In the Garden of the Death Orchids

A Marred Cord (Clunky Fellini pun...ignore it and keep moving...)

2012-01-03T22:01:00.002-06:00

If you’re wondering why today’s film is called The Fifth Cord, the least likely way to go about getting an answer is by actually watching it. Still, it has an appeal of its own that makes you forget the problem of the non-sequitur title, and after the first few minutes you’ll have forgotten what incongruity was bothering you.

Director Luigi Bazzoni and cinematographer Vittorio Stararo quickly establish an Argento-esque atmosphere of stylish omniscience, with a fish-eye lens wandering through a nightclub as a disembodied voiceover speaks eagerly of his urges to kill. Ennio Morricone’s jazzy, discordant score kicks in over the opening credits and the bright colors, extreme close-ups, and floating camera movements assure us that there’s only one place we can be: Italy in the 1970s. Of course if one fails to pick up on those subtler clues, the poor dubbing leaves little room for doubt.

Our hero, whom we are introduced to presently, is none other than Django himself, Franco Nero. A hard-drinking, washed-up shell of a man fueled solely by J&B and regret, Andrea would be a walking cliché, were he a cop rather than a reporter. Donning his gumshoes for an investigation following an attack on an Australian tourist that spirals into a web of murder and eroticism, Andrea finds himself in a fight for his life that just may offer a chance at redemption—or a final descent into madness.

With its lavish set design and luscious women it’s tempting to make a pat comparison between The Fifth Cord and Argento’s murder mysteries. In fact, while the visual flourishes are distinctly Italian I found Bazzoni’s storytelling sensibilities more analogous to a classic Hollywood noir thriller, albeit with touches of horror a la Kiss of Death. Of course all gialli have their roots in hardboiled American whodunits in a sense, but rarely is the translation this literal. Tone down the violence and polish the dialogue and the script looks like something that might have landed across, say, Jacques Tourneur’s desk in the late forties.

Particularly well done is a suspense setpiece in which a wheelchair-bound woman finds herself alone in a vast house with an unseen killer lurking in the shadows. One can almost effortlessly interpose an Ingrid Bergman or Dorothy McGuire crawling across the dark expanse of wooden paneling, struggling in vain to reach a telephone that isn’t there. Without question it’s the highlight of the movie.

In addition, however, to the shadows, trench coats, and femme fatales, The Fifth Cord also inherits one of noir’s less desirable trappings, the third-act information dump. This seems to occur when writers treat the mystery as a valid element of the plot rather than simply as a MacGuffin to support the characters and atmosphere, and it is when the film’s pace should be quickest and most desperate that the greatest amount of exposition must be unpacked.

Fortunately, Bazzoni (who also co-scripted) understands the dangers of indulging the muddled plot for too long and the climax of the film is a drawn-out scene of child endangerment—which, if you’re insensitive or downright sadistic like me, is always entertaining. The impact is blunted somewhat by the fact that we the audience have spent so little time with the victim that we have little reason to invest in his plight, apart from the mere fact of his youth; but the filmmaking prowess is strong enough that this is a minor problem. Stararo’s camera puts us in the distressed child’s position, rather than depending on our sympathies, so our lack of familiarity with the character is a moot point, as he is used less as a character than as shorthand for helplessness and vulnerability.

The subsequent chase scene, while well shot, is ultimately lackluster; Andrea’s transformation from a frustrated alcoholic burnout to an action hero is unearned, but hardly surprising for this type of pulp. And the revelation of the killer’s identity and motivation fails to impress. I suppose it is an unfortunate hazard of this type of story that the answers are inherently less interesting—and less revealing—than the questions, which is probably why gialli, focusing more on atmosphere and less on satisfactory conclusions, are regarded as style over substance.

While The Fifth Cord is overall an entertaining watch for the horror buff, its hesitancy to commit to either the thematically-concerned approach of noir or the more ethereal and intangible appeal of Eurohorror shunt it into the category of intriguing mediocrity, a bastard offspring that stumbles over its own feet from lack of affirmative direction, and in its gracelessness it lives up to neither parent.

Happy Holidays, Motherfuckers!

2011-12-25T14:18:00.003-06:00

In the words of my plush talking Taco Bell chihuahua, Feliz Navidad amigos! To celebrate the Yuletide cheer I thought I'd post a quick little scribbling that I employed as a morbid Christmas card a few years back. Nobody seemed to like it then and it hasn't gotten any better with age but, hey, it amuses me and it's more creative than posting yet another screencap from Silent Night, Deadly Night II, so there you are.

Beware the Snowman

As soon as the goddam snowman came to life, he twisted off Jimmy’s head like a bottle cap. I stood frozen, shocked, as the other children ran screaming around me and Jimmy stumbled around decapitated, his mitten-clad hands passing through the space where his head had been. He looked like a drunken stage magician, but this trick had gone bad.

Jimmy’s neck stump spurted blood into the gray winter air like Old Faithful, spraying the white driven snow, and then Jimmy fell to his knees and hit the ground with a muffled whump, and he didn’t move. The snowman held Jimmy’s head in the air by his little red puffball hat and roared in savage animalistic triumph, his coal eyes glowing. Then he looked at the broom we’d placed in his hand, ice-covered wheels turning in that disproportionately large head of his, and he snapped the wooden handle in half. The splintered tip was jagged and angry. Frosty’s smile was the same. He stuck Jimmy’s head on one half of the stick and stood it up in the snow. The other half he brandished like a weapon.

His head swiveled to gaze at me.

I ran.

My snow boots sank into the soft ground; my legs burned before I even got started. Behind me, disconcertingly close, I could hear the snowman. Thumpety thump thump. Thumpety thump thump. Getting closer.

“Let’s run,” said Frosty, his voice like metal gears grinding gravel. “And we’ll have some fun.” He laughed. I could almost feel droplets of ice on the back of my neck.

I was wishing intently we hadn’t found that old silk hat.

I saw too late that the gray shape peeking from out the white blanket of snow was a rock. My foot connected. The rock wasn’t about to go anywhere, so I went airborne to accommodate it. I pictured Frosty’s broom handle staking me through the heart like a vampire. Too bad that bit worked on humans, too.

I rolled onto my back, thinking the snowman’s gaping maw would be the last thing I would ever see. He raised his stick for the killing blow…but then—

A ball of fire swept across my vision. Frosty howled and reared as the flames scraped against his belly.

“What’s the matter, Frosty? Thought you needed a light for that corncob pipe of yours!”

Valerie. Dear sweet torch-wielding Valerie, I could kiss you—

She’d come back for me.

I got to my booted feet. Valerie swung the torch. Frosty roared, raising his arms as if to protect his corpulent three-tiered body.

“Melt the son of a bitch!” I shouted.

Valerie plunged the torch into Frosty’s chest. The fire flickered in protest and for a heart-stopping moment I thought the snow would overpower the flame. But it held, by God, and Frosty screamed. Sometimes I hear that scream in my nightmares.

Valerie didn’t flinch. “This is for Jimmy, you bastard!” she muttered from between clenched teeth.

The cries of agony faded, eventually. We found ourselves staring at a puddle, on top of which floated the top hat and various facial accouterments. “Frosty the snowman,” I said, “is as dead as he can be.”

Valerie dropped the torch. “We should probably…take down Jimmy’s head,” she said, staring at the ground. “It wouldn’t be nice for his mother to find him like that.” And then she began to cry.

I saw it before she did. Words in the snow, forming as if drawn by an invisible finger. “Christ,” I said, staring at it.

I’ll be back again some day.

"AAAAH!"ctober Chills: Trick 'R Treat

2011-10-31T20:47:00.005-05:00

31 days. 31 chills. Frankly I’m surprised I made it. October turned out to be one of my busier months of late, and while I wouldn’t really be comfortable calling any of my posts from the “AAAAH!”ctober Chills series actual reviews, I am satisfied that I at least kept up with the project, insignificant though it may be in the grand scream of things.

Tonight’s fetid film is a little number from a few years ago titled Trick ’R Treat. Not since Halloween has a movie been so blatantly immersed in…well…Halloween, and writer-director Michael Dougherty doesn’t take long to acknowledge a debt to Carpenter’s classic. Within the opening two minutes there is a slow tracking shot pulling away from a lit pumpkin, a holiday ghost decoration very reminiscent of Michael Myers in his famous white-sheeted disguise, and a Steadicam POV shot approaching a quiet house in the suburbs. Also, this leering figure looks a trifle familiar, no?

In this postmodern, Tarantino-led “movies about movies” generation, many young filmmakers are so intent on creating a love letter to cinema that they forget, amidst the endless homage, to actually insert a point of view. Were you to turn “Spot the Reference” into a drinking game with Trick ’R Treat you’d probably be sporting a pretty good buzz by the Creepshow-esque comic book opening credits. Factor in the years-long period that the movie was shelved by the studio prior to release and the discerning filmgoer will be as cautious as they are drunk.

While the movie does play on a lot of familiar story shapes and character archetypes it turns out, fortunately, to be not entirely bereft of original ideas. Like a good campfire story or a classic E.C. comic, the interwoven segments are not so much concerned with slow-burn plot development as quick-hit thrills. There are a few twists I didn’t see coming and, helpfully, the tone is often quite humorous (albeit blackly so at times), giving it a freshness it might not otherwise attain. But for those expecting nuance and subtlety, an anthology themed around All Hallows Eve is probably not your best bet.

Halloween Notables:

Killer Costumes

Disembodied Mischief Makers

Gratuitous Nudity/Wild Wolves

Haunting Histories

Fog-Soaked Nights

Horny Teenagers

Knife-Wielding Madmen

Undead Undesirables

Deep Dark Forests

"AAAAH!"ctober Chills: Alice

2011-10-30T23:28:00.003-05:00

Reportedly, children hated Lewis Carroll. Rather than thrilling them with his inventive imagination, he would drive them to tedium by speaking for hours on end about logical puzzles and mathematical principles. Also there’s the whole “maybe he was a pedophile” thing but let’s not get embroiled in that controversy.

Anyhoo, hisAlice in Wonderland books are rather unconventional children’s fare and some of those boring tendencies of his were firmly implanted in the work, albeit in a more accessible and engaging format. Riddles, wordplay, mathematics, and the nonsensical abound in his tales through the looking glass, with characters speaking practically in koans. For an odd story to successfully translate to the screen, an equally odd approach is required. Many have attempted the task, but mere faithfulness to the written word is never able to translate the more intangible qualities of the off-kilter spirit of the novels. Well, what about a surreal Czech horror film in which a live action actress interacts with an assortment of stop-motion characters, ranging from complex, fully articulated animatronics to sock puppets with googly eyes? Sounds promising.

Actually it’s debatable whether Jan Svankmajer’s 1988 adaptation Alice is a true horror film, but it certainly has its share of creepy and disturbing imagery. Imagine a 90 minute Tool music video sans music and you’ve got a rough idea. While some kids might be put out or even frightened by the film’s austereness, I imagine a bigger problem would be keeping them interested, as the dialogue is sparse and mostly consists of the young actress’s simplistic narration.

One aspect of Carroll’s work that is rather anomalous for children’s literature is its sense of coldness. There is never any particular warmth, kindness, or love shown to Alice throughout the books, even by her briefly mentioned parents; the characters are at best indifferent and at worst openly hostile. She is ultimately an observer only, a rather unimportant cog in a universe that would continue to function equally well or perhaps better without her. Svankmajer’s interpretation brings this often-unnoted sense of nihilism to light with woodland creatures who would sooner slice off Alice’s hand with a saw than look at her. This is a world not so much of enchantment as of alienation.

Still, Carroll’s work was, counter intuitively, charming for all that bleakness, and no adaptation would capture the mood of the classic without some measure of that charm. When the White Rabbit (a taxidermy hare) comes into existence by pulling himself free of his wooden post, biting the nails from his paws, and slicing open his own stomach to a gush of sawdust, substituting for entrails, the potentially unnerving scene is offset in the next moment by levity as he regards himself in a dingy mirror, quite the dapper fellow in his natty new duds.

Young Kristýna Kohoutová is also instrumental in lightening the movie’s darker shades and striking a careful balance in tone. While not terribly expressive, she has a natural screen presence that keeps the eye engaged and the mind reassured. Even while the whole of Wonderland seems to be against her there is a precocious inquisitiveness that conquers both her fears and ours, though fortunately the film never condescends to be cutesy.

The opening monologue, spoken by a bodiless mouth in extreme close up, intones, “Now you will see a film made for children…perhaps.” Perhaps indeed.

Halloween Notables:

Creepy Dolls

"AAAAH!"ctober Chills: Island of Lost Souls

2011-10-29T23:59:00.001-05:00

It’s been almost 80 years and half a dozen adaptations, but the 1932 original version of H.G. Wells’ Island of Dr. Moreau is still the most well-regarded. Charles Laughton is excellent and surprisingly understated as the ho-hum title character, and the other performance of note is Kathleen Burke as Lota the leopard girl. The sound is a bit wonky as filmmakers were adjusting to the transition from silent films at the time, and the cinematography is less than dynamic, but the lighting is classic high-contrast Golden Era Hollywood horror and the writing is top notch, more than making up for the film’s sometimes awkward staginess. If you like this sort of thing Island of Lost Souls is a must-see.

Halloween Notables:

Mad Scientists

Manmade Monsters

Observant Cats

"AAAAH!"ctober Chills: Phantasm

2011-10-28T22:46:00.000-05:00

When I started this whole damn thing it did not occur to me that I had scheduled two movies by director Don Coscarelli. In fact I only really included Incident On and Off a Mountain Road because it happened to be on television at the time and I had nothing else on hand. But there is a pretty notorious film of his that I had yet to see so, hey, screw variety.

Of course I am talking about the 1979 classic Phantasm. Legend goes that the original cut was a more coherent three hours long, but in a bid to create a more accessible film Coscarelli whittled it down to a lean ninety minutes, losing a lot of cogency along the way. The result is only a bad dub job away from an Italian supernatural psychothriller.

The weird concept at play is that an extradimensional traveler known only as the Tall Man (Angus Scrimm in an icon-creating role) needs Earth’s dead to create an army on his home planet. To what purpose? Who knows. In any event he’s constantly foiled by those meddling kids.

Phantasm is a movie very much of its time and it never apologizes for that. Crash-zooms, feathered hair, slow motion, an eerie-jazz score, and the occasionally cheesy dialogue firmly pin it in its decade of origin. The low budget reveals itself from time to time, but it actually aids the film’s dreamlike nature. When the actors, whether by intent or inability, exhibit almost no reaction to seeing a flying metallic sphere drain a man of blood, it makes the experience that much more surreal and hypnotic for the audience.

Halloween Notables:

Graveyard Jaunts

Gratuitous Nudity

Candlelit Wanderings

"AAAAH!"ctober Chills: The Abominable Snowman

2011-10-27T21:37:00.002-05:00

A few years ago I saw a Canadian television program which put forth the theory that Sasquatches are in fact alien scouts dropped off by UFOs to take stock of our planet, either for research or to prep Earth for invasion. In 1957 Hammer Studios explored territory only slightly less absurd with The Abominable Snowman, in which it is revealed that the Yeti is both telepathic and poised to overtake mankind as the dominant species.

Being released just a few months after The Curse of Frankenstein, I would guess that this represents one of their last attempts at sci-fi/horror before moving exclusively into horror proper with their Technicolor productions throughout the sixties and seventies. Peter Cushing is warmer as a benevolent botanist than in most of his other iconic Hammer roles (though maybe it is only the frigid milieu that makes him seem so by comparison) and co-lead Forrest Tucker is also good as a brash American explorer leading the expedition to find the fabled monster. The two characters—one an idealistic scientist interested only in truth and progress, the other a profit-obsessed charlatan—bounce off of one another for most of the film and their contentious relationship, in a dangerous and isolated environment where failing to get along could mean death, is the source of most of the film’s tension.

The yeti himself doesn’t get much screen time, which is fortunate given that the final reveal resembles nothing so much as a Muppet who has not yet downed his morning coffee. Still, director Val Guest does a passable job of creating atmosphere with the unseen creature’s howls echoing through the chill air, and the soundstage locations blend in well with the location shooting, which offers some majestic vistas that could conceivably house a beast of legend somewhere in the slumbering snows.

The Abominable Snowman is not a great movie, but it’s a satisfying creature feature fit for a quiet winter evening.

Halloween Notables:

Featured Creatures

Mystical Old Coots

"AAAAH!"ctober Chills: Ebola Syndrome

2011-10-27T18:40:00.004-05:00

After twenty seven straight days of watching horror movies you begin to think you can’t really be surprised anymore. That is only because you have not yet watched Hong Kong’s Ebola Syndrome.

Wow. To call this movie batshit insane is an understatement. I haven’t been this gleefully incredulous since my first viewing of Evil Dead II in high school. Since I’ve seen more horror and become more jaded since then it stands to reason that a movie could only provoke an equivalent reaction if it were exponentially more outrageous. But man, nobody does extreme like Asian cinema.

Our “hero” is a greasy-haired weasel who, in his introductory scene, has sex with his boss’s wife and then massacres the entire family when the boss comes home and catches them in the act. Well, actually, he doesn’t quite get round to murdering the young daughter, as he is interrupted just before setting light to her gasoline-soaked body. “What are you doing?” demands the intruder. “I’m killing them!” he responds irritably. “Is that a problem?”

The character only becomes more likable as he rapes an infected tribal woman, kills his new boss and wife (he’s got a thing with bosses), and cooks them Sweeney Todd style to serve to an unwary public. Thus begins a fearful epidemic that paralyzes a nation.

Unfortunately the movie is pretty dialogue-heavy—not that I mind reading subtitles but they aren’t ideal for translating comedy. And the 100-minute movie outstays its welcome by a good 15 minutes. A subplot in which the lone survivor of the family murdered at the beginning grows up and sniffs out the killer could have easily been deleted, as it doesn’t wind up amounting to much.

But Ebola Syndrome is definitely a film with staying power. See how long it takes for you to feel comfortable going out to eat again.

Halloween Notables:

Odd Cuisine

Gratuitous Nudity

Slaughterings with Wild Abandon

"AAAAH!"ctober Chills: Haxan

2011-10-26T23:52:00.003-05:00

One of the great things about silent films is the ability to choose your own soundtrack. For Haxan you’ll probably want to listen to “Hellfire” from Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame at least once. Not that I’m telling you what to do. You’ll just know it’s the right choice.

The Swedish/Danish documentary on witchcraft through the ages was produced by Benjamin Christensen, according to the opening credits, from 1919 to 1921. Over the course of seven chapters it illuminates ancient conceptions of Hell and the devil and, through dramatic reenactments, shows what women accused of witchcraft in the Middle Ages went through, highlighting the injustice and hypocrisies inherent in the justice systems of the time. Once any trace of suspicion fell on a particular individual it was pretty much a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation. The final chapter attempts to explain much of the behavior of women accused of witchcraft by following her contemporary counterpart, the victim of “hysteria.”

