tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-59147728600629032802024-03-05T02:04:21.957-05:00Nessun timore
Horror films from the 1960s, 1970s, & 1980s. European horror, sleaze, giallo, slasher, found footage-- all that is offbeat and bizarre.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger204125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5914772860062903280.post-3175821614745475712014-10-31T08:00:00.000-04:002014-10-31T08:00:37.993-04:00Slashtober 3-D (Part V): Terror Train (1980) dir. Roger Spottiswoode<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Logline:</span></i></b> The boys of Sigma Phi Omega are throwing what might be the biggest party of their pre-med college careers. Well, if not the biggest, it's certainly the <i>longest</i>: this New Year's Eve costume party is taking place on a specially chartered train chugging across the frozen Canadian countryside, because that sounds like fun (and practical, to boot!). What the amassed party-goers haven't expected is that their isolated, locomotive night full of booze, sex, and magic might change onto deadlier tracks. Beneath one of the attendee's costumes lurks a stowaway, seeking revenge for the pranks of parties past. Before the train arrives at the station, he's determined to make them all scream louder than the train's whistle.</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Crime in the Past:</span></i></b> Exactly three years prior to the current action, the freshman class of the Sigma Phi Omega fraternity pulled a life-altering prank on Kenny (Derek McKinnon), their most nebbish of pledges. Doc (Hart Bochner), the frat's resident prank-puller and asshole, noticed Kenny's attraction to the lovely Alana (Jamie Lee Curtis), and so enlisted her and his fellow frat brothers to help him carry out a ruse aimed at humiliating poor Kenny. But not everyone involved in the prank knew Doc's true intentions, which were to get an unsuspecting (and underwear-ed) Kenny in bed with a dismembered, autopsied corpse. Doc and the gang flawlessly orchestrate the prank during the frat's annual New Year's bash, giving them all a good laugh at the end result (excepting that party pooper Alana, who screams in horror at her complicity). Then again, one supposes that the prank could only be considered a "flawless" prank if you disregarded the potentially perceived flaw of Kenny being so horrified at what has happened to him that he requires hospitalization for psychological and emotional trauma afterwards. But, come on, essentially flawless!</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Bodycount:</span></i></b> a serial magician makes 10 living people vanish, and 10 corpses reappear.</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Themes/Moral Code:</span></i></b> <i>Terror Train</i> is one of that rare breed of slasher films with a unifying theme informing its carnage, and the theme here is that of <i>illusion</i>. Though written only shortly after the beginning of the early '80s slasher boom, screenwriter T.Y. Drake's script is aware of how much weight films within the subgenre place upon misleading appearances and improbable plot points in order to further their not-always-well-conceived mystery and horror elements. Recurring slasher events such as the lightning-fast disposal of victim's bodies and the miraculous resurrection of the killer at the climax after certain death are here explained with tongue embedded deeply into grievous cheek wound: it's all magic! The casting of its killer as a professional magician allows the filmmakers to have a lot of fun playing around with the narrative cheats that most slasher films employ earnestly. Thus, when <i>Terror Train</i> imbues its killer with almost supernatural stalking and slashing abilities, it discourages us from critiquing it for fear of resembling those miserable souls who heckle magicians in the middle of their acts. The lapses in logic and violations of physics are all part of the act.<br />
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Additionally, the film also makes repeated use of the illusion of appearances, preventing the characters (and the audience) from seeing what's right in front of them. The costume party setting provides our killer with a perfect cover, allowing him to travel in plain sight and interact with his future victims while donned in the costumes of his previous victims. The killer makes numerous speedy costume changes over the course of the film, and this mutability of fixed appearance lends him a mysterious aura for both audience and characters, despite the fact that we're certain of his identity. Again, this is all in the spirit of fun, poking the conventions of the mystery-thriller genre in its ribs: for much of the second half of the film, we're encouraged with a knowing wink to consider the possible guilt of the obvious red herring, Magician Ken (David Copperfield), while the real killer Ken is standing beside him, cross-dressing as his <i>red-haired</i> assistant. The fact that this whopper escapes most viewer's discerning eyes on first viewing (I know it escaped mine) is a credit to the film's competency beyond the liberties we might afford it due to its emphasis on the illusory. It tricks us fairly and squarely, too. </div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Killer's Motivation:</span></i></b> Ostensibly, Kenny is seeking the psychotic version of comeuppance against those who humiliated him three years prior when they tricked him into becoming aroused by the cold, clammy embrace of a corpse. We're led to believe that Kenny's experience left him psychologically shattered and therefore susceptible to the desire for overblown retaliation. But maybe these motives are all an illusionist's misdirection: late in the film, we learn of the rumor that Kenny had been suspected of murder <i>before </i>the whole prank business transpired, and so might have already been a secret psycho all along, with the prank simply giving him a better excuse to stab people. Very tricky. A second alternative: as it's demonstrated that Kenny was always a student of magic, perhaps he's just homicidally pissed off that he didn't see the frat's sleight of hand (or, uh, <i>bed</i>) coming.</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Final Girl:</span></i></b> Oh, Jamie Lee. The woman who birthed the slasher subgenre's archetypal heroine in <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077651/">Halloween</a></i> (1978) returns to the scene a few years later with a very different sort of final girl. Unlike JLC's other slasher roles (Laurie Strode [of <i>Halloween</i>] and Kim Hammond [of <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081383/">Prom Night</a></i>]), the character of Alana isn't exactly an innocent victim of circumstance. Rather, she is an active, if uninformed, participant in the cruel prank that triggers Kenny's psychological breakdown. What sets her apart from the other prank participants (i.e. the killer's eventual victims) is her remorse. She's horrified and ashamed of her role in the prank, which provides immediate contrast with how everyone else involved experiences it: as Kenny is freaking out on top of the corpse-bedecked bed, rolling himself up in the bed canopy with his hysterical twirling, we see Alana scream while her friends belly laugh. Her remorse extends so far as to have her attempt a visit to Kenny in the psych ward shortly after he's admitted, and to have her chide her friends for years afterwards for their fond reminiscences of their heartless treatment of Kenny. When confronted by Kenny late in the film, Alana even attempts to apologize to him, which we feel is a genuine action on her part, unlike the pleading of some doomed slasher victims. This isn't to say that Kenny forgives her; if anything, he's probably just saving her for last. But the film obviously operates under some sense of karmic justice, and so Alana is spared because of her better qualities. </div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Evaluation:</span></i></b> From the director of <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098536/">Turner & Hooch</a></i> (1989) comes a film rife with magic, suspense, mystery, and 100% fewer dead dogs! But enough about Tom Hanks: <i>Terror Train</i> provides a wealth of slasherific pleasures. Inventive bloodshed, an implausible isolated location, an intelligent blending of mystery and magic, three iconic villain costumes, a young Jamie Lee Curtis screaming her heart out, and a gravely serious David Copperfield making peanuts serve themselves while grinding cigarettes through coins <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdOx886tO9U">like the stud he knows he is</a>-- these are but a few of the treasures that puff out of this one's chimney. To quote T.J. from <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082782/">My Bloody Valentine</a></i> (1981), I'm "<i>so damn sorey</i>," but no one did this whole slasher thing better than the Canadians did in those halcyon days of the early 1980s.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5914772860062903280.post-83491965703500619222014-10-24T08:00:00.002-04:002014-10-24T08:00:06.926-04:00Slashtober 3-D (Part IV): Girls Nite Out (1984) dir. Robert Deubel<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Logline:</span></i></b> This year, Dewitt University's annual sorority scavenger hunt will go down in the books as placing a special emphasis on the word "hunt" after the participating sisters, their boyfriends, and their secret lovers are mercilessly stalked by a crazed killer outfitted in the basketball team mascot's wacky bear costume. Could this killing spree have any connection to the grisly murder of another sorority girl that occurred years back during an earlier scavenger hunt? Possibly, but who cares to find out when there are more pressing queries to address, such as "Is Prior's girlfriend really cheating on him with her second cousin?"; "Will Maniac's Mrs. Bates impression win him a feature role in <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086154/">Psycho II</a></i>?"; and "How many Golden Oldies can they play on the soundtrack before the producers run out of money?" </div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Crime in the Past:</span></i></b> Some years ago, Dickie Cavanaugh. a "young, semi-illiterate American" attending Dewitt University, lost his mind in the middle of a hell week ritual out in the woods surrounding the campus. He was never the same. That's one way the kids tell it. The other, factual version is that Dickie Cavanaugh was a misogynistic asshole who murdered his girlfriend during the yearly scavenger hunt because she dumped him to start dating other guys, perhaps those who would most probably refrain from murdering their girlfriends after any perceived slight to their virile masculinity. Poor, pitiable Dickie: a victim the daily horrors of being a college-educated white male in American society! Sigh. So, anyway, after murdering his ex, Dickie is carted away to a mental asylum, where he lives for many years before finally hanging himself in his padded cell. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Bodycount:</span></i></b> 8 (possibly 9?) "typical victims of a society gone berserk" have their internal organs fatally scavenged.<br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Themes/Moral Code:</span></i></b> A simple thesis: women drive men violently crazy by jumping from one bed to the next. Almost every one of the film's college-aged women is either actively cheating on her boyfriend or considering it, and this is labeled by the film's moral code as A Terrible Thing. And of course there's a double standard: Mike Pryor's (David Holbrook) girlfriend cheats on him with her second cousin and we're encouraged to gag; Teddy (James Carroll) cheats on his girlfriend with Dawn (Suzanne Barnes), a girl a little bit higher on the social ladder, and we're supposed to congratulate him. (Although, conversely, we're also encouraged to condemn Dawn, who has callously cheated on her own boyfriend in order to make this pairing possible.) The notion being expressed here is that women are the property of men, to do with as they please. Adulterous behavior is permissible for the latter, but never for the objectified former. For the women of the film to express a masculine sexual freedom in their actions marks them for punishment. Enter sexually liberated women, pursued by killer in bear costume.<br />
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Whether or not we're supposed to be critical of the misogynistic cultural values expressed within the film probably never crossed the filmmakers' minds, but that doesn't mean there isn't enough here to get us questioning the status quo. Despite it's bizarre amount of sympathy for the "wronged" Mike Pryor, we can't help but see him as the abusive, violent asshole he is, even if he's innocent of his girlfriend's murder. Similarly, we wonder why such a big fuss is made over Maniac's (Mart McChesney) girlfriend dumping him, especially in consideration of his obviously repressed homosexual feelings for Teddy. (Shirtless male-only bedroom parties and Village People BDSM couples costumes should be an indication of something pertinent in the two men's relationship.) Must she remain his property even if he's uninterested in her sexually?<br />
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Finally, we're especially forced to consider (and perhaps criticize) the complicity of certain female characters in perpetuating these beliefs of male superiority. When one female character walking across the quad is told by a creepy male character that "girls shouldn't be out at night alone," to which she chirps in agreement, we feel disappointed. Can't a Girl just have a pleasant Nite Out without getting slashed to ribbons? And when we discover the identity of the killer and her motives, which essentially boil down to hero worship of the male sex, we feel grossed out by the terrible psychological influence that the androcentric values of her culture have had on her and others. Our villain may be acting as a self-defined "moral authority," but, considering the general likability of her liberated victims, her morals seem grotesque and draconian from our perspective.</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Killer's Motivation:</span></i></b> The killer is Barney (Rutanya Alda), a flirty middle-aged waitress at the on-campus diner who also sometimes goes by the name Katie Cavanaugh, identifying her as the impossible identical female twin (!!) of convicted campus murderer Dickie Cavanaugh. After Dickie's suicide, Katie snaps, kidnapping his body to preserve in the diner's walk-in freezer and embarking on a bloody scavenger hunt of revenge against those "sluts" and "whores" who ruined her poor brother's life by cheating on him and driving him to the mad house. Her acts of revenge conflate all young women with Dickie's ex and blame the inconstancy of certain women for the culturally ingrained violent misogyny of men. We also discover that Dickie is innocent of the crime he was committed for; it turns out that it was actually Katie who took it upon herself to teach Dickie's ex a fatal lesson in female subordination way back when.<br />
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Besides all this weirdness, the most interesting characteristic about <i>Girl Nite Out'</i>s killer is her iconic costume. A mop-haired b-ball bear mascot with a protruding felt tongue and Freddy Kreuger-ish retractable claws might seem an odd choice for producing a menacing sight, but it's all quite effective in action. Moreover, the costume is an appropriate fit for the killer considering its prior context within the film and her ultimate aspirations. The costume formerly belonged to Benson, the campus's resident sleazy ladies' man, and we see him early on in costume groping and harassing various young women. By killing Benson and swiping his costume, Katie is able to do a bit of gender bending by inhabiting the role and outward appearance of the film's sex-crazed male. The fact that she uses this costume associated with the sexual harassment and objectification of women for the new purpose of doing physical violence to women demonstrates the frighteningly fine line separating these behaviors. Chalk another one up for "probably unintentional criticism of cultural values."</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Final Girl:</span></i></b> There's isn't one. Lynn (Julia Montgomery), quasi-hero Teddy's cheated-upon girlfriend, is our closest thing to a typical slasher heroine, but even she disappears long before the film's climax after she discovers the first corpse, making way for the film's true heroine to take center stage: Hal Holbrook as buxom campus security officer Jim MacVey.</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Evaluation:</span></i></b> <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087336/">Girls Nite Out </a></i>(a.k.a. <i>The Scaremaker</i>) is like if <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084522/">Porky's</a></i> (1982) were a slasher film. Yes, of course, any given slasher with a high school or college-aged cast of victims is destined to have at least a dollop of raunchy humor adorning the top of its entrails-stuffed casserole, but that's not what I'm getting at. <i>Girls Nite Out</i>'s resemblance to a sex comedy runs deeper than the presence of a few locker-room pow-wows and pairs of exposed bosoms, making it a uniquely strange entry in the early '80s slasher canon.<br />
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Can you remember the name of a single hero or heroine in any generic, run-of-the-mill '70s or '80s teen sex comedy? Can you remember the relationships between any of the characters, or any significant story developments surrounding them? Of course you can't. The teen sex comedies of the era were carefree, discursive, and episodic sojourns into grossly exaggerated versions of contemporary teenage life, periodically punctuated by tasteless gags and cartoonish slapstick, and thus they generally had no vested interest in narrative or character development beyond the bare essentials (i.e. Male Character starts out virgin, then gets laid; Female Character starts out a bookish prude, then takes off her top). The sex comedy's focus is less individuals and their stories are than the random and varied assemblage of cultural signifiers relevant to teenage life: beer, boobs, and basketballs; joints, junk food, and jock straps.<br />
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Contrary to their popular reputation as similarly shallow "dead teenager flicks," the majority of slasher films really don't follow the sex comedy's philosophy of disregarding story and character in favor of a scattered parade of indistinguishable teenagers doing teenage things. Certainly the slasher subgenre expresses a similar fondness for indistinguishable teens doing teenage things for <i>one</i> of its purposes: slasher films always need their victims. But, importantly, the subgenre is also littered with over-complicated (but more-or-less linear) mystery narratives and vulnerable, tortured protagonists who undergo radical transformations by way of their conflicts with their would-be killers. Essentially, the slasher film is obsessively concerned with story and character. Even the original <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080761/">Friday the 13th</a></i> (1980), a simplistic slasher with threadbare characters and bare-bone plot developments, distinguishes itself from the mindless spectacle of the average sex comedy through its emphasis on the repetition of local history and the presence (and enduring popularity) of its heroine.<br />
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The way in which <i>Girls Nite Out</i> operates places it closer in line with the sex comedy's philosophy than the slasher's. The film is presented as an episodic series of events in the lives of its rather large cast of college buffoons. Because we shift frequently and rapidly among the various characters' stories, we're given no genuine protagonists to follow, as even those characters whose names we bother to learn eventually disappear for long stretches of the film, if not entirely (wherefore art thou, Maniac?). Like the generic sex comedy, <i>Girls Nite Out</i> creates a viewing experience akin to that of being an invisible observer at an actual college party: we absorb every action and detail, but the context is nigh inscrutable, and we're unlikely to ever discover where everyone has wound up at the end of the night.<br />
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Ultimately, those recognizable elements of the slasher film that <i>Girls Nite Out</i> possesses (namely, the bloody local history of Dickie Cavanaugh and its ramifications in the present) are not inextricably tied into this episodic sex comedy plot. The killer isn't revealed to be anyone's second cousin. No heroine emerges to confront her literal and figurative demons. The party isn't even cut short because all the attendees are dead. In fact, whenever our bear costumed killer pops in to slaughter another student we're left feeling that she has intruded from an entirely different sort of film (a slasher film starring Hal Holbrook, principally) and swept away another nameless body. Luckily, the Alpha Chi Omega house won't be running out of those anytime soon, and the keg's far from dry.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5914772860062903280.post-34280058233524654102014-10-17T08:00:00.001-04:002014-10-17T08:00:13.324-04:00Slashtober 3-D (Part III): Curtains (1983) dir. Richard Ciupka<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Logline:</span></i></b> While in pre-production on his new film, director Johnathan Stryker (John Vernon) decides to ditch his old leading lady (Samantha Eggar) in a loony bin and invite six younger starlets to his private mansion for an intimate weekend of auditions to take her place. Unfortunately for the hopeful young actresses, they must contend not only with the exploitation and disappointment inherent in the film industry, but also with a scythe-wielding maniac in an old crone mask, looking to pull down the curtains hastily on each of their performances.</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Crime in the Past:</span></i></b> After securing the film rights to a hot new property, an aging actress prepares for the lead role by committing herself to an insane asylum to help with her method acting. Unfortunately, the director of the project decides to leave her there.</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Bodycount:</span></i></b> 8 hams who've overstayed their welcome get figuratively yanked off stage with a figurative hook.</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Themes/Moral Code:</span></i></b> Thematically, the film attacks the effects of show business on the female psyche. Simply put, showbiz (specifically, the men controlling it) drives women insane. First, women are driven mad trying to get into showbiz when they have to deal with the backstabbing of their equally desperate female competitors and the sexual advances of the male producers and directors who act as gatekeepers to employment (and who deem the women valuable not as talent but as young, warm bodies). Then, once (and if) they've entered into showbiz, the manipulation and exploitation continues, with actresses of all ages and levels of success putting their money, careers, and bodies into the control of the same horrible men, who are eager to toss these women aside once they've grown too old or served their purpose.<br />
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This is the combined fate of all our actresses in the film. Patti (Lynne Griffin) can't get a gig because she won't sleep with her directors. Christie (Lesleh Donaldson) has talent as an ice skater, but quickly learns that the only thing that matters in becoming an actress is her willingness to give away her body. Tara (Sandra Warren) has accepted her designated role as eye candy, and allows her exposed breasts to have more screen time than her voice. Brooke (Linda Thorson), an accomplished but somewhat older actress, is forced to embarrass herself by auditioning for (and sleeping with) the director. Finally, there's Samantha Sherwood, the aging actress who literally risks driving herself insane by committing herself to an insane asylum, <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-m2RY7ln-wI">Shock Corridor</a></i>-style, all for the sake of the role and her beloved director, only to be rejected upon her return.<br />
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Can these women be blamed for going a little nuts? </div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Killer's Motivation:</span></i></b> The killer, Patti, is driven by her willingness to do anything to win the role, even if it means knocking off the competition in the most deadly of fashions. We also know that she's lost roles repeatedly because of her refusal to play the skeevy casting couch (er, casting <i>Jacuzzi</i>) game with sleazy Hollywood bigshots. (Or, worse yet, she may have lost roles even <i>after </i>submitting to the casting couch game.) As she's also a stand-up comedian, Patti initially seems the least likely suspect among the assembled women, and also the least likely to win the coveted dramatic role of "Audra." It's clear that Patti has a hard time of things being a funny girl in a Dramatic Actor's world, but the film never convinces us that this frustration would propel her into full-bore straight-jacket insanity, instead of the clear-headed insanity of cold-blooded opportunism. Nevertheless, into the straight-jacket she goes, and the last time we see her she's giving her glassy-eyed comedy routine to a group of patients in the mental ward.<br />
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The film's quasi-red herring is, of course, Stryker's former muse Samantha, who has the best excuse for insanity and revenge. The killer's outfit, including a droopy old hag mask, is obviously meant to further this suspicion in our minds, as it could very likely represent a visual projection of Samantha's inner feelings about herself, scared as she is that Stryker is right, and that she is a worn-out old woman whose career has reached its end.<br />
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However, the hag mask could as easily have relevance to Patti and her feelings about her own age and the state of her career. While not as old as Samantha or the also accomplished Brooke, Patti isn't exactly young anymore either, and her complete lack of success as an actress probably has her fretting when she sees a younger crop of actresses, like Christie, enter the scene. Patti knows that the time one has to flourish as an actress in Hollywood is very limited, and that even the relatively young can be seen as grotesque hags after too long.</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Final Girl:</span></i></b> The last girl standing is our killer, as there's no room for final girls in the cutthroat world of show business, wherein any moral superiority is soon corrupted. Early on, Christie, in her youthful naivete, seems the likeliest candidate for elevation to final girl status, but almost as quickly as we begin to think so, we find that she has jumped into bed with Stryker. The aftermath might leave her in tears of regret, but those will only get you so far in a slasher film. Specifically, in Christie's case, as far as the next scene.</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Evaluation:</span></i></b> In the storm of press that followed <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085385/">Curtains</a></i>' recent and much-needed B<a href="http://synapse-films.com/synapse-films/curtains-blu-ray/">lu-ray and DVD release from Synapse Films</a>, many reviewers adopted the opinion of the film's cast and crew (as detailed in the special feature interviews and commentaries) that the film is an utter mess, the slipshod and barely comprehensible result of a troubled (director replaced! cast shake-ups!) and prolonged (3 years!) production. I think anyone who believes <i>Curtains</i> to be a trainwreck hasn't sufficiently plumbed the chaotic depths of low-budget horror cinema. </div>
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Certainly, the film is saddled with some dangling ends (what's Michael Wincott doing here?) and abrupt switches of tone and style (massive re-shoots with a different [non]director will do that), but what continues to surprise me most about <i>Curtains</i> is how complete of a film it feels, despite its production problems. Patchwork as it may be in reality, there's a coherent story in the finished <i>Curtains</i> that builds to a cheekily morbid crescendo. Along the way, the film is dotted with surrealism, satire, melodrama, cheesy exploitation, tasteless fake-outs, genuine chills, flashy setpieces, and mind-numbing chase sequences. The film crams in every commendable and lousy attribute that characterized the early '80s slasher, and the truly remarkable thing about it is that this strange brew feels intentional, as if it were all business as usual in the constricted, hysterical world populated by the vile Stryker and his batty ingenues. Editors Michael MacLaverty and Henry Richardson deserve a lot of credit for molding the disparate footage they had into the film's relatively cohesive whole.</div>
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Unlike the fun but fairly rote <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081383/">Prom Night</a></i> (producer Peter Simpson's other major contribution to slasher cinema), <i>Curtains</i> is a unique and (mostly) classy affair, steeped more thoroughly in the austere tradition of classic Agatha Christie murder mysteries than in contemporaneous dead teenager flicks. (Mark the hallmarks: a mostly adult cast of characters! a posh, isolated mansion location! wicked betrayals! bitter jealousies! a <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_Then_There_Were_None">Ten Little Indians</a></i> plot structure!) Add to this sense of class a healthy dose of self-awareness (the film proper is credited on-screen to the director within the film! the plot of the film itself appears to mirror that of Stryker's script! meta fake-outs galore!) and a handful of masterfully constructed slasher setpieces (icecapades! doll in the road!), and you're looking at one of the most satisfying, stylish oddball slashers of the subgenre's halcyon days. Even if its seams show.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5914772860062903280.post-64396764134068901462014-10-14T08:00:00.001-04:002014-10-14T08:00:00.730-04:00Slashtober 3-D (Part II): Just Before Dawn (1981) dir. Jeff Lieberman<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Logline:</span></i></b> Five young adults pack their gear in a van and head up into Oregon's scenic mountainous region to check out the property that one of their group, Warren (Greg Henry), has recently inherited. Unfortunately, the kids do not heed the warning to stay away, as given to them by kindly forest ranger Roy (George Kennedy) and his trusted horse, Agatha (Agatha the Horse). Thus, after crossing the rope bridge into terror, the group must contend with a maniacal killer (or is that killers?) in between setting up camp and skinny dipping.</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Crime in the Past:</span></i></b> Generations upon generations of inbreeding. Sure, sister-brother/child-parent coitus might not be against the "law" in their armpit of the woods, but it sure as heck turned out to be against nature. There are also faint intimations that the rural population of Oregon's mountain region has had disastrous run-ins with city folk before, though this possibility is not elaborated upon.</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Bodycount:</span></i></b> 6 souls are forced to "skadoot" from this mortal coil.</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Themes/Moral Code:</span></i></b> Being a backwoods slasher, the film tosses at us the standard issue urban vs. rural rigmarole. Warren, the leader of our gang of cool college city kids, is a "land baron" through family inheritance, and thus he and his companions believe they have a right to visit and occupy the forest and mountains for a weekend of fun. They don't stop to consider that the mountains might be home to any rural folk, and when they discover that this is the case, one of Warren's friends slyly remarks to him "Congrats, you're a landlord." See, these city slickers believe they can waltz into rural landscapes and take possession of them through use of their money and obscure legal system, and the film embarks on setting them straight (i.e. stabbing them). They'll learn that all the land deeds in the world don't mean squat if, as Sheriff Roy so eloquently puts it, "mountain can't read."<br />
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If you felt like stretching, you could also claim that the film has an environmentalist streak to it, arguing for the conservation of natural wilderness that is threatened by the encroachment of filthy, destructive human interests. For evidence, see the shot in which the boot belonging to one of the film's killers stomps down a piece of litter tossed onto the forest trail by the protagonists. Heavy stuff.</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Killer's Motivation:</span></i></b> Keep it in the family long enough, and that seed's gonna grow bad. Our killers are a pair of twins, and the products of inbreeding. (The birth of twins is a quite common occurrence among the mountain folk, we're told. We're left to assume why.) There's also the possibility that the twins are "devils" belonging to "the devil race," but what exactly that means isn't elaborated upon. Unlike their skittish but harmless peers, these hillbillies like to kill any and all intruders into their domain, for reasons unspecified. They're the strong, husky, mostly silent type. (Only mostly silent because they do frequently giggle out <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKm5xQyD2vE">the raspy snicker of Muttley</a>, Dick Dastardly's canine companion on <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wacky_Races">Wacky Races</a></i> [1968-1969].)<br />
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Though uncomplicated villains, they certainly are frightful when glimpsed as hulking, obscured figures in the background of various shots. Moreover, their dual identity lends itself to the film's best trick: the surprise revelation (about halfway through) that the killer we thought was flying solo had a wingman all along.</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Final Girl:</span></i></b> Our final girl for this particular jaunt into the madman-infested forest is Constance (Deborah Benson), Warren's girlfriend. She possesses many of the hallmarks of the archetypal final girl. She's attractive but plain and a bit tomboyish, maybe even prudish. (She's contrasted with the other female on the trip, Megan [Jamie Rose], who goes skinny dipping the first opportunity she receives (while Constance builds a campfire) and whines to the trees about the local wildlife thieving her makeup in the night.) She's a lover of animals. She's more responsible and cautious than her fellow travelers, wanting to abandon their weekend plans long before the others do. Finally, she's also the first to realize the actual danger of their collective situation.<br />
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But by the film's conclusion, Constance emerges as one of the more complicated final girls of the early slasher years. Like most final girls, Constance grows in strength and resilience against the killer, and she ultimately dispatches him through the reversal of symbolic phallic power. Here, this reversal is construed as a fist and upper arm straight down the killer's gullet, making her victory one of the most viscerally and physically powerful in the slasher's history. Yet, bizarrely, this adoption of stereotypically masculine strength comes at the height of her "femininity": this whole final sequence occurs immediately after Constance emerges from a tent wearing makeup for the first time in the film and dressed in Megan's booty-revealing shorts. Strangely, it seems as if Constance's more outwardly "masculine" characteristics were holding her back, making her, as she explains earlier in the film, helpless to save herself. Only by embracing her femininity is she able to become the Amazonian warrior she always was deep inside.<br />
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This is a total inversion of the final girl syndrome. Femininity is championed, and masculinity devalued. Where is Warren, Constance's cocky and superficially tough boyfriend, all throughout her fight with the surviving killer? He's lying on the ground in abject fear, cradling his wound and weeping, unable or unwilling to assist while his girlfriend completes the manly heroic task. After the conflict has ended, Warren (still crying and moaning uncontrollably) stumbles into her as she stands dazed but victorious over her vanquished foe. To her great credit, she doesn't hug him back.</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Evaluation:</span></i></b> Jeff Lieberman-- <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Lieberman_(roboticist)">not the roboticist</a>, of course, but the (hmm) <i>auteur</i> behind <i><a href="http://nessuntimore.blogspot.com/2013/01/squirm-1976-dir-jeff-lieberman.html">Squirm</a></i> (1976) and <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074226/">Blue Sunshine</a></i> (1978)-- created in 1981 what is quite possibly the finest backwoods slasher outside of the obvious prestige of the sub-subgenre's granddaddy, <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068473/">Deliverance</a></i> (1972). <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082592/">Just Before Dawn</a></i> isn't highly regarded by slasher connoisseurs because of its gargantuan body count or gnarly practical gore effects. The cast of victims is small, the methods of dispatching them far from outlandish, and the bloodshed minimal (though the film does have one particularly memorable piece of effects work in its final moments. Hint: gulp). Nor is the film esteemed because of wacky plot developments or a colorful cast of bit characters (though the presence of George Kennedy, with his horse Agatha and his amateur green thumb, doesn't hurt).<br />
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Rather, what sets <i>Just Before Dawn</i> apart from dopier backwoods fare like <i><a href="http://nessuntimore.blogspot.com/2012/10/slashtober-prey-1984-dir-edwin-brown.html">The Prey</a></i> (1984), <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0182996/">Don't Go in the Woods... Alone!</a></i> (1981), and <i><a href="http://nessuntimore.blogspot.com/2012/04/final-terror-1983-dir-andrew-davis.html">The Final Terror</a></i> (1983) is its emphasis on capital "A" Atmosphere. Employing the classic (though rarely [successfully] imitated) <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077651/">Halloween</a></i> (1978) style, tension and suspense dominate Lieberman's film, leaving the murders as punctuation marks rather than film-justifying setpieces. Instead, the film revels in agonizingly protracted chases through the forest and subtle, blink-and-miss glimpses of our lurking menace(s) at the sides of the frame. And speaking of John Carpenter, keep your ears perked for those pulsating Carpenter-esque synth chords that ring off the film's mountains. And speaking of those mountains, let's not neglect to note that <i>Just Before Dawn</i> is a vibrantly lensed film, despite its requisite small budget, thanks to the location shooting in Oregon's gorgeous Silver Falls State Park. Few slasher films have the means or access to fill their frames with to majestic waterfalls, and so they settle for filling them with exposed breasts instead. Aware of its advantage, <i>Just Before Dawn</i> gives you both in the same shot.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5914772860062903280.post-26302316365064974592014-10-10T08:00:00.002-04:002014-10-10T08:00:01.321-04:00Slashtober 3-D (Part I):The Prowler (1981) dir. Joseph Zito<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Logline:</span></i></b> In the summer of 1945, the small New Jersey town of Avalon Bay was shocked by the gruesome double murder of two young lovers during the local graduation dance by an unknown assailant. Thirty-five dance-less years later, a group of college co-eds resolves to revive the town's abandoned graduation celebration despite the fact that it's the year 1980 and, as such, they'd probably all be happier off at a house party somewhere with a keg and "Funkytown" blaring on the stereo. Nevertheless: with the local sheriff (Farley Granger) away on a fishing trip, the combat-geared killer of thirty years prior is primed for his big, pitchfork-laden comeback. The residents of Avalon Bay are advised to check their bushes for <i>The Prowler</i>.</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Crime in the Past:</span></i></b> Can we fault Rosemary (Joy Glaccum) for ditching her GI boyfriend, off fighting overseas in World War II, through one of the era's many Dear John letters? She makes a strong case for her own innocence: she's a young girl, and she had resolved (okay, sure, "promised") to wait for her beau to return from the war, but boy that war sure is going on for a long time and she's not going to be young forever, you know? In this case, distance (or thousands of miles of ocean and war-torn European countryside) does not make the heart grow fonder. It's a bum situation, but Rosemary handles it with surprising maturity in her letter, which we have read to us through voice-over. She lets her unnamed high school lover down lightly, explaining her sympathetic dilemma and expressing her hope that they can still be friends when he returns. Rosemary's is not the <i>best</i> way to show appreciation for this particular Nazi-pummeling Defender of the American Way, but it's her choice, and she's honest, respectful, and realistic about their situation. </div>
