Archive for the ‘The Horror!?’ Category


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
cienmatography 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
cienmatography 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.


Étoile

January 13th, 2012 | article by | 2 Comments »
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dir. Peter Del Monte
1989 / Gruppo Bema / Reteitalia / 101′
written by Peter Del Monte, Franco Ferrini and Sandro Petraglia
cienmatography by Acácio de Almeida
original music by Jürgen Knieper
starring Jennifer Connelly, Gary McCleery, Laurent Terzieff, Charles Durning and Olimpia Carlisi

American ballerina Claire (Jennifer Connelly) travels to Budapest for an audition for either a role in “Swan Lake” or a place in a ballet academy (as about other things, Étoile is decidedly unclear about it, but it really doesn’t matter in the long run). When her time to audition comes, though, Claire has a sudden case of nerves and flees, getting lost in the belly of the theatre the audition takes place in, until she comes to a stage where she, of course, begins to dance.

Claire is witnessed by the ballet troupe’s director (Laurent Terzieff), who for some reason that will become clear later on calls her by the name of Nathalie. Which, of course, again drives Claire to flight.

Later, our heroine, in an understandably bad mood about her own behaviour, tries to distract herself by talking a walk through Budapest. She meets fellow American Jason (Gary McCleery) – with whom she had already met-cute before – and proceeds to do some of that earnest falling in love in minutes young people in movies are so fond of; though it has to be said that Jason seems much more smitten with Claire than she is with him, for Claire has after all already found the love of her life in form of dancing, as she explains to him. Not one to be discouraged by that sort of thing, Jason promises to return to the theatre with Claire the next day to try and get her a second chance for her audition.

That very night, though, Claire is so disturbed by a nightmare about characters from “Swan Lake” the audience also already knows as part of the dance troupe she decides to just pack her things and fly back to the USA at once. Before she can escape whatever she’s fleeing from, though, Claire’s identity (and probably her reality, too) begins to shift. She signs a form with the name “Nathalie Horvath”, and follows a call for a person of that name to the airport’s information booth, from where she is directed to a car waiting for Nathalie/her. Not surprisingly, the car is driven by the dance troupe’s factotum who brings Claire/Nathalie to a rather dilapidated mansion she had already entered once while cavorting with Jason.

From that point on, Claire becomes Nathalie, the prima ballerina of the dance troupe, and spends her time staring at swans in the park, rehearsing for “Swan Lake”, and looking pretty zoned out.

On one of her outings to the park, Nathalie is observed by Jason, who had been pretty frustrated by her supposed return to the USA. When he tries to talk to her, Nathalie doesn’t recognize him. Jason is understandably confused by the whole affair, and begins obsessing about Claire/Nathalie, follows her, sneaks around, succeeds in a Library Use roll, and eventually stumbles on a peculiar and rather horrible truth about his beloved’s coming appearance in “Swan Lake”. If Jason can’t rescue Claire, a past tragedy will repeat itself.

  
  
  

To get the obvious question out of the way first, yes, there are clear parallels between Italian director Peter Del Monte’s Étoile and Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, but even though both films share certain thematic interests (loss or fluidity of identity of a young woman), and – obviously – “Swan Lake” (a ballet made to explore shifting identities if ever there was one), both directors have very different approaches to their material that can’t all be explained by the different eras their films were made in. Where Aronofsky’s idea of the irrational is grounded in very traditional psychological models (bringing the dreaded bane of “realism” even into a film about somebody losing touch with reality), Del Monte goes a more European way. The Italian is not very interested in realistic psychology, and instead aims for the archetypes found in fairy tales and myths, where symbols and the things symbols are supposed to signify are often one and the same.

It’s difficult to ignore the influence Hitchcock – especially Vertigo - seems to have had on Del Monte’s movie. Watching the film, I was frequently reminded of a less hysterical twin to Brian De Palma’s Hitchcock-influenced (some people would argue ripping off Hitchcock; these people are wrong) phase, an impression that certainly did not decrease through the themes and visual cues these films share. The clear parallels to Hitchcock and De Palma are a bit of a problem for Étoile from time to time, pushing me to comparisons that make it look worse than it deserves. To use an easy example, Gary McCleery sure is no James Stewart (not even a Cliff Robertson).

It would probably have been better to cast the leads five to ten years older, which probably would have made them too old for the fairy tale parallels, but could have improved one of the film’s weak spots to no end. Don’t misunderstand me, McCleery isn’t bad, and young Jennifer Connelly does dreamy, dream-like and beautiful very well indeed, but he is lacking the edge his more obsessive scenes need, and she is not at all convincing in the scenes when she takes on the role of the black swan, both things somewhat more experienced actors could have sold better.

These problems on the acting side aren’t what will make or break Étoile for most viewers though, I think. Basically, the potential audience of Étoile will encounter (or enjoy) the same problems-that-aren’t-actually-problems-but-parts-of-the-general-aesthetic many of my favourite European films of the fantastic show: the languid pacing and ambiguous working of space and time that have more to do with the structure of a dream than that of a textbook narrative; the characters that don’t pretend to function like real people; the emphasis on mood possibly to the detriment of believability and clearly to the detriment of realism. Of course, all these things belong in a movie with no interest in picturing reality, or being “believable” as a depiction of consensus reality.

Generally, Del Monte seems to have control over his film (not something I’d say about all movies in this style) until we come to the climax, that is, when trouble rears its head. Let’s just say that the scene of Jason fighting a giant black swan clearly oversteps the line between the dream-like and symbolic and the painfully ridiculous, and that a dramatic highpoint should probably not be a film’s worst scene.

For most of its running time, though, Étoile plays out like a dream, with all the symbolism and all the ambiguity of symbols that implies. I suspect most of the film’s viewers will either adore – like me – or hate that dream-like mood dominating it; I don’t feel neutrality to be an option.

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.


Grave Encounters

January 6th, 2012 | article by | No Comments »
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dir. The Vicious Brothers
2011 / Twin Engine Films / 95′
written by The Vicious Brothers
cienmatography by Tony Mirza
original music by Quynne Craddock
starring Sean Rogerson, Ashley Gryzko, Merwin Mondesir, Mackenzie Gray, and Juan Riedinger
available on dvd through Amazon.com

(Don’t) stop me if you’ve heard this one before. The footage Grave Encounters consists of is purportedly edited down from footage shot by the team of the ghost hunting TV show “Grave Encounters” during the filming of their rather fatal sixth episode.

An appropriately smug and somewhat cynical team of five (Sean Rogerson, Ashleigh Gryzko, Merwin Mondesir, Mackenzie Gray and Juan Riedinger) sets out to spend a night locked in one of those creepy former asylums for the mentally ill that dot the US landscape (at least if I can believe what the horror movies – who clearly wouldn’t lie to me – tell me). The ghost hunters don’t go in expecting to actually find anything supernatural, obviously, but as long as they can pretend to be creeped out, it’ll be good, successful reality TV, right?

Fortunately for the movie’s audience, and very unfortunately for the film’s protagonists, they will encounter quite a bit more paranormal activity than they ever could have expected or wished for. And while the things the crew first encounters, like doors moving by themselves, may only be a little creepy, later developments have a much more dangerous and disturbing bend. Clearly, not everybody – if anybody – will make it out of the place alive.

By now, I think, there are enough found footage/fake documentary/POV horror movies about ghost hunting TV people around to make up their own little sub-sub-genre. Unlike the other films of this sort I had the dubious honour of watching, Grave Encounters is actually a pretty good film.

  
  

The film does of course have its share of flaws. I think the interview parts before the crew is locked in could have been cut down a little, to make the film’s start a little pacier. As it stands, the actual meat of the narrative begins about forty minutes into the film, just at the point when I was beginning to lose my patience with it a little.

I also could have gone without the overuse of the jerky zoom lens style in the interview sequences – it’s the sort of thing nobody holding a camera in a professional or semi-professional capacity actually does (not even the directors of photography of ghost hunting reality shows), and it threatens the poor helpless audience with seasickness. Once the interview segments are over, the zoom lens is fortunately retired forever, so I’m not even sure why it’s used this extensively early on at all.

Grave Encounter‘s biggest problem is probably the quality of its special effects. About half of the effects do actually look pretty decent to my eyes, but the other half (let me just say big-mouthed ghosts) looks too much like bad digital fakery and too little like terrible things from beyond. On the other hand, it is pretty clear that this is strictly a low budget affair, and even when the execution of the effects seems problematic, they’re usually trying to show something creepy or conceptually interesting. When in doubt, I take a badly realized but interesting thing over something that looks slick but is basically boring.

