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Devil’s Express, The

Friday, March 5th, 2010

a.k.a. Gang Wars
company: Mahler Films
year: 1976
runtime: 82′
country: United States
director: Barry Rosen
cast: Warhawk Tanzania, Wilfredo Roldan,
Larry Fleishman
writers: Niki Patton, CeOtis Robinson
and Barry Rosen
cinematography: Paul Glickman
not on home video in the USA

Luke (awesomely named Warhawk Tanzania) leads a successful martial arts dojo in New York. Among his pupils are as diverse people as the white cop Sam as well as Rodan (probably not related to the kaiju, played by Wilfredo Roldan), the drug-dealing thug leader of a street gang called the Black Spades.

Luke seems to have become quite successful in the growth of his own martial arts as well, at least he has earned the honor to travel to China to attain a new rank by getting his ass kicked by an elderly master. Luke seems to have some hope for instilling a bit of spiritual growth in Rodan, so he takes him on his Chinese adventure.

After a bit of fighting and losing, the New Yorker only needs to do some meditation in the woods to level up to level nine. He chooses Rodan to protect his body while he’s doing the silent soul-searching stuff. Unfortunately, Rodan is easily bored, and instead of protecting his friend, he’s all too soon roaming through the woods until he finds a cave full of century old corpses. Unknown to the freshly awakened Luke, he also steals an amulet one of the dead wears around his neck.

Both men don’t realize that their indiscretion has awakened the amulet’s owner, who is annoyed enough to possess some poor random Chinese guy and stow away on the same ship to New York the martial artists take, obviously with bad intentions in mind.

Back in New York, Rodan steers his gang into a war with a Chinese gang called the Red Dragons, while the demon, although seemingly pining for the return of his amulet, moves into the subway system and starts to kill people.

At first, the police think the gang war and the subway murders are somehow connected, but Sam – who is quite bright for a cop in a blaxploitation movie – soon realizes that there must be more to the latter than meets the eye. He also tries to get Luke’s help in containing the gang situation, but the martial artist is of course too much in love with his own machismo and the evils of The Man to be of any help.

Luke is only getting active when the demon finally kills Rodan. At first, he tries to avenge his friend on the Red Dragons, but when a random wise old man explains to him who really killed his friend, he decides to catch himself a demon.

There’s not much that could be sounding more grindhouse than a combination of blaxploitation, American martial arts and horror flick, promising a very special sort of dubious movie nirvana. Of course, “sounding good” was often as far as films made for the grindhouse circuit came to the word “good” at all, so I went into watching The Devil’s Express with some reservations regarding its quality. I was positively surprised.

Sure, Barry Rosen’s film isn’t exactly what one would call a good film, but it takes the elements of the three (four, if you add the surprise visits in cop movie territory) genres it plunders with enough enthusiasm and earnestness to win my heart.

It’s certainly a film with its share of problems. The acting – with the exception of the guy (possibly Larry Fleishman) who plays the Italian-American cop with excellent clichéd gusto and a schizophrenic bag lady – is rather wooden, but carries with it the sort of authenticity you get by casting semi-professional actors and amateurs. And I can hardly blame Warhawk Tanzania for not being as awesome as his name.

Compared to even the most mediocre martial arts movies from Hong Kong or Taiwan, the fighting (I wouldn’t really speak of fightchoreography in this case) isn’t much good either, but are there any US martial arts films with good, or even just competent, fights? At least the fights aren’t lackluster, because everybody on screen is really trying to get into it like Bruce Lee, just without the required training.

The movie’s plotting isn’t much to gush about either. The script doesn’t even seem to be able to decide who its protagonist is – Luke? Sam? both? – and therefore jumps merrily back and forth without developing much momentum.

Additionally, the film’s running time is padded out by random inserts of not exactly important scenes. However, in this film the padding is where the fun lies, since here “padding” doesn’t mean the usual travelogue footage or scenes and scenes of people explaining the plot to each other, but wondrous moments of exploitative art. Sudden bouts of grindhouse social realism (the things that just happen to land on camera when you film outside in a big city without a permit), an utterly random love montage between Luke and a nameless woman, a kung fu fighting waitress, or the rambly monologueing of a bag lady unite to become something quite special.

