Posts Tagged ‘Mystery’


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.

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.

Der Todesrächer von Soho

August 26th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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a.k.a. The Corpse Packs His Bags
Year: 1972   Runtime: 76′  Director: Jess Franco
Writers: Jess Franco, Artur Brauner  Cinematography: Manuel Merino   Music: Rolf Kühn, Jess Franco
Cast: Horst Tappert, Fred Williams, Elisa Montés, Barbara Rütting, Luis Morris, Siegfried Schürenberg

A murderer with a very peculiar modus operandi haunts London. Concentrating on people visiting the fair city, he first packs his victims’ bags, then kills them with an incredibly precise knife throw.

Inspector Ruppert Redford (Fred Williams) – oh, the hilarity! – of Scotland Yard has quite a bit of trouble solving the case. I’m sure his trouble has nothing at all to do with him being a typical early 70s smartass playboy who just loves to let civilians do his job for him, like the (weirdly competent, obviously odious) comic relief photographer Andy Pickwick (Luis Morris) or his personal friend, the crime writer Charles Barton (Horst Tappert).

To be fair to Redford, one has to admit that the case is rather complicated, seeing as it not only involves the strange murders, but also a shady doctor (Siegfried Schürenberg) with more than just one secret, his lovely assistant (Elisa Montés) with a secret of her own, a drug ring peddling a drug thrice as potent as heroin, various bombings, one or more revenge plots, and Barton’s secret. Not unlike Redford (who will solve his case by going where Pickwick tells him to, and being obnoxious), I lost track of the plot about halfway through the movie, and never was quite sure what was going on in some of the plot lines, so it’s difficult to blame him.

Say what you will about German producer impresario Artur “Atze” Brauner’s attempts at jumping on the successful Edgar Wallace adaptation wagon by making a contract with Wallace’s son Bryan Edgar Wallace that allowed him to use the younger Wallace’s name and the often very fine titles of the man’s books and make completely unrelated films out of them, but the man did show good taste when it came to the international co-operations late in his film cycle. After having co-produced Argento’s Bird With The Crystal Plumage, Brauner hired beloved auteur Jess Franco for his next Bryan Wallace movie, Brauner’s second version of Wallace’s Death Packs A Suitcase.

  
  
  

Now, I have gone on record saying that I generally prefer Franco’s more personal films – at least when we’re talking about his work of the 60s and 70s – to his attempts at making more conventional genre movies, but Der Todesrächer von Soho (which translates as “the death-avenger of Soho”, and no, the word “Todesrächer” does exist in German as little as “death-avenger” does in English – it’s just a lovely case of the sort of random composite noun the German language loves so dearly) turns out to be an exception to the rule, and may in fact be one of my personal favourites among Franco’s films. It’s probably because Franco might not have been allowed to indulge himself in his erotic obsessions as heavily is Franco fans are used to – well, beyond a very short nightclub sequence and a lot of women wearing boots, anyway – but does indulge heavily in his love of pulp and a visual and narrative style that have come down through the serials (on the visual side, of course combined with the man’s usual tics and enthusiasms).

While Der Todesrächer doesn’t work at all as a straight pulpy narrative (what with it having a plot so byzantine my first viewing didn’t even leave me with an understanding of the knife-thrower’s motives, even though I guessed his identity without much trouble with his first appearance on screen), it’s a virtual feast of classic pulp, serial, and krimi clichés as seen through the slightly skewed but loving perspective of Franco. The whole film is basically Franco shooting classic poses of the genres he’s working in from his favourite weird perspectives and through glass tables while a pretty hip soundtrack by Rolf Kühn (with some contributions by Franco himself) plays, pretty obviously having a lot of fun with it and for once not even trying to achieve transcendence through boredom. In fact (and genre-appropriate), Der Todesrächer is as fast-paced and sprightly as a Franco movie gets, with nary a minute where nothing exciting or at least interesting is happening on screen, making this one a Franco movie that’s much easier to appreciate than his more self-indulgent films. How could I not appreciate Franco having fun in this way?