As far as flaws in independently produced horror go, these are rather minor ones, and they are overshadowed by the things Grave Encounters‘ directors – going under the somewhat silly moniker The Vicious Brothers – do right.

  
  

Prime among things that the film does right, is the way it treats its characters. Even though they are presented as slightly pompous and deeply dishonest towards their audience (I think this is what people call realism), the film still allows them more than enough sympathetic traits to make it easy enough for an audience (or at least me) to empathize with them. I’m not talking great character depth here – I doubt great character depth is anything POV horror can even achieve – but enough depth to make the characters human. The script certainly gets help here by actors who may be a little broad in their approach sometimes but are pretty good at switching from their early on-camera ghost hunting pomposity to people completely out of their depth and scared out of their wits.

Some of the things our not so intrepid protagonists have to face are pretty scary on a conceptual and on a concrete level, but even when they only encounter standard ghosts, these are standard ghosts doing ghostly things thematically appropriate for an empty asylum setting. These activities can’t help but add a historical dimension to the ghosts, making them not just disquieting or frightening for the things they do to others, but also the things that have been done to them; a victim turned into a monster by outside forces is often more effective than a mere monster.

Aside from ghosts, though, there are also a few things making the protagonists’ lives harder that come from the Weirder side of the tracks than mere dead people walking around being rude. The Vicious Brothers do some very effective things with temporal and spatial anomalies that suggest the influence of Daniel Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. It’s exactly elements like these nods to Danielewski what most films of the contemporary (post-crappy-Paranormal-Activity, in contrast to the post-Blair Witch one) POV horror genre are too often missing for my taste. Hauntings of this kind are visually cheap to realize and give a film an added dimension of the frighteningly strange and unreal that rubs nicely against the hyper-realism of the POV-form, but I’m afraid too many horror directors working right now are in love with the straightforwardly scary.

Consequently, I’m glad that Grave Encounters dares to be this decisive bit different from its brethren. Now, where did I leave that EMP-meter?

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.


Magic of the Universe

December 9th, 2011 | article by | 1 Comment »
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a.k.a.: The Magician / Salamangkero
Year: 1986  Runtime: 84′  Director: Tata Esteban
Writer: Grace Hill Serrano   Cinematography: Joe Tutanes   Music: Rey Ramos
Cast: Michael De Mesa, Sunshine Dizon, Tom Tom, Gina Alajar, Tanya Gomez, Armida Siguion-Reyna

Stage magician Professor – we never learn Professor of what, though I do suspect trundling through the jungle to be his main area of expertise – Jamir (Michael De Mesa) loses his little daughter Freza (Sunshine Dizon) when he’s doing a standard disappearing act. The little girl disappears well enough but she doesn’t reappear again when she should. Looking not quite as worried as the situation would suggest, Jamir, his wife and his fat little boy assistant (Tom Tom) go off to visit a friendly black magician, hoping he can explain what happened to Freza. Alas, despite some tasteful licking of raw monkey brains (I don’t think no animals were harmed in the making of this movie), there’s not much concrete to be gotten from the magician, except some mutterings about Jamir being in terrible danger and some vague hints pointing the family in the direction of another jungle village.

Once arrived there, the family has nothing better to do than to stage another show (that is the sort of thing you do to find your disappeared daughter, right?), during which Mum disappears too. While Jamir and the fat boy start to get a bit depressed now, Mum finds herself reunited with Freza – as captives of an evil witch named Mikula (Armida Siguion-Reyna) who lives with a horde of child prisoners, some horned pig people and a cross between a gremlin, a toad, your worst nightmares and a TV in a palace in the jungle. Mikula finally deigns to do some exposition, so we learn that she has kidnapped the Jamir women to avenge herself on Jamir’s dead great grandfather, who was her teacher at magic but cursed her with a big, pulsating head once he realized how evil she was.

Jamir hears about the same story from the ghost of said great grandfather the very same night, because now it’s exposition time, the film just can’t stop itself anymore. Gramps also adds that Jamir needs to find some magical doodad to be able to fight Mikula, else he and his family will die and Mikula will rule the world.

The rest of the film sees Jamir and the fat boy wander aimlessly through the jungle, getting saved from the attentions of a guy with a very big sword by the Guardian of the Woods (whose power is shooting cartoon laser beams from her eyes, if you need to ask) and impress a tribe of feral little people with the old pigeon trick. Then the boy is kidnapped too and the film spends most of its time with everyone not Jamir escaping from Mikula, meeting strange things and people and getting kidnapped again, until it is time for Jamir to become undeservedly powerful and win the day with his own new cartoon lightning beams. What a hero!

  
  
  

I suspect Filipino Magic of the Universe to be one of those at least part-time disturbing kids movies all Asian countries seem to excel at, though its combination of naive and round-about plotting, bad rubber masks, cruelty to adorable little monkeys, freakish creatures making even more freakish noises, and little children (sort of) saving the day might just as well be explained by everyone involved in the production being batshit insane or hopped up on snorting crystallized EC comics; actually, now having thought about it for a few seconds longer, it’s probably all three.

Connoisseurs of this sort of movie – the little sister genre to my beloved weird fu genre – will pretty much know what to expect from Magic: awkward and somewhat dull direction (by Tata Esteban); a primitive – possibly borrowed from somewhere – synth soundtrack that fluctuates between the trite and the disquieting (the latter is especially awesome here in the fight scene between Tom Tom and a demonic kung fu kid, or whatever he/she/it is supposed to be); editing of the rough and tumble kind; ideas and concepts so disturbing most Western movies for grown-ups wouldn’t dare use them (that poor monkey at the beginning or the Guardian of Forest’s head being eaten to give Mikula more magic power, anyone?) presented with shoulder-shrugging nonchalance; a lack of explanation for a lot of things (whatis Mikula doing with all these children?); an English dub job so atrocious one can’t help but think it was done by random tourists who were kidnapped and locked up in the cellar of the film’s producers as a cheap alternative to professional voice actors.

All that and more is there and accounted for in a film that does its best to sabotage its rather mind-blowing effects with somewhat ponderous pacing and a hero of utmost incompetence (he’s really just wandering around until he points a stick at his nemesis), but that just can’t be anything less than entertaining as long as it is adding one weird and wondrous thing to the next. When the film’s not actively disturbing you with Mikula’s increasingly pulsating head, it’s weirding you out with a sudden monster synth rock party (Mikula has her own band, just like a Bollywood villain, although the film lacks a scene where Jamir pretends to be part of a dance troupe), or throwing in a random easily depressed swamp monster and a woman turned to stone for good measure.

I don’t really like ending a write-up on a “you’ll like this thing if you like this sort of thing” note, but what can a boy do when confronted with a movie whose main achievement apart from being oh so very strange is that nobody making it does seem to have just stopped for a moment and said “what are we doing here, guys?”?

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

The Invisible Man vs. The Human Fly

December 2nd, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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a.k.a.: Tomei Ningen To Hae Otoko
Year: 1957  Runtime: 96′  Director: Mitsuo Murayama
Writer: Hajime Takaiwa   Cinematography: Hiroshi Murai   Music: Tokujiro Okubo
Cast: Yoshiro Kitahara, Ryuji Shinagawa, Junko Kanau, Ikuko Mori

A strange and increasingly violent series of burglaries and murders shakes Japan. The murder victims are usually found stabbed in the back, and killed in tightly controlled or completely locked places. Or on an airplane toilet. Additionally, nobody ever sees or hears any sign of the perpetrator or perpetrators. Why, you could think the killer is invisible! That’s at least what the lead investigator of the case, well-respected young cop Wakabayashi, says in a moment of weakness.

When the policeman utters this rather absurd theory while interviewing some scientists he is friendly with about the airplane toilet business one of them witnessed, they aren’t laughing about his flights of fancy. Ironically, the men are working on some scientific ray stuff whose by-product is invisibility, or, as they prefer it to be called, imperceptibility. They haven’t tested it on a human being yet, though, out of fear that it might be dangerous.

Apart from putting the idea of an invisible copper into his brain, this isn’t getting Wakabayashi anywhere right now. Fortunately, the continuing murder spree gives our hero and his team a lot to distract them. The last few victims have been pointing in the air and swatting at something during their last moments, and witnesses heard the buzzing of a fly. Why, you could think the killer can turn into a fly! Which is nearly, but not quite what is happening. In truth, the killer is using an experimental reagent made during the war to facilitate his escapes. This reagent, you see, can shrink down a man until he is not quite as small as a fly. As SCIENCE(!) teaches, all small creatures are able to float through the air while making the buzzing noise of a fly, so that’s the explanation for the noises the witnesses heard.