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So it's really rude that her former lover, upon his disembarkation from the Queen Mary, mails a pitchfork through the beating chests of Rosemary and her new boyfriend, Roy (Timothy Wahrer), at the 1945 graduation dance as his form of a reply letter. The USPS would deliver anything in those days.</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Bodycount:</span></i></b> 8 Dear... (er) <i>Dead</i> Johns.</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Themes/Moral Code:</span></i></b> In most ways, <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082951">The Prowler</a></i>'s moral code is about as prudish as you'd expect: vodka, condoms, and rolling papers litter the trail to slasher hell. Bawdy college students of both sexes (though with special emphasis placed on the women) are punished for their transgressions, which are as various as flashing old men in wheelchairs, spiking the punch at the dance, and canoodling in the shower.<br />
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That said, the film does feature a few moments that undermine the typical slasher audience's expectations. For instance, consider the surprise arrival of creepy big lug Otto (Bill Hugh Collins) wielding a shotgun in the final act. Though a red herring for the killer in his early appearances, here he arrives as a hero, attempting to assist Pam (Vicky Dawson) in her tussle with the killer. "Attempting" is the key word, for Otto is almost immediately murdered by the killer after making his presence known, shattering our sense of momentary peace and prolonging the finale. With Otto dead and her boyfriend deputy, Mark (Christopher Goutman), lying unconscious in the other room, Pam is made of aware of the fact that the cinematic world she's living in is not one in which gallant men ride into the scene and save the day. This maiden will have to fend for herself.<br />
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Also reflect upon the moment that transpires just before the credits roll. Pam, relieved and exhausted after her victory against the killer, returns to her dorm room and discovers the still-living, lobotomized body of a friend of hers (and one the killer's victims) strung up in the showers. In this <i>Carrie</i>-inspired stinger, the poor boy reaches out towards Pam and the camera as if he were an undead creature, but in reality he's gasping for assistance. We realize he's been hanging around in that steamy tomb, hovering above his girlfriend's corpse with a belt around his neck, for almost the film's duration, and only now, at the conclusion, is his suffering allowed to end. This brief coda reminds us, in a rather chilling way, of the massive death toll that is often forgotten by the audience of slasher films and by the characters within them as the action rushes towards the final conflict. Forgetting the killer's demise and whatever little catharsis that brings, there's no happy ending in <i>The Prowler.</i> Just a lot of bodies.</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Killer's Motivation:</span></i></b> Our killer in both 1945 and 1980 is none other than our sheriff, George Fraser. His identity as the killer isn't exactly difficult to guess: the actor playing him, Farley Granger, is the film's only marquee name, and his early excuse of "Gone fishin'!" to explain his absence for the bulk of the film is about as subtle as "Gone slaughterin' the innocents!" We might imagine that his motivation for killing his ex-girlfriend Rosemary and her new, obnoxious boyfriend back in 1945 was due to rage and jealousy fueled by the misogynistic, macho bullshit expectation of men's possession of women as objects. Or, perhaps, we might imagine that he was merely homicidally offended that of all the other dudes she could have chosen over him, she chose the jackass Roy, whose proudest accomplishment is his access to his father's checkbook.<br />
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But, nah. This killing is no rational act. Georgie Boy seems to have suffered some sort of war trauma (witness his preference for killing in full combat gear) and has now psychotically associated it with the end of his romantic relationship. Suiting up in his murdering garb for him is like preparing to head into battle, and his enemies are young lovers everywhere. The revival of Avalon Bay's college dance awakens George's psychotic personality from its decades-long slumber, forcing him to relive that fateful night in 1945. As we see, he mistakes every girl he comes across for his once-beloved Rosemary, and thus must once again plunge the pitchfork into her heart and into his own.<br />
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The killer also seems to have a particular hang-up about young women submerged in water. That one I can't explain. He hates the juxtaposition of water as the symbol of purity with the nubile bodies of sexually-active women? We've dived too deep, I fear...</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Final Girl:</span></i></b> Pam is textbook. She's pretty, but not as conventionally pretty as her girlfriends. She's more motivated than her friends, as she demonstrates by spearheading the planning for the dance. She doesn't take part in the other teens' hanky-panky, nor does she imbibe alcohol or controlled substances. She's squeaky-clean. She's dating an older guy, Deputy Mark, and squabbles with him over his giving more attention to the other girls. (Perhaps, in grand final girl tradition, Pam doesn't put out.) Best of all, she's also an amateur sleuth, narrowing down the list of suspects quicker than the police manage to. When her strength is called upon, she goes at it with the killer and winds up blowing his face off with a shotgun. Pam is everything a final girl is prescribed to be, and that makes her a crushing bore.</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Evaluation:</span></i></b> <i>The Prowler</i> is a personal favorite, but I would never deny that it's an acquired pitchfork to the gut. Director Joseph Zito (he of <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087298/">Friday the 13th Part IV: The Final Friday</a> </i>[1984], and a few Chuck Norris, Dolph Lundgren, and Gary Daniels action films) must have had a reputation on set for falling asleep on set and thus neglecting to communicate his directions to the actors. How else to explain the many unending sequences of characters aimlessly wandering through a handful of locations, discovering and accomplishing nothing? Could he have possibly imagined he was hired to direct a documentary on the formation of cobwebs? These laborious, suspense-free stretches of the film (seriously, they might make up as much as 1/4 of the running time) are so patience-testing that they're certain to turn off all but the most tolerant of viewers. In fear of having these moments transform the whole affair into cinematic molasses, editor Joel Goodman goes so far as to cut into them unrelated shots of the killer wandering around. But we're not fooled: this thing is <i>padded</i>, and it knows it.<br />
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But when it's not wasting our time, it's one the bizarro greats. Arguments for the defense: a) it's a partial <i>period piece</i> slasher, the most rarefied of its kind, b) it features some of Tom Savini's most brutal practical gore, and it utilizes these moments exceptionally well (like little shots of adrenaline to perk us up out of our collective slumber), c) and it boasts a wickedly bleak sense of humor that demonstrates a willingness to play around with the subgenre's conventions, even if only subtly (see: Themes/Moral Code section above or the opening "heeey, are you alive out there?!" type smash cuts, but particularly see Bill Nunnery as the character of "Hotel Clerk" about half way through the film, in one of the longest and most gleefully infuriating bits of character weirdness in all of slasherdom). <i>The Prowler</i> might suffer a few cuts and bruises while on its prowl, but it sure succeeds in breaking into my house every October.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5914772860062903280.post-62656207896614332032014-10-07T08:00:00.000-04:002014-10-07T08:00:02.214-04:00ESSAY: Who's S-S-Scared?: The Scooby Doo Gialli<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The second issue of the <i><a href="http://www.cinemasomnambulist.com/search/label/Fang%20Of%20Joy">Fang of Joy</a></i> fanzine is hot of the presses (indeed, actual presses [of a sort] were involved this time!). Included within it, among fine pieces from <a href="http://ridingthenightmare.blogspot.com/">Jose Cruz</a>, <a href="http://creatures-of-light-and-darkness.blogspot.com/">Simon Wright</a>, <a href="http://yellowrazor.blogspot.com/">Brad Hogue</a>, one <a href="http://www.cinemasomnambulist.com/">Richard Glenn Schmidt</a>, and many others, is a zine-exclusive essay by yours truly on a particular sub-subgenre of Italian horror-thrillers that I've christened The Scooby-Doo Gialli. Check out the first few paragraphs below and then watch a trailer I've prepared in order to get your further pumped up for your forthcoming purchase. (Is this the first time anyone has bothered to make a trailer for an essay? Is my pat on the back traveling through the post to me as we speak?):</div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;"><i><span style="font-size: large;">"</span>On Saturday morning, September 13th, 1969, American CBS stations aired “What a Night for a Knight,” the first episode of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon </i><b>Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!</b><i> The series would run for 25 episodes, concluding on Halloween of 1970. Each adventure more or less invariably found the meddling teens and gluttonous Great Dane of Mystery Incorporated breaking down in some remote American township and catching wind of a supernatural baddie haunting the area. After much spooking, munching, chasing, and sleuthing, the gang would discover that the supernatural villain of the week was no such thing: it was, instead, always a human in an elaborate costume, scheming towards some money-making human end.</i></span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;"><i>Then, in the early-to-mid-1970s, several Italian and Spanish giallo horror-thrillers—with titles like </i><b>The Red Queen Kills 7 Times</b><i>, </i><b>The Etruscan Kills Again</b><i>, and </i><b>Murder Mansion</b><i>—employed a similar structure on the silver screen, incorporating faux-supernatural menaces into their convoluted plots as cover for nefarious inheritance schemes and psychosexual serial murder. Sure, you’d be hard pressed to spot a van full of adolescent gumshoes anywhere in these films, but the preponderance of red-haired leading ladies and sandy-maned, ascot-wearing pretty boys is certainly suspicious.</i></span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;"><i>Was it merely a coincidence that these faux-supernatural gialli began cropping up immediately after </i><b>Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!</b><i> concluded its run on television?</i></span></div>
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<i><span style="color: #c92121;">Well, probably...<span style="font-size: large;">"</span></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">Read more by <a href="http://www.ebay.com/itm/111477743769?ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&_trksid=p3984.m1555.l2649">purchasing <i>Fang of Joy</i> Issue #2</a> for a low, one-time payment of $6.</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5914772860062903280.post-17413717381385287652014-10-02T08:00:00.000-04:002014-10-02T08:00:02.242-04:00A Dreadful Decade (Part X): Toad Road (2012) dir. Jason Banker<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Logline:</span></i></b> After meeting James (James Davidson) and his close-knit group of drug-taking layabouts, the once clean-cut Sara (Sara Anne Jones) soon spirals into substance dependency. But when Sara begins searching for a high that will break down the walls of perception and elevate her into another realm of existence, James grows concerned about the radical shift in her behavior. He's especially worried about her desire to test out an old York, Pennsylvania, urban legend, that of the Seven Gates of Hell erected (literally or figuratively) deep within the woods. No one has made it all the way to the seventh gate and entered into hell, but Sara is determined to cross the barrier, with or without James' help.</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Analysis:</span></i></b> There's a strong temptation to read <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2076372/">Toad Road</a></i> as a stern note of caution against escalating drug use and addiction, but that would be ignoring the reality of the lives that the film presents us with: if not for the temporary release provided by drugs, and if not for the potential they might hold for opening up gateways to better worlds, then <i>what else is there</i>? We learn that James' parents are worried that his aimless, drug-taking friends are having a bad influence on him, but the truth is that James and his friends are drawn together because they're all equally unmoored from the lives expected of them. We see, particularly during Sara's induction into this group of friends, that no one in this ragtag group of kindred spirits is pressured into doing drugs. Rather, they all independently seek out the temporary escape from their lives that mind and senses-altering substances provide for them, and their association with one another is more akin to a support group than an influential social circle.<br />
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The film doesn't condemn or condone these young adults' use of drugs, but it does question the efficacy of their actions. Are they actually achieving liberation from their lives, or merely casting themselves into a sort of purgatory? As Sara explores her hunger for new chemical experiences, to the growing concern of even her constantly narcotized friends, she decides to discover the answer by achieving the ultimate high: an encounter with hell itself. She's determined to pass through the gates of hell symbolized by the town's local urban legend of Toad Road, which James references as a metaphor for the point of no return that one can fall into through irresponsible drug use but which Sara sees as a literal exit. This difference of outlook is the death knell for their romantic relationship, as James isn't brave (or misguided?) enough to take his recreational drug use and temporary sojourns from reality to their extreme. Instead, he imagines out loud the lives that he and Sara might be able to lead together: they can move away and start anew, he can go to college like her, and maybe they'll even get good jobs one day. Sara reminds him that she's failing out of school; she's moved far past the desire for leading a conventional life.<br />
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After Sara has slipped through the seven gates, abandoning James, her disembodied voice seems to report back with her findings. As she passed through each successive gate, a little bit more of her previous life-- her self-doubt, pain, disappointed parents, fractured relationships-- faded from existence, replaced by nothingness, through which she gained power. Past the final gate, Sara experienced the embrace of "a black void," offering "ultimate solitude." But, if so, how can she communicate this information from her state of solitude back to us, those imprisoned souls who have refused to pass into hell? Are these words we hear her own, or merely James' imaginings, as he's left behind with his guilt and numbness and only able to hope for the best? We never see the other side that Sara allegedly passes over to, nor the other possibilities it might have to offer, even if those "possibilities" are no more complicated than the oblivion accompanying death. What we do see is life grinding on for James and his wayward friends, and a decided lack of improvement in their situations. And, after long enough, not even the drugs help anymore.</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Technical Merits:</span></i></b> <i>Toad Road</i> exists as a curious hybrid of style and genre, in part documentary, found footage, low budget drama, and psychological horror. Director Jason Banker, who also wrote the film and acted as its cinematographer, blends <i>Cinéma vérité </i>documentary footage of his cast of non-actors going about their aimless daily business with scripted scenes of those same non-actors contemplating their actions, relationships, and futures. The obvious ease with which the actors perform in the authentic hangout and party scenes provides a nice thematic contrast with the discomfort they appear to display when grappling with the somewhat stilted dramatic scenes, as they endearingly stumble their way through the words written for them. Like the actors who portray them, these characters act more naturally when under the influence of the artificial haze produced by drug and alcohol consumption than they do within the confines of the scripted "reality" that forces them to consider their relationship troubles, family issues, poverty, and collective inability to lead "normal" lives. The film's style is such that the characters' words seem false and contrived whenever they're required to deal with existence beyond the next high or juvenile gag. And that's appropriate, because for them adulthood is a role for which they are poorly suited. When, in one of the film's scripted scenes, James lays out his sketchy plans for attaining a "normal life," he sounds like he's stealing half-remembered lines he once overheard from a bad movie. But when he's having Vicks blown into eyes during one of the many documentary sequences, and he breaks out in tears at the bizarre physical sensation it's producing within him, we witness an uncomfortable human rawness that couldn't be captured in the performance of any actor.</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Relevance:</span></i></b> This is reality horror. <i>Toad Road </i>captures the meandering, blitzed out lives of its very real characters with uncanny, documentary precision. Because the film is, in part, a document of its actors' actual lives, it also stands as a universalizing summation of the general malaise felt by so many emotionally deadened suburban teens and twentysomethings. I knew a version of every one of the film's developmentally stunted characters back in high school. Our parties looked exactly like the parties they throw (with fewer hard drugs, maybe), and our stunts and pranks were much like theirs. Our interactions were as shallow, and our prospects about as promising. We even had <a href="http://www.weirdus.com/states/new_york/road_less_traveled/whiskey_hollow_road/index.php">our own urban legend out in the woods</a>, and our own ill-advised adventures bent on testing out its reality. The film understands, as we implicitly did, that the societal expectations for those youths of the mid-to-lower middle class to develop into "normal human beings" can be crippling, and that the appeal of simply slipping away from it all, by aide of illicit substances or by some worse method, is difficult to ignore. That the film can't settle upon which fate is worse-- oblivion or the average life of an American adult-- points towards an existential horror that's far more chilling than any monster creeping in the forest.<br />
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The real life <a href="http://www.vocativ.com/culture/uncategorized/american-ghost-story-brief-eerie-life-sara-anne-jones/">death of actress Sara Anne Jones</a> from a drug overdose not long after the film's completion stands as a tragic, melancholy reinforcement of the film's observations, and it situates the fictional action as a truer reflection of reality than we might like to admit. <i>Toad Road</i> is haunted by Jones's ethereal image. (Eerily, the last time we see her in the film, she's swallowed up by a gigantic video distortion leading to hell, as if the medium itself has consumed both character and actress.) If we are aware of Jones's death going into <i>Toad Road</i>, her presence compels us to wonder about the validity of her character's claims. Is there an alternative to the existence we're pressured to embrace? Is it possible to enter hell and emerge out the other end, into the possibility of "something better, something real"? Or do we, in our search for that other plane of existence, only manage to kill ourselves, out of frustration, ennui, or fear? We can't possibly know. The fictional Sara and the actual Sara aren't around to tell us, and we're left, like James is, slamming our fists uselessly against the foundations of the unfinished structures we've built around us, hoping for it all to collapse but knowing it won't.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5914772860062903280.post-25315859387379805472014-09-26T08:00:00.000-04:002014-09-26T10:15:20.383-04:00A Dreadful Decade (Part IX): The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh (2012) dir. Rodrigo Gudiño<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Logline:</span></i></b> After inheriting the estate of his estranged mother (Vanessa Redgrave) upon her death, Leon Leigh (Aaron Poole) visits her empty home to gain a sense of closure to their unresolved relationship. Alone in the house and surrounded by her collection of occult relics and decorations, Leon begins to recall his traumatic childhood, during which his mother incessantly tried to induct him into the bizarre cult of angels that she and her husband belonged to. Over the course of the night, the ghosts of Leon's past and the monsters of his present will converge in order to test the strength of his disbelief.</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Analysis:</span></i></b> There are two different interpretations that we are encouraged to read from Leon Leigh's journey back through his tortured personal history and decayed family relationships. Rather than being antithetical to one another, these separate readings are both required pieces of the same sad puzzle.<br />
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At first, we're encouraged to read the haunting that Leon experiences while spending the night in his mother's home as symbolic of him confronting the trauma of his childhood spent with her. We learn as the film progresses that Rosalind subjected the juvenile Leon to borderline sadistic "games" that sought to pressure him into becoming a believer of her occult faith in the power of angels. The rift that formed between mother and son was caused by Leon's steadfast refusal to "play" his mother's game and his eventual flight away from the oppressive coercion she placed upon him at home. Now, separated from his experience for many years, Leon begins to subconsciously doubt his decision, despite his outward gestures demonstrating his continued agreement with the conclusions of his younger self (e.g. putting his cigarette out in an angel statue's stone eye). Leon begins to fear that his mother was right, and that by turning his back on the angels of her faith he has encouraged the angels to give up protecting him from the horrors of the world. Thus, the horrors of the world come scraping at the front door, in the form of a snarling, impossibly long-limbed cat-beast, a creature that could have oozed its sickeningly hairy form from the pages of one of M. R. James's tales. Thanks in part to the rationalizing psychological advice of his girlfriend/therapist as given through various phone conversations over the course his harrowing night, Leon is eventually able to shake off his frightening hallucinations and renew his conviction in the falseness of his mother's beliefs, ridding himself of her cloying spirit and his lingering self-doubts in the process. As a final gesture indicating that he's ready to move on, Leon announces his intentions to sell off every bit of Rosalind's property. This chapter of his life has been completed.<br />
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But the film's final moments provide us with the second interpretation of the events that have transpired. Rosalind, who has been speaking to us throughout the film as a disembodied voice on the soundtrack, finally reveals her words as emanating from beyond the grave, rather than from the written last will and testament of the title. From her restless spirit, we learn of her suicide, and how it was motivated by her son's unwillingness to forgive her, the loss of faith that accompanied her belief's inability to set things right, and the subsequent loneliness that crept up on her, "like an animal ready to pounce," over the years spent without her beloved son. We learn that in her continuously cruel desperation to coerce and control her son's feelings, she leaves Leon a suicide note reading, "Do you miss me as much as I miss you?" Finally, we learn that Leon never reads the note, for he never deigns to visit her accursed home, even after she bequeaths it to him. The Leon of the film is Rosalind's fantasy, an imaginative torture she puts herself through nightly as she watches, again and again, her son abandon her and her beliefs, even as she cries out pitifully for him to stay. The ghost becomes the haunted, and rightfully so. Rosalind's inability to understand the effect of her actions on her son, and thus her unwillingness to seek forgiveness or change her ways, marks her for her haunted fate. We could call this existence Rosalind has made for herself a sort of hell, but perhaps not: in her imagination, at least Leon wills himself to remember her, if only for a night.</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Technical Merits:</span></i></b> <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2332831/">The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh</a></i> is writer/director/<i><a href="http://www.rue-morgue.com/">Rue Morgue Magazine</a></i> founder and president Rodrigo Gudiño's first full-length feature film, produced after creating only a handful of short films prior. Though inventive, his shorts lack the substance to elevate them above their visual gimmicks. What is so surprising about <i>Rosalind Leigh</i>, then, is how confident, controlled, and deliberate its style feels, and what a boon it is to the film's realization of its narrative. Though minimalist by design and budgetary necessity, the film hardly feels like an apprentice effort. Gudiño effortlessly blends long takes, voice-over storytelling, found footage, single location shooting, dodgy (but well-masked) CGI, and documentary-esque explorations of visual space as if to do so were his second nature. You could label the film's freewheeling, ever-evolving style as the product of an overeager first-time filmmaker wanting to cram all of his newly learned tricks in at once, but that feels to me like the wrong assessment. There's a clarity of purpose in the film's every wild and unexpected stylistic shift, as it seeks to make strange once again the horror stories and situations that we've become overly familiar with. I don't necessarily understand every one of Gudiño's stylistic choices (uh, opening credits over the little brother of Kubrick's cosmic fetus?), but I suspect he has his reasons. And, even if not, the cumulative effect of the film's technical experimentation is a breed of weird I can still get behind<br />
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Pared down to its bones, <i>Rosalind Leigh</i> contains no plot development or horror set-piece that we could call wholly unique, but the myriad ways in which these familiar elements are presented to us sure make them feel that way. An example: a character calls up a home security company to review the footage from the camera outside the front door of the house he's in. We've seen this scene before in other horror films, and we know it might (very likely) end with the discovery of some fiend or creature barely visible somewhere within the frame of the blurry footage. Gudiño makes this typical scene strange by a) implying vaguely, and without future consequence, through religious music on hold and creepy amateur web design that the security company is run by the mysterious angel cult, b) presenting the customer service representative on the other line as a strangely lifelike computer-generated voice that can seemingly respond to complex human language commands, and c) having this impossibly strange computer <i>be voiced by the very same actor who is speaking to it over the phone. </i>Nothing of any particularly horrific value occurs during this scene, plot-wise -- unless you find a man on the phone sitting at a computer to be a terrifying sight in and of itself -- but the film's off-kilter presentation of the action makes it one of many uniquely disquieting scenes sown throughout the film, sprouting strangeness.<br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Relevance:</span></i></b> As a single-location, (more-or-less) single-actor horror film, <i>Rosalind Leigh</i> bears a certain resemblance to the excellent middle portions of the two adaptations of Susan Hill's <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098672/">The Woman in Black</a></i> (1989; 2012), in which our lone protagonist wanders around the dreary home of a now-deceased occupant and uncovers curiosities, documents, and recordings that reveal a macabre secret history underlying the present day narrative. But unlike both versions of <i>The Woman in Black</i>, <i>Rosalind Leigh</i> realizes that the isolation and anxiety produced by this haunted ramble can be intensified by never leaving the property. We're given no respite from the subtle terrors lining the walls and lurking behind every door of Rosalind Leigh's <i>unheimlich</i> abode, and this helps make the film one of the stronger examples of horror cinema fascinated with architecture and physical space. Like <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081505/">The Shining</a></i>'s Overlook Hotel, <i><a href="http://nessuntimore.blogspot.com/2014/09/a-dreadful-decade-part-vii-innkeepers.html">The Innkeepers</a></i>' Yankee Pedlar Inn, or <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0261983/">Session 9</a></i>'s Danvers State Hospital, Rosalind Leigh's grotesque home is essentially the film's secondary protagonist, and exploring the very form and atmosphere of this space provides many of the film's most suffocating terrors. (And, again, unlike those other films, <i>Rosalind Leigh</i> never allows us to fill our lungs with the air from any other location, not even for a moment.)<br />
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Also of interest to horror fans is <i>Rosalind Leigh</i>'s exploration of the relatively untapped potential of angels as objects of horror. Sure, we can't help but see shades of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByPrDPbdRhc"><i>Doctor Who</i>'s Weeping Angels</a> in the possibly animate angel statues of Gudiño's film, but the defining characteristic of <i>Rosalind Leigh</i> 's angels (besides them not being, well, <i>time-energy feeding</i> <i>aliens</i>) is how creepy they act while ostensibly trying to save our souls from an afterlife of torment. That's an impressive feat. The film employs its angels as symbols of the uneasiness you feel when a little old lady on the street hands you a church pamphlet while cheerily informing you that you're going to burn in hell. The horror of these angelic figures is generated from the jarring disconnect between the dual religious messages they impart to their victims, alternately turned towards them with open arms and turned away with grimaces carved upon their faces: If you believe in me, I will comfort and protect you; If you disbelieve, fear the worst. These are the sort of benignly horrific angels that cinema could use more of. They're a welcome development away from the mopey badass angels of <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114194/">The Prophecy</a></i> (1995) and <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1038686/">Legion</a></i> (2010), and they're just about as frightening as a winged John Travolta in <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117038/">Michael</a></i> (1996).<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5914772860062903280.post-8975782687128700612014-09-17T08:00:00.000-04:002014-09-18T00:05:50.340-04:00A Dreadful Decade (Part VIII): Absentia (2011) dir. Mike Flanagan<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Logline:</span></i></b> Seven years after her husband vanished without a trace and with his death now having been declared <i>in absentia</i>, Tricia (Courtney Bell) is finally beginning to move on with her life, despite feeling haunted by his absence. She's pregnant with her first child, involved in a new romance, and reconnecting with her long-estranged younger sister, Callie (Katie Parker). But when her husband, Daniel (Morgan Peter Brown), appears bloody, malnourished, and traumatized on the street in front of their home, Tricia's life is once again thrown into confusion and turmoil. Where has Daniel been for the past near decade, and what does his disappearance have to do with the large number of missing persons in the immediate area over the past century? The answers lie within the walls of a dark cement tunnel, underneath the reality we perceive, in a fantastic hell of unearthly origins.</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Analysis:</span></i></b> <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1610996/">Absentia</a> </i>is a film about loss, grief, and the ghosts of past shames haunting us in the present. It's a film about sisterhood, family, and sacrifice. Perhaps strangely, it's also a film about the cruelty of a greedy bridge troll. Well, as we learn, it looks a little more like a silverfish than Shrek, but a troll nonetheless. Fortunately, the film's emphasis isn't placed on exploring the wickedness of a fairy tale monster, but on examining the sad lives of the gruff goats the troll gobbles up in his hunger. Though the film takes the Norwegian fairy tale "<a href="http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0122e.html">Three Billy Goats Gruff</a>" as its partial inspiration, we're left to experience the alternate version, in which the goats fail to outsmart their adversary. We're watching the previous goats, the ones who attempted to cross the bridge before the fairy tale proper begins: the goats whose lives gave the troll its reputation for voraciousness.</div>
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These are battered, broken characters, hobbled by their addictions, mistakes, and regrets. Tricia has lost seven years of her life searching for and mourning over her lost husband, whom she never really loved to begin with. (They were high school sweethearts, we learn, and their marriage was a rash and unhappy decision.) Callie has been adrift for most of her adult life, struggling with drugs and doomed romantic relationships, all while alienating herself from her family and loved ones. Both seek solace through various methods (Tricia through rounds of therapy and meditation; Callie through religion), but both cannot escape their demons (Tricia is haunted by visions of her accusatory husband; Callie keeps her emergency stash in a jewelry box beneath her crucifix). Their lives are not happy ones, and just when things begin to look up (the sisters reconnect, a baby is on the way, a romance is in bloom, a new house is being hunted for, a fresh start is on the horizon), life kicks them off the figurative bridge into the muck: Daniel returns and then disappears once more, Callie starts using again (or at least everyone assumes-- and always will assume-- she has), romance is ruined, plans are scrapped, and trust and faith evaporate.</div>
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The film's tagline proclaims, "There are fates worse than death." True: there's always life. What option do Tricia, Callie, and even Daniel have but to absent themselves from their situations, to retreat to a realm that's not quite death but far from the disappointments of earthly existence? In their turns, all three are spirited away to a subterranean nether realm, existing beyond the laws of matter and possibly time. But, you might be asking, isn't this all the fault of that greedy troll and his famous appetite for those who wander onto his terrain by mistake? Surely these three weren't asking for their grim fates. Ah, but a counterargument: consider how easy it is for those characters who remain to justify away the absence of those missing, to imagine the hundred reasons they would have to simply disappear. When Callie attempts a trade with the troll for Tricia and her unborn infant, we might commend her selflessness for offering up herself first, instead of the customary neighborhood pets. But is it selflessness of selfishness? Is Callie envious of her sister's tortured quasi-oblivion? It might seem the cruelest trick when the troll spits out only Tricia's unborn fetus in response to Callie's offer before collecting its flesh bounty from her, but perhaps it's not a trick at all. Perhaps Tricia is precisely where she wants to be, absent from the pains of the past seven years. And as for Callie, it's telling that our last image of her in the film is a tranquil one, shot from behind and through the strange perspective of the realm she now inhabits, looking out into what she used to know as her cursed reality. We see that her new keeper has its insectile arm draped lightly over her shoulders, as if in comfort.</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Technical Merits:</span></i></b> <i>Absentia</i> is a testament to the potential effectiveness of horror on a limited budget, With over a third of its production funds crowdsourced from a Kickstarter campaign, the film didn't have an inordinate amount of money to play around with, but writer/director/editor Mike Flanagan sure makes the most of his pennies. Unable to afford lavish special effects to create the film's eerie subterranean netherworld or its mammoth insect overseer, Flangan and his cinematographer choose to employ suggestion and subtlety (those oft forgotten tricks of the trade) in those spots of the film where visual horror is necessitated. The dreary digital sheen of the film's mid-level high definition video is made an aesthetic asset rather than a mark of its financial inferiority: its startles us with its placement of an ancient, folkloric evil within the context of the mundane contemporary world and the digital lenses we now more often than not glimpse it through. </div>
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This is what budget horror cinema should look and feel like in the current decade. That Flanagan was able to accomplish so much with the pocket change (relatively speaking) that he had for <i>Absentia</i>, and then turn in a glossy, Hollywood-esque followup with (in Hollywood's terms) a paltry $5 million for his next feature, the excellent <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2388715/">Oculus</a></i> (2014), should shame most other horror filmmakers out of the genre. You know what else cost $5 million? <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2109184/">Paranormal Activity 4</a> </i>(2012), which was funded and produced by <a href="http://blumhouse.com/">Blumhouse Productions</a>, just like <i>Oculus </i>was. It shouldn't be, but it's like comparing rotten apples and blood oranges. The rotten apples should start paying attention to the superior fruit.</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Relevance:</span></i></b> <i>Absentia</i> is a candied house of horrors for its viewers. As we approach it, the film gives off the sickly sweet appearance of a character drama. We imagine we'll get up close and personal to the lives of our principles, tasting the bitter outer layers of trauma and hardship before our taste buds hit the saccharine redemption at the center. Ah, but we are mistaken, for this is a witch's candy house, and as we wander inside we discover the horror locked in the basement: the endurance of the scarier fairy tales and folklore against the progression of time, sugarcoating a Lovecraftian realm of supernatural, subterranean terrors and torment. Our mouths taste sour before we're pushed into the oven, off of the troll's foot bridge, into Grandma Wolf's gaping maw. We've been tricked. The film ushers childhood bedtime stories and nightmares into horror's contemporary era, but its revisions of these interchangeable tales we dimly recall from our youth are only surface-level. (A bug for a troll isn't much.) To truly frighten us, it knows that it need only tell us the tales again.</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5914772860062903280.post-53597566370025033312014-09-09T08:00:00.000-04:002014-09-09T13:21:30.048-04:00A Dreadful Decade (Part VII): The Innkeepers (2011) dir. Ti West<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Logline:</span></i></b> On the last weekend of the historic Yankee Pedlar Inn's operation as a business, front desk clerks Claire (Sara Paxton) and Luke (Pat Healy) embark on a ghost hunt when not serving their few remaining guests. The two minimum wage workers hope to capture evidence of the presence of Madeline O'Malley, the hotel's famed phantasm, for fun and possible profit. But Claire is soon to discover that the spirits of the Yankee Pedlar Inn are very real, and that they have their own plans to capture her, too...</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Analysis:</span></i></b> In traditional ghost stories, ghosts aren't created by accident. Fate (or the authorial hand) pushes certain characters-- even on occasion the protagonists-- towards their haunted afterlives, bestowing upon them an existence lonelier than death. Such a fate may seem cruel and unfair, but we can't shake the feeling that these characters are marked for ghost-dom, and that they might lead more productive lives postmortem than they were able to while still breathing.</div>