As much as I love Franco, I usually do not use the word “exciting” to describe any of his films, but Der Todesrächer von Soho is an exception to that rule too, working as a timely reminder that Franco could be versatile if a given project interested him enough.

German viewers will probably have another reason to look fondly, or even with mild astonishment, at the film, for its use of Horst Tappert is quite an eye-opener. Here in Germany, Tappert is primarily known today as the star of the long-running (I thought about eighty years, Internet sources speak of only twenty-four) cop show Derrick. The show’s complete run of 281 episodes was written by Herbert Reinecker whom you also might know as the writer of Rialto Film’s Edgar Wallace cycle (and yes, Tappert was in some of those too, and quite lively at that). Unfortunately, Reinecker’s attempts at a more psychological crime show only resulted in a show as visually dead, emotionally and intellectually dull, and politically conservative as anything I’d care – or rather not care – to imagine, and drove Tappert to performances that would be cruel to call “wooden”, for even pieces of wood have feelings that can be hurt. Having grown up with Derrick, and somewhat forgotten Tappert’s part in the earlier Wallace movies, it came as a real shock to watch the actor here, about two years before he started on the show that was to make/end him, smiling, acting, even over-acting, and possessing an actual physical presence like, well, an actual human being, outplaying the film’s cops film character with effortless charisma. It’s quite a thing to behold, though not enough for me to ever want to revisit Derrick.

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.

Die Blaue Hand

August 12th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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a.k.a.: The Blue Hand / Creature With the Blue Hand / The Bloody Dead
Year: 1967    Runtime: 84′  Director: Alfred Vohrer
Writer: Herbert Reinecker  Cinematography: Ernst W. Kalinke   Music: Martin Böttcher
Cast: Klaus Kinski, Harald Leipnitz, Carl Lange, Diana Körner, Siegfried Schürenberg, Albert Bessler
(This write-up concerns the original German cut of the movie, and not that abomination some cruel American producer created out of it and random horrible inserts later on.)

Dave Emerson (Klaus Kinski), descendant of a formerly rich family, is sentenced to a nice little holiday in the establishment of local shady psychiatrist (so untrustworthy he’s even wearing a monocle, for Cthulhu’s sake! in the 60s!) Dr. Mangrove (Carl Lange) for killing the family gardener.

Nobody cares much that Dave has insisted on his innocence in the murder throughout the trial, or that the evidence against him is pretty circumstantial, least of all his “loving” mother Lady Emerson (Ilse Steppat).

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Detective Dee And The Mystery Of The Phantom Flame

June 30th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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a.k.a. Di Renjie
Year: 2010    Runtime: 124′  Director: Tsui Hark
Writers: Chen Kuo-Fu, Chang Chia-Lu  Cinematography: Parkie Chan Chor-Keung, Chan Chi-Ying
Music: Peter Kam Pau-Tat   Cast: Andy Lau Tak-Wah, Li Bing-Bing, Tony Leung Ka-Fai, Deng Chao,
Carina Lau Ka-Ling, Richard Ng Yiu-Hon, Teddy Robin Kwan

China in the 7th Century, during the Tang Dynasty. To commemorate her crowning as the first (and, unfortunately, last) Empress of China, Wu Zetian (Carina Lau) has commissioned the building of an unpleasantly gigantic statue of the Buddha pretty much next to her palace grounds. Her rather dictatorial policies have left the Empress with a lot of enemies, so it doesn’t come as much of a surprise when trouble hits her construction project.

Two of the people responsible for the building of the Godzilla-large statue are killed. More surprising than the fact of their death is the way the men die – spontaneous combustion. The deaths may very well have been caused by the victims’ moving of some magical pieces of script hanging inside of the statue, but the Empress is only prone to superstition when it suits her, and stays sceptical. After her chief chaplain (as the not exactly trustworthy subtitles call him) visits her in form of a talking deer and mutters an imprecise prophecy, the Empress decides that the stars ask her to put the mystery into the hands of Judge Dee (Andy Lau).