In these moments, The Devil’s Express isn’t so much a cheap shot at making money by haphazardly throwing a movie together, but a near-magical evocation of a particular place at a particular time. This is something you couldn’t get in a more carefully constructed picture that (understandably enough) would need to keep out all the randomness Rosen’s film (probably unconsciously) embraces. Of course, not too many low budget films of this type manage to incorporate as many of these moments of magic/unconscious art as this one does.

I also have to stress that some scenes belonging to the film’s main plot line are pretty great, too. The scenes in “China” are very creatively realized, and while you’d never believe them to take place in China, Rosen gives them a very different feel from the city scenes. I think it is the quality of the light that’s mainly accountable for that effect.

First and foremost, The Devil’s Express is an extremely fun movie. I can take a lot of delight in a film that goes out of its way to keep the promises of fun it makes, even if it is a little sloppy, a bit cheap and very silly, so I felt right at home with it.

For more bizarre movie goodness, be sure
to visit Denis’ excellent review blog The Horror!?

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Crazies, The (original)

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

companies: Pittsburgh Films,
Latent Image and Cambist Films
year: 1973
runtime: 103′
country: United States
director: George A. Romero
cast: Lane Carroll, Will MacMillan,
Harold Wayne Jones, Lloyd Hollar,
Lynn Lowry, Richard Liberty,
Richard Francis, Harry Spillman,
Will Disney, Edith Bell,
Bill Thunhurst, Leland Stames
writers: Paul McCullough (original
script) and George A. Romero
cinematographer: Bill Hinzman
music: Bruce Roberts
special effects: Tony Pantanella
and Regis Survinski
order this film from Amazon.com:
VHS | SD DVD | Blu-ray

Things get a little crazy in Evans City, Pennsylvania after a germ warfare experiment crash-lands in the town water supply in this early thriller from director George A. Romero (Night of the Living Dead, Martin).  Recently remade as a slick horror piece by Breck Eisner with an executive production assist from Romero himself (read our coverage of that film here), the original The Crazies plays less for chills than one might expect.

The story is relatively simple: The Army descends upon the quiet community of Evans City in full HAZMAT getup in an effort to contain an accidental outbreak of the experimental Trixie virus.  Epic miscommunication between the Army, civilians, and the scientists on the hunt for a vaccine causes no end of trouble, with the unprepared military suddenly finding themselves up against both the crazed infected and the understandably defensive citizens of the town.  Meanwhile a small group tries to escape the insanity, dodging military patrols while dealing with the crazies among their own . . .

There are horrific elements to Romero’s The Crazies to be sure.  The opening plays as a repeat of that from Night of the Living Dead, with a young boy trying to scare his sister through ghoulish behavior.  Things soon take a turn for the serious, as the boy’s father loses his mind and sets fire to the property.  Later displays of insanity, a priest’s self-immolation in front of his church, an elderly woman treating a soldier as so much knitting, and a father lusting after his teenage daughter, make for indelible images as powerful as anything from the earlier Night . . . but are few and far between.

The step down in horror means a step up in action, the uneasy balance between the two marking The Crazies‘ place as a bridge between the better-known horror classics that bookend it.  Scenes of the Army bursting into homes unannounced and the gun battles that ensue are highly evocative of the tenement scene early on in Dawn of the Dead, with one major difference:  The tenement residents in Dawn know that they’ve been breaking the law in keeping their dead in the basement of their building – no one bothers to tell the citizens of The Crazies why they’re suddenly finding themselves under martial law.  It’s no surprise when factions of the town, crazed and sane, take up arms against what they see as an anonymous invasionary force.

Made as the war in Vietnam was in its death throws and opposition to it was at its height, the image of the US military in The Crazies is not a terribly kind one.  Soldiers are seen stealing from invaded homes as well as from the corpses of dead, for instance.  The commentary here seems to be more about individual indiscretion under extreme circumstances (a big part of the later Dawn of the Dead) than a condemnation of the military as a whole, here presented as an organization of working men who are every bit as confused about what they’re doing in Evans City as the citizens are about their being there.  Hogtied by bureaucracy and a lack of both supplies and manpower, it’s no small wonder that the containment operation devolves into madness so quickly.

