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Hunchback of the Morgue

May 19th, 2012 | article by | No Comments »
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a.k.a. El Jorobado de la Morgue
directed by Javier Aguirre
1973 / Eva Film / 79‘
written by Paul Naschy, Javier Aguirre and Alberto S. Insúa
cinematography by Raúl Pérez Cubero
 starring Paul Naschy, Maria Perschy, Rosanna Yanni, Alberto Dalbés, Victor Alcázar, María Elena Arpón, and Ángel Menéndez

The picturesque Bavarian mountain town of Feldkirch has everything a movie town needs: a surprisingly big hospital, a system of catacombs that has been used by the Templars and the Inquisition, and a reform school for young women. It would probably be a fantastic place to live in, watching shower scenes and listening to Wagner all day, if not for the fact that basically everyone in town is a mean, mad bastard in one way or the other.

Hard-working, not particularly clever, hunchbacked, ugly (at least that’s what everyone says: Naschy isn’t wearing any “ugly” make-up, looking just like he does in other movies where he’s supposed to be a handsome lady killer) morgue assistant Gotho (Paul Naschy) is the favourite victim of everyone in town. His daily routine seems to consist of being insulted, slapped around, and made fun of, his only recourse being a mad expression when he cuts corpses into parts (which is something you do in this particular hospital morgue). The only one treating Gotho like an actual human being is Ilse (María Elena Arpón), but the girl is lying on her death bed with a lung disease (must be consumption), and all the flowers the really rather sweet Gotho can bring her won’t keep her alive.

When Ilse dies, Gotho cracks. The mild-mannered man turns a bit murderous, first killing two other morgue assistants who are trying to rob his dead sweetheart with a conveniently placed hatchet, then dragging Ilse’s corpse down into the catacombs hoping she’ll awaken one day. Afterwards, it’s off to another revenge murder.

And that’s how things could continue for Gotho, if not for the resident mad scientist, a certain Dr. Orla (Alberto Dalbés). With the help of his assistant Dr. Tauchner (Victor Alcázar), and Tauchner’s girlfriend the reform school head (I think) Dr. Meyer (Maria Perschy) Orla is trying to create artificial life, but Orla’s total lack of scruples and his need for fresh body parts cost him the co-operation of the hospital.

 
 
 

So it’s pretty much like Christmas and his birthday falling on the same day for Orla once he realizes where Gotho is hiding. The catacombs will make a fine laboratory for the secret continuation of his experiments, and Gotho is easily swayed to help with acquiring body parts once Orla has promised him to revive Ilse. Soon enough, Gotho’s new duties will involve grave robbery, murder and the kidnapping of fresh girls from the reform school (for Orla’s experiment turns from a mass of cells into a hungry monster); the only hobby they leave room for is kissing the feet of reform school co-head Elke (Rossanna Yanni) and getting romanced by her in return.

Of course, things can’t stay this paradisiac forever, and Gotho will have a violent discussion with Orla’s monster (which just happens to look like the Oily Maniac) soon enough.

Even for something taking place on Planet Naschy (the great man of Spanish horror cinema course being co-responsible for the film’s script as well as playing the male lead), where the bizarre is actually the quotidian, El Jorobado is a pretty wild concoction. Where else, after all, would a story about a mistreated hunchback with certain necrophiliac tendencies taking vengeance on his tormentors be just too normal not to need an infusion of a gorier variation of the classic mad scientist story at about the half-way mark? I am, of course, not complaining about this broadening of the narrative (such as it is) for it’s exactly things like this that give most of Naschy’s films their charm and their weird energy.

That energy comes especially to the fore here, in a film that eschews the usually languid pacing of many of Naschy’s scripts for something much snappier. Which isn’t to say the script doesn’t have many of the usual flaws in a Naschy film, namely, that most characters act like complete idiots (would you believe it’s a bad idea to tell the mad scientist your plan to out him to the police?), and that some of the connective tissues one is used to from a professionally written movie are missing, so it’s always a possibility the film’s not going to show an important development at all but prefer to just talk through it later on; possibly for budgetary reasons, possibly because Naschy hated proper transitions. If one wants to enjoy El Jorobado - or most of Naschy’s other movies – one has to accept that things don’t work in quite the same ways on Planet Naschy as they do in our world or in the movies in our world.

 
 
 

On the other hand, it’s difficult to imagine a more “normally” structured film having the time for all the small digressions and suggestions of various kinks El Jorobado has – some torture, a random whipping, the quite clearly suggested necrophilia, the fem dom whiff of Gotho’s feet kissing or just the suspicion that Elke falls in love with Gotho because she’s into men with physical disabilities for the disabilities’ sake and not the men’s, or else really has a thing for guys who kiss her feet for little reason; it’d probably make for an awesome porno.

This being a horror movie instead of pornography, though, the film is much more interested in crude yet entertaining gore effects, most of which ooze a classic carnival charm I found myself unable to resist. The only problematic scene in this regard is when Naschy fights some rats who are nibbling on Ilse’s corpse. At first, they “jump” (that is, are thrown at him with great force) our hero – the sort of thing that’s always good for a laugh, but then, we’re attacked by pictures of actual rats being burned alive with a torch. Like all real animal violence in the movies, that’s just completely out of ethical bounds for me, and makes it difficult to still call the film’s fake violence “good-natured” and “silly” as I else would have had.

Nearly a thousand words in, I still haven’t mentioned El Jorobado‘s director Javier Aguirre. That’s because there really isn’t much to his direction. Despite the moody assistance of an awesome mountain village, a spooky ruin, and some fine catacombs, Aguirre’s direction just doesn’t do anything memorable at all, certainly nothing even vaguely comparable to the weirdness of the script. On the other hand, Aguirre is also not doing anything that’s actively bad, so it’s difficult to criticize him for anything but being not as crazy as the script he’s working with and shooting it like a straight little horror movie.

If you’re willing to ignore the fate of those poor rats, El Jorobado De La Morgue is a perfectly entertaining piece of Naschy craziness, containing everything I love and hate about the man’s work, plus (at least in the Spanish language version) a small nod towards the Necronomicon that will make all co-Lovecraftians happy, too.

The Horror!? is a regular cult cinema column by Denis Klotz, aficionado of the obscure and operator of the film blog of the same name.


Santos vs. Las Lobas

May 11th, 2012 | article by | 2 Comments »
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a.k.a. Santos vs. the She-Wolves
directed by Rubén Galindo and Jaime Jiménez Pons
1976 / Producciones Jiménez Pons Hermanos / 86‘
written by Jaime Jiménez Pons and Ramón Obón
cinematography by Raul Dominguez and Victor Gaitán
 starring El Santo, Rodolfo de Anda, Gloria Mayo, Jorge Russek, Bubia Martí, Carlos Suárez

This May the agents of M.O.S.S. throw their collective gaze (warning: may turn living matter to stone) toward everything hairy and beastly: King Kong, Feroz Khan’s chest and more. To stay up to date on our exploits regarding the matter, you can just follow this handy link.

Before you do that, though, it’s time for me to tell you about the awe-inspiring fight between (the decidedly waxed) El Santo and a band of lycanthropes (decidedly hairy).

Santo’s (El Santo!) sweet life of wrestling fools in the ring and getting kissed by the White Wolf Queen of the lycanthropes (something that will not be important later on) is rudely interrupted by a sleazy private eye who tells our hero some random stuff about lycanthropy and hands him an envelope containing a meeting place with a certain Cesar Harker (Rodolfo de Anda), werewolf hunter. Santo, after having fought every supernatural creature you’d care to name, and some others too, is still the great sceptic, poo-pooing the whole lycanthropy idea and shrugging that strange visit off. One imagines Santo gets visits like that so often he has learned to be choosy whom to believe.

His opinion changes when our sceptical hero is repeatedly attacked by a pack of dogs with the awesome abilities to a) make the great El Santo very very afraid, and b) to disappear into thin air. Clearly, something supernatural is going on here, so the luchador decides that meeting up with Cesar will be just the thing to do.

At their very leisurely meeting (it’s still the 70s) Cesar explains to Santo that the Harkers have a long tradition of werewolf hunting, helped by their freakish immunity to the curse of lycanthropy; quite unlike Santo, who will – thanks to his “dog” bites – have to do something against the lycanthropy problem or turn into a lycanthrope himself before the next Great Red Moon (whatever that is) rises. Fortunately, there’s an old prophecy foretelling either the end of the world through a lycanthropocalypse or the end to the hairy menace by the hand of a legend or symbol of silver. That latter symbol, Cesar is pretty sure, would be Santo.

 
 
 

Practically, Cesar knows the lycanthropes are based quite close to the small village (still with its own doctor and chief of police) he and his family are living in, so he invites Santo to his home. After dispatching of one of the incredibly ineffective lycanthrope assassins who seem to hound Cesar’s every step (a random flashback shows he can’t even play a relaxing round of golf without being attacked), Santo agrees. But being the responsible chap that he is, the luchador is first going to fulfil his contractual obligations and have a wrestling match; he’ll be with Cesar a bit later. After all, possibly turning into a wolf person in the near future is no reason for the idol of the masses to not show up to a fight. My protestant work ethic is ecstatic.

The situation will be quite changed once Santo arrives in Cesar’s home village, though. The werewolf hunter and the White Queen have killed each other off, leaving behind some very angry lycanthropes in need of a new queen, Cesar’s twin brother Eric (Rodolfo de Anda without glasses), and various women and children who will soon enough be in peril. I’m sure there’s nothing untoward in the crate that arrives from Transylvania the same night Santo does, like, for example, the King of Lycanthropes Licar.

The whole affair could become too much even for a hero like Santo, but Eric, a bare-chested (again a waxed one) vest-wearer named Gitano (Carlos Suárez looking like a man who has a lot of fun here), and various armed villagers (when they’re not trying to kill Santo for no reason I managed to discern) are there to pinch in.

One of the real joys of lucha cinema is the adaptability of the genre. As long as he stays a hero, a lucha movie doesn’t need to interpret its central character as a standard masked crimefighter alone, unlike – for example – US superhero films do, leaving the door wide open for genre hopping of a kind that makes lucha movies surprisingly adaptable.