Despite the occasional outside interjection (there’s a particularly funny interlude in which one of the actresses working on the film insists on having an ancient torture device applied to her) Haxan feels less like a documentary than a series of short films bound together under the pretense of education. With some rather lurid images of Lucifer (Christensen himself, in makeup that holds up well in the simultaneously real and unreal world of silent film), topless women, drunken orgies, and infant sacrifice, I do not think it is cynical to suggest the goal was often titillation as much as it was edification.

Purporting to be a study of the ways in which superstition was perpetuated by ignorance and fear of the unknown, the reenactments are still often presented as though the accused women really do commiserate with Satan. This would be like slapping a professorial epilogue onto the beginning of The Exorcist and then claiming the ensuing film is a documentary about how mental illnesses have been mistaken for demonic possession over the centuries.

The ending, in which a hysterical woman’s misadventures are shown to parallel the medieval Hell-wenches in certain key regards, is quaint and a bit too simplistic, especially since hysteria isn’t even really a thing anymore, but it’s cute enough I suppose. What the filmmakers really ought to have shown was the cutting edge clinical treatment of the time, the inducement of “paroxysm” by that most amazing of medical wonders, the vibrator. Now that would have been educational.

Incidentally, did you know that at one time books were marketed to ladies detailing the prime seating locations on a train for maximum vibration? Sure, I watch the History Channel.

Halloween Notables:

Seductive Witches

Old Nick

Odd Cuisine

Gratuitous Nudity

Torture Shows

Black Masses

"AAAAH!"ctober Chills: Premature Burial

2011-10-25T23:18:00.000-05:00

Ray Milland has a powerful and irrational fear of being buried alive. But you know, I have a feeling everything’s going to work out just fine for him…

From the early to mid 1960s Roger Corman embarked on a series of adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe’s material, ultimately culminating in seven feature-length films, an anthology of short tales, a Poe pastiche (The Terror), and a film with a Poe title and a story from H.P. Lovecraft (The Haunted Castle). If you’ve seen more than one you have a pretty good idea of what to expect. Given larger budgets than he’d ever worked with before Corman created a series of colorful, lavishly decorated Gothic thrillers with stellar icon-populated casts and literate scripts from Twilight Zone alums Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont. Plus there will probably be a funky dream sequence in the middle to pad out the running time.

Whenever Roger Corman talks about his Poe pictures he is always quick to bring up how his direction was influenced by the psychoanalytical theories in vogue at the time, mostly having to do with how hallways in the castle represent the vagina and so forth. It’s not a bad fit since Poe littered his stories with symbols of the unconscious, though practically speaking it’s difficult to know exactly what Corman did differently in bringing the screenplay to life with this Freudian approach. Still, there is often a subverted sexuality permeating the films and Hazel Court, as the long-suffering wife, can certainly get a come-hither look in her eye when she wants to.

Premature Burial seems to be the least notable of the Poe pictures. Vincent Price’s absence may have something to do with this, as does the fact that Corman was growing bored with their formulaic nature, as evidenced by his toying around with the format in the ensuing entries. Still, for a touch of the old-fashioned spine-tingling, it hits the spot.

Halloween Notables:

Fog-Soaked Nights

Graveyard Jaunts

Stormy Nights

Doomed Romances

"AAAAH!"ctober Chills: Inferno

2011-10-24T23:04:00.005-05:00

If you buy a used book at a mysterious bookshop, and it talks about three covens of evil and all-powerful witches, and you suspect it just might be real…don’t start investigating.

Inferno is Dario Argento’s follow-up to Suspiria, which is, as you shan’t remember from a previous post, one of my top ten favorite horror movies. While largely regarded as an inferior film there is a passionate minority willing to defend it as better than the original. Sort of like those weirdoes who insist that Temple of Doom is actually the best Indiana Jones movie. Keep dreamin’, people.

Having been shot immediately after Suspiria it’s interesting to see which characteristics Inferno inherits from its mother film. Visually, it sports a similar color scheme, with dominant reds, blues, yellows, and greens; the sets are opulent, the women beautiful, the lighting surreal. There are certain sequences which have been lifted almost wholesale from Suspiria, such as a cab ride on a rainy night, with the same actor playing the taxi driver who gave Jessica Harper so much attitude previously.

Less successfully transposed are the more abstract, intangible fairy tale elements that made the first film unique. Despite the odd gusts of preternatural wind or gnarled inhuman claws, Inferno is a much more straightforward and plot-oriented, with Argento lapsing back into procedural investigation mode as a comfortable means of moving the story along. The lack of a writing credit for Daria Nicolodi is telling.

There is also speculation as to how much credit Mario Bava deserves for the film, since he was verifiably involved with the production but accounts vary as to exactly how far his influence extended. Some claim he was merely a special effects technician and set designer while others believe he practically directed the film. Given what I know of both directors’ work I wouldn’t be surprised if Bava did run the set at times, but if nothing else it was definitely Argento’s show in the editing room.

I could spend several paragraphs detailing the differences between the two films and giving my opinion as to which was the more successful on each point but I think what it comes down to, in a larger sense, is that Inferno does feel less like a sequel than a redundant retread, with much of what made Suspiria special stripped away. Still, if you like Argento’s color palette and dreamy moods, Inferno is good for more of the same, and it has the following dialogue exchange, which Suspiria cannot boast:

“Have you heard of the three sisters?”
“You mean those black singers?”

Halloween Notables:

Dusty Old Tomes

Candlelit Wanderings

Seductive Witches

Observant Cats

"AAAAH!"ctober Chills: The Lodger

2011-10-23T23:32:00.003-05:00

Marie Belloc Lowndes’ novel The Lodger has been committed to celluloid no less than six times, first as a silent film by Alfred Hitchcock and most recently in 2009 with Alfred Molina in the title role. As Jack the Ripper himself continues to intrigue and terrify so too, apparently, does this story of a suspicious tenant whose odd behavior may mark him as the infamous murderer whose grisly exploits have all of London in a panic.

The 1944 version plays out as one would expect a gaslit thriller from Hollywood’s Golden Age to do—lots of shadows, lots of fog, lots of softly lit starlets and a few musical numbers. Merle Oberon is beautiful as ever playing a stage actress just beginning her rise to fame in London’s theater scene, though her character, Kitty, is at times naïve almost to the point of mental incompetence. In one scene eccentric lodger Slade is practically drawing her a blueprint of how he’s going to murder her and she laughs it off as though it is all quite charming and gay.

Laird Cregar, who died the same year the film was released, is exceptional as the aforementioned Slade, prime suspect in the Ripper murders. Portly, nervous, and wild-eyed, he is nonetheless a fearful and fascinating figure, steering into the skid of the character’s madness and managing to impart some subtlety while never failing to go for the gusto. It is quite believable that Kitty would be drawn to him, though this aspect of their relationship is never overplayed.

Screenwriter Barre Lyndon would have another encounter with Saucy Jack in a few decades when he penned a teleplay for the television series Thriller based on Robert Bloch’s short story “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper.” His script for The Lodger is suspenseful but light, with an almost playful streak of dark comedy. My favorite scene involves Inspector Warwick (ably played by George Sanders) guiding Kitty on a tour of The Black Museum at police headquarters and narrating all the dastardly deeds that have been performed with the homicide weapons on display.

The Lodger fits nicely into the canon of Jack the Ripper mythology, romantic and dread-inspiring in equal measure.

Halloween Notables:

Fog-Soaked Nights

Candlelit Wanderings

Knife-Wielding Madmen

"AAAAH!"ctober Chills: I Saw the Devil

2011-10-22T21:37:00.002-05:00

A Korean police officer vows revenge on the man who viciously murdered his pregnant wife. But how does one go about inspiring fear in the damned and demented? It’s a thorny path to be sure.

I Saw the Devil, the latest from acclaimed director Jee-woon Kim (A Tale of Two Sisters), is already being touted as a great film. I’m not sure I’m ready to commit to that level of praise. Kim’s direction is top-notch, flashy without being distracting, and he keeps the two-and-a-half hour movie clipping along at a decent pace. The problem is the script, which I found to be average at best.

The psychologically destructive nature of revenge has been well documented in fiction, going back at least to Shakespeare. I mean, probably. I can’t name which play or anything but it seems like the sort of thing he would have written about. Scribe Hoon-jung Park throws in enough twists, turns, and shades of gray for the hero’s descent to be entertaining, if not entirely compelling, but as the credits rolled I felt that for all its uncompromising violence and brutality, I Saw the Devil just didn’t have anything new to say on the subject.

More enduring are the performances. Min-sik Choi, protagonist of the thematically similar Oldboy, creates a rich and layered character from what could have been a one-note psychopath. Byung-hun Lee’s character is not endowed with a lot of unexpected complexity but there’s always a roiling ocean behind his eyes.

Early on in the movie there’s a scene where cop and killer face off, and the buildup is akin to a showdown in the Old West. It’s the quintessence of I Saw the Devil and in the end you’ll be wondering if anybody walked away from the shootout unscathed.

Halloween Notables:

Slaughterings with Wild Abandon

Odd Cuisine

"AAAAH!"ctober Chills: Texas Chain Saw Massacre

2011-10-21T23:08:00.000-05:00

If I was smart I would have written some of these blog entries before October in case I got extremely busy at a certain point in the month. But I'm not that smart or that well-prepared so instead I shall have to settle for a few very terse reviews.

Fortunately for me, today's film has been discussed so often that it really warrants no further analysis. I saw Texas Chain Saw Massacre. It's a classic for a reason.

The Ramones wrote a song about it by the way. They pronounce massacre "mass-uh-cree." "Texas Chain Saw Massacre/They took my baby away from me." Those are the lyrics to the chorus.

Halloween Notables:

Graveyard Jaunts

Slaughterings with Wild Abandon

Odd Cuisine

Backwoods Killers

"AAAAH!"ctober Chills: Werewolf of London

2011-10-20T23:20:00.002-05:00

On an expedition in Tibet, a botanist discovers a rare flower that blooms only by moonlight. This coincides with a werewolf attack but, happily, said flower happens to act as an antidote to lycanthropy. As the newly transformed doctor learns that werewolves instinctually attack those they love most it’s a race against time to cure his condition lest his beloved wife face the consequences of his furry affections.

It seems Werewolf of London is chiefly remembered as a sort of trial run for major classic The Wolf Man, produced six years later. Maybe it’s that there are no catchy rhymes or perhaps it is because the Werewolf of London never went mano a mano with Frankenstein’s creature, but I think the most likely reason the latter film enjoys a superior status its leading man. As I noted in my review of The Invisible Man the defining characteristic of the Universal monsters was their humanity; they were all tragic figures to one degree or another. Dr. Glendon, the protagonist played by Henry Hull, is a reluctant monster, and the writers do their best to draw out his loneliness and regret vis-à-vis an increasingly distant wife that he can only shun in his efforts to protect her; but Glendon is still by and large a cold presence, lacking Lawrence Talbot’s charm, gregariousness, and tormented expressions of dread in the light of a full moon.

This is not to say Werewolf of London is an unenjoyable experience. I always love it when old horror movies feel as though they have collided with the Ernst Lubitsch production shooting on the next sound stage over, and there’s a lot of delightful banter going on around the boring main characters. Particular favorites of mine are Mrs. Whack and Mrs. Moncaster, two quarrelsome old lushes who rent a room to Glendon when not sneaking each other’s liquor and knocking one another over the head.

This undercurrent of comedy cheats Werewolf of London of a more profound sense of pathos when tortured Dr. Glendon collapses in the throes of death, but since there are plenty of other movies to fill that void I don’t mind a werewolf movie that strays from those emotional moors every now and again.

Halloween Notables:

Wild Wolves

Observant Cats

Doomed Romances

Fog-Soaked Nights

Dusty Tomes

"AAAAH!"ctober Chills: Hostel

2011-10-19T14:50:00.000-05:00

I went into Hostel expecting to hate it.

In fact, I did not hate it.

I count that as a win.

Halloween Notables:

Torture Shows

Malicious Foreigners

Gratuitous Nudity

Horny Teenagers

"AAAAH!"ctober Chills: I Bury the Living

2011-10-18T23:20:00.004-05:00

Robert Kraft has it all: a beautiful girlfriend, a square jaw, and whatever else guys dreamed about in the fifties. But after being hereditarily railroaded into taking a position as director of the local cemetery, Kraft begins to suspect he holds sway over death itself. It seems that whenever he switches the pins on a map of the cemetery from white to black, the owner of that plot turns up dead. All Kraft has to do is decide how best to utilize this newfound power…

I Bury the Living has gained a reputation as a forgotten classic, if a minor one, being hailed as something akin to a lost episode of The Twilight Zone. Frankly I thought it would be much better suited to an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

While not patently incompetent, there wasn’t much to elevate the film above second-rate status. The writing was overdone, the performances hammy when they weren’t wooden, and the photography occasionally stylish but more often uninspired, though the degraded version readily available for download on YouTube or Archive.org probably does the original print no favors. There is a small measure of “Monkey’s Paw”-style spookiness achieved by the end, and the techniques used to illustrate Kraft’s descent from sanity, while outdated even by 1950s standards, are fun. But overall it’s too long a walk for too little payoff.

Worth noting is that the director was a man name o’ Albert Band, father of low-budget maestro Charles Band. I have yet to see any of the notorious Full Moon pictures but if they are as schlocky as they are reputed to be, I think it’s safe to say little Charles didn’t fall too far from the tree in that regard.

Halloween Notables:

Graveyard Jaunts

"AAAAH!"ctober Chills: Idle Hands

2011-10-17T22:38:00.006-05:00

They say idle hands are the devil’s playground, so it should come as no surprise that the character flaw of our protagonist in 1999’s Idle Hands is laziness. (That adage about the right hand not knowing what the left is doing also comes into play.) His sloth eventually results in the eventual death and undeath of his best friend and Jessica Alba shows up in her underwear but I don’t want to give anything away.

For most horror fans the nineties was a disappointingly fallow period following the genre renaissance of the seventies and the icon-saturated eighties. Scream exploded into a miniature phenomenon of its own in the middle of the decade but left in its wake a glut of hollow self-referential, would-be “hip” slashers for a generation weaned on MTV. I have a soft spot for these since, as one who came of age in the nineties, Urban Legend was my first real foray into horror and I’ve still got a nostalgic tingle for the otherwise abysmal I Know What You Did Last Summer.

For my money, though, Idle Hands is much more noticeably an homage to cult horror-comedies of the eighties than the postmodern cynicism of the following decade, despite its share of gloss and an eye-rollingly blatant collection of contemporary rock songs shoehorned into the film for the benefit of a marketable soundtrack. Slacker pothead Anton (counter-intuitively likeable as opposed to annoying with “Whatever happened to that guy?” Devon Sawa essaying the role) would have been appropriate dead-in-five-minutes fodder for Jason at Camp Crystal Lake. The possessed hand angle is obviously reminiscent of Evil Dead II and Seth Green’s turn as Anton’s best-friend-turned-zombie owes a debt to An American Werewolf in London.

I think of Idle Hands as I would a later Mel Brooks movie: not every joke lands, and some are real groaners, but the whole production is so amiable it’s hard to begrudge its lack of complete comedic success. If the movie owes anything to Scream it’s in the “spot the cliché” department, with such classic bits as “Man at War With His Own Body,” “Love Interest Who Misinterprets Hero’s Odd Behavior as Romantic Aggression,” and that perennial favorite, “Dumb Guy Who Says Dumb Things.” It’s been done before but that’s part of the experience.

Even in the relatively infertile plantation of the horror-comedy subgenre Idle Hands doesn’t break any new ground, but it sure is a fun watch.

Halloween Notables:

Killer Costumes

Disembodied Mischief Makers

Observant Cats

Undead Undesirables

Fog-Soaked Nights

Horny Teenagers

Gratuitous Nudity

"AAAAH!"ctober Chills: Horror Hotel

2011-10-16T22:44:00.004-05:00

In swinging London circa the early 1960s there’s trouble afoot in a sleepy hamlet known as Whitewood. Led on a research quest by Hammer/Amicus staple Christopher Lee, his star pupil writing a paper on the occult uses her vacation time to soak up the local history, only to get a first-hand lesson in witchcraft.

Horror Hotel (a.k.a. the equally misleading but slightly less schlocky City of the Dead) is a fun little chiller that nestles comfortably into any autumnal horror movie line-up. Director John Llewellyn Moxey spent most of his career directing television and he does a great job building old-fashioned shivers on a low budget, with a prominent fog machine and selective lighting successfully obscuring the film’s soundstage environs. (I’m reminded of avant-garde filmmaker Guy Maddin’s quote that a shadow is the cheapest special effect in the world.) With its jazzy score, quiet tension, and simple story, Horror Hotel would not have been at all out of place as an episode of Thriller.

There are some telltale signs that the movie was probably done on the cheap and with a pretty tight schedule. Top-billed Christopher Lee is prominent but has in actuality relatively little screen time, making me think of that old grindhouse trick of hiring a star for a day or two and shooting all their scenes at once. The script is workman-like, offering few surprises, and while generally solid it feels undeveloped in certain areas. (For some reason I found it endlessly amusing that the coeds apparently just major in Science. They do Science Research, they refer to one another as Science Students, and upon graduation they look forward to exciting careers of Doing Science. I guess specialization was not a big deal back then.)

This does not take away from the effectiveness of Moxey’s direction, which makes great use of sound as well as imagery to create a cloying atmosphere of inescapable evil. I don’t get creeped out by much in fiction but soulless satanic chanting always gets me looking over my shoulder when the lights go out. Additionally the movie is damn beautiful, both in terms of cinematography and its choice selection of starlets. For those who think the portrayal of the pin-up girl reached its zenith in the sixties there’s definitely nothing here that will prove you wrong. Yowza.

Also, I think “Just ring for doom service!” is my new favorite tagline ever.

Halloween Notables:

Seductive Witches

Dusty Tomes

Fog-Soaked Nights

Graveyard Jaunts

Black Masses

Car Troubles

Candlelit Wanderings

"AAAAH!"ctober Chills: The Golem

2011-10-14T02:52:00.000-05:00

Back in high school, when I was first delving into film in a more serious way, I would occasionally attempt to refine my limited understanding of German Expressionism by locating a more satisfying definition and procuring a list of films that were notable within the genre. I was frustrated by the fact that, no matter what source I utilized, there seemed to be only three examples of Expressionism consistently given: Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and The Golem. Several years later, being more well versed in cinema in general and horror cinema in particular, I know that Expressionism is not really something you can explain on paper, and while its influence permeated many films throughout the twenties and thirties before being subsumed into noir in the forties, there are only really three films that display the concept at its purest, and they are listed above.

Funny how long it took me to see that last one.

I suspect everybody already knows the story of The Golem by now. In an effort to defend his people from persecution, a rabbi builds a massive clay figure and alchemically brings it to life to carry out his bidding. But the longer the Golem exists, the more autonomous it becomes, until even the rabbi’s commands cannot deter it from a village-wide rampage that leaves his followers wondering if his ideas were really the best.