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In <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1594562/">The Innkeepers</a></i>, Claire is already a sort of ghost when we meet her. Her aimlessness and twenty-something ennui places her somewhere between life (or adolescent vigor) and death (the inevitable daily grind). When, early in the film, she flees from the range of the insipid juvenile babble issuing from the mouth of a similarly aged barista (Lena Dunham), we realize that Claire has divorced herself from the concerns of young adulthood, but her inability to even comprehend a life or passion outside of her dead-end job illustrates her failure to assume the (sometimes soul-crushing) responsibilities of being an adult. At one point in the film, Luke accuses Claire of being in the throes of a "quarter-life crisis," but this is news to her: even with the inevitable closing of her place of employment mere days away, Claire hasn't given a moment's thought to her plans post-steady paycheck.<br />
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This absence of forethought on Claire's part is because she is exactly where she's supposed to be, among the other lost and purposeless spirits (a widower, an abandoned bride) haunting the Yankee Pedlar Inn. Claire has been marked by fate: as Luke notes, when trying to comfort her, "Everything happens for a reason, Claire. Nobody just winds up at Yankee Pedlar." His aren't hopeful words.<br />
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The film posits young adulthood and minimum wage work as a sort of purgatory that one can either aspire a way out of or be trapped in forever. (Though the film also acknowledges the difficulty of making anything of one's self in our busted, post-bubble economy. What exactly is one to do for a "legitimate career"? Open a hotel?) Luke is spared a ghostly existence because at least he's trying, <a href="http://www.paranormalinvestigations-webring.net/users/~innkeeperluke/realhauntings/index.html">however poorly</a>, to achieve a level of success outside of the doomed inn. On the contrary, Claire subconsciously realizes she has no aspirations, prospects, or literally any place else to haunt, and the end of the business is, for all intents and purposes, the end of her aimless wheel-spinning.<br />
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The rotten economy leads to the demise of both Claire and the Yankee Pedlar, but it's the hotel that emerges as the major figure worth mourning. The film imparts to us lots of little intimations that the Yankee Pedlar has a real, tangible history, and that the hotel itself is actively resisting becoming obsolete, forgotten, and unoccupied (it's making new ghosts, after all). And, if we can't bring ourselves to feel sympathy for a woman unable or unwilling to pull herself up by her still-corporeal bootstraps, we can certainly lament the loss of a home for wayward souls.</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Technical Merits:</span></i></b> Separated by actual title cards, the film's chapters unfurl before us like those of the best supernatural literature: slowly but certainly, like graveworms to the corpse buffet. <i>The Innkeepers</i> abandons the retro style of Ti West's previous films <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387549/">The Roost</a></i> (2005) and <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1172994/">The House of the Devil</a></i> (2009), but revels in the slow-burn horror of the latter. West's avoidance of a deliberately nostalgic style in this retro-narrative-influenced outing is appropriate, juxtaposing the lurid appeal of ancient history (the historic hotel; the classical ghost story) with the overwhelming sterility and blandness of the modern world (dispiriting economic recession; contemporary horror cinema). Thus, West keeps much of <i>The Innkeepers</i> snail-paced, its exquisitely framed images rolling deliberately, almost fluidly, across the screen. He allows only fleeting glimpses of the supernatural to crawl into his compositions and remind us of the gracefully sinister storytelling traditions wallpapered over by the 21st century's drudgery.<br />
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Like all effective horror films (and like very few of its contemporaries), <i>The Innkeepers</i> understands that true horror is not located in the repeated build-up and release of suspense. Rather, horror is generated by mood and atmosphere, by the disquieting framing of the camera or by editing that lingers serenely on the ghastliest of sights just long enough to sear them into our retinas. In this vein, West openly pokes fun at his peers and their over-reliance on build-and-release jump scares: in one scene, Luke spooks Claire with <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbJsLSxCuoQ">one of the many Youtube videos</a> in which a half minute of silent anticipation is shattered by a demonic shriek and the enlarged image of some variation of Linda Blair's face. Put into comparison with the mastery of the genre's form on display in <i>The Innkeepers</i>, the bulk of modern horror looks roughly as complex and polished as the uploaded shock-video efforts of hypothetical Youtube user dEMonIAC94. Sure, West is rubbing other filmmakers' noses in their own laziness a little bit (even if lightheartedly), but I won't fault him for setting a higher standard.</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Relevance:</span></i></b> <i>The Innkeepers</i> is a little like <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1289/1289-h/1289-h.htm#page312">Charles Dickens's "The Signal-Man"</a> (1866), if you transported the latter's action from the lonely railroad tracks of England to a lonely historic inn in Connecticut. Both <i>The Innkeepers</i> and "The Signal-Man" are concerned with protagonists stuck in dead-end jobs, haunted by spirits of their own static lives, and ultimately consumed by their inability to extricate themselves from their situations. There's not an exact resemblance between the two works, but Ti West, <i>The Innkeepers</i>' writer and director, is quite obviously paying homage to the tradition of classical Victorian and Edwardian ghost stories that "The Signal-Man" is a sterling example of: quaint, melancholy tales of the relationship between fate and the supernatural.<br />
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The film's use of this classical ghost yarn form is important because of its increasing obsolescence in 21st-century horror cinema. Traditional ghost stories simply aren't feasible in our postmodern era. Look at the ghost films of recent years: <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1179904/">Paranormal Activity</a></i> (2009), <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0178868/">Ringu</a></i> (1998), <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0286751/">Kairo</a></i> (2001). Each of these films strives to place the figure of the ghost outside of its familiar territory (no more haunted manors, hotels, moors, or cemeteries) and thoroughly enmesh its existence with the most recognizable elements of modern technology (home video cameras, telephones, VHS tapes, televisions, webcams, and the Internet). The postmodern ghost transcends fixed place and lives out its afterlife digitally through our devices and media; the traditional ghost that <i>The Innkeepers</i> homages is stranded, rattling its chains to deaf ears while irrevocably tied to its location. And the fact is that America's haunted locations are dying. Demolitions, re-modelings, and renovations are eradicating the country's architectural history, replacing buildings of character with antiseptic McMansions, planned communities, and strip malls. At the time of <i>The Innkeepers</i>' release in 2011, Phil Coldiron <a href="http://www.fandor.com/blog/end-of-year-critics-party-2011s-best-films-picked-by-our-writers/">wrote</a>, "who could imagine a ghost story set in a Courtyard by Marriott?" No one can, and that's why the majority of traditional ghost films produced in the last decade or so (<i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0230600/">The Others</a></i> [2001], <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0464141/">The Orphanage</a></i> [2007], <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0256009/">The Devil's Backbone</a></i> [2001], <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1687901/">The Awakening</a> </i>[2011]) have been period pieces set in foreign countries, alleviating our difficulty in imagining a contemporary America with standing buildings old enough to have a history.<br />
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The ghosts of yore dematerialize with the shuttering of their local haunts, and this is a reality worth mourning. In the <a href="http://www.pedlarinn.com/">for-real operational Yankee Pedlar Inn</a> (est. 1891) and its ghostly inhabitants (both "<a href="http://ahauntedworld.wordpress.com/2014/03/29/yankee-pedlar-inn-torrington-ct/">real</a>" and imagined), West finds dual last bastions worth celebrating, and his film's intelligent drawing of parallels between the demise of historic architecture and the growing irrelevancy of ghost stories demonstrates his fondness for and eagerness to preserve both, if only temporarily. Sadly, but appropriately, he ends <i>The Innkeepers</i> with the image of a door being shoved closed, both literally and figuratively. We could claim a spirit's forceful push was the cause, but the handprints smudged on the frame are our own.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5914772860062903280.post-42441479729765034832014-08-21T15:19:00.001-04:002014-08-21T15:19:53.794-04:00A Dreadful Decade (Part VI): Amer (2009) dir. Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Logline:</span></i></b> A triptych of sex and death. In the first segment, Ana (Cassandra Forêt), a young girl, has strange and frightening encounters with her wraith-like grandmother on the eve of her grandfather's funeral. In the second segment, Ana (Charlotte Eugène Guibeaud), now an adolescent, savors the sensory delights of the world and the attention of men during a trip into town with her mother (Bianca Maria D'Amato). In the final segment, Ana (Marie Bos), now an adult herself, returns to her abandoned childhood home to confront her past and is instead confronted by a black-gloved killer brandishing a straight-razor.</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Analysis:</span></i></b> <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1426352/">Amer</a></i> is about the perils (and pleasures) of psychosexual development gone horribly awry. Freudian psychoanalytic theories have long been entwined with horror cinema on both sides of the Atlantic, but rarely so explicitly as they are in this Belgian-French thriller. The film dramatizes an extreme case of sexual repression, with our patient-- the young, adolescent, and finally middle-aged Ana-- confusing Eros and Thanatos during her latent stage of childhood development. To confuse, perhaps conflate sex and death at such a delicate period in one's life will create obvious issues later on. Thus, we watch as Ana grows up into a woman who simultaneously courts and resists sexual attention, as if the prospect of sex is akin to a primal threat of violence <i>and</i> a gateway to the ultimate sensual pleasure.<br />
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We witness the root of Ana's repression taking hold in the film's first segment, when Ana walks in on her parents having sex immediately before the family is to attend its decrepit patriarch's funeral. The film tells us that this is a key moment: Ana's eyes go wide, and glass cracks and breaks across the the image of her face as the lights illuminating the screen shift between vibrant primary and secondary colors. She sees her mother on her back in a fit of ecstasy, looking much like a corpse on a slab, or like the corpse of her grandfather in the other room. Her father's sexual thrusting looks like the mindless violence of a killer thrusting a knife. The damage is done.<br />
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Ana has this traumatic encounter after being chased around the house by her ghastly, witchy grandmother, who is perpetually veiled in black lace to conceal her horrific visage. For the child Ana, this elderly presence, with its extreme age, opaque habits, and proximity to death, exists as a personification of death itself, always in pursuit of us mortals from the day we're born. However, these feelings don't dissuade Ana from her attraction to the death that the elderly figures in her life represent. We see her recklessly spy on her grandmother's arcane activities, and she steals her dead grandfather's jewelry from his corpse (going so far as to use a crucifix to pry it from his rigor mortised hands). The threat and presence of death will continue to have an allure for Ana.<br />
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In the film's second section, we watch as Ana's mother recognizes a connection that Ana has already made: through her daughter, who has now grown into sexual maturity, she sees that she is being replaced by a younger copy of herself and thus becomes aware of her own mortality, recognizing (as Ana already does, in her own twisted fashion) that the price of sex (read: reproduction) is death. As the two women strut into town in their sundresses and consciously attract the gazes of the men they're passing by, each is acutely aware of the other's position in life. Ana sees her mother's graying temples and smugly smirks; her mother sees her daughter's budding sensuality and tries desperately to hold its hand like a mother would a small child, to prevent it from blossoming.<br />
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But, for Ana, her blossoming is a complicated life event. We notice as the wind blows onto her body and an ant crawls across her skin that Ana has become keenly aware of the sensual pleasures that the world now has to offer her. Thus, the sexual attention of the men she encounters on this trip into town is somewhat appealing, but it's also clearly threatening. As she walks, alone, past a large group of rugged and dangerous looking motorcyclists, we understand her to be pulling her windblown dress down out of both feigned modesty and a genuine sense of fear. She's intrigued by the pleasure these men have the potential to now offer her, but she's also cognizant (however rightly or wrongly) of the danger in embracing such sexual pleasures.</div>
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In the third section of the film, we learn that Ana's predicament has resulted in a frigid and apprehensive adulthood. She has forsaken sexual activity, imagining every male she encounters in her daily travels as a threat to her safety. We meet her as she is returning (for reasons unknown) to her family's abandoned villa, the site of her traumatic experience and the catalyst of her sexual repression. While there, wandering the villa's empty rooms and hallways, her psychological troubles come to a head as she is stalked by a masked, black-gloved madman who is attempting to violate her (in one way or another). Is this villain the rugged, dangerous-looking cab driver who drove her there? After all, he knows where she's staying and that she's staying there alone. Have Ana's fears of the men around her proven justly founded?<br />
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The reality of Ana's situation is more psychologically complex than baseless paranoia. The killer she encounters (who first attacks her while she's getting perhaps a little <i>too</i> comfortable with her own body in the bathtub) is no one but herself, projected outwardly into the world by her psyche as a separate entity. She lives in fear of her own desire for sexual pleasure, imagining this desire as a faceless, psychotic male waving around a phallic straight-razor. For Ana to express her sexuality in any form (by herself or with a friend) is to beckon the violent reaction of this other persona, who appears to have taken the place of her grandmother in her psyche as the primal figure of Death. While her mind primarily views this entity as something separate from herself and looking to punish her, she also opportunely uses the persona to punish others: when the cab driver eventually <i>does</i> show up at the villa (for purposes unknown but probably no good), Ana, adopting this persona, brutally carves him up with her razor. For all, the price of sex must be death. Ana is certain of this.<br />
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So certain is Ana of the correlation between sex and death, that she stabs her personified sexual desire in the gut to avoid confronting it, inadvertently causing her own death by gut wound. When we next see her, in the film's final images, she's on a slab in the mortuary, being delicately, perhaps sensually manipulated by the hands of an unseen mortician. Her expressions, in death, mirror those of her mother during sex, and the soundtrack is filled with low, ghostly sighs, as if she's actually responding to touch. In death, her confusion of Eros and Thanatos is reconciled if by nothing more than the fact that there's nothing to fear from the death that has already caught up to her. This isn't an unhappy ending: we discover that for Ana, the price of death is sex. And, as we see in the final frames before the credits roll, a little bit of much-needed postmortem physical attention has the ability to break down psychological barriers and animate the coldest and clammiest of souls.<br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Technical Merits: </span></i></b>The technical merits of <i>Amer</i> should be immediately obvious to anyone with working senses. It's one of those "every frame deserves to be screencapped" pictures. Directors Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani are practitioners of a high style, using sound and image to communicate their story and its themes without the use of exposition or dialogue. (The few small snippets of dialogue in the film's first segment don't serve as meaningful exceptions.) The technique the the pair employ switches frequently and with ease, like when transitioning from the first episode's Jan Svankmajer-style frenetic focus on abstracted actions and objects to the second segment's Spaghetti Western-inspired protracted dramatic tension. <i>Amer</i>'s style is also a jumble of visual and aural associations from Italian fantasy-horrors of the 1970s: Cattet and Forzani's framing <a href="http://offscreen.com/view/amer">plucks exact shots from the work of Argento and Bava</a>, and their soundtrack effectively repurposes the music of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxwLjHVpifg">Stelvio Cipriani</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhPcEU3nUAI">Bruno Nicolai</a>. Pilfer they might, but they pilfer from the greats.<br />
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Relevance:</span></i></b> Despite the popular consensus that Cattet and Forzani's <i>Amer </i>is a blatant (if possibly egregious) homage to the Italian giallo thriller, the truth is that the film's homage extends to most areas of Italian exploitation cinema of the 1970s. Sure, the film's longest episode is given over completely to giallo elements and imagery, but signifiers throughout the remainder of the film call to our minds other genres, like the Argento-style supernatural horror film (as in all of the first episode), Leone-esque Spaghetti westerns (as in the incessant, tension-filled close-ups on eyes in the second episode), and poliziotteschi crime films (as in the use of several soundtrack selections recycled from genre classics).<br />
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<i>Amer </i>doesn't strive to be a flashy contemporary giallo; rather, it succeeds on its own merits by taking a recurrent giallo theme (the Freudian sex/death confusion), filtering it through the kaleidoscope of '70s Italian cinema <i>in toto</i>, and then translating it into French, creating a lurid and often dizzying demonstration of the artistry inherent in the era's diverse sights and sounds. In this sense, <i>Amer</i> could be seen as a celebration of others' work, and that it is, but its originality lies in its complex rearrangement and intensification of those cherry-picked motifs and visual/audial elements. In flaccid-- if more digestible-- terms, it's less of a Greatest Hits than it is a collection of recognizable but undeniably distinct (and weirdly alien) remixes. Thus, <i>Amer</i> is brain candy for any critically-minded viewer of Italian horror cinema, alternately numbing and igniting the synapses as it stalks its merry way across the cortex.<br />
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To grasp the subtlety of Cattet and Forzani's approach to their material in <i>Amer</i>, one need look no further than their follow-up feature, <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2733258">The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears</a></i> (2013), a study in cinematic excess and incoherence. Minus the Belgian duo's still obvious talent as visual filmmakers, their relentless experimental tendencies, and their expert use of genre soundtrack greats, their sophomore effort all too frequently resembles what <i>Amer</i>'s detractors claimed that film was: a cluttered, pretentious film-school appropriation of the giallo. Put into juxtaposition with one another, <i>Amer</i> must now seem the more tasteful approach to lovers and haters all.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5914772860062903280.post-52876181811078906262014-08-13T08:00:00.000-04:002014-08-13T08:00:04.333-04:00A Dreadful Decade (Part V): Lake Mungo (2008) dir. Joel Anderson<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Logline:</span></i></b> After the accidental drowning of their teenage daughter (Alice, portrayed by Talia Zucker), the surviving members of the Palmer family have trouble sorting out their collective grief. Their problems are exacerbated by the alleged appearances of Alice's ghost in their home and abroad. This pseudo-documentary seeks to determine the existence of Alice's spectral afterlife and uncover the lingering mysteries of her corporeal days, long buried in the sands of Australia's dried-out Lake Mungo.</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Analysis:</span></i></b> When we see Alice Palmer in old photographs and video footage, those taken both before and after her untimely demise, we can't shake the feeling that we're looking at a ghost. Perhaps, as the film hints, she was always a ghost, in one sense of the term. We learn over the course of the film that she has encountered her own ghost, has dreamed of her later life as a ghost, and has taken actions that she will later take again as a ghost. Alice Palmer haunts <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0816556/">Lake Mungo</a></i>. The appropriateness of the film's title and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Mungo">its reference to New South Wales' famous dry lake</a> is manifold. At the film's climax, Alice encounters a specter of her future at the dead lake, only to later die in the active waters of another, different lake. Later, she is seen haunting the lake she died in, and yet she was already haunting the dry Lake Mungo while she was alive. Lake Mungo itself materializes within the film as a phantasm, as a visual monument to a place both dead and curiously alive, lingering on as a palpable presence and vacation spot. The temporal circularity of <i>Lake Mungo</i> leaves the dry lake and Alice stuck somewhere between life and death, existence and nonexistence. <i>Lake Mungo</i> laments the tragedy of such a fate, and one way to read the film is as an ode to those sad souls like Alice who can anticipate their own ends through the troubling way they lead their lives. Alice is haunted by her own ghosts: the knowledge that her actions are leading her swiftly towards death and her resignation over the fact that no one can help her, not even those closest to her.</div>
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But I think there's a far grimmer reading to be dredged from the bottom of <i>Lake Mungo</i>, one derived not from Alice's personal demons but from the gross negligence of her family in recognizing her trouble before (and after) it was too late. The Palmers loved Alice, certainly, but it's clear they never really possessed any awareness of what was going on in her life. They're ignorant of her fear of death, her use of psychic counseling, and her bizarre sexual affair with the next-door neighbors. We're told of the chilly relationship between Alice and her mother, June (Rosie Traynor), who could never manage to give herself fully to her daughter. After Alice's death, each member of her small family attempts to grieve in a different way: Roy (David Pledger), her father, distracts himself with his work; Mathew (Martin Sharpe), her brother, inexplicably forges fake evidence of her ghost's presence in the family home; and June steadfastly clings to the hope that Alice might not be dead at all. With the exception of Roy (who is eager to forget Alice entirely), the family's expressions of grief are based in the logic of guilt. They don't want Alice to be gone from their lives entirely, because if she is that means they've failed her in some way, and that June's fear that Alice will have died not knowing how much they loved her is fact. Thus, the family colludes to keep Alice alive, in one form or another, until they feel absolved of their own guilt over not being able to help her during her existential depression, of which they were clueless.<br />
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It's the act of uncovering Alice's secrets in the year that follows her death that makes her family think they've finally put her spirit to rest. The film's most melancholy and heart-wrenching horror is that they're wrong. In their desire to move on with their lives, the Palmers were distracted by the superficial revelations about Alice's troubled life and were thus unable to see that her deeper problem was her inability to seek solace and assistance within her distant family unit. During the film's denouement, a masterful montage of separate psychic meditation sessions with mother and daughter conducted a year apart about an unknowingly shared dream, we learn that Alice has been trying to communicate to her family her continued existence, to no avail. In the end, her family abandons her, moves to a new house free of her association. But perhaps they had already abandoned her, back when she was alive, sobbing with fright at the foot of her parents' bed but unable to bring herself to awaken them. The film's conclusion leaves Alice's family ignorantly, blissfully sleeping on, and Alice herself haunting empty hallways, alone, in death as in life.</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Technical Merits:</span></i></b> The effectiveness of <i>Lake Mungo</i>'s documentary approach to horror storytelling goes a long way towards lending legitimacy to the documentary/found footage horror subgenre. The film's documentary form suits the material, allowing us to glimpse Alice Palmer only through ghostly family videos and photographs, in which her vibrant life is captured in flat, lifeless celluloid and digital pixels. The documentary form allows writer/director Joel Anderson to keep Alice and her mystery at a distance from us, but it also enables him to slowly unravel a lot of the plot's big revelations in a way that feels organic to the constructed nature of a documentary, and which would probably feel cheap or unearned in a traditionally shot horror feature. Watching <i>Lake Mungo</i>, we're always aware that we're in the hands of a skilled documentarian who wishes to lead us gently from one mystery to the next, with the film's sheen of faux-reality making us feel (however fleetingly) like collaborators, following the leads placed before us. As if we're watching a segment on <i>Unsolved Mysteries</i>, and right before the commercial break we'll be flashed the phone number for the tip hotline.<br />
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Much of the film's success as a faux-documentary can be attributed to that fact that it's wonderfully shot and edited, with a keen awareness of the proper balance of static talking-head interviews, moody scenery and location shots, and amateur found footage. Like the best actual documentaries, the screen is subtly kinetic and layered, with the assembled images providing for the viewer a narrative beyond the information given through interview and observation. For the sticklers out there, you could easily (and cruelly) convince a fellow viewer that it was a real documentary (I have!), as it only very rarely stretches credibility or verisimilitude. (The only obvious flaw in this aspect of the film is the repeated occurrence of random folks around town discovering important-to-the-narrative images/figures/ghosts in their barely discernible amateur-recorded video footage. A bizarre, unnecessary form of crowdsourcing, we might say.)</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Relevance:</span></i></b> If the television series <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7d0Lm_31BE">Twin Peaks</a></i> (and its prequel film, <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105665/">Fire Walk with Me</a></i> [1992]) had been filmed as a faux-documentary and lost all of its oddball humor, it would look a lot like <i>Lake Mungo</i>. Of course, there's no murder mystery acting as <i>Lake Mungo</i>'s narrative backbone like in <i>Twin Peaks</i>, but otherwise the similarities are pertinent: a beautiful, locally adored teenage girl (also with the surname "Palmer." Imagine that...) dies tragically, her family's grief affects the whole town, a mystery (of a sort) is unraveled as the characters discover the seedy secret life of the dead girl, and eventually all gives way to a creepy, half-decipherable supernatural world. This affinity for the intrigue and narrative twists of <i>Twin Peaks</i>-inspired dead teen girl mysteries is actually a partial detriment to <i>Lake Mungo</i>, though not a fatal one. All of the focus placed upon Alice's secrets and hidden quasi-bad girl persona distract from what is, at its core, one of the most emotionally despondent horror films out there. The film drowns itself in sadness, and yet it's no less frightening for its embrace of that emotional tether. <i>Lake Mungo</i> is far from the first film to try to make us feel sympathy for a scary ghost, but it's one of the best at making us realize the crushing, inescapable humanity of those storied chain-rattlers.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5914772860062903280.post-42504141116250326062014-08-06T08:00:00.000-04:002014-08-06T08:00:00.738-04:00A Dreadful Decade (Part IV): Calvaire (2004) dir. Fabrice Du Welz<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<span style="font-size: large;">a.k.a. </span><b style="font-size: x-large;"><i><span style="color: #c92121;">The Ordeal</span></i></b></div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Logline:</span></i></b> Heading to the south of the country to perform at a Christmas gala, corny traveling musician Marc Stevens (Laurent Lucas) is stranded in the swampy Belgian countryside after his van breaks down. He stays the night at the defunct inn of a local proprietor (Jackie Berroyer), with his intention being to see a mechanic and continue on his journey the following morning. However, things don't go quite as planned, and Marc's mild annoyance at a prolonged stay at the inn quickly turns to abject horror when his deranged host reveals his true intentions.</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Analysis:</span></i></b> Despite its conventional horror movie trappings, the horror in <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0407621">Calvaire</a> </i>sprouts from a fear far more existential than that of being held prisoner by a madman in a remote area: it exploits the fear that we exist in other people's minds not as individual, autonomous beings, but as objects that can be manipulated and transformed to fit others' desires. Worse yet, the film implies that we're helpless to stop others from forcing this metamorphosis upon us. We are prisoners of others' characterizations of us. Marc, the film's protagonist, winds up in his bound and beleaguered position because his host, Bartel, decides that he faintly resembles his absent wife, Gloria. (The resemblance? They are both singers.) We know that Bartel understands that Marc is not Gloria, but we eventually learn that it makes no difference to him: Gloria was not so much a person to Bartel as she was an idea, and if he has to use Marc to occupy the place of that idea in his mind (and thus fill the void in his life), then so be it. Marc has no options other than to wear the dress and smile or to attempt (and fail) to escape.</div>
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The objectified relationship between Bartel and Marc is not an isolated incident within the film. Nearly every character treats Marc similarly. The old folks and nurses (including the ever-lovely Brigitte Lahaie) at the assisted living homes he performs at see him as a dashing lover who will sweep them away from the death and decrepitude coloring their lives. The violently perverted villagers of the town Marc's stranded in decide to agree with Bartel and thus also choose to see Marc as Gloria, who they are certain will fill their lives with love and carnal pleasures, as of old. Furthermore, this displacement and confusion of individual identity for self-serving purposes extends beyond Marc and his relationships with others, which we see in the villagers' use of livestock as proxies for human lovers and the man-child Bruno's insistence that a calf is his missing dog.</div>
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The titular ordeal that Marc faces is his struggle to accept and embrace that he is only what others want him to be. Thus, his ordeal (and the viewer's) ends in the film's final moments when he assumes his given role as Gloria and (in a truly horrifying flourish) demonstrates his sympathy for those who have objectified him. Marc learns that the role of an object is to provide selfless comfort and absolution for others. As implied by the moment halfway through his torture when Bartel literally nails Marc to a wooden crucifix in his barn, the objectified person is a martyr, dying for the sins, vices, mistakes, and emptiness of us all.</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Technical Merits:</span></i></b> So very drab. The impossibly cold earth-tones and wintry, overcast gloom of the film's interiors and exteriors encourage one to feel that if the film had been toned in sepia it would have resulted in a picture with little discernible difference from the actual final image. This drabness of the visuals is oppressive for the viewer, and rightfully so: we are invited to share in the ordeal and to feel the same slow, dreary restrictiveness (figurative and literal, of course) of the backwoods locations. </div>
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Though director Fabrice Du Welz's films have become more overtly stylish in the last few years, <i>Calvaire</i> is marked by its near absence of style. All events, from the ordinary to the sickening, are filmed with the same flat disinterest by the camera. Violence is incidental; traumatic horror is routine. This anti-style reflects the senses-deadening weight of these characters' continued existence, in which objects and experiences blur into one another. The unremarkable cinematography also keeps the film's more surreal elements grounded in far-too-uncompromising reality. The only moments during which the film breaks this spell and implements a deliberate style are during the piano waltz that the villagers dance to in grotesque zombie-like fashion while gathered in the local bar (shades of Bela Tarr's <i>Damnation</i> [1988]) and the frenzied camera's whirlwind capturing of enthusiastic laughter and faces in closeup at the climax. The former, in limb-severing medium shots, awkwardly displays the villagers' equally as awkward attempts at feeling anything at all, while the latter dizzily demonstrates the intoxicating but ultimately deadly power of experiencing an actual emotion. These moments of style are brief and illustrative. Like its world, the film has little room or tolerance for enthusiasm.</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Relevance:</span></i></b> <i>Calvaire</i> is the second herald of what I called the mini-Belgian Horror Renaissance in my write-up of <i><a href="http://nessuntimore.blogspot.com/2014/07/a-dreadful-decade-part-i-left-bank-2008.html">Left Bank</a></i> (2008). However, its place in this contemplation of the past decade in horror cinema could just as easily belong to Du Welz's followup thriller, <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1029241">Vinyan</a></i> (2008), an enigmatic tale of a couple who make the dangerous journey from Thailand to Myanmar in search of their possibly abducted child. <i>Vinyan</i> might even be the better film, but <i>Calvaire</i> is the one I have the most admiration for as a piece of horror filmmaking. It's rather stock horror set-up (man's car breaks down in woods, man stays at creepy rundown inn, man is made to suffer for this decision) is rather quickly subverted by far stranger narrative impulses, resulting in a film that could have been made by the hypothetical deformed offspring of Bela Tarr and <a href="http://nessuntimore.blogspot.com/2014/01/robert-aickman-double-feature-cicerones.html">Robert Aickman</a>. Is it religious allegory? An unhinged love story? A waking nightmare? Whatever it is, it's far from typical. </div>
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Plus, its refusal to linger on its implied acts of bodily torture and depravity makes it a quasi-torture porn film for the squeamish. In truth, the film hardly feels like an entry in that most abhorred of horror subgenres. It's impossible to recall another torture porn film that goes so far out of its way to avoid depicting on-screen gore as <i>Calvaire</i> does. Isn't sexually-charged splatter the whole point? But, then again, isn't it so much worse to imagine your captor and tormentor telling you how much he loves you before he goes to work tenderly on your flesh? In order to create those audience nightmares, there's no splatter necessary.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5914772860062903280.post-16563783387386329762014-07-23T07:00:00.000-04:002015-08-10T12:58:20.408-04:00ESSAY: Terror for Tots: My Adolescent Fascination with Horror<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9-iTVotuTSi9RV-n21nSlgQzzWgmtT8pgaVddhyphenhyphenZKNGATd3KFX94CCMbMjNghbKyDc2cmsVSYjHsCOSmJxBDzKZLM8U0Lexj2fHSsgVwKoH3LulumnRYLib0Esgr6acny_uBbMEfL7Z4/s1600/JimKayAMonsterCalls.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="220" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9-iTVotuTSi9RV-n21nSlgQzzWgmtT8pgaVddhyphenhyphenZKNGATd3KFX94CCMbMjNghbKyDc2cmsVSYjHsCOSmJxBDzKZLM8U0Lexj2fHSsgVwKoH3LulumnRYLib0Esgr6acny_uBbMEfL7Z4/s1600/JimKayAMonsterCalls.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Illustration by Jim Kay, from the novel <i>A Monster Calls</i> by Patrick Ness</td></tr>
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<b style="color: #c92121; text-align: center;"><i>Abstract</i></b><b>:</b> A personal reflection on the enchantment that horror movies held over one particular child's psyche during his developmental years. Why did he love monsters so? Was he a monster himself? (Well...) What did fictional monsters teach him about his own life? We reveal that his world felt a whole lot safer with fantastical cinematic monsters roaming around in it, as those creatures were easily vanquished when contrasted with the invulnerability possessed by the mundane horrors of growing up.</div>
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<b style="color: #c92121;">This essay features discussion of:</b></div>
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<i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087800/">A Nightmare on Elm Street</a> </i>(1984) dir. Wes Craven</div>
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<i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093560/">The Monster Squad </a></i>(1987) dir. Fred Dekker</div>
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<i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097758/">Little Monsters</a></i> (1989) dir. Richard Greenberg</div>
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<i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087363/">Gremlins</a></i> (1984) dir. Joe Dante</div>
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<i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099864/">Stephen King's IT</a></i> (1990) dir. Tommy Lee Wallace</div>
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I can remember the exact moment when I stopped being afraid of monsters.</div>
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For most of my early childhood, my parents had been members of <a href="http://www.mooseintl.org/public/default.asp">Moose International</a>, which invariably meant that on Friday nights they would cart my two brothers and I over to Moose Lodge #644 on East Genesse St. for dinnertime and a couple of the surrounding hours. Typically, my younger brother and I would race through the bar area to the claw crane machine resting against the back wall near the bathrooms. We'd bust open a fresh roll of quarters and then try our skill (or was it blind luck?) at acquiring as many worthless stuffed animals as we could with the time and coins provided. We had a routine.</div>
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But one October, the week before Halloween, Moose Lodge #644 underwent a redecoration. When we arrived, we were ushered from the usual entrance to a new ramshackle facade leading directly into the dining area. We were told by those guarding the entrance that the dining area's stage and dance floor (which did indeed feature a disco ball suspended high above it) had been converted for the night into a haunted maze, populated by Moose Lodge members dressed in costumes and waiting patiently behind freestanding walls for the moment to jump out and scare us. The maze was providing tonight's only entrance into the Lodge. Naturally, I was terrified.</div>