As is so often the case in the genre, the movies of the great El Santo are a prime example of this. Santo starred in Universal-inspired classic horror films, 60s spy movies, adventure films, unfunny comedies, pulp-y crime films, rancheros and inexplicably weird stuff. Basically, Santo starred in everything except romantic comedies (unless you’re a fan of the Santo/Blue theory) and melodrama (though there are of course lucha melodramas without Santo), turning every other genre into sub-genres of the great equalizer that is lucha cinema.

 
 
 

By the time Santo shot Santo vs. Los Lobas, the lucha genre had lost much of its popularity, leaving the tenacious wrestler pretty much in the cinematic dregs, seeing him work for producers churning out very silly, often surprisingly boring movies, on budgets that could probably not always buy shoe-strings for everyone. So it comes as a bit of a surprise – even more of it when you add Santo’s generally family-oriented image – that Las Lobas is a lucha entry into the genre of somewhat bleak, very dream-like 70s horror that does actually set out to be a real movie instead of random reels of Santo, musical numbers, and travelogue footage. Las Lobas also turns out to be one of the weirdest entries in Santo’s filmography not produced by Vergara.

What’s probably even more surprising is how well this attempt works, with directors Rubén Galindo (last seen here letting Santo fight against garbage bags) and Jaime Jiménez Pons creating an often nightmarish, always illogical, mood out of cramped looking shots taking turns with strange, yet strangely compelling compositions, a gritty looking aesthetic that’s always rubbing against the weirdness of the plot and ideas, effectively dim lighting, and editing whose rawness emphasises the strangeness of it all by roughing up the film’s flow. I’m not sure Galindo and Pons were planning to make their film quite as strange as it feels, and that its technical peculiarities weren’t just based on a mix of budgetary troubles and ineptness on their side, but it’s the results that count, and the results are, as my American brethren like to say, awesome.

Among the things about Las Lobas that may be clever or may be just accidents is the film’s tendency to make Santo a bit more human and fallible than he often is: he’s fleeing from his early dog attackers in a very undignified way (what is it with Galindo and letting Santo high-tail it?), actually needs the help of others, and even loses fights without being tricked into losing them. One might think this time around our hero’s actually in danger, which is – of course – a pretty clever thing to find in a horror movie.

But really, it’s the mood of the film that makes it as special as it is. It’s one of those films where the strangeness of the pictures – lycanthropes who look like bearded ladies in fur bikinis carrying torches standing in a circle around their queen, the White Queen laughing a threatening laugh from the roof of a building, a party with circle dancing turning into a minor lycanthrope massacre – and the peculiarities of the script – a main character dying only to be replaced by a twin who is exactly like he was, the character who is built up as the Big Bad dying quite early leaving plot threads and an ancient prophecy dangling, the rules of lycanthropy changing with every second scene, connections between characters never really getting explained – really come together to form something like a fever dream through which the audience drifts; it’s just that this fever dream has a masked wrestler in it, too. And, as a wise man once said, everything’s better with a masked wrestler.

The Horror!? is a regular cult cinema column by Denis Klotz, aficionado of the obscure and operator of the film blog of the same name.


Darna! Ang Pagbabalik

May 4th, 2012 | article by | No Comments »
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a.k.a. Darna: The Return
directed by Peque Gallaga and Lore Reyes
1994 / Viva Films / 104‘
written by Floy Quintos, from characters by Mars Ravelo
cinematography by Marissa Floirendo
music by Archie Castillo
starring Anjanette Abayari, Edu Manzano, Cherie Gil, Pility Corrales, Rustom Padilla, Bong Alvarez, and Lester Llansang

If you want to know more about Mars Ravelo’s Wonder Woman inspired yet supremely Filipino superheroine Darna and her different on-screen incarnations, head on over to my buddy and fellow agent of M.O.S.S. Todd of Die, Danger, Die, Die, Kill, who has spent a lot more time watching and thinking about Darna movies than I have.

The home province of everyone’s favourite rural superheroine Darna (Anjanette Abayari) is flooded in a villain-caused (yet not exactly explained by the film) catastrophe. Worse, a large woman clad in green and wearing a turban accosts our heroine in her non-superheroic form as country girl Narda while she’s distracted by a snake and clobbers her from behind. The villainess then proceeds to steal the stone Narda needs to swallow to transform into Darna, leaving our heroine for dead and in the rather undignified position of having to be rescued from the rising flood by her Grandma and her little brother Ding (Lester Llansang).

Either the clobbering, the loss of the stone, or the trauma of the natural catastrophe leaves Nards rather addled in the brain, and she spends the following escape of her family to Manila – as well as her first days there – as a happy, mute, loon, though somewhat threatened by various unpleasant males who find her mental state all too inviting. Still, it’s like a super hero vacation.

Once arrived in Manila, the family takes shelter in the hovel of Pol (Rustom Padilla), who may or may not be a distant relative, but who in any case once left their country home for the big city.

 
 
 

After various adventures – among them a meeting with local gangster chief Magnum (Bong Alvarez) – a sort of plot develops. It turns out that Darna’s arch nemesis, the snake-haired Valentina (Pilita Corrales), is responsible for the loss of Darna’s stone. She needs it to keep herself from turning into an – probably ill smelling – heap of goo, it seems.

Apart from that Valentina has bigger plans too. Her – also snake-haired – daughter Valentine aka Dr. Aden (Cherie Gil) has founded a millennial cult playing on the fears of the poor parts of society, promising her followers that Manila will rise into the skies to save them all from the coming destruction of the Philippines by floods, if they just pray hard enough. Valentine’s crazy preacher TV programme (she has interpretative background dancers) puts the mind-whammy on Grandma, who soon spends all her time praying and furnishing Pol’s hovel with plants. Which is actually an improvement, but hey – evil!

Anyway, while he’s out and about sniffing around the cult’s lair (why? you got me there), Ding manages to steal Darna’s stone back, and soon enough, our heroine is fighting evil-doers again, getting into a romantic triangle with Pol and a cop named Max (Edu Manzano), and saving the Philippines from the snake family’s evil plans.

Well, say what you will against the at times plodding pace of this outing of the ever-popular Filipino heroine Darna, but it’s still packed full of stuff, some of it interesting, some puzzling, some just plain weird. My plot synopsis has left out various side plots, “comic” distractions and characters – like Ding’s female friend Pia (Jemanine Campanilla) – the movie decides to forget halfway through, but really, this is not the kind of film that’s interested in a finely crafted dramatic arc. The film’s structure is – like in most other films meant for a more rural Filipino audience I’ve seen – episodic and distractible, and often reminded me of the way 70s Bollywood tried and succeeded to be everything to every viewer. Despite the absence of musical numbers, Darna! Ang Pagbabaliktruly squeezes everything and the kitchen sink into its 100 minutes of running time: cute children, low-brow humour, superheroic throw-downs, romance, a bit of horror, some excellent South-East Asian weirdness like freaky snake person transformation effects and an exploding villainess, a bit of social melodrama, and even a bit of religion (not surprising in a Filipino movie, really).

 
 
 

This kind of approach does of course threaten a film’s coherence and always risks to annoy a given viewer by spending too much time on the elements she isn’t interested in. As a German viewer, I’m certainly not part of the film’s core audience, seeing as it is clearly produced with a Filipino audience of the early 90s in mind, playing with and against the anxieties – poverty, religious mania, natural catastrophes – of its time and place. If you look at a film like this as an outsider, you need to bring a bit of patience and a willingness to accept a slightly different view of the world than you’re used to; in this regard, Darna! Ang Pagbabalik is just like a Ramsay Brothers movie or the body of work of Sompote Sands, though certainly more good-natured than the works of the former, and far less painful than those of the latter.

Fortunately, the film – co-directed by Peque Gallaga and Lore Reyes – does have more than a few elements that make getting into it quite easy for somebody of my tastes, and, I suspect, the discerning tastes of the typical reader of this column. If there’s one thing that speaks a true international language, after all, then it’s scenes of a statuesque and likeable beauty in a skimpy yet curiously not sleazy outfit flying around punching evil-doers and monsters. Abayari may not be the greatest of actresses (especially when playing trauma clown Narda), but she’s likeable (you seldom see a US superhero grin this much, as if it were an actual joy being a hero, flying and saving people, instead of a pain in the ass), has the right physique for her role and manages to wear a skimpy costume with a degree of dignity that shouldn’t be taken for granted.

But even when it isn’t clobbering time, Darna! Ang Pagbabalik has more than enough enjoyable, or at least interesting moments. Some of the scenes surrounding the snake women’s cult are actually somewhat disturbing in their portrayal of religious mania – those that aren’t pretty goofy, that is – and the whole plot line of Grandma turning into one of the cult members is not exactly realistically handled, but quite effective as a play on the fear of losing a lost one to malevolent influences without having the power to do anything about it.

These scenes are pretty dark for what is at its core a family movie, and would be quite unthinkable in a Hollywood family movie (just as the semi-realistic portrayal of poverty and desperation), which is, of course something I do approve of.

And even though Darna! (you gotta love that exclamation mark there) Ang Pagbabalik isn’t meant for me, it still made me glad to have watched it.

The Horror!? is a regular cult cinema column by Denis Klotz, aficionado of the obscure and operator of the film blog of the same name.


The Pirates of Blood River

April 27th, 2012 | article by | 5 Comments »
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dir. John Gilling
1962 / Hammer Film Productions / 87′
 written by John Hunter, John Gilling, and Jimmy Sangster
cinematography by Arthur Grant
music by Gary Hughes
starring Kerwin Matthews, Christopher Lee, Andrew Keir, Marle Landi, Oliver Reed, Michael Ripper, and Peter Arne

At the end of the 17th century, a group of Huguenots fled France and settled on the tropical, piranha-infested Isle of Devon somewhere in the tropics. Now, two generations later, what once was supposed to be a colony giving freedom from persecution has become a tyranny of a handful of older men with impressive facial hair under the leadership of Jason Standing (Andrew Keir, as intense as always, even though the script doesn’t provide him with much to work with here). The bible-wielding elders sentence people to death or life in their own little penal colony for breaking that obscure set of religious laws known as “the ten commandments” (or something of that sort). The less bearded classes aren’t too happy with the political state of affairs, yet they’re still too respectful of their elders and their elders’ leather-vested henchmen to openly rebel.