The real villains (the only villains, in fact) of the piece are the politicians and generals at the top of the food chain.  They’re first priority is to put a nuclear weapon in the skies over the quarantined city, a decision that has more to do with saving face (biological warfare experiments are obviously a no-no) than containing the infection.  Robert Wise’s The Andromeda Strain seems a likely inspiration for these sequences, with those in charge sitting in a room far from the center of action with far more concern for their personal careers than anyone who might be affected by their decisions.  Romero adds a nice touch here, showing several of the group having snacks (an orange, a sandwich) as they glibly discuss the mass-murder of a few thousand civilians.

Made for peanuts in his native Pennsylvania and on the streets of the real Evans City, The Crazies is an interesting if jumbled production from a Romero still trying to find his footing in the film world.  The biggest fault of the production is its kinetic editing sensibility, heavily influenced by Romero’s past as a commercial filmmaker.  What works well for scenes of action or horror leaves the drama tangled and, thanks to the low-budget audio recording, frequently unintelligible.  It’s not a bad film by any means, particularly given the considerable budgetary constraint, and there is still some prescience to the story (the corralling of displaced citizens into a high school gymnasium reminds of the Louisiana Superdome during and after hurricane Katrina).  It’s just not up to par with Romero’s better known works from the same time period, though the positives – strong performances and immediate, documentary-style photography – make up for the negatives.

The Crazies wasn’t a terrifically successful picture upon release in March of 1973 (it was even less successful when re-released as Code Name: Trixie a few years later) and hasn’t developed the same level of cult devotion Romero’s two contemporaneous zombie pictures.  Released twice previously on VHS by Vista Home Video and Anchor Bay respectively, Blue Underground has recently given the film the respect deserving of a lesser work from a horror icon.  Now available on both DVD and Blu-ray from the company, their editions come with excellent restored 1.66:1 framed anamorphic video as well as a nice array of supplements – including a commentary track with director Romero, a featurette on supporting actress Lynn Lowry (Shivers, I Drink Your Blood), the usual trailers and television spots and an extensive stills gallery.  Suffice it to say, the Blue Underground editions are the ones to own.

There are more than enough reasons for genre fans to see this one – the director, the supporting cast (Richard Liberty (Day of the Dead), Richard France (Dawn of the Dead) and the aforementioned Lynn Lowry), the memorable moments of craziness.  Though rife with imperfections Romero’s goal of creating a timely action / horror / thriller is achieved all the same, and The Crazies ‘73 is still a far more intriguing beast than its recent remake will ever be.  Recommended.

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Crazies, The (remake)

Monday, March 1st, 2010

companies: Overture Films, Participant
Media, Imagenation Abu Dhabi FZ,
Penn Station and Road Rebel
year: 2010
runtime: 101′
country: United States
director: Breck Eisner
cast: Timothy Olyphant, Radha Mitchell,
Joe Anderson, Danielle Panabaker,
Christie Lynn Smith, Brett Rickaby,
Preston Bailey, John Aylward,
Joe Reegan, Glenn Morshower
writers: Scott Kosar
and Ray Wright
cinematographer: Maxime Alexandre
music: Mark Isham
out in wide release

A germ warfare experiment crash-lands in the water supply for the sleepy community of Ogden Marsh in this modestly budgeted redux of George Romero’s sardonic 1973 thriller.  The new The Crazies wisely avoids rehashing the events of the original outright, though a few moments of slick horror aren’t enough to cover for the fact that the Scott Kosar and Ray Wright screenplay has precious little on its mind.

The story this go around focuses squarely on sheriff David Dutton (Timothy Olyphant, Live Free or Die Hard) and his wife Judy (Radha Mitchell, Pitch Black, Surrogates), who are expecting their first child.  The intrusion of a shotgun-toting maniac into a high school baseball game announces the arrival of Trixie, a destructive virus engineered by those maniacal masterminds working for the big-G Government.  It isn’t long before other townspeople are showing signs of infection, glassy stares and questionable behavior (some reminiscent of the M. Night Shyamalan misfire The Happening).  Just as sheriff David and deputy Russell (Joe Anderson, Amelia, The Ruins) start to put the pieces of the Trixie puzzle together the town is cast into darkness, an all-encompassing communications blackout announcing the arrival of the film’s second villain: the big-M Military.

Soon David, his wife and his faithful deputy are on the road, doing their best (and failing) to avoid the likes of crazed gun-toting hillbillies and the anonymous forces of the gas-masked Military on their way to Cedar Rapids.  They meet others along the way of course – one of Judy’s patients, her boyfriend, and the less-than-friendly new management of a rural car wash – none of whom are terribly important.  The film wastes no time in dispensing with them by means of pitchfork-armed high school staff or squads of Army-issue goons.