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Even after being repeatedly reassured by my parents that those costumed creatures waiting for me in the dark were harmless diners and bar patrons whom I saw every week at the Lodge in their human forms, I refused to enter the maze. I'm not sure I knew what specific dreadful thing would happen to me if I did enter the maze, but I was certain I didn't ever want to find out.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>A Nightmare on Elm Street</i> (1984)</td></tr>
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Eventually, after much coaxing and probable bartering, a compromise was reached: my much braver older brother would traverse the maze first, soaking up all the scares and asking the costumed volunteers to refrain from jumping out at the next fearful travelers who passed them by. Those travelers were my father and I, with me in his arms, hugged tightly to his torso, head buried in his shoulder to escape the sight of whatever lingering horrors might remain in the maze. As we began our trek through, I was relieved to discover that my brother had done his job: none of the monsters were trying to scare us. After a few jolt-less twists and turns, I had enough confidence in my bear-hugged safety to open my eyes, if only for a brief moment, to examine my frightful surroundings. </div>
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What I saw was Freddy Krueger hiding behind a wall that we'd already left in our wake. He was smiling and waving his clawed hand in a friendly, if somewhat mischievous, greeting. <i>At me</i>.</div>
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Deposited safely at the other side of the maze, I was stunned. I hadn't seen any of his movies yet, but, like every kid of the late '80s and early '90s, I knew Freddy Krueger. (Remember, this was the brief era when, even if I wasn't directly familiar with any of Freddy's screen adventures, something as innocuous as supermarket sticker vending machines <a href="http://i.imgur.com/elnEe4q.jpg">would have had no trouble informing me</a>.) Sure, I knew this Freddy was just some Lodge member in a cheap store-bought costume. But boy did it look convincing through half-shut eyes in the blood-red lighting dimly coloring the maze. If I wanted to, I could believe it <i>really was</i> Freddy Krueger, and that what he'd made at me was a gesture of civility, signalling peace between my world and the world of horrors he represented.</div>
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In a daze, I wandered over to my customary stool at the far end of the bar, near the unoccupied shuffleboard tables. Like he always did, Norm, the bartender, sauntered over and gave me a free Shirley Temple and a bag of Andy Capp's Hot Fries. "I just met Freddy Krueger," I told him. "He was a pretty nice guy."</div>
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I looked at monsters differently after that night. I'd always enjoyed horror movies, but like most children I harbored a vague fear of the monsters contained within them. Lying in bed at night, I was certain that the Blob was stuck to the ceiling above, waiting to drop down upon me and start slurping; most mornings, I knew for a fact that Jaws himself was swimming in the carpet under my bed, patiently awaiting the moment when I would foolishly stick my foot over the edge. These were far from crippling anxieties, but they were the sort of feelings that kept me at a slight distance from the genre, carefully (if subconsciously) metering out my exposure to these films so as to prevent any more nightmare creatures from entering the repertoire.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Detail of Monster in My Pocket - Monster Mountain packaging</td></tr>
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But, soon after Freddy Krueger waved at me, my fascination grew. Horror-- in film, in print, as a <i>feeling</i>-- became my obsession. I'd spend what felt like hours browsing through the VHS box art in the supermarket video store's 'Horror' aisle, imagining what terrific treasures lay within those spools of magnetic tape. I would be glued to the television for most of the month of October, absorbing every <a href="http://vimeo.com/73741908">Halloween-themed sitcom</a> or <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBqFB51A8fY">commercial</a> that aired. The only childhood birthday party I can remember being thrown in my honor was themed after Alvin Schwartz's <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scary_Stories_to_Tell_in_the_Dark">Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark</a></i> series of horror folktales and urban legends. My favorite toys were the small, soft plastic figurines of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_in_My_Pocket">Monster in My Pocket</a> toy line. What better evidence of my newfound fuzzy feelings towards monsters than the fact that I'd keep pint-sized replicas of them in my jean pockets at all times? Monsters didn't frighten me anymore; they'd become my figurative security blanket.</div>
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I suppose it's not surprising that my favorite childhood horror movies were those in which children befriended monsters. In Fred Dekker's <i>The Monster Squad</i>, a group of monster-loving adolescents become friends and allies of Frankenstein's monster (Tom Noonan) in a prophesied battle against all of the other classic movie monsters (Dracula, The Mummy, The Wolf Man, Gill-man). <i>Little Monsters</i> finds Fred Savage being pulled down into a netherworld of creatures both frightening and friendly by the monster under his bed (Howie Mandel). <i>Gremlins</i> features young Billy Peltzer (Zach Galligan) discovering that his adorable new pet monster has the unintentional ability to multiply and create a wicked horde of more diabolical devils. I think it's interesting that all of these films characterize monsters as beings that are simultaneously both good and evil, and capable of embracing either tendency at a moment's notice. Feed Gizmo after midnight and see if he's still a fuzzy sweetheart. Regardless, there's no denying that my childhood's monsters were demonstrative of a general weakening of the role of cinematic monsters in American culture. As I discovered, even Freddy Krueger was blurring the line between hero and villain in the later entries of his series, with his corny quips and cackling demeanor making him a rather perverse children's icon, worthy of being immortalized as <a href="http://i.imgur.com/Tj4gZ1l.jpg">squishy dolls</a> and <a href="http://i.imgur.com/29osRpw.jpg">yo-yos</a>.<br />
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What this child-proofing of the monster in late '80s and early '90s American horror cinema says about our culture at the time is probably worthy of another essay, but my affection for this new breed of monster is easily explained: I liked these gentler monsters best, in spite of the latent threat that remained within them, because they were a testament to the idea that the truly horrific could be revised into something more benign. I was never especially terrified while watching the movies containing these monsters; instead, I was comforted. In one sense, these horrific monsters had been tamed, and I knew implicitly that if any of their inherent monstrousness were to be unleashed, it would be adequately dealt with by the adolescent protagonists sometime in the third act, restoring the balance. I understood that these monsters were products of essentially happy narratives, and that any horror they wrought would be converted for me into entertainment or catharsis.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEix8NClXU9rkbY4I0m7Ez96OS6VWH1d3OecPH0aOUyH9GJnq8jEziWy4ledTESFF_oisqRdHdGkkrI_ZUdI704MMVkea9aEO5Tc87Q9Cajciigk_GuRGkMmJVOvB_OcclkInepTPsrNhsc/s1600/monstersquad.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="218" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEix8NClXU9rkbY4I0m7Ez96OS6VWH1d3OecPH0aOUyH9GJnq8jEziWy4ledTESFF_oisqRdHdGkkrI_ZUdI704MMVkea9aEO5Tc87Q9Cajciigk_GuRGkMmJVOvB_OcclkInepTPsrNhsc/s1600/monstersquad.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The Monster Squad</i> (1987)</td></tr>
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The only problem for me was that this sort of controllable monster was restricted to the VHS tapes that they came to me on. I can still remember the things that actually frightened me as a child. I remember when, in my adolescent desire to become more worldly, I dedicated myself to watching national news programs every night. What I saw was Waco, the Rwandan Genocide, the Unabomber, the O.J. Simpson murder trial, and the Oklahoma City Bombing. I recall watching true crime television programs like <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwAG-DnWhiY">Unsolved Mysteries</a></i> and being flabbergasted by the depths of human depravity they would detail. The real horrors of my childhood weren't contained in the monster movies I was spending all my time with, but were out in the world that awaited me as I grew up, like monsters lurking around a corner in a poorly lit maze, anticipating the fresh meat.<br />
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Perhaps my fascination with horror as a child was a naive form of psychic shielding through fantasy. Maybe I was maintaining a belief for myself that the horror in the real world could be controlled like it was in my movies, that it could be altered to a more pleasant outcome. Trapped in these films, I wouldn't ever have to face those everyday horrors of adult life, both the grave and mundane. I could tune out the news, and pop in my tapes. I could wish all the horror away. At the very least, I could wish it into a more cuddly form.<br />
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The desire to rid myself of the horrors of reality explains my reaction to the only film that ever really traumatized me as a child: Tommy Lee Wallace's made-for-TV miniseries adaptation of <i>Stephen King's IT</i>. The film scarred countless children of my generation, and it's not difficult to see why: its villain, Pennywise the killer clown (Tim Curry), is another, albeit more sinister, variation on the alternately comforting and horrifying monster. On the one hand, he's a dancing clown who blows balloons and cracks jokes; on the other hand, he eats children. But his confrontations with a <i>Monster Squad</i>-esque group of kids in a small Maine town play out far differently than the Squad's encounters with Frankenstein and the bunch: Pennywise becomes for the child protagonists a symbol of the horrors of growing up, deceptively personified as that most comical figure of adolescent innocence. As in life, the dancing clown of childhood leads you blindly into the gaping maw of adulthood.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXQIV8byv6bYFbvTyQYynSfQGpEuWNPj81BnkcvfB3g-9ClS_r0NjKnFSBtZQ9W11gY7VHtSaP-OcVQN8XtlZoUXX5lyCOC8SKooBcQH8YFj8aO7IyM9sLqsEwpcMEpjYGl6vLnMyC4cI/s1600/pennywisepond.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="252" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXQIV8byv6bYFbvTyQYynSfQGpEuWNPj81BnkcvfB3g-9ClS_r0NjKnFSBtZQ9W11gY7VHtSaP-OcVQN8XtlZoUXX5lyCOC8SKooBcQH8YFj8aO7IyM9sLqsEwpcMEpjYGl6vLnMyC4cI/s1600/pennywisepond.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Stephen King's IT </i>(1990)</td></tr>
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When I braced myself to watch the entirety of <i>IT</i>, I was thrilled by the climax of the first part, in which the children literally wish the monster away by refusing to believe in him. In that moment, they had the power my subconscious so desperately wanted and that I derived vicariously from all the monster movies I consumed. But then came my viewing of the second part of <i>IT</i>, and I was crushed (for far deeper reasons than the reveal of Pennywise as a giant alien turtle). The children's wishing away of the horror of reality had failed. The monster still lurked out there in the maze of life (or, concretely, in the labyrinthine sewer system of Derry, Maine). Worse yet, I was forced to reckon with the fact that these once so imaginatively powerful children had grown into aimless and depressed adults, living out horrible lives filled with humdrum horrors. One of them even kills himself to avoid facing the reality of his life and his failures. Was this what I had to look forward to as I grew up into the world? When added to all of the very real tragedies and atrocities littering the planet, it didn't seem like I had much to look forward to. It's no wonder I'd want to comfort myself through horror films, to reassure myself that the monsters could be controlled or wished away. Like Eddie Kaspbrak (Adam Faraizl), I wanted to feed battery acid to the slime of existence, and I wanted it to do permanent damage.</div>
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But it's not possible to wish monsters away. I think deep down I knew that, too. Wishing them away is also what Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) tries on Freddy in the original <i>A Nightmare on Elm Street</i>, and her success doesn't last long either. Freddy would return time and time again in numerous sequels to haunt the dreams of her and others, and there wasn't anything anyone could do about it as long as the films kept making New Line Cinema money (another reality of the adult world). Even horror movies with ostensibly upbeat endings had taught me while I was young that there's a certain fragility to the tranquility and happiness achieved in one's life at any age, as if those states have a built-in expiration date. Gizmo can't stay dry forever, the portal that sucked up Dracula will spit him out again in some distant century, and children from Derry, Maine will continue to go missing, even if all the clowns leave town. Given enough time, the monsters always emerge again from the dark of the maze to pounce upon the next weary traveler. And there are always more monsters deeper in the maze, biding their time, waiting to swallow you whole. The trick is in convincing them to smile and wave instead.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNSlrd6f2Z3aCK_pIY0qYeZMEXE233N0DLNZIgQwmj8EpzuiYuFKdvzfzovf89YOHByeUPGFUYfZjjmipan0y5fUJdBNmya5IZaZXKF9zyMm77Q8CbGVS5n9mpyHdZsFcFDYdp-013Lho/s1600/freddywaving.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="241" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjNSlrd6f2Z3aCK_pIY0qYeZMEXE233N0DLNZIgQwmj8EpzuiYuFKdvzfzovf89YOHByeUPGFUYfZjjmipan0y5fUJdBNmya5IZaZXKF9zyMm77Q8CbGVS5n9mpyHdZsFcFDYdp-013Lho/s1600/freddywaving.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A friend.</td></tr>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5914772860062903280.post-60791938332117110162014-07-16T08:00:00.000-04:002014-07-17T18:53:17.566-04:00A Dreadful Decade (Part III): Berberian Sound Studio (2012) dir. Peter Strickland<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaU-qEIYRqo6mrQjiTVfJalfuc7d72aial0JRY4fb6RP3t-xtRUjzCQu_0L0u5SdpbuU8E1CjlIzRxG6RfhZZwlgWKvay3bIfgfStSTrfsLO_7Tm_3wdClS8A1oHp-UdnSf1oIPA5U6RA/s1600/berberian.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaU-qEIYRqo6mrQjiTVfJalfuc7d72aial0JRY4fb6RP3t-xtRUjzCQu_0L0u5SdpbuU8E1CjlIzRxG6RfhZZwlgWKvay3bIfgfStSTrfsLO_7Tm_3wdClS8A1oHp-UdnSf1oIPA5U6RA/s1600/berberian.jpg" height="320" width="224" /></a></div>
<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Logline:</span></i></b> In this 1970s period piece, Gilderoy (Toby Jones), a successful sound engineer of English nature documentaries, is invited to Italy's Berberian Sound Studio by the director Giancarlo Santini (Antonio Mancino) to work on his latest film. Though initially excited about the prospect of working on a narrative film with a renowned filmmaker, the meek and mild Gilderoy is soon put off by the complex hostility of the Italian film industry and the grisly tasks he's asked to perform to create the film's sound. What Gilderoy wasn't informed of is that Santini's latest film, <i>The Equestrian Vortex</i>, is a graphic horror film, and thus the sound engineer's increasing complicity in bringing to aural life the sickening images on screen is having a frightful effect on his sanity.</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Analysis:</span></i></b> Italian horror cinema of the 1970s was, in a sense, the apex of queasy on-screen violence. Certainly, horror films in the decades since have sought and succeeded to increase the sheer level of bloodshed on display, but as the '70s bled over into the '80s and on, what were once startling moments of stylized physical violence (occupying a realm halfway between delirious fantasy and sober reality) transformed into the cartoonish excesses of modern cinematic gore. We necessarily remain at a distance from cartoon violence, but the brutal hacking and slashing seen in Italian gialli like <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073582/">Deep Red</a></i> (1975) and <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069019/">Don't Torture a Duckling</a></i> (1972) was (when compared to that of their international contemporaries) impossible not to feel the visceral effect of. Even today the violence in these battered and aged Italian gialli has the power to shock viewers in a way that the goopiest modern torture porn horror cannot. With an unmatched sleazy ferocity, '70s Italian horror broke the taboos first.</div>
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In part, <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1833844/">Berberian Sound Studio</a></i> ponders the effects of such violence on those souls who labored to create it. It asks: could anything but a film industry full of monsters produce this sadistic breed of cinema? This is a criticism that's often been lodged against the likes of Argento, Fulci, and Martino, and it's a possibility that Peter Strickland's film finds fascinating to explore. We watch as Gilderoy feebly attempts to maneuver his way within an industry that is as callous and insensitive towards its financial debts as it is towards cinematic depictions of vaginal rape with a branding iron. When not popping champagne corks in honor of undefined celebrations, those in charge of the Italian movie-making machine are grinding up the human beings in their employ, disposing of them if and when they refuse to be the mere objects they're required to be for the production's sake. If not monsters-- the film appears to argue-- then these films couldn't have been created by anything but desensitized automatons, psychologically oblivious to the carnage they're wreaking on screen.</div>
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Yet, what sounds like a rather puritanical blanket condemnation of '70s Italian horror and its producers grows more complex when considered in light of Gilderoy's evolution over the length of the film. Initially, Gilderoy (a stuffy Englishman, naturally) is horrified and repulsed by the images he's forced to gaze at day after day during his employment at the studio. His halfhearted attempts to create the soundtrack to the film's murders eventually give way to outright defiance: Gilderoy can't will himself to be complicit, as if his refusal or failure to provide the required foley effects could spare the on-screen victims their fates. But as his frustration with his bosses and his situation grows, Gilderoy slowly begins to embrace the cinematic violence, insofar that he begins to lose himself in the images of the film. Soon enough, he's watching himself in horror movie situations that play out on the screen in front of him. Reality and fantasy enmesh, and Gilderoy emerges from the collision as another one of those cold-blooded movie-making automatons. (Appropriately, he also emerges magically fluent in Italian.) At the film's ear-piercing climax, Gilderoy sadistically employs his trade to cause violence to another member of the crew for the alleged benefit of the film. Immediately after Gilderoy has sunk to this new low, the camera moves in to find tears crowding his eyes with regret, and we watch as he wanders over to attempt communion, perhaps reconciliation, with the movie screen he's been battling all along. </div>
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Perhaps in the end the film is an essentially moral one, arguing against the bloody misanthropy on display in Italian horror and the potential detriments it might bring into the psychological lives of its makers (not to mention its audience). But, at the same time, the film recognizes the allure of cinematic violence and the inherent temptation we feel to wallow in it: we can't forget that Gilderoy was <i>smiling</i> as he tortured another human being with his deafening sound waves, as if he were one of <i>The Equestrian Vortex</i>'s inquisitors "interrogating" an accused witch. The Italian horror film that inspired his psychosis is appalling, certainly, and probably not of the artistic merit that its director claims, but it's essentially innocent. As a piece of lifeless cinema, it doesn't command his actions or dictate his thoughts. Ultimately, Gilderoy's failure is his inability to distinguish the screen from reality and cinematic violence from actual violence. Through negative example, perhaps the film hopes we fair better.</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Technical Merits:</span></i></b> One would expect that a film about the creation of sound would itself have expert sound design. <i>Berberian Sound Studio</i> does not fail on this count. Though it expresses an occasional affection for the bombastic scores of Italian soundtrack stalwarts like Morricone, Nicolai, and Cipriani (courtesy of the English band Broadcast), much of the film's sound design is deliberately subdued, placing ambient noises (those real, imagined, and manufactured) at the forefront. Thus, sonic tensions run high. Strickland's film has the distinction of employing sound as a physical weapon, both within the film and without.</div>
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Humorously, Strickland also undermines our expectations by never allowing us to glimpse a single frame of <i>The Equestrian Vortex</i>, the horror film within the horror film (<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7zIfUwwoQ0">beyond its stylish, solarized opening credits</a>, that is). We've come to a horror film (of two sorts), and yet we're denied any bloodshed. How rude. Or perhaps not: the film's greatest visual merit is its fixation on the gory remains of the assorted fruits and vegetables that Gilderoy and his assistant foley artists massacre for their sound effects. As the lingering, nauseating closeups of the putrid, rotting husks of melons and turnips remind us, there are real victims of violence here, if not those we expect.</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Relevance:</span></i></b> If nothing else, the film is indisputably <i>about</i> the production of horror films, and specifically that unique moment in European genre cinema in which entire films were captured without live sound and instead employed the work of gifted sound engineers, foley artists, and voice actors to create the films' post-synced soundtracks. The effort and talent that went into producing all the sound for these countless genre classics have been largely ignored in favor of praise for the delirious cinematography of the era. I think <i>Berberian Sound Studio</i> successfully corrects this oversight by deftly demonstrating how these sound practitioners could manipulate the silliest of audio recordings into the truly horrific.<br />
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You might scoff at my contention that <i>Berberian Sound Studio</i> is itself a horror film, but I believe I have enough evidence on my side. In spite of whatever reservations Strickland might have about horror cinema, his film is clearly modeled after the Italian giallo (and his film within the film, <i>The Equestrian Vortex</i>, obviously derived from <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076786/">Suspiria</a></i> (1977), that supernatural giallo supreme). Impressively, Strickland manages to imbue his film with the mood and atmosphere of a giallo without ever fully slipping into the subgenre's cliches. We encounter shady characters, implied sexual violence, a descent into psychosis, and a late night stalking with a blade, but all of these moments are approached from directions grounded (more or less) in quasi-reality, as if the film were coming at the giallo's tropes sideways. An example: The physical violence, as noted above, is vegetal. It's a humorous employment of the giallo's elements that provides them for us while denying us their full expression. Like the figure we see switching out reels in the titular studio, we sense that a fiend in black leather gloves is running Strickland's projector, too.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5914772860062903280.post-79344946635111338652014-07-09T08:00:00.000-04:002014-07-09T08:00:07.514-04:00A Dreadful Decade (Part II): Resolution (2012) dir. Justin Benson, Aaron Moorehead<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Logline:</span></i></b> After being e-mailed a video chronicling the dire condition of his drug-addicted friend (Chris, portrayed by Vinny Curran), Michael (Peter Cilella) resolves to help his long-estranged buddy break free of his dependency by confronting him at his remote cabin in the woods. Michael decides to go the tough love route, handcuffing the stubborn Chris to the wall and vowing to help him through his violent, expletive-filled withdrawal over the next few days and nights. Complications arise when it's discovered that Chris has lost a large supply of his dealers' drugs and that he's actually squatting on a Native American reservation. But worst of all are the mysterious documents and recordings being left around the cabin and surrounding woods for Michael to discover, documents and recordings that begin to reveal the horrific history of the area and eventually suggest the possibility that someone is attempting to revise the story these two friends are living out.</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Analysis:</span></i></b><i> Resolution</i> is a film about the demands audiences make and the unfortunate effects these demands can have upon characters living within a narrative world. As part of an audience, we have certain expectations for structure. We expect development and complication, explanation and resolution. Beginning, middle, end. Only the most tolerant of us aren't angry when a narrative fails to include any of these aspects, whether it be out of ineptitude or defiance. After watching movies or reading books we've been somehow disappointed with, we often express our wish for how it <i>should</i> have ended. In contrast to most narratives outside of Choose Your Own Adventure books, <i>Resolution</i> gives this power of revision to the audience, though in a limited way. The film presumes to know what sort of plot we want, and it chastises and punishes its characters whenever they fail to provide it. What we want (says the film) is an unhappy ending.</div>
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The first time I watched <i>Resolution</i>, I was somewhat put off by this assertion that the film makes. After all, hadn't I grown unusually fond of these characters over the length of the movie? Hadn't I wanted them to escape their predicament and resolve the issues in their lives and friendship? Why would I wish them the ill that the film claims I do? I thought that the film was working at cross purposes by including such well-wrought character drama and then assuring me that I wanted to see these likable fellows dead, one way or another. But further viewings and reflection has me feeling differently. </div>
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I think <i>Resolution</i> is correct. As an audience member, I wanted events beyond the mundane to transpire in these characters' fictional lives. When creepy recordings turn up in and around the cabin, I want Michael to explore them despite his better sense, to probe further and risk putting himself in danger. I desire problems and drama within the central relationship of the film, and I yearn for them to be resolved. When the characters maintain that their personal problems (like so many problems in our real lives) <i>can't</i> be solved, I'm happy when the film forces them to reconsider, in spite of whatever further dangers or traumas they will have to experience. In a sense, I derived my entertainment from these characters' suffering, and so, by extension, how could I ever be satisfied with a happy ending, especially within the context of an ostensible horror film? I'll need the truly horrific to rear its ugly head eventually, whatever the cost. <i>Resolution </i>doesn't fail me on this count. Or, rather, I don't fail it.</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Technical Merits:</span></i></b> The film's naturalistic, nearly Dogme 95-esque approach to visual storytelling (single location, handheld camerawork, the absence of a musical score) is offset by creeping reminders of the essential artificiality of the images on screen. Scenes occasionally transition from one to the next by way of an audio and video effect that is akin to a hot projector burning up the print passing through it. One of these faux-antiquated effects (the presence of such being curious enough considering the film was captured digitally on the Red One camera) even interrupts a scene mid-conversation, causing our two leads to question the strange noise they just heard (but which, of course, they should not have.) These metafictional stylistic contradictions are deliberate, making apparent on screen that the archetypal audience's desire for a certain type of ancient narrative transcends time, format, medium, and style itself. Notice, for example, the fact that Michael's discoveries throughout the film reveal numerous narratives to us, and while each takes on a different form--photographs, projector slides, books, vinyl records, film reels, video tapes, audio tapes, computer-recorded video-- each also possesses the same grim ending. As the medium improves over time, imbuing its images and sounds with greater clarity, definition, and verisimilitude, we may forget that what we're watching is a constructed story. <i>Resolution</i>'s approach ensures that we remember.</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Relevance:</span></i></b> A quote from the <i>Village Voice</i> on the front cover of <i>Resolution</i>'s home video release boldly proclaims that Justin Benson and Aaron Moorehead's film "puts <i>The Cabin in the Woods</i> to shame." That's not an entirely honest assessment. Certainly, both films are metafictional reflections on horror cinema and both take place in a woods-ensconced cabin, but similarities end there. <i>Cabin in the Woods</i> is unmistakably a genre film, while <i>Resolution</i> is not so easily classified. <i>Cabin in the Woods</i> revels in the various permutations of the same basic story we see again and again in horror films; <i>Resolution</i> dreads the inescapable pull of a deeper, ingrained narrative structure that anticipates (perhaps requires) tragedy. <i>Cabin in the Woods</i> is excess; <i>Resolution</i> is restraint. A "one coin, two sides" situation. For the open-minded viewer, they make lovely companion pieces to one another.</div>
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But it's that unclassifiable nature of <i>Resolution</i> that makes it noteworthy for admirers of horror cinema. Its decided refusal to engage earnestly in any stock horror movie cliche is noble. (Moments of the film gleefully deflate recognizable scare tactics like the figure tapping on the window or the person lurking in the dark of a cave.) Yet, it's the film's dedication to employing a primal essence of horror that is what defines it. It presents us with objects of fear that have no face, and with suspense that derives from no obvious or explainable catalyst. The film is full of palpable unease, but its audience would be hard pressed to describe for you its monsters. Are these monsters indeed personifications of the audience, or are they more supernatural in origin, as the final moments might suggest? Or are they instead all too human, or cosmic, or spiritual? As the eccentric French hermit, Byron (Bill Oberst, Jr.), asks Michael in the film, how can an isolated tribesman in Ecuador tell the difference between an alien, an angel, and a ghost? He can't, of course, but he can perhaps sense a difference of intent, and the intent of those undefined forces in <i>Resolution</i> is undeniably no good.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5914772860062903280.post-10363775723430451882014-07-02T08:00:00.000-04:002014-07-02T08:00:07.116-04:00A Dreadful Decade (Part I): Left Bank (2008) dir. Pieter Van Hees<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS6wUGHTxJzN9MW_6Y3Z7d-h9I2Kwf2ZBmJGDVghyphenhyphenvi2Xg2dCcfDIeoWhcm94GScUTNH1mXhZYvqFGl9BW_IpyNuFy4MqjTMnIFBeCYenUzrJ3LrjH70KPzeeSmML-y-L5Z_ie1Vt-1_Y/s1600/linkeroever.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhS6wUGHTxJzN9MW_6Y3Z7d-h9I2Kwf2ZBmJGDVghyphenhyphenvi2Xg2dCcfDIeoWhcm94GScUTNH1mXhZYvqFGl9BW_IpyNuFy4MqjTMnIFBeCYenUzrJ3LrjH70KPzeeSmML-y-L5Z_ie1Vt-1_Y/s1600/linkeroever.jpg" height="320" width="224" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">a.k.a. </span><span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: #c92121;"><b>Linkeroever</b></span></i></span></div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Logline:</span></i></b> After being diagnosed with an inexplicable bout of chronic fatigue syndrome and dropping out of a big track competition, Marie (Eline Kuppens) moves into the apartment of her new boyfriend, Bobby (Matthias Schoenaerts), in order to convalesce. While there, she begins to unravel the mysteries of the sudden disappearance of the apartments's previous occupant and the sinister pagan history of the surrounding area, Antwerp's Left Bank. As her condition worsens and the peculiar encounters pile up, Marie begins to realize that someone or some<i>thing</i> in the Left Bank has plans for her.</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Analysis:</span></i></b> If <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0940723/">Left Bank</a></i> has any obvious fault, it's that it might have hammered away too freely at its themes of wasted lives, second chances, and rebirth before its incredible final moments, when this previous talk takes on very literal significance and (almost) all is made clear. Perhaps there's one too many lines of dialogue in which Bobby expresses his desire to give Marie "the chance to do better" or Marie herself wishes she could "just start all over again." For the viewer, Bobby's observation that Marie doesn't even look happy when she's running (i.e. engaging in her life's passion) was apparent already from Eline Kuppens's sober and aimless performance. At only 27 years old, Marie is a young woman who has been beaten down too far by her own brief existence, saddled as she is with the baggage of an overbearing mother, a disappointed father figure, the absence of a social life, and a sense of self-loathing bred from perfectionism. In truth, she's a typical twentysomething who is having difficulty making the transition to full-blown adulthood, and so she experiences the malaise of having to Figure It All Out. There's nothing inherently fatal about Marie's condition, though it might certainly feel that way to her, stuck in the moment. She yearns for a return to the childhood innocence she has left behind, when all this stuff didn't matter.<br />
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Peculiarly, this dilemma in Marie's life is that which the film's pagan guild exploits for their earthly magic. Reading the overdramatic suffering and ennui on Marie's blandly tortured face, the guild members decide to lead her (forcefully, but perhaps not unwillingly) towards sacrifice in honor of what they call alternately The Diabolical Vagina and the great Dragon in the ground. Through their drawn-out occult ceremonies, they usher her towards both death and life renewed. This makes them rather odd villains. They're certainly menacing enough (and mean with a crossbow when threatened), but the pagan guild is essentially doing no more than giving Marie what she outwardly desires. Sure, the guild themselves possibly receive immortality and eternal youth in return, but would we begrudge them that for their good deed? In one sense, they're preying on Marie's youthful weakness and confusion for their own benefit; in another, they're teaching her what so many of cinema's gypsies have taught us in the past-- be careful what you wish for.</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Technical Merits:</span></i></b> Though the pagans' plot against Marie is ultimately revealed to be quite simple (at least in comparison with other human sacrifices we've seen in film), director Pieter Van Hees and his screenwriters don't shy away from including ambiguous visual symbolism--the sort to inspire <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0940723/board/?ref_=tt_bd_sm">much baffled IMDb discussion board commentary</a>--whenever they have the chance. The choice to include so many of these unexplained moments (like Marie's discovery of ash in the crotch of her panties, her suckling of a grown man while on a jog through the forest, the rat that explodes from out of her hairy knee wound, and the presence of her paternal track coach at her apparent rebirth) could be frustratingly vague, but the cinematography from Nicolas Karakatsanis and the editing by Nico Leunen ably support such maneuvers by never lingering the shot or prolonging the scene in order to hold our hands through an interpretation of its ripe imagery. Nor does the cinematography or editing easily explain away these surreal visuals as products of Marie's dream life; rather, these aspects of the film ground the visuals in a skewed sense of reality. This approach gives such moments a subtle coherence or logic: despite how strange they may appear, they're presented as if they're organic to world we're witnessing on screen. To make the bizarre commonplace is an impressive feat.</div>
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;">Relevance:</span></i></b> <i>Left Bank</i> should be of interest to horror fans for its successful melding of two European horror subgenres previously unassociated, Polanski's Polish/French/American urban paranoia thriller (as seen in <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074811/">The Tenant</a></i> [1976], <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063522/">Rosemary's Baby</a></i> [1968], and <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059646/">Repulsion</a></i> [1965]) and the rural pagan superstition horror that was dominant for a time in the United Kingdom (in films like <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070917/">The Wicker Man</a></i> [1973], <i><a href="http://nessuntimore.blogspot.com/2013/11/robin-redbreast-1970-dir-james.html">Robin Redbreast</a></i> [1970], <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095488/"><i>Lair of the White Worm</i></a> [1988], and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066849/"><i>The Blood on Satan's Claw</i></a> [1971]). We can call the combination successful because the juxtaposition of what seems at first to be two disparate subgenres serves to point out the obvious facts that we've forgotten: the cities of Europe were once rural landscapes, and the people inhabiting these areas might not have possessed the same cuddly, (largely) non-violent belief systems of the modern world. The film asks us to ponder what dark, ancient history might still remain buried in the earth, beneath the excess of concrete and metal that we've built up around us. Beyond its narrative conflation of the subgenres, the film also does a swell job of reminding us visually of this dual history of its location by giving frequent screentime to placid shots of the quietly menacing forests, fields, and waters scattered alongside the Left Bank's busy urban environments, reminding us that the latter has not consumed the former but simply masks it.<br />
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<i>Left Bank</i> is also of interest in that it--along with a few other notable recent films--marks a revitalization of Belgian horror cinema, which has been nearly nonexistent in the last few decades, and previously was only marked by a few scattered films like <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067690/">Daughters of Darkness</a></i> (1971), <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067592/">The Devil's Nightmare</a></i> (1971), and <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098157/">Rabid Grannies</a></i> (1988). <i>Left Bank</i> is the first of three (!) contemporary Belgian horror films to make this collection of my favorites of the past ten years, so (in my estimation at least) we're in the midst of a mini-renaissance of horror from the land of fries and waffles.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5914772860062903280.post-62165112777533691082014-06-25T07:00:00.000-04:002014-06-25T07:00:02.703-04:00ESSAY: No, YOU'RE Next: The Transformation of a Home Invasion Thriller<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<i><u><span style="color: #c92121;"><b>Abstract:</b></span></u></i> A consideration of the possible influence one little-known home invasion thriller had on another, much more well-regarded home invasion thriller. A nasty case of plagiarism? Well, we wouldn't be shocked if the makers of the latter had caught a late night television broadcast of the former at some point. Regardless, this isn't a case of outright thievery; it's a demonstration of how a thriller film becomes a horror film, and of the fine line separating cliched earnestness and intentional self-parody in cinematic storytelling.</div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;"><b>This essay features discussion of:</b></span></div>
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<i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1853739/">You're Next</a></i> (2013) dir. Adam Wingard</div>