Standing’s own son Jonathon (Kerwin Mathews, one of the better romantic leads for this sort of film) is especially dissatisfied with life on the island, thinking that his father lets himself be manipulated into a cruelty that is quite against his nature by his colleagues. Quite lacking in holiness, Jonathon’s also in love with a married woman who is mistreated by her husband, and plans on fleeing the place together with her. Alas, before the couple can realize their plans, the elders are catching them in the act of rubbing their cheeks together, provoking the poor woman into running into a river full of piranhas.

Graciously, the elders don’t sentence Jonathon to death for his unbiblical behaviour, but rather to spend some time in the colony’s penal colony, which, as it turns out, is just as much of a death sentence, just a slower one.

 
 
 

Things at the colony are rough, and Jonathon’s background makes him not exactly well-liked by the warden, but eventually, the young man escapes. Only to run right into the arms of the pirate band of Captain LaRoche (Christopher “I’m French, no, really” Lee) which counts among its members some beloved Hammer mainstays like Oliver Reed and Michael Ripper. For a pirate, the Captain seems civilized enough, and claims to be willing to help Jonathon out with peacefully getting rid of the rule of the elders if the younger man only agrees to let the pirates stay in the Huguenot village for rest and recuperation whenever they need it.

In a turn of events that only surprises Jonathon, the pirates are really in it for the raping and the pillaging. LaRoche is convinced that the founders of the colony have hidden away a treasure of gold somewhere (he might even be right), and he’s willing to do absolutely anything to get it. Of course, hoping for gold and actually finding it are two things, especially when some of the Huguenots turn out to be quite competent guerrilla fighter.

John Gilling’s The Pirates of Blood River is the least among Hammer Film’s handful of seafaring averse pirate movies, slightly hampered by a script that sets up conflicts for its first thirty minutes it will then not bother to resolve later on by anything else but hand-waving.

The whole religious oppression angle is very much side-lined – except for two or three wavering dialogue scenes – once the pirates arrive at the colony, and is only ever resolved by the fact that LaRoche kills off the elders one by one, which sure is a solution, but not one that’s thematically satisfying. On the positive side, pirates.

 
 
 

Said pirates are a bit sillier than in the other Hammer pirate movies, too, for some genius (Gilling? Anthony Keys? Jimmy Sangster?) decided it would be a bright idea not just to camp up their appearance, but also to let them all – except for Michael Ripper, whose dialogue instead tests out how often a man can use the pirate-appropriate word “matey” without giggling – speak with painfully fake accents. Reed – in an unfortunately minor role – and Lee – doing his evil glowering shtick with some enthusiasm and thanks to that to very good effect – seem to be trying to outdo each other in the badness of their “French” accents. Though this aspect of the movie clearly has camp value (too bad for me I abhor the concept), it’s standing in stark opposition to the film’s earnest dramatic tone and makes it quite a bit more difficult to take certain scenes seriously.

This isn’t to suggest there’s nothing enjoyable at all about the movie if you’re not into pointing at especially silly pirates; this is, after all a Hammer production made in the early 60s, a time when the high professional standards of the studio and the people working for it made it quite impossible for them to produce a bad movie. Gilling – who directed two of my favourites among the studio’s horror movies with The Reptile and The Plague of the Zombies - may have his problems with the film’s pacing in the early scenes, but once the film’s final half hour arrives, he milks a lot of excitement out of the guerrilla warfare between the Huguenots and the pirates trying to get away with their ill gotten gains. At that point, there’s little left of the silliness of the film’s earlier scenes. High camp is replaced by a certain grimness surrounding that makes up for a lot of what came before.

My true disappointment isn’t so much with the film’s problems at the beginning anyway but rather with the idea how fantastic the film could have been if it had been quite as good as those last scenes right from the start. As it stands, the sympathetic viewer needs a bit of patience and the ability to ignore a problematic set-up to enjoy The Pirates of Blood River, but with that patience, the film is still very much worth seeing.

The Horror!? is a regular cult cinema column by Denis Klotz, aficionado of the obscure and operator of the film blog of the same name.


Der Würger von Schloß Blackmoor

April 20th, 2012 | article by | No Comments »
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dir. Harald Reinl
1963 / Mosaik Film / 84′
a.k.a. The Strangler of Blackmoor Castle
 written by Ladislas Fodor and Gustav Kampendonk
cinematography by Ernst W. Kalinke
music by Oskar Sala
starring Karin Dor, Harry Riebauer, Dieter Eppler, Rudolf Fernau, Ingmar Zeisberg, Hans Nielsen, and Hans Reiser

Former colonialist bureaucrat Lucius Clark (Rudolf Fernau) has found a pretty sweet set-up for himself. He’s soon to be knighted for his crimes against humanity/deeds for the British Empire, and spends his life sponging off the money belonging to his niece Claridge Dorsett (the inevitable Karin Dor) which he is uses to rent most of the castle of a certain Lord Blackmoor (Walter Giller). Oh, and he also has an oven full of stolen raw diamonds he’s slowly selling off to the – of course – shady bar owner Tavish (Hans Nielsen). Because Clark’s lazy, he has hired on ex-con diamond cutter Anthony (Dieter Eppler as Klaus Kinski) as pretend butler, so that everything needed for the illegal diamond trade is happening in house, or rather in castle.

Alas, all good things have to come to an end, and so Clark soon enough finds himself confronted with various problems, most of them connected to his dark past (so it’s all his own fault). First and foremost, a masked man who knows quite a lot about Clark’s past wants him to hand over the diamonds, and kills whoever gets in his way. That guy, let’s call him “The Strangler”, strangles his victims and then cuts an “M” into their foreheads before he decapitates them for extra fun and games. Then there’s the fact that Tavish, the shady lawyer Tromby (Richard Häussler) and barmaid Judy (Ingmar Zeisberg) – in varying configurations – would very much like to acquire some of Clark’s diamonds without having to pay for them. Oh, and did I mention Claridge’s colleague Mike (Hans Reiser) and Lord Blackwood are also acting quite suspiciously? Or that Anthony’s raving mad, wants to make sweet sweet love to the diamonds, and would prefer to make Clark rich by killing Claridge instead of seeing his boss sell his precioussss?

Fortunately for the blandly innocent Claridge, Scotland Yard sends its most wooden inspector, Jeff Mitchell (Harry “I’m so emotionless, I’m two pieces of wood” Riebauer) to romance her painfully somehow solve the strangler cases.

 
 
 

Der Würger is yet another of those non-Edgar Wallace krimis that are doing their best to emulate the successful formula of the Rialto movies; that’s certainly easier to do when you have, like krimi veteran director Harald Reinl does here, a Bryan Edgar Wallace novel to adapt. Edgar Wallace’s son did, after all, make a career out of emulating his father and selling his surname to the highest bidder (frequently German producer impresario Artur “Atze” Brauner, who is as close to one of the eccentric producer impresarios of the US and the UK as we Germans ever got), so the shoe fits perfectly well.

Of course, with the sort of movies I generally champion, keeping as close to a successful formula as possible is not necessarily a bad thing as long as one knows what to do with it. Reinl (and scriptwriters Ladislas Fodor and Gustav Kampendonk, both men of excellent names, interesting filmographies, and a talent for writing absurdly confusing scripts) is as good at producing excellent, low budgeted entertainment out of a formula as one can be. Whenever I praise one of Reinl’s krimis, I mention his highly mobile camera, his talent for serial-like action sequences and the noir-like mood of the slower scenes (often also thanks to cinematographer Ernst W. Kalinke), and these three elements are again what turn Der Würger into a pretty great time.

Sure, the action isn’t quite as good and frequent as in some of Reinl’s higher budgeted Rialto productions, but what is there of it is as exciting as action in German movies of this period (or, frankly, any period, for German director almost always just suck at this sort of thing) gets, showing off some nicely creative touches.

The art direction also isn’t quite up to the Rialto standards; fake Britain is not as playfully fake as it sometimes gets, nor does the film show quite the absurd imagination of its big predecessors. There’s your standard castle, there’s fog, there’s a boring bar, and for most of the film’s running time, that’s perfectly enough to put me in the not-Britain of the krimis.

 
 
 

The film’s other big flaw is clearly the acting. While German movies of this period always tend to the stiff and slightly melodramatic, most of the performances here are just the decided bit stiffer than usual (that might vary with the dubbed versions, of course); the performances aren’t horrible, they’re just not as good as the could be. There are two exceptions to that in the cast: Riebauer who plays exactly the same character Heinz Drache or Joachim Fuchsberger usually played lacks so heavily in charisma I have a hard time understanding why anybody would want to cast him as anything, not to speak of as the male lead, while Dietler Eppler may not be a Klaus Kinski, but sure as hell does his utmost to channel the great actor’s spirit by ranting, raving and making bug eyes at Karin Dor, something I do heartily approve of.

I also do approve of the production’s peculiar choice of soundtrack. The krimis always had a tendency to involve some of the better German film composers like Martin Böttcher and the godly Peter Thomas, but Der Würger goes one step further by (like a few other films did) employing the pioneer of electronic music Oskar Sala, co-inventor of the Trautonium and all-around eccentric musical genius. His weird, abstract electronic score probably isn’t what one would expect to hear in a piece of pulpy entertainment like this (some of Sala’s musical decisions seem somewhat perverse) but it’s often exactly what the film needs to feel more unique than it actually is. Sala’s music even turns what may be the most boring bar in the krimi genre into a place of weirdness and (slight) wonder.

Now, even though I’ve been pretty critical about nearly every part of the movie, I do like Der Würger von Schloß Blackmoor quite a bit, even ignoring Sala’s and Eppler’s contributions. The film may not be quite up to the standards of the best of the Rialto Wallace krimis, but those films are as good as this genre gets; Der Würger may not be quite as excellent, yet it’s still an all-around fun film despite all of its flaws.

The Horror!? is a regular cult cinema column by Denis Klotz, aficionado of the obscure and operator of the film blog of the same name.