About half of the murders are connected by this reagent too, because the victims have all been part in the war crimes committed during its creation, though none of them have been punished for them. This part of the killing spree is vengeance for and by the only man who did get punished, and is now using a rather mad gentleman with an addiction to the reagent to commit the murders. The other half of the killings has something to do with the madman’s obsession with a nightclub singer on whom he likes to perv when he is shrunk down, but let’s not go there.

Obviously, this is the sort of case that can only be cracked if someone is willing to take the risk of becoming an invisible man.

  
  
  

Even though this plot description sounds as awesome as it is dumb, Daiei’s IM vs HF is not quite as awe-inspiring as I would have liked it to be. The film has two major problems it is only just able to conquer to my satisfaction. The first one is scriptwriter Hajime Takaiwa’s peculiar decision to frame much of the movie’s first two thirds as a slightly weird police procedural, with many scenes of earnest looking men doing earnest police business that are only from time to time broken up by the insanity that waits in the plot’s background. The second problem is also one belonging to the script. Takaiwa seems hell-bent to stuff Human Fly as full of elements of the police procedural, the slightly sleazy exploitationer and the mad science horror film as possible. This, however, leaves even the more patient viewer (like me) with a film full of ideas and plot-threads that are never really explored nor explained and in the end more often than not just stop with a hand-waving gesture when Takaiwa is getting bored of them.

Characterization-wise, there’s never a clear through-line for why people act like they do. Just to take some obvious examples, why does the film’s villain suddenly turn from a man out for vengeance and a bit of money into the sort of bad guy more fitting into an issue of The Spider? What does he need the invisibility ray for when he already can turn into a flying, buzzing little man? And, while I’m at it, why doesn’t he just steal it (he is the Human Fly, after all) instead of going for a semi-apocalyptic blackmail plan? And why does the elder scientist’s daughter decide that the invisible scientist already at work isn’t enough and turns into the invisible woman?

I sure could make up some reasons for the characters’ behaviour, and some of the film’s obvious plot holes, but I do think that’s the responsibility of the script, not the audience. Especially the film’s last third gives the impression of Takaiwa giving up and just making stuff up as it goes along without any thought for coherence or sense. Come to think of it, hero pulps like The Spider with their usually heated and sloppily constructed narratives seem like an excellent point of comparison to what Taikawa does here writing-wise.

Comparable to many of the hero pulps, the writing flaws that hinder IM vs HF from becoming the goodSF/crime/horror hybrid movie with a subtextual line about the violence committed by war-touched people in post-war Japan it could have been, are also making it enjoyably nutty and near impossible to dislike for viewers like me who can get excited about a film that’s just full of silly stuff for no good reason other than the clear awesomeness of all silly stuff. This is, after all a film that doesn’t want to realize that flies have wings for a reason, a film that also makes up some nonsense about face and hands of an invisible person getting visible quite fast again because of the rays of the sun while the rest of it doesn’t (no nudity for Japanese people who want to turn visible again, it seems), only to then forget that for the rest of its running time. It also presents turning back from an invisibility by means of SCIENCE(!) as very dangerous, until it’s time to wrap everything up, when it’s not only possible to turn visible again and live, but to seemingly go from one state to the other at will. It’s all very dumb, and reeks of lazy writing as much any modern blockbuster I’ve seen, but it sure is fun to watch what nonsense Takaiwa is going to come up with next.

The film’s other big plus point is Mitsuo Murayama’s (whom I know as one of the Japanese directors who’d go on to work a bit for Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers) direction. For my taste, Murayama isn’t a very consistent stylist, but he is the kind of director always going for the most interesting angle from which to shoot the more boring police procedural scenes, making the parts of IM vs HF most in need of not looking square and boring look much weirder than their actual content and context deserve; if you’re the generous type, you might even suggest Murayama is hinting at the strangeness surrounding his square policemen right from the beginning by way of his stylistic tics. Be that as it may, Murayama’s often peculiarly cramped, close-up and Dutch angle heavy visual style keeps the movie’s rather slow beginning interesting, and helps the mess that is its script stay a mess that is fun to watch even in its worst moments.

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

Island of the Living Dead

November 12th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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Year: 2006  Runtime: 94′  Director: Bruno Mattei
Writer: Antonio Tentori   Cinematography: Luigi Ciccarese   Music: Bruno Mattei, Daniele Campelli
Cast: Yvette Yzon, Gaetano Russo, Ydalia Suarez, Jim Gaines, Alvin Anson

After accidentally depositing the treasure they were trying to take from the bottom of the sea deeper on it, a hapless yet heavily armed gang of treasure hunters lead by a certain Captain Kirk (Gaetano Russo) gets into even more trouble. While piloting their ship through a thick fog, our heroes (cough) collide with rocks where there shouldn’t be any, and will have to do a few repairs before they can get anywhere else again.

Fortunately there’s an uncharted island nearby where the crew will try to scavenge provisions and do a bit of treasure hunting while one lone idiot stays behind to do the repairs. Little do they expect that the island has been populated by the undead for a long time now. Soon enough, our heroes by default find themselves under attack. Oh, and the treasure hunters’ boat explodes when repair guy pushes its self destruct button once he is attacked and surrounded by zombies.

At first, our now well and truly stranded heroes have only minor problems surviving the attentions of the zombies who may have been running around since the 17th century but still look pretty good for their age. Later on, scriptwriter Antonio Tentori decides that normal zombies are boring, and so the undead start getting pretty darn talkative, trying to drive the characters to kill each other by playing dumb mind games. Or something. From your standard zombies we then go to skeleton monks, hallucinations, a curse, and what might be vampires, too. How will designated final girl Sharon (Yvette Yzon) survive?

After a pause of half a decade, Italian movie god Bruno Mattei resumed his work of blowing minds and keeping under budget with the beginning of the 21st century, shooting as many movies until his death in 2007 as the direct to DVD market would allow. Even though late period Mattei isn’t quite as mind-blowingly crazy as he was when he was still working with Claudio Fragasso, Island of the Living Dead (shot in the Philippines like in the good old times of AIP) has much to recommend it, at least to an audience consciously seeking out Bruno Mattei films; in short, people like me.

Instead of ripping off plot, structure and dialogue of his movie wholesale from a single, artistically slightly more successful source – that technique will have to wait for the sequel – this ripe effort sees Mattei stealing bits and pieces from other movies in a way that could be construed as homages by an alien unsure of how homages work. Apart from a translation of the early graveyard scene from Night of the Living Dead into scenery-chewerish and dumb, there are scenes and set-ups lifted from Zombi and really everything else with a zombie in it, as well as the Demoni movies. John Carpenter’s The Fog is the source for the backstory to the whole undead invasion, with the little difference that Carpenter’s curse makes a certain degree of sense where Mattei’s doesn’t. Instead of making sense, Island‘s curse produces a tinted sea-to-land battle that I suspect to be stolen from a much older feature.

  
  
  

In his many years of experience as a director of crap, Mattei has mastered some impressive techniques. I especially admire the anti-dynamic editing that seems to be designed to create a structure for the film that consciously destroys tension. Zombie attacks are intercut with hot Latin reading action, and scenes of “characterisation” are broken up by shots of zombies crawling around somewhere else for no good reason whatsoever, as if the whole affair had been directed by a highly distractible child.

The film’s action scenes are nearly as great as the editing, seeing as they are clearly staged to suggest that most of the characters have the ability to teleport (which fits in nicely with the film’s utterly random day and night cycle that suggests that the whole film takes place over either one day or five, possibly just four – it’s difficult to say when day and night are this random). Alas, the characters are always teleporting towards the zombies instead of away from them, but usually only get killed once they’ve decided to sacrifice themselves for their friends in situations that don’t afford this kind of suicide at all. But hey, somehow the ridiculous action movie one-liners need to get on screen, right? (It CAN be done). It’s pretty awesome, really.

Equally awesome and/or awe-inspiring is the collective inability of the cast to emote even in the slightest like normal humans beings do. Dialogue is mangled as if the speakers were trying to fight off a man in a gorilla suit, and scenery is not chewed, but head-butted until it stops moving. I especially approve of the effort of Ydalia Suarez who plays Victoria. Never has she met a line she does not want to shout in an overenthusiastic fashion. Look Ma, she’s in a real movie now!

As if all this wasn’t enough to kill the few brain cells that survived my encounters with other Mattei films,Island is filled to the brim with compellingly idiotic details. Early on, there’s a random martial arts versus zombie scene that doesn’t end well for the martial artist because he decides to sacrifice himself for no good reason while kicking one single zombie in the crotch. This is followed by scenes featuring zombie conquistadors wearing plastic conquistador helmets as probably found by the production team in a souvenir shop, zombies that take naps and growl into the camera, characters willing to drink wine from an open cup that must have been standing around openly for a few centuries, that boat self-destruct button, an eye patch-wearing head rotating inside of a treasure chest, really religious undead skeleton monks, the all-important Lovecraft shout-outs, a zombie flamenco dancer, and music that often sounds as if somebody were just playing musical cues from other films (even Star Wars for a few seconds) on a cheap synthesizer, which is exactly what’s happening.