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<i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118696/">Below Utopia</a></i> (1997) dir. Kurt Voss</div>
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Allow me to describe for you a horror film. Help me to remember its title.</div>
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It goes like this: A young couple is driving to a family get-together. The man (a college English teacher) is anxious because his relationship with his wealthy family (though particularly his father) is strained due to their perception of him as a failure. The woman--the man's significant other--is also anxious, considering this will be her first encounter with his family. The couple arrives at this isolated family estate in the countryside, and many tense encounters are had between siblings and between children and parents. During dinner, a trio of ferocious mercenaries invade the home and murder most everyone inside. The young couple survive by evading the killers, and, eventually, they're able to turn the tables on their aggressors by way of borrowed weapons. In particular, the woman demonstrates her physical and emotional resilience to the terror surrounding her in this second half. </div>
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The killers successfully done away with, a twist is tossed our way like a live hand grenade: the male half of this couple staged the whole grisly affair. See, he hired the anonymous assassins to murder his entire, much-maligned family so that he would be the sole recipient of their vast estate. (It appears that being an English teacher simply wasn't paying the bills.) He then decided to put his girlfriend through this harrowing ordeal so that she could serve as an innocent witness to the authorities concerning the senseless carnage and, thus, discourage any suspicion that might turn in his direction. But, now that she has learned the truth of her boyfriend's nefarious scheming and mass familicide, she has no recourse but to murder him in retaliation, which she does.</div>
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What movie am I thinking of?<br />
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You might be thinking that I'm thinking of Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett's recent home invasion horror film <i>You're Next </i>(2013). Actually, I was describing the film <i>Below Utopia</i> (a.k.a. <i>Body Count</i>, 1997), starring Alyssa Milano, Justin Theroux, Tiny Lister, and the incomparable Ice T. But you wouldn't be wrong, either, because what I've described above is the same basic story (and accompanying minute details) seen in <i>You're Next</i>. The two films are identical in this broad sense, separated only by their respective decades of release and the fact that if you're reading this blog you've most likely seen the one and never even heard of the other.<br />
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I'm hesitant to label the similarities between <i>Below Utopia</i> and <i>You're Next</i> as the product of an act of deliberate plagiarism by the latter against the former. Kurt Voss's <i>Below Utopia</i> isn't exactly startling in its originality, and it's possible that writer Simon Barrett was simply working from the cliches of the twisty, surprisingly long-lived inheritance scheme thriller genre when he was drafting <i>You're Next</i>, resulting in a film the travels the same well-trodden path. But I have a tough time swallowing that line. The two films are much too much alike for the resemblance to be mere coincidence, and I would wager that Barrett was influenced at least unconsciously by the earlier film, if not directly. Either way, I have no doubt that Barrett had seen <i>Below Utopia</i> prior to writing his film. This isn't a criticism. I'm equally as certain that Barrett and Wingard had seen <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0482606/">The Strangers</a></i> (2008), <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0808279/">Funny Games</a> </i>(1997; 2008), <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0338095/">High Tension</a></i> (2003), <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0465203/">Them</a></i> (2006), <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0856288/">Inside</a></i> (2007), and numerous other contemporary home invasion thrillers before writing <i>You're Next</i>, too. In its postmodern self-awareness, Barrett and Wingard's film is striving to upset the expectations of its specific subgenre, and thus it requires a resemblance to (and familiarity with) those prior films within that subgenre. It's to be expected.<br />
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The complicating factor in all this is that <i>Below Utopia</i> isn't a horror film, despite the fact that the majority of home invasion films are. It's a thriller, certainly, perhaps a crime or a drama film, but it's not horror. Almost all of its violence happens off screen, with the emphasis being not on forcing the audience to gawk at the visceral images of a family being demolished but on encouraging that audience to follow the loopy plot twists and stay ahead of the action. The film's antagonists aren't shadowy, menacing madmen, but Tiny Lister checking the radio for basketball scores and Ice T cracking wise between gunshots. It's shot and edited in a flat, suspense-bereft late-'90s DTV style (despite it having received a theatrical release), and while you might run the risk of being absentmindedly entertained by the events on screen, being afraid seems unlikely.<br />
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<i>You're Next</i> transforms the same basic story into something that could not be mistaken for anything but a horror film. The film intends to shock, terrify, and amusingly astonish by the lengths to which it goes in sowing its mayhem. Frenetic handheld camerawork, palpable tension punctuated by cheap jump scares, iconic villains, unflinching brutality leavened by audience-rousing reprisals, buckets upon buckets of fake blood: it's all the things midnight movies are made of. Considering its foundational commonalities with the earlier film, <i>You're Next</i> is best viewed as a revision of <i>Below Utopia</i>, seeking to amend the errors of the "original" film's presentation. In a commentary track on <i>You're Next</i>'s home video release, Barrett expresses that his desire in writing the film was to correct what bad home invasion movies got wrong. That it does. Despite its novel twists and turns (which <i>You're Next</i> co-opts as its own), <i>Below Utopia</i> is as typical as they come, with audible DUN-DUN-DUNs soundtracking its revelations and strained grasps at psychological complexity. Nevertheless, <i>Below Utopia</i> still presents the horrific concept of a man callously ordering the deaths of his entire immediate and extended family. Does not such a horrific concept deserve the casing of a horror film that <i>You're Next</i> provides?<br />
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But <i>You're Next</i> has value beyond this transformation of genre, whatever the truth is concerning its source. In that same commentary track, Barrett and Wingard agree that what is necessary in contemporary horror cinema is not necessarily new material, but new perspectives on that material. <i>You're Next</i> is better classified as an upheaval than a new perspective. Despite their claim that the film contains no overt "postmodern winks," Barrett and Wingard approach <i>You're Next</i> as self parody. The film lulls us into a sense of familiarity by beginning like an earnest slasher film and playing up narrative cliches like the motiveless thrill-killers and cinematic cliches like the sights and sounds of an unnaturally creaky old house. But it's not all that long before the film disregards our expectations and embraces the absurd, with blenders to the head and the apparent immortality of Joe Swanberg's character (another aspect mirrored, though without comment, in <i>Below Utopia</i>'s similarly immortal brother character of Justin, as portrayed by Nicholas Walker). <i>You're Next</i> encourages its characters to blindly but knowingly play into genre cliches by splitting up and wandering into dark rooms despite the presence of murderous psychopaths and then milks these moments for dark humor. Simultaneously, the film creates characters and moments that subvert those cliches, like Final Girl Erin (Sharni Vinson), whose childhood training as a survivalist makes her beyond circumstantially resilient, in contrast to so many other horror movie heroines. In short, the film strives successfully to be as unpredictable as it is knowingly hackneyed.</div>
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This is because <i>You're Next</i> is pointing out the conventional flaws of films within the subgenres of the slasher and the home invasion thriller while self-consciously reveling in those flaws. To an extent, it's devaluing the earnestness of those other films <i>and</i> acknowledging how crudely fun they can be. It's a film that puts on lurid display its exhaustion with the cliche of horror narratives motivated by nothing but their villains' inherent sadistic evil (à la <i>The Strangers</i>) or hoary psychological derangement (à la <i>Inside</i>) by leading us towards those cliches and then making them vanish, much to our discovered elation. Like <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117571/">Scream</a></i> (1996), which Barrett and Wingard strangely assure us their film is nothing like, <i>You're Next</i> allows us to feel smart for noticing its manipulation of conventions and its evacuation of faux-realism from a horror movie scenario that rests in absurdity.<br />
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<i><br /></i>Case in point: <i>Below Utopia</i> falls into the trap of faux-realism-through-cliche when it attempts to ground the reasoning for the by-proxy massacre in the sudden and inexplicable mania of Justin Theroux's previously sane character. It's amusing to watch Theroux ham it up as a secret psycho, but this attempted justification of the family massacre plot is far from a satisfying development, as it's trying too hard to explain away actions that are artificial and born of genre narrative necessity anyway. This phony realism, propped up by groan-worthy storytelling banalities, is the state to which so many home invasion thrillers fretfully strive. Why? Unlike most other horror subgenres, the home invasion thriller is constrained by its location. What could be more real or sacrosanct to us than our homes? It's for this reason that most audiences find the notion of home invasion skin-crawling, but it's also for this reason that filmmakers working within the subgenre actively forgo including levity or self-awareness in their productions in the interest of playing on those very real fears. Thus, home invasion thrillers are by and large dour, self-serious affairs, mired in their flimsy sense of authenticity, regardless of the level of preposterous genre fantasy they depict on screen. Like <i>Below Utopia</i>. (Or, for instance, <i>Inside</i>, in which the goopiest, goriest, stupidest blood fantasies are enacted without the trace of a smirk.)<br />
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In rebellion against this trend, <i>You're Next</i> embraces the artifice of its plot throughout, and pointedly (and humorously) recognizes the barbarity of its central inheritance scheme, with its mass familicide being ordered for no reason more complex than the accelerated transference of wealth between uber-greedy family members. Barrett and Wingard have re-structured their borrowed plot around the act of the wealthy swallowing up all those around them in the pursuit of more wealth, despite all good sense, placing these actions within a hysterical reality dictated by the logic (or illogic) of the conceit. What the filmmakers achieve is a state of genre filmmaking unadulterated by the restraints of verisimilitude that so many works of fantasy are hobbled with. They've taken a series of films set in its ways and liberated it for a receptive audience, but this insight is partially lost if it's never made clear to us what, <i>specifically</i>, they were taking to begin with, but for a chance encounter with it in the discount DVD bin. If the influence is there (which I suspect it is), it's frustrating that Barrett and Wingard have been so coy about it in the publicity surrounding the film. After all, it's sort of the point.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5914772860062903280.post-37424210886496073622014-06-11T08:00:00.000-04:002014-06-22T17:58:21.576-04:00ESSAY: The Sacrament (2014), Willow Creek (2014), & the Shape of Found Footage Horror to Come<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<b><i><span style="color: #c92121;"><u>Abstract</u>:</span></i></b> An essay on the current state of the found footage subgenre of horror. Prognosis: Fatal, probably, but that death nerve keeps on twitching. An examination, in particular, of two recent and once-promising FF films (<i>The Sacrament</i> [2014] and <i>Willow Creek</i> [2014]) that fail to add much new to the subgenre while basing their approaches to the form in those of a couple of films over a decade old. The found footage movement appears stagnant, but does any opportunity for advancement or maturation remain? There are slow-burning glimmers of hope.<br />
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<b><span style="color: #c92121;">This essay features discussion of:</span></b></div>
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<i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2383068/">The Sacrament</a></i> (2014) dir. Ti West</div>
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<i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0365960/">Zero Day</a></i> (2003) dir. Ben Coccio</div>
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<i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2885364/">Willow Creek</a></i> (2014) dir. Bobcat Goldthwait</div>
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<i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0185937/">The Blair Witch Project</a></i> (1999) dir. Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick</div>
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Back in 2012, after the release of the non-FF but sneakingly <i>like</i> and <i>advertised-as</i> FF horror film <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1991245/">Chernobyl Diaries</a></i> (2012), <a href="http://nessuntimore.blogspot.com/2012/05/chernobyl-diaries-2012-dir-bradley.html">I predicted</a> that as found footage horror films began to fall from favor, as Hollywood studios and independents alike began to realize that the success of <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1179904/">Paranormal Activity</a></i> (2009) was not quite as repeatable as they'd hoped (even for further <i>Paranormal Activity</i> films), what we'd begin to see was something akin to osmosis. Screened alongside mainstream fluff at the multiplexes for long enough, found footage horror would begin to rub off on its more traditionally filmed peers to the extent that the two would soon become indistinguishable, I imagined. The handheld, documentary style would pop up in films that weren't intended as faux-documentaries, and the emphasis on "character" and "narrative" in traditional horror would evolve into an emphasis on the audience's "experience" of the audible and visual horror. I will pat myself on the back for this one: the fingerprint of the found footage movement is omnipresent as of 2014. You'd have a smaller list by simply noting those films that <i>don't</i> in some way utilize the found footage aesthetic, but for the sake of supporting my claim here's a collection of relevant films that do: <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1922777/">Sinister</a></i> (2012), <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1457767/">The Conjuring</a></i> (2013), <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2011276/">The Banshee Chapter</a></i> (2013), <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1707392/">Lovely Molly</a></i> (2012), <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1433822/">The Apparition</a></i> (2012), <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2388715/">Oculus</a></i> (2014), <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2184339/">The Purge</a></i> (2013), <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2235779/">The Quiet Ones</a></i> (2014). None of these films could reasonably be classified as a found footage horror film, and yet each either contains sections that utilize the FF aesthetic or are traditional horror movies filmed in an FF-reminiscent style.</div>
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So my glimpse into the crystal ball of horror cinema's future proved me correct that once, but could I manage a repeat performance of foreseeing? <a href="http://nessuntimore.blogspot.com/2012/07/meltdown-035-lost-found-across-spectrum.html">Later in 2012</a>, while fuming over the detritus released to the general public under the working title of <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1560985/">The Devil Inside</a></i> (2012), I posited that all of the creative potential in the unadulterated FF form hadn't been evacuated quite yet, and I was certain that those storytelling champions of the subgenre were riding their horses into view from off on the horizon. Any second now, they'd be here, and found footage horror would find its redemption in the public's eye through their efforts.<br />
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I'll admit that I was maybe less of an oracle on this matter. The last two years of found footage films, both major and minor, have been pretty much what I had hoped they wouldn't be: hours upon hours of paranormal investigation or Satanic happening found footage with ambitions stretching no farther than "BOO!" As the gap between consumer and professional digital video fast closes, another sort of osmosis is happening in the realm of budget horror cinema, in which narrative inspiration seems to be derived from <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpkmBjh7cSM">supernatural Youtube Gotcha! videos with the highest number of views</a>. The creative bankruptcy of the majority of FF films being produced and released at this moment signals that the subgenre is undoubtedly at its lowest point.</div>
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Yet, I wasn't entirely foolhardy in my prediction. In the last few years, a handful of genuine filmmakers have indeed seen the value of the non-traditional found footage form in communicating their stories on screen and thus have produced found footage films of their own. For instance, Barry Levinson (<i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1713476/">The Bay</a></i> [2012]) , Renny Harlin (<i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1905040/">Devil's Pass</a></i> [2013]), and Bernard Rose (<i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2041331/">Sxtape</a></i> [2013]) have all directed found footage horror films within the last two years. Sure, those three aren't exactly visionary filmmakers (as each of their FF films indicate), and, moreover, their embrace of the FF form might be rooted in practicality (promising an FF film's budget might be the only way these relative old-timers can find work within the ever-youthful genre), but the point stands. Filmmakers raised and practiced on traditionally filmed cinema are turning toward the found footage form for some reason or another. Notably, this year saw the limited releases of two promising found footage films from two very different but equally legitimate directors: <i>The Sacrament</i>, directed by Ti West (<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1594562/"><i>The Innkeepers</i></a> [2011], <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1172994/">The House of the Devil</a> </i>[2009]), and <i>Willow Creek</i>, directed by Bobcat Goldthwait (<i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1912398/">God Bless America</a> </i>[2011], <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1262981/">World's Greatest Dad</a> </i>[2009]). Perhaps, I imagined, these bonafide filmmakers, whose previous features I find to be both intelligently and artfully crafted, would indeed be the subgenre's ghoulishly pallid white knights, rescuing it from the clutches of insipidness.<br />
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My imagination was a bit too romantic. <i>The Sacrament </i>and <i>Willow Creek</i> are both fine films, and in style and execution are among the most satisfying the found footage crop has produced in the past few years. Yet, while watching them, I couldn't shake the vague sense of disappointment that comes with reliving a once-fond experience after years spent apart and finding it somehow diluted, cheapened in the interim. Against my hopes, the majority of what these two films bring to the subgenre is a rehash of what had already come before, over a decade earlier, in a pair of superior films (namely, <i>Zero Day</i> [2003] and <i>The Blair Witch Project </i>[1999]). Despite the best efforts of these talented artists, the subgenre in their hands remains a set of carnival rides eroded with age and held together with rubber bands.<br />
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Allow me to explain:<br />
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First, there's Ti West's <i>The Sacrament</i>. Heading into it, I held an unreasonable amount of hope for this one. I felt the subgenre needed a savior, and who could be better equipped to accomplish this salvaging than one of our best contemporary horror filmmakers? I nearly peed myself in anticipation when I found out West was making an FF film. Sure, his first effort in the subgenre (the "Second Honeymoon" segment from the FF anthology <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2105044/">V/H/S</a></i> [2012]) wasn't revelatory, but it was the shining pearl of relative intelligence and creativity in that turd pile. I hoped that a full-length effort, unencumbered by the anthology format, might prove even stronger. But <i>The Sacrament</i> is a disappointment. It's been accused of being a slavish faux-reproduction of the Jonestown Massacre, and that it is, but that fact alone doesn't make it a wasted effort. The Jonestown Massacre is a bizarre and perplexing event in American history that <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0762111/">no number of talking head documentaries </a>can suffice to make total sense out of. Thus, <i>The Sacrament</i> poised itself to be an enlightening, if fictional, dramatization of events that could attempt to explain, on some level, the damaged human minds that caused it.<br />
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It's at this point that I'm reminded of Ben Coccio's faux-Columbine shooting found footage film, <i>Zero Day</i>. What that film and <i>The Sacrament </i>have in common is the use of the found footage form to bring immediacy to a historical tragedy, to allow our camera eye to witness the events firsthand without the glossy layers of Hollywood filmmaking separating us from the very real (if, again, slightly fictionalized) carnage. But, in contrast to <i>Zero Day</i>, <i>The Sacrament</i> doesn't succeed in this goal of making real the horrifying unreality of the actual events. Being a "Horror Film" first and foremost, <i>The Sacrament</i> keeps its cult members frightening and alien to us, and thus we're never presented with the opportunity to know or understand them. We are made to become firsthand witnesses to the events, but we leave them knowing no more about why they happened then those real-life viewers watching television news reports of the Jonestown Massacre's aftermath. It's a problem of perspective: <i>Zero Day</i> utilized the found footage form as a video diary of its Columbine-esque killers, and we, aligned with them as viewers, were encouraged to identify with them and their deeds. The film doesn't justify the actions of its teen murderers, but it allows us to, on a human level, understand a bit more about these killers (both real and imagined) beyond the sneering villain yearbook photos burned into our brains. <i>The Sacrament</i>, released a decade after <i>Zero Day</i>, neglects to forcefully provide us that human identification, and thus its use of this particular history-pilfering form fails. By the close of the film, we know nothing about the motivation of Gene Jones's supernaturally charismatic Father, nor do we truly understand what it took for his many followers to blindly live and die by his dictates, against their better sense and reason. <i>The Sacrament</i> strives to be a Creepy Cult Found Footage movie, not a Chilling Investigation of the Human Condition and Mass Suicide, and thus reeks more of "exploitation" than "examination." This observation doesn't render <i>The Sacrament</i>'s most powerful scenes, like the inevitable Kool-Aid guzzling, any less visceral, but it does make them feel significantly more hollow.</div>
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And if the connection between <i>The Sacrament</i> and <i>Zero Day</i> feels more spiritual than direct to you in this argument about found footage's inability to advance, then consider Bobcat Goldthwait's found footage Bigfoot hunt, <i>Willow Creek</i>. Before <i>Willow Creek</i>, Goldthwait had never made a horror film. Regardless, it was difficult for me not to be intrigued by the prospect of what he could bring to the subgenre. His previous, darkly comedic features proved to be winning satires with a keen eye focused upon the shallowness of our current media. Could <i>Willow Creek</i> enact a similar critique, perhaps with that keen eye focused on the innumerable Bigfoot Hunter or Paranormal Investigator "reality" television programs littering the broadcast schedule? Somewhat unfortunately, <i>Willow Creek</i> is a straight-up Bigfoot hunt found footage flick. Bigfoot FF is some of the worst out there at the moment (beaten for the title only by Abandoned Asylum Ghost Hunter FF), so as this realization about the film's intentions dawned on me about a third of the way through my viewing of <i>Willow Creek</i>, I feared for the worst. Fortunately, <i>Willow Creek</i>'s steadfast return to the basics of the found footage form reveals the lingering potency of the subgenre's style.<br />
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But, simultaneously, <i>Willow Creek</i> reveals the subgenre's unwillingness to move that style forward. As a Supernatural Documentary Gone Awry FF, <i>Willow Creek</i> follows, beat-for-beat, the exact structure of the subgenre's chief progenitor, <i>The Blair Witch Project</i>. As in <i>The Blair Witch Project</i>, we witness the intrepid protagonists of <i>Willow Creek</i> preparing for their documentary shoot, filming introductory footage, entering the relevant town and interviewing the locals, heading to a famous local spot and filming more footage, camping out and being relentlessly terrorized at night while in a tent, getting lost in the woods, and perishing in an enigmatic ending in which much camera-whirling carnage is had and a vague callback from earlier is made. Goldthwait's film is not as succinct as <i>The Blair Witch Project</i> (the townie interview section of <i>Willow Creek</i> drags on far too long), but despite sharing an identical structure, the film doesn't prove grating. While more ramshackle and amateurish than I would have banked on, the film features amiable performances and enough suspense to justify its existence. But still, the question must be begged: is aping (pun intended) another decade-plus-old entry in the subgenre the best that a legitimate filmmaker can muster in 2014? Does such an obvious purloining of previous source material (however effective in isolation) herald the death knell of found footage? Has the shaky well run dry?</div>
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I'm still unsure. Considering <i>The Sacrament</i> and <i>Willow Creek</i> in retrospect, I realize that each film's most effective scene provides something to the viewer that traditionally filmed narratives would be extremely reluctant to and that most FF films of yesteryear would also most likely shy away from in their push toward kinetic, nausea-inducing camera movement: the extended stillness of frame. We see this in <i>The Sacrament</i>'s horrific stationary long shot of the force-injection of cyanide between once-loving family members. We see it in <i>Willow Creek</i>'s remarkable, nearly 20-minute-long tent-entrenched long take. (Actress Alexie Gilmore's face throughout this shot is the film's MVP). These shots may not be new uses of the form (even each of <i>Paranormal Activity</i> films makes occasional use of the camera that lingers), but they're by far the most prolonged and effective uses of a stationary camera that I've seen in the subgenre. Each of these scenes (though brief when considered in the larger running time) remind us of FF's effectiveness as a form, of the squirm-inducing splendor of the camera that won't flinch, and of the filmmaker whose presence is felt only through an absence of interference, who refuses to give us relief through a cut to quieter pastures and instead leaves us as helpless as a camera dropped to the ground. Moving forward, I hope the FF movement embraces this stillness of stationary horror. Let the cameras fall-- and remain-- where they may.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5914772860062903280.post-35977249852063640442014-05-28T08:00:00.000-04:002014-05-28T08:00:07.947-04:00Shepperton Screams (Part XVI): The Monster Club (1981) dir. Roy Ward Baker<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>For sixteen weeks, <b><a href="http://macabrebookshelf.blogspot.com/">Jose Cruz of The Grim Reader </a></b>and I will be delving into the complete horror filmography of Amicus Productions and regaling you with our spirited discussions. Below is our mutual consideration of a final anthology film produced by Amicus's Milton Subotsky, <b><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081178/">THE MONSTER CLUB (1981)</a></b>. </i><br />
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<span style="color: #c92121;"><b><u>GR:</u></b> Well. Here we are.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">We’re in </span><b style="color: #c92121;">THE MONSTER CLUB (1981)</b><span style="color: #c92121;">, to be precise, and oh boy is it the happenin’ place to be on a dark and chilly night when you got time to kill and want to share a drink with a fiend. The film is both the most and least appropriate to leave off on during a conversation concerning Amicus Studios. It has all the macabre, darkly witty qualities of the company’s former films, combining garish horror with a satirically pointed look at the very same conventions that they had built their reputation upon. Vampires leer with goofy fangs, creatures and critters dance with wild abandon, and a fellow who appears to be a Jewish werewolf comedian all lighten the air with their wink-wink, nudge-nudge mannerisms and hamminess. Its trio of terror tales is uniformly good to great, delivering solid thrills, innovative twists on old mainstays, and atmosphere as thick as London fog that would make any avid viewer’s black heart flutter.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">It also brings a creative team together from the company’s old days that is swoon-worthy: a group of thespians including Vincent Price, John Carradine and Donald Pleasance; composer Douglas Gamley back at the bandstand; Roy Ward Baker (</span><b style="color: #c92121;">ASYLUM</b><span style="color: #c92121;">, </span><b style="color: #c92121;">AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS</b><span style="color: #c92121;">) directing; a script based on the short stories of R. Chetwynd-Hayes, the scribe who provided the sources for Amicus’ previous portmanteau </span><b style="color: #c92121;">FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE (1974)</b><span style="color: #c92121;">; and even ol’ smiling Milton Subotsky is back as one the producers. </span><b style="color: #c92121;">THE MONSTER CLUB</b><span style="color: #c92121;"> is in every way a triumph and a perfect swan song for Amicus.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121; text-align: justify;">Except it’s not an Amicus movie.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #c92121; text-align: justify;">As you alluded to in your earlier post, </span><b style="color: #c92121; text-align: justify;">THE MONSTER CLUB</b><span style="color: #c92121; text-align: justify;"> is in no way, shape, or form a product of Subotsky’s and Max Rosenberg’s brainchild, rather a joint picture made under the strange entities known as Chips Productions and Sword and Sorcery Productions. It’s very true that it brings back many of the company’s members for this little ghastly jamboree, but </span><b style="color: #c92121; text-align: justify;">THE MONSTER CLUB</b><span style="color: #c92121; text-align: justify;"> is not in fact a card-carrying member of the studio that dripped blood. This is a point that undoubtedly surprises a lot of folks, because the film feels like the genuine package so much that it’s hard not to imagine it sitting amongst the shelves with </span><b style="color: #c92121; text-align: justify;">DR. TERROR’S HOUSE OF HORRORS (1965)</b><span style="color: #c92121; text-align: justify;"> and </span><b style="color: #c92121; text-align: justify;">TORTURE GARDEN (1967)</b><span style="color: #c92121; text-align: justify;">. And sure, if we had wanted to be sticklers about it, we could have excluded </span><b style="color: #c92121; text-align: justify;">THE MONSTER CLUB</b><span style="color: #c92121; text-align: justify;"> and just ended this mini-blogathon with </span><b style="color: #c92121; text-align: justify;">THE BEAST MUST DIE (1974)</b><span style="color: #c92121; text-align: justify;">. But, honestly, doesn’t that just sound depressing when you read it? </span><b style="color: #c92121; text-align: justify;">THE MONSTER CLUB</b><span style="color: #c92121; text-align: justify;"> is truly an Amicus film in spirit, and that’s all that matters to me.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #c92121; text-align: justify;">And in a way </span><b style="color: #c92121; text-align: justify;">THE MONSTER CLUB</b><span style="color: #c92121; text-align: justify;"> points the way toward the new generation, namely in its wraparound segments, the vibrant life blood of youth coursing through the synthesized notes of the musical numbers that fuse punk and glam and Gothic into a heady mix that is just too good to resist. The headquarters of the eponymous society itself are sweeter than gargoyle lollipops (try them sometime), a pad that looks like it was hastily adorned with trappings from the nearest Spencer’s Gifts shop to make it look as “spooky” as possible, a set from a horror host’s program infused with a neon, late-night party atmosphere. It’s a glorious world that the vampire Eramus (Price) and his favorite author Chetwynd-Hayes (Carradine) reside in. Here is a place where the writer’s works, all in lurid paperback editions, are proudly displayed in a bookstore’s window. And not only do humans enjoy reading Chetwynd-Hayes’ shudder stories, but the monsters get a kick out of it too! This is a world where horror flourishes, a plane of existence that practically thrives on it and where everyone loves it unremittingly. When I die, I hope my soul goes to the disco spookhouse that is </span><b style="color: #c92121; text-align: justify;">THE MONSTER CLUB</b><span style="color: #c92121; text-align: justify;">, a place where I can strip my skin away to reveal the gyrating skeleton underneath or shake my booty in a rubber Halloween mask as I please.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #c92121; text-align: justify;">I think you’re going to need to take it over from here. They’re playing my song…</span><br />
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<b><u>NT:</u> THE MONSTER CLUB</b> is probably the only film in cinematic history bearing the credit of “Music by John Williams and UB40.” Oh, sure, the “John Williams” in question is an Australian guitarist, not the noted American composer, but the juxtaposition of the names and the associations they evoke is nonetheless appropriate: this final quasi-Amicus production is classic English horror of the ‘60s and ‘70s dressed up in the spandex and oversize blazers of the ‘80s. It’s a creaky Gothic castle redecorated as a punk rock club. The sight of old horror fogies like Vincent Price and John Carradine being given VIP treatment at a youth hot spot while electric guitars blare over the soundtrack proves that you’re right: this is an alternate world we’re visiting.</div>
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Each of <b>THE MONSTER CLUB</b>’s three segments (while maybe a touch goofier than usual) would have no real trouble fitting into the fold of any prior Amicus-produced anthology. However, one could not say this of the film’s wraparound segments, which mostly take place in the eponymous nightclub and could almost better be called “musical interludes.” The brightly hued, hip environs and patrons and upbeat, jocular tone of these segments is totally at odds with everything Amicus ever produced previous to this moment. This commingling of old storytelling sensibilities and glossy modern aesthetics is jarring, particularly because of the inability or disinterest on the part of Baker, Subotsky, Chetwynd-Hayes, et al. to blend these disparate parts into a unified whole. Instead, we’re provided with three typically pulpy Amicus horror tales punctuated by rock songs about vampire romance and weekend skeleton stripteases. I honestly don’t know what to make of it.</div>
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We could call it callous marketing. Perhaps the intention was to wrangle some final dollars out of the tired Amicus anthology formula by appealing to teenaged audiences through surface-deep appropriations of youth culture. Or, maybe the intention was to garner the interest of children through corny vampire humor. Without the checks and balances of his partnership with Max Rosenberg, Subotsky infects the film with an unadulterated strain of the childish glee and fascination with storybook monsters that we’ve endured previously in a more subdued fashion in the earlier anthologies. Third option: maybe what we see in the film is no more than these once-Amicus, now-ancient filmmakers following (or attempting to follow) the natural trends of horror in the 1980s towards the frivolous and excessive. Hell if I know. <b>THE MONSTER CLUB </b>feels at moments like all of these reasons and none of these reasons are responsible for its genesis.</div>
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Moreover, this confusion of intention produces a tonal inconsistency that throws into question our perception of every last thing we see on screen. Example: The many scenes of the titular rock club feature shots of sundry creatures in dime store Halloween masks who are bobbing and thrashing about to the tunes being played on stage, as if they populated a low-rent Mos Eisley Cantina. At no point is it made apparent to us whether or not we should be accepting those masks for the fleshy and furry faces of actual monsters. That’s the sort of diegetic limbo the film places us in throughout, somewhere between earnest worldbuilding and ludicrous spoof.</div>