With Death on Your Back

April 13th, 2012 | article by | No Comments »
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dir. Alfonso Balcázar
1967 / Bengala Film / 86′
a.k.a. Con la Muerte a la Espalda
 written by Alfonso Balcázar, José Antonio de la Loma and Giovanni Simonelli
cinematography by Victor Monreal
music by Claude Bolling
starring George Martin, Vivi Bach, Rosalba Neri, Daniele Vargas, Klausjürgen Wussow, and Michel Montfort

A gang of international evil-doers has invented a drug that can be used to provoke completely innocent members of the military into pushing the Big Red Button that would loose the Big One. Does it show I’m so old I even remember the Cold War?

Anyway, that drug may not sound all that useful to you or me (for what good is destroying the world, really, unless you’re an insane cultist of some eldritch god?), but “the third power” we will certainly not call China (oops) is very interested in acquiring it.

Fortunately, our international evil-doers make a very public test run of their drug, giving one of those professors of every discipline you can imagine called Professor you often find in these films enough data to develop an antidote against it. For once, the Americans and the Russians (as represented by agents called – I kid you not – Bill and Ivan) are of one mind, and are even willing to share the antidote with each other, if with gnashing teeth.

For some reason, the good guys ship the Professor and his assistant Monica (Vivi Bach) off to Hamburg, where he is supposed to give a suitcase containing the antidote and/or the formula for the antidote to the proper authorities during some rich woman’s party. Of course, the international evil-doers get wind of that particularly useless plan, and gun down the Professor. If not for the intervention of suave/smarmy thief Gary (George Martin) who just happens to be a sucker for beautiful women and suitcases containing valuables, they’d be able to kill Monica and steal the suitcase too.

Having acquired Monica and the suitcase, Gary isn’t quite sure what to do with them – sell them on to the Chinese? The Russians? The Americans? Be a gentleman thief and protect Monica? It would be nice if our hero (or not) had some time for further deliberation, but each and every faction who knows about Monica and the suitcase wants to capture, kill or buy him, leaving the poor jerk hardly a second to breathe or put the (horrible) moves on women. What’s a thief to do?

 
 
 

It has always been one of the pleasures of the Eurospy genre for me to encounter unexpectedly fun films like With Death On Your Back. Its director Alfonso Balcázar is one of those workhorses who spent much of their career during the 60s and 70s churning out films in the popular genres of the day, trying their best to craft fun movies out of clichés, pieces taken from other movies, and actual talent. In Balcázar’s case, a lot of his work took place in the Spaghetti (or is it Paella in this case?) Western, but I have to admit I don’t remember having seen a single one of them, which may either speak against their quality, my memory, or my knowledge of European genre films of the 60s and 70s.

Be that as it may, With Death On Your Back seems to be the director’s only Eurospy film, which is a bit of a disappointment given how entertaining the film is. Sure, much of what happens on screen is the usual mixture of a suave/jerk-y (why do these words seem to be synonymous to me by now?) hero charming the ladies in improbable ways, punching goons in the face (or whatever other body parts look most punchable), and going through various chase sequences to acquire and keep a McGuffin, but Balcázar just as surely knows how to make the generic just pretty darn fun.

For me, the light variant of the Eurospy movie to which With Death certainly belongs has a lot in common with the comedy genre. Both don’t thrive as much on originality as on an ability to make the well-known and expected feel new and exciting, and both genres often survive problematic plotting through the timing of their delivery. Balcázar’s movie is nothing if not good at timing and pacing, letting hardly a second go by that doesn’t have something exciting happen in it, never stopping for longer than a joke or a kiss until its hero stumbles into the next punch-up or the next chase, keeping the audience hooked through breathlessness and – always an important factor in a genre movie – a willingness to entertain that makes it easy to just overlook minor flaws like the fact that the scriptwriters don’t always seem to realize Hamburg is situated in Northern Germany and not in Bavaria or the silliness of most everything going on.

Balcázar is helped in his endeavour of keeping the audience away from thinking about plots, plot holes and other dumb stuff like that by an ultra-generic – or archetypal – soundtrack by Claude Bolling that’s just bound to swing things along, a cast – also featuring Rosalba Neri and a very unexpected Klausjürgen Wussow as mid-level baddies – that has no problems at all to go with the silliness instead of against it (there is, as you probably know, not much worse than an actor trying to be all thespian-like in what is basically an adventurous romp), and some very decent stunt work.

Plus, there’s a scene documenting the eternal struggle between earthbound human and small plane (hello, Mister Hitchcock), guest starring machine pistols, so what’s not to like?

The Horror!? is a regular cult cinema column by Denis Klotz, aficionado of the obscure and operator of the film blog of the same name.


Death Falls Lightly

March 30th, 2012 | article by | No Comments »
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dir. Leopoldo Savona
1972 / Agata Films / 85′
a.k.a. La Morte Scende Leggera
 written by Luigi Rosso and Leopoldo Savona
cinematography by Luciano Trasatti
music by Coriolano Gori
starring Stelio Candelli, Patrizia Viotti, Veronika Korosec, Rossella Bergamonti, and Tom Felleghy 

Warning: It’s impossible not to talk about the film’s ending when talking about its strengths and weaknesses, so the following will enter spoiler territory.

After returning home from a business trip Giorgio Darica (Stelio Candelli) finds his wife dead in her bedroom with a slit throat. Giorgio does not report the murder to the police, for his business trip was of a type one just can’t use as an alibi, unless one is a big fan of spending time in prison. Instead, Giorgio goes to a judge (or lawyer, the fansubs aren’t quite sure about that one, though I’d go with judge) he is working with. Giorgio’s business, you see, is to smuggle drugs for a conspiracy of corrupt judges, cops and politicians who buy position and influence with the money they make from the drug trade (and clearly, any form of corruption that’s profitable). Even though that’s not something you want to say aloud in a murder trial, it is very much something a man like Giorgio is willing to say in a murder trial if his rather well-positioned “friends” don’t help him out of his problematic situation.

Because nobody wants to risk to have Giorgio arrested or questioned, and even just killing him is deemed too risky, his partners hide Giorgio and his girlfriend Liz (Patrizia Viotti) in a big, empty hotel building, while they put their influence in action and make further plans that may or may not be meant to exonerate Giorgio.

The couple’s stay at the hotel isn’t too pleasant. Giorgio’s new position in life as a murder suspect does not make Liz happy, especially since she isn’t quite sure her lover didn’t actually kill his wife, so there’s a lot of squabbling and hysterics going on between the two. That, however, is before the hotel turns strange. Music plays in rooms where there shouldn’t be any music playing, and noises hint at other people staying where there shouldn’t be any. It’s as if the hotel were haunted by ghosts peculiarly in tune with Giorgio’s troubles. Things turn even stranger, when a group of people appear who claim to be the hotel’s owners. It doesn’t take long until Giorgio isn’t sure what’s dream, what’s reality and what’s delusion.

  
  

Leopoldo Savona’s Death Falls Lightly is a more interesting example of the giallo than it at first seems to be. The film’s first half is more than a bit slow going, and even though its rather sardonic comments on the state of Italian judicial and political culture are not completely without relevance for anyone curious about the political climate surrounding early 70s Italian genre cinema, it’s also not exactly a riveting first half. Especially the whole “lovers flip out on each other after spending about one day alone together” angle is just not very convincing, and while the secrets and lies which these scenes disclose as the basis of Giorgio’s and Liz’s relationship will be important later on, I could think of less artificial ways to expose them.

However, once that (expository) hurdle is taken, Death takes a turn for the weird I can only describe as delightful; at least if your definition of “delightful” fits a series of scenes that turn a character’s inner workings into simply yet effectively realized metaphors and nearly drive him insane in the process. I find especially lovely how organic the film’s turn from the semi-realistic tone of its beginning to the weird and possibly supernatural is, with Savona using the empty hotel as a place that – even when we are nominally still in the “realist” part of the movie – does more belong to the realm of dreams than to that of reality as we usually understand it. Savona emphasises this by lighting and blocking everything that takes place in the hotel quite differently from the rest of the film, suggesting the claustrophobia and spacial and temporal disjointedness of a dream.

Of course, and somewhat disappointingly, all the supernatural occurrences will later turn out to be no such things at all in a last act twist that is not exactly to my taste – as I prefer the supernatural in my narratives to stay supernatural, or at least ambiguous – but that works too well to ruin what came before. Mostly, this part of the movie works well enough for me because Death - quite surprisingly for a giallo – does play fair with its audience by featuring a killer whose motivations you can discern from the clues the film delivers, as well as by using a device for its plot twist whose cause you have actually witnessed and (hopefully) just forgotten as one of these random flourishes giallos tend to include. Of course, even though the twist’s set-up makes sense seen from that perspective, it’s still quite difficult to buy it as anything any police force, even one as corrupt as the one shown in the movie, would actually be involved in; on the other hand, it’s thematically and atmospherically so fitting to the film at hand, I can’t find it in me to see that fact as a problem for anyone who doesn’t insist on absolute realism – and therefore boredom – in her movies.

I, for one, am happy to have found another giallo that succeeds at wedding rather sardonic politics with moments of dream-like beauty.

The Horror!? is a regular cult cinema column by Denis Klotz, aficionado of the obscure and operator of the film blog of the same name.


The Devil-Ship Pirates

March 23rd, 2012 | article by | No Comments »
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dir. Don Sharp
1964 / Hammer Film / 86′
 written by Jimmy Sangster
cinematography by Michael Reed
music by Gary Hughes
starring Christopher Lee, Andrew Keir, John Cairney, Barry Warren, Suzan Farmer, Duncan Lamont, Natasha Pyne, Michael Ripper
The Devil-Ship Pirates is available as part of the Icons of Adventure DVD Collection. 

It’s 1588, and the Spanish Armada has just taken its deadly thrashing. The Diablo, the small ship of Spanish privateer Captain Robeles (Christopher Lee) has taken flight as soon as the tides of battle turned against the Spanish. With his ship in a bad state, Robeles decides to pilot it into the English marshes in the hopes of finding a place to make repairs in peace before he and his crew can take up pirating again.

Their luck leads the pirates into the vicinity of a small English town whose younger male population has nearly completely gone to war, leaving the place in the hands of women a cowardly country squire (Ernest Clark), some middle aged and elderly men of the lower classes, and Harry (John Cairney), a young man who lost the use of his left arm in Spanish captivity, and who romances Angela (Suzan Farmer), the daughter of the squire, quite against the man’s wishes. Harry’s father Tom (Andrew Keir) is something of a spokesman of the villages working classes. (There are, of course, also the women of the village, but the film isn’t progressive enough to do much with them).