Island of the Living Dead truly is everything one could hope for in a movie directed by Bruno Mattei: it’s dumb, it’s inept, it’s utterly shameless, it makes no sense at all – it’s like a bad photocopy of a crassly commercial movie that is just too stupid to actually know how commercial movies work and nearly becomes experimental filmmaking through sheer wrong-headedness. In any case, Mattei’s film is entertaining in a crazy way Italian movies have seldom been in the last decades. It might be great for all the wrong reasons, but as Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham say: if loving a Mattei movie is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

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

The Incite Mill

November 4th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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Year: 2010  Runtime: 107′  Director: Hideo Nakata
Writer: Satoshi Suzuki   Cinematography: Junichiro Hayashi   Music: Kenji Kawai
Cast: Tatsuya Fujiwara, Haruka Ayase, Satomi Ishihara, Kinya Kitaoji, Nagisa Katahira, Takuro Ohno

Looking at the career of director Hideo Nakata, I can’t avoid the impression he had his difficulties recovering from the catastrophe that was the US The Ring 2, possibly because being responsible for that one is a shame someone with even a little bit of pride in his work would have a hard time living down.

In Nakata’s case, his decline isn’t as horrible as it could be. In fact, compared with Takashi Shimizu, the state of Nakata’s career is absolutely golden, seeing as he’s not making something called Rabbit Horror 3D, and doesn’t seem to have lost all his talent while slumming in Hollywood. The Incite Mill is a clear demonstration that he still has what made me fall in love with his earlier films.

The Incite Mill is a pretty typical entry into the sub-genre of the thriller that is occupied with putting a bunch of characters into an artificially locked down place, having them submit to peculiar and bizarre rules and observing them fastly starting to kill each other off, in part because People Ain’t No Good™, in part because the party responsible for their imprisonment does some subtle and some not so subtle things to, well, incite them to murder. In this variation, the characters have come to the place of their imprisonment out of their own volition, for the promise of a surprising amount of money for just seven days of work in a psychological experiment. Of course, they didn’t expect quite as much violence, nor that they’d be the stars in one of these popular Internet shows nobody in the cast has ever heard of you only encounter in movies.

As this is a Japanese movie, the rules element is quite heavily emphasised, riding one of the hobby horses of Japanese pop culture of the last ten years or so in what is probably a reaction to the country’s still heavily restrictive and regimented society and the resulting pressures to conform on the individual.

  
  
  

There are also many allusions to classic manor mysteries (ten little Indians ahoy), and the Cluedo-inspiring (or Clue-inspiring for you Americans) construction of that very mechanical sub-genre. In a sense, Nakata seems to want to escape the heavy artificiality of his set-up by pointing it out himself. To a degree, this works pretty well, though I couldn’t help but begin to question parts of the story’s basic set-up I would probably not have questioned in a movie less knowingly artificial. Just to take an obvious example: how come the police hasn’t gotten involved if this is not the first time this little show has been broadcast? I can believe in police laziness and incompetence, but I’m pretty sure this sort of thing would at least have been in every news show in the country, and therefore nothing the characters could notknow about. And while I’m thinking about logical problems, how is it that most of the characters actually believe anyone (especially people who never ever show their faces to them) would pay enormous amounts of money for them to take part in a simple psychological experiment? I find this sort of thing much harder to believe than the existence of ghosts, aliens, and vampires, but your mileage may very well vary.

The Incite Mill‘s best moments are interesting enough to let me forget these doubts, however. Besides taking cues from manor mysteries and the brethren in its own sub-genre, the film also does some things that are bound to help a guy like me forget little niggles like logic problems and a lack of coherent worldbuilding. Namely, there is a slight SF element in the form of one of these new-fangled ceiling-bound robots with impressive gripper arms (and some useful gadgets). Even though it isn’t talking or beeping melodically like a good robot should, it’s still there to throw people in jail, inefficiently patrol the Paranoia House’s (yes, that’s how the place of the experiment is named – surely no reason the get paranoid) corridors at night, and to delight my heart to no end. After all, everything is better with robots.

I’d be remiss in my duties if I didn’t mention the good ensemble cast, consisting – among others – of actual movie star Tatsuya Fujiwara (with whom Nakata has worked before on the Death Note spinoff L: Change the World), veteran actor Kinya Kitaoji, veteran TV actress Nagisa Katahira, and some other members of the TV actor and idol business (Haruka Ayase, Satomi Ishihara, Takura Ohno and others). All of them (yes, even the male idols) deliver performances that are generally convincing and often even quite intense. There’s never the feeling that you’re watching idols act. Rather, these are actors who also take part in the idol rat race, but do know about more than pushing their physical assets into the camera. There’s a certain degree of overacting on display, but overacting seems to fit the hysteria-inducing situation the characters are in quite well. Plus, I prefer conscious and artful overacting to the near-catatonic blandness that is so trendy in English language cinema right now. I understand, all that botox makes one’s face difficult to move, but still…

Hideo Nakata for his part has never been a flashy director, usually preferring a style that subtly influences an audience perception of a story and its characters to one that is always pointing at the director’s technical abilities, which usually works to the detriment of the narrative. Nakata is too self-assured a director to have much of a need for showing off. If you want to see his technical accomplishments, you will find them in the careful framing of scenes, in the precise rhythms his films’ editing creates, and in Nakata’s strong sense for iconic imagery that works as an actual, living part of his movies. In The Incite Mill, Nakata shows that all of these talents are still alive and well in him, serving him as well in his new genre of choice as they did when he was making the horror films which made me fall in love with Japanese horror.

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

The Power

October 28th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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Year: 1968  Runtime: 109′  Director: Byron Haskin
Writer: John Gay   Cinematography: Ellsworth Fredericks   Music: Miklos Rozsa
Cast: George Hamilton, Suzanne Pleshette, Michael Rennie, Nehemia Persoff,
Richard Carlson, Yvonne De Carlo, Aldo Ray

Professor Jim Tanner (George Hamilton) is the scientist in charge of a project researching pain to make NASA’s astronauts more durable. During a meeting that is supposed to introduce their new government contact, Arthur Nordlund (Michael Rennie), to the team, notorious crackpot Professor Hallson (Arthur O’Connell) gets a wee bit hysterical about the results of some intelligence tests he made with the members of the team. It looks like one of the scientists has climbed some additional steps on the evolutionary letter, and has an improbable IQ as well as the obvious perks that go with something like that, like mind control and telekinetic powers. The other scientists, including Tanner and his girlfriend Professor Lansing (Suzanne Pleshette), are more than just a little skeptical concerning their colleague’s ideas, but when Hallson convinces everyone to concentrate on rotating a piece of paper with the power of their minds, and the thing actually begins to rotate, they are proven wrong. Looks like one of them really must be the homo superior.

That very same night, the mysterious mutant kills Hallson with his or her mental powers. The scientist only leaves behind a note with the name “Adam Hart” on it, a name his wife (Yvonne De Carlo) will later remember to have something to do with her husband’s childhood. While he’s at it, the guy who definitely isn’t Professor X casts enough doubt on Tanner for the police to see the scientist as the main suspect for the Hallson’s murder. Hart, seemingly having a rather unhealthy sense of humour, then proceeds to turn Tanner’s very real academic credentials into fakes, which costs the Professor his job pretty quickly. Not satisfied with that, Hart then tries to kill Tanner (in what may very well be the film’s weirdest scene) with the help of a carousel.

Somehow, Tanner manages to survive the mutant’s attack. The events have made it quite clear to him that he can’t expect help from anyone, and that he certainly can’t trust his colleagues anymore, for one of them must be his hidden enemy. So the scientist sets upon the only course still open to him: trying to find Hart’s trace in Hallson’s hometown. Obviously, dangers to life and sanity, and Aldo Ray await him.

  
  
  

Byron Haskin’s George Pal-produced The Power is a surprisingly peculiar film that uses its SF thriller plot to create a film that unites elements of the pre-70s conspiracy thriller with scenes of a gleefully bizarre nature, and a generally pessimistic view of human nature, resulting in something halfway between Alfred Hitchcock and an acid trip.

