio backing behind it.

Bloody Moon / Die Säge des Todes

"Miguel, don't look at me that way. I'm your sister. Go back to the dance."




Halloween Franco style

There, watching the others enjoying themselves and deciding he wouldn’t mind a piece of the action the deformed young man dons a Mickey Mouse mask to hide his features and decides to pose as one of the dancers’ boyfriends.

The ruse works, up to a point. But as Miguel comes on too strong, the girl realizes something is up and pulls off his mask, her reaction one of predictable horror. In response Miguel grabs a handy pair of scissors and proceeds to stab her to death.


There has to be a porn film in this; the air pirates fly again

The credits roll.

Five years later and Manuela arrives to collect Miguel from the clinic where has been being treated for his homicidal tendencies. The doctor opines that Miguel is more or less cured, but also warns that the young man should not be subjected to any trauma, lest he relapse.


One of the usual suspects – the mute handyman

Indeed, on the train to there is a tense moment as for one moment Manuela fears Miguel has relapsed and killed a student, Angela, though it turns out that she had simply dropped out of sight momentarily. More importantly, however, is the fact that Angela, en route to the language school that forms part of the resort complex, does not immediately recoil in fear or disgust at the sight of Miguel’s deformity, thus establishing a potential beauty and the beast scenario.


The Countessa

Soon thereafter, someone murders the wheelchair-bound Countessa. Perhaps it is Manuela, displeased that the old woman disinherited her in favour of her brother. Perhaps Miguel learned he was to inherit and decided to speed the process along. Or maybe it’s Alvaro, whose language school is in dire need of a cash injection...

Whoever they may be, the killer then starts to work his or her way through the students at the school. Angela, by this point singled out as our point of identification, finds her friend Inga’s body with a knife through it, but Inga’s body vanishes before she can show it to anyone else.








Classic slasher / splatter imagery; with Franco the 180-degree rule is entirely optional

Maybe Inga did just go off on a boat trip with Angelo, the resort’s resident lady killer. But, if so, why would Angela also hear a threatening message on her language tape before narrowly avoiding being crushed by a falling boulder…

Given the popularity of the slasher film in the early 1980s the question was less whether prolific Spanish trash auteur Jesus Franco would make one as what he would make of it.

On my first viewing of Bloody Moon four or so years ago my impression was not much: the film seemed to be a relatively impersonal one in which most of Franco’s idiosyncrasies were subordinated to delivering the generic goods in the form of suspense, shocks and splatter and sleaze.

Revisiting the film, however, I’m no longer so sure. Certainly Franco had done his homework, as the Halloween-esque pre-credits incident attests to in particular.

Yet already there seems that characteristic hint of subversion through Miguel’s donning of the frankly ludicrous looking Mickey Mouse mask. It’s the kind of thing which an American director wouldn’t think of or wouldn’t have been able to get away with.

It’s also apparent in the way he references Bava’s Bay of Blood and Five Dolls for an August Moon – as two previous films which took the giallo and worked it into black comedy – through the figure of the Countess and the eventual re-appearance of Inga’s corpse in a wardrobe, suspended on a coat hanger and wrapped in clear plastic.




Wrapped in plastic

In this regard, it’s notable that for every slasher trope there also seems to be a giallo one. One wonders, for instance, whether Miguel is the Michael Myers figure his forename would suggest, the unknowable monster whose overriding impulse is to kill, or a too-obvious red herring more like Claudio Volonte's character in Bay of Blood.

Likewise, if the film is replete with voyeuristic scenario, these are shared out amongst the characters regardless of gender, as when some of the girls – many of whom are soon to die, admittedly – look in on another of their number as she feigns a sexual encounter.


A dummy torso that looks like a masked killer from Torso

Even more interesting in this regard is the child who almost saves one of the girls from being decapitated by the circular saw from which the film presumably gains its German title. Though the scenario here relies heavily upon the idiot plot, with the girl consenting to being tied up on the board by the unidentified, black glove wearing figure, and features some not entirely convincing make-up effects – though, as ever with Franco this sense of artifice could be intentional, in sharp contrast to the unfortunately all too real killing of a snake which appears to threaten Angela at another point – the tension generated and ensuing shock set piece are undeniably effective.

So too is the climax of the sequence as the killer, having dealt with Angela, then unceremoniously runs over the child, as the eye-witness. Again, it’s the sort of thing that only a director like Franco would have the audacity to do. (Carpenter, of course, also had a child character unceremoniously killed in Assault on Precinct 13, eliciting shocked 'I can't believe they did that' reactions.)