Breck Eisner’s The Crazies hits upon several of the high points of the 1973 film, updating the house-fire opener of that picture to good effect, but eschews the military perspective entirely (a huge part of the original, which focused on the inefficacy of government bureaucracy at the time of the Vietnam War), a perspective that could have added some prescience to this by-the-books horror programmer in the wake of hurricane Katrina and in the midst of two wars in the Middle East.  Instead we get an anonymous Military machine that, in obvious allusion to the Nazis, rounds the towns population into cattle trucks and concentration camps in preparation for mass extermination.  Yikes.  A soldier momentarily captured by David and his cohorts even enlists the Nuremberg defense after helping to gun down a teen-aged boy and his mother: “We were just following orders.”  There can be little doubt as to who is supposed to be perceived as more dangerous – the Military or the crazies – with a fuel-air bomb hanging over our protagonists’ heads.

The “military = bad” trope has been repeated in films ad-nauseum for as long as this reviewer can remember, and while it probably still works for plenty of people it’s my biggest complaint against the picture.  One thing we can be thankful for, however, is the exclusion of a scheming uniformed baddie behind it all.  Whoever is behind the quarantine operation in Ogden Marsh is left graciously unexplored, and one irksome genre pratfall avoided.

The other villains of the piece, those poor souls unfortunate enough to have become infected with the Trixie bug, are utterly unremarkable in design, with Eisner choosing to take his cues from the overflowing cornucopia of blandness that is modern zombie cinema.  The crazies sprout sores, puffy veins and discolored eyes, an aesthetic far too familiar to be in the least big frightening on its own.  Crafty implementation could have solved that particular issue, but no dice.  Eisner telegraphs his scares far in advance and allows too many of the horrific setups to devolve into outright silliness, leaving The Crazies sorely lacking in real visceral thrills.  Gore is actually quite limited here, and those expecting buckets of exposed inner organs may be disheartened.  Here I find myself giving Eisner considerable credit, for depending on the horror of the situation over graphic visuals.  A pitchfork to the gut is no less terrible a prospect without the sight of intestines flailing about.

Eisner seems more adept at action than horror here, with the slow-motion tumbling of an SUV proving one of the highlights of the picture.  His handling of the dramatics is adept if not particularly brilliant, and it’s the believability of the small-town characters that ultimately lifts The Crazies above merely average.  The cast do well in their respective roles even if no one (as is the case with much of the picture) stands out.  The fictitious Ogden Marsh may be no substitute for the real Evans City of the original, but it’s Mayberry-esque main street appeal is not to be underestimated.  The intrusion of HAZMAT-suited military men upon Rockwellian America is still a vision both surreal and effective, though it is a pity more wasn’t done with it.

I feel it important to note that I did enjoy The Crazies by and large, even if I have no desire to see it again.  Neither memorable or really effective, it’s still better than most horror programmers these days.  The crowd I was with was certainly entertained (admittedly much more-so than myself), even with a baby cooing and giggling  throughout.  The best thing about the picture may be Romero’s place as its executive producer – he’ll undoubtedly see a decent payday for his troubles.  This new The Crazies may be entirely forgettable, but those on the lookout for a matinee’s worth of entertainment could certainly do worse.

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Real Pocong, The

Friday, February 26th, 2010

company: Sinemart Pictures
year: 2009
runtime: 97′
country: Indonesia
director: Hanny R. Saputra
cast: Sakinah Dava Erawan, Nabila Syakieb,
Ashraf Sinclair, Kinaryosih
writer: Aramantono
cinematography: Khatulistiwa
not on home video in the USA

As is somewhat traditional in films, a small, young family consisting of mother Rin(i) (Nabila Syakieb), father (I)Van (Ashraf Sinclair) and little daughter Laura (Sakinah Dava Erawan) moves into a new home in the country, although as a non-Indonesian I’d call it “the jungle” or at least “the deep dark woods”.

Rini and Van are enthusiastic about their new house. It was cheap, and there are none of the dangers of the city threatening their daughter now. One would think that the country air could also be good for Laura’s asthma. There’s a certain lack of neighbours, though, with the only person living nearby the young physician Dr. Nila (Kinaryosih). At least she’s friendly and could probably be of help when little Laura has one of her attacks.