I wonder if The Golem was a noted influence on James Whale’s Frankenstein. Paul Wegener’s performance, though as broad as one would expect from the earliest silents, imparts a measure of humanity to the creature, as when he appreciatively sniffs a flower bequeathed to him by a woman in the town. And while not explicitly stated, there is the usual moral that men should not tamper in God’s domain by taking the creation of life into their own hands.

Paul Wegener, in addition to playing the lead role, co-directed the film, having had a good amount of experience in the genre before. He also directed and starred in The Student of Prague in 1913, which is occasionally considered the first horror film, and followed that up with two films centering around the Golem in 1915 and 1917, respectively, though both are sadly lost to the sands of time. Because of this it is difficult to know for sure whether Wegener was influenced by Wiene or Wiene was influenced by Wegener’s earlier work (or if they were both simply borrowing from the stage), but the angular sets, harsh and dramatic lighting, and climactic chase scenes certainly bear a striking resemblance to one another.

Of course it’s impossible when discussing Der Golem not to mention the eerie prescience of its subject matter, being a film about Jewish persecution only a decade and a half before the rise to power of Adolf Hitler in the film’s country of origin. Given how literally the phrase “History repeats itself” often manifests in the timeline of worldly events I don’t think there’s anything too inexplicable about the coincidental nature of the plot. After all, Jews are so used to being vilified, scapegoated, and discriminated against, they have a word for it: pogrom. (The word is Russian but it may have come from a Yiddish term.) In the early centuries A.D. it was pretty common for rumors (perpetuated by the Christian church) to surface about vile ceremonies in which Jews committed incest, slaughtered babies, and devoured their flesh in sacrifice to their heathen gods.

But further discussion of this would require a basic knowledge of history, which I do not possess, so allow me to bask in the prideful sense of accomplishment at having finally seen the third and apparently final major pillar of German Expressionism. Congratulate me, won’t you?

Halloween Notables:

Manmade Monsters

Dark Magick

Observant Cats

Slaughterings with Wild Abandon

"AAAAH!"ctober Chills: My Bloody Valentine

2011-10-13T18:57:00.002-05:00

It just wouldn’t be Halloween without a holiday-themed slasher, and 1981’s My Bloody Valentine distinguishes itself by being the only horror movie my scaredy-cat mother has seen that she does not claim scarred her for life. My only complaint is that, it being from Canada and all, it seems the filmmakers wasted the opportunity to inject something more culturally relevant. I mean, how long do we have to wait for Boxing Day Massacre or St-Jean Baptiste Day of the Dead?

In the small town of Valentine Bluffs (a community whose entire identity seems to be affixed to the holiday) there is a legend of a deranged coal miner who went mad after six weeks of being trapped underground. Blaming the Valentine’s Day Dance for the negligence that caused the mine collapse, the miner warns the town never to observe another St. Valentine’s Day, lest they face the wrath of his bloodstained pickaxe. His threat is put to the test on the twentieth anniversary of the disaster, when local teens with no respect for the ominous ramblings of creepy bartenders decide to stage the first celebration in two decades. That’s when the bodies begin to turn up.

As I mentioned earlier, the movie is Canadian—wonderfully, painfully Canadian. There are accents to put Bob and Doug McKenzie to shame and there are no less than a thousand appearances of Moosehead Beer. Apart from the setting, however, there’s not much to distinguish My Bloody Valentine from any run-of-the-mill eighties slasher; the same bad acting, the same POV shots, the same red herrings. There’s a minimal attempt at what is called a “story” and the character development is mostly limited to everybody telling the main character what a loser he is for leaving town and coming back when he couldn’t make a go of it elsewhere. It’s true, though. He is a loser.

While most of the films I’ve watched this month are best served with a high wind and the crepuscule pressing against the windows, My Bloody Valentine is better suited to a six pack and a group of friends. Here are some sample comments you may wish to utter during the screening: “Sex is enjoyable, is it not?” “Boy, that sheriff is quite the fool!” “I would not split up if I were them!” And so forth.

Halloween Notables:

Odd Cuisine

Masked Murderers

Haunting Histories

Horny Teenagers

Candlelit Wanderings

"AAAAH!"ctober Chills: Bedlam

2011-10-12T23:24:00.004-05:00

Bedlam is probably the first movie I’ve ever seen that claims to be based on a painting (or a series of them). The story laid out in William Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress tells of a young man who inherits a fortune upon his father’s death, wastes it on violence and debauchery, and ends his days in a madhouse. Apart from taking its visual design and few cues from the eighth engraving, set in London’s Bethlehem Hospital, Bedlam fashions its own plot in sordid muckraking fashion to expose the inhumane conditions of the notorious asylum.

Boris Karloff plays Master Sims, the Apothecary General of of Bedlam. A cruel man, he takes pleasure in treating the inmates like animals, beating them, caging them, and—it is implied—taking sexual advantage of those more pleasing to the eye.

The accidental death of a poet at the madhouse catches the attention of aristocratic Lord Mortimer, who is upset not because a good man is dead but because he had already paid him for a poem that had not yet been completed. His protégé, Nell, a woman approaching the “riches” stage of a rags-to-riches success story, attempts to harden herself to the plight of the inmates in the manner of the ruling class she so desires to infiltrate, but her good heart wins in the end and she embarks on a costly mission to oppose the abominable practices of the sadistic Master Sims.

The idea of a powerful man committing his innocent antagonists to an insane asylum has been used often, from Wilkie Collins’s sensation novel The Woman in White to Clint Eastwood’s Changeling, and despite the repetition it has lost none of its nightmarish potency. It is interesting to note that, as in the witch hunts of centuries past, it is primarily women who find themselves falling victim to such a plight: women who know too much, fight too much, speak too much. Undoubtedly the infuriating injustice of the scenario resonates so deeply as a symbol because it taps into the powerlessness and voicelessness of women throughout the ages.

Mark Robson, the second editor promoted to director under Val Lewton (the first being Robert Wise), is my least favorite of the Lewton Crew. His direction is ham-fisted, his philosophies overbearing, with a sledgehammer replacing the delicate chisel of Tourneur’s quiet masterpieces. I think in particular of the scene in The Seventh Victim in which Tom Conway reforms a group of Satan Worshippers by reciting the Lord’s Prayer.

To his credit, while Bedlam still makes a few sweeping statements which the story does not earn (Nell’s instantaneous taming of a particularly vicious inmate simply by offering him kindness…let’s see how far she would have gotten with Charles Manson), Robson generally directs the film with aplomb. There is the moody lighting and eerie atmosphere one comes to expect from these pictures, with an added undercurrent of social commentary, such as that on display in the scene where the fat, idle rich attend a masque held at the hospital, chortling and prattling on about politics while inmates forced to perform for their pleasure drop dead in the background. (One boy asphyxiates from being covered in body paint—a precursor to the Goldfinger legend.)

Karloff is responsible for adding another unexpected element: humor. While his Master Sims is ruthless and menacing—certainly not a man to be trifled with—he is also positively delightful in his corruption. In a memorable scene early on he becomes frustrated when another man fails to comprehend his “business” practices: “I’ve asked you for a bribe, man! Have you never been asked before?!” It is to Karloff’s credit that his occasional bumbling does nothing to diminish the ultimate threat he poses to Nell, and it is their battle of stamina and beliefs that fuel the film’s tension.

Leading lady Anna Lee is similarly commendable as his antithesis. Strong-willed and uncompromising, she is more human than saint, exhibiting fear and uncertainty in the face of Sims’s provocations. It is because of this fallibility that her deeds are more admirable and her character more relatable, and in a genre more often celebrated for its monsters and madmen, it’s refreshing to find a hero one can root for as well.

Halloween Notables:

Loony Bins

Candlelit Wanderings

"AAAAH!"ctober Chills: Picnic at Hanging Rock

2011-10-11T00:52:00.005-05:00

Hanging Rock is a strange place. When a class of Victorian girls picnics there on St. Valentine’s Day, 1900, watches inexplicably stop, red clouds appear, and an ominous and indefinable sense of portent holds sway over the formation. Three girls slowly become attuned to the landmark’s enigmatic vibrations, and before the day is over they have disappeared without a trace, leaving in their wake a lingering mystery that will instill a melancholy dread in the repressed community and shatter the lives of those left behind.

I would describe the tone of Picnic at Hanging Rock as meditative, but upon what is it meditating? Loss of innocence? The end of an era? The self-styled prisons of illusory control? I don’t particularly know what it is trying to say but I feel it is confident in what it is saying, and in a capable director's hands, that is enough for the moment.

Certainly it has a hauntingly lyrical quality about it, an intangible sense of something predatory and unspoken lurking beneath the surface. Everything seems to be moving in slow motion even when it is not. It is not a coincidence that Peter Weir chose to open the film with a voiceover quoting Edgar Allan Poe’s “A Dream within a Dream,” and in fact I wouldn’t be surprised if a pre-Eraserhead David Lynch was influenced by the elegiac dada landscapes of Weir’s deliberate tone poem.

Picnic at Hanging Rock is an art film, unabashedly and unapologetically so. It never aspires to accessibility but at the same time it is firm in its identity as opposed to defiant. It does not dare us to like it, but neither does it grovel for our affections; it simply exists as it must and wishes to exist, which means you’d better be willing to accept it on its own terms. Prepare yourself for surreal and ponderous soliloquies to be dropped at a moment’s notice, such as the following:

“Whatever can those people be doing down there? Like a lot of ants. A surprising number of human beings are without purpose. Though it is probable they are performing some function…unknown to themselves.”

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Halloween Notables:

Mysterious Disappearances

Lovecraftian Overtones

Candlelit Wanderings

"AAAAH!"ctober Chills: Martyrs

2011-10-10T00:40:00.005-05:00

I almost always start writing my reviews while I’m watching the movie, just so I can jot down my thoughts as they are fresh. Here are my preliminary notes taken during the first half of Martyrs:

“In addition to taking the “AAAAH!”ctober Chills blogathon as an opportunity to catch up on a number of the classics I’ve had on my to-watch list for some time, I also thought it would be a good idea to take in some of the flicks that have been causing a lot of buzz but which, for whatever reason, didn’t pique my interest. Being an arrogant ass I assumed that the hype surrounding Martyrs meant that it could not possibly be a good film; or at the very least, that it wouldn’t appeal to me.

“I don’t think I can be entirely blamed for this attitude, given that most discussions of the film tend to focus on its brutal violence and gore rather than any frank appraisals of its merits. Not once has anyone ever recommended the film by saying, “I was drawn into the plot and invested in the well-drawn characters.” Sensationalist dreck designed merely to capitalize on taboos and shock value, with no real intrinsic worth outside the particular moment in which it is released, is rather dull to me and the “dood! It’s like totally sick man!” taglines surrounding Martyrs on forums and podcasts had me wearily avoiding yet another film I didn’t need to see.

“Imagine my surprise, then, upon realizing almost immediately that Martyrs was not only not a poorly made piece of trash…it was actually rather good. Well-shot, well-acted, well-written, and generally all around well-made, writer-director Pascal Laugeir’s story of an orphaned girl taking revenge on those who horrifically abused her as a child is intelligently crafted and relatively restrained, given the subject matter.”

Well, by the time I got to the midway point, that review became entirely irrelevant as the film screeched into an abrupt tonal shift brought about by a jarring and surreal plot twist. I won’t spoil it for anybody who has yet to see the movie but suffice it to say I’m not being melodramatic when I claim to feel betrayed by the cheap and simplistic way Laugeir chooses to resolve his story.

Rather than actually developing the courageously challenging moral and intellectual dilemmas set up in the first act, Laugeir instead forces the story in a completely unjustified direction that plays out more like Saw as written by a pretentious philosophy student. What began as a fresh and potentially thought-provoking film devolves into the repetitive, lowest-common-denominator set of stimuli I had originally feared it would be. I could barely stand to watch the last forty five minutes, not because they were horrific but because they were so tedious.

Oh, Martyrs. Is it really fathomable that I once had hope you would upset Onibaba as my favorite film of the month? How unfortunate that you merely wound up distinguishing yourself as the most disappointing.

Halloween Notables:

Stormy Nights

Slaughterings with Wild Abandon

Gratuitous Nudity

"AAAAH!"ctober Chills: Cronos

2011-10-09T14:44:00.005-05:00

In 1993 the world was introduced to a genre maestro in the low-budget effort Cronos. Guillermo del Toro’s first movie offers a fresh perspective on the vampire mythos in this tale of a kindly grandfather who comes into possession of a golden mechanical insect housed inside one of the antique clocks he has prepared for resale. While hiding it from a sickly man and his ruthless nephew who will stop at nothing to acquire the device, he discovers it is in fact an alchemical fountain of youth with some rather unsavory side effects.

While I enjoyed the film for its own sake, what is perhaps most impressive about Cronos is how complete and self-assured a vision it is for a debut feature. Most of del Toro’s trademarks and obsessions appear fully formed—human monsters, clockwork apparatuses, religious imagery, slanted views on what it means to be a family. The cinematography, which is quite impressive for a two million dollar film, is tinged with the same warm amber hues and cold steel blues that will seem immediately familiar to fans of his later work, as will the graceful, fluid camera movements.

One word that del Toro tends to use in interviews is “idiosyncrasies,” and it is a word that applies to his writing as well as his directorial styles. Ron Perlman, as a villain, is not above threatening a child or offing his enemies by tossing them off a cliff, but he’s also charming and funny, even in his childish temper tantrums and his eternal preparations for the perfect nose job.

The heart of the film comes from the grandfather’s relationship to little Aurora, which is surprisingly well developed given how little screen time, relatively speaking, is dedicated to it. The economical writing and the strong performance of del Toro stalwart Federico Luppi creates a sense of history between the two characters, and granddaughter Aurora is a strong presence despite only one line of dialogue. I suspect the practical reason for this was simply that the little girl just wasn’t a very good actor, but del Toro skillfully cuts around her or hides her in shadow or behind curtains without calling attention to how little her face is being shown.

Cronos, like most of del Toro’s films, defies easy and immediate categorization, balancing horror, poignancy, and comedy in equal measure. While the studio system would doubtless rail against any story that refuses to be told in a straightforward and easily marketable manner, I very much appreciate the intimacy and personality of del Toro’s strength of vision. Like most of my favorite films Cronos is not an easily digestible experience but a complex peek into the mind behind it.

Halloween Notables:

Pesky Bloodsuckers

Stormy Nights

"AAAAH!"ctober Chills: The Invisible Man

2011-10-08T02:06:00.004-05:00

The main pleasure to be had from denying yourself a horror classic for many years is the ability to include it in your inevitable October blogathon the self-imposed rules of which specify that all films watched must be first time views. Needless to say this is a rite of passage in any boy’s life.

And so today I closed a chapter in the book of my personal horror fandom with a screening of the 1933 classic The Invisible Man. The last of the iconic Universal classics which I had yet to see, the experience is bittersweet, as I feel a sense of accomplishment but also a tinge of remorse that I have no longer to look forward to a first time viewing of any of these genre-defining works. But, there are still plenty of sequels.

As with Whale’s other horror entries The Invisible Man strides a fine line between comedy and horror, and it is a testament to the man’s ability that the result is not an incoherent mess. A walking set of pajamas is inherently absurd, and under a lesser director the sillier moments might overwhelm the story and make it all but impossible for the audience to take anything seriously, but Whales skillfully juxtaposes the laughable with the shiver-inducing.

Claude Rains’ performance is as much to thank; if you’ve got to build an important character with little more than a voice, it helps to have one of the best voices in cinema at your disposal. Rains is versatile enough to have fun with the role when he can but subsequently channel deadly seriousness in the next moment. His hooting laughter upon stealing a bicycle from an incredulous bystander is infectious, but when he matter-of-factly announces that he has just killed a policeman by bashing his head in, both the characters and the audience feel the full and violent weight of his insanity.

It’s also up to Rains to establish a measure of sympathy for Dr. Griffin with very little to work with: as the story begins he is not only invisible (meaning that reaction shots, one of the filmmaker’s greatest tools for establishing empathy, are out of the question) but also mentally unhinged. While he is cackling over rampages of murder and destruction it is his yearning and tenderness for love interest Flora that highlight the vestigial remains of his forgotten humanity. In her presence he reveals himself to be too far gone for a return to normalcy to be aught than a pipe dream, but Rains still communicates a submerged sense of regret, the internal and ultimately futile struggle of the former good doctor to overcome his deteriorating sanity for the sake of his weeping bride to be.

As with the archetypal werewolf Griffin is only bestowed his normal visage upon death (the only shot of Rains’ face throughout the entire film) as if to symbolize the immutable nature of the human soul, stolen from him in life but returned at the door of an unknown and transcendent eternity. Like the other Universal monsters Griffin is in some sense tragic, and through his tragedy he has endured.

Halloween Notables:

Mad Scientists

Doomed Romances

"AAAAH!"ctober Chills: Onibaba

2011-10-07T15:21:00.006-05:00

If I were to say to you, “Imagine a horror film directed by Akira Kurosawa,” you’d immediately envision Onibaba. Of course this was not the work of the seminal director but Kaneto Shindo displays the same penchant for precise compositions, striking use of light, and deliberately paced storytelling. On its own the opening scene is a tour de force of sound, as Shindo uses the sparse rustling of dead grass and low winds to build a contoured texture of foreboding.

The story follows a mother and daughter-in-law scraping out a meager existence after the son is called away to war. Scavenging like vultures, their subsistence hinges on murdering soldiers in the brush and trading their armor and equipment for food. Oh, and there’s a devil mask that comes into play eventually.

Shindo could have easily demonized the pair (and I suppose he does, literally) but he allows his camera to remain impartial, viewing them with the same neutrality when they are ruthlessly stripping dead warriors of their belongings as when they are forced to come to terms with the death of the son. Their actions are reprehensible but in their struggle to survive they are sympathetic. One wonders what one would do in their place, and with desperation permeating the air the real enemy seems to be only the futile and nonsensical war.

To be honest when I set myself the task of watching Onibaba I expected to feel as though I was watching it because I should, not because I wanted to. My experience with Japanese cinema prior to the more contemporary fodder has always been one of admiring detachment; even the more sensationalistic Jigoku had to be broken into several bite-sized chunks for me to get through it. But thanks to Shindo’s sure hand and skill at subtle character shading I was completely engrossed in the movie from the very first frame.

And again, I can’t overstate how beautifully the movie was shot. Every scene had me wanting to grab screencaps.

While it’s still early yet in the “AAAAH!”ctober Chills Challenge (Chillenge?) I think Onibaba will be a tough act to beat. Just edging out Queen of Spades as my favorite film so far, nothing short of an immediate Top 10 favorite will dethrone Onibaba.