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The Amazing Mr. X

June 10th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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a.k.a. The Spiritualist
Year: 1948    Runtime: 78′  Director: Bernard Vorhaus
Writers: Muriel Roy Bolton, Ian McLellan Hunter, Crane Wilbur  Cinematography: John Alton
Music: Alexander Laszlo   Cast: Lynn Bari, Turhan Bey, Cathy O’Donnell, Richard Carlson, Paul Faber, Virginia Gregg

Stinking rich Christine Faber (Lynn Bari) has lost her beloved husband Paul (Donald Curtis) two years ago in the sort of car crash that can only be described with the adjective “fiery”. Though Chris has a new beloved in form of the horrifically boring and prosaic district attorney Martin Abbott (Richard “Wooden” Carlson), and a marriage proposal is in the air, she hasn’t really come to grips with Paul’s death. So it’s not that much of a surprise when Chris one night thinks she hears a voice that might very well be Paul’s – or might just be the sound of the waves hitting the beach close to her villa – calling out her name. On the beach, she doesn’t find Paul’s ghost, but rather a smarmy guy calling himself Alexis (Turhan Bey) who works on her with a highly practiced psychic spiel full of things no stranger could know about the woman.

At first, Chris is still wavering between fascination and scepticism, but a horrible nightmare, or rather a vision full of barely disguised wedding anxiety (which seems perfectly natural when one is to wed Richard Carlson some time in the future), puts Chris over the edge, so she decides to visit Alexis in his “professional” capacity. A few tricks later, Chris is a regular customer of the psychic, a fact neither Martin nor her younger sister Janet (Cathy O’Donnell) are too happy with once they find out.

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A Cold Night’s Death

September 18th, 2010 | article by | No Comments »
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company: ABC Circle Films
year: 1973
runtime: 74′
director: Jerrold Freedman
cast: Robert Culp, Eli Wallach,
Michael C. Gwynne
writer: Christopher Knopf
cinematography: Leonard J. South
music: Gil Melle
Not on home video in the USA

Dr. Vogel, at the behest of “the space program” the lone scientist manning a behavioural science station on top of a mountain somewhere in the arctic parts of the US (I suppose), hasn’t been heard from for four weeks. One would think his employers would be a little faster reacting to loss of contact with him, especially when one keeps in mind that his last radio messages were hinting at a psychological breakdown, but I digress. Anyway, said employers haven’t seen the pre-credit sequence that makes it quite clear that something is absolutely not right up there.

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Dark and Stormy Night

August 23rd, 2010 | article by | No Comments »
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film rating:
disc rating:
company: Bantam Street
year: 2009
runtime: 93′
director: Larry Blamire
cast: Jim Beaver, Jennifer Blaire,
Larry Blamire, Brian Howe,
Dan Conroy, Robert Deveau,
Bruce French, Betty Garrett
writer: Larry Blamire
cinematography: Anthony J. Rickert-Epstein
music: Christopher Caliendo
Reviewed from a screener provided
by Shout! Factory, LLC.
Order this film from Amazon.com

Dark and Stormy Night made its DVD premiere on the 17th of August courtesy of Shout! Factory, and can currently be ordered through Amazon.com and other online retailers.

Plot: A motley assortment of people converge on an old mansion to hear the reading of a will, only to be murdered one by one by an unseen assailant.

Ah, Larry Blamire strikes again. In the interest of full disclosure I’m no fan of the writer / director / actor, and my only other experience with his work (The Lost Skeleton Returns Again, released on DVD day and date with this) left me utterly underwhelmed and even a little pissed that I had expended the minimum of effort required to screen it. Dark and Stormy Night improves slightly upon that picture, if only because it never devolves into a protracted and clumsy back and forth over double negatives, but that’s faint praise indeed.