Less friendly are other inhabitants of the area. Right on the family’s first day in the new house, Laura follows a strange, unsmiling girl of about her own age deeper into the woods, until she comes to a weather-beaten old shack beside a well. There, the other girl seems to disappear into thin air. Instead, something dressed in white funeral shrouds jumps Laura.

When Rini finds her deeply disturbed daughter, she can’t get a word out of the girl, and puts her strange behaviour on an understandable reaction to the new environment. In truth, a pocong (female Indonesian ghost dressed in white shrouds that often seems to have religious connotations I won’t pretend to understand) has taken an interest in the girl. At first, it seems relatively benign, turning into a kitten and sneaking into Laura’s room, or singing her lullabies, but just too soon the ghost again lures the girl to the shack.

Only this time, Laura doesn’t return.

The police (who are never actually shown by the film) find not a trace of the child, nor any explanation of what happened, so the desperate Rini seeks the help of a medium, very much against Van’s will. The medium diagnoses the place to be haunted and declares a pocong to be the child snatcher, but seems unwilling to act on her findings. Only when Van calls her out in a fit of aggressive scepticism she deigns to do something, and I can’t say that I find giving the sceptic an amulet that is supposed to help him cross over to the spirit world and then drive away never to return to be a very responsible action.

Surprisingly enough, Van actually uses the amulet to cross over (through a gate of pine trees, no less), and manages to bring Laura back. Of course, this is not the end of the family’s troubles.

The more films of the (as it seems still merrily continuing) Indonesian horror film boom I see, the more impressed I am with it. Of course, quite a few of the films are terribly generic, or marred by the sort of comic relief that is neither comical, nor any kind of relief, but you can say that of every country’s genre film output at the best of times. The important thing is the good films, and the good horror films made in Indonesia in the last five years or so tend to be very good, and quietly ambitious in exploring the possibilities of their genre.

The Real Pocong definitely is one of those good films. Directed by Hanny R. Saputra (whose other films I unfortunately know next to nothing about), it is a film that treats its horror story as a fairy tale. One just needs to have a look at the plot structure - like the way the film uses repetition - or the elements (the deep dark wood, the road into the other world, the child-snatching supernatural creature etc) of the plot to realize this.

The characters are more archetypes than psychologically “realistic” people. As such, they don’t always act as rational or logical as some viewers might want them to – especially Rini’s inability to completely understand what is happening around her in the final third of the film could be very problematic to some – but I’m not too sure I would find people learning that their little daughter has been kidnapped by a ghost and then acting rationally and logically that much more believable. Thankfully, the handful of actors is good enough to provide performances which do not confuse the archetypal with the inhuman.

I was especially impressed by Sakinah Dava Erawan. Child actors are often terrible, and I find it somewhat unfair to blame them for it, seeing that they just don’t have much life experience they could draw from, but I didn’t find it difficult at all to sympathize with this little girl. Cleverly, the first part of The Real Pocong lets the film’s audience share Laura’s perspective, her mixture of terror and wonder and the naturalness with which she treats the stranger occurrences around her; as a child, she doesn’t have the grip on what should be reality and what not a grown-up possesses, and because we share her view of the world, we don’t get to have that grip either.

As any good fairy tale would, the movie does well addressing anxieties people typically don’t want to be confronted with quite directly. The Laura-centric half of the film embodies many childhood anxieties. It’s not only the more banal ones like “the thing in the cupboard” or “the thing under the bed”, but the fear of not being understood by one’s parents, and the more painful fear of not being able to trust them.

The second half of the film puts the same (slightly painful) spotlight on the big parental fear of the loss of one’s child without going down either the road of Spielbergian kitsch, nor that of exploitative melodrama.

Apart from that, The Real Pocong also manages to be quite creepy (again, as a good fairy tale should be). While some of the special effects look a bit ropey, the production design and photography are excellent. This is one of the few horror films whose actions take place nearly entirely by daylight, and it proves that a director who knows what he’s doing doesn’t need darkness to build a mood of dread.

For more bizarre movie goodness, be sure
to visit Denis’ excellent review blog The Horror!?