But of course, October works in mysterious ways…

Halloween Notables:

Killer Costumes

Gratuitous Nudity

Odd Cuisine (That’s a dog she’s eating)

Stormy Nights

Campfire Tales

"AAAAH!"ctober Chills: The Company of Wolves

2011-10-06T22:12:00.005-05:00

Ever since that episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark? that illustrated the more gruesome aspects of traditional fairy tales I’ve been fascinated by the true grimness of the Grimms. That such truly macabre, immoral, and sexual elements were voluntarily transmitted to children (fairy tales were once fashionable as ribald parlor stories intended strictly for adults, but as their critical stock went down they were relegated to a younger audience) is fascinating to me. And while the sanitization and bowdlerization of the yarns has only increased in the last century—to the extent that most are unaware of the genre’s more salacious roots—there remains a strong contingent of artists and storytellers who look beyond the family-friendly façade to exploit the more morbid aspects and atmospheres of the original narratives.

Suspiria and Snow White: A Tale of Terror are two sufficiently creepy excursions into the darker pages of the classic storybooks, but when Neil Jordan set out to adapt Angela Carter’s short story “The Company of Wolves” to film in 1984 he focused on a more oneiric and provocative tone. Through a complicated structure of stories within stories within dreams he explores a common theme of burgeoning sexuality and the feminine sexual identity as women meet various fates at the hands (paws?) of werewolves.

The metaphor is not a new one; the tale of Little Red Riding Hood, for example, has evolved throughout the centuries to reflect changing views of sexual relationships and the responsibilities of women within them. Contemporaries of Perrault (who first collected the tale) said that a woman had “seen the wolf’ when she lost her virginity.

The deliberately contradictory outcomes of the girl-meets-werewolf stories in The Company of Wolves, however, obfuscates the ultimate statement of the film and with a single viewing it is only possible to conclude that Jordan’s (and Carter’s) viewpoint is less than simplistic. At the end of the dream it seems Rosaleen (the protagonist) has tamed the wolf that only moments ago murdered her grandmother in cold blood; when her real-life counterpart awakens from the dream, however, she screams in terror as a wolf crashes through her window, and the actress recites Perrault’s original concluding poem (which is decidedly cautionary) over the end credits: “As you're pretty, so be wise / Wolves may lurk in every guise / Now as then, 'tis simple truth / Sweetest tongue has sharpest tooth.”

Maybe the point is that all sexual encounters cannot be summed up with a tidy verse, or that the various aspects of sexual awakening are neither entirely good nor entirely bad. Or maybe there is no point. In any event it would take a proper college thesis to unravel the symbolism embedded within the story.

To get back to horror, there are several transformation sequences throughout the film, and while they reveal the lack of budget this can be forgiven thanks to the surreal tone. The effects clearly rely on the innovative work of Rick Baker and Rob Bottin from the parallel werewolf movies of a few years back, An American Werewolf in London and The Howling, but each of them distinguishes themselves by feats of inventiveness. I don’t know which is my favorite, the man who tears off his own skin as a prelude to the transmogrification or the aristocratic wedding party that changes into a pack of wolves under stuffy clothing and powdered wigs.

Choose your own favorite at home!

Halloween Notables:

Creepy Dolls

Deep Dark Forests

Wizened Grandmothers

Campfire Tales

Old Nick

Wild Wolves

Graveyard Jaunts

"AAAAH!"ctober Chills: Invaders from Mars

2011-10-05T13:38:00.005-05:00

In the 1950s land of Technicolorville a young boy named David spies from his bedroom window what appears to be a UFO crash-landing just beyond his backyard. Soon it appears that the Martians inside are abducting the townspeople and transforming them into servile automatons to perform their insidious bidding. While everyone in the neighborhood seems to be turning against him it’s up to David to convince those adults not under Martian control to believe his outlandish story…

Invaders from Mars is a dyed-in-the-wool sci-fi/horror classic not altogether dissimilar thematically from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, revolving around the same rural paranoia of not being able to trust those we have known our entire lives. It’s probably pretty easy to fit this into the framework of a McCarthy-era parable. While at times the budget, or lack thereof, is quite obvious (the Seussian Martians in particular are quite silly, with loping gaits and visible zippers on their costumes) there’s a depth to this cheesy boyish fantasy that gives it the power still to get under the viewer’s skin.

Even before the Martians invade there’s something unnerving about this world, where everyone pastes on phony infomercial smiles and the strongest expletive is “Gee, whiz!” I don’t know if this was part of the filmmaker’s intention or if the cast just came from the Leave it to Beaver school of emoting so popular at the time, but there’s probably a case to be made that we are all partially “controlled” by a disconnected exterior, an invented façade that submerges our true selves in the name of societal acceptability, and the film points this out by presenting both scenarios (before “possession” and after) as equally cartoonish.

Or it could be argued that, since the story is from the boy’s perspective (and perhaps entirely a product of his dream), the overly simplistic “good” and “bad” versions of his parents are indicative of a child’s black-and-white understanding of the good and evil dichotomy. The dream explanation also justifies the incredible speed with which David gets not only the local astronomer on his side, but the entire U.S. Army. (“Here, son, help me fire this bazooka.”) But whichever theory you subscribe to, you’re probably overthinking it.

Still, while the over-the-top execution can be at times laughable, there remains a disturbing and almost cruel potency to the basic idea that taps into our primitive fears of betrayal and abuse by those meant to protect us. When George leaves the house a loving, good-natured father and husband and returns cold and short-tempered, it’s positively chilling. The transformative metaphor is broad enough to be applied to many relationships, from an alcoholic parent to a secret Communist, but more important and immediate is the gut-wrenching terror of looking into the face of someone you love and seeing that the person you came to know no longer exists.

Davy’s mom isn’t too hard on the eyes though, huh? I’d be his friend if I got to go over to her house. “Hellooooooooo, Mrs. MacLean.”

Halloween Notables:

Creepy Kids

Alien Visitors

Evil Doppelgangers

"AAAAH!"ctober Chills: Queen of Spades

2011-10-04T23:45:00.007-05:00

In the early nineteenth century (we are informed through the opening titles) a card game called Faro is sweeping Russia, making and ruining fortunes in a single stroke for gamblers across the land. Captain Suvorin, an army officer unsatisfied with his lot in life, learns of the myth of a countess who traded her soul in exchange for the winning hand, and he vows to stop at nothing to learn her great and terrible secret.

A British production from 1949, The Queen of Spades would make a great double feature (in looks, tone, and accents) with Dead of Night…and in fact there was such a DVD package at one time, though it is now sadly out of print. The film has a restraint that one normally associates with classical English ghost stories, though like a coiled spring it maintains an escalating tension that explodes into bombast at well chosen moments.

The best sequence, for my money, is the flashback to the damned countess’s youth that narrates her fall from grace. Through a mysterious occult tome Suvorin learns that the countess was an amorous lady with a jealous husband, and it is through her fear of him that she is led to a shady and never-glimpsed figure that imparts to her the fateful secret of the cards. We know nothing of this mysterious benefactor but that he travels the world in search of needful persons, that he sculpts their visage carefully in wax before meeting with them, and that he knows of many things a man oughtn’t to know. The cinematography, already a shadow-painted blend of noir and expressionism such as prevailed at this time, kicks into overdrive and the whole of the backstory could be extracted intact and play on its own as a sort of dark fairy tale.

During the last act, in which Suvorin is tormented by the spectral apparition of the now-deceased countess, I was very much reminded of the “A Drop of Water” segment of Bava’s Black Sabbath. Through a careful employment of sound, swinging lights, and high winds, the vengeful ghost is never seen but its presence is very much felt. It’s the perfect film for a chilly autumn night, with a fire flickering at the hearth and the whisper of dead leaves swirling outside.

Halloween Notables:

Dusty Tomes

Faustian Bargains

Killer Costumes

Mystical Old Coots

Creepy Dolls

Secret Passageways

Ghostly Visitors

"AAAAH!"ctober Chills: Baba Yaga

2011-10-03T14:00:00.007-05:00

In Russian folk tales, Baba Yaga is a witch that lives deep in the woods in a rotating house raised up on chicken feet. Sometimes good, sometimes evil, she uses a mortar and pestle to launch herself through the forest in pursuit of lost children who might provide her with her next meal.

What does the Italian horror film from 1973 titled Baba Yaga have to do with the Slavic legend? Absolutely nothing.

Like any good spaghetti slasher from this era we are given a pretty convenient entry point to the world of high fashion, a photographer named Valentina. As you might immediately guess, there’s more than one incongruently-scored montage of topless models trouncing around in tacky costumes.

Following a night of highfalutin debauchery, Val is knocked to the ground by a passing car and recovers somewhere in the midst of the plot. The driver is a pale, mysterious blonde who introduces herself as Baba Yaga. Val keeps a straight face when she learns this but I suppose if your name is Valentina you don’t have much room to laugh at anyone else.

As her relationship with Baba Yaga progresses, Val experiences a series of strange events including a cursed camera, surreal dreams of sadomasochistic Nazi captors, and a malicious errand-running doll. In other words, she’s in a European horror movie.

There’s not much to surprise even the casual viewers of gialli excepting perhaps the low body count and the old-school atmospherics permeating the witch’s abode. Stunning cinematography, beautiful women, erotic encounters and haute décor are all par for the genre course and if that’s your cup of terror tea you could do worse.

More unexpected is the political undercurrent running through the film, manifesting in scenes of political protests on the streets, Sex and Civil Rights photo ops, and a bizarre commercial shoot in which a black man is “annihilated” by a white man to represent a particular detergent’s effectiveness against clothing stains. This progressive commentary all comes to naught, however, as the denouement finds Val in typical damsel-in-distress mode waiting for a man to come save her.

I suspect this modern jive talk is just that: talk. And the pretentious, café-elite dialogue between Val and her director-for-hire boyfriend gets tiresome pretty quickly:

“Tomorrow I start a series of soap commercials.”
“You’re nothing but an old whore!”
“That’s true, and who isn’t? We’re all whores of various species. The only difference is that I’m a whore and admit it, while the majority are whores but play at being sane. Believe me, Val, it’s all a big farce—a game, and contradiction is the number one rule.”
“Look, for some people contradiction is the only hope for salvation.”

And on and on to the tune of countless insufferable art students. I don’t know if this is a conscious satire of the would-be erudite or a straightforward case of a screenwriter who believes he is much cleverer than he actually is, but either way it’s pretty grating. Of course this all culminates in a somewhat imaginative yet still quite cheesy love scene and as I stared at this hairy man’s naked back I couldn’t help but think the movie would be much better without him.

See? No men in that shot and I’m okay with it. Clearly, lesbian subtext and S&M gear are enough to carry any film.

Halloween Notables:

Seductive Witches

Observant Cats

Creepy Dolls

Old Dark Houses

Gratuitous Nudity

Candlelit Wanderings

Stormy Nights

Killer Costumes

"AAAAH!"ctober Chills: Incident On and Off a Mountain Road

2011-10-02T03:07:00.001-05:00

Another day, another chill.

Today, rather than invest in a lengthy novel, we peruse a short story: “Incident On and Off a Mountain Road.” This quick flick was adapted for the small screen by Phantasm director Don Coscarelli as the debut episode of Mick Garris’ Masters of Horror series for Showtime. As with Bubba Ho-Tep, Coscarelli takes a trip to the sandbox of mojo champion storyteller Joe R. Lansdale for inspiration, but whereas the former resulted in a triumph the latter feels akin to a pie that has rested too long on a windowsill: it’s good, but with a trifle more attention it could have been delicious.

Ellen is driving down the lonely mountain road of the title, fiddling with her radio, when the scenic journey is interrupted by a less-than-relaxing car crash. The violent collision is but a scratch compared to the damage Ellen will endure over the course of the night, however, as she discovers she’s interrupted a hulking deformed figure in the process of lugging his latest victim to a cabin in the woods for proper disposal. Fortunately, it happens that Ellen has received copious training from her survivalist ex-boyfriend, and it soon becomes apparent that she will give the pale giant a run for his money.

Joe Lansdale, an intense and often very funny writer with a Twain-like knack for the Southern vernacular (being a native Texan himself), is one of my favorite writers, with the uncanny ability to seamlessly blend the disturbing, the humorous, the poignant, and the just plain bizarre. I have read the original story on which the episode is based, and while it certainly has those elements it doesn’t strike me as the most obvious choice for adaptation, feeling more gimmicky and conceptual than much of his work. Probably it was based partially on budgetary concerns, but Lansdale has pieces much better suited for maximum impact in a short running time—the devastating yet darkly funny “The Night They Missed the Horror Show” being an obvious example.

Another problem is leading lady Bree Tanner, who does not bring the requisite reserves of toughness to the role of Ellen. Although the other characters keep referring to her as strong, it just isn’t convincing, even when she’s fashioning a trap for her pursuer from a strip of cloth, a branch, and a pair of scissors. A heartier and more robust actress would have struck the proper balance between frightened and determined, but Tanner leans much too far to one side and never appears any more threatening than a scared little girl.

Still, at only an hour Coscarelli injects enough of his idiosyncratic brand of kookiness into the script to keep interest levels up—Angus Scrimm is a standout as a mad old coot housed in the killer’s lair—and I give him kudos for presenting a credible dissolution of a marriage in flashbacks to Ellen’s troubled past without having it come across as cursory exposition. That said, Bubba Ho-Tep is still your best bet for Lansdale’s signature Texinsanity stew brought to life in the moving image.

Halloween Notables:

Backwoods Killers

Corpse Collections

"AAAAH!"ctober Chills: The Monster

2011-10-01T15:37:00.001-05:00

Well, here we are lads and lasses. Another October has crept upon us. The Month of Eternal Midnight. And what better way to celebrate the impending All Hallows Eve than with one frightening feature a day? 31 Days, 31 Chills. Welcome to…“AAAAH!”ctober.

Each day, unless something goes horribly awry such as my being mutilated by disgruntled squirrels (seriously, they’re mad, I chased one up a tree once as a kid and it threw a nut at my head), I shall strive to post a review of a horror film. My own personal rules: it must be at least 45 minutes (I believe somebody somewhere lists this as the official minimal running time for a “feature film” though I am too lazy to confirm this) and it must be a first time viewing. My primary goal is variety: horror films from all eras and countries, of all styles and subject matter. Slashers, gialli, German expressionism, torture porn, creature features, giant bug movies; nothing is too disparate or too irrelevant.

So without further ado let’s get this crazy train a-moving with a silent Lon Chaney vehicle from 1925, The Monster.

The basic story is this: following a rash of strange disappearances, a meek clerk with delusions of sleuthdom takes it upon himself to apprehend the unknown culprit and win the girl of his dreams, the shopkeeper’s beautiful daughter. Unfortunately for him a more distinguished employee has set his sights on the same girl, and when the whole trio wind up in the lair of a mad scientist it’s up to Johnny Goodlittle (seriously, that’s his name) to come through for his woman or die trying.

The Monster treads some pretty familiar territory, and while it preceded the silent adaptation of The Cat and the Canary by two years, the respective plays upon which each were based debuted on stage the same year, 1922. I don’t know who was copying whom or if there was just a general enthusiasm for Spooky Mansion theater at the time, not being terribly well versed in Jazz Age Broadway, but there’s not much to see here if you’re already familiar with the superior Paul Leni production. Not to mention that even at 90 minutes it’s a tad overlong.

Lon Chaney is effective but underutilized in the role of the insane Dr. Ziska, who has taken the run of an abandoned mental asylum to perform hazily defined resurrection experiments on passing motorists. The only genuinely creepy scene in the film occurs at the beginning, as Ziska’s deformed crony causes a car accident and then abducts the incapacitated farmer from his vehicle.

After that director Roland West eschews thrills for chuckles as Johnny and friends bumble their way through secret passages, dark staircases and imposing laboratories, with some antics obviously inspired by Buster Keaton and other popular slapstick performers of the time.

Of course the love interest eventually finds herself strapped to a table with Johnny as her only hope for salvation, and frankly, though you can see it coming a mile away, I think we’d all be disappointed if it didn’t end up that way.

Halloween Notables:

Mad Scientists

Old Dark Houses

Secret Passageways

Taciturn Henchmen

Stormy Nights

A Haunting I Did Go

2011-08-29T21:28:00.006-05:00

Hey, have you heard about the Holga? All the cool kids have! It's the ultimate thrill in plastic fantastic photography! If you aren't shooting with a Holga you might as well be shooting yourself...in the face! With a gun!

That was a hyperactive commercial from the mid-90s that turned dark.

Anyway, a Holga, if you aren't in the know, is a really awesome medium format toy camera that you can buy for about $30. The lens is plastic, which means the images are infused with a soft-focus dreamy quality, and the film is 120 size, which is much larger than 35 mm and the pictures are square. It's got a nice retro feel and the average Holgagrapher ranges from the amateur to the fine-art producing professional.

I've had a passing interest in photography since I was a kid, but the technical know-how that the serious photographer must possess has always intimidated me. So when I learned of the stripped-down, bare-knuckle apparatus from China that required nothing of me but a roll of film and a bit of patience I bought myself one immediately. And what was my first thought upon laying hands on this cheap hunk of awesome?

That I had to make my way to the local cemetery for a photo session, of course.

That's right. Despite being a mature college graduate with a colorful wardrobe it really doesn't take much to revert me back to a maudlin monochromatic high school goth kid. Next thing you know I'll be breaking out the eyeliner.

Still, I suppose no self-respecting horror blogger with even a casual interest in camera-nomics can really escape a cemetery photo shoot, cliched though it may be. I mean, what are dead people doing with these statues, right? Nothing! So the living ought to enjoy them every so often I say.

Incidentally I wish I had gotten a closer shot of this marble mensch. You can't really tell because of the clouds in the photo but he seemed to be missing a head. So far as I could tell it wasn't vandalism or neglect; the statue was just carved sans cranium. Makes you wonder about the backstory of the fellow in that grave.

If you're interested creating your own lo-fi aesthetic, this is the place to go (though you may want to browse Amazon as their prices are much cheaper for some of the items). The Holga Darkroom is a great blog to visit for inspiration, reference, and a gallery of great Holga photographers, if you want to see what people with actual talent can produce from behind that crappy lens. Please note that nobody is paying me to endorse these products at this point, though I will gladly become a shameless shill for a pathetically low sum.

Just remember, though, if you do start stalking around in graveyards you never know who might be watching you in turn...

BotW: Deadman Wonderland

2011-08-09T14:03:00.003-05:00

I don't read a lot of manga, or eat a lot of mangoes, or believe in a lot of mangoats; I hate all things that begin with "mang", is what I mean to say. But I picked up a copy of Deadman Wonderland on clearance chiefly, I admit, because of the title. And because it was on clearance. I prefer to call myself "frugal."

The story begins after a massive earthquake that cripples Tokyo (eerily enough, this was published before the recent disaster in Japan). We are told that, in an effort to revive Japan's economy, the world's first fully publicly owned prison, known as Deadman Wonderland, has been opened to spur tourism. Visitors from around the world are allowed to watch as prisoners are pitted against one another in deadly challenges.

The protagonist is a student named Ganta, lone survivor of a massacre that left his entire class brutally slain. The violence was in reality perpetrated by a mysterious floating "Red Man," who laid waste to the classroom with his superior rapping skills and/or a powerful red jewel which he then bequeaths to Ganta, who is subsequently convicted for the crime and sent to serve his sentence in the prison. As he struggles to eke out a meager and miserable day-to-day existence, however, Ganta begins to suspect that even deadlier games are being played at Deadman Wonderland than those which the public are allowed to see.