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Re-watching the film has revealed to me that my feelings have cooled a bit since my last viewing. It’s a charming film, certainly, and (as I’ve touched on above) it’s uniquely bewildering, but it’s also pretty far from the best anthology that Amicus (or those persons directly related to Amicus) has to offer. As noted, tonal inconsistency is an issue, but worse yet is that the second segment (or, the entire middle section of the film) is utterly forgettable. (I should know; I’d forgotten it!) Still, <b>THE MONSTER CLUB</b>’s unmitigated juvenile enthusiasm for its subject matter carries it farther than you might expect. How can one quibble with the opening anthem’s declaration that “Monsters Rule, OK!”? Some things are obviously true.</div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;"><b><u>GR:</u></b> It’s too bad that George Pal had already called “Dibs!” on the title <b>WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE (1951)</b>, because the dichotomy between the music video-jive of the wraparound segment and the hoary, Old World theatrics of the actual vignettes in <b>THE MONSTER CLUB</b> is pretty stunning. While Halloween-masked boogiers get funky on the dance floor, Eramus regales us with tales of shuttered misfit monsters, Borscht Belt bloodsuckers, and fog-shrouded ghoulery. Peanut butter and chocolate it most certainly is not, and yet I find it to be a delicious concoction nevertheless. Sure the two thematic worlds on presentation here could hardly be any more different to each other, but they’re both individually fun and full of their own special appeal that the big clanging noise they make when they run into each other is dulled by my overwhelming affection for each of them. Sometimes I think I’m much too loving for my own good.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">Our first story, “The Shadmock,” introduced to us by way of head-scratching monster genealogy, is a rather delicate little sonata that plays up the pitiful poignancy of its main character before ratcheting up the gruesome terror for its crispy dénouement. Lovers Angela (Barbara Kellerman) and George (Simon Ward) catch wind that a local, rich hermit named Raven (James Laurenson, memorable for his sinister turn in the </span><b style="color: #c92121;">HAMMER HOUSE OF HORROR</b><span style="color: #c92121;"> episode “Rude Awakening”) keeps all of his valuables and bundles of cash locked in his mansion’s safe. Sniffing prime bait for a little thievery, Angela tries laying on the charm when she applies for a general secretary/housekeeper position under Raven’s employ. However, the lady finds the gentleman’s appearance a little upsetting.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121; text-align: justify;">Raven is the poster child for reclusive oddballs. His skin is milky pale from prolonged periods spent indoors, his oily hair parted down the middle in choirboy fashion and the dark rings under his puppy dog eyes hinting at a restless and tortured soul. That’s because Raven is a shadmock, that most despised of bastardized monsters, a Looney Tunes caricature of creepiness fueled by an intense hunger for affection and acceptance. The shadmock, though, is not without his own set of fangs, except that his comes in the form of a banshee-like whistle, one that renders those who hear it into a pile of singed flesh.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #c92121;">The first segment of </span><b style="color: #c92121;">THE MONSTER CLUB</b><span style="color: #c92121;"> is probably the film’s best and undoubtedly its most unique. One cannot confuse it for any of the other adapted stories from R. Chetwynd-Hayes’ Amicus resume, in this or the previous </span><b style="color: #c92121;">FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE (1974)</b><span style="color: #c92121;">. It is perhaps most notable in its prevalent mood of loss and alienation. Any attempts at cheap shocks or cheesy humor are (mostly) dispelled in favor of painting a somber portrait of Laurenson’s character. In some ways this first story makes </span><b style="color: #c92121;">THE MONSTER CLUB</b><span style="color: #c92121;"> feel more legitimate because it takes the time to study Raven’s monstrousness directly rather than superficially exploit it. It is the very fundamental difference between Raven and the other characters that serves as the story’s focal point. What is it that makes someone a monster? Is it an outwardly grotesque appearance? The potential or inclination to harm? Can a monster ever truly feel and, more importantly, find love?</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">We see that the shadmock is even an outcast amongst his own kind. During a masquerade, Raven’s fellow beasts effortlessly glide around the ballroom while he stands off to the side, a lonely island unto himself. While the other creatures here all wear similar masks, Raven’s opaque façade is especially indicative of his rank in their dark society. He is the plain, the unwanted, the unremarkable. His desperation is sharply illustrated for us when he comes upon Angela in the very act of pilfering his riches. In Raven there is neither rage nor even hurt at this betrayal occurring right before his eyes—the typical reaction of a wronged demon in this sort of story.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">Instead he willingly tells Angela to take whatever treasures she wants… so long as he is able to hold on to her and have her love. It’s sickeningly sad, and the woman’s disgusted rebuke stings bitterly. Our hearts can’t help but go out to Raven as he emits his piercing whistle, tears brimming in his eyes. This is not an act of wanton vengeance. It’s pure, raw hurt. The image of the charred Angela advancing on George that caps off the story loses a bit of its punch because of this, but in the end it doesn’t really matter. The episode’s truly devastating moment has already come to pass.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">The next story is “The Vampires.” Talk about your highs and lows. Now, I don’t necessarily hate “The Vampires,” but as my family has a fondness for saying about meals that didn’t particularly wow them: “Well, you don’t have to make this for me again.” That may be a little harsher than what I really feel, but the company that the second vignette keeps with its two bookending tales can’t help but make its charms feel diminutive in comparison. Which is honestly something that I hate doing with anthology films: basing the value of one story on how it stacks up against the others. So let’s try to look “The Vampires” right in its puss and call it out for what it is.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">The story, for what it’s worth, mainly concerns a young boy named Lintom Busotsky (Warren Saire, and no points for figuring out the anagram) whose father (Richard Johnson) is a creature of the night straight off the boat from the old country. Lintom himself is constantly teased at school—palely shadowing the estrangement theme from “The Shadmock”—not because he is also a genuine Nosfertau, surprisingly enough, but just for being a lanky loser in general. And yet these playground taunts are evidence enough for one Mr. Pickering (Donald Pleasance) to recognize the boy’s allegiance with the undead. Eventually the man gains the child’s trust and makes a house call one day along with some of his associates, proving to the lad that his parents were right to warn him about “men carrying violin cases.”</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">The most unfortunate thing about “The Vampires” is that it feels like a retread back into the old Amicus days when they tried to inject blatant shtick into their tales of horror. Or, “The Dreaded Days of the </span><b style="color: #c92121;">VAULT</b><span style="color: #c92121;">” as they’re still known amongst the villagers. We get more goofy eye-teeth here ala “The Cloak” segment from </span><b style="color: #c92121;">THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD (1970)</b><span style="color: #c92121;"> and Johnson goes all out as he puts on his Bela-in-the-opera-cape act for our “amusement.” It can get to be some pretty tedious stuff, all of which reaches its patience-trying apex in the tale’s climax when the vampire father reveals that he was wearing a “stake-proof vest” and a ketchup packet the whole time. To quote Johnson’s rabbi: “Oy vey!” This blatant fangfoolery deadens any potential impression that the story could leave upon our minds. To allude to an earlier comparison you made, this humor is generally not clever or innovative but rather as tired as an old, rubber chicken, thus cementing its status as generally forgettable.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">There are some bits that work though. I was actually chuckling out loud when the two B-Squad members carry out the vampified and now-slain Pickering to their van, the solemn funeral dirge skipping in its track as one of the men tries to kick an errantly swinging gate door open and the long stake jutting out of the corpse’s body grinding against the floor of the vehicle as they stuff it into the back. But as you say, it’s all fairly unmemorable and were it not for the few titters it elicits from the audience it might have been hardly worth mentioning.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">But let’s give three cheers to the final selection for bringing our spirits back up. “The Ghouls” does not attempt to look at monstrosity with a poetic eye or give it a jovial poke in its ribs like the two preceding tales but rather chooses to exist as a pure and wholesome example of the Saturday night creature feature. Which is to say it’s oodles of good, creepy fun. Sam (Stuart Whitman), a film director in the process of shooting his latest horror picture, decides to do some location scouting to find the perfect patch of decrepit land to serve as the backdrop to his dreary drama. And that he certainly finds in the out-of-the-way town of Loughville (see above for “no points”), a rotting hamlet just off the highway and equipped with its very own insular, rolling fog. Once there he is accosted by a skeevy, wild-haired innkeeper named Patrick Magee, his helpful and winsome daughter Luna (Lesley Dunlop), and a whole pack of rabid inhabitants who would like to have him over for dinner.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">It’s nothing earth-shattering, but what I was most surprised by in re-watching this particular segment is how it breaks free of the limiting shackles that are inherent in the anthology format to become a kind of mini-movie in its own right. Once Whitman eludes the fetid claws of the hungry horde for the first time and holes up in the crumbling church with his female companion, “The Ghouls” begins to take on a slightly grander scale, echoing the type of siege pictures that genre pioneers Carpenter and Romero made so famous.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">This makes “The Ghouls” both a call back to simpler horrors and an appropriation of contemporaneous genre movies all in one. On one side we have the ravenous ghouls hurling stones and cursing at our human hero, on the other the rough and tumble Whitman warding off his pursuers with a gilded crucifix. The story even has a neat bit of video game-esque worldbuilding when Whitman discovers a diary amongst the skeletal remains of the town priest chronicling the progressive invasion of the ghoul-people, complete with vivid illustrations in the style of Bernie Wrightson that paint the monsters in a more fantastic light than the dirty vagabonds that make up the murderous mob in reality. It all makes for a fairly invigorating experience, one that is punctuated by notes of both melancholy and that dark irony that short horror tales thrive on.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">Ahh, I’ve become tired from my trademark wordiness yet again. I think I’ll leave the final estimation of this film in your reliable claws. I shall acquaint myself with a blood martini and listen to the next band’s set. I hear they have a killer groove.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">But before I go I feel it is appropriate to raise a toast. Here’s to your tireless efforts, my friend, and here’s to the house that was Amicus.</span></div>
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<b><u>NT:</u></b> Once again, I fear you’ve unearthed my coffin-brain and scooped the exact thought and word content onto your plate, at least with regard to what I felt needed to be said about this particular picture. Well, perhaps you’ve only scooped out nearly all of my words. Like the noble Humegoo, I’ll make use of whichever dangling nouns and verbs are left in my ravaged neural network while attempting to offer some closing thoughts on these segments and the film in total. Pardon Humegoo inarticulateness. Here me go.</div>
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I think your reading of “The Shadmock” is on point. It’s the most emotional and affecting tale to come out of a Subotsky production, and it ranks as my favorite sub-half hour slice of horror we’ve discussed over these past few months. Essentially a whistling-monster infused reimagining of <b>DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978)</b> in miniature, “The Shadmock” forces us to confront our notion of the monstrous in a way similar to how the earlier film encouraged us to reevaluate our conception of the archetypal heroic young lovers. Despite his sickly pallor, unflattering hairstyle, and combustible whistling, can we in truth call Raven a monster? Or is his monstrousness a result of his society’s labeling of him as a monster, for reasons difficult to put into words? Moreover, wouldn’t it be more appropriate to classify the callous, indifferent couple, Angela and George, as the real monsters of this piece? What makes Raven a monster in this world is his loneliness and his desperation for human (or monster) connection. The merciless nature of those around him (even the damned cat is without pity!) makes of Raven a curious, repugnant creature by contrast. To desire love, above all earthly things? Aaagh!</div>
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Though perhaps I’m a monster, too, because I couldn’t help but get a kick out of the abrupt cut the film makes from a close-up of Raven’s anguished face to a close-up of B. A. Robertson’s face snarling out the first few lines of a rock song (“Sucker for Your Love”) back at the Monster Club. No time to wallow: the party must go on. (And to note: Robertson’s twitchy performance of this ditty, filmed for its duration in that extreme facial close-up, is among my favorite moments in the film. I like to think his performance is belying the early stages of a transformation into one breed of beast or another.)</div>
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Moving on, I’ll take a pass on “The Vampire.” In my family, we have the saying “If you can’t say anything nice, make sure he isn’t wearing stake-proof vest.”</div>
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Unsurprisingly, I’m also in agreement with you on the merits of “The Ghouls.” It’s a fine segment for us to go out on, and—as is par for the course with Amicus/Subotsky—it’s as ridiculous as it is genuinely suspenseful. (As you mention, the villagers in their tattered rags and bluish complexions are a peculiarly ramshackle vision of ghoulishness. Or, as Eramus would explain, “smaller budget.”) You’ve singled out my favorite aspect of the episode by mentioning the storybook history lesson of Loughville: I found those Wrightson-esque visualizations of the ghouls to be more horrid than anything Amicus has ever given us. Initially, I was surprised to find myself being so drawn into the ghastly static narrative of this story within a story, but the terrifying power of those lined faces and limbs—doing things as innocuous as dancing or peeking out from the bed covers—repulsed me in a way the main narrative’s moving images never could. (More evidence for the power of oral and visual storytelling, right?) This brief tangent within “The Ghouls” reads a little like a Lovecraftian tale of fiendish human degeneration, and that type of story never fails to set my skin a’crawling.</div>
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After all of the above has transpired, we wind up back at the Monster Club, and we watch as Vincent Price dances and claps out of time at the front of the stage upon which The Pretty Things play some English faux-reggae. This is after he has given a long, impassioned, winking speech to the assembled creatures of the night, arguing for humanity rightful place in the ranks of monsterdom (because of all the war, genocide, and assorted murders committed by humans, you see…). This is an appropriate end to our Amicus journey. Amicus was at times ahead of the curve in the horror business, at most other times behind, and sometimes so far off the curve its point failed to register on the graph. Their productions were at times deathly serious and at times were presented with a tongue so firmly planted in cheek they risked choking on it as it slipped down their throat. Amicus tried just about everything, to varying levels of success, during its short tenure in horror cinema, and that rambunctiousness has earned my appreciation (and I’m certain it has earned yours, too). Their films were perhaps never great, but they were always game, and they were—without (much) pretension—never embarrassed to be making the sort of horror they were making, whatever its negligible artistic value. The Amicus films were, in a sense, like Vincent Price dancing to reggae. We love them an offal lot.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5914772860062903280.post-69597334330874936032014-05-21T08:00:00.000-04:002015-01-16T08:57:25.328-05:00Shepperton Screams (Part XV): The Beast Must Die (1974) dir. Paul Annett<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i><span style="color: #c92121;">For sixteen weeks, <a href="http://macabrebookshelf.blogspot.com/"><b>Jose Cruz of The Grim Reader</b></a> and I will be delving into the complete horror filmography of Amicus Productions and regaling you with our spirited discussions. Below is our mutual consideration of Amicus's <b><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071200/">THE BEAST MUST DIE (1974)</a></b>. Check back every week for more dialogues and (naturally) more nightmares.</span></i></div>
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<b><u>NT:</u></b> This blog post is a detective story-- in which you, dear reader, are the detective.</div>
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The question is not "Which blogger has been murdering the English language on the regular?" but "Which blogger is the fuzziest, cuddliest werepup?"</div>
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The second question you must ask while reading this blog post, dear detective reader, is whether or not <b>THE BEAST MUST DIE (1974)</b> put that fatal silver bullet right between the eyes of Amicus Productions.</div>
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<i>Watch for the Werepup Break.</i></div>
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We've been observing the slow decline of Amicus for the past few weeks, but, for those keeping track, <b>THE BEAST MUST DIE</b> is their last true horror film, and one of the very last films the production company made before slipping into accusations, rebuttals, and lawsuits. The contentious Milton Subotsky/Max Rosenberg relationship is ultimately what killed Amicus, but a brief look at a film like <b>THE BEAST MUST DIE</b> reveals that they were already stuffed and mounted, a hopelessly out of touch antique trying to blend into the groovy contemporary milieu. I've used it before in our recent conversations, but the word that leaps to mind is "kitsch." That's a nasty word to have associated with your earnest productions, but, alas, that's how far we've sunk.</div>
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Look at what we have thrown at us at the top: </div>
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•<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>a ludicrous William Castle gimmick in which the audience is informed that they are being recruited to solve the mystery and will, in fact, be given a time-out at the climax so that they can guess the lyncanthrope's secret identity.</div>
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•<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>a very decade-appropriate (and so of course completely ill-fitting) instrumental funk score.</div>
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•<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>batty pseudoscience concerning the "werewolf disease," which is delivered by Peter Cushing's Dr. Lundgren and received by every other character with only the faintest inklings of doubt (this is a world in which lycanthropy is accepted almost a priori).</div>
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•<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>a plethora of exposition explaining a "high tech" security system composed mostly of microphones buried in the ground. </div>
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•<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>helicopter and car chases, phony "Stand Your Ground" trespassing executions.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfgSVdT3c6Zol9Ljxht6ZfR0NklTutqiIi8Uo-hk9hfLoGAmPWn_cnp7l0eUNQ8wnIH21knbANQXwFMDZreaoP4U0rsUi7hUmyx2bDa0yRRDy5RnI-au12TiCvtrHGlp0lPvoyp-jrtWA/s1600/vlcsnap-00088.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfgSVdT3c6Zol9Ljxht6ZfR0NklTutqiIi8Uo-hk9hfLoGAmPWn_cnp7l0eUNQ8wnIH21knbANQXwFMDZreaoP4U0rsUi7hUmyx2bDa0yRRDy5RnI-au12TiCvtrHGlp0lPvoyp-jrtWA/s1600/vlcsnap-00088.png" height="225" width="400" /></a></div>
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•<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Amicus's first black protagonist, Tom Newcliffe (Calvin Lockheart), who is also, honestly, their first black character beyond assorted voodoo priests and jazz musicians. To celebrate this progressive casting decision, the film characterizes Tom as a man who manipulated his way into money and now has invited all of his friends (and his wife!) over to his estate so that he can imprison them and mercilessly slaughter whichever one is a werewolf, earning him the title of Ultimate Macho Hunter.</div>
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•<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>a German Shepherd (enhanced with extra fluff) as our werewolf.</div>
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<b>THE BEAST MUST DIE</b> is relentlessly stupid. One part Agatha Christie, one part <b>SHAFT</b>, a smattering of Paul Naschy's wolfy romps, and a few pounds of "The Most Dangerous Game." What results is a potion almost too salty to be palatable. Almost. Despite its obvious, unavoidable, fundamental detriments, could it be that I actually enjoy the blasted thing? Might you have enjoyed it as well?</div>
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~*~*~WEREWOLF BREAK~*~*~</div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;"><b><u>GR:</u></b> Hopefully one is not allergic to sharp cheese and puppy fur, because <b>THE BEAST MUST DIE (1976)</b> has both in abundance. You’ve pointed out many of the film’s sillier moment: it’s half-hearted and completely unconvincing explanation for lycanthropy that basically involves spit glands turning a person into a wolf; the prominent security system that has really only one scene of importance, said system seemingly unable to keep track of, you know, who’s leaving their rooms and going out on late-night hunts; the cuddly little tyke who performs the role of our titular beast, <b>KILLER SHREWD</b>-ed into looking much more fearsome (but not really) than he actually is with the help of some shag carpeting.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">And yet—AND YET—when the bullet is bitten at the end of the day I find myself in the same boat as you. I find the film to be mindlessly entertaining in spite of (or, heaven forbid, because of) its sundry flaws and missteps. I mean, you’re talking to the guy who thought <b>THE DEADLY BEES (1966)</b> was halfway decent, so by comparison alone <b>THE BEAST MUST DIE</b> seems like one of the perennial touchstones of all the cinematic arts. Still, <b>BEAST</b> is a film with good intentions, and even though it does a mad tango in the opposite direction for every step forward it takes, it can’t help but seem really, really cool. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">Maybe it’s the musical score swiped from a deleted scene of <b>SHAFT (1971)</b>. Maybe it’s the determined and game performances put in by the whole cast. Maybe it’s because that werepuppy is so freaking cute. For every good point though, there’s something that sticks in its paw and hampers the journey. <b>THE BEAST MUST DIE</b> tries for an undercurrent of ultra-smooth Blaxploitation funk that it lands most of the time. Calvin Lockhart is great as the lead, matching his quirky vocal inflections (“The werewolf bit me”) with a cool swagger and sweaty machismo. Puzzling then (but not really) then that the majority of the film’s advertising should put supporting player Peter Cushing in the forefront, playing up the image of him toting Lockhart’s hunting rifle which he only does for literally three seconds in the actual movie. So much for any progressiveness on that front. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">The film also has several good action set pieces, one of my favorites being the hunt-by-helicopter that has Lockhart trying to take down the racing werewolf with machine gun fire, only for the lycan to mutilate his pilot (in a hilarious bit where the actor clearly looks like he’s giving the dog a big ol’ bear hug) and cause the aircraft to explode. Others though, like the extended auto chase where Lockhart pursues the fleeing Michael Gambon, feel like so much padding, fluff used to hide the movie’s thin storyline. Yet the slightness makes everything feel more digestible, a straight action-adventure yarn seasoned with some supernaturalism to satisfy the horror hounds. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">You’ve already snarled about some of the film’s aspects, but which of its qualities gets your wolfsbane bloomin’? And, more importantly, how many shoehorned werewolf jokes can I make before someone lays me low with a silver candlestick?</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">~*~*~SON OF WEREWOLF BREAK~*~*~</span></div>
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<b><u>NT:</u></b> Gosh, if I’m being honest, I love almost everything about <b>THE BEAST MUST DIE</b>. The film presents one of those slightly off-kilter fantasy worlds that I’ll never be able to get my fill of. See, the majority of the werewolf films in horror history cast the existence of wolf men and wolf women as freak occurrences, as stray pieces of ancient superstition invading a basically sane, rational, and realistically conceived modern universe. This is not so in <b>THE BEAST MUST DIE</b>. Here, when Tom Newcliffe assembles his guests in the parlor for the first of two Hercule Poirot moments and announces that someone “sitting in this room is a werewolf,” not one of them flinches. In this alternate reality, in which it’s implied that nearly every character we meet has some prior experience consuming human flesh (!), the existence of werewolves is about as likely as anything else.</div>
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This bizarre fantasy logic extends beyond the wolfier elements as well. Consider, for instance, that Tom Newcliffe flat out tells his wife (Marlene Clark, slumming it [or furring it up?] the year after her brilliant turn in <b>GANJA & HESS [1973]</b>) that if he discovers she’s the werewolf then he will not hesitate to shoot her. Yes, fewer than twenty minutes into the film, our hero is earnestly threatening to shoot his beloved wife. After (spoiler) he is compelled to shoot her during the film’s conclusion, he appears astonished at his own actions. This is the sort of film in which the logic of its character’s motivations confuses even the characters afflicted by it. It’s the sort of film in which the anti-protagonist is given no other option during the film’s resolution than to shoot himself in the face with a hunting rifle.</div>
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I’d argue the film is essentially incompetent in everything it attempts, whether it is action, horror, or suspense. The action is mild and laborious (those car chases, the opening forest pursuit fakeout) or plain ludicrous (machine-gunning a werepup from a helicopter); the horror is confused (after a shot of a werepup licking its lips in a skylight above Anton Diffring, we cut to the discovery of Diffring’s body, mostly intact minus a missing… eyeball); and the suspense is a gimmick (despite the encouragement of the 30-second werewolf break, there’s no way we could have guessed the identity of our wolfish fiend[s] with evidence-backed certainty). Yet, if anywhere, the film’s recommendation lies within these faults. <b>THE BEAST MUST DIE</b> is a rarefied treat for the bad film connoisseur: a film technically competent enough to know better than to descend into the pit of continuous narrative absurdity but that thankfully proves not to.</div>
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Okay, I’m gonna take my helicopter out for some puppy machine-gunning now, if you’ll excuse me. I’ll turn it back over to you only if you promise not to tell anymore werewolf jokes: I swear, they’ll make me howl in pain rather than laughter.</div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;"><b><u>GR:</u></b> That passive attitude you mentioned the characters have regarding the supernatural is actually the seed of one of my favorite scenes. I forget the particulars or who even broaches the question, but one of the guests asks Peter Cushing’s character in jest “Any signs yet, doctor?” As in, “See any signs that one of us is a werewolf?” Cushing matches this silly inquiry with an equally hysterical response. He looks up from his newspaper, peers over his glasses, scans the room, then says “No, not yet.” Well thank goodness we have the experts on our side! </span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">That rampant indifference mixes with sincere earnestness to create a potently bizarre atmosphere where everyone treats the situation as if it was a Sunday murder mystery party with dear old Aunt Eunice. Still, <b>THE BEAST MUST DIE</b> does a commendable job of trying to mold its super-swingin’ Euro vibe with its genteel British sensibilities. Can you imagine what this might have been had it been an AIP co-production like the previous <b>MADHOUSE (1974)</b>? Surely we would have seen a bipedal wolf man crashing through windows and carrying maidens in his hairy arms ala Naschy, the film ending with a mob of mad, torch-wielding villages setting fire to the mansion while the monster and Lockhart battled it out on the roof. As fun as that may sound, I actually do admire the grim, low-key note the film ends on with the hunter finally bagging his most prized game at the cost of both his love and his own identity. Lockhart does what Lawrence Talbot could only dream of.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">Speaking of lost loves, I think the relationship between Newcliffe and his wife is a little more genuine than you might think. The early joke he makes about gunning her down if she turns out to be the werewolf is exactly that: a joke. How else might a husband respond to his wife asking him what he would do if turns out that she is secretly the very thing he is trying to kill? “Hmm. I’d have to think about that” would be anticlimactic to say the least. The retort of “Bang!” that he offers—along with a flash of finger-gun—is no different than the similar quips hubbies offered their old ladies in any number of contemporaneous TV shows. And if you can’t stop thinking of <b>THE BEAST MUST DIE</b> as a 70’s-era sitcom now, you’re welcome. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">The confusion you say he displays during the movie’s climax is certainly there, but it’s also mixed with shock, horror, and more than likely extreme guilt. Trying to work out the “how” of his wife’s lycanthropy is undoubtedly overwhelmed by the sickness of heart he feels. This wasn’t supposed to happen, he thinks. She wasn’t meant to be hurt. How could I have done this to her? </span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">Not only that, but Newcliffe may be realizing at this point that he has truly lost himself. Staging elaborate manhunts. Installing surveillance throughout his entire home. Pursuing his guests and cornering them with threats upon their life. Strolling around in his black leather gear and firing off guns in the halls. One wonders what he might have been like before his mania consumed him. Was a he a light-hearted man who simply wanted to live his life, love his wife, start a family? Was he normal before he became… something else? The tears we see Clark shed as she holds the silver bullet and looks at her husband can either be taken as uncertainty or acceptance. Perhaps she isn’t sure if Newcliffe will fulfill his earlier promise. Or maybe she knows exactly what’s going to happen next.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">Towards the end of the film Newcliffe swears that “Tonight… the beast must die.” And he does indeed slay the werewolf. But I suspect that the hunter was prescient of the fact that there was still a monster residing at the manor after the wolf had been killed. His final decision might not have been completely dependent on the fact that he was bitten during his final confrontation with his prey. Maybe he just saw it as a sign.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">A sign that the transformation was complete. </span></div>
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<i><b><span style="font-size: large;">Next week: <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081178/">THE MONSTER CLUB (1981)</a></span></b></i></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5914772860062903280.post-58472763368863298962014-05-14T08:00:00.000-04:002014-05-14T08:00:08.933-04:00Shepperton Screams (Part XIV): Madhouse (1974) dir. Jim Clark<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>For sixteen weeks, <b><a href="http://macabrebookshelf.blogspot.com/">Jose Cruz of The Grim Reader </a></b>and I will be delving into the complete horror filmography of Amicus Productions and regaling you with our spirited discussions. Below is our mutual consideration of Amicus's <b><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071790/">MADHOUSE (1974)</a></b>. Check back every week for more dialogues and (naturally) more nightmares.</i></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;"><b><u>GR:</u> </b>As we sashay away from the penny dreadful ghoulies of Amicus’ previous effort, we enter the gay and glitzy world of Hollywood (or London serving as Hollywood anyway) for a brief moment at the start of <b>MADHOUSE (1974)</b>. An interesting creature <b>MADHOUSE</b> is, it being a co-production with Amicus’ Yankee equivalent American International Pictures. The familiar Shepperton settings are moved over to Twickenham Studios for this go-around, but that’s not the only change here. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">Take for instance the presence of the irrepressible Vincent Price--who had previously made such delicious fare as the Dr. Phibes films for AIP--and his co-star Robert Quarry, himself the monstrous star of his own mini-franchise, the Count Yorga pictures. As a side note, the company had previously pitted the two stars against one another in <b>DR. PHIBES RISES AGAIN (1972)</b> as villain and anti-hero. This is their second production together and, amongst the other sly winks that <b>MADHOUSE</b> includes at the world of horror movies, there’s a costume party scene that has Quarry dressed up in full vampire gear, which is perhaps the closest the world ever got to getting <b>DR. PHIBES FACES COUNT YORGA</b>. Not only that, but the original <b>COUNT YORGA, VAMPIRE (1970)</b> allegedly started out as a pornographic film, which makes Quarry’s role here as smut-producer Oliver Quayle a rather sharp jab at his ribs.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;"><b>MADHOUSE (1974)</b> is certainly not my favorite film about crazy actors killing people (queue up <b>THEATER OF BLOOD [1973]</b> for that, please), but in re-viewing it this past weekend and letting its eccentricities stew in my mind I was fairly surprised by how fairly adept it is at having its fun with its satirical asides and creating multiple moments of genuine suspense so that the two are never either slight or overbearing. There are so many diverse elements, some that are soap-operatic and others that are just plain bizarre, but when you put all of them together it somehow works and the final product coalesces into… what is this anyway? A slasher? A gaslight thriller? A parody? All of the above? With so many sundry voices babbling in the halls of this madhouse, it’s a wonder that the whole affair is as harmonious as it is. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">Lord knows though that <b>MADHOUSE</b> has enough kooks and kinks and quirks to make you dizzy. From a blackmailing couple who speak like Tweedledee and Tweedledum to an insane, scarred woman who lives in a basement purring to her pet spiders, <b>MADHOUSE</b> is certainly intent on making its pulpy tale of a thespian being stalked by his own murderous, onscreen character into something distinctly weird-tasting, like sour cream and red herrings. But before I launch full force into the film’s jovialities and general bat-shitteries, I think I’ll take five and lounge on Dr. Death’s operating table.</span></div>
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<b><u>NT:</u></b> Up until this point we’ve foolishly neglected to mention the secret history of Amicus Productions. Although producers Milton Subotsky and Max Rosenberg certainly made quite a few pictures under the Amicus banner, they seemingly weren’t content enough to keep their fingers out of various other grave worm pies. With <b>MADHOUSE</b> we see them working with AIP, but this wasn’t the first collaboration between the two productions companies: that honor would fall upon the utterly bizarre <b>SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN (1970)</b>, also starring Price and Cushing but with the added bonus of Christopher Lee. Though the film would only be released under AIP’s header, both Rosenberg and Subotsky’s names can be found in the opening credits. Of additional note is that Subotsky and Rosenberg co-produced the Christopher Lee witchcraft flick <b>THE CITY OF THE DEAD</b> (a.k.a. <b>HORROR HOTEL</b>) way back in 1960 in a collaboration that perhaps spurred their eventual endeavor as Amicus a couple years later. And then, after ending their business relationship, each man added several more noteworthy credits to his name: Rosenberg executive-produced films like <b>BLOODY BIRTHDAY (1981)</b>, <b>THE INCREDIBLE MELTING MAN (1977)</b>, and <b>CAT PEOPLE (1982)</b>, while Subotsky returned to America to co-produce several Stephen King adaptations (<b>CAT’S EYE [1985]</b>, <b>MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE [1986]</b>, <b>THE LAWNMOWER MAN [1992]</b>). Further fun fact: The last film we’ll be covering in our Amicus retrospective, 1981’s <b>THE MONSTER CLUB</b>, isn’t even a genuine Amicus film, though it is often mistaken for one and is a Subotsky production released under a different company of his. </div>
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This is all to say that the Amicus machine was beginning to wear down as it neared the mid-1970s. The definable characteristics of the company’s established brand were being jettisoned in the interest of keeping the company afloat and of ensuring their ability to continue making movies. The partnering of AIP and Amicus for <b>MADHOUSE</b> signals a cost-saving financing measure, but what it results in is not an Amicus film, despite the presence of Amicus regulars like composer Douglas Gamley and cinematographer Ray Parslow. <b>MADHOUSE</b> is an AIP film, through and through, in the American drive-in tradition of the <b>PHIBES</b> and <b>COUNT YORGA</b> films as well as groovy contemporary numbers like the zombie revenge flick <b>SUGAR HILL (1974)</b>. This shift away from the elements of Amicus's wheelhouse (self-serious horror, corny humor, a denial of the existence of sex) is no detriment to <b>MADHOUSE</b>. Rather, the film is one the liveliest associated with their name, boasting finely demented performances, a modicum of brutal violence, and a playful intelligence.</div>
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Much of my interest in the film rests upon its delightful metacinematic twist: Paul Toombes (Price) is a veteran horror film actor being haunted by the specter of his most famous prior role, the fiendish, Coffin-Joe-by-way-of-Baron-Samedi-looking Dr. Death. This haunting is both literal (someone is trying to gaslight Toombes into believing that he is a killer under the psychopathic sway of his alter ego) and symbolic (Toombes is unable to escape the role that defined and ruined his career, despite whatever initial success it brought him, and that cut his marriage and sanity short-- or, in the case of his marriage, cut his bride-to-be's neck a little short). We could draw easy comparisons between Paul Toombes's meta struggle with Dr. Deaths both real and imagined and the typecasting the real Vincent Price experienced throughout his career, having portrayed a menagerie of similarly grotesque villains in the <b>PHIBES</b> films, <b>THEATER OF BLOOD (1973)</b>, <b>HOUSE OF WAX (1953)</b>, and (naturally) that weirdo Amicus-AIP co-production <b>SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN</b>. Yet (and I may be mistaken here but) I've never heard Price lament the direction his career took or the proliferation of campy horror roles offered to him, so any potential poignancy to be gained from all of this winking self-awareness goes unrealized. We watch Paul Toombes watching Vincent Price on the silver screen in old roles (like the magic duel with Boris Karloff from <b>THE RAVEN [1963]</b>) as if he we were watching himself, but this doesn't imbue the character or the moment with pathos. Instead, it's visual trivia for horror buffs.</div>