Casting George Hamilton of all people as a scientist of some renown may sound more bizarre than clever, but his special brand of absent-minded vacuity works here as well as it would later do in Curtis Harrington’s The Dead Don’t Die, turning him into someone in whose shoes most every viewer would be able to feel comfortable, even if said viewer is less pretty and well-groomed. As we all know, this sort of thriller works well with an everyman character for audience identification in the lead role, and if Hitchcock could cast Cary Grant accordingly, Haskins could do the same with George Hamilton.

Haskin’s direction is interesting, but also a bit all over the place. The Power‘s main draft is the Hitchcockian thriller – some scenes seem to directly and deliberately echo The Man Who Knew Too Much and North by Northwest, especially, and a many of the film’s techniques for creating suspense are taken directly from Hitchcock’s playbook - yet Haskin also has a tendency to include moments of broadest-stroke satire that always threaten to turn into melodramatic horror, and scenes that are mock-surrealist enough to belong into an Italian film from the 70s (see especially Hart’s fun fair attempt at killing our hero or the very strange final confrontation between hero and villain). However, there are also moments of truly disquieting nuance to be found here, like the moment when Yvonne De Carlo’s “funny”-drunk and oversexed middle-aged woman begins to show the cracks that Hart’s powers have left in her mind, or the emotionless, matter-of-fact way Aldo Ray’s character discusses that he’s been on the lookout for people asking for Hart so that he can kill them for these last ten years. These moments also go a long way to demonstrate how important a good supporting cast is to a) make a film better and b) help someone like Hamilton look good. These performances and what they stand for are also where the film’s rather pessimistic and paranoid stance regarding human nature can be seen most clearly. InThe Power‘s world, every character has mental breaking points and cracks that make it easy for them to be dominated by someone like Hart; everyone is corruptible and nobody is save from harm from the people surrounding him. This is not a position the film ever states outright, yet it is hidden in plain sight in every scene right until the end when a big question mark half-heartedly pretends to be a happy ending.

Less good than the supporting cast are the film’s special effects, or rather, their execution is more ropy than you’d expect from a film made in 1968. Unfortunately, the effects in the film’s grand finale are its weakest, with some very cartoony animation, a rotating skeleton and George Hamilton’s floating head standing in for a mental duel that would have worked better if the actors had just stared at each other while Miklós Rózsa’s dramatic music played. In The Power‘s case, we call them “special” effects for a reason.

Fortunately, a handful of badly executed special effects in conceptually interesting scenes is not enough to drag down a film as interesting and peculiar as The Power is. As a matter of fact, this is exactly the sort of imperfection that makes a film even more itself by revealing a humanity you don’t usually encounter in things that are perfect.

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

Heroic Trio

October 21st, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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Year: 1993  Runtime: 84′  Director: Johnnie To
Writer: Sandy Shaw Lai-King   Cinematography: Tom Lau Moon-Tong, Poon Hang-Sang
Music: William Hu Wei-Li   Cast: Anita Mui, Michelle Yeoh, Maggie Cheung, Damian Lau, Anthony Wong

An invisible villain is stealing babies from their cribs and out of hospitals! The evildoer even mocks the police by announcing jis or her victims beforehand. Not even the son of Hong Kong’s chief of police is safe, as hard as the policeman responsible for the case, Inspector Lau (Damian Lau), is trying. Eventually, the local superheroine (Anita Mui) – depending on the version of your subtitles either called the copyright-endangered “The Wonder Woman” or the incredibly boring “Super Heroine” – takes an interest in the case, which might or might not have something to do with her being Lau’s wife Tung when she’s not fighting evil while wearing a mask. But alone, not even she is able to catch the invisible fiend.

Said fiend is a woman named Ching (Michelle Yeoh), using an experimental invisibility that is still in development created by a scientist she’s shacking up with. Ching is in the service of someone only known as Evil Master or Old Bastard (Yen Shi-Kwan). Evil Master is a person of dubious gender (so probably supposed to be a eunuch) with a most excellent plan: make one of the stolen babies – all of whom are astrologically destined to greatness – the emperor of China and turn the rest of them into his cannibal assassins. It’s quite obvious that Ching is conflicted about the whole baby stealing business, but years of brainwashing are difficult to get rid of.

Once the police chief’s baby has been stolen, another costumed heroine appears. Chat aka The Thief Catcher aka Seventh Chan is more of a bounty hunter than Wonder Woman is, preferably – though not exclusively – working for money. Chat is also an escapee of the Old Bastard’s assassin program, and an old friend of Ching’s, who once let her friend live when Evil Master told her to kill Chat.

As a heroine, Chat is of the rather reckless sort, prepared to pull stupid stunts like kidnapping a baby herself to provoke the invisible baby stealer into action. That’s the sort of plan that in a Hong Kong movie has a good chance to end with a dead baby, which it does. However, this does at least bring Chat into contact with Tung and lets the bounty hunter realize who is stealing all the babies and why. Eventually – but not before it is revealed that Tung and Ching have a common past too – the three women will throw their lots in with each other and give the Old Bastard what he’s got coming.

  
  
  

Before Johnnie To had his own production house, he was working as a director for hire like just about anyone else in Hong Kong’s industry. Most of his films of this period don’t show as much of the hand of their auteur as we are accustomed from him now, and are instead realized in the directorial style of the minute in Hong Kong, making them decidedly professional and strangely impersonal affairs.

Nonetheless, some of To’s movies of that time period are pretty great movies, or are even, as is the case with Heroic Trio, minor classics of their kind. Heroic Trio might be an impersonal effort by the standards of its director, but it is also action directed by the great Ching Siu-Tung, and perfectly adapts nearly everything that is great about early 90s wire fu movies to the superhero genre that wasn’t exactly filled with great movies at a point in time when Tim Burton’s Batman movies seemed to be as good as superheroes could get on film.

The wire fu film’s combination of the insane, the bizarrely violent, the poesy of bodies in motion, the slapstick-y and the melodramatic always had clear parallels to what’s great about the superhero genre (one could even argue that wuxia heroes are old-timey superheroes with swords), so making a wire fu superhero movie seems like an obvious direction to take the genre in.

Of course, obvious directions don’t always lead to watchable films. In Heroic Trio‘s case, though, they do. Even though you can criticize To’s direction as being strictly inside the parameters of early 90s wire fu, with all the Dutch angles, wobbly zooms and dramatic slow motion shots that implies, one would have to be a soulless monster not to enjoy this style of filmmaking, especially when the action sequences between the scenes of melodramatic slo-mo crying are choreographed by someone like Ching who knows how to let non-martial artists like Anita Mui and Maggie Cheung look more or less convincing in a fight, or at least as convincing as is necessary in this sort of film. Michelle Yeoh for her part doesn’t need anyone to let her look good in an action scene.

It’s also a true joy to watch a movie featuring three female superheroes where the heroines’ competence is never questioned by anyone. “But you’re a girl” is just not a sentence that belongs in a film coming from the wuxia tradition that is so rich in female heroes, so nobody ever utters it. On a slightly more superficial level, and one slightly less feminism-compatible one, seeing our competent heroines played by Mui, Yeoh and Cheung is the sort of experience that can distract a guy from a movie’s flaws quite well.

Truth be told, I’m not even sure I should even call Heroic Trio‘s problems flaws at all. Perhaps, interpreting them as simple markers of their place and time would be much fairer, especially given how much more enjoyable they make the movie at hand. How, after all, can I resist a script that turns a decidedly simple basic plot into a more or less labyrinthine construction of flashbacks, side plots and contrived connections between characters? And how could I not approve of a superhero movie actually willing to kill a baby, even if it’s only to give Mui the opportunity to cry some very decorative tears? And how could I not enjoy Heroic Trio‘s sudden, generous, bursts of ridiculous, awesome nonsense like Anthony Wong (playing the original cannibal assassin) munching on his own cut off finger, or the great moment in the film’s finale when the Big Bad has been reduced to a skeleton and decides to ride Yeoh’s body like a bony puppeteer? How not to love a film morally dubious enough to throw in a scene of one of its heroines mercy-killing a bunch of cannibal toddlers for no good reason at all?

If Heroic Trio is one thing, it truly is the embodiment of the whole of Hong Kong wire fu filmmaking 1993.

 

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

Miami Golem

October 14th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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Year: 1985  Runtime: 85′  Director: Alberto De Martino
Writers: Gianfranco Clerici, Alberto De Martino, Vincenzo Mannino
Cinematography: Gianlorenzo Battaglia, Paolo D’Ottavi   Music: Detto Mariano
Cast: David Warbeck, Laura Trotter, John Ireland, Loris Loddi, Giorgio Favretto, Giorgio Bonora

War correspondent turned local TV reporter in Florida Craig Milford (David Warbeck) is sent to film the newest experiment of scientist Dr. Schweiker (Sergio Rossi), whom everyone calls – smiling as if it were the best of jokes – “that filthy Nazi”. Schweiker has cloned and somehow genetically manipulated cells that were found inside of a meteorite. Schweiker’s goal is to, um, you got me there.