I find that Japanese storytellers have a propensity for staggering conflicting tones against one another in completely unexpected ways while still producing a coherent product. Deadman Wonderland is no exception, being by turns violent, cruel, depressing, hilarious, erotic, and creepy. The story began in 2007 and is currently ongoing, though I have only read the first two volumes, and you have to learn to read from right to left or the conversations and flow of action won't make any sense at all. But the delicious artwork and carefully unfolded storyline make the effort worthwhile, particularly if you're in the mood for something just a bit different from what we're used to in the Western hemisphere.

The Villain Must Die: A Brief Contemplation of Our Need For Terror

2011-08-01T15:49:00.003-05:00

A while back I read a book (I don’t mean to brag but I possess as high as a third grade reading level) titled The Witch Must Die: How Fairy Tales Shape Our Lives by Sheldon Cashdan. It was an interesting treatise on the role played by villains in children’s stories and attempted to explain why, as the title says, the witch must die—often in a particularly gruesome manner, such as being inserted into a barrel lined with spikes and dragged down the street by a horse. Cashdan made many appeals to the popular schools of psychological thought but the essential premise, if I may boil it down to a sentence or two, was this: In order to reconcile the two sides of the mother—the attentive, dedicated side and the neglectful or simply absent side—infants undergo a process called “splitting,” where the parental figure is separated into two halves: Good Mommy (the one who is there to comfort and provide for when needed) and Bad Mommy (the one who, even in the best parent living, is not available every second of every day or who exhibits any sign of negative behavior).

This one's definitely Bad Mommy

Because children at first link their own identities with the identity of the mother, this dynamic extends to the self: Good Child and Bad Child. The witch, then, symbolically represents the Bad Side of Mommy and Child, and children thus use fairy tales to work through their own internal conflicts: when the witch is slain at the end of the tale, the indication is that the good side of the child’s personality has persevered over the bad, and children begin to learn how to control the internal battle that wages throughout our lives.

I mention this only because I have been thinking lately about that eternal and seemingly unanswerable question: why do we love horror? I think the horror story has its roots in the frightening figures of fairy and folk tales, and if what Cashdan theorizes is at all correct then we don’t just like horror—we need it. The reminder that good can triumph over evil in an external, universal sense is always comforting, certainly, but that existential conflict between our inner good, clean-shaven Spock and the bad, goatee-sporting Spock never really gets resolved even after we develop an independent sense of self. I suppose, in Freudian terms, you might call it the id versus the superego.

Slasher movies, though probably my least favorite subgenre, are always handy to bring up when illustrating a philosophical point about horror at large because they are imminently accessible and popular distillations of the genre as a whole. Much of the legwork in decoding the archetypes and motifs has already been done by Scream and Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film. Slashers tend to be fairly black-and-white in their presentations of good and evil and it doesn’t take much to see virginal Nancy and child murderer Fred Krueger as modern analogues to Hansel and Gretel and the mean old witch of the Grimm tale. (Wes Craven even makes the connection explicit in New Nightmare, which uses Heather’s narration of the story to her child as a direct parallel to Freddy’s emergence into the real world.) Of course, we are living in an age (both in terms of our adult-ness and the chronological timeline of the objective world) of cynicism, so it is now common practice to offset the happy-ending cliché with a revelation, just before the cut to black and the rolling credits, that the villain hasn’t really been extinguished, at least not for good—which does, I think, still play into the internal-conflict theory in that we realize, upon shedding our youthful naiveté, that the battle is ongoing and we’re living on a triumph-by-triumph basis, as opposed to promising that with one final victory we can overthrow our own inner demons and never again be troubled by temptation.

So it is my supposition that, despite being regarded as an inherently upsetting genre, horror is in fact, in very general terms, a reassuring mode of storytelling, for its simplicity of execution and its direct appeal to the subconscious. It’s much easier to understand evil as the singular characteristic of a corporeal entity than to acknowledge its presence in each of us, and to understand the villain as a blade-wielding psychopath than a collection of politicians and bankers hidden under doublespeak and bureaucracy. Of course there is still the inconsistency of said psychopaths being exorbitantly more popular than their heroic nemeses, but as I don’t want to deal with any contradictory information I’ll just be glib and conclude that we’re all a bunch of sick self-loathing sadomasochists.

BotW: The Croquet Player

2011-07-30T14:48:00.004-05:00

You might think that croquet is only slightly more terrifying than golf, simply by virtue of the mallets being somewhat more threatening. Well, let me tell you something…you’re right.

Croquet itself is not the object of terror in H.G. Wells’ late-period novella, written some three decades after his most recognizable works. In fact, calling it The Croquet Player is a bit like if Mary Shelley had changed the title of Frankenstein to Some Irrelevant Guy on a Boat. The titular character actually has nothing to do with the story proper; he just happens to meet the actual narrator in a park and the story is then relayed to him, a framing device that I suspect was only employed to bulk up the meager page count.

While the book is a short one, coming in at just under a hundred pages in hardcover, Wells takes his time unfolding the story, and it takes the reader some time to get a bead on exactly what is going on. At first, when the narrator’s preamble identifies the tale as one not of a haunted house, but of a haunted countryside, I suspected that this admission and the peculiar events that followed were the results of Wells’ attempt at an M.R. James ghost story; it displayed that same quiet unease, surrealness of setting, and eccentricity of characters of which James’s stories are the quintessence.

About halfway in, however, the narrative takes an abrupt shift with a chapter entitled “The Skull in the Museum,” where the real terror is evidenced to be Darwinian rather than supernatural. I hesitate to reveal much beyond that for fear of spoiling the experience, and it seems appropriate that a short book should be met with a short review; the curious can gobble it up in a few hours’ time if they should wish it. I will say, however, that this might be the earliest progenitor to the subgenre of “infection horror” later developed in classic films such as The Crazies or 28 Days Later.

The Croquet Player can be read online for free at Project Guttenberg.

Totally Minxed

2011-07-29T17:38:00.007-05:00

Take Seven. Replace the cast with cats. Send it off to Don Bluth to be animated. You now have a film roughly resembling the 1994 German murder mystery Felidae. Needless to say…it’s an odd film.

The plot kicks off with our scrappy hero Francis moving with his owner to a decrepit house in an otherwise idyllic neighborhood. Francis informs us, in his hard-boiled narration that continues through the entirety of the picture, that his owner is a writer who pens sappy pulp romances and moves every time he gets writer’s block, which is often. Immediately Francis stumbles upon a corpse (feline of course) in his backyard and discovers, via hard-living-tomcat-with-a-heart-of-gold Bluebeard, that this is only the latest victim in a series of murders in the area. Francis dons his amateur sleuthing cap and is thrust into a series of events involving lab experiments, sexual intrigue, rapist-animals, and an avalanche of dead kittens. If only Andrew Lloyd Webber had included a few of those elements in Cats it would have been a more interesting show.

Actually, despite the inclusion of gruesome murders, a sacrificial cult, references to gay rape, and other decidedly kid-unfriendly subject matter, the movie didn’t really feel much darker in tone than, say, The Secret of NIMH—which is, admittedly, a pretty dark film in its own right. Clean up the script and cast Dom Deluise as a spastic sidekick and Felidae becomes appropriate for the six and up crowd.

In examining my reaction to the film, though, I do wonder if what feels like a general lightheartedness, for want of a better word, is due in part to the fact that this is a horror story told from a cat’s perspective. It raises some interesting questions about how deeply the audience can invest when the victims and the consequences are removed entirely from the human sphere. I’m not saying I enjoy the slaughter of innocent cats but one of the things that makes the average horror film so frightening is the idea that humans—the sophisticated, civilized animal at the top of the food chain that has supposedly traded in atavistic aggression for wisdom, empathy, and self-awareness—can still do some awfully brutal things to other humans. Animals, on the other hand, have never been known to respond to reason so far as I know, and so the murder of one cat by another, regardless of how surreal and strangely human the motivation may be, comes across as a fairly low-stakes reenactment of the natural course of things.

The other element that hampers any real terror, for me anyway, is the animation style. Felidae has the look and feel of a late-eighties Disney movie; if an unwary everyperson was shown a few cels they might guess it had its origins in some unremembered scene from The Great Mouse Detective. (Ironic, given Francis’s comment that a particularly bizarre cult ritual upon which he is spying “wasn’t exactly a scene out of The Aristocats.”) However much sex and savagery the filmmakers wish to inject into their feline guignol, this style is not as conducive to horror as the razor-edge anime of Perfect Blue or even the Modern Medieval orchestrations of Chernobog in the “Night on Bald Mountain” segment of Fantasia.

This isn’t to say that I would want my kids (had I any) plopping down in front of the television for a screening. There are some rather disturbing scenes of animal experimentation as scientists hoping for an instantaneous skin-bonding substance strap stray cats to a table and burn through their skulls with the imperfected formula. Presented in an emotionless, documentary-like style, with a straightforward narration that contrasts Francis’s sleepy Bogartings, it reminds me of the surgery scene in Eyes without a Face in its unflinching sterile cruelty. And as if that wasn't enough there are mountains of cat corpses dancing on marionette strings, disembowelments, decapitations, and even a graphic depiction of, erm…mating. Me-ow.

Anyway, the lack of genuine horror atmosphere is hardly a condemnation as Felidae is more truly a noir, albeit tinged with some giallo elements. And like most gialli—as with most noirs—the solution to the mystery isn’t half as important as the journey getting there. Good thing, too, as I’d be lying if I said I completely understood the convoluted climax. (Note to self: just because it’s animated doesn’t mean you can pay only sporadic attention to the plot.) In all, director Michael Schaack deserves kudos for balancing the contrasting emotions at play, which could have rendered the film an unfocused mess. Felidae emerges as a fine example of what animation can achieve when the stigma of family-friendliness is dropped and the medium is allowed the freedom to be as mature or as infantile as the artist wishes it to be.

BotW: Pretty Monsters

2011-04-18T00:55:00.003-05:00

There are two criteria which, in my estimation, qualify an artist of any sort as a master of their medium. The first is that no one else does what they do in quite the same way as they do it. The second is that they make it look easy.

Kelly Link is a master of her craft. There’s nobody around who does what she does, and the reason is because nobody can. (Trust me, I’ve tried.) Her prose is Gene Kelly: light, energetic, dazzling, and seemingly simple. When you see it you think, “I can swing from that lamppost and smile with my hat upturned to the rain and be magic, too.” Only in the doing lies the deception’s discovery.

What you cannot do—and I do not mean this personally but really, you can’t—is effortlessly weave humor, and terror, and poignancy, and absurdity, and pathos into a cohesive whole the total effect of which is greater than the sum of its well-drawn parts.

The reason you’ve never heard of Kelly Link is because she does not write novels. Even Clive Barker, whose most famous literary work is a collection of short stories, has noted that anthologies, on a good day, do not sell half as well as novels, and Link works exclusively in short stories and novellas. Hence, authorial celebrity unachieved. But I’m doing my part and spreading the word.

Pretty Monsters, Link’s third collection aimed at young adults, is a bizarre bukkake act the participants of which are familiar genres (sci-fi, horror, surrealism). Link deftly mixes the poetry of atmospherics with the lugubrious emotional realities of the exposed nerve endings that might collectively be referred to as adolescence. Her heroes and heroines strive to stay sane throughout the tumultuous storms of pubescent yearnings, employing the same level of effort in their quests for balance and normalcy that other literary characters channel into epic pursuits for magic swords or Holy Grails.

Link’s perspective on teenagers is healthy and honest without becoming overbearing; her wry narration often undercuts the melodramatic throes of her angst-ridden protagonists while still sympathizing with them. Pretty Monsters is above all a fun book to read. Her gift is verisimilitude through hyperbole, a seemingly contradictory dynamic familiar to fairy tales that bypasses intellectual symbolism for emotional; while one is not entirely certain why a particular image or circumstance resonates, it resonates nonetheless, to a depth that speaks of its probing importance in the Mariana Trench of the unconscious.

In “The Faery Handbag,” a series of mishaps stems from the alternate supernatural world nestled inside a grandmother’s purse. In “Monster,” an ostracized youth at summer camp encounters a sarcastic flesh-eating creature that alternately claims to be or not be Angelina Jolie. My favorite story might be “The Wrong Grave,” about a tormented poet who, in a fit of romanticism, buries the only copy of his masterwork with his dead girlfriend, then attempts to retrieve them only to discover an unfamiliar and overly talkative dead girl in her coffin, sporting sentient hair that may or may not be trying to kill him. Then there’s the Gothic Western setting of “The Constable of Abal,” in which a fortune-telling charlatan and her transgender progeny collect ghosts on bracelets; and “The Specialist’s Hat,” a babysitter-in-a-haunted-house tale turned on its head.

There’s more to recommend in the collection than I can possibly mention, as Link is the sort of writer who makes every sentence count. Hanging letter from letter and paragraph on paragraph, she spins a universe of orgasmic millennial starbursts that twist and refine and restructure on the page in a way that words ought not be able to do—and simply won’t do, when you or I try to make them. Only Link is dancing on that weird and wonderful street.

Listomania: My 20 Favorite Horror Films, Part II

2010-11-01T22:56:00.002-05:00

Rolling merrily along…

Evil Dead II

I’ve never done acid, but sometimes I think that because I’ve seen Evil Dead II I won’t have to. The rare sequel that honors and builds on the original while spinning 180 degrees from it, Sam Raimi eviscerated the holy mother of fuck out of whatever melancholy ensued following his sophomore slump, the misguided Crimewave, by luring Ash into that damning cabin in the woods once more to have all manners of hell unleashed upon him.

It’s difficult to say just what makes this schizophrenic roller coaster so appealing. Partly, it’s just plain satisfying to see a hammy Bruce Campbell get the shit kicked out of him for ninety minutes. It’s also the possibility that at one moment you think you’re fine, the next you wake up to discover you’re chopping off your possessed hand while a mounted deer head laughs at you. Evil Dead II is absolutely more than the sum of its flopping, dismembered parts, which is certainly more than can be said for the toothy Evil Ed.

Halloween

Well, duh.

What more needs to be said about John Carpenter’s low-budget triumph of suspense over gore? The faceless killer, the shadow-tinged suburbia, the pervading sense of evil, it’s all been rehashed again and again. But what really surprises me every time I rewatch Halloween, most remembered as an auteur’s tour de force, is how well written it is. Sure there’s a clunky line here and there, but Debra Hill’s contribution to the film is not to be overlooked. The three main characters are not just likable, but clearly defined as well. Nobody is reduced to an affectation, stereotype, or catchphrase, unlike the cast of so many slashers that would follow. We remember Lynda, Annie, and Laurie because of what they do and say, because of their personalities, rather than through some quick identifying archetype like the Slutty Girl, the Party Guy, and the Misfit. All the directorial prowess in the world wouldn’t matter otherwise.

Spider Baby

Or The Maddest Story Ever Told, for those of you wondering which of the teeming thousands of movies entitled Spider Baby I’m talking about.

I’m not sure what to say about this one except that it is indeed quite mad. Jack Hill, exploitation filmmaker extraordinaire, has what you might call a quirky mind. Some might see it as being in poor taste to take on murder, incest, rape, mental retardation, and cannibalism and play it all for laughs, but Spider Baby is not a film that sets out to be malicious or offensive. Perhaps the general tone of amiability amidst the madness and carnage emanates from the fact that’s the picture has quite a bit of heart. The performances from Lon Chaney Jr., Jill Banner, and Virginia Washburn are not just brilliant, but sincere as well. Even in its lunacy Spider Baby is one of the most affecting explorations of unconditional love and the meaning of family ever committed to celluloid. It’s the sort of film you want to catch in a cup and release outside rather than crushing it in a tissue and flushing it down the toilet, and I can’t believe I just used that kind of figurative language. Help me.

The Exorcist

Just when you think it can’t get any more obvious than Halloween—hello!

Anyway, I’m not going to beat a dead horse here. Just watch the scene where Chris is walking home to the strains of Tubular Bells and passes by the nuns on a windy street. That visual poetry, more than the pea soup vomit and the rotating heads, is what makes this a great film.

Let the Right One In

Horror films are rarely honest. They don’t have much call to be; that’s the department of drama anyway. But what if a film could encapsulate all the style and verve and flair of an exceptional monster movie and still be one of the most emotionally honest portraits of childhood you’ve ever seen? That’s where the next movie comes in.

Let the Right One In has many roadblocks to engendering familiarity with an American audience. It’s subtitled. It takes place in a cold, foreign country. It’s about supernatural creatures. The main human character is a Columbine case in the making, and we’re supposed to identify with him. But specifics have an odd way of becoming universal, and the budding romance between Oskar and Eli manages to be as moving and engrossing as it is disturbing and strange. Director Tomas Alfredson’s deliberate use of ambiguity serves to help rather than hinder engagement with the story, and his almost documentary-style presentation isn’t even much help in figuring out whether the ending is happy or horrifying. You may have to use your brain a bit to sort through exactly how you feel, but you sure will feel respected in the morning.

The Haunting

Robert Wise got his directorial start under Val Lewton, subbing on Curse of the Cat People and taking the reins for The Body Snatcher, so he was no stranger to genre when he donned his horror boots once again after A-picture hits like Run Silent Run Deep and West Side Story. It certainly seems that the lessons he learned from Lewton were not forgotten for this adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s seminal haunted house novel. The Haunting in question is in this case almost completely psychological—sure it’s hard to deny there are real ghosts at work, but their presence is largely implicit and evidenced mostly through their impact on repressed, frigid heroine Nell. They are never seen, only heard—one of the most exciting sequences in horror movie history is created entirely through sound, as the spirits echo and boom their way straight into the darkly wooded psyches of both characters and audience. And when the opening sequence is an almost exulting parade of morbidity wherein a series of women meet their untimely deaths, you know you’ve got a keeper.

Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary

The infant on the list, Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary is not the most recent film chronologically, but it is the most recent that I’ve seen, having watching it for the first time only about a week ago. Canadian maverick Guy Maddin has been called either the most avant garde of mainstream filmmakers or the most mainstream of avant garde filmmakers, his films being shot on Super 8 and utilizing Soviet style montage editing and the rough, grainy aesthetic of early sound films to create a feverish waterfall of personal obsessions and non sequiturs. In 2002 Maddin fixed his mad gaze on the eponymous stage production performed by the Winnipeg Ballet and, using it as a springboard, crafted a frenzied neo-silent that schools virtually every other adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel as a singular victory of tone and mood.

Much of the actual dancing has been jettisoned for the film, but its spirit has been preserved in many other aspects of the production; this is, for all intents and purposes, a silent musical. The rapid cutting, the camera movements, even the title cards all weave seamlessly together to encode the rhythm and grace of ballet into the very film stock itself. Greed, sexuality, mystery, and a decided undercurrent of xenophobia (Dracula is played by an Asian actor) resurrect or reinterpret many of the long-dormant themes of Stoker’s novel, and though the story is expanded at some points and condensed in others to fit in the space of just an hour, this feels like perhaps the most faithful version of the classic story I’ve ever witnessed.