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Deadly Spawn, The

Monday, February 22nd, 2010

a.k.a. Return of the Aliens: The Deadly Spawn
company: Filmline
year: 1983
runtime: 81′
country: United States
director: Douglas McKeown
cast: Charles George Hildebrandt,
Tom DeFranco, Richard Lee Porter,
Jean Tafler, Karen Tighe
James Brewster, Elissa Neil,
Ethel Michelson, John Schmerling,
Judith Mayes, Andrew Michaels
writers: Ted A. Bohus, John Dods,
Douglas McKeown, Tim Sullivan
cinematographer: Harvey M. Bimbaum
music: Paul Cornell, Michael Perllstein
and Kenneth Walker
special effects: John Dods, John Mathews,
John Payne, Kevin G. Shinnick,
Arnold Gargulo and Gregory Ramoundos
disc company: Synapse Films
release date: October 26, 2004
retail price: $19.95
disc details: Region 0 / NTSC / dual layer
video: 1.33:1 / pictureboxed / progressive
audio: Dolby Digital 2.0 mono (English)
subtitles: none
special features: Two feature-length audio
commentaries, production photo and still galleries,
comic-style prequel short, outtakes and audition
tapes, new alternate opening, original trailer,
cast and crew biographies
order this disc from Amazon.com

Plot: A monster crashes to Earth in a meteorite and crawls into a damp basement, where it slowly eats its way through the members of the family living in the house above.

The Deadly Spawn is the sort of film that could only have emerged from years of heartfelt hard labor on the part of good friends, a grimly imaginative bit of gross-out monster horror that’s at least as much fun as it is rough around the edges.  The brainchild of writer and producer Ted A. Bohus and special effects man John Dods, the film touches base with just about every science fiction monster romp of the preceding 30 years, from It Came from Outer Space and The Blob to the then-recent Ridley Scott mega-hit Alien, while retaining a unique low-budget magic all its own.  Made for about the cost of my second car The Deadly Spawn is far from perfect, but that doesn’t stop it from being a hell of a good time.

The premise is simple: A monster crash-lands in the New Jersey countryside and finds a nice wet home for itself in a family’s basement.  Once there it grows, sending baby monsters out to conquer the surrounding town.  People are eaten, families destroyed, and a monster movie obsessed boy becomes on unlikely hero.

It’s best gotten out of the way early that the script by Bohus, Dods, director Douglas McKeown and production assistant Tim Sullivan, has its fair share of low points.  Long sections of the earliest two thirds of the picture are devoted to slow slogs of exposition, none of which is terribly interesting.  The main cast of high school kids is a welcome change from the traditionally irritating monster-chow variety, at least.  They spend the picture worried about real-world things – grades, studying, a dead uncle in the recliner downstairs – though a brief bit of romantic interest between two of them is better left skipped.  In the end the teenagers exist only to be threatened by the title monster, dependent on the real hero of the story (an eleven year old) for their survival.

The biggest problem with the drama is just how superfluous most of it is, though the true star of the picture – the toothy, multi-headed brainchild of John Dods – and its crafty implementation more than makes up for it.  The Deadly Spawn’s extensive displays of monster-oriented death, mayhem and destruction are certainly its biggest selling point, and with good reason.  The chief creature, roughly a man’s height with three heads and fleshy stalks protruding from its back, spends quality screen time with the young hero in the basement in a series of wonderfully shot scenes.  There are moments where the low key lighting and imaginative framing seem positively inspired.  The most memorable of the scenes by a fair margin is when the child and spawn first meet, the boy watching as the monster vomits up his mother’s disembodied head!

While fans of the new breed of bargain basement monster horror (now industrialized and dominated by a few awful straight-to-video companies) will be accustomed to gore, the violence of The Deadly Spawn was quite graphic and intense for the time.  The many monster attacks are quick-cut and bloody, and rendered all the more effective by the free-for-all nature of the scripting (the film happily abides by Joe Bob Briggs’ rule for horror, that anybody can die at any time).  The Deadly Spawn opens with a classic cult scare, with the monster devouring not one but both of the parents of the household.  Later a teen-aged love interest is unceremoniously beheaded and tossed out of an upper floor window!  An attack on a vegetarian luncheon provides some welcome bad-taste laughs while the schlocker ending takes the “?” finale of The Blob to its logical conclusion, with a gargantuan spawn devouring the countryside.