Robeles hopes to win the help of the village in the repair of his ship – and later get an opportunity to loot it – by applying a trick that plays on the place’s relative remoteness. He’ll march his men into town and pretend that Spain won over the British fleet and is now occupying the British Isles.

The squire and the local vicar only seem all too glad to oblige the new master in town, but the working classes – especially Harry and his father – are burning to make contact with any British resistance against their supposed occupiers. Ah, class war.

While Robeles has to use all his cunning and cruelty to play his ruse and keep the villagers under control, he is also threatened by philosophical differences with his first officer. That young man, Don Manuel Rodriguez de Savilla (Barry Warren), is a true Spanish patriot, and disagrees quite resolutely with Robeles plans for returning to the pirate business. Perhaps he will even disagree with them enough to partner with a bunch of English villagers?

 
 
 

While everybody (of taste) loves Hammer Film’s horror output, people – me too often included – tend to ignore most of what the studio put out in other genres. In some cases, like the studio’s small yet insipid comedy output, that’s pure self-defence, but in other cases, like its land-locked pirate movies, ignoring these films means missing out on some very fine genre filmmaking.

Case in point is The Devil-Ship Pirates, as directed by the generally dependable Don Sharp (who must have had a very good year in 1964, creatively, for it’s also the year that saw him direct the very fine little horror movie Witchcraft). It’s a film as clearly done on a budget as anything Hammer did at the time, but it’s also a film that knows how to use what it has (one ship, some fine looking sets and a highly dependable cast) in often inventive, always professional ways, and very entertaining ways.

Sharp’s direction isn’t as endowed with an eye for the pretty as it was in Witchcraft, but it provides the film with a sense of pace and tension that works well with the film’s script. Sharp also manages to handle the film’s more melodramatic parts in a rather off-handed way that provides them with a stronger feeling of veracity than you’d usually expect from scenes like them. There may be nothing flashy about Sharp, but he sure does all the right things to tell a clever story in an appropriately clever way.

Clever is a good way to describe Jimmy Sangster’s script for the film. The pirates’ plan does at once provide for a simple yet exciting set-up and keeps the film’s action constrained to a comparatively small number of locations without letting the production feel impoverished in any way; and once that plan is set up, it’s only a question of letting the various characters act appropriately, put in a few opportunities for mild swashbuckling (an English countryman is no Errol Flynn), and just let the plot roll out in a logical yet entertaining manner.

 
 
 

Of course, Sangster also finds time to add in some of Hammer’s usual political interests: the upper classes (especially the middle-aged men of the upper classes; there’s often still hope for the younger men and women in the production house’s films, at least if they’re willing to fall for lower class guys and girls) are not to be trusted, the working middle class is awesome, priests mean well but often don’t really know what they’re doing. It could be quite annoying, if it were not a) obviously true and b) made more complicated by characters who are allowed to transcend their class characteristics to act like actual human beings, or at least the adventure movie version of such.

On the acting side, The Devil-Ship Pirates provides ample opportunity to watch various Hammer stalwarts do their usual thoroughly convincing stuff. Standouts are Andrew Keir – who brings surprising intensity to a rather small roll, and Michael Ripper who portrays a pirate as if his usual innkeeper character had gone nasty with a relish that can’t help but delight.

Even the film’s romantic leads in form of John Cairney and Barry Warren are perfectly okay. That may be caused by the script providing them opportunities to play somewhat more complex characters than usual for romantic leads, but I’m surely not going to complain about added complexity in my adventure movies.

For once, I’m also not going to complain about my least favourite iconic horror actor, Christopher Lee. Sure, he plays more than half of his scenes on auto-pilot, doing his usual menacing shtick with little obvious interest in his role, but he has two really great moments. The first one – in his first violent confrontation with Don Manuel – is one of these (getting rarer the longer the actor’s career went) moments when the actor stops letting his Christopher Lee-ness stand in for acting and really puts some energy into projecting the smouldering menace he always was able to bring into its roles, but often seemed too disinterested to actually bring to use, turning his villain suddenly into someone not just bad in a perfunctory way as afforded by the script, but Evil in a much more total sense. Staying with the capital E Evil, his second great scene here sees Lee delighting in doing the most evil thing imaginable in a movie villain: outwitting a little boy.

Clearly, The Devil-Ship Pirates has everything you could ask of an adventure movie.

The Horror!? is a regular cult cinema column by Denis Klotz, aficionado of the obscure and operator of the film blog of the same name.


Die Farbe

March 16th, 2012 | article by | No Comments »
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dir. Huan Vu
2010 / Spharentor Filmproduktionen / 85′
 written by Huan Vu
from the story The Colour out of Space by H.P. Lovecraft
cinematography by Martin Kolbert
music by Tilman Seege
starring Ingo Heise, Michael Kausch, Marco Leibnitz, Erik Rastetter, Marah Schneider

The 70s. The father (Patrick Pierce) of Arkham academic Jonathan Davis (Ingo Heise) disappears while retracing his own steps during and shortly after World War II in rural Swabia. Jonathan, deeply concerned, follows him, only armed with a pack of old photos.

At first, Jonathan seems to be completely out of luck. Nobody in the small village he traces his father to seems to have seen him, but at last one of the villagers, a certain Armin Pierske (Michael Kausch), recognizes the elder Davis not on the contemporary photo but at least from a thirty year old army picture.

Pierske tells Jonathan a weird story about how he met the elder Davis when he himself came home from the front, and tried to warn Davis and his men off of visiting a neighbouring farm for reasons Pierske then goes on to explain to Jonathan by way of flashing back to a time shortly before the War.

A meteorite crashed down on the farm of Pierske’s (in the flashbacks played by Marco Leibnitz) neighbours, the Gärteners (Erik Rastetter, Marah Schneider, Leon Schröder, Philipp Jacobs, Jonas Zumdohme). The scientists coming to investigate were confused by the thing’s curious properties: meteorites don’t, after all, generally shrink over time, nor do they have properties strangely at odds with what we know about physics. Shortly before the meteorite could disappear forever during a lightning storm, the scientists found some sort of capsule inside of it, setting free an unearthly colour when trying to take a sample.

 
 
 

With no physical evidence at all anymore after the disappearance of the meteorite, the scientists left. However, strange things began to happen on the Gärteners’ farm. Fruit (and later some animals) started to grow freakishly large, but they also developed a taste that made them unsalable; the trees in the family’s orchard took on disquieting properties, moving when there wasn’t any wind to move them. And slowly, one by one, the family members began to change, growing unstable, mad, and ill through the agency of something not from this Earth.

Of course, the Gärtener’s farm is the one Jonathan’s father was visiting after the War; and it might just be that something he saw there has now called him back in one way or the other.

Huan Vu’s (whom you might know as the director of the Warhammer 40K fan film Damnatus that was killed by the angry lawyer brigades of Games Workshop) Die Farbe is a very fine adaptation of one of my favourite Lovecraft stories, the wonderful “The Colour Out of Space”. At first, I was rather sceptical concerning the story’s relocation from New England to Southern Germany, but for the most part, this change of location is to the film’s advantage. Sure, a viewer has to make a bit of an effort to accept the actors speaking English with clear (yet not very heavy) German accents in the film’s beginning as Americans, and then, once the film’s narrative has relocated to Germany, Ingo Heise’s Jonathan speaking German with a fake American accent, but the alternatives would surely have ruined what is after all an independent low budget production. Trying to pretend Germany is New England would have either robbed the film of its often impressive and mood building outside location shots, or threatened to make unintentionally funny what desperately needs to be earnest. A bit of accent trouble is much preferable.

This is especially the case because Vu uses the individuality of rural Swabia so well, giving the film the all-important sense of place that – as I can’t help but repeat again and again in write-ups – is one of the most effective ways for a low budget movie to gain a character all its own; competing with high budget films – European or American – on their own terrain generally means ignoring the advantages this kind of production has over them. Plus, the Swabian-Franconian Forest can be – filmed in the right way like it is here – an excellently creepy place, just the kind of locality where the intrusion of the Weird seems believable.

 
 
 

Die Farbe not only manages to evoke a place, but also specific times, through simple yet effective tools. Initially, I thought the three time levels were unnecessarily complicated, however, it soon became clear that the nested flashbacks really were the best way to tell Vu’s version of Lovecraft’s tale, and that – not a given in independent horror – Vu actually knows how to handle this sort of structure without the resulting film becoming tedious or needlessly confusing. It’s also nice to see a Lovecraft adaptation that does not feel the need to permanently include winks and nods towards the authors other works or shoehorn historical guest stars in for no other reason than to demonstrate that its writers know who Charles Fort was. There’s a guest appearance of the Danforth Memorial Library at the beginning, but that’s mostly that.

This admirable sense of restraint runs through the majority of the film’s writing. The movie prefers to underplay many of its dramatic and horrifying beats, all the better to be able to get its viewers with those it doesn’t underplay. It’s spiritually as close to Lovecraft’s writing in this particular story as possible, using those of the writer’s techniques that are applicable to film, and only changing the story’s framing instead of its major beats. The only part of the writing I’d criticize is the twist in the last act that doesn’t ruin the film, but also doesn’t do anything to improve it. As plot twists go, it isn’t horrible, it just seems a bit unnecessary.

On the visual side, Vu makes the interesting decision to film in black and white, except for the Colour itself, which is a clever and elegant way to get around the question of how one shows a colour that is indescribable – when the world is black and white, any colour will look Weird. For once, I also find it impossible to be annoyed by the use of CGI; in fact, CGI seems to me the right method to bring a living colour without a body as we understand it to life (such as it is). After all, a thing without body mass can’t suffer from the typical CGI problem of things looking like they have no body mass.

All these elements (plus some decent to good acting) add up to a piece of contemporary independent horror cinema I for once find easy to praise; I am, as it turns out, a sucker for films whose directors make one intelligent decision after the other and even improve on these decisions through thoughtful execution.

The Horror!? is a regular cult cinema column by Denis Klotz, aficionado of the obscure and operator of the film blog of the same name.