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Mr. Sardonicus

May 20th, 2010 | article by | No Comments »
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company: William Castle
Productions, Columbia
year: 1961
runtime: 90′
country: United States
director: William Castle
cast: Ronald Lewis, Guy Rolfe,
Audrey Dalton, Oskar Homolka,
Erika Peters
writer: Ray Russell
cinematography: Burnett Guffey
music: Von Dexter
Order this film from Amazon.com

After some carnival impresario-like mugging of our host (and director and producer) William Castle, the film introduces its hero. Sir Robert Cargrave (Ronald Lewis) is a successful Victorian physician and specialist in the treatment of paralysis.

Unexpectedly, Cargrave receives a letter written by the love of his youth, Maude (Audrey Dalton), who would have become his wife if not for a greedy father without the proper faith in Cargrave’s future career. Maude is now married to a certain Baron Sardonicus and lives in one of those imaginary Central European countries full of people with utterly incongruous accents I know and love from dozens of other movies.

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The Clown Murders

March 12th, 2010 | article by | 1 Comment »
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company: Magnum Films
year: 1976
runtime: 96′
country: Canada
director: Martyn Burke
cast: Stephen Young, Susan Keller,
John Candy, Lawrence Dane,
Gary Reineke, John Bayliss
writer: Martyn Burke
cinematography: Dennis Miller
order this film from Amazon.com

Would-be big shot business man Philip (Lawrence Dane) is just about to make an actually big deal for once, selling the farm that belongs to his wife Alison (Susan Keller) to a land development company that will build one of those nice apartment complexes where once fields were. Because the land is not Philip’s but Alison’s property, he needs her signature on the sale contracts, which for some reason that is never made quite clear need to be signed on October 31st just before midnight.

This is not a case of a husband forcing his wife, Alison is in fact quite willing to get rid of the farm and with it a part of her past she would like to forget, but there are other people who have quite different ideas.

Alison’s ex-boyfriend Charlie (Stephen Young), who once lived with her on the farm this is all about, has just returned from some unsuccessful business adventures outside of Canada, and he, for one, would just love to get back with Alison, her being married notwithstanding.

While pretending to be as drunk as the people he’s speaking with actually are, Charlie manages to talk three supposed friends of Philip’s, Ollie (John Candy), Rosie (Gary Reineke) and Peter (John Bayliss) into helping him with a mad plan he sells them as a prank. He wants them to use a Halloween party Ollie arranges as a backdrop for kidnapping Alison so that she won’t be able to sign the papers selling the farm on time. Since every single one of them hates Philip at least a little, and lusts quite frightfully after his wife, the idiots agree.

On Halloween, the quartet sets their plan in motion, dresses up as clowns and kidnaps Alison. At first, they drag the woman to Peter’s home, but there, cracks between the men become obvious. Until now nobody except Charlie did truly realize what repercussions their actions would have. For some reason, not one of them imagined that Philip would just call the police, as he of course does. Now, the men don’t know what to do anymore.

Alison herself doesn’t exactly act like a good kidnap victim. She doesn’t seem too sure about what to do with Charlie and the others, but she is most certainly not afraid of them or trying to escape from them.

After some arguments which already begin to turn violent, Charlie talks his co-kidnappers into transporting their “victim” to the farm. Surely, nobody will look for them there.

At their destination – and after a meeting with a cop that goes as badly for them as everything else – the men squabble and drink some more, while Alison does her best to provoke them. You’d think leaving these people cooped up with each other alone would be enough provoke a minor blood bath, but there’s someone else stalking them, someone who dons a clown mask and shows some rather murderous tendencies.

The Clown Murders is certainly different. The DVD cover (and the plot description on the IMDB, of course) let the film look like a run-of-the-mill slasher, but nothing could be further from the truth.