The John Dods directed special effects, made for little more than the price of the 16mm stock they’re filmed on, are generally excellent.  The full-sized spawn puppet is a magnificent creation, even if it does look a little too much like a trio of razor-toothed cocks perched atop a bulging scrotum base.  Some of the simplest techniques manage the most impressive results, like the tiny tadpole spawns wriggling along barely submerged tracks or two-dimensional paper and foam puppets filmed in silhouette.  There’s little doubt that CGI would be used for such effects these days, but I’ll take the foam-and-rubber work of Dods and company over that newer method of doing business any day.

The Deadly Spawn was quite a success when 21st Century Film Corp. released it theatrically in 1983 (after nearly three years in production), making back ten times its production budget in its opening week in New York.  It was on home video that the film found its real cult following, both in America and especially in mainland Europe (it was banned as a “Video Nasty” in England), and I remember passing by its graphic over-sized Continental Video box many times as a child.  It looked terrible to me then, the cover showing the full-size creature surrounded by dismembered limbs, but it was one of the first videos I rented when I went to work at my hometown’s own (and now defunct) Video Spectrum years later.

The home video market has come a long way since the time The Deadly Spawn was released, and Synapse Films deserves no small amount of praise for doing such an exceptional job of bringing the film to its long-awaited digital debut.  Working from the original 16mm camera negatives, Synapse has delivered the most definitive video release of the title to date.



The 1.33:1 progressive transfer presents The Deadly Spawn in its originally intended aspect ratio, and while the pictureboxing  (to compensate for overscan on traditional television sets) limits the available resolution a bit my complaints about the transfer otherwise are slim.  In fact, I don’t think I have any!  The wonderfully grainy image presents with strong detail and accurately captures the highly variable nature of the photography.  Extensive color correction makes for exceptional results, and the frequent reds (seen in blood, bath robes, and even a telephone) really pop.  There is some minimal damage, limited to infrequent dirt and speckles, but nothing distracting – I’d wager this looks better than many of the 35mm blowups that played theaters in the 80s.   Audio is a healthy Dolby Digital 2.0 monophonic track that faithfully reproduces the highs and lows of no-budget recording.  There are no subtitles.

Proving that The Deadly Spawn was as much a labor of love for Synapse Films as for the original creators, the supplements are stacked.  First up are two audio commentaries, one with writer and producer Ted A. Bohus and another with special effects man John Dods, writer / director Douglas McKeown, production assistant Tim Sullivan, executive producer Tim Hildebrandt and actor Charles Hildebrandt (the 11 year old hero of the film).  The cast and crew track makes for tremendous fun, while the Bohus track tends towards the more serious and informative, covering the troublesome nature of the lengthy production as well as the distribution issues with 21st Century Film Corp.  Other supplements are more traditional, including a theatrical trailer (sourced from tape), extensive stills galleries, filmmaker biographies, and even a bloopers and outtakes reel, though there are some standouts.  We get audition tapes for the cast, a contemporary John Dods introduction to the creature listed as “A Visit with The Deadly Spawn 1982″, an alternate opening with some new effects added, and even a comic book prequel to the film.

I’ll never be one to call The Deadly Spawn a great film, but it’s certainly a fun one and I’ve been a fan for a long while now.  The reasonably priced Synapse Films disc was released on my birthday, 2004, and I picked up my copy as soon as I was off work that evening.  It’s a great disc by any estimation and comes highly recommended to both fans of the feature and monster horror buffs in general.  As for the film, it may be a little shabby but I love it all the same.  This reviewer say see it!

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Sheitan

Friday, February 19th, 2010

company: 120 Films
year: 2006
runtime: 88′
country: France
director: Kim Chapiron
cast: Vincent Cassel, Roxane Mesquida,
Olivier Bartelemy, Nico Le Phat Tan,
Leila Bekhti, Ladj Ly
writers: Kim Chapiron, Christian Chapiron
cinematography: Alex Lamarque
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I’m going to explain a bit more of the film’s subtext than I’d strictly like in the course of the write-up, so anyone planning to see this with fresh eyes shouldn’t read any further.

It’s the night before Christmas. After being thrown out of a club thanks to the douchey behaviour of their friend Bart (Olivier Bartelemy), Ladj (Ladj Ly), Thai (Nico Le Phat Tan), the barkeep Yasmine (Leila Bekhti) and vague acquaintance Eve (Roxane Mesquida) decide to drunk drive to Eve’s country home to spend some time there.