The Last Run

March 9th, 2012 | article by | No Comments »
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dir. Richard Fleischer
1971 / MGM / 91′
 written by Alan Sharp
cinematography by Sven Nykvist
music by Jerry Goldsmith
starring George C. Scott, Trish Van Devere, Tony Musante, Colleen Dewhurst, Aldo Sambrell and Antonio Tarruella
The Last Run is available as part of the Warner Archive Collection and through Amazon.com

Former professional driver of getaway cars Harry Garmes (George C. Scott being very brilliantly George C. Scott) had retired to a Portuguese fishing village nearly a decade ago. Shortly after coming to the village he lost his child in an accident, and a bit later his wife to another man, leaving him if not dead inside, then emotionally hibernating for a long time.

Now, Harry seems to have decided that enough is enough, and takes on the job of helping in the escape of con Paul Rickard (Tony Musante) from a Spanish prison. Harry’s supposed to pick up Paul while the guards of his chain gang (or whatever the Spanish version of one is called) are distracted by a big damn explosion, and get him over the border to France.

Of course, things don’t go quite as planned. It’s not just that Paul turns out to be – fitting enough for a professional criminal – a bit of a jerk – a rather dumb one at that, and is willing to risk a detour just to pick up his girlfriend Claudie (Trish Van Devere), who one might imagine to be able to make her way to France on her own. There’s also the little problem that the people responsible for Paul’s break-out only got him out of jail to kill him once he arrives in France.

At that point, the very lonely Harry has already fallen a bit in love with Claudie – something Paul supports for practical reasons – and is willing to risk the little bit of life he feels he still has to help the couple escape. The trio’s best route of escape seems to be to reach Harry’s Portuguese home and cross the ocean to Africa on a fishing boat the driver owns. They only need to somehow avoid the horde of killers that’s on their trail. Yet even if they manage that, things still may not turn out too well for Harry.

  
  
  

The Last Run‘s director Richard Fleischer is a peculiar case of a man often only regarded as a work for hire guy of dubious talent (which probably is the kind of reputation you deserve when you end your career directing films like Red Sonja and Conan the Destroyer), yet who nonetheless has some fantastic films that look pretty damn personal and auteur-ish to me in his filmography. Especially some of Fleischer’s later RKO noirs and many of the films he made in the late 60s and early 70s are well worth a look, and possibly even worth a snooty remark calling the director a “true auteur” or some such.

Until last year, when Warner decided to finally release the film on one of their overpriced Archives DVD-Rs, it was quite difficult to get a hold of The Last Run at all, so it was easy to believe the critical mauling the film got from people like Roger Ebert. Fortunately, now that one can see the film with one’s own eyes, one just might be able to see a film that certainly isn’t flawless but is also much better than the reviews and its rather pained production history (George C. Scott driving away initial director John Huston! George C. Scott ruining his marriage on set and already working on his new wife! George C. Scott being as difficult as Kinski! Etc.) would lead one to expect.

One of the most criticized elements of the film is the lack of dynamic in its action sequences, but watching them in context, I couldn’t help but think their dry, laconic, and utterly naturalistic tone is part of the point of the whole affair. After all, Fleischer (or frequently brilliant scriptwriter Alan Sharp) even sets up an explicit contrast between the old gangster romanticism of classic Hollywood and the much dryer tone of his own film through various dialogue scenes between Musante and Scott and another scene where Musante and Van Devere are watching an old gangster movie.

This does not mean that the action scenes are completely unexciting. In fact, if you’re willing to accept Fleischer’s clear emphasis on staying inside the realm of the physically possible, you’ll perhaps find them to be unexpectedly effective at raising your blood pressure. Fleischer’s direction of these scenes, and really, of the whole rest of the film too, is wonderfully off-handed and laconic, avoiding all big directorial gestures and all showing off – and not by making this avoidance of showing-off its own grand gesture, either. The director grounds his sparse plot in a believable sense of place, giving as much room to the Spanish landscape his characters drive through as to the things happening in that landscape.

Neither the action scenes nor the crime plot are really what the movie is interested in anyway. I believe these elements are only there at all to fulfil the genre expectations an audience will probably have going in. At its core, though, The Last Run is a film much more interested in exploring the nature of loneliness in middle-aged men and the emotional death it can lead to, the difference between the cynical optimism of youth as embodied by Musante and the – ironically – much less cynical pessimism of Scott’s age, and the very existentialist (or Nietzschean, depending on your philosophical favourites) concept of hope as the most destructive emotion of them all – even if the one hoping is as conscious as Scott here of how little importance his hopes are in the greater picture of the universe.

The Horror!? is a regular cult cinema column by Denis Klotz, aficionado of the obscure and operator of the film blog of the same name.


Don’t Look in the Basement

March 2nd, 2012 | article by | No Comments »
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dir. S.F. Brownrigg
1973 / Century Films / 89′
a.k.a. The Forgotten, Death Ward #13
written by Tim Pope
cinematography by Gerald Gibbs
music by Robert B. Alcott
starring Bill McGhee, Jessie Lee Fulton, Robert Dracup, Harryette Warren, Michael Harvey and Jessie Kirby
Don’t Look in the Basement is available in multiple editions through Amazon.com

When psychiatric nurse Charlotte Beale (Rosie Holotik, growing increasingly hysterical very prettily) arrives at the peculiar little clinic of Dr. Stephens (Michael Harvey), where no door is ever locked, and patients are treated in a manner as far away from traditional psychiatry as possible (with all the good yet also all the bad that implies), she doesn’t suspect the awful truth the audience learned during the pre-credit sequence. Stephens has been axed by one of his patients, the axe-loving Judge Cameron (Gene Ross and his favourite fake axe), and the only nurse has been strangled for supposedly kidnapping a baby (that is in fact a doll) by another patient. It’s the sort of thing that can happen when you give an axe to a man with violent tendencies so he can live them out hitting a poor innocent log, and a baby doll to a woman who thinks it’s her baby.

The only remaining medical professional, Dr. Masters (Annabelle Weenick), has decided to get rid of the bodies, so that her little family can remain as if nothing had ever happened. How fortunate there’s no missing persons bureau in Texas (or so I imagine).

Masters is not too keen on Charlotte’s arrival, but after some back and forth, she decides to allow the nurse to stay. That’s a decision Charlotte won’t be all that happy about in the long run, for the streak of violence among the patients, once awakened, continues with a bit of murder and a bit of tongue cutting, and deteriorates further from that point. Why, you could even think at least some of the murders have a concrete reason besides madness.

But who is doing the killing – creepy manchild Danny (Jessie Kirby, reminding me of Steve Ditko’s “The Creeper”, among other nightmare-inducing things), orally fixated friendly manchild Sam (Bill McGhee, in a surprise turn where the person of colour is the least murderous character on screen), the judge, the nymphomaniac, the soldier (Hugh Feagin)? All of them together, or somebody else?

  
  
  

The Forgotten (as is the initial and least sexy sounding title of the film at hand) is the directorial debut of Texan local filmmaker S.F. (Science Fiction? San Francisco?) Brownrigg. Brownrigg, unlike many other director/producers of local independent horror actually managed to put out more than one film, and going by The Forgotten, that’s a thing to be quite excited about. Even in this debut Brownrigg proves himself a capable director, using the small number of locations available – the film basically takes place in and around one not very interesting mansion – and a love for close-ups and surprisingly sprightly camera-work and editing to produce a mood of increasing claustrophobia and tension. Sure, there are some moments that will seem amateurish compared to bigger productions (sometimes Brownrigg’s love for close-ups goes a bit too far for example, the blocking of scenes is often just strange, and you can’t turn a normal house into a clinic, not even one as weird as this one), but by and large, Brownrigg is in control of his material, and knows which techniques to use to achieve his aesthetic goals.

I very much love how Brownrigg’s direction grows less and less “normal” and conservative the longer the film runs, clearly mirroring how increasingly unhinged the characters become.

These characters, though, may be the film’s main problem for some. The way they are written and acted is hardly informed by any actual knowledge about mental illness. One might even find the movie’s whole set-up and large parts of its execution and vibe offensive. Personally, I’ve seldom found myself offended by the depiction of the mentally ill in horror films because I see the movies’ various whackos and psychos as just as fictitious as vampires and werewolves. If you want to piss me off in this regard, show me I’m A Cyborg, But That’s OK and its horrible romantization of the pain people with mental illnesses suffer from.

Anyhow, coming back to the film, Brownrigg, has to work with a cast of amateur and semi-amateur actors, and if you’ve ever seen an amateur actor trying to play “mad”, you probably know what to expect: a horde of people chewing scenery so hard and excitedly, it comes as a bit of a surprise there’s still scenery left to chew after half an hour of the film is through. However, the actors’ various ideas of how to go about their roles (from cackling, to shouting, to bug eyes, to menacing stares, to McGhee’s awesome blissful calm and Kirby’s “crazy clown in puberty” performance) come together in a way that may start out silly but become increasingly intense, the bad portrayals of “insanity” taking on the feel of more real insanity, as if all the cackling, shouting and gibbering would actually unhinge the actors and/or the audience. Come the film’s grand (as much as the budget allows, of course) freak show finale, the performances have taken a turn towards the feverish, even the disturbing, and the film’s tone turns from a 70s interpretation of the friendly hokeyness of a William Castle production towards something a little more nightmarish and (in)arguably creepy. One may very well argue the latter turn to be utterly typical of the more cynical mood of 70s horror cinema, even though Don’t Look doesn’t have quite as cruel an ending as one would expect of it following this theory.

While Brownrigg does escalate his movie’s action further than older horror rules and regulations would have allowed, and certainly shows himself unafraid of a little blood and decapitations, there’s also a sense of (rather black) humour surrounding the movie that reveals itself in knowing nods in the direction of the audience that are best exemplified by the film’s lovely ending credits, which show the actor’s names over stills of their characters’ corpses (if available). It’s the perfect mix of the brazenly exploitative, the funny, and the slightly disturbing – a perfect ending for a film like this if ever I’ve seen one.

The Horror!? is a regular cult cinema column by Denis Klotz, aficionado of the obscure and operator of the film blog of the same name.