It’s a psychological thriller much more interested in building an atmosphere of tension up to the moment just before it turns to violence than in the violence itself. There is a bit of bloodshed, to be sure, but the film spends most of his running time building up to it until it becomes seemingly inevitable.

The character work here is surprisingly subtle. While the characters’ actions aren’t always logical or rational (actually, the men mostly come over as rather dumb, Alison as quite inexplicable), they perfectly fit their character types. These are all men jealous of something in Philip that they find embodied in his “possession” of Alison. Rosie and Peter are certainly not able to see Alison as a person, and their lusting after her has much more to do with their wish to prove their dominance over Philip than in any carnal interest in her. Charlie for his part has (probably, the film is only insinuating, not telling) thought up the whole bizarre plan as a way to win Alison again, yet it is the Alison he remembers he wants, and not the woman standing right before him. I had my problems understanding Ollie’s character, or why he goes along with the kidnapping, but I’m pretty sure there’s a reason why he is the one among the men Alison sleeps with in the end, apart from her sharing the self-destructive urge that seems to drive everyone’s actions.

There’s an uncommon element of ambiguity running through the whole film; nobody’s motivations are ever directly explained, and I’m quite sure that the characters don’t know why they are doing what they are doing. There is of course a subtext to the film talking about violence lurking just below the surface of male interaction, barely repressed and just waiting to explode, and the roles someone like Alison has to play just to survive, but that doesn’t explain everything that is going on in the film’s text.

What is Alison trying to achieve? Does she realize who the other man in the clown mask is? The film isn’t telling, and I’m not too sure if the director and writer Martyn Burke actually knows, or if he’s making some parts just up as they come along.

Burke does some fine, unobtrusive directing here. The Clown Murders might move slowly, but not a single shot in it is padding. Everything on screen is meant to convey something about the characters that couldn’t be told through dialogue alone.

Of course, one could argue that the film is just too ambiguous and/or too subtle for its own good, and it is certainly true that this is a film for people willing to take it on its own terms and in its own rhythm.

The Clown Murders needs viewers willing to accept that there are theories to have, and interpretations to be made, but no clear answers will be given about its characters. Like some things in life, much in it needs to stay ambiguous.

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


In the Folds of the Flesh

November 25th, 2009 | article by | No Comments »
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poster

cover for the Severin Films release - art copyright 2008 by Severin Films LLC.

a.k.a. Nelle Pieghe della Carne
companies: Talia Films
and MGB Cinematografica
year: 1970
runtime: 92′
country: Italy / Spain
director: Sergio Bergonzelli
cast: Eleonora Rossi Drago, Pier Angeli,
Fernando Sancho, Alfredo Mayo,
Emilio Gutierrez Caba, Mario Rosa Sclauzero
writers: Sergio Bergonzelli,
Mario Caiano, and Fabio De Agostini
dvd company: Severin Films
release date: October 28, 2008
retail price: $19.96
disc details: region 0 / NTSC / single layer
order this title from Amazon.com
reviewed from a screener provided
by Severin Films LLC

Plot: A twisted family kills off visitors to their castle thirteen years after the mysterious and traumatic disappearance of the head of the house, a mafia boss named Andre (Alfredo Mayo).

I’ve seen few films that seek to entertain through shear confusion and preponderance of style, but Sergio Bergonzelli’s [BLOOD DELIRIUM] twisted and violent giallo does just that.  The screenplay by Bergonzelli with Mario Caiano and Fabio De Agostini tears through enough plot to fill a slew of feature films, racing through such saucy subjects as incest and patricide before finally resolving itself . . . Sort of.

Confounding as contending with its twists and turns (sometimes four in a single scene) may be, never let it be said that IN THE FOLDS OF THE FLESH is boring.  Things start off with a bang, with a recently disembodied head lying on the floor of a bedroom on a dark and stormy night.  Lucille (Eleonora Rossi Drago) takes to burying the remains of the murdered in the backyard of her employer’s seaside castle and, for reasons unknown at the time, sends a motorboat puttering out to sea unmanned.  Escaped convict Pascal (Fernando Sancho) sees everything but opts to say nothing when captured by the police, paving the way for his future extortion of the family.