A malfunction during Craig’s highly scientific looking attempt at filming the alien cells nearly ends the film early by killing the poor dears. Fortunately, the cells miraculously revive and Craig is distracted from that particular strangeness by vague looking projections swirling around the lab, talking to him in a language he doesn’t understand.

Our hero’s not too fazed by stuff like this, shrugs the David Warbeck shrug, and goes home. Shortly after he’s gone, Schweiker and his whole team are assassinated by the henchmen of evil rich guy Anderson (John Ireland), and the cells are stolen. Anderson has a fiendish and absolutely sensible plan: to grow the cells into a monstrous creature completely under his control he will then use to blackmail governments into doing whatever he wants them to do, like giving him contractual work. I think bribery would be an easier way to achieve that goal, but then I’m not an evil capitalist. For some reason, Anderson thinks Craig – and not sanity – is a threat to these plans and commands further henchmen to kill the reporter too.

But Craig, once he’s heard of the murders, gets himself a gun and demonstrates that shooting down helicopters with a revolver and being an all-around action hero are among the skills you learn as a war reporter.

When Craig’s not involved in chases and shoot-outs, he tries to find out what the strange swirling things were trying to tell him. Fortunately, he meets Joanna Fitzgerald (Laura Trotter), a very helpful woman who recognizes the message as being in the language of sunken Atlantis. Or aliens. Or both.

In fact, Joanna is secretly working for a group of benevolent aliens who give her fantastic psychic abilities (none of them protecting her from a gratuitous shower scene, alas). The aliens have decided that Craig is The Chosen One™, destined to destroy the cells which of course belong to the most horrible and destructive creature ever to live. It’s all in a day’s work for David Warbeck, I suppose.

  
  
  

Quite at the end of his career, Italian director Alberto De Martino had to work from confusing scripts bizarrely unfit for someone who was always at his best when directing straight action material. Miami Golem‘s confusing and generally random mix of Science Fiction, horror, action, and all kinds of 70s crackpottery (in the mid 80s to boot) isn’t as drugged up as that of De Martino’s Pumaman was – but what is? – yet it’s still pretty darn weird.

The film’s first fifty minutes or so consist of cheap and silly but also pleasantly tightly realized action scenes, which are regularly broken up by long sequences of characters talking reams of ridiculous poppycock at each other. There’s bad science, Atlantis, telepathy, telekinesis and people talking in that lovely Italian dub job manner that makes everyone sound as if they had learned cursing by watching Ed Wood movies. It’s enough to let anyone who has a heart and a brain cry tears of laughter and delight.

After those first fifty minutes are over, though, Miami Golem gets really weird. De Martino still shakes things up with decent action sequences, but most of the rest of the film is dedicated to melting its audience’s brains with as much dead-pan ridiculousness as it can possibly offer.

Among the film’s greatest moments belong a scene where an alien explains Craig’s role as The Chosen One™ by stopping time and drawing our hero into a mirror dimension (or something) where it can take on Craig’s appearance to talk to him, making the film’s main expository scene one of (an obviously pretty amused) David Warbeck discussing THE END OF ALL CREATION with himself. No no no, I’m sure he’s completely sane. Other high points of this phase of the film are many, many, many shots of actors and the embryo rubber doll in a jar that is the titular Miami Golem using mental powers at each other – leading to some lovely facial expressions and much VERY HARD STARING. And a blinking rubber embryo.

Even better are probably the scenes where the Golem/rubber embryo attacks Craig and Joanna with telekinesis, which is of course mostly demonstrated by the actors jumping around in the style of mildly excited St. Vitus’s dance sufferers and stunt doubles looking nothing like the actors catapulting themselves against walls. This, dear friends and readers, is exactly what movies were invented for.

Miami Golem‘s air of heart-warming wonder is further strengthened by an acting ensemble willing and able to say the most ridiculous things with the straightest of faces and what looks like real enthusiasm to me. His enthusiasm is of course what made David Warbeck such a likeable leading man in most films of the Italian phase of his career. He clearly realized that he was usually acting in ridiculous nonsense, but didn’t let that hinder him from putting as much energy into what he did on screen as possible, seemingly always having fun with his lot. If there’s an ability ideally suited to letting a grown man upstage a rubber embryo in a jar, as Warbeck does here so beautifully, it is the man’s gift of throwing himself into the job of having serious fun on screen.

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

The Colossus of New York

October 7th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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Year: 1958   Runtime: 70′  Director: Eugene Lourie
Writers: Thelma Schnee, Willis Goldbeck   Cinematography: John F. Warren   Music: Van Cleave
Cast: John Baragrey, Mala Powers, Otto Kruger, Robert Hutton, Ross Martin, Charles Herbert, Ed Wolff

When altruistic scientific genius Jeremy Spensser (Ross Martin) is run over by a truck – which is the sort of thing that can happen when you’re running onto a street chasing your son’s toy plane – his father, genius brain surgeon William (Otto Kruger) takes the personal loss and the loss to humanity extremely badly. Once I had spent some on-screen time with his surviving son, the semi-genius electronics scientist Henry (John Baragrey), I could understand the old man’s feelings quite well, for his father’s very pronounced preference for Jeremy has turned Henry into a giant prick.

So disturbed by Jeremy’s loss is William that he uses his own scientific talents to steal and save his son’s brain. It’s all for the best of humanity, you see, and certainly hasn’t anything at all to do with William’s inability to face the death of his son. After some SCIENCE(!) using water tanks, electrodes and other very scientific implements, the brain is as good as new. Now it’s time to build a new body for Jeremy’s brain, and who better to help out there than Henry? Henry has spent the months in between trying to take his brother’s place with Jeremy’s wife Anne (Mala Powers) and son Billy (Charles Herbert), but has been met with a polite indifference he has been unable to parse or wear down; Anne is drawn to the (comparatively) least prickish man in the film, Jeremy’s former partner in science John Carrington (Robert Hutton), but that’s not something Henry realizes. Do I even need to mention the Spenssers don’t find it necessary to tell Anne they’re playing with her dead husband’s brain?

So William and Henry build a huge, lumbering robot body with a face like an expressionist sculpture for Jeremy, because we couldn’t have the man look into a mirror and not have a breakdown, right?

Given how his brand new body looks, and that his dear family tells him his wife and son are dead, the newly mechanized Jeremy takes quite well to the whole situation. Sure, he has a complete breakdown and asks his father to destroy him until the old arse convinces him otherwise, but afterwards he starts on his new experiments that are supposed to make the poles usable for food growth, or something of that sort. Science(!), I dare say. All this does obviously take place in William’s lab right in the cellar of the house Anne and Billy live in, too, but hey, when Anne hears something like the horrible screams of her husband when he first sees what he’s been turned into, the charming Spenssers can just tell her she’s hallucinating because of the strain she has been under, right?

But then, in a development nobody could have seen coming, Robo-Jerry develops fantastic ESP powers, like random precognition, hypnosis and later on the ability to shoot death rays out of his eyes, as you do. I’m sure he won’t put the mind whammy on his father to be able to visit his own grave on the first anniversary of his death where he surely won’t repeat a scene from a Frankenstein movie with his son.

And surely, the knowledge that his father and brother not only haven’t bothered to build him a decent robot body but have also lied to him about his wife and kid won’t turn our Jerry a wee bit mad! Man, this transplanting brains into robot bodies business really is pretty difficult.

  
  
  

As you know, Jim, art director and production designer Eugene Lourie did occasionally – and quite successfully – dabble in the direction of 50s giant monster movies. The “monster” in The Colossus of New York is, despite what the film’s title and marketing tagline (“Towering above the skyline – an indestructible creature whose eyes rain death and destruction!”) might suggest, not one of the giant kind trampling New York into tiny pieces, but rather a brother to the misunderstood creature Frankenstein created. Interestingly, Jeremy, with his ability to speak and think coherently and his planned acts of destruction late in the film is closer to the creature of Mary Shelley’s novel than the more childlike creature of the Universal movies, something that I have difficulty seeing as an accident in a script as clearly literary as that Thelma Schnee delivered for the movie.