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I enjoy <b>MADHOUSE</b> for all the reasons you’ve mentioned, but in a pinch I’d also choose <b>THEATER OF BLOOD</b> over it. The latter film is a brilliant and cutting satire wrapped up as a bloody Jacobean revenge play, while the former is a quirky, hysterically pitched drive-in feature. Both entertain, but only one of them is a film I'll continually return to. Hell, I once wrote an essay during my MA about how <b>THEATER OF BLOOD</b> and Joel Reed's <b>BLOODSUCKING FREAKS (1976)</b> serve as the natural cinematic descendants of the stage tradition of English revenge drama. Is anybody going to write a scholarly paper on <b>MADHOUSE</b>? We’ve already scribbled out far fewer words than we usually do in these initial responses, and if we have trouble talking about it then surely the film is cursed.</div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;"><b><u>GR:</u></b> Your brief history of the production company’s existence, in addition to being enlightening, puts <b>MADHOUSE</b> in a proper light, I think. As you said, it seems to be quite clear that this is more AIP than Amicus, but for some reason the film’s British qualities seemed to stick out more for me than the American. But you’re right: this is straight up drive-in fodder, more wild and loose and kitschier than anything those stodgy ol’ crumpet-munchers could dream up in their archaic nightmares. <b>MADHOUSE</b> is of a piece with AIP’s filmography, a picture where sexual relations are described frankly (but not as lasciviously as, say, the Count Yorga movies) and the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink nuttiness that was a hallmark of many other features from James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff (think of the murderer in the ape costume from <b>MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE [1971]</b> swinging over the theater audience!) is served up on a spider-filled platter. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">The glimpses we get of the real Price’s past films (all AIP movies, natch) are merely filler, because not only do they lack the added metafictional depth of Boris Karloff’s similar musings from Peter Bogdanovich’s <b>TARGETS (1968)</b>, but one never becomes quite convinced that Toombes as a character is fed up with his being listed as a horror actor. It might be because of the actor. Karloff was certainly no slouch and always performed admirably and professionally, but his characters always generated a weariness and a pathos that you could feel. Price, however, was more commonly known as the jovial prince, the rogue with the funny mustache and cackling voice whose glee was always apparent even when playing the wickedest of villains. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">More than likely though, it was the film itself that hampered this potentially touching aspect of Toombes’ character because, as we saw a scant year earlier, Price brought a genuine sense of tragedy to his portrayal of Edward Lionheart in <b>THEATER OF BLOOD (1973)</b>, his hammy theatricalities accenting his character’s wounded soul even as he gallivanted about in a happenin’ afro wig. Price does have a wonderful little monologue as Toombes though, speaking of Dr. Death as “The sleeping phantom we roused” before lighting the set up in hellish fire. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;"><b>MADHOUSE</b> lacks that kind of poignancy but more than attempts to make up for it in shock and sensation. The story is pure pulp, perhaps epitomized best in the segment where Toombes, in full costume—a costume which, I must say, tickles my fancies for capes, skull faces, and dashing evening wear all at once—faces off against the “real” Dr. Death who snares his prey in a Phibes-like move by trapping the actor on a bed that comes equipped with a crushing top! The exploitative elements are ramped up here, moreso than they surely would’ve been in Shepperton’s delicate hands. The company did well with the high theatrics of <b>AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS (1973)</b>, but <b>MADHOUSE</b> is a different, wilder beast altogether, one where the first murder’s lead-in with the killer adorning black leather gloves and removing a gleaming scalpel from a velvet case, all the while breathing heavily, brings to mind Italy’s gialli and the slashers still yet to come in the States. And would Amicus have given us the utterly trashy reveal of Toombes discovering his fiancé’s corpse, with the head rolling off its shoulders with all the grace of a decapitated mannequin? Heaven forbid! I will say this though: that bizarre, slow motion yawn-scream that Price does here and later in the film is oddly unsettling. The other murder sequences are just as feisty; Paul’s co-star strung up on a noose to the mad orchestra of blaring juke boxes and whirring pin ball machines; the batty blackmailers skewered by a sword ala Mario Bava’s <b>A BAY OF BLOOD (1971)</b> and Sean S. Cunningham’s <b>FRIDAY THE 13TH (1980)</b>; the death of the plucky Julia (Natasha Pyne) left to our imaginations as she screams her last as Dr. Death’s cape slithers through the elevator doors that he has now cornered her in. I think it’s safe to say that when day is done and shadows fall, <b>MADHOUSE</b> must surely take home the blue ribbon for sassy homicides. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">I could probably go on about all of the movie’s remaining surrealness, but being we may be running low on conversational fuel as it is, I will instead defer to you and retreat into the darkness of my arachni-cellar to listen to my gramophone. </span></div>
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<b><u>NT:</u></b> We’ve covered most of it, but here are a couple of stray observations I find to be worth typing up:</div>
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Speaking of zany homicides, how about the death of Toombes’s friend and rival, Herbert Flay (Peter Cushing)? I’d hazard a guess that this climactic demise takes the spider-filled prize. Picture it: Flay is sitting victorious in his own screening room, watching Dr. Death films in celebration of the fact that his friend, Toombes, has recently burned to death (or so he thinks). What a surprise, then, when Toombes steps out from the projected images on screen to confront his viewer, just like the bloodsucking Count would to his audience decades later in “The Tale of the Midnight Madness” from <b>ARE YOU AFRAID OF THE DARK? </b>(This action would eventually be called “pulling a <b>PURPLE ROSE</b>.”) After some heated conversation and old man tussling, Flay is stabbed in the back (quite literally) by the wife he keeps locked in the basement (spatially confused Mr. Rochester-style), which sends him tumbling down into his wife’s spider terrarium. Once there, his body is immediately eaten up by the many spiders crawling over him, leaving naught but bone after a lap-dissolve with no indication of the passage of any time. Those were some hungry, hungry arachnids. After this, we witness the creepy development of Toombes creating a Peter Cushing mask to wear for his new role of a lifetime (thus allowing us a glimpse of Cushing’s best jowly/scowly Price impression). Finally, we watch as Toombes and his new old face have dinner (sour cream and red herrings [?!]) with his new old wife as a record of Price himself singing a schmaltzy ballad spins on the gramophone. It’s all very joyously macabre, we might say, and serves as further support for our placement of <b>MADHOUSE</b> in the nutty AIP camp.</div>
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And as much as we’ve knocked <b>MADHOUSE</b> for failing to use its metafictional self-awareness to any ends beyond the merely clever, I think there’s one aspect of the film that complicates that reading. With the past and aborted future of Toombes’s fiancée Ellen (Julie Crossthwaite), we observe the film’s oddly playful critique of the movie making business’s lack of opportunities for young actresses trying to break in. We learn that an actress like Ellen has two options: she can be an adult film starlet or the nubile victim in a horror film. Both choices are degrading, and both are looked down upon by those in charge. Witness Toombes’s disgusted, judgmental reaction when he discovers that Ellen chose to act in adult films early in her career. And if you think that indicates that he and others in the business believe that acting in horror films is the classier option, just consider the fate of Faye (Adrienne Corri), who acted in a Dr. Death film only to see herself be immediately forgotten and abused rather than launched into stardom by those above her in the moviemaking world. Pretty young actresses have a bad lot in film, <b>MADHOUSE</b> reminds us, as is true of Julie Crossthwaite, the actress who plays Ellen, who here chooses death over sex in one of her earliest major film roles, though which of the two she had chosen probably wouldn’t have mattered much. Guess how much longer Julie Crossthwaite’s acting resume is? It started promisingly, perhaps, but like so many it had its head lopped off in the first act.</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><b>Next week: <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071200/">The Beast Must Die (1974)</a></b></i></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5914772860062903280.post-3579421432181589802014-05-07T08:00:00.000-04:002014-05-07T08:00:14.330-04:00Shepperton Screams (Part XIII): And Now the Screaming Starts (1973) dir. Roy Ward Baker <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i><span style="color: #c92121;">For sixteen weeks, <a href="http://macabrebookshelf.blogspot.com/"><b>Jose Cruz of The Grim Reader</b></a> and I will be delving into the complete horror filmography of Amicus Productions and regaling you with our spirited discussions. Below is our mutual consideration of Amicus's <b><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069715/">AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS (1973)</a></b>. Check back every week for more dialogues and (naturally) more nightmares.</span></i></div>
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<u><b>NT:</b></u> Oh, how I pined for the hoodwinking this premise appeared to promise: In 1795, a newlywed couple takes inheritance of the groom's family estate in the English countryside. Before they have the chance to unpack, the bride is catching fleeting glimpses of a whole assortment of creaky Gothic horrors: a bloody hand bursting out of a painting, an eyeless specter leering through windows, and a decapitated limb wriggling around the floorboards. It's all a little too much too soon, isn't it? This new bride attempts to explain these stupefying sights to her husband and the household help, who fail to take her breathless horror with anything but salt and (worse yet!) seem to be conspiring to keep certain information away from her delicate ears. This bride soon begins to go a little nuts, and can be found wide-eyed and bewildered most waking hours. What are the odds that the bride's new husband has cooked up these assorted scares in order to terrify his wife out of her wits and equally out of some vast bank account or bequest? Pretty good odds, really, if we're at all familiar with similarly spun webs of cinematic intrigue from the past several decades of thrillers. If <b>AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS (1973)</b> were a film that you could step inside, you wouldn't be able to help but notice the aroma of softly burning gaslights infecting the air.</div>
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Alas, this is no gaslight thriller. No one is trying to drive Mrs. Catherine Fengriffen (Pete Walker regular Stephanie Beacham) to the madhouse. At least no one corporeal. Her loving husband (Ian Ogilvy) is exactly that, and the aforementioned household help (Rosalie Crutchley) soon enough finds herself victim to the same ghostly presence haunting the lady of the manor. Yes, despite my every wish to the contrary, this is a genuine supernatural thriller. Adapted from David Case's short novel <b>FENGRIFFEN: A CHILLING TALE (1970)</b>, <b>AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS</b> concerns itself with a strange curse carried out by cackling phantasms, spreading torment across generations while righting a wrong wrought by antiquated class divisions.<br />
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Beyond the slightest intimation that the barbaric behavior of the ruling classes deserves to be countered by the equally ancient customs of the pagan peasantry, we're never informed by what strange magic this curse comes to fruition through. In the Amicus Cemetery of Reanimated Horrors, you might return from the dead through specific occult leanings (voodoo, witchcraft, demonic mirror possession) or you might start sucking air as a vengeful fiend simply because the plot demands it. And the plot of <b>AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS</b> demands a lot. But perhaps this vagueness of supernatural origins is as it should be: this film isn't one overly concerned with narrative coherence. This is a big, explosive Gothic horrorshow (our second true Amicus period piece, though its isolated castle setting means the budget doesn't have to stretch far beyond appropriate costumes and interior furnishings). The frights contained within this cinematic castle of blood are hysterically-pitched, full of melodramatic emotion and overblown action. When, at the film's climax, Ian Ogilvy's Charles Fengriffen fervently yanks his ancestor's skeletal corpse out of a coffin and then swings it repeatedly—grasped at the ankles—against the stone of his own final resting place, we know for certain (as if we didn't already) precisely what sort of frenzied film we're dealing with. I mean, <b>AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS</b> is even the earliest film I can think of containing what we'd call modern-style jump scares. Its setting might hark back to the dusty prestige of 1960s English horror, but in every way that matters <b>AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS</b> is a product of the bolder, more frantic, and slightly sillier early '70s.</div>
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Whether or not I fully enjoy the final results of all that I've mentioned above is a whole other tomb full of worms. I'll ponder that query as I bounce the skeleton over into your court.</div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;"><b><u>GR:</u></b> Once again, you’ve perfectly and succinctly captured my own impressions of our topic as you did with <b>I, MONSTER (1970)</b>. The first thing that occurred to me when that great, gory appendage popped out from the regal portrait Stephanie Beacham was observing was “Wow, that was quick.” “Too much too soon” is certainly the case here, especially as the opening credits of <b>AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS (1973)</b>, despite that grindhouse-ready title, put you in mind of <b>DARK SHADOWS</b> or any number of the paperback Gothic romances that haunted the shelves of grocery stores and pharmacies of the day with their visions of beautiful ladies trying to elude the shadows of menacing manors. The idyllic shots of the stately grounds, the stirring strings composed by Amicus favorite Douglas Gamley, and Beacham’s soft narration (“…my days filled with fear, my nights filled with horror…”) makes one think that we’re going to be presented with a respectable period piece, one that settles for an aura of barely-repressed sexuality and gloomy expressions of the soul in favor of spookhouse shocks. But the minute the wriggling fingers of the Fengriffen curse make their dynamic entrance, we know exactly what kind of movie this is going to be.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">Which is not to say that <b>AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS</b> is a bad picture, but it’s certainly not on the same level of prestige as entertainments such as Bronte’s <b>WUTHERING HEIGHTS (1847)</b> or even, to go back to your point of reference, Patrick Hamilton’s <b>GAS LIGHT (1938)</b>. This is a rough’n’tumble supernatural shocker in period clothing, no more sophisticated than any of the similar fare that Amicus has offered thus far. Which, again, is not my way of being a priss about the whole thing, but the bloody hand seems like such an incredibly early introduction of the creepy goings-on in the story that it implies some sense of uncertainty on the part of the filmmakers. They don’t think that the audience could possibly retain interest in a story about a newlywed couple in all their lace and frills, so they throw us a bone with that five-fingered beast in the hopes that we’ll sit up in our seats and say “Gee, now this is a good movie!” In this sense <b>AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS</b> begins very much to resemble a more modern horror film in its almost desperate attempt to capture our attention lest we drift off.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">Roy Ward Baker seems a little more comfortable in these antiquated surroundings, his directorship solid throughout in his first standalone horror effort after having turned out <b>ASYLUM (1972)</b> and <b>THE VAULT OF HORROR (1973)</b> for Shepperton Studios. He shows an affinity for both the quieter moments of the piece as well as the more operatic business involving mutilation and rape. It’s those grandstanding moments though that this particular house is built on, but this being a British horror film made by old veterans of the industry it shows us very little skin and a relatively small amount of blood, minus the occasional eyeless, handless specter making its requisite appearance. When one thinks how sleazy <b>AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS</b> could have really been (say, in the hands of Al Adamson or Andy Milligan), what we see on screen seems fairly tame. So, when the filmmakers have no flesh or plasma to titillate our senses with, they attempt to drum up the cinematic vibrato in the scenes of murder and mental anguish which, to say the least, has a tendency to play more goofy than shocking. As a matter of fact, I’ll see your skeleton-thrashing and raise you one old biddy strangled by ghost hands tossed down a staircase… in slow motion. <b>AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS</b> may be game, but as you have observed in the past, that earnestness leads the film to occasionally slip on a putrefied limb and go ass over breeches in its attempt to be taken as serious horror-drama. Still, it’s not without its charms.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">Now before I pass out all cross-eyed like Mrs. Beacham, I’ll turn the conversation back to you lest you curse the first virgin bride of my home. </span></div>
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<b><u>NT:</u></b> In an earlier discussion of ours (the one concerning <b>TORTURE GARDEN [1967]</b>, to be precise), I made a comment about how Amicus was ushering itself into the era of blood and guts, and that their films were beginning to embrace explicit themes and images about half a decade before their prim and proper contemporaries at Hammer Film Productions would. Having since revisited most of the Amicus films through this collaborative series of ours, I've come to realize I was off the mark. Well, to an extent. The Amicus films we've been discussing so far certainly imply a level of explicitness foreign to the majority of popular British horror at the time, but the on-screen depictions and elaborations of this risqué subject matter have more often been suggestive than visceral. </div>
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By the time we reach 1973 with Amicus, we realize they've fallen behind the times in this regard. Hammer had already made their mammary-laden Karnstein trilogy, and the blood was flowing freely in films of theirs like <b>SCARS OF DRACULA (1970)</b>. In contrast, <b>AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS</b> presents to us two off-screen scenes of sexual violence (one perpetrated by a ghost!), some light bloodletting, and a brief shot of a lady's bare back. "Fairly tame" is one way of putting it. You're right: I would much rather see this reconfigured as a decade-appropriate sleazefest. Imagine: Andy Milligan's <b>THE RATS ARE COMING! THE SCREAMING STARTS HERE!</b></div>
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Alas, I've decided that I enjoy whatever small charms <b>AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS</b> bashes against the crypt. Yes, it's essentially applying hoary, William Castlesque spook tactics (minus the gimmicks) in a period package, but that's enough to elicit a guffaw of appreciation from me. It's been surprising to observe how flawed Roy Ward Baker's directorial contributions to the Amicus oeuvre have been (much more so than those of the more-or-less consistent Freddie Francis). As you've written, the film seems torn between its earnest ambitions for producing serious period horror and the presumed pressure to provide its audience with over-the-top frights. As a result, the film manages neither, resulting in it feeling like a bizarre, tonally challenged hybrid of intentions. </div>
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I think the film just barely escapes becoming like the over-serious, ludicrous disaster I saw in A<b>SYLUM (1972)</b> through sheer luck: that film's mini Herbert Lom mannikins were on holiday, so the filmmakers had to settle for the normal-sized Lom causing havoc instead. But, in earnest, I think I'm able to stomach the goofy horrors on display in this picture because Baker and his crew seem to have gained an ever-so-slight sense of self awareness about the zaniness they're putting on screen. An example (and my favorite moment in the film): When the tormented Catherine Fengriffen decides to end it all by committing seppuku (!) or perhaps a home abortion (!!), her stab towards her own pregnant belly is foiled (as a slow pan down reveals to us) by the now-skewered disembodied hand we've seen crawling around the estate since the first reel. As a filmmaker, you don't toss in the antics of Thing T. Thing (of <b>THE ADDAMS FAMILY</b>) without the basic cognizance that you're doing something silly. At least I hope so.</div>
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Embarking on a deeper reading of the film's themes seems to me a blind, limbless fool's errand, so I will refrain. But that’s not me condemning it. <b>AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS</b> might be as insubstantial as a pair of wriggling, transparent ghost hands, but those spectral mitts can still play my tune.</div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;"><b><u>GR:</u></b> Wait. You’re saying there is a deeper reading of the film’s themes? There are themes? </span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">I jest, of course. There probably is at least a small cauldron full of subtext bubbling under the images of <b>AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS</b>, and while just about any film is worthy and prime for analytical study if you really wanted to make a go of it, as you say it seems a silly task to try and build an academic mountain out of Roy Ward Baker’s mole-hill of horrors. And for the record, I’m copyrighting the title <b>MOLE-HILL OF HORRORS</b> for my next screenplay.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">Instead, I shall take the lead that you’ve so efficiently used in the past and simply jot down a few of the fleeting and not-so-fleeting impressions that the film made upon my mind. And since it’s Friday, I’m going to be taking this to a whole new level of laziness by writing these impressions in bullet-format. Can your heaving bosom handle the shocks that I’m sending your way right now? </span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">•<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Catherine’s visions of the gory phantom are certainly evocative enough, but they appear to evoke a different mood when, in the midst of making-out, Mrs. Beacham goes all wide-eyed while Ogilvy attempts to calm her down. Snapping out of her stupor, Catherine pulls her husband forward with renewed vigor, hoping that the demons of the past will be repelled by the scent of passion.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">•<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Though she is frightened by a great many beast, including one of the family Rottweilers, at no point in time is Catherine spooked by a dangling spider, as the Miss Muffet headpiece she occasionally wears might lead you to believe.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">•<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>The Fengriffen cemetery is charming in its crowded, insular qualities, all crooked graves and creeping vines, but it must be the first that I’ve seen that seems to generate its own strategically-placed clouds of mist.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">•<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Winner of Most Fabulously Dressed: Catherine in her handsome strolling attire, complete with dark skirt, overcoat, and hat, greatly aided by the presence of a riding crop she swings at the wind-whipped grass. It makes me feel naughty. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">•<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Baker shows he can have a good eye for visuals in those beautiful angled shots of the angry blue sky outlining the dark façade of Fengriffen Manor.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">•<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Upon seeing a woodcut-style illustration of a bare-chested woman lying in bed as a horned fiend lurks before her, Peter Cushing’s Dr. Poe feels the need to clearly define what we are seeing with a grim whisper: “Sexual relations with demons.” Yeah, thanks for that.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">•<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Winner of Most Fabulous Line of Dialogue: “I live in horror that this is the child of a ghost.”</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">•<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>What’s the deal with that ghost anyway? His handlessness seems to indicate that he is the avenging woodsman, but his eyelessness implies that he is that spirit’s descendant Silas (also Whitehead), who has his peepers shot through the back of his skull when the frenzied Ogilvy brings an end to his smirking ways with twin pistols. In a film wrought with conflicting ideas, they can’t even settle on whose ghost is haunting the house!</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">•<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>For all of its appealing missteps, the film actually generates potent tension and uneasiness during the scene where Herbert Lom’s wicked Henry defiles the bride of his groundskeeper (Geoffrey Whitehead) as the helpless groom is forced to watch. The latter’s behanding by axe is equally chilling as Whitehead doesn’t emit a gasp or a choke as his limb is lopped off, his hatred for his master more intense than any physical trauma he could possibly suffer. The whole scenario is slightly reminiscent of the family backstory from Arthur Conan Doyle’s <b>THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES</b>. And if you expect me to make a terrible <b>HAND OF THE BASKERVILLES</b> joke, you can forget about it. Wait.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">•<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>…but as effective as the inciting event of the curse is, the bedevilment itself is somewhat perplexing, as the groundskeeper’s curse attacks not the direct perpetrator of the crime but some random and for-all-he-knows completely innocent woman in the future who has nothing to do with the heinous act itself. I understand that this may be the “point,” as the woodsman’s wife was herself an innocent unwillingly drawn into the madness of the Fengriffen family, but as a means of payback against the man who raped his wife it’s pretty shitty. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">•<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>…however, it does make for a fittingly bleak climax that has the ever-stunned Catherine behold her newly-born babe to see that it bears the same red birthmark on its face as the one that Silas’ family line possessed, in addition to a missing hand. It’s interesting to note the differences one sees in Catherine’s and Rosemary Woodhouse’s reactions to their progeny. For a woman who literally bore the son of Satan, Rosemary takes on the prospect of motherhood in stride when compared to the catatonic Catherine. Maybe it’s just the changing of the times. Maybe it’s because not everyone’s fit to be a parent.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">•<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>And for all of those trials and tribulations, the sacrifice and the terror that she went through during the film’s ninety minutes, Stephanie Beacham is awarded in the final credits with the prestigious place of fourth-billing.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">Fin.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><b>Next week: <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071790/">Madhouse (1974)</a></b></i></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5914772860062903280.post-64103091333362892842014-04-30T08:00:00.000-04:002014-04-30T08:00:01.991-04:00Shepperton Screams (Part XII): From Beyond the Grave (1974) dir. Ken Connor<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>For sixteen weeks, <b><a href="http://macabrebookshelf.blogspot.com/">Jose Cruz of The Grim Reader </a></b>and I will be delving into the complete horror filmography of Amicus Productions and regaling you with our spirited discussions. Below is our mutual consideration of Amicus's <b><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070078/">FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE (1974)</a></b>. Check back every week for more dialogues and (naturally) more nightmares.</i></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;"><b><u>GR:</u></b> Having plundered the collected works of American frighteners Robert Bloch and Entertaining Comics to varying degrees of success, Amicus turned to the short stories of one of their fellow countrymen, Ronald Chetwynd-Hayes, to supply the sundry beasts and bloody bits for their next portmanteau feature, <b>FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE (1974)</b>. Chetwynd-Hayes was a literary brother to Bloch in many ways, mainly in the manner in which he utilized stock genre tropes and seasoned them with black humor, though Chetwynd-Hayes lacked some of the sharpness in prose that Bloch demonstrated with his snap endings and biting dialogue, be it however laden with bad puns. Chetwynd-Hayes’ fiction was a bit jollier in comparison, but his stories were an ideal fit for Shepperton Studios, always eager as they were to leaven their grisly subjects with little winks and pokes at the audience.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #c92121;"><b>FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE</b> is especially notable for its expert art direction and inventive design. The film is filled with neat little camera transitions, a delicious color palette, and sumptuous sets. The screen becomes awash in hues of blue when the supernatural is present, showing us ghostly vistas of fog and skeletal trees as well as decadently decorated parlors of Gothic furniture festooned with dust and cobwebs. Even the most innocuous of decisions—letting a blood drop fall from a ceiling to fill the camera lens with red—add a significant amount of visual wit to the proceedings. The overall technical skill of <b>FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE</b> is somewhat surprising when you take into account that this was director Kevin Connor’s very first film at the helm. Having worked previously as an editor and sound editor on a handful of features, it’s evident that Connor brought his expertise and that of cinematographer Alan Hume (<b>THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE</b>, <b>THE WATCHER IN THE WOODS</b>, <b>STAR WARS: EPISODE VI – RETURN OF THE JEDI</b>), art director Bert Davey (<b>THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY</b>, <b>SUPERMAN III</b>, <b>ALIENS</b>) and set decorator Simon Wakefield (<b>BATMAN BEGINS</b>, <b>CASINO ROYALE</b>, <b>MUPPET TREASURE ISLAND</b>) to the project to give us a very pretty-looking picture.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">Sadly, the style seems to outweigh the substance here. As wonderfully macabre as all the knick knacks are, the stories themselves are not quite as memorable as one would hope. Whereas Bloch had his share of ingenious little plots—you could easily name them off as “That one with the head-eating cat” or “The one where those body parts came back to life” and have someone instantly recognize which one you’re talking about—Chetwynd-Hayes’ offerings run a little on the dry side and, had it not been for the engaging and fun tech work, might be completely forgettable. There’s at least one entry here that stands firmly on its own two legs as a singular horror fable while the others fall on the wayside. Two of them are practically interchangeable! But we’ll get to that in the bit.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">The film’s wraparound segment involves a curiosity shop called Temptations Ltd. owned by the Proprietor (Peter Cushing), a quiet little man whose shop is packed to the brim with grim antiquities that would make any genre fan’s heart skip a beat. This uniting framework is used once more to promote the moral justice of the Amicus universe, though here the punishments seem quite disproportionate to the crimes of our characters. Instead of the murderers and sadists that we’ve seen before, the victims of otherworldly justice in <b>FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE</b> are basically just a bunch of folks who are trying to skimp on paying the Proprietor the proper price for his artifacts. Whether it’s switching tags on the items or boorishly haggling for a lower rate, these folks find out that even if you’re nothing but a cheat in Amicusland, you’re screwed. It’s even wryly remarked that the film’s final customer, a young lad low on funds, still has to go through the hellish wringer before Cushing sees that he did in fact pay him the total and correct amount for his purchase. No one’s safe!</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">Speaking of which, I suggest that you step away from that iron maiden you’re eyeing there to give us your side of the story before ol’ man Cushing kicks us out for loitering.</span></div>
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<b><u>NT:</u></b> For me, <b>FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE</b> is the dark horse among the Amicus anthologies.</div>
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When we began preparing for these dialogues, I was surprised to realize that <b>FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE</b> existed. I’d previously seen every one of Amicus’s anthologies, and yet somehow this one had managed to elude my memory. Of course I fondly reminisced about the one in which Peter Cushing ran a curiosity shop, but, I thought, wasn’t that in <b>THE VAULT OF HORROR</b>? It was only while watching <b>FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE</b>—the production company’s (sorta) penultimate portmanteau—for the second time that faint recollections of the individual episodes began to flicker across my consciousness like the blue flame of a spooky séance candle. In my experience, <b>FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE</b> began to resemble an Amicus-patented Vengeful Corpse: dead and long forgotten in my ignorance, the film was resurrected by a second viewing and crept its way inexorably into my den, eager as it was to unleash its delectable morbidity upon me once again.</div>
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In truth, <b>FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE</b> might be my favorite Amicus film we’ve done thus far (though <b>TORTURE GARDEN</b> runs a close second). Why, then, had I almost completely forgotten about the film and all of the small, ghoulish treasures contained within? It’s difficult to say.<br />
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It’s not the fault of director Kevin Connor (<b>MOTEL HELL</b>) or the assembled cast and crew. As you’ve duly pointed out, this is an attractive film full of technical flourishes that set it apart from the usually quite static (if still attractive and appropriately atmospheric) Amicus visual style. The acting is on par with what we’re accustomed to in these bite-sized sketches of wicked souls, and we even a get few new welcome faces added to the roster who put in distinctive performances of their own (Donald and Angela Pleasence, David Warner). The score is effective, the sets are impeccable, and the production’s (most likely) miniscule budget was wrung dry. <b>FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE</b> feels invigorated by its fresh but experienced creative talent behind the camera, unlike our last entry, <b>THE VAULT OF HORROR</b>, which gave the impression that Amicus was exhausted with (or perhaps had exhausted) the anthology format.</div>
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You’ve pointed towards the writing as a possible culprit for the film’s unmemorable status, but I’m not sure that I can agree. These four segments feel no more featherweight than any other segment we’ve seen in an Amicus portmanteau and— as you also note—they certainly express a similarly wry wit interspersing the bloodshed. The film’s longer than average running time might lead us call them quieter, more slow-burning tales in comparison to what we’re used to from Bloch and EC Comics by-way-of Milton Subotsky. Yet, I can’t think of a finale in the Amicus oeuvre more explosive than the one we witness in the final tale, “The Door.” Hell, even “The Elemental” jumps farther over the top than we’re accustomed to with its climactic living room windstorm. All four tales are recognizably Amicus material, and (I’d argue) they’re stronger than the majority of their peers.<br />
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So what is it about these tales, then, that prevents them from sticking? My best guess relates back to your remark about how two of these tales are essentially interchangeable (I’m guessing you’re referring to the first and the fourth). <b>FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE</b> presents a coherence that’s foreign to us anthology connoisseurs. Rather than being disparate tales plucked at random from an author’s collected works and crammed (however clumsily) into the confines of a frame narrative (looking at you, <b>HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD</b>), these four tales are all of a piece. Each focuses around witchcraft, the occult, and the ancient supernatural evil that lurks in the cracks of the world (and within the cracks of various mundane antiques). These tales work together, revising each other’s basic themes and story content. This grouping of tales isn’t designed to be as attention-grabbing as we might expect (we’re not barreling swiftly from a story about a head-munching cat to a story about a murderous piano, after all), and thus they do tend to blend together in our minds. This is made especially apparent when, as you’ve said, two of the episodes only significantly differ in the identity of the haunted object and in the story’s final outcome. Even the film’s curious anthology format (which finds the film moving sequentially in time from the events of the frame narrative to the events of each tale without utilizing the conceits of flashbacks or visions of potential futures) encourages us to view the film as a cohesive unit, as a single chronological story rather than subdivided bits of horror fantasy. When we think of Amicus anthologies, we think of their wild variety of horror elements, their abandonment of consistent tone, and their tendency towards a disregard for internal coherence. <b>FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE</b> possesses none of these attributes, and I can only imagine this is what left it underrated in my estimation until now.</div>
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Now, I’m going to go gaze into the beyond (courtesy of this nifty haunted mirror) while you give your further thoughts on these specific curiosities.<br />