Thirteen years pass.  Lucille has raised Andre’s daughter Falesse (Pier Angeli) and her own son Colin (Emilio Guitierrez Caba) by herself in the castle, telling them that it was Andre who was beheaded that night and that Falesse herself wielded the sword.  They are content creating strange art and taking care of family pets Kiki and Kioka (a pair of vultures caged out back!) until people start snooping about the place, and things go quickly downhill from there.  Falesse kills two men, stabbing one in the back and decapitating the other, leaving Lucille and son little to do but dispose of their remains in an acid bath they keep in the shed (!).  Soon the recently released Pascal returns with blackmail on his mind, only to find himself gassed to death with cyanide and dissolved in the aforementioned acid bath for his troubles.

Each murder reveals a little more about the mysterious disappearance of Andre, information that only confuses the audience more as to what actually happened.  That confusion reaches a dizzying peak when an elderly man, claiming to be the deceased Andre, returns to the castle with a young institutionalized woman, supposedly the real Falesse, in tow.  I’m not sure even I can rightly explain what happens from there, and for the sake of preserving some of IN THE FOLDS OF THE FLESH’s multitude of surprises I won’t even try.

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I suspect that Freud himself, quoted in hilarious fashion just before the opening credits roll (“remains . . . REMAINS! . . .”), would have been baffled by the time this one was through.  I was that for certain, but I had a good time of it all the same.  While its subject matter tends towards the perverse, Bergonzelli’s thriller plays as more serious than sleazy.  The frequent violence is never overtly graphic (though there is quite a collection of disembodied heads on display) and nudity is kept surprisingly limited.  The most one can expect is in a flashback involving a group of female prisoners shuffling into a Nazi gas chamber (!), and that’s hardly of a titillating variety.  It may be a far cry from good clean fun, but a Bruno Mattei Nazi-sploitation sex fest this certainly isn’t.

Perhaps the biggest surprise for me in viewing IN THE FOLDS OF THE FLESH is the amount of style it packs in.  Bergonzelli will never be confused with Bava, Fulci, or Argento, but one can’t fault him for trying.  Psychedelic lighting, filter effects, and flashes of still photo montages are frequent among the more traditional flourishes.  Expect lots of crash-zooms.  The score by Jesus Villa Rojo is suitably bizarre, alternating between a beautiful main theme, dramatic musical stings, and incidental tracks that can only be described as carnival-esque.  The cast is a well chosen lot.  Eleanora Rossi Drago (beautiful here in her final film role) and Pier Angeli [SODOM AND GOMORRAH] are always nice to have around, and Fernando Sancho [RETURN OF THE BLIND DEAD] and Emilio Guitierrez Caba both put in memorable turns.

Severin Films has more or less rescued IN THE FOLDS OF THE FLESH, greatly overshadowed by the genre works of Argento, Fulci, and Bava from the same time period, from obscurity, offering it legitimately on home video in the United States for the first time.  The enhanced and progressive transfer presents the film in its originally intended 1.85:1 aspect ratio and looks very strong.  Colors are striking and contrast is spot on, and the image seems blessedly unmanipulated.  The vault elements from which this disc was mastered appear to be in more or less fine shape, with the exception of a few dropped frames and scratchy cuts.  Audio is represented by a suitable Dolby Digital stereo English track – there are no subtitles.  Extras are limited to a theatrical trailer, but the reasonable retail price will make it an enticing release for Euro-cult fans all the same.

Bergonzelli’s film is a bucket full of crazy and I had a blast with it.  The Severin Films disc is bare bones, but the transfer is one of their strongest yet in SD and the price (a sticking point on many a disc I’ve reviewed from them) seems about right in this case.  Wtf-film recommends.

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