House on Haunted Hill

For many, Vincent Price’s definitive role was the pompous and grandiose madman, your Dr. Phibes or Lockhart from Theatre of Blood. For me, it’s his slightly (but not much) more down-to-Earth turn as Frederick Loren in schlockmeister William Castle’s most famous film, House on Haunted Hill.

It’s a fun movie, to put it mildly. I think it was borne of the screenwriter just making a list of cool things he’d like to see in a spooky campfire story and wrapped it all in a big creepy mansion. Tiny coffins with pistols inside? Sure. A hideous old hag woman in the basement? Why not? A talking skeleton? Well, you’ve got to class it up a little.

But Price makes the film. I love the acidic exchanges he has with his wife, Carol Ohmart of Spider Baby fame. He points an unopened champagne bottle at her like a sniper rifle: “It would make a good headline, playboy kills wife with champagne cork.” Sure, it’s all over-the-top nonsense, but it’s entertaining nonsense, and you can’t always take cinema too seriously.

Peeping Tom

Peeping Tom was released the same year as Psycho and I think the two together would make a pretty good double bill. Michael Powell, whose reputation and career were all but destroyed from the fallout of this controversial psychothriller, turns a vivid Technicolor eye on himself as well as his audience in the story of a focus puller who moonlights as a serial killer.

What has the potential to become a forgettable thriller with a cheap “hook”, that of the killer filming his victims to record their dying expressions of terror, becomes an examination less of the sociopathic mind than of the very mainstream tendency to look. Powell examines the link between cinema and voyeurism, art and alienation, questioning the tendency to excuse one and vilify the other when they both hinge on the base impulse to spy on lives that are not our own. The only character who “sees” through the protagonist’s veneer to his dark nature is a blind woman; her daughter, a kind-hearted soul, sees in the same man only goodness. Is one character more objectively “right” than the other? Perhaps it is a matter far more complex than a sweeping judgment of good or evil.

But it’s not merely an intellectual exercise. Peeping Tom is disquieting, suspenseful, even downright creepy at times. The scariest moment, funnily enough, is when murderous Mark shows angelic Helen a home movie. Mark’s father apparently conducted experiments in fear using his own child as subject, and the movie depicts a young Mark woken from sleep by his father throwing a lizard on him in bed. Though the act itself seems quite harmless, Powell creates a sinister undercurrent that almost electrically suggests something deeper and much more disturbing was transpiring between the lines. As they say, it’s what you don’t see that’s scariest…perhaps because you know in your secret heart just how much you want to see it.

The Raven

It’s not the most famous of the Lugosi/Karloff collaborations (that honor unquestionably goes to The Black Cat) but for some reason I responded much more favorably to The Raven, another in-name-only adaptation of Poe source material. In this one Bela Lugosi plays a supa talented surgeon who sets his sights on the daughter of a colleague, a dancer whose life he saved following a near-fatal car wreck. Grateful though she is, said dancer is already in love with another man and is noticeably put off by the good doctor’s insanity. Lugosi is left with little choice but to build an elaborate torture chamber by which to dispose of all those who stand in his way so he might claim the girl for his own, and Karloff is thrown into the mix as a dangerous but ultimately sympathetic murderer on the lam who needs a new face. Of course Lugosi doesn’t quite give him what he bargained for.

I love Depression era horror movies; their use of light and contrast in the black-and-white palette is still very reminiscent of German expressionism and they are only outdone in stylization by the elaborate musical numbers capping the Busby Berkeley extravaganzas of the decade. The Raven has some gorgeous photography on that score. I also found the cat-and-mouse game between Karloff and Lugosi more satisfying than the constant chess match in The Black Cat, which went on a bit too long to be fully convincing, and there’s some amusing comic relief like you get in B movies from the thirties when the actors apparently think they’re on the set of The Thin Man. Medieval torture devices really aren’t that frightening when you’ve got a smart-aleck husband-and-wife team cracking wise the whole time. If only Joan of Arc had had a sardonic spouse in tow, well, the ecclesiastics would have looked quite the fools then I tell you what.

Listomania: My 20 Favorite Horror Films, Part I

2010-10-31T22:04:00.004-05:00

Are you a fan of lists? Do you applaud the concept of stealing? Then this blog entry is for you!

I have, in fact, ideas. Tons of ‘em. But they’re ambitious and I’m lazy, so I’d rather just copy from the blogger sitting next to me. Don’t try to cover up your paper, Joe Monster, or I’ll slug you. And give me your lunch money.

I’ve seen a lot of horror films. I’ve yet to catch up with a lot of them, too. There are so many out there, elusive, like a wisp of fog in a glass eye. No, I don’t know what that means either. I’m also fickle, so any list of Top 20 Horror Films I’m apt to proffer is liable to look completely different come the dawn. But nothing is quite so easy as writing about that which I already know I like, so without further ado, herein lies my definitive, authoritative, essential, attack-of-the-deranged-mutant-killer-monster-snow-goons, list of stuffs and such not.

Jaws

Let’s get this out of the way. Jaws is a perfect movie. Perfect performances, perfect script, perfect score, perfect direction. If this movie is on television, I have to watch it straight through to the end, no matter how recently I’ve seen it. In the midst of a famously troubled production, Steven Spielberg somehow managed to craft a film that feels precise and inevitable, every moment exuding control and deliberation. It’s a masterpiece about a giant rubber shark, and prior to 1975 who ever thought that was a sentence anybody could say?

Howard Hawks supposedly defined a good movie as “three great scenes and no bad ones.” I would submit that every scene in Jaws is a great scene, though you undoubtedly have your favorites. (Well, duh, the Indianapolis speech is one of them.)

Scream

The irony of my love for Scream is that I grew up in the nineties having definitively missed the nostalgia boat for eighties slashers; I hadn’t seen a single one at the time, and now that I have seen them, I don’t like them. Odd that I should “get” this movie so well.

Perhaps it’s because Scream is less a specific satire of the horror genre than a meditation on the blurring boundary lines between fantasy, media, and reality in the 1990s. In the world of the film, the investigative reporter sensationalizes real-life atrocities with the same relish a horror flick dispatches of its fictional characters. Are the terrible events surrounding Sidney Prescott more the result of a bloodlusting tabloid news coverage, an irresponsible cinema that makes no apologies for its consequences, or just good old-fashioned homicidal tendencies?

Academic concerns aside, Scream is also just a fun movie. The cat-and-mouse game between heroine and killer is actually entertaining and suspense-ridden because you care about the character. Kevin Williamson’s writing style, which has never worked better than on this project, is hyper-stylized without becoming annoying or smug. The graceful direction of Wes Craven keeps the potentially pretentious script from getting in its own way and has fun poking at every horror cliché in the book before the oddly elegiac, self-reflexive ending.

Psycho

I want to be a bigger fan of Hitchcock. Heck, any film student would. But the truth is, most of his films either have little impact on me or draw me so close to adoration before shoving that obese middle finger right in my face. The ending of Vertigo springs to mind.

But the man did it perfectly, once. Psycho is a film that ought to feel like a cheap, mediocre TV episode. Inspired by the success of the previous year’s House on Haunted Hill, Hitchcock reportedly shot Psycho quickly and cheaply using the crew from his television show and a source novel by Robert Bloch. Seems like it ought to have been The Terror, the plodding Poe pastiche Roger Corman fabricated from thin air simply because he had a few extra days with Boris Karloff. But it isn’t that. It’s a work of art.

Like Jaws, it’s impossible to explain why everything works, but it does. Anthony Perkins should have won an Oscar as Norman Bates. It’s not a showy role, at least until maybe the end; the character is just a sad loser with mommy issues for all we know. But Perkins makes him fascinating. The MacGuffin is also in full force in the form of the money Marion steals from her boss. Never has a plot point been so casually tossed aside by the director the moment it sets the story in motion, but we don’t feel cheated or misled. We know we are in the hands of a master, and we go willingly for the journey.

May

What is May, exactly? You’ll find it in the horror section at most video rental chains (future edit: DVD rental websites), but it isn’t. At least it isn’t only that. It’s disturbing, sure. Tragic even. But it’s also very funny, albeit darkly so. Often it’s all three at once, such at the scene where blind children crawl on broken glass while an ethereal voice hums over the soundtrack.

May is an incisive and heartbreaking character study about a girl who has trouble making friends; she is, by her own admission, “weird.” Angela Bettis plays the shit out of the title role, conveying, virtually without dialogue, the hopefulness, dread, heartache, and self-loathing that is immediately recognizable to the socially awkward. Ana Faris and Jeremy Sisto round out a great cast that belies the film’s meager budget, which is also contradicted by the stunning cinematography and mise en scene. Lucky McKee has been mostly silent since this debut in 2002; let’s hope the man has more to say in the future.

Sleepy Hollow

Visionary auteur Tim Burton wraps up German Expressionism, Italian horror, and the Hammer Gothic in a visual tour de force that also manages to pay homage to steampunk, splatter films, and fairy tales. It’s probably his only “true” horror movie to date, though it also flaunts Burton’s trademark sense of humor that ranges from the idiosyncratic to the groan-worthy (“Watch your head!”).

What I love most about Burton’s films is the feeling that I’m walking around inside the recesses of another person’s mind, in the dark part of the sea unconscious, where the light does not penetrate and the fish have no eyes. Sleepy Hollow has the bat-winged-windmills, the scarecrows, and the graveyards of Gothic horror, but fuses it with a strong sense of character (indeed, everyone in the film apart from Katrina Van Tassel is a Character with a capital C) and a moderate dose of the dreamlike. And it went on to become one of the highest-grossing films of all time. I guess weird is at least a little mainstream.

Kill, Baby…Kill!

From one Gothic horror to another, the poorly titled Kill etc comes across as shock maestro Mario Bava’s answer to Hammer studios. Storytelling was never the man’s strong suit, but a surprisingly evocative ghost mythology is woven into the backstory of this tale of witchcraft and revenge from beyond the grave. Creepy children have never entirely held my interest, but the blonde waif-phantom in this film is almost more entrancing than frightening, shrouded in a omen-cloak of church bells, unnerving giggles, and chill air.

Black Sabbath is probably the more accessible of Bava’s films, but devoting a full 80-minute runtime to one story gives him the chance to gradually ramp up the intensity. Things get trippier and trippier as the final confrontation approaches, the nightmare quality being achieved primarily through imagination and creative camera tricks since the budget was not even full enough to allow for a professional dolly (Bava used a child’s red wagon). My favorite sequence involves the hero magically running through the same room over and over again, until he apparently “laps” the Mobius strip of his dilemma and finds himself chasing after his own doppelganger. The idea of repeating the same incident over and over again without explanation has been utilized everywhere from the Nightmare on Elm Street sequels to Groundhog Day, but Bava’s own “witchcraft” with the camera gives both the scene and the film as a whole its own mad energy that invites repeat viewings again and again.

Phantom of the Opera (1925)

Lon Chaney Jr. arguably met his defining role in the guise of the nameless title character in this silent adaptation of Gaston Leroux’s classic novel. Only occasionally included in the classic Universal Horror canon but serving very definitely as a precursor to their classics of the 1930s and ’40s, Phantom of the Opera combines German Expressionism with Gothic Romance to achieve a shadow-soaked, atmosphere-laden mood piece.

Chaney’s makeup and, to a lesser degree, his performance have certainly been given their due over the decades; certainly his Phantom is sympathetic and alluring without spinning into an overly tormented wet dream for female spectators on the Great White Way. The two-strip Technicolor masquerade, reduced to quite a shitload of fuck in public domain versions of the film, is vibrant and lush, and the hand tinted frames, of a mourning Chaney in swirling crimson cape, immediately anteceding the spectacle are no less impressive or magical. It is a film that must be experienced rather than watched; it’s impossible not to be lured into this opera house.

I Walked With a Zombie

I once heard a film geek describe a particular movie’s cinematography as “liquid sex.” That’s as apt a phrase as any to describe Jacques Tourneur and Val Lewton’s follow-up to their surprise B movie hit Cat People. I had the pleasure of seeing I Walked with a Zombie on the big screen and after a certain point you really do almost feel as though you are swimming in warm, enveloping silver. Virtually the whole movie is flawless women drifting through the moonlight in sheer gowns, black shadows from tree branches and leaves occasionally lilting through the frame, and I’d be hard pressed to call the pleasure derived “erotic” since the sensation seems almost to be bodiless.

I Walked with a Zombie is also distinguished by a supporting cast of African Americans who are not minstrel-show stereotypes, though they are in servile roles (as they would have been at the time), and voodoo, while responsible for the whole mess that has our heroes all in a bother, is treated with surprising respect and restraint. Never do you get a sense that the perpetrators are “evil”; it’s never quite that, if you’ll pardon the pun, black and white. For a film made two decades before the Civil Rights movement it’s a decidedly progressive film, so you don’t have to feel guilty for enjoying it.

Suspiria

The fairy tale: charming, grotesque, and above all mysterious. It has remained surprisingly elusive on celluloid, especially since the advent of sound, when a unanimous call rung out for films to move increasingly into the realm of the “realistic.”

Suspiria was at least shot without sound, so maybe that’s half of it. Dario Argento’s 1977 magnum opus remains the closest thing we have to a true fairy tale on 35mm. Some have called it a nightmare, a fever dream, an enigma. Some have called it boring. But I believe what we have in this film is something even rarer than perfection: we have something unique.

Nothing about Suspiria invites an intellectual evaluation. Even the emotions must be “trained” to respond to this unusual set of stimuli, when logic and even instinct have little bearing on what actually transpires in the world of this German ballet school. It’s a microcosm of oneiros, confined to labyrinth hallways. Most criticism, and much praise, seems to miss the point; it’s not about colored lights and stylish murder set pieces, though I won’t deny those are important components. It’s about a kind of psychological tactility. It’s a painting of a mental landscape; you can run your fingers over the canvas and feel the gobs of paint where mistakes were covered up; transformed; allowed to redefine the work as a whole. And that touch acts as a unifying portal to time, to place.

To mind.

The Sixth Sense

The only way to describe the awe I have for The Sixth Sense is to put it thusly: M. Night Shyamalan wrote a bad episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark?, only he made it brilliant.

This is one of the most compelling films I’ve ever seen. It’s an affecting drama wrapped in the guise of an aggressive scare flick. It’s truly frightening at times, yet emotionally resonant. And what kills me is that the story was sitting there the whole time. Ghosts seeking closure—certainly one of the more persistent and exploited horror tropes, but nobody ever thought to do it quite like this. To make it personally meaningful, beyond some vague reassurance about an afterlife or loved ones continuing to live on or watch over us. Most writers use the conceit to tell us something about death; Shyamalan used it to tell us something about life.

Thus concludes the first half, as a fond farewell to All Hallow’s Eve. Tomorrow, on All Hallow’s Day, perhaps I shall usher in the New Year (the year begins and ends with Halloween as far as I’m concerned) with the remaining ten.

See you around.

Happy All Hallow's Eve...Eve

2010-10-30T02:50:00.003-05:00

Hi!

You may be thinking, since this is October, that I've been blogging all month long, in the manner of my more dedicated blogren. You may be thinking that...but it's all...AN ILLUSION!!!!!*$)% Blah muah haha.

In fact I haven't been blogging at all. Have been watching a lot of horror films, though. So far I'm up to 18, if you're charitable and count the silent Waxworks and the Preston Sturges-produced comedy I Married a Witch. Maybe I'll post a recap tomorrow. Maybe I won't.

Also I've got a black eye. Let's not talk about that.

So, in an attempt to pretend I'm providing content, here's a video I had nothing to do with: Episode 14 of the web series The Maria Bamford Show, a spoof of the horror genre in general called "Death and Happiness." If you are unfamiliar with The Bammer, let me introduce one of the funniest stand-up comics working today. This video will make little to no sense since you have no idea who the characters are and how they are related to one another. Oh well.

I love it, love it, love it all. The Cryptkeeper-style intro, the frantic running-in-place, the flying butt. Not to mention the cheerfully delivered, "I have social anxiety, and I'm afraid of fire."

Now go out and have fun, you rapscallions.

Random Screencaps: White Zombie

2010-09-30T20:37:00.006-05:00

Allowing some Leeway

2010-09-28T00:51:00.003-05:00

Scream of Fear is an atypical Hammer film (at least, for those anteceding The Curse of Frankenstein) for a few reasons. One, it’s more of a thriller than a proper horror film. B, it’s contemporary (for 1961). Tres, it’s in black and white. And thus do you add up to what Christopher Lee would call the best film Hammer ever made.

Made in the wake of Les Diaboliques, one can’t avoid recalling Clouzot’s influential film as the story unfolds. Penny is a wheelchair-bound student returning home to France to stay with her father and new stepmother. The latter is there, along with a handsome chauffeur, a maid, and a vaguely menacing doctor (Christopher Lee, sporting an equally vague accent), but Penny’s father is nowhere to be seen—on a business trip, we are to understand.

Almost the moment Penny crosses the threshold into the house that, to her, does not represent a home, strange happenings begin to occur, most of them assembled around the inexplicable appearance and disappearance of her father’s corpse. Forming an alliance with chauffeur Bob, Penny sets out to discover whether she’s sliding into insanity or the victim of an elaborate plot to get her out of the picture.

One can almost hear Jimmy Sangster’s typewriter breathing a sigh of relief on every page as the Hammer scribe, saddled with a brand of formal, reserved Gothic horror wherein the script was almost beside the point, temporarily broke free of the genre’s constraints to play in a world much less manufactured. Certainly the dialogue, while not exactly a paragon of snappiness, is much more naturalistic. But Scream of Fear is hardly a character-driven film; the “ambiguously insane woman” sub-genre is almost as fraught with convention as the one for which Sangster was more used to writing. The script, for the first hour, feels overly familiar. While certainly watchable, it doesn’t really bring anything new to the Gaslight card table.

The last 20 minutes, however, is where the film really takes off. More exposition, character development, and plot twists take place in the third act than the rest of the film combined. Built on a solid, deliberately paced foundation, it threatens to spiral out of control but fortunately remains coherent and surprising, thanks in no small part to the steady hand and assured eye of director Seth Holt. Unlike Terence Fisher, who was given to bouts of melodrama, Holt’s approach is even-keeled and organic, sparing the bombastic explosion of horns when a realization is made or when…well, I was about to say “when a corpse is discovered,” but I just rewatched the scene and there is indeed a geyser of melodic accompaniment.

Also notable are the contributions of DP Douglas Slocombe, who began his career on classics like Kind Hearts and Coronets in the forties and called it quits after Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in 1989. You can tell he absolutely relishes the opportunity to do some old-fashioned black and white, horror-style, and the result is a film even inkier than Siodmak’s The Spiral Staircase or Bava’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much. Characters melt into and out of the shadows, contributing to Penny’s sense of conspiracy and paranoia and keeping the world fluid and unpredictable. The dirty backyard pool, around which much of the tension is centered, is a black portal into the unconscious, weed-choked and dark as pitch.