No Orchids for Miss Blandish

February 17th, 2012 | article by | No Comments »
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dir. St. John Legh Clowes
1948 / Tudor-Alliance / 103′
written by St. John Legh Clowes
from the novel by James Hadley Chase
cinematography by Gerald Gibbs
music by George Melachrino
starring Linden Travers, Jack La Rue, Hugh McDermott, Walter Crisham, MacDonald Park and Lilli Molnar
No Orchids for Miss Blandish is available on DVD through Amazon.com

It looks like a certain thing for a trio of would-be gangsters: grab the incredibly valuable jewellery of millionaire’s daughter Miss “I don’t need no stinking first name” Blandish (Linden Travers) while she and her fiancée are driving through dark country roads on the way to a roadhouse. As it goes with things that are certain, the robbery plan ends with a dead fiancée, two dead would-be gangsters and Miss Blandish kidnapped by the last surviving gangster, a certain Bailey (Leslie Bradley). Oops.

Bailey drives his victim to a country shack, where is planning on, well, shacking up for a while and doing Miss Blandish harm. Just when he is about to rape her, members of the Grisson gang, who learned of Bailey’s plans and whereabouts by ways too complicated to explain, appear like a particularly inappropriate sort of cavalry. Their leader, Slim Grisson (Jack La Rue), decides to kill off Bailey and kidnap Miss Blandish (and her jewellery) for himself.

But a strange thing happens to the hardened gangster once his booty (human and monetary) is safely stashed away at the club he owns. Slim falls in love with his victim, even becoming willing to risk the wrath of his partner/boss Ma Grisson (Lilli Molnar) – who doesn’t actually seem to be related to him – for said love. When Slim tells Miss Blandish to take her jewellery and just go on home, it turns out that he’s not the only one who’s in love here. Clearly, that sort of mutual feeling can not end well in a noir.

 
 
 

At the time the British noir No Orchids for Miss Blandish came out, it seems to have caused a minor scandal by flaunting British censorship scandals towards filmic violence (and probably sex) enough to end the career of its director, the excellently named St. John Legh Clowes and its female lead Linden Travers. From my modern perspective, this, like a lot of things causing censors to foam at the mouth, seems more than just a bit overblown. Sure, conceptually the film’s scenes of violence are a bit more directly visceral than was typical for its time, but Clowes execution of those scenes is so unconvincing, with fists that miss bellies by miles and bullets that are so clearly never shot no audience member (many of whom will have lived through various kinds of real violence during World War II) can have been shocked by what’s happening on screen.

I suspect that it’s the sexual content that broke the film’s neck anyhow, seeing as the amount of innuendo and the number of scenes where the film is basically stating “the characters are now going to have premarital sex while the camera’s not looking” reminds of the raunchier Hollywood pre-code films I’ve seen.

But really, it’s not the sex nor the violence that makes No Orchids as interesting a film as it is, it’s the peculiar way it goes about its business of being a British noir. Most of the British noirs I’ve seen were putting their efforts into taking the aesthetics and philosophy of the Hollywood noir and putting them into a decidedly British setting, with decidedly British characters and exploring decidedly British themes. It’s none of that for No Orchids. Like the novels of James Hadley Chase (one of which this is based on), the film tries its damndest to pretend it is an American noir, setting its story in the USA yet still casting – apart from Jack La Rue’s ersatz-Bogart and Walter Crisham’s ersatz-Widmark – British actors for the roles.

This lets No Orchids take place in a particularly strange place – a USA where everyone tries for a different kind of badly done American accent to stiffly utter (often rather weird) dialogue full of off-key americanisms in, frequently while wearing clothes that are clearly supposed to be American-style, but actually look like the clothes people wear in classic gangster films as recreated by a mad tourist. This whole aspect of the movie has a highly alienating effect, putting a distance between a modern viewer and the film that makes emotional involvement near impossible. It’s all much too artificial too be immersive.

 
 
 

This effect is even further heightened by a script that is confusing and difficult to believe even for noir standards, and that oozes so much puppy-like excitement about aping all aspects of American noir it ever put its eyes on that it’s impossible to take it seriously at all. The film makes no attempt to make the sudden love between Slim and Miss believable even in the slightest, and instead puts them into scenes of bizarre domesticity that can’t help but leave one with the feeling that Clowes either had a very peculiar sense of humour and was trying to have the audience on, or is an alien only vaguely familiar with the idea and ideal of love. This sort of thing sure makes for an interesting film, but also left me giggling throughout the “dramatic” climax that – I think – is supposed to jerk a few tears.

So, by the standards of how a “good” film is supposed to be, No Orchids For Miss Blandish is pretty much a total loss. However, as a film that takes a by the time well-developed style of filmmaking and makes it weird through its own sheer wrong-headedness and an insistence on imitation as if it were a broken mirror, it’s absolutely brilliant. As regular readers of this column and my blog know, there’s not much I love better in a movie than the ability to present itself as part of a different world than the one I come from. No Orchids For Miss Blandish achieves that effect effortlessly, while also providing some very pretty pictures to look at (say what you will about Clowes’s direction, but he sure knew how to do “pretty fake”), horrible musical numbers and “comic” interludes to be disturbed by, as well as psychosexual nonsense to shake one’s head about.

For a film that is trying so hard to be like other films, No Orchids sure is very much only like itself.

The Horror!? is a regular cult cinema column by Denis Klotz, aficionado of the obscure and operator of the film blog of the same name.


The Imperial Swordsman

February 10th, 2012 | article by | No Comments »
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dir. Lam Fook-Dei
1972 / Shaw Brothers / 87′
written by Lam Fook-Dei and Ku Hsi
cinematography by Ho Lan-Shan
action director Leung Siu-Chung
starring Shu Pei-Pei,  Chuen Yuen, Yue Wai, Cheng Miu and Tung Li

As always, the Chinese Emperor is in trouble. The high-ranking official Fu Bing-Zhong (Cheng Miu), who is supposed to guard the Empire’s eastern borders, is planning to attack the capital with the help of a bandit army and his Mongol allies. When the Emperor finds out about Fu’s treasonous ways, he relieves him of his posts, and orders him to return to the capital. Fu pretends to go along with the Imperial edict, and begins his way in the direction of the capital on foot and only accompanied by a lone servant. In truth, he’s carrying his attack plan on the capital and a list of names of generals in his pack to bring that information to the heavily fortified mountain base of his army of bandits.

Lord Sun (Lee Pang-Fei), whoever he might be, somehow knows what Fu’s plans are and sends out four imperial bodyguards – the sisters Shi Xue-Lan (Shu Pei-Pei) and Shi Xue-Mei (Yue Wai), and the rather dubious looking couple of Zhi Yu (Lee Wan-Chung) and Gu Wan (Liu Wai) – to kill the traitor and get a hold of his plans and if need be to infiltrate the mountain base of their enemy and break all resistance there. If possible, they are to team up with imperial swordsman Yin Shu-Tang (Chuen Yuen), who walks around the countryside being rude to people while dressing a lot like a certain character out of Yojimbo, and a small group of men lead by Jin Zhi-Ping (Tung Li) who have infiltrated parts of the bandit organization. At least I think that’s what the plan is – the film sure isn’t making that point very clear, and in the beginning, the characters tend to act in a way that doesn’t fit too well with what they are out to achieve. The Shi sisters, for example, pretend to be a pair of sisters on the run from a marriage, and hunted by Zhi and Gu, which certainly makes a degree (but only a degree) of sense as long as they are interacting with Fu and trying to look harmless but doesn’t make a lick of sense when they do it towards Yin too.

Be that as it may, before long, everybody knows more or less on which side he or she stands, and a desperate battle can begin.

 
 
 

For the first forty minutes of its running time, Lam Fook-Dei’s The Imperial Swordsman seems like a rather minor Shaw Brothers wuxia that features some promising fight scenes but more often than not shoots itself in the foot with a lack of narrative clarity that is remarkable even for a film in a genre not exactly known for such a clarity. The longer it goes, though, the less interested the film seems in being needlessly confusing (not to be confused with the needed confusion of a Chor Yuen film), and the more interested it becomes in being awesome.

Once the protagonists start their attack on Fu’s base, the whole film turns into a long (about thirty to forty minutes), and incredibly intense series of fights and pitched battles that is as good as anything of its type I’ve seen. Lam (with whose body of work apart from The Imperial SwordsmanI am disappointingly unfamiliar) shows a fantastic ability to not only increase the action’s intensity from moment to moment, even when he’s juggling three or four fights happening parallel to each other in different parts of the base, but to show it in ever changing imaginative ways that at times seem heavily influenced by the way Japanese chambara films used to frame their action. The Imperial Swordsman‘s fights are often as much about the parts of the fights Lam’s camera doesn’t show as about those it shows, trading a bit of clarity of choreography (which was by the way created by Leung Siu-Chung) for the ability to surprise from shot to shot.

Lam again and again does things like going from standard wuxia camera set-ups to thirty sudden seconds of a static shot looking from outside into a corridor into and out of which the fighters move, so that we only ever see parts of the battle surrounding the camera’s point of view, which again is replaced by a more close and more dynamic set-up for a short interlude with a more individual (and therefore more personal) fight. Somehow, Lam’s creative style never gives the impression of belonging to a director just wanting to show off, and never breaks the all-important rhythm – wuxias of course having a lot in common with music – of the film. It’s a fantastic and altogether unexpected thing to witness in a film that began merely being solidly done.

 
 

Lam also shows a fine eye for shooting some well-known Shaw Brothers cave sets in ways I haven’t seen before, making the very familiar look new and exciting again. I also approve of a bit of obvious but beautiful miniature work that stands in for locations nobody working for the Shaws could ever have afforded to shoot at; there are some of the standard outside locations every regular viewer of these films know by heart, but the artifice of model work is in many cases better – at least moodier – than nature in any.

The Imperial Swordsman‘s mood is somewhat gritty, with an emphasis on decorative blood spatters and some pretty gruesome – yet great – ideas for action set pieces, like the fight where one of the Shi sisters has to avoid being run through with her own sword that’s sticking in the belly of her opponent. As that example should make clear, Lam’s film may be on the more bloody and gritty side of the Shaw Brothers’ output, but it sure is preferring fun gritty violence to the more realistic type. It is, of course, a directorial decision that’s right up my alley, especially when the film’s idea of fun leads to moments like the one when Xue-Mei gets rid of a whole corridor (there are a lot of corridors in this movie) of guards with the help of her trusty throwing darts, as demonstrated by some fast cuts, a few swishing noises and a lot of falling bodies. And really, that’s the thing about The Imperial Swordsman‘s second half: it’s so full of exciting little moments like this, of outrageous ideas and imagination I could go on for another thousand words or so just listing every single one of them.