The saw of death

Stylistically the film is less interesting. Though Franco’s characteristic zooms and peripatetic camerawork are there, both come across as devices motivated more by economy than formal experimentation, in sharp contrast to Five Dolls for an August Moon.

Gerhard Heinz’s score is frankly dire.

Slash Hits Volume 2

This second volume in Midnight Media's ongoing Slash Hits series, subtitled Teens in Trouble, covers the peak years of the slasher film, 1980 to 1982, and is of interest to fans of Italian genre cinema fans for an all-encompassing approach that sees the likes of Joe D'Amato's Absurd, Romano Scavolini's Nightmares in a Damaged Brain, Ovidio G Assonitis's Madhouse, Fulci's The New York Ripper and Argento's Tenebrae being included alongside the more mainstream North American fare.

Taking a viewer's guide approach that recognises the main reasons many will have besides curiosity, nostalgia or completism for sitting through many of the examples contained within, each film is given ratings for boobs and blood.

These prove criteria by which Euro product often scores highly, The New York Ripper getting a maximum five on both scales and Tenebrae a four and a five - Friday the 13th gets only two and four by way of comparison.

Nightmare / Nightmares in a Damaged Brain

George Tatum suffers from homicidal mania. The doctors at the institution where he was incarcerated following a multiple murder have never been able to establish the root cause of his illness, but have been treating him with an experimental drug. Believing George cured they release him. He then disappears...

Written and directed by Romano Scavolini, this is one of those films that I had wanted to see for a long time. Partly it was its status as a video nasty, complete with notorious guess-the-weight-of-the-brain-in-the-jar promotional competition and the dubious distinction of seeing its distributor jailed. Then there was the controversy over the extent of Tom Savini's involvement, whether he contributed the make-up effects or only acted in an advisory capacity. And then there was the attention lavished on it in the book Spaghetti Nightmares, where Scavolini is given what seems an undue prominence at the forefront of Italian fantasy cinema. So when a VHS rip, panned and scanned but apparently uncut, appeared on the file sharing network over the weekend, it was a must download and watch.






The Tenebrae shot, take one

The film lacks most of the familiar giallo iconography, with the mask that George dons at one point seeming more to do with Halloween than anything else. Likewise, with his identity as disturbed killer established at the outset – a strategy that also makes the film more Maniac than The New York Ripper, to identify two reference points and further identify that this is the kind of territory which some may not wish to enter – the main mysteries are exactly where he is going and what lies at the root of his psychosis.






The Tenebrae shot, take two; note the killer kid as one likely reason why the film had trouble during the Video Nasties era

Really, however, neither is particular enigmatic, with the extensive cross-cutting between George and a seemingly unconnected family and use of flashbacks to a childhood trauma probably enough to give giallo and slasher fans strong sense of deja vu about the proceedings.

Scavolini's direction is a mixed bag. He does some nice tricks, like using the Tenebrae shot of one character bending down to reveal another behind them, or shooting through a hole in a door, but fails to lavish comparable care and attention on the majority of the scenes and set-ups, making their by-the-numbers nature all the more apparent. Likewise, in using the bend over reveal shot twice – even worse, with the second actually at what should be the climactic revelation – the effect is to ironically dilute its impact and make you think that Scavolini was running increasingly short on ideas or borrowings from Carpenter, The Shining, The Godfather (!) and whatever else. (In fairness, however, it also to be acknowledged here that his film pre-dates Argento's, while the diegetic referencing of Blow-Up when a Polaroid of an empty house seems to reveal a figure at a window also signals Scavolini's willingness to acknowledge his influences, even if I do not think the results demonstrate him to be in any way equal to them.)


Killer in a Sid Haig rather than William Shatner mask?


Kids and guns - a winning combination


The performances are variable. Baird Stafford, who would later appear in the director's Vietnam movie Dog Tags (and, if the IMDB is to believed, nothing else) is scarily convincing as the compulsive killer, although the other adult performers are generally less impressive. The child actors are more annoying than anything else, though it could also be argued that this is part of the point with one in particular, a practical joker and boy who cried wolf type by the name of CJ, sorely testing the patience of his mother, her boyfriend and the babysitter.

One unintentional source of amusement is the central computer system the clinic staff appear to be using as they track down George. Maybe they had access to cutting edge equipment, with vague hints at a conspiracy whereby the now-reformed George is to be put to work for the government or military, but the thing makes Google seem somewhat inadequate.