When we are first introduced to Penny, at the airport, she is not only in a wheelchair but hidden behind dark sunglasses, coding her not only as the Woman Without Legs but as a Woman Without Eyes as well. Metaphorically blind, and bound by the prison of her own body, she appears helpless, receptive rather than active, and ill-equipped to proceed down the thorny, confusing cliff atop which she is poised. But her dependence and inadequacy, we discover as we move along, are an illusion. She is a woman armed with much more than a mere mouth with which to scream. And that is ultimately what keeps this film worth watching.

House of the Smaller Houses

2010-09-20T18:12:00.004-05:00

Check out this poster:

Looks neat, eh?

House of the Wolfman is reportedly a throwback to the Universal monster mashes. I suppose that for werewolf fans, the arrival of this pseudo-sequel is sort of akin to Carrie Fisher finally bestowing a medal upon Chewbacca at the MTV Movie Awards, as a somewhat satisfying redress of past grievances--namely, that Wolfie never got a House of to call his own.

The low-budget film stars Ron Chaney, descendant of the Lons, as the kooky (presumably) mad scientist figure around whom the cast and/or mayhem gather. After watching the trailer I wish I could report an unsinkable sense of confidence, but apart from the kick-ass cinematography, which really captures that high-contrast, dragged-behind-a-car feel of an old film print that hasn't really been taken care of, I don't know if my initial feelings are good. It just sort of looks amateurish and cheap to me. When the monster bursts through the door, it doesn't convey the power and strength of the creature; it looks like an actor punching through cardboard.

Maybe if it was an original story that sought to evoke the Universal films of the 1940s rather than specifically tying itself to them by name, I'd be more willing to accept the obvious shot-on-video-ness of it all as a mere fan tribute. But you just sort of expect a certain impossible quality when your favorite childhood monsters are carousing through that monochromatic, cobweb-ridden castle again, just like you remember from the Saturday morning creature feature. The DVD release later this month ought to prove, at least, interesting.

Anyway, I posted all that so I'd have an excuse to post this:

...because I find it funny.

All right, I'm Finnished

2010-09-09T22:22:00.005-05:00

In the midst of swigging vodka, steaming in the sauna, and producing some kick-ass metal, native Finns have occasionally stopped burning churches for long enough to concentrate their hangover-induced stupor into the odd horror film. In fact, one bit of “research” (a.k.a., perusing a forum written in a language I don’t understand) led me to believe that Finland has only produced two horror films, both released, funnily enough, in 1952. A quick Google search dispels this with a controversial 2007 opus called Sauna (of course) starring a metal band called Lordi (of course), crowned champions of the 2006 Eurovision Song contest.* I guess that would be a bit like a couple of American Idol winners starring in some savage work of terror. So, From Justin to Kelly then.

But there were indeed two Suomi horror flicks produced in 1952: The Witch, which was apparently remade as a softcore drive-in picture in the ’60s by us Godless Americans, and the more readily available The White Reindeer, which seems to get more buzz within the community—perhaps because a casually dedicated individual actually has a chance in hell of tracking it down. Although the only version floating around is plagued by a “bug” for the TV station it was recorded off of (visible in the screencaps), and I’ve heard reports of the subtitles crap out after the first five minutes. Bootleg buyers beware.

The movie begins whimsically enough (after a haunting expository prologue-in-song, of course) with a group of reindeer herders strapping themselves to their hoofed charges and rocketing down a snowy hillside. The filmmaker artfully chooses to remain ambiguous as to whether this escapade is alcoholically motivated. Two of the racers, bright-eyed Pirita and love interest Aslak, become separated from the pack and begin a game of flirtation wherein Aslak lassoes Pirita and violently drags her off her sled for some tonsil hockey. Ha ha, her neck snapped! How charming.

After tumbling down a hill together, as you do, the two decide to get married, leading to a cutesy wedding party where the boozy, giggly, pre-coital scent of romance hangs in the air as the guests reluctantly shuffle out of the cabin to give the young couple their time alone. The hesitant, embarrassed, almost shy gesticulations of four booted feet, visible under the hanging curtain that sets off the makeshift bedroom, is a particularly Lubitsch-esque touch.

The story, such as it is, unfolds rather simply against this backdrop: Pirita, sensing an increasing emotional distance from Aslak, visits a local seer while her husband is away. Tsalkku-Nilla, Shaman (whose leglessness probably has something to do with impotence, symbolically, but I’m not willing to make this psychoanalytical journey at the moment), makes a love potion from deer testicles et al but tells Pirita that she must sacrifice the “first living thing” she encounters on her way home. Anybody who’s ever read a fairy tale probably knows that such vague verbal contracts usually result in your having to send your daughter away to marry an ugly dwarf while saying things like, “OOH, that scwewwy Wumpewstiltskin twicked me!” in an Elmer Fudd voice, and predictably enough, just outside her cottage who does Pirita spy on the horizon but her husband. Gasp.

Fortunately (or at least relatively so) the first thing she makes physical contact with is their pet reindeer: “relatively” because in this world such a creature seems as beloved and familial as a dog in America. But at least Pirita is spared from taking the knife to her husband. (Funny, come to think of it, that the “altar” is both a place where you marry and a place where you slaughter in sacrifice. Etymology is fun!)

Deed done and potion imbibed, a restless Pirita discovers one of the side effects of the shaman’s magic: by the light of the full moon, she is transformed into a white reindeer. His words, that “no man will be able to resist you,” play out in ironic fashion as an ill-fated man rethinks shooting the deer and decides instead to capture it. When he does so, it is not a reindeer but Pirita who stares back at him, with madness in her eyes. A bloodcurdling scream rends the chill air. Also, it was a dark and stormy night, and other such literary clichés.

Like any good werewolf movie, The White Reindeer exists in a universe where there’s a full moon pretty much every night. This doesn’t really make much sense but allows for Pirita to get in a bit of killing every few minutes so in my book, physics be damned. Also paralleling the werewolf genre is the manner in which the villagers quickly get down to debating the culprit behind the murders, some deciding it is the work of the “white reindeer witch” glimpsed by the friend of the first victim. One old gent, faced with a non-believer, alludes to the fact that “a lot happens here that you can’t understand in the south,” setting up an intriguing (for me, anyway) dynamic, north vs. south, normally played out in these types of films by “gypsies vs. regular folk” or “small-towners vs. urbanites.”

Eventually, the reindeer is let out of the stall, so to speak, when one of Pirita’s would-be victims fingers her in front of the entire town (in the accusatory sense, I mean) and tries to kill her. While at first the townspeople seem to dismiss his condemnations as a flight of fancy, their suspicions incrementally grow, and Pirita herself gradually realizes the truth. The climax of the film sees an angry mob giving chase, bearing forged spears rather than torches but no less an angry mob for all that, while Pirita retreats to beseech Tsalkku-Nilla (who has frozen to death in his cabin) and then the altar itself to lift the curse from her. We watching at home know there’s only one way to remove that curse, however, and there’s only one person to deliver her unto spiritual peace. I’ll leave you to surmise how it ends.

One of the more interesting aspects of The White Reindeer is the glimpse it affords into an alien culture. One early scene in particular feels almost like a bizarre twist on the American Western, the desert sand replaced by snow, the cattle herds by reindeer, the cowboys by coat-wrapped Finns on skis. Pirita herself, pigtailed and high-cheekboned as she is, wrestles a reindeer to the ground with her bare hands as a matter of course. The lack of theatrics in the depiction of this people drives home in an almost documentary fashion the idea that, for them, this is a natural way of life. The result is that an exotic setting (for the Western viewer, anyway) becomes a nonchalant reality, giving the horror a sufficient springboard. Of course, I’m only assuming vampiric were-reindeer are uncommon occurrences in Scandinavia; heck, I’ve never been there.

The monochrome photography makes striking use of the terrain, creating a world that exists only in two extremes: snow white and coal black. Certain shots look almost like a charcoal drawing. With the sparse dialogue, precise visuals, and a heavy employment of incidental music, you start to feel almost as though you are slipping into a silent film at certain points. If one can justifiably assign a national character to an area’s filmic output based solely on two of those films, then I would lump this in with Let the Right One In (and yes, I know that was Swedish not Finnish) insofar as both of them are quiet, subtle, deliberately paced, emotionally distant, and cold.

There’s quite a bit about The White Reindeer that, if not begs, then at least politely coughs for discussion—the ambivalent use of Christian symbolism, the idea of horror as an inherent morality play and where that leaves our sympathetic female protagonist, the creation of a new mythology around this twist on the transformation tale—but I think I’ve rambled on for long enough. I believe Stephen King refers to my style of blogging as “verbal diarrhea.” Let’s say this, then: I’d stop short of calling the movie an overlooked classic, but I could be convinced to label it an obscure gem. This is best seen as an arthouse horror film, with a Val-Lewton-meets-German-Expressionism sensibility transposed to a unique location that gives the appearance of a new trick to this old dog. The deliberate, almost dreamlike pace and tone holds its own against the thin story, weak characterization, and that universal truth which we all take for granted: that reindeer just aren’t that scary. Unless you remember that scene in Prancer where the little girl dreams about getting crushed by a plastic one. Or something, I don’t really remember that movie.

*Lordi actually starred in a different horror film, called Dark Floors, but I felt the need to combine the two for effect. Or rather I discovered later that they were two different films and I’m too lazy to change it. But not too lazy to add an unnecessary and elaborate postscript. Go figure.

I'm Not Dead Yet

2010-06-09T03:14:00.003-05:00

Hey everybody...and by everybody I mean the one or two people who check here regularly. I'm still alive. Coming up I've got a review of the obscure '60s arthouse horror Incubus, a retrospective on the Mario Bava Collection Volume 1, and more books of the week. Plus I've got a job now so hopefully I can afford to revive my Netflix account before all the Italian horror flicks in my queue move to the "Saved" section. Stupid Netflix.

I've got a few real humdingers in store for you. And as long as you don't think the term "humdingers" warrants high expectations, you oughtta be satisfied.

TTFN.

The death of Random Rentals

2010-05-22T00:27:00.005-05:00

Behold, dear readers; great tidings of disappointment do I verily bring unto thee.

Here’s the scoop—I was thinking of doing a new feature for the blog entitled Random Rental Somethings, where “Somethings” would be replaced by a day of the week or some other temporal moniker. In order to do my part for physical movie rental companies, and to potentially spread the word about unseen gems, I concocted a plan wherein I would periodically visit a rental chain, pick out a horror movie at random, watch it, and review it here. Lesser known movies would get exposure, ailing rental companies would get my business, and I’d have a brand spanking new widget for my sidebar. Everybody wins!

Unfortunately, the Random Rental feature died before it was even born.

Why, you ask? Why am I shoving your metaphorical Christmas tree of happiness up the chimney in my sham Santa Claus outfit? I’ll tell you why. Because there are but two rental places within driving distance of my location, Hollywood Video and Blockbuster, and upon preliminary investigation with the future blog feature in mind, I uncovered some very disturbing information. Turns out Blockbuster’s Horror section is stocked primarily with crappy direct-to-market DVDs, the latest remakes and PG-13 megahits, and the classics and franchises we in the horror community already know and love. I don’t think they had a single film from before 1978 and none of the obscure films predated 2005.

Hmm, I thought, scanning the teaser copy on a few DVD cases that tried to pass off DV cam torture porn as legitimate drama. Well, Hollywood Video was always the more diverse of the two chains anyway. I bet I’ll find something there.

I hopped into my 1995 Honda Accord, which is a faded candy apple red and no longer smells of urine, and drove across town pumping Sometimes When We Touch from my blown-out speakers, confidence exuding from every pore in my body. Or perhaps that was sweat, but in any event I felt ready to conquer the world.

I pulled into the Hollywood Video parking lot, donned my sunglasses which are cool enough to be worn at night although it was then mid-afternoon, strutted up to the ugly glass-and-metal façade, and saw a sign that read: “This location is now closed.”

Closed?!?!.

Fuck.

I even missed the closing blowout sale.

And so died that particular dream.

I mean, I suppose I could do something with Netflix wherein I simply browse through titles in the Horror section and add them to my queue, but it just wouldn’t be the same. The gratification would be delayed, the pleasure of browsing the box art would disappear, and I’d have to waste a rental slot on a film that might suck.

In lieu of Random Rentals I did want to talk, for a moment, about my memories of browsing through the local movie depositories when I was a kid. My existence postdates the advent of VCRs but my childhood predates, just slightly, the format change to DVD, which hit in a big bad way when I was about ten. (My dad has never really been at the top of the technological mountain, but for some reason a DVD player costing in excess of $1,000 was one of his impulse purchases in the late nineties.) By the time I was old enough to rent my own movies on a regular basis, online rental companies were in vogue, so the days of physically renting tapes occupies a pretty nebulous but impactful No Man’s Land in my life.

When I was a wee lad—call it about eight or so—I was inexplicably drawn to the horror genre but was absolutely terrified of it at the same time. Maybe visiting the celluloid scaring grounds was a way of trying to conquer my fears, by controlling them with the Stop, Pause, and Fast Forward buttons. Invariably my late-night diet of cheesy ’80s slashers, horrible Sci-Fi channel originals, and the odd classic or two sent me to bed with two eyes and both ears focused on every shadowy corner lest a malicious entity hid there with watchful eyes.

Even before I thought I wanted to be a filmmaker, the local video place had a certain mystique about it. We used to go to a local chain called Bob Bardash, usually with the motivation of swinging into the Dancing Tomato afterwards to pick up a pizza and a quart of their homemade ice cream. Wandering the aisles of the Bob Bardash, surrounded on all sides by rows of clear plastic VHS cases stuffed with what on a book would be called a dust jacket, emblazoned with art on the front and the teaser and cast list on the back, was an almost transcendentally joyful experience. Every tape represented an experience et potentia, amorphous and mysterious until the moment I brought it home and played it on the 24-inch boxy abomination that was our television. Of course I was too chicken to actually watch most of the horror films, but given that most of them would have paled in comparison to the film I imagined I was missing out on, I’m not sure that ultimately proved to be a bad thing. Then again I thought Mortal Kombat: Annihilation was a masterpiece, so I suppose my standards couldn’t have been too high.

Most video stores, as far as I can remember, kept the tapes in boxes, either clear or white or black, that opened like a book to reveal the tape inside. Less popular was the plastic rectangular prism with an opening at the bottom, where you pressed the opposite sides together to allow the tape to fall out. With those cases I remember sliding the tape up and down when it was halfway out, too young and innocent to understand the sexual connotation of the motions, because I was so enamored with the noise it made as the plastic of the tape scraped against the plastic of the case: a dry, industrial “wheedget-whoo” like you might hear sampled on a hip-hop track. We also had a device separate from the VCR that rewound the tape because my mother claimed that constantly rewinding tapes in the VCR would wear down the machine. If she wasn’t around, of course, I didn’t bother transferring the tape from one to the other.

I don’t remember specifically whether I had any favorites, browsing-wise. The image of the little boy in New Nightmare brandishing his homemade Freddy Fingers, adorning the back of the VHS box, stuck with me over the years. My imagined contextualization involved the child slowly morphing into Freddy in a dream sequence, with the picture in question depicting a point during his transformation just after the knives had grown from the fingers. In the actual film, which saw years later, I believe it was not a dream sequence, the kid did not morph into Freddy, and the knives were simply taped to his fingers, but I still sort of prefer my version. I also vividly remember a picture on the back of some Friday the 13th sequel in which a screaming girl is climbing out of a pit of bodies, but I’m not sure, having not seen any of the franchise outside of parts 1, 2, 4, and Freddy VS. Jason, whether that’s actually what I was looking at or if my brain embellished whatever it was over the years.

The bad carpet, the bare walls, the large windows in front that let in the rays of the setting sun, all these things combine into an experience that is unquestionably more in my memory than the sum of its parts. It was, if you will excuse my rose-tinted flowery reminiscences, a storeroom of dreams. It was the intersection where my internal self and the external world met, finally and perfectly, to augment and shape the totality of my humanity, to reinforce and foster a world only dreamt of—both then, because I did not understand it, and now, because I can never recapture that perception. The world of cinematic magic has been digitized; the physical product is shipped out of warehouses in white sleeves devoid of character, or streamed from a server directly to your computer screen. Perhaps you will forgive me when I don my stylish yet distinguished Old Man Hat and gripe, a trifle wistfully, that it’s just not the same.

BotW: Ancient Images

2010-05-20T02:22:00.003-05:00

Ancient Images by Ramsey Campbell.

Why? Here's why:

A back story involving a cursed film production starring Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff
Lovecraftian overtones
Merry ol' England, wot wot
Killer scarecrows
Wheat sustained by sacrificial blood
Wheat! That grows on blood!!!
Cranky condemnation of '80s splatter films (woot woot)
Graphic scenes of music video editing
Slightly less graphic scenes of men plummeting to their deaths from tall buildings
Menacing thin folk
Dialogue scenes in pubs, pip pip and all that
Thrills
Chills
Kills
And a special guest appearance by Nancy Reagan

One of those isn't true.

Go Easton, Young Man

2010-05-18T23:12:00.002-05:00

It’s time for another round of everybody’s favorite program, Name That Hacktor! That’s right, the fast-paced game show where you stand to win absolutely nothing.

I love shtick.

So the other day I was watching The Munsters, as I am wont to do, and I really think Herman and Lily have just about the perfect marriage. I’m ruminating on this when what to my wondering eyes should appear but this guy, and eight tiny reindeer:

Admittedly that’s a difficult photo to place him with. How about this:

Or this:

That’s right, it’s none other than Robert “Yer hittin’ the BOOZE again, huh?” Easton, master thespian and star of Bill Rebane’s The Giant Spider Invasion--maybe the worst thing to ever come out of Wisconsin. And that includes my mother-in-law! Yuck yuck. I kid because I despise.

I don’t know why I was so surprised when I finally placed him as college basketball prodigy Moose Mallory, who whisks Marilyn Munster away for a date at the end of the episode (now this is one alliterative couple). I guess it’s because The Munsters, as schlocky and silly a show as it is, has an air of legitimacy about it. Yvonne de Carlo worked for Cecil B. Demille, for Gawd’s sake! The idea of Hollywood royalty coming into contact with a man who would one day utter the perennial chestnut, “You’re so dumb you wouldn’t know rabbit turds from Rice Krispies,” is just a little mind-blowing. For me, anyway. I can’t speak for you, unless you’re my wife, in which case, stop reading this and get back in the kitchen.

Anwyay, Easton does turn in a fine comic performance, for what it’s worth. The funniest moment occurs when Grandpa overenthusiastically zaps a fire into being, the flames leaping across the hearth to ignite the reclining Moose’s boots. “Hey Pa,” deadpans Moose laconically. “You’re closer to mah feet than I am. Would you mind puttin’ out the fire?”

“Okay, son,” Pat Buttram grudgingly concedes, rising to beat out the flames. “But don’t expect me tah do it every time.”