The Horror!? is a regular cult cinema column by Denis Klotz, aficionado of the obscure and operator of the film blog of the same name.


Sennentuntschi

January 27th, 2012 | article by | No Comments »
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dir. Michael Steiner
2010 / 115′
written by Michael Steiner, Stefanie Japp and Michael Sauter
cinematography by Pascal Walder
music by Adrian Frutiger
starring Roxane Mesquida, Nicholas Ofczarek, Andreas Zogg, Carlos Leal and Joel Basman

1975. Just after a small village in the Swiss Alps has buried its sacristan after his suicide, a bloody and battered young woman (Roxane Mesquida) appears in town. The woman doesn’t seem to be able to speak, and is clearly either heavily traumatized or mentally ill, but the villagers at once blame her for the sacristan’s death. After all, one of the villagers saw what he thinks was a woman in a monk’s robe in the mountains the day before, so witchcraft must be afoot! This must make some kind of sense to the villagers, even though it’s the sort of logic that’s only logical if you’re a surrealist. It sure doesn’t help improve the situation when the local priest brandishes his crucifix in the poor woman’s face and provokes her into a fit of panic.

Confronted with that sort of superstition, and a little bit infatuated with the mysterious stranger, the local constable Reusch (Nicholas Ofczarek), seemingly the only man in town who isn’t batshit insane, takes charge of the woman and attempts to find out who she is and where she came from. He stumbles upon something strange: his new ward looks exactly like a woman who disappeared twenty-five years ago during the burning of a mountain cabin that killed three men.

While Reusch is away talking to the retired cop who worked the case in the 50s, the priest attacks the nameless girl with a knife, and drives her to flight. On her way, she accidentally causes a miscarriage (her fear of crosses is again to blame) in Reusch’s former girlfriend (now the mayor’s wife), which conclusively proves to anyone not Reusch that she is in fact a witch.

Next time we see the girl again, she arrives at the mountain cabin of farmer Erwin (Andrea Zogg), his son-who-thinks-he’s-his-nephew Albert (Joel Basman), and their newly arrived helper Martin (Carlos Leal), who is on the run for the murder of his wife, and therefore just as insane as everyone else in the movie. Because they were just having an orgy with home-made absinth, the men kinda-sorta assume the girl’s a Sennentuntschi like in the old story about a straw doll brought to life by the devil. Clearly, the girl’s suffering won’t end with her arrival.

All the while, Reusch discovers the dark secret of his village.

  
  
  

So, the classic continental European artful exploitation movie, horror department, is alive and well and living in Switzerland, it seems. Even though director Michael Steiner deconstructs most (yet not quite all) potential supernatural aspects of his story and the Sennentuntschi legend, he’s doing everything else I’ve come to expect in and hope from this kind of film.

As the plot synopsis should have made clear, the film is heavily over-written, full of preposterous plot ideas (only about half of which I’ve mentioned) and melodramatic explanations for everything that’s happening, populated by (predominantly male) characters who are all so clearly out of their minds as to make a girl who can’t speak, acts like a child and turns dead guys into straw dolls look positively normal. In addition Sennentuntschi is told with a structural trick I’m not going to spoil that I don’t think makes the film any better, but clearly makes it a hell of a lot weirder; in fact, I’m utterly unsure if Steiner wants his audience to be surprised by that trick or not – his film is sending very mixed messages about it.

This may sound as if Sennentuntschi weren’t a good movie at all, but the opposite is true. There’s much to be said for the film’s over-serious rediscovery of much of what was good about European genre cinema of the 70s, the rediscovery of a combination of strangeness, metaphorical overload, and classic exploitational values, as well as for its the willingness to be nasty and cruel to its characters, even those it clearly doesn’t hate. I, for one, can’t help but respect a film that gives up clarity for the possibility to surprise its audience. But then, that’s what I would say.

On the film’s metaphorical level, Steiner seems to be quite obsessed with dualities. At least, the film is stuffed full with them, from the boring man-woman and rationality-superstition ones to the structural one I’m still not willing to spoil. As is good and well-loved tradition, the film’s narrative logic and the reasons for its narrative logic can get a bit confusing, which seems to be a fitting way to construct a narrative about characters who are all not exactly mentally healthy.

Not confusing at all is Steiner’s visual mastership. The director uses the impressive Swiss landscape to build a mood of overwhelming strangeness, and to intensify the already over-heated feelings of his characters, grounding the strangeness of what is happening in the very real, yet also very strange mountain landscape of a place whose harshness seems to influence the state of mind of the characters populating it for the worse.

I also found myself very impressed by Roxane Mesquida’s acting. Her combination of childlike body language, the visible remnants of hurt and pain, a peculiarly innocent sexuality and a very calm sort of madness dominate the film’s best moments without being showy. If not for Mesquida’s performance, the part of the film’s metaphorical level that’s all about contrasting “maleness” and “femaleness” would probably be quite annoying, but the actress turns what could be a mere symbol – and a symbol of various conflicting things, by the way – into a person. Plus, most of the male characters’ problem isn’t their maleness, but their being murderous rapist assholes, a fact the film seems to realize about half of the time. Which again puts Sennentuntschi directly in the tradition of classic European exploitation movies, where the subversive, the uncomfortable and the conservative have always been entwined in the most interesting, yet also often very uncomfortable, manner.

The Horror!? is a regular cult cinema column by Denis Klotz, aficionado of the obscure and operator of the film blog of the same name.


Mr Wrong

January 20th, 2012 | article by | No Comments »
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dir. Gaylene Preston
1986 / 83′
written by Geoff Murphy, Gaylene Preston and Graeme Telly
from a story by Elizabeth Jane Howard
cinematography by Thomas Burstyn
original music by Jonathan Crayford
starring Heather Bolton, David Letch, Margaret Umbers, Gary Stalker and Danny Mulheron
Mr Wrong is available on OOP VHS under the American title of Dark of the Night

Meg (Heather Bolton perfectly embodying a mixture of inexperience/naivety and hidden strength) has left her country home for the big city (I’d insert a joke about what “big city” means in New Zealand here, but that would be oh so inappropriate seeing where I live), where she works in an antiquities store. To make it easier to visit her parents over the weekends – and probably as a symbol of her freshly won independence – the young woman buys a used Jaguar.

Her first long drive with the car does not go quite as well as Meg would have hoped for. When she stops by the side of the road to take a night nap, she’s awoken by hard and pretty unhealthy sounding breathing noises from the back seat of the car that start whenever she turns off the interior lights. Worse, or at least even more frightening to her, there’s nothing and nobody to see on the back seat.

After that experience, Meg becomes increasingly nervous and afraid of the car, a state of affairs that is certainly not improved by further peculiar happenings surrounding it. After Meg has had a nightmare centring on a long-haired woman, she sees the exact same woman standing by the side of the road trying to hitch a ride in her waking life. For whatever reason, Meg stops for her.

However, the woman isn’t alone. A man (David Letch) gets in together with her, but he doesn’t seem to actually be together with the woman as Meg assumes. In fact, he doesn’t seem to know about the woman’s presence at all, which becomes understandable but not exactly less peculiar when she suddenly just disappears from the car. The guy is more than just a bit creepy too, and Meg has a hard time getting rid of him.

This experience is nearly enough to convince Meg of getting rid of her car as soon as possible, and when she learns that its last owner was a young woman about her age who was murdered, and whose killer has never been caught, our heroine does try to sell it off.

That, however, is much easier said than done, for the car begins to sabotage Meg’s efforts in ways that could be explained away by bad luck, if it weren’t clear to the young woman her car was haunted.

While all this is going on, a mysterious someone begins to send Meg roses – surely, this won’t have anything to do with the rather more horrible things going on in her life right now?

  
  
  

I know little about the movie scene in New Zealand (with the exception of being quite intimate with the films of Peter Jackson and Jane Campion), so I can’t really say how typical Gaylene Preston’s Mr Wrong is for the cinematic output of the country in the mid-80s. What I can say is that it is a pretty fantastic little film in mode and mood of the clever – and quite weird – ghost story. Given that this is based on one of the handful of supernatural tales Elizabeth Jane Howard wrote, the “clever and weird” part isn’t too much of a surprise; it is, however, quite a positive surprise how well the Weirdness of Howard’s story and Preston’s naturalistic eye on the New Zealand of the 80s complement each other.

As frequent readers of my ramblings will know by now, I am an admirer of low budget films that make use of the cheapest of all special effects – local colour – to set the mood of their stories, and am even more of an admirer of films that are letting the very real of a specific place and time collide with the Weird and the peculiar, so I am predisposed to liking Mr Wrong, as it is a film whose whole modus operandi is very much based on these techniques. Even better, Preston really knows what she’s doing in this regard, showing herself to be equally at home with taking a – slightly sarcastic – look at her central character’s live and times (I wouldn’t be too surprised if there were a certain autobiographical element at work here, either) and with slowly showing the seams and cracks of Meg’s existence where the disquiet and the strange can enter through, cracks, the film seems to say, even the most unspectacular of lives has. Are, after all, Meg’s life and that of her unhappy predecessor in car ownership all that different from each other? Preston doesn’t overstretch the parallels between the woman and the haunt. In fact, if you don’t want to see this aspect of the movie – that is most probably there to demonstrate something about the way a woman still has to fight for her independence (in the sense of self-ownership) – you will probably never notice it at all. It’s always excellent when a director is subtle with the treatment of her film’s metaphorical level.

From time to time, Mr Wrong is a bit rough around the edges, but it’s the kind of roughness that comes with the territory of making movies for little money in a place where making a movie can’t have been all that easy to begin with, and is offset by a direction that can be creative and imaginative without feeling the need to show off. After all, it’s clear to see for everyone that the director really knows how to use the idiom of the ghost story and the thriller without any need for her to point it out to her audience like a bad Hollywood actor trying once in his life for actual acting. Instead, Preston’s film impresses through an unassuming intelligence.

The Horror!? is a regular cult cinema column by Denis Klotz, aficionado of the obscure and operator of the film blog of the same name.


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