Schnee’s script is a very interesting effort, managing to surround the silly parts and the plot holes you’d expect (and demand) of a film like The Colossus with more complex characters than you’d generally find in a 50s SF/horror film and some pretty poignant scenes concerning the most dysfunctional family I’ve seen in a genre movie from the 50s. Quite contrary to the traditions of the time, where acting the dick usually makes you the hero of the piece, The Colossus actually seems to realize how dysfunctional and horrific its characters actually are, and makes their flaws the true reason for the minor catastrophe the film’s plot culminates in. Sure, there’s a short discussion (acted with great gusto by Kruger, who seems to have quite a bit of fun with his mad scientist role throughout the film) about the soul early on in the film, and some of the mandatory “tampering in god’s domain” speechifying at its end, but it’s also clear that the film’s heart isn’t in these explanations. Everything bad that happens here comes from the characters’ inability to treat each other like actual, complete human beings.

Of course, a complex, yet heavily flawed (and a bit too short), script like this could be easily ruined by the wrong direction style. I’m pretty happy to report that the script at hand wasn’t adapted by a poverty row point and shoot director like – say – William Beaudine, but the clearly more art conscious Lourie, who had no problem recognizing a Freudianized version of Frankenstein when he saw it and used the opportunity to turn his film into as much of a visual homage to early Universal horror movies as a film set in the New York of the 50s (not that we get to see much of it – most of the film takes place in three rooms and a graveyard) can be. For my tastes, Lourie is very successful at it too – at least so successful that most of his film’s theoretical silliness turned out to not feel silly at all while I was watching, because the film’s finely developed atmosphere turned most of what it surrounded into something serious and riveting.

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

The Dead Don’t Die

September 30th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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Year: 1975   Runtime: 74′  Director: Curtis Harrington
Writers: Robert Bloch  Cinematography: James Crabe   Music: Robert Prince
Cast: George Hamilton, Linda Cristal, Ray Milland, James McEachin,
Joan Blondell, Ralph Meeker, Reggie Nalder, Yvette Vickers

1934. In the night of Ralph Drake’s (Jerry Douglas) execution on the electric chair for the murder of his wife during a break in a dance marathon, the supposed killer, who has no memory of what took place between him and his the murdered but is sure he would never have killed laid a hand on her, makes his brother Don (George Hamilton) promise to find out who is the true killer.

Initially, Don – who is in the Navy and not a detective anyhow – has nothing to go on in his investigation. A visit with Moss (Ray Milland), the dancehall promoter responsible for the dance marathon Ralph and his wife took part in, does not bring to light anything the sailor doesn’t already know.

And that could be that already, making for a very short film, but strange things begin to happen all around Don. It begins when a mysterious woman (Linda Cristal) – later to be named Vera LaValle – tries to warn Don off the case completely, for a certain “he” knows what the sailor’s up to and will do something terrible to him if he persists. Before he can question Vera further, Don sees his dead brother walking around outside the restaurant the scene’s taking place in, and follows the dead man into a shop whose owner Perdido (Reggie Nalder) is not a fan of people just barging in at him. In the following scuffle, Don accidentally kills Perdido, or at least thinks he does, before the shop owner’s assistant (Yvette Vickers) does her best to bash his head in.

When Don awakes, he finds himself in the tender care of Vera. The woman spouts more cryptic warnings, but at least she now gives the mysterious “him” a proper name – Varrick – and very reluctantly puts Don on his trace. That trace, not completely surprisingly, leads directly into a funeral parlour. Alas, there seems to be no Varrick at hand there. However, there’s the body of a certain Mister Perdido laid out. Our hero is confused enough to take a look at the dead man. Little does Don expect the corpse to speak to him with someone else’s voice and try to strangle him.

After escaping the zombie, Don decides to go to the police with his rather wild story, because that’s what you do when dead people attack. The patient cop on duty even agrees to accompany Don to Perdido’s shop to clear things up. It’s just that Perdido seems to be pretty much alive, and makes Don’s story out to be an alcohol fueled fantasy.

Obviously, Don can’t count on the help of the police anymore, yet he can’t bring himself to give up until he has found out what the hell is going on around him.

  
  

The excellently titled The Dead Don’t Die belongs to the last interesting phase of director Curtis Harrington’s career, before he became just another guy churning out episodes for any old TV show people paid him for, and that film about the possessed dog.

The Dead is a TV production too, it can, however, count itself among the small yet potent group of US TV horror movies from the 70s that are just as individual and peculiar as anything made for the big screen. Unexpectedly for a TV movie in general, yet not all that surprising if you’ve seen some of the other TV movies directed by Harrington, the film has the feel of something more personal and individual than what you’ll usually see produced for the small screen, and fits nicely into the cinematic body of work of its director.

As is typical of his films, Harrington fuses diametrically opposite elements into a film that’s dream-like and artificial. On the one hand, the The Dead Don’t Die is pervaded by a sense for and an interest in period detail that just screams – at least as much as the film’s budget and short production time allow – “realism”, its visual style, on the other hand, is clearly influenced by the conscious artificiality of the film noir (and what, after all, is more noir than the story of a guy looking for the man who framed his brother for murder, a mysterious woman with a heavy accent, and series of strange encounters?), the lush melodrama of Douglas Sirk (though with other social interests than Sirk had), and the hidden complexity of Val Lewton’s RKO productions. In a sense, Harrington is about as retro a director as I could imagine (see also the near obsessive casting of old guard Hollywood actors in minor roles here and everywhere else in his career), but he’s not interested in merely reproducing the past. Rather, Harrington is taking (his favourite) elements of the past to shape something new and very much his own. Which, again, isn’t something you’d expect to find in a TV movie, where routine usually comes before individual artistic expression.

As a whole, The Dead feels like a film noir’s themes had stumbled into an RKO horror movie that for its part has found itself inexplicably entwined with the visual and emotional world of the melodrama.

Robert Bloch’s (who you might know as the author of the novel Hitchcock’s Psycho is based on, but who began his career as a pulp writer in the Lovecraft circle, wrote large amounts of SF, horror and mystery, and also worked a bit for TV too) script is an appropriately strange one, too, full of small but interesting diversions and peculiar little flourishes that just might let the members of The Dead Don’t Die‘s audience put on the same utterly confused facial expression George Hamilton wears for much of the film’s running time.

I’m not a great admirer of Hamilton, but his sleepwalker-ish body language here and his wide-eyed looks of surprise are just what the film and his role need of him. His character is, after all, walking through scenes and encounters as unreal and surreal as anything a man might dream up, never sure what’s real and what’s not, finding himself completely out of his depth.

It all adds up to one of the best voodoo zombie movies of the 70s.

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

Maya

September 16th, 2011 | article by | 2 Comments »
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Year: 1989   Runtime: 96′  Director: Marcello Avallone
Writers: Marcello Avallone, Andrea Purgatori, Maurizio Tedesco  Cinematography: Silvano Ippoliti
Music: Gabriele Ducros   Cast: Peter Phelps, Mariellia Valentini, Erich Wildpret, Cyrus Elias,
Mariangélica Ayala, William Berger

A small town in rural Mexico is predominantly inhabited by descendants of a Mayan tribe who are still holding to some old traditions. Once a year, the townsfolk celebrate a ritual, symbolic sacrifice of a child on top of the local pyramid to keep the ghost of the evil Xibalba (or Xibalbai – the voice actors are of more than one opinion), whom the townsfolk’s ancestors murdered, at bay. Of course there’s a prophecy that the dead guy will some day return to cut out every tribe member’s heart.

Some time before the newest celebration is supposed to take place, US expat Salomon Slivak (a very sweaty William Berger) stumbles onto the top of the pyramid after meeting a strange, big-haired girl child, mumbling an off-screen monologue about crossing some sort of “border to the other side”. Slivak sure seems to have crossed over to somewhere, for something or someone kills him up there by cutting out his heart.

A few days after the old man’s death, his daughter Lisa (Mariella Valentini) arrives in town. The more Lisa hears about the circumstances of her father’s death, the more disquieted she becomes, until she kinda-sorta begins to try and find his killer herself. This being the sort of film that it is, Lisa isn’t actually doing much more than walking around, asking weird questions that are answered in even weirder ways, and doesn’t appear for large parts of the plot (such as it is). She also kinda-sorta falls for another local US expat, restaurant owner, gambler, bum and all-around jerk Peter (Peter Phelps), whose best trait probably is his hatred of wearing shirts.

While Lisa and Peter aren’t doing much, further killings hit the town. An invisible force murders people in various, creative ways, but never misses out on cutting out the hearts of its victims afterwards.

The whole affair culminates (as far as a film told in a way as roundabout as this one can be said to culminate) on the night of the big ceremony. Will our protagonists actually do some protagging for a change?