Is it immature to snicker at someone named Buttram?

So, incredibly enough, a man who rose to dubious prominence playing unsophisticated rednecks started his career portraying none other than an unsophisticated redneck. O mischievous Fate, doest thou in thy infinite confounding contortions exhibit no regard for my fragile mental state?

Me Myself and Island

2010-05-15T17:28:00.003-05:00

If you’ve ever wondered what audiences 80 years from now will think of the average Michael Bay film, your curiosity can well be satiated by screening an old-timey equivalent, the 1929 adaptation of Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island. Even George Lucas, the man who gave us an entire trilogy of films on the “Look what computers can do!” plot principle, was once savvy enough to understand that a special effect without a story is indeed a pretty boring thing.

Unfortunately that’s the best word I can conjure up to describe The Mysterious Island—boring. Excruciatingly, painfully, mind-numbingly boring. For a story with all the trappings of a romantic science fiction adventure it just doesn’t have a spark of life in the entirety of its 95 minute runtime. The film was so dull, in fact, that I could only finish it by viewing it in half a dozen brief increments. In the final five minutes, as the story slowly, arduously wrapped up its plot threads, I was reaching for my laptop to see if I could find a 24 hour webcam site that showed a continuous, static shot of drying paint.

Lionel Barrymore plays a benevolent scientist-leader, Count Dakkar, who in addition to eliminating class barriers within the society of his small island has also invented a neat-o diving ship, for underwater exploring and the like. Oh boy, I sure hope we get interminable shots of the ship descending, agonizingly slowly, into the murky, uninteresting depths of the ocean!

Dakkar’s daughter (or sister, not sure which), Sonia, is in love with common laborer Nicolai Roget, a notion that visiting dignitary Baron Falon, ruler of nearby Hetvia, can’t comprehend, being something of a bourgeois jackass. It’s ironic that Falon has a distinctively Russian look about him, the Soviet Union later becoming the poster child for an ideology that theoretically sought to foster a classless society, what with Falon being a real prick when it comes to poor people and all. If I knew my history better I’d dazzle you with all the impressive and shiny brilliance of a disco ball, but as it is I’ll just have to let the observation lie there like a flaccid frankfurter in an innuendo-laden male impotence commercial.

Because Baron Falon is a douche nozzle (I’ll certainly keep an eye out to see if my use of the term “douche nozzle” draws any search engine traffic here), he up and invades Dakkar’s island. Fortunately, his scheduled slaughter coincides with Roget and crew having taken the diving ship out for a test run, although upon returning they painfully and ignorantly blow the element of surprise. I can’t blame them, since there wasn’t a periscope or radar on the ship that would have alerted them of any danger on the island. Disregarding After the Fire’s advice Roget does turn around (oh oh), despite Der Kommissar being in town (oh oh) and dives beneath the surface, with Falon giving chase in the spare diving ship.

After this point it all becomes a little blurry for me, but essentially what happens is that Sonia the love interest gets involved, Roget is lured back to the surface under false pretences, Dakkar joins Roget while Sonia is a damsel in distress in Falon’s clutches, and both ships sink to the bottom of the ocean. There, the hero (I think) and the villain (I think) duke it out on the ocean floor in unwieldy metallic diving suits that make it virtually impossible to figure out who the hell you’re looking at. All this occurs in the midst of an undersea kingdom, staffed by weird pygmy creatures, that is used as little more than a backdrop while a regular-sized octopus attacks a scale model of the diving ship. Necessary? Of course not! But how else does one engage the audience if not by continually throwing random, semi-intriguing, undeveloped crap at them?

So then, needless to say, everybody heads home and Dakkar blows up his laboratory because he doesn’t want to be remembered as a bringer of evil into the world, in the form of, er, a submarine that didn’t really do anything significant apart from change the locale in which the bad guy tried to kill them. Despite the fact that everybody really worked their asses off to save his life, Dakkar gets into his diving ship and takes it out into the ocean to destroy both it and himself. Then, the island is attacked by zombie pirates. Or at least I think that’s what happened; I was paying more attention to the paint drying website at that point.

The bottom line? The special effects are marginally interesting in their quaintness, occasionally even brilliant for the time, but they do not a movie drive. Writer-director Lucien Hubbard is way too impressed with all the whiz-bang he can get out of the moving image and not nearly impressed enough with the rudimentary (a.k.a. time-tested) conventions of, say, character and story. Funnily enough, the ole IMDB tells me that Jacques Tourneur’s father Maurice co-directed the film in an uncredited capacity, “funnily” because Tourneur the younger was so averse to showing the audience anything, even the killer panther in a killer panther movie.

Similarly unspectacular are the intermittent sound sequences inserted into an otherwise silent film. The bulk of it is used for a tedious dialogue-heavy scene at the beginning where Dakkar explains some blah blah blah to Falon about his diving ships, when all we really need to know is that they are ships and that they dive. Most of the rest of it is relegated to brief sound effects that aren’t even worth the effort. The market for silent films was virtually dead just two years after The Jazz Singer proved a smashing success at the box office—Charlie Chaplin was considered an outright madman, continuing to release silent comedies as late as 1931 (yes, Modern Times was released in 1936, but it had sound sequences)—so from a business standpoint the idea of shooting a few quick dialogue exchanges makes sense, but artistically it doesn’t raise the film above the level of “novelty.” It reminds me of the way studios are currently so eager to cash in on the 3D craze that they will add a third dimension even when it proves to be nothing but a detriment to an already unimpressive film. I didn’t see the Clash of the Titans remake but I sure heard about it.

The only aspect of The Mysterious Island I really liked was Jacqueline Gadsden as Countess Sonia, playing the wide-eyed innocent with just a bit of pluck that keeps her helpless heroine bit from getting too insufferable. This was her last film, which makes me wonder if there wasn’t something about the sound era that disagreed with her. The fact that she was billed as the more easily pronounceable “Jane Daly” perhaps suggests that some studio was attempting to cultivate a leading lady persona for her—“Jacqueline Gadsden” doesn’t quite flow off the tongue like, say, “Fay Wray.” Whatever the reason, Gadsden disappeared from the film industry for the following five decades, dying in California in 1986, exactly one week after her eighty-sixth birthday.

Still, even the bright spot of her rather limited role isn’t quite enough to justify a viewing of this mediocre mishmash, which is useful mainly as an argument against those who believe an over reliance on special effects at the expense of story is strictly a modern cinematic affliction. Recommended for die hard silent film fans only.

BotW: Carrie

2010-05-13T00:08:00.000-05:00

As far as most mainstream readers are concerned there’s only really one name in horror—Stephen King. The man has written more books than the entire Bush administration probably ever so much as skimmed. As the years have drifted by like leaves on an autumn wind King has earned some hard-fought respect with works that, whether book snobs like it or not, have come to be regarded as proper “literature,” whatever those superior minds in ivory towers have currently decided the word means. The Green Mile, “The Body,” “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption,” and The Stand have been met with critical acclaim and just might survive in the heart of popular culture after the author has left us. But sometimes there’s just no denying the emotional impact a pulp horror potboiler can have, and King stumbled into a resonant tragedy of almost Greek proportions with what should have been a forgettable airport paperback, his first novel, Carrie.

Beginning life as a short story, Carrie’s plot is not exactly complex. A shy, mousy high school misfit experiments with and develops her latent telekinetic abilities just as outside forces conspire to thrust her into the limelight at the senior prom, where a devastating prank sends her on a murderous psychic rampage.

Despite her indiscriminate slaughter of both the guilty and the innocent alike on prom night, Carrie never loses our sympathy because even the superhuman among us, who charmed their way through high school with a toothpaste-ad smile, have suffered moments of insecurity, of humiliation, of downright cruelty. In the grand scheme of things, amidst war and genocide and world hunger, the petty drama of adolescent politics doesn’t seem all that important, but King clearly remembers the devastation of high school made hell. In his memoirs/rumination on his craft, On Writing, he describes his memories of two girls which he mined for inspiration in creating the title character, girls who rushed through the school hallways with their eyes on the floor and their books held tight to their chests. Both of them were dead by the time Carrie was published, one through suicide and the other as the result of an illness.

I appreciate King’s honesty, which keeps the story from becoming a morality play. While good and evil are somewhat clearly defined, the bitchy popular girl clearly being the necessary villain, even the characters trying to help Carrie are not saints. They still occasionally feel disgusted or exasperated by her meekness, and their motives center around guilt more than selflessness. Sue Snell, the good girl of the piece, fucks her boyfriend in the back seat of his car in a scene that still makes me feel a little sleazy. Nobody is pure or virginal or undefiled in the squalid, gritty small town reality of their existence.

Carrie has been put through the wringer, so far as adaptations go, spawning a classic movie, a not-so-classic movie sequel, a crappy (I assume) Sci-Fi miniseries, and even an ill-fated Broadway musical (what). But the book alone authentically captures a portrait of suburban teenage life, where the sweltering, stifling sense of boredom, melancholy, meaninglessness, and desperation culminate in an explosion of nihilism remembered by the outside world only as a sensationalized TV movie. Like the predatory hive-mind of the high school “normal,” it ignores only that which it cannot exploit.

Live Nude Girls

2010-05-11T01:37:00.005-05:00

If, as is often said, Barbara Steele is the Elizabeth Taylor of horror...

...then surely Edwige Fenech is the Audrey Hepburn?

Seriously. Look at that picture and tell me they aren't the same person.

Also, is posing nude with cats just de rigeur for genre screen sirens?

You may be tempted to make a "pussy" joke here.

Please. I implore you. For the sake of our nation's future...restrain yourself.

And now, the news

2010-05-07T17:11:00.005-05:00

Hello and welcome to the 5:00 news. I'm your anchor Dan Blather.

No I'm not.

But I do have exciting news! See? A link to a legitimate item and everything!

It seems that the 1960s horror anthology series Thriller is getting a long-overdue DVD release. For those not in the know this series was hosted by a mustachioed Boris Karloff, who also played a character within the story some few times. In theory it's not dissimilar from his introductory duties on Mario Bava's Black Sabbath a year later, except this time there's no Italian dubbing to get in the way.

The release date is August 31st. The release price is $149.98. The stars include Elizabeth Montgomery, Leslie Nielsen, William Shatner, Tom Post, John Carradine, Ursula Andress, and Cloris Leachman, for starters. Plus the show gives a lot of love to oft-overlooked genre mainstay Robert "Psycho" Bloch, who adapted many of his own short stories into teleplays for the hour-long program. And bonus features include commentaries by folks the likes of Tim Lucas, Arthur Hiller, and slasher-director-cum-porno-parody-maven Jim Wynorski. You know you want to hear what the man who helmed The Hills Have Thighs has to say about vintage television.

For my money, Thriller is pound-for-pound the horror equivalent of The Twilight Zone. It's surprisingly scary, surprisingly visceral, and surprisingly good. I'm sure I'll be writing more about it when the DVD hits the market...especially if the good folks over at Image Entertainment feel the need to send me a free copy. I'll pimp it, I swear! My, er, five or six readers will definitely be well informed!

Note: Source photo for the above image can be found here.

BotW: Monster 1959

2010-05-05T00:20:00.002-05:00

In today’s decidedly post-modern world, when artists, filmmakers, comedians, and writers mine material out of the exploration of pop culture—thereby creating an endless series of reflections, pop culture shaping and begetting pop culture—the creature feature of the 1950s and 1960s have not gone untouched. Joe Lansdale has a brilliant story called Godzilla’s Twelve Step Program, funny and scary and a little heartbreaking as Lansdale stories tend to be. Mike Nelson of television’s Mystery Science Theater 3000 set his first novel, Death Rat, in a broad B-movie universe. And David Maine visited this well-trod territory for his giant monster novel, Monster 1959.

In a plot that closely parallels King Kong, a group of American hunters wind up on a non-specific tribal dominated island where the natives routinely serve up virgin female sacrifices to a large, green, radiation-spawned monster simply called K. Betty, the blonde botanist, naturally falls into the Fay Wray role when she is kidnapped and offered to K. Upon rescuing her, ultra-masculine adventurer and boyfriend Johnny concocts a plan with born showman Billy to transport K. to the U.S. for a campy circus show. In predictable fashion, K. escapes with Betty and tears up the city with Johnny, the police, and the military giving chase, culminating in a man-beast showdown atop the Statue of Liberty.

It all sounds pretty familiar, but where the novel deviates from formula is in Maine’s exploration of the psyches of the archetypal cast. In true 1950s style Betty is given the superficially empowering occupation and education of a scientist—a botanist in this case—but ultimately proves rather useless in any department but that of the distressed damsel. Beau Johnny’s proclivity for saving her from mortal danger goes far beyond chivalry and into the realm of psychological need; for him the traveling show, in which he and Betty nightly reenact her abduction and rescue, is an ongoing means to satiate his exponentially increasing addiction to the psychological accoutrements of “hero.” Their relationship is a perverse manifestation of gender repression, with the long-suffering Betty playing the helpless persecuted maiden so that Johnny can feel the knight errant such as his fetishized hyper macho ideal constantly demands.

In a way Monster 1959 reminds me of Watchmen in the sense that it deconstructs common character types in this genre and attempts to posit what would motivate these people, driven as they are to engage in such bizarre behavior, should they exist in reality. Invariably it all comes back to psychosexual hang-ups and raging insecurity, which may seem a trifle simplistic but for the fact that the novel is ultimately a satire. The characters may seem like caricatures, and they are, but in some capacity they approach truth in ways that the wish-fulfillment heroes and heroines of a patriarchal nation’s wet dreams often deny.

Plus you get that great 1950s Technicolor.

For those who wish me to go to Hell

2010-05-04T00:33:00.006-05:00

There’s a soft spot in my heart, somewhere just above the left ventricle I believe, for silent horror. If I have one lament for the current state of film (and believe me I have more than that) it is that the silent film has been relegated to a niche market. Occasionally I wonder how the language of cinema would have evolved in unimaginable ways if the coming of sound had been staved off for just a few more years. I also wonder how many licks it takes to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop, but that’s another story.

It was therefore with great anticipation that I settled down to witness the little-seen Rex Ingram supernatural thriller The Magician. I’m not savvy enough to say with any kind of authority that this was ever considered an outright lost film, but I have stumbled across several textual whispers to the effect that it was for many years quite difficult to find. If you’ve seen it it’s probably because like me you caught a showing of the newly restored print on Turner Classic Movies in March. I love TCM.

We begin with sculptor Margaret Dauncy, who is putting the final touches on a giant Mephistophelean statue. Unfortunately for her Lucifer feels the need to fall from grace once more and the crumbling clay figure breaks its downward descent on her spine. Margaret is whisked away to surgeon Arthur Burdon, who saves her from paralysis and begins courting her toot suite. But all is not well as sinisterly leering Oliver Haddo (played by Paul Wegener, director and star of Der Golem) fixes his malevolent gaze on innocent Margaret, who is destined to play a role in his evil plans.

Haddo is a self-proclaimed magician, based in part by source-novel writer W. Somerset Maugham on occultist Aleister Crowley, and has aspirations to artificially create living beings by alchemical means. It turns out that even with magick on his side he can only give life by first destroying it—in fact his manual of choice is ridiculously specific in its demands: “In selecting the subject for obtaining this heart blood, a maiden of fair skin, golden hair, eyes that are blue or grey is essential.” Surely one of the few times embodying the Aryan ideal can actually set you back in society.

Haddo, Svengali-like, gradually inducts the damsel under his hypnotic spell, much to the chagrin of Burdon. Eventually both Margaret and Haddo disappear after she stands up Burdon on their wedding day and both are later found in Monte Carlo rigging the casino system for material gains. It is unclear why Haddo doesn’t simply kill Margaret immediately as he could undoubtedly cheat the Roulette table on his own, but in any event when he discovers that Burdon is hot on his trail he high-tails it to his menacing mountaintop laboratory with his mesmerized bride in tow to finally finish the job.

With Margaret incapacitated it’s all up to Burdon to stop the diabolical magician and save the world from his tyrannical rule (I assume). It’s a race against time as Haddo slowly lowers the knife toward the struggling maiden’s vulnerable breast while Burdon makes a mad dash up the lab’s spiral staircase to rescue his lady fair. Ladies and gentlemen, will he make it?!?!

Yeah, probably.

Wide-faced Paul Wegener, undoubtedly the Robert Z’dar of his time, plays the villain to the metaphorical mustache-twirling hilt in the kind of hammy performance that only ever really sells in a silent film. Apparently somebody behind the camera was getting a tad self-conscious over the star’s cloak-swirling antics, as Burdon at one point remarks to a giggling Margaret, “He looks as if he had stepped out of a melodrama.” Overhearing, a miffed Haddo sweeps his cape over his shoulder and stalks off.

The highlight of the film is a sequence where Haddo, in a bid to demonstrate his demoniac powers to Margaret, literally descends into Hell. The gentle sepia tones burst into a glaring angry red like a crash of thunder as the sculpted faun on the wall melts into a fiendish satyr blowing into a pan flute. The damned writhe and toil in misted agony as the denizens of the Inferno cavort around bubbling cauldrons in the clearing of a black forest. A lustful faun spots the suddenly long-haired Margaret, whose expression suggests both horror and perhaps erotic intrigue, and attempts to ravish her while a horn-coiffed Haddo looks on with serpentine eyes. I wouldn’t be surprised if The Magician was an influence on the mad Chernabog romp in Fantasia, although my impression could have been shaped by Robert Israel’s score, which launches into Night on Bald Mountain here.

Also taking inspiration from Ingram’s film were, perhaps, more than a few Universal horrors. The life-creating laboratory at the end, wrapped in torrents of rain and licks of lightning, certainly feels like a page from the book of James Whale. And Haddo’s entrancing gaze, under the sway of which the heroine is powerless to resist, reminds one of Bela Lugosi’s eyelit stare in Dracula or Boris Karloff’s in The Mummy.

What’s most disappointing about The Magician is that it’s a real schlock tease magic-wise. Apart from the aforementioned trip to Hades, which was awesome and no mistake, Haddo’s powers are limited to such mundane activities as cheating the craps table and not dying from a snake bite. He gets killed off just prior to effecting what promised to be a really memorable and exciting scene, what with the grandiose lab equipment and all. There’s also a pervasive infusion of slapstick humor that ranges from mildly amusing to distracting to downright ludicrous, such as when Haddo’s laboratory self-destructs following the villain’s demise and the next shot is of his scientific underling hanging from a distant tree, very much alive but with most of his clothes blown off. As far as desecrations of physics goes this rates just below Daffy Duck’s beak slinging around to the other side of his head when Elmer Fudd unloads his shotgun into his face at point blank range.

Even so (boy I hate artificial concluding transitions) The Magician is a must see for any silent horror fan. The imagery is elegiac and haunting, the story compelling, and the atmosphere as hypnotic as Haddo’s stare. That’s what I love about silent films, that they can present you with an obviously stage bound image of Hell and yet, because of the grainy fairy tale quality of 1920s film technology, you still think to yourself, “Yeah, I could see Hell really looking like that actually.”