The folks’ place must be far from Paris, because the group only arrives some time the next morning. There’s no trace of Eve’s parents at her place, only Dad’s doll collection. The only people home are the family’s satyr-like groundskeeper Joseph (Vincent Cassel) and – unseen by the Parisians – his highly pregnant wife Marie (Georgette Crochon). Marie mostly seems to spend her time making a doll out of spare parts and hiding, but the city folk are too busy with other things to notice.

Ladj would really like to get into Yasmine’s pants, merrily ignoring the fact that he has a girlfriend at home, while both the obviously douchy Bart, and the more subtly douchy Thai both feel very attracted to Eve, who for her part isn’t exactly discouraging anyone (although I don’t think these guys would notice if she were). Joseph for his part seems strangely interested in Barth, but for what reason won’t become clear until much later in the movie.

Suffice it to say that these reasonably friendly country people have some rather strange hobbies, besides throwing smiling racist insults around. Everything Joseph and the country youth do has an undertone of violence and weird menace that people a bit more sensitive and sensible than our “heroes” would find creepy, if not outright disturbing. Of course, the violent undercurrent will come to the surface in the end, if in a different way than you would expect.


Kim Chapiron’s Sheitan really is something different than you’d think on first (or even second) sight.

It all starts out as a French variation of the backwoods slasher, promising a gore explosion in the manner of much of the French horror renaissance for its final thirty minutes.

But the longer the film is running, the clearer it gets that this is not the kind of film it initially pretends to be. In spirit, it is much closer to the great weird European films of the fantastic made in the Seventies than its contemporaries, willing to give up on the notion of plot or characters nearly completely to better be able to drag its viewers into the realms of utter strangeness and dry, wrong-feeling humour.

Instead of the expected revue of kills, the film plays out as a series of increasingly disquieting, often erotically charged set pieces bound to confuse, annoy, amuse and confound anyone with their grotesquerie. While it is obvious to the film’s audience (the characters are rather dense, I’m afraid) that something very unpleasant is bound to happen rather sooner than later, the film virtually wallows in not explaining itself too early. But, unlike in some of my other very favorite weird ass European films, everything happening does in fact happen for a reason. You see, it is important that Sheitan takes place at Christmas, because the child Marie is going to give birth to is the Anti-Christ, or at least that is what the country family thinks – there is nothing overtly supernatural going on. Much of what happens during the course of the movie happens as a twisted mirror of Christian tradition, sometimes more subtle and sometimes less (Mary and Joseph, anyone?).

Still, as I said, the film never does actually say this outright, and instead treats its high concept a bit detached and with a feeling of sardonic humour, like a joke it doesn’t need you to get to find funny.


I’m very fond of the way Chapiron directs the film. It is steady, technically adept, but doesn’t try to out-weird itself like a lot of modern horror films going for weird are wont to, very often to their detriment. This does not mean that Chapiron just points and shoots. Rather, he is building the mood of intense strangeness required for his film in more subtle ways and does not seem to need or want to put too much emphasis on his own abilities.

“Subtle” isn’t a word I’d use for Vincent Cassel’s performance here. From a certain perspective, he’s chewing the scenery outrageously, but still manages to give this outwardly blustering performance a much more disturbing undercurrent, as if his outer madness is hiding something much worse (which it in fact does). Roxane Mesquida’s performance as Eve is nearly as intense as Cassel’s, but not as aggressively over the top. She projects a quiet eroticism that also hints at something different beyond or below it.

Our theoretical heroes are just as well played, but the characters the actors are left with don’t have much depth to them. They’re supposed to be a bit dense, a bit too aggressive, and utterly unlikeable, and they manage that perfectly. Of course, this isn’t a character study, but a trip into the land of the weird, so I’m not complaining.

There isn’t much to complain about in Sheitan anyway. Sure, it doesn’t have a plot, but watching something this clearly in the tradition of 70s Eurohorror and demanding “plot” instead of a  moody trip into a strange place in someone’s head is just wrong-headed, like complaining that the moon isn’t made of green cheese.

If you let it, Sheitan can beautifully mess with your head, and make your mind a more interesting place for its ninety minute running time (and possibly afterwards). I couldn’t wish for more.



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For more bizarre movie goodness, be sure
to visit Denis’ excellent review blog The Horror!?

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