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<span style="color: #c92121;"><b><u>GR:</u></b> As a matter of fact, I do agree with you in regards to the high amount of sturm und dang on display in <b>FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE</b>, as it truly is the most ferocious Amicus picture we’ve yet seen when it comes to scenery-destroying action. So why then, as you admit, does it leave such a foggy impression in the mind? Let’s see if we can find out.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">“The Gate Crasher” is the first of our crackly tales, telling of the young Edward Charlton (David Warner) who purchases a gilded, antique mirror from Cushing’s store to enliven the atmosphere of his flat. It’s a great conversation starter, as it so proves when his friends are inspired by the spooky looking-glass to hold a séance. Afterward Edward is haunted by a Rasputin-like figure from the mirror-world who demands that Edward feed him blood. Because what else do ghosts do? Connor and company certainly start with their best foot forward here, as “The Gate Crasher” is the vignette in which they really let loose with those little flourishes I mentioned earlier. The séance scene is particularly notable, the blue flame of the candle dancing high like an angered wraith as the camera pans around the little table to each of the participants’ leery faces. When Warner is transported to the mirror-world in a dream, the primary color scheme and close camera angles recall the memorable, off-the-cuff night terror that Cushing himself suffered in the “Waxworks” episode of <b>THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD (1970)</b>.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #c92121;">Even at its abbreviated length, “The Gate Crasher” comes close to feeling a little overlong, the narrative supported solely on our protagonist’s seemingly endless supply of plasma to his new, reflective friend. The bit with Warner knifing a prostitute is a cute little wink pointing towards his future turn as Jack the Ripper in TIME AFTER TIME (1979), though it is curious how, in his hypnotized state, Warner doesn’t bother cleaning up the sticky mess in his apartment yet makes it a point to dress in his pajamas before going to bed! The story becomes an intriguing parable of a man descending into the pit of addiction, as we see Charlton’s once handsome lodgings go to shambles and his healthy pallor transformed into a waxy, sickly countenance. The Face, as it is credited, is like a demonic monkey on Charlton’s back that constantly demands more hits of the juice it loves so much; as it so tellingly intones to him at one point, “You must feed me.” Charlton eventually becomes lost himself, a restless specter ready to plague the next foolish mortal to fall under the mirror’s hold. And if that’s too self-consciously high falutin’ for you, check out that bit when the Face, finally released from his prison, orders Charlton to take his own life with the instructions of “Grip my shoulders. Now thrust forward.” That naughty monkey!</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">The following story, “An Act of Kindness,” is probably the film’s high mark for a number of reasons. For one, it probably has the strongest sense of character and purpose of the lot, not to mention being the one that is perhaps the most cleverly and tightly plotted. I don’t say this merely because “An Act of Kindness” has a twist ending but because for the whole of its running time you are never entirely sure where it’s going to end up. It has a canny unpredictability that’s gripping to watch. Ian Bannen portrays Christopher Lowe, a by-all-means average man who tries to become just a little more than that in the eyes of a streetside ragman, Jim Underwood (Donald Pleasence). He does this by obtaining an honorary military medal from Temptations Ltd. and Pleasance duly offers Bannen his home and heart, not to mention the hospitality of his daughter Emily (Angela Pleasence). Not only are the Underwoods remarkably kind, they also know just how to alleviate Bannen of his nasty wife and apathetic child with a little brand of their own magic.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">Or is that really the case? “An Act of Kindness” is a sneaky little number, and its general atmosphere (barring the wickedly cruel finale) seems like an anomaly compared to the wild and woolly haints and ghouls that inhabit the other stories. The second vignette derives its chills from more quietly shuddersome moments, like when the veiled and white-faced Emily stalks over Diana Dors as she sleeps, a gleaming knife in her hand. Angela Pleasence is wonderful here, even outshining her father a bit as the waifish girl whose toothy smile can inspire warmth and cold-blooded terror equally. “An Act of Kindness” feels more substantial for its tragic arc of events as well; when we see Bannen, we see the insignificant worker ant who only wishes to have some kind of importance to his fellow humans, so much so that he’s willing to lie about who he really is. He sees his own life as having so little merit that he must build up an alternate, more heroic personality just to receive some kind of warmth. He’s not trying to scam Cushing out of one of his antiquities just for the sake of material possession like the others. He needs the medal to become important. It’s this that makes his ultimate fate seem harsh. He was merely a stooge, a means to an end. Just as he was in life.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #c92121;">“The Elemental” makes it evident from its opening prologue that this segment is going to be the oft-dreaded (but generally not too terrible) “funny” one. Think “Golf Story” from <b>DEAD OF NIGHT (1945)</b> or “The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill” from <b>CREEPSHOW (1982)</b>. Cushing indulges in a little humor himself when he tells customer Reginald Warren (Ian Carmichael) upon making his purchase “I hope you enjoy snuffing it.” Because Warren has bought a snuff box, you see. Apparently the little case is bedeviled, as Warren finds out when he is pestered by a spiritualist named Madame Orloff (Margaret Leighton, channeling Aunt Bedelia) on the train ride home. The woman claims that Warren has an elemental perched on his shoulder, a mischievous demon that proceeds to make his life a living hell. Fairly stumped by his supernatural quandary, Warren calls on Orloff to help him exterminate the pest.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #c92121;">Most of this story’s humor stems from Leighton’s fruity turn as the cat-lady-as-exorcist Orloff. Her wavering, eccentric tone is matched by her brassy expletives such as when she commands the elemental to “Get out, ya bastard!” Leighton has quite a few lines that tickle the ribs due to the earnestness with which she delivers them, like when she describes the demon feeding off its victims’ energy (“Sucking up the fluids like a babe at his mother’s breast”) or the evil’s magnetism to Warren’s wife Susan (“She’ll attract them like flies to a dung heap!”). A disquieting moment occurs in the middle of the program when Warren’s familiar coyishly tickles Susan in bed only to start strangling her. The scene is rather unsettling in its own small way, though the sight of Nyree Dawn Porter struggling with her invisible attacker and her race to the bathroom as she retches at the poltergeist’s awful stench will certainly provoke some laughter. The exorcism finale is a pretty crackerjack set piece, as Orloff bellows her commands as pillows burst in an eruption of goose-feathers and a ghostly wind nearly tears the house right out of the ground. Its played-for-cereal ending is just a tad ludicrous though, as we see the now-possessed Porter strike down her hubby with a poker (déjà vu…) only to break down the front door with superhero flair as she exits into the night. “The Elemental” has such an odd mixture of terror and triviality that the moments when it plays for laughs feel more and more off-kilter and weird the more you think about them. This is perhaps epitomized no more succinctly than in another “context is everything” chestnut that Orloff offers on par with the Face’s orders from “The Gate Crasher”: “His main objective is to get inside you.”</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">Our final selection for the evening is pretty much simplicity personified in both title and content. It’s a weird fairy tale called “The Door” in which happy couple William and Rosemary Seaton (Ian Ogilvy and Lesley Ann-Down) acquire an ornate, Gothic stone door from Cushing’s shop to use it as the entryway to a pantry (!) in their home. When Rosemary fancifully imagines the door opening to a more dramatic space, William discovers that it does just that, as his meagre shelves are replaced with a sapphire-hued parlor of the previous century. Not only that, but it is the room of the dreaded Sir Michael Sinclair (Jack Watson), a depraved aristocrat who spent his sordid life immersing himself in the study of evil. And you can bet your ascot that Sir Michael is not resting easily now that the portal to his realm has been opened.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">You were correct in your guesstimation that my earlier comment about the interchangeable stories was referring to “The Gate Crasher” and “The Door,” seeing as how they both deal with two different kinds of gateways that grant access to vampiric men of the past who terrorize the modern worlds of their young protagonists. They act as interesting companion pieces though, as the former shows our hero giving in to the power of darkness where the character from the latter tale hacks it to pieces with a battle axe. As pale as it might be as a reworking of the Bluebeard tale, “The Door” certainly grabs one’s attention with more adept technical skill and bombast. Light and darkness are used to good effect when William reads Sinclair’s journal, the implications of his sacrilegious acts made by the dancing shadow of a crucifix on the wall, and Sinclair’s own entrance is quite creepy as we initially see him only as a raggedly-breathing shadow before he is revealed for the bewigged bogey that he is. Once in the light, Sinclair becomes a regular cackling villain when he sweeps the fainted Rosemary off her feet, snickering to William as the lad tries to stop him “Two souls are better than one!” Enthusiasts of performers such as Tod Slaughter will surely get a kick out of that. And the segment ends on a real blood-and-thunder note as William lays waste to the evil door, the carvings oozing plasma and causing Sinclair to collapse like a heap of sticks. I especially liked how William’s blows on the door’s hinges apparently caused Sinclair’s spine to break in two! A small amount of cleverness and a rarely-seen happy ending make “The Door” stand out, but amongst its fellows it may seem like it’s retreading ground we’ve literally just seen. But, to be fair, typing all my thoughts out has actually made this story rise in my estimation. What’s up with that? Maybe I just have a thing for bloodsuckers in curly period wigs.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">Okay, I think somebody better bash my head with a poker before I babble on any more than I have. Even this little sprite on my shoulder is pissed off at me now.</span></div>
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<b><u>NT:</u></b> If only that little gremlin had stopped you sooner: For the most part, you’ve summed up my exact feelings about each of these witchy tales. I could stare long and hard into the blue candle flame and try to drudge up some further interpretations from the beyond, but why bother? Amicus anthology tales are slight by design. All I shall offer are a few stray observations about these tales before moving on to place the final nail in this flick’s coffin.</div>
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I find “The Gate Crasher” to be a rather wonderful witch’s brew of horror subgenres. Part psycho-slasher (David Warner’s murder of prostitutes brings us into seedier territory than we’re used to); part ghost story (a séance and a haunted mirror, even if this mirror doesn’t give the ones from <b>THE BOOGEYMAN (1980)</b> or <b>OCULUS (2014)</b> much competition); part <b>LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (1960)</b> master/slave dynamic (yes, to Warner the ghost mirror commands, “Feed me!”); and part Lovercraftian tale of cosmic coercion (we learn that the mirror leads to a shadowy beyond of immortality and ultimate power, and that those who occupy this nether realm “are Legion.” The implication may be Satanic, but the details seem to point towards a horror far grander). I think the problematic homosexual undertones you’ve picked up on are on point: sure, the mirror man tries out the blood of women, but it’s ultimately the blood of Warner and his effeminate, cat-toting downstairs neighbor that return him to a corporeal state. Warner himself seems to be dealing with similar feelings of sexual confusion (recall, he’s unwilling to get all pointed and thrusty with his presumed galpal, Pamela). We can only hope that one day the masses become a little more understanding of other people’s lifestyles, enabling Warner and his extra-dimensional pals to come out of the ghost mirror.</div>
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“An Act of Kindness” is certainly the film’s best tale, for all the reasons you’ve mentioned. The segment captures in its characterization of Christopher Lowe (Ian Bannen) a depth, subtlety, and pathos rarely angled for in these roughly twenty minute long Amicus short films. But, yes, every scene is enlivened by the waifish, ghostly presence of Angela Pleasence. Her filmography is sparse, but those who have witnessed her in films like this and Jose Ramon Larraz’s <b>SYMPTOMS (1974)</b> aren’t soon to forget her. Her unsettling, improvised, nearly tuneless rendition of a creepy lullaby (which includes the charming and reassuring line, “eaten by worms in the cold wet earth”) while doing absent-minded chores around the house is going to rear up in one of my nightmares someday, I just know it.</div>
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When considered among to the other (quote unquote) funny episodes of prior Amicus anthologies (I’m thinking “Voodoo” from <b>DR. TERROR</b> or “Bargain in Death” from <b>VAULT OF HORROR</b>), “The Elemental” is assuredly a cut or two above. I believe I chuckled a few times, thanks to the insuppressible Madame Orloff (Margaret Leighton), so that’s something. For me, the ultimate success of this segment rests upon its <b>POLTERGEIST</b>-y climax, all sound, fury, and living room windstorms. The image of a possessed Susan (Nyree Dawn Porter) bursting out through the front door like She-Hulk in the final shot will never cease to strike a spark of amusement in me. Or perhaps that’s just the elemental perched on my shoulder pulling at my cheeks?</div>
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And despite its niggling impression of “been-there-done-that-literally-half-an-hour-ago,” I quite love “The Door.” Allow me to count the reasons: 1.) the absurdity of a grandiose antique door being installed on the hinges of a stationary pantry, 2.) said stationary pantry (who has ever even heard of such a superfluous thing?) doubling as a time travel portal, 3.) the sheer brutality of the drawn out final conflict in which the door and its demon get the butt of an ax handed to them, and 4.) the revised ending in which one of our victims is allowed to escape through good behavior, producing the cleverest sting in the tail we’ve had yet.</div>
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Again, if you average them out, I’d have no hesitation placing <b>FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE</b> near the very top of the Amicus canon. It’s lively, creative, provocative, well-acted, well-shot: a real devil of an anthology. I still wonder, then, why it so quickly faded from my memory. If I were to disregard the influence of its supremely unmemorable title, I might hazard that part of the reason is portmanteau fatigue. When I first viewed the Amicus anthologies several years ago, I tackled them all in short succession. By the time I arrived at this, their seventh anthology, I suppose I’d had enough of anthologies altogether. During our Shepperton Screams series, I’ve again made short order of them due to our schedule, and, believe me, I’ve felt the effects of this bombardment. I think there’s only so much anthologizing a poor elemental soul can take. Let’s agree to move on to redder pastures, shall we? Let’s see that if it’s at this late point in Amicus’s brief life that the screaming truly starts…<br />
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<i><span style="font-size: large;">Next week: <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069715/" style="font-weight: bold;">And Now the Screaming Starts (1973)</a></span></i></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5914772860062903280.post-21297940825966079072014-04-23T08:00:00.000-04:002014-04-23T08:00:00.631-04:00Shepperton Screams (Part XI): The Vault of Horror (1973) dir. Roy Ward Baker<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i><span style="color: #c92121;">For sixteen weeks, <a href="http://macabrebookshelf.blogspot.com/"><b>Jose Cruz of The Grim Reader</b></a> and I will be delving into the complete horror filmography of Amicus Productions and regaling you with our spirited discussions. Below is our mutual consideration of Amicus's <b><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070868/">THE VAULT OF HORROR (1973)</a></b>. Check back every week for more dialogues and (naturally) more nightmares.</span></i></div>
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<b><u>NT:</u></b> The success of <b>TALES FROM THE CRYPT</b> at the international box office and the abundance of remaining comic book source material licensed from EC Comics encouraged Amicus to speedily put a follow-up film into production. Surprising, then, that the resulting anthology, <b>THE VAULT OF HORROR</b> (known in some territories at release as <b>TALES FROM THE CRYPT II</b>), wound up as different from its progenitor as it is. While <b>THE VAULT OF HORROR</b> follows the structure established in the prior film (a skimpy, graveyard-set wraparound supporting four short segments and one longer episode all adapted from EC horror comics), it diverges in its approach to tone. For better or worse, <b>VAULT OF HORROR</b> is a “funny” film. In our last discussion, I discussed the peculiar tonal balancing act <b>TALES FROM THE CRYPT</b> performed with its simultaneous dark, ironic humor and deathly sincerity. <b>THE VAULT OF HORROR</b>, on the other hand, sees its predecessor’s dark, ironic humor and raises it a handful of visual sight gags and punchlines.</div>
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I don’t particularly mind this alteration (the film ranks only slightly lower in my estimation than <b>TALES</b>), but it’s easy to imagine that it might rankle a few. For instance, it might rankle you, my friend. Having already heard your preliminary consideration of this film on the Hello! This is the Doomed Show podcast, I know you’re not too fond of the various jars of pickled cinematic goodies the film places on its cluttered shelves. I can’t exactly disagree with you: when comparing Amicus’s two EC anthologies to one another, <b>VAULT OF HORROR</b> is unquestionably the inferior product. It feels rushed, it feels cheaper, and it feels broader. Worst of all, it feels less inspired: up until this point, every Amicus anthology has sought to complicate the established formula in one way or another, but this one is content to lay dormant, to simply cash-in.</div>
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Fortunately, the problems listed above have never stopped me from enjoying a film. I recognize <b>THE VAULT OF HORROR</b>’s flaws, but I embrace it all the same. The wry, bloody charm of the comic originals emerges intact, I think, and the emphasis on overt, exaggerated humor in the film (without sacrificing the grislier aspects) is a valid method of representing the comics’ cornier qualities. (Its exaggerated humor also helps us horror historians discern a clearer bridge between the Amicus anthologies and the later HBO television series in terms of their approaches to adaptation.) In a prior discussion, I criticized director Roy Ward Baker for making <b>ASYLUM (1972)</b> too grim and humorless, and—if nothing else—I could never accuse him of doing the same in this one. Additionally, there are some striking moments and images to be found in <b>THE VAULT OF HORROR</b> (both of the comedic and the horrific variety) that could rival those populating <b>TALES FROM THE CRYPT</b>. It even manages to best <b>TALES</b> at a key moment: the conclusion of <b>VAULT</b>’s frame narrative hits a curiously melancholy (and, dare I say it, poignant) note that we haven’t seen in an Amicus production since the conclusion of <b>DR. TERROR’S HOUSE OF HORRORS (1965)</b>, and I’d go so far as to argue that this melancholy note is the better of the two. It also beats tumbling like lemmings into a white hot hell pit.</div>
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However, it must be noted: to (a white hot) hell (pit) with the censored version of <b>THE VAULT OF HORROR</b>. To achieve a PG rating from the MPAA for its American theatrical release, Amicus cut out the closing darkly comic visual punchlines from the first two segments. This censored version then became the version most widely distributed on home video, and thus the uncensored version exists today only in shoddy-looking composite bootlegs and open matte overseas releases. This is an unfortunate state of affairs. The cuts don’t amount to much of the running length (certainly less than a minute), but the effect of their absence on the film as a whole is devastating.</div>
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We’ve taken an elevator to hell with this one, pal. Do you still despise the ride?</div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;"><b><u>GR:</u></b> The inferno-like rage I might have previously held against <b>THE VAULT OF HORROR</b> has certainly cooled in the intervening years, but as I found out in watching it for this assignment there’s still a small but very present part of my brain that wails “This is no <b>TALES</b>!”, usually right around the start of “Midnight Mess.” But you’re certainly right. <b>VAULT</b> has its moments, and perhaps it’s my general disinclination towards it that helps to make them shine all the brighter. I can see this film slowly inching itself a little closer to my heart upon subsequent viewings, but there are aspects of it that taste like bitter, bloody broth in my mouth that I may never be able to get over.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">Roy Ward Baker establishes a very different mood (as does Subotsky with his script) than the arch melodramatics that Francis had tinkered with so wonderfully in the prequel. The establishing shots of modern England—the House of Parliament on the Thames to be exact—are worlds away from the Gothic cemetery of <b>TALES</b> and the robustness of the previous film is traded in for a more dreary sense of foreboding, despite the footage itself looking like it could have been ripped from the reels of any old travelogue. This is the same sensation that, for me, carries on into the rest of the film with a few brief exceptions. Where TALES seemed vivacious, <b>VAULT</b> is on the whole pictorially lackluster; indeed, at one point I actually wrote “This movie looks like it has a cold.”</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">The cinematography doesn’t have the same pop as Norman Warwick’s compositions. The muddy browns and faded greys of DOP Denys N. Coop can’t help but rub off on me and bestow an overall sense of “blah.” This look isn’t a bad thing in of itself, but supplanted in the bigger-than-life world of garish comic book horror, it can’t help but look, as you say, cheap and run of the mill. Composer Douglas Gamley is one of the few hangers-on from <b>TALES</b>, but even his score can’t help but feel like a bittersweet reminder of the completely bonkers and one-of-a-kind orchestrations he made under Francis’ direction. It even becomes a bit unintentionally funny in the beginning when we see the gentlemen boarding the elevator as naturally as anything else, but then there are those intense horns of his blowing away in the background like we’re seeing the destruction of Pompeii.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">The wraparound segment may seem to be uninspired and a bit far-fetched, but I actually have soft spot for it, recalling as it does the type of “gentlemen’s club” story that was quite popular in Britain, where gruesome subjects were discussed in between drinks and cigars to the nameless narrators willing to hear the accounts to their black finales. It also acts as a kind of bridge to the earlier <b>DEAD OF NIGHT (1945) </b>which also shared a host of tale-tellers provoked by the strange dream of one of their number into sharing accounts of the uncanny. Its patented weirdness (people calmly sitting down to tell each other scary stories while never *once* looking for a damn way out) is given a quietly mournful punctuation by the film’s climax as we see that the characters who were never in search of an exit have been in the eponymous vault the whole time, for those who might have been wondering when that shoe was going to drop.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">We skip out on the sardonic tones of the Cryptkeeper in order to hear the solemn realization of Curd Jürgens that he and his fellows are doomed to an eternity of telling each other of their horrid lives. It’s a quieter version of Hell than that of <b>TALES FROM THE CRYPT </b>for sure, and in some ways it seems much more terrifying and sad that instead of being forced into the fiery cauldron kicking and screaming like Ralph Greene these men realize in their hearts where they are and what they have done and walk out amongst the mist-shrouded graves to accept their fate. There was actually ghoulish makeup done by Roy Ashton for this scene that would’ve shown the cast as shrivel-faced corpses. That might have taken away some of the tragic sting, and its deletion from the final film due either to an editorial decision or the further bastardization of the censored version (it really is the worst) is perhaps for the better. It’s a strangely affecting ending to cap off a film that has given us such sights as vampires with snake fangs and grown men in ladies’ underwear. Such is the perplexing picture that is <b>THE VAULT OF HORROR</b>.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">My glass is getting empty. Tell me about the strange visions (dreams, phobias, obsessions, fears…) that you had while listening to the gents recount their ghastly phantasms while I fill my decanter.</span></div>
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<b><u>NT:</u></b> You’ve perfectly summarized my feelings about the film’s denouement. And, I agree, it’s an odd choice to infect the film with a strain of somber and restless sorrow after five straight tales of awkward chuckles. I’d argue that the choice was rooted in a desire to reflect (in reverse) the occasional abrupt tonal shifts the original EC comics audience experienced when moving between the humorous frame stories and ghastly narratives proper, but such an argument would seem somehow off. Despite the sly intelligence and subversive wit of the EC brand, such subtle pathos as that which the film’s ending creates for its audience was beyond the ken of those horrific funny books. Rather, understated pathos is Amicus’s game, and I think this ending is a product of the Amicus of <b>DR. TERROR</b>, <b>THE PSYCHOPATH (1966)</b>, <b>I, MONSTER (1971)</b>, and nearly every Peter Cushing performance creeping on set and making its presence known. It’s a curious marriage, but a fascinating one.</div>
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But on to a discussion of these tales from the… vault:</div>
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“Midnight Mess” (originally published in <b>TALES FROM THE CRYPT #35</b>, 1953): As with <b>TALES FROM THE CRYPT</b>, we open with a surprise murder. That film’s fire poker whack to the head is a good deal more shocking and visually arresting than the strangulation we witness in “Midnight Mess,” but the moment nonetheless stands as another deliberate call-back from this film to its successful predecessor. (As the Crypt-Keeper might say, “If it ain’t broke, beat it to death.”) The forced connection between the two films is especially obvious considering that this scene doesn’t exist in the original comic. This is because the film’s version sends Harold Rodgers (Daniel Massey) on an elaborate, sister-murdering inheritance scheme, while the original comic has its hero stopping by his sister’s place merely because he was passing through town. Yes, the film ramps up the stakes appreciably, but in truth Subotsky’s script works to improve upon its source in most every way. While us dedicated horror fiends can likely sniff out the town’s vampire menace before it’s revealed, the film at least tries to conceal this surprise through vague references to a shadowy “them” being those fiends responsible for all the blood-draining. Al Feldstein’s script for the comic, with its constant warnings to the protagonist from the townsfolk to “watch out for those darned vampires,” lacks this subtle grace. The addition of the inheritance plot—and Harold’s presumed murder of his sister, Donna (Anna Massey, his real life sister)—also adds a wonderfully ironic karmic twist to the ending revelation, which fails to connect on the four-color page. Yes, the fangs in this tale are quite ostentatious, and the jugular tap might be a step too far into comedy for some, but I relish these aspects. The tap, for instance, is lifted straight from the comic’s final panel. For me, this macabre and comical elevation of a standard horror premise is precisely what EC Comics excels at, and in this segment the film translates that sensibility to the screen with wicked skill.</div>
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“The Neat Job” (originally published in <b>SHOCK SUSPENSTORIES #</b>1, 1952): My favorite episode of the film, “The Neat Job,” is derived from the inaugural issue of one of EC’s pulp crime comics, yet its horrific twist ending (present in the original comic) makes it a fine fit for this gathering. Both the comic and the film act as wonderful exaggerations of the resentment that erupts from time to time when trying to please your significant other in a domestic setting, despite you and your partner’s wildly different conceptions of what “neatness” and “order” look like. Arthur (Terry-Thomas) places an undue amount of pressure on his new wife, Eleanor (Glynis Johns), to conform to his ideas of those concepts, and his constant berating of her when she fails to live up to his standards cause her to go a little mad in her attempts to do right by him. Unlike “…And All Through the House,” this tale is slightly more sympathetic to the plight of the housewife with a demanding husband, demonstrating the absurdity of his arguments and the helplessness of her situation until she empowers herself through violence. The fact that she screws up one final time by reversing the word order of Arthur’s catchphrase (“A place for everything, and everything in its place!”) is a delightfully quaint stinger that’s an invention of Subotsky’s own. To give our screenwriter/producer extraordinaire more credit, the film version elevates the silliness (the sight of Terry-Thomas wearing women’s underwear will not soon leave my mind’s eye) but also the grotesqueness of the source material (the lovingly long pan across the many jars or Arthur’s pickled parts was one of those grotesque moments trimmed from the American theatrical release). The episode’s best (because least explicable) joke of all is the casting of the fifty-year-old Glynis Johns as a young trophy wife of the sixty-year-old Terry-Thomas. Oh, how times have changed.</div>
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“This Trick’ll Kill You” (originally published in <b>TALES FROM THE CRYPT #33</b>, 1952): This episode is one of those standard-issue “supernatural revenge against evildoer” tales that EC (and Amicus) were so fond of. I like the segment, though I find in it scant material worth remark save for one particular scene that demonstrates Baker and Subotsky’s filmmaking intelligence when crafting their source for the screen. The scene I’m referring to is the one in which the magician, Sebastian (Curd Jurgens), and his wife, Inez (Dawn Addams), are testing out their new charmed rope magic trick back in their hotel room, shortly after murdering a young Indian girl for it. What the pair discovers is that the rope is not an illusion, of course, and after Inez climbs to the top of the rope she looks up above her, screams, and vanishes into the ceiling. Up until this point, the comic and film remain identical in their presentation of this scene. But then Amicus does it better: on the ceiling, at the exact spot where Inez vanished, blood begins to spread from above, bleeding through the paint. It’s a tremendously creepy moment, adding a touch of genuine fright that the comic original sacrifices for bombast (in the comic, Inez’s bloodless, dismembered doll limbs tumble down from the ceiling onto Sebastian). All of the <b>THE VAULT OF HORROR</b>’s previous visual scares have been deliberately laughable and extravagant, so this moment stands apart for its preference for chilling suggestion over outright gore, adding some surprising and very welcome variety to the proceedings. I appreciate the restraint.</div>
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“Bargain in Death” (originally published in <b>TALES FROM THE CRYPT #28</b>, 1952): Well, you can’t win them all. “Bargain in Death” is adapted almost precisely from its source comic, and yet it ends up so much sillier on the silver screen. From the blast of wind emanating from the scream of the casketed Maitland (Michael Craig) that sends the hair of the medical students blowing wildly back, to the cloyingly metafictional, intertextual reading one character is seen making of the novelization of Amicus’s own <b>TALES FROM THE CRYPT</b>, this is some goofy tripe. The implausibility of the central insurance scam—which, in its clumsiness, unintentionally implies that its two schemers are financially dependent homosexual lovers—ensures that we won’t discover much to take away from these events, except that perhaps medical school fees are much too high. If this were a longer segment, it would significantly mar the film. As it is, it’s a brief wisp of post-burial bad breath in the larger sensation.</div>
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“Drawn and Quartered” (originally published in <b>TALES FROM THE CRYPT #26</b>, 1951): Before he donned a scarf he wore a ginger beard. This segment stars Tom Baker (the fourth Doctor Who, and the second Doctor, after Jon Pertwee, to pop up in an Amicus anthology) as a poor and downtrodden painter living in Haiti who discovers that various critics and art dealers back in the homeland scammed him by telling him his art was worthless and then selling it for exorbitant prices for their sole profit. Pissed, Baker’s artist, Moore, employs the aid of voodoo to bestow his art with magical properties of revenge. Don’t worry, it doesn’t all blow up in his face or anything. Oh, never mind, yes it does. Of course it does. There’s a fine premise supporting “Drawn and Quartered,” but it’s not one chock full of bombshells. As soon as Moore realizes his powers, our minds flash back to the self-portrait he painted in the opening scene and we know precisely what’s about to occur. Like “Blind Alleys” from <b>TALE</b>S, this final segment is given a much longer running time in which to weave its yarn. Unlike “Blind Alleys,” “Drawn and Quartered” doesn’t benefit nearly as much from the expansion. Subotsky and Roy Ward Baker aren’t certain what to do with the extra time, so they throw in another revenge murder for kicks (which enables them to bring in Denholm Elliott for a glorified cameo). Tellingly, the art dealer who becomes the victim of this final attack in the film only appears in the source comic by name: Moore is stomping off to take care of him when the neglectful workman’s turpentine makes goopy work of his self-portrait’s face. The comic realizes that by this point the conceit was worn out and needed its grim ending posthaste; the film, in contrast, attempts to squeeze the last glob of ruddy pigment out of the tube. A misstep.</div>
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Now, I daresay I haven’t yet squeezed the last glob out of this conversation, so take it away.</div>
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<b><u><span style="color: #c92121;">GR:</span></u></b><span style="color: #c92121;"> I’ll try to keep it brief and splatter my last few impressions of the film onto the canvas of discussion without making too much of a mess. I’ve been drinking.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">“Midnight Mess”: As I stated earlier, this one kind of sours my view of the film right from the get-go and leaves me hungering for more. It reminds me of stories I used to write in middle school where the characters would lay their motivations right out before doing that very same thing. I’m talking about those fleeting five seconds where Jonathan goes to his sister’s place, tells her he’s there because of their late father’s inheritance, establishes his goal to get it no matter what, and then knifes said sister before leaving her to rot. Oh, and then he goes to a restaurant that’s directly across the street to grab a bite before returning home to claim his riches. And look, I understand that the very presence of vampiric diners demands at least a little suspension of disbelief from us but a murderer hanging around the exact neighborhood where he just committed his crime and going into a crowded eatery just to grab a glass of tah-mahto juice strains one’s patience. Subotsky’s rewriting of the main character’s motives for passing through the strange town hampers the narrative rather than beefing it up, and all of Feldstein’s fun set-pieces (the revealing mirror, the blood tap) lose some of their punch, especially if you have the horrid misfortune of seeing the edited version of the film which just shows the latter as a still shot with a big ol’ ink blot covering up Massey’s jugular faucet. It’s as if Baker felt the material unworthy of his time and passed over this appetizer in a rush to get on to the entrees. The only thing that <b>THE VAULT OF HORROR</b> does right is show us a switchblade-swinging Anna Massey, an element which was sadly lacking from the original comic book.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">“The Neat Job”: It seems we have similar tastes in E. C. tales, as this is also my favorite entry from the film. I had been surprised when watching it in preparation for Richard’s podcast how much I ended up enjoying it, as my spotty memory of my initial viewing of the film on muddy VHS years before had not conjured up any fondness I might have attributed to it. Glynis Johns is cute as a button as the soft-voiced Eleanor trying to maintain her household and her sanity under the fastidious hand of Terry-Thomas. Seeing him with ascot and wine glass, all of the contents of his cabinets diligently marked, speaks to the prissy obsessive-compulsive within me, and it’s somewhat interesting that for all his demands Thomas never quite comes off as the abrasive brute one might imagine an abusive spouse as. He just happens to be very particular, and the comeuppance he receives is one perfectly matching his foibles which all of the best E. C. paybacks accomplished. Johns’ frantic last minute cleaning of the house, the messes only escalating in her hurry, is like something from a sitcom with the laugh track taken away, as tragic as it is funny because we know from Johns’ sensitive portrayal how much she truly wants to make her husband happy. I think Thomas would have approved of her tidiness in cataloguing his remains. As a matter of fact, they do share a laugh together at the end, even though his smile happens to be pickled.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">“This Trick’ll Kill You”: It seems appropriate that this journey into magic and morbidity is the third entry of five in <b>THE VAULT OF HORROR</b> as it strikes me as middle-of-the-road. It doesn’t quite devolve into perfect inanity (we’ll be seeing that soon), but it’s really nothing to stand up and cheer for either. Curd Jürgens does have a nicely sinister air as the imposing Sebastian trying to find the secrets of an Indian girl’s fantastic dancing rope, while Dawn Addams appears to be caught in an attempt to literally act her face off as his wife Inez. When she climbed onto the magically suspended rope and proclaimed “It HOLDS me!” I imagined a vein tearing itself through her forehead. (There’s an equally unintentional hilarious bit where, after briefly examining the girl’s basket and feeling the rope for any sources of suspension, Sebastian angrily tells Inez “If I couldn’t figure out how it worked, no one can!” He’s a trained professional; no one can feel a rope like he can.) Thankfully that did not happen, and the slowly pooling plasma on the ceiling is an even better fate and the one truly chilling moment from the film as we’re left to ponder just what the greater cosmic forces have done to Inez. The feminine link that the Indian girl’s powers seem to have (her blessed rope was in the possession of only the mothers in her family) is an interesting twist that seems reminiscent of the world from Fritz Leiber’s <b>CONJURE WIFE</b> in which magic was solely practiced by the hands of women. The enchanted rope used to mete out punishment is rendered somewhat convincingly as it comes to full malevolent life to viciously whip at Sebastian as he tries to escape, and the final few seconds with the girl’s slightly smiling corpse tumbling from its hiding place to gaze up at her killer adds a nice stinger on this little sleight of hand act.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">“Bargain in Death”: Oh, boy. I don’t know what kind of bargain the boys at Shepperton Studios thought they were making with this one, but I want my money back. Overall, this story has the same graveyard comic-vibe that informed many of E. C.’s stories, but something is just lost in translation in adapting “Bargain in Death” for the British screen. The art by Jack Davis from the original source (whose exaggerated style adorned everything from MAD Magazine to TV Guide) adds a lot to the corny aesthetic, but on camera with flesh-and-blood actors the whole affair is pretty lame and generally mind-boggling. “Bargain in Death” makes “Midnight Mess” feel like <b>BRAVEHEART</b>, if for no other reason than the fact that this vignette leaves one with the uncertain feeling of whether or not they really did see it or if it was just a crazy dream they suffered through during a two minute power nap they took while watching the movie. The utterly painful pandering (I could have sworn Michael Craig looked at the camera after his line “There’s no money in horror” as if to say “Wah-wah-wah!”) and the further need for characters to say exactly what’s on their mind (“I wonder how long it will take him to realize his friend Alex isn’t coming?” Craig’s partner in crime Alex said while driving, to no one in particular) is particularly irksome. When the bulldog groundskeeper of the cemetery tells the two medical students “Sorry bout the ‘ead,” I think he was talking about us.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #c92121;">“Drawn and Quartered”: The final fatal vision that is offered to us from the vault dwellers is this, a fanciful reworking of <b>THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY</b> and just about every voodoo story you might have encountered. Tom Baker has an intense power as the suffering artist Moore (with his red hair and beard, perhaps his first name is Alan), whose path of vengeance is marked in blood and vibrant pastels. I admit that I find the overall concept neat and actually like the various brands of death and mutilation that Moore enacts upon his enemies, though the solemn lead-ins with Moore confronting the paintings with their crimes and marking them for destruction are pretty much blown up when we see the actual, hysterical scenes of the characters getting what’s theirs. One, an art critic, is rightfully accused by his wife for sleeping around, so she decides to fix his lascivious eyes by grabbing what we can assume is a bottle of acid from a bureau in their bedroom and tossing it into his face. The other, a curator, tries to show his simple assistant how to properly use a paper cutter only to lose his precious hands in the process, said appendages seeming to fly off the table like a pair of mittens in a gust of wind. The final standoff between Baker and the oily Elliot does actually manage to generate some tension; I do love Baker’s preamble of setting the wristwatch on the table and saying “You have two minutes to live.” Between this, Elliot’s forced suicide, and Baker’s race back to the office to reclaim his watch a nice sense of urgency is worked up towards the end, but it can’t hold a candle to the sweaty climax of “Blind Alleys.” It along with the funereal wraparound end things on a fine enough note, but holding <b>THE VAULT OF HORROR</b> up to its predecessor can’t help but make on remiss for what could’ve been.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b><i>Next week: <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070078/">From Beyond the Grave (1974)</a></i></b></span></div>
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