Marcello Avallone’s Maya is a pretty weird film that will grow on a certain, very specific and very small sub-set of fans of Italian horror like green fungus on bread, while the rest of the world will look at it – if it’ll realize its existence at all – with a mixture of boredom and exasperation. Fortunately, it’s quite easy to find out to which of the two groups you, dear reader, will belong. Just try and imagine a film indebted to the style and rhythm of Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond, transplanted into Venezuela standing in for Mexico, tarted up with some barely understandable and badly explained bit of fictitious mythology, with less gore and more interrupted rape scenes (three, by my count), and made by a director who isn’t quite as talented (or mad) as Fulci at his best, but is really trying to be. If that thought makes you happy, or at least a wee bit interested, than there’s a good chance that you’re either me or belonging to the group of Italian horror fans in need to watch out for fungus attacks. Otherwise, you better stay away from Maya, because it’ll only bore you.

  
  
  

For us, the un-bored and un-boreable, Maya is a bit of a treat, especially since there aren’t all that many films actually inspired by more than just the gore of Fulci’s best films. As I said, Avallone’s movie is much more restrained in the gore department than Fulci’s movies generally were, but the murder scenes share the near-arrogant apathy towards the laws of physics and logic with the maestro’s work. The murders are very much at the heart of the movie, too, establishing the proper mood of the unreal, of the breaking-in of the illogical into the world as we know it, at a place where the borders between the quotidian world and the beyond have grown thin and weary.

The parts of the film’s running time that aren’t spent on the murders show the town (most of the time, it actually looks like a village, but some scenes seem to establish it as slightly larger with a slightly less rural feel – you could certainly put it down to sloppy direction, or you could see this imprecision as just another way Avallone uses to rattle the audience’s securities) as a place whose inhabitants are generally closer to acts of madness, violence and irrationality than is typical. Interestingly enough, Avallone uses two (horribly acted) wandering rapist Texan punks on vacation to make it difficult to read the townsfolk’s irrational tendencies as an expression of his film’s racism (though it’s clearly not a filmwithout any problematic ideas about race) but rather as a consequence of the place’s closeness to the other side, as if a door had been standing open just a tiny bit for centuries, letting something unhealthy and destructive cross over that infects (perhaps calls to) anyone coming into contact with it, in small and large ways.

Maya’s plot – as far as you can actually speak of a plot, which you probably can’t – has the stop-and-start quality of the Fulci films it is so obviously inspired by, the same sense of rambling and meandering that is hypnotic to some, and just boring to others, but that seems to be just the logical way to plot a film that is in part about the absence of the sort of order “tight” or just technically competent plotting would suggest.

The movie’s characters, all – as is tradition in Italian genre cinema – either chew scenery as if they’d never eaten anything better or seem passive and listless as if the only emotional reactions they have ever been able to show is sweating. And there’s a lot of sweating done by the whole cast, adding to the air of heaviness and oppression. Maya‘s script includes some minor attempts at giving its characters something akin to development, but most of it is buried under the murder scenes and the sweating, and obstructed by the film’s slow, slow rhythm.

I’ll certainly always prefer Fulci’s big three of gory, dream-like horror to Maya, for Fulci’s just a better, more daring director than Avallone.Maya, however, is still a minor pearl that puts such a heavy, honest emphasis on a mood of weirdness and slight alienation that it would be quit impossible for me not to love it.

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

Der Frosch mit der Maske

September 9th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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a.k.a. Face of the Frog
Year: 1959   Runtime: 87′  Director: Harald Reinl
Writers: Egon Eis, J. Joachim Bartsch  Cinematography: Ernst W. Kalinke
Music: Willy Mattes, Peter Thomas   Cast: Joachim Fuchsberger, Siegfried Lowitz,
Eva Anthes, Eddi Arent, Jochen Brockmann, Karl Lange, Walter Wilz

For over a year now, a (rather large) gang under the leadership of the mysterious masked villain only known as the Frog (played by himself, if we can believe the credits), has been terrorizing Britain with a series of robberies and break-ins, blackmail, and a bit of murder to make things more interesting, always leaving behind the mark of a frog at the places of their crimes. Why it’s so difficult to catch the members of a gang who is in the habit of branding its own with the sign of the Frog in a pretty visible place I don’t know.

On the case is Scotland Yard’s Inspector Elk (Siegfried Lowitz, who’d later go on to play a smug and rude cop in the long-running – and pretty damn boring – TV police procedural Der Alte, in popularity only second to Derrick), a man of a smugness and rudeness as great as his success at catching the Frog is small. But even the incompetent must get lucky some time, and Elk’s time comes when the Frog takes a carnal interest in a certain Ella Bennet (Eva Anthes). The villain’s idea of romance is a bit peculiar: suddenly appearing masked in a lady’s room at night and declaring that you’ll come again to take her with you another night, whether she wants to come or not is – I think – not what Miss Lonelyhearts recommends. I’m not sure what Miss Lonelyhearts says to blackmailing the lady of your heart by pulling her improbably naive brother (Walter Wilz) into a contrived murder affair, but that’s The Frog’s Way of Romance™, too. Whatever happened to roses and long walks in the park?

The Frog’s rather dubious handling of his romantic situation is good news for Elk, though, for it provides the inspector with ample opportunity to gather clues regarding the plans and identity of his enemy.

Fortunately for everyone involved, Elk’s not the only one the case. Cocky millionaire amateur detective (and nephew of Elk’s boss) Richard Gordon (Joachim “Blackie” Fuchsberger, some time before his career as a popular TV host, or as we Germans say, “Showmaster”) and his competent comic relief butler James (Eddi Arent) are inserting themselves into the investigation. Gordon’s pretty damn enthusiastic about his hobby, too, at least once he’s met Ella; he’s also a bit more competent at the whole romance thing than the Frog.

Now, our heroes will only have to find a traitor inside of Scotland Yard (don’t trust the thin ‘staches and eyebrows), investigate a dubious night club, survive captivity and wait until so many of the film’s human red herrings have been killed off that there’s only one guy left who can be the Frog.

  
  
  

Watching the very first of Rialto’s Edgar Wallace adaptations (this early in the proceedings still keeping comparatively close to Wallace’s novel), it’s becomes clear at once why the cinematic Wallace krimis took Germany by storm. Compared to just about anything else the country’s cinema put out at the time, Der Frosch is pure pop cinema: a bit lurid (as lurid as you could possibly be in Germany in 1959, really, which isn’t that lurid, but certainly also not coy), a bit silly, delightfully pulpy, taking itself not too seriously, yet not walking into the trap certain later Wallace movies would enter where a film takes itself so little seriously that it can be read as self-hatred or self-destructive. It’s not the sort of film you’d expect coming from German cinema at all, especially not in 1959 when pop cinema as an idea didn’t very much exist over here and pop culture itself had entered the slow, sad years between 1959 and 1961 when it looked as if pop itself had only been a fad.

Mainly responsible for the film’s energetic (and energizing) effect is Harald Reinl’s direction. Though they roughly belonged to the same generation of filmmakers who started out in the biz in the 1930s and were therefore pretty damn old for being “pop”, Reinl’s style is quite different from that of his Wallace adaptation colleague Alfred Vohrer – until now the only krimi director I’ve talked about here or over at my home base. Where Vohrer likes his acting melodramatic and his directing zooming in the direction of the surreal, Reinl seems to be going for an updated serial effect, using the much better technical and financial state of his production to achieve a feeling of dynamism and intensity atypical of the usual ponderous German movie. Reinl uses a lot of separate shots for every scene, loves snappy and tight editing and is no friend of scenes going on for too long. The editing is especially effective when it comes to the action scenes. As you probably know, neither the 50s nor Germany are usually praised for their action choreography, but (if you can ignore the minor fact that fists don’t actually seem to connect with faces in Wallace land) Reinl and his editor Margot Jahn manage to actually make the action sequences exciting through the cinematic wonders of clever framing and speedy cuts.

Reinl’s no slouch in the atmosphere department either. There are some fine examples of moody (studio) night shots to be found whenever appropriate, with some stylish uses of high contrast light and shadow play you can describe as noir-ish without having to stretch things too far.

Ironically, all that visual beauty comes from a director whose filmography shows him as a pure work for hire guy who spent his time directing whatever was thrown at him – Wallace krimis, Heimatfilme, unfunny comedies, Karl May adaptations, some Erich von Däniken “documentaries” or even (later in his career) a would-be Roger Corman Poe adaptation. Directors like Reinl never get a fair shot at being taken seriously outside of our cult movie specialist world, as if the qualities of a director were defined by the commercial situation he works in, and not by what we see on screen. This isn’t to say that parts of the director’s output aren’t pure and simple crap – because man, they sure are – it’s to say that we should probably not decide the worth of a life’s work by looking at someone’s worst films.

The Horror!? (not to be confused with The Edgar Wallace Mystery Hour) is a weekly cult cinema column by Denis Klotz, an aficionado of the obscure and operator of the film blog of the same name.

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