A Dreadful Decade (Part VI): Amer (2009) dir. Hélène Cattet, Bruno Forzani

Logline: 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.

Analysis: Amer 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 and a gateway to the ultimate sensual pleasure.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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 too 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 does 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.

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.

Technical Merits: The technical merits of Amer 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. Amer's style is also a jumble of visual and aural associations from Italian fantasy-horrors of the 1970s: Cattet and Forzani's framing plucks exact shots from the work of Argento and Bava, and their soundtrack effectively repurposes the music of Stelvio Cipriani and Bruno Nicolai. Pilfer they might, but they pilfer from the greats.

Relevance: Despite the popular consensus that Cattet and Forzani's Amer 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).

Amer 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 in toto, 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, Amer 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, Amer 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.

To grasp the subtlety of Cattet and Forzani's approach to their material in Amer, one need look no further than their follow-up feature, The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears (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 Amer's detractors claimed that film was: a cluttered, pretentious film-school appropriation of the giallo. Put into juxtaposition with one another, Amer must now seem the more tasteful approach to lovers and haters all.

Meltdown 09: Yellow Days of Summer (Part II)

Body Puzzle 

(Misteria) 

(1992) 

dir. Lamberto Bava

They're never the best of the lot, but it feels wrong to ignore a giallo from Lamberto Bava whenever one watches a whole pile of them in a row. Although they were all produced a decade or more after the subgenre had peaked, there's still something quintessential about his giallo films, or at least quintessentially '80s European horror about them, meaning they're cheaper, gorier, frillier, and more colorful and garish than their forefathers. From A Blade in the Dark (1983) to Delirium: Photos of Gioia (987), Lamberto's gialli forgo subtlety and style in favor of big blades and bigger hair. As the great Mario Bava's talent-challenged son, Lamberto chooses to overcompensate for his lack of cinematographic grace in all of his directorial efforts by piling on the decade-specific sleaze and cheese. And as in the cases of the two films mentioned above, this overabundance can be a lot of fun, as his gialli often border on a sensibility close to that of the frenetic insanity of his biggest horror hit, Demons (1985). But I have to suppose that by the early '90s, after several years of cranking out mostly Italian TV features, Bava had begun to mellow out. Body Puzzle, his chief giallo of the period, is an almost restrained effort, barring the inclusion of a few pieces of inspired lunacy (like a toilet bowl cam that watches from underwater as a severed hand plops down into the bowl, or when the snarling killer pops out from the interior of an icebox full of cubes and corpses). Through its restraint alone the film winds up tonally and aesthetically closer to the traditional gialli of the '70s than Bava had ever come before, and the result is a curious change of pace. Following the Columbo formula, we're presented early on with a killer (François Montagut) who listens to classical music through earbuds while he harvests donated organs from his assorted victims for conspicuous placement around the house of the recently widowed Tracy (Joanna Pacula), and it's up to the efforts of a dedicated police inspector (Thomas Arana) to unravel why. Many convoluted revelations concerning identity, sexuality, and vital statistics follow, along with some cameos from nearly unrecognizable older versions of Erika Blanc and Gianni Garko. Its constant, running-length-stretching plot twists and contortions keep the proceedings involving, but it's both amusing and beguiling to watch Lamberto play-- even fleetingly-- at building a classy production. I mean, consider who we're talking about here.

In the Eye of the Hurricane 

(El ojo del huracán) 

(1971) 

dir. José María Forqué

In the Eye of the Hurricane is a very Jean Sorel sort of film. It's an erotic thriller in the Diabolique mode concerning a handsome playboy who slyly plots the torment and hopeful death of a wealthy woman that he's romantically involved with in order to gain access to her vast funds. So, it's a lot like some of Sorel's other gialli: Parnoia (1970, written about below) and The Sweet Body of Deborah (1968), in particular. As luck would have it, Sorel happens to star in this enthralling Spanish-Italian co-production too (hooray for type-casting!). I won't deny that I'm a sucker for this type of giallo, as I've found that much joy can be wrung out of the games of domestic treachery and double-crosses even when they're not all that creative in their respective approaches or implementations. But In the Eye of the Hurricane, I'll hazard to argue, holds a dagger of originality up to the sub-subgenre's throat and dares it to make a clever move, resulting in a film that's both more suspenseful and ultimately more satisfying than its formal typicality would initially suggest. 

In this type of giallo, the female protagonist is generally beleaguered and hysterical, driven to madness, beset by paranoia, and left without much hope of saving herself from her own predicament without outside aid. In contrast, In the Eye of the Labyrinth's leading lady, Ruth (Analía Gadé), overhears the unambiguous late-night scheming of her envious ex-husband (Tony Kendall) and her sexy yet duplicitous new boypal (Jean Sorel, naturally) about halfway through, and thus she uses this secret knowledge to shape the events that follow. We spend the rest of the movie observing Ruth's emotional waffling between silent heartbreak over her beloved's betrayal and her cool determination to foil the plans against her before her danged brake fluid is tampered with again. (This waffling isn't always graceful, but it is always enjoyable to watch: in one scene, Ruth pretends to lay asleep and bizarrely resigns herself to death while Sorel's character stands behind her and points a gun at her head, unaware of her cognizance of his presence and intention. The editing in this scene hits a fever pitch as it quickly cuts back and forth between extreme close-ups of their anguished faces waiting far too long for something to happen before it finally does: the bedside phone rings.) Our uncertainty about which perspective Ruth will ultimately align herself with (revenge or resignation) makes the last act (which mirrors Carroll Baker's blackmail home imprisonment at the hands of two nymphomaniacal siblings in Umberto Lenzi's Orgasmo (1969)) a riveting watch as Sorel sneers, a crazed Rosanna Yanni snarls, and the sexual torment commences. Without divulging too many details of the wrap-up, it should be noted that Ruth is a complex and capable female protagonist-- independent, strong-willed, and essentially faultless-- and these qualities alone set the film that rises up around her apart from the pack and their parades of tragic or guilty women. All this, plus a scene in which Sorel and Gadé perform an upside Spider-Man kiss on the beach while rubbing each other's tummies. This corpse is exquisite.

Everybody Deceased... Except the Dead 

(Tutti defunti... tranne i morti) 

(1977) 

dir. Pupi Avati

It's not an arduous task to place myself back into the frame of mind that once thought, "A giallo spoof from the director of one of the subgenre's finest entries (The House with Laughing Windows (1976))? How could this viewing experience possibly go awry?" But, as I was reminded of after watching Everybody Deceased... Except the Dead, one should probably never underestimate the enigma that is 1970s Italian comedy: it will always find new horrendous ways to baffle and repel. We are, after all, speaking of the cinematic output of a country whose horror-thrillers even end, from time to time, on the high note of an anal rape gag (see: Andrea Bianchi's uber-sleazy Strip Nude for Your Killer (1975)). Commercial Italian films of the period were in no way subtle or refined, and the comedies even less so. If you haven't seen any but would like a general idea of how they feel, then imagine the general tasteless tomfoolery of a Screwballs (1983), a Joysticks (1983), or any other lewd and crude American teen sex comedy of the '80s and then skew that exact same content towards a middle-aged audience rather than post-pubescent teens. So, in short: jokes about masturbation, loose women, the mentally-handicapped, little people, homosexuality, cowboys, and... book salesmen. The story concerns just such a bulbous-nosed book salesman (Carlo Delle Piane) who arrives at the Zanotti family mansion on the eve of their patriarch's funeral in order to sell that collected bunch of eccentrics and perverts a reproduction of an old manuscript detailing the finer points of their family curse and a prophecy promising treasure if nine corpses are accumulated over the course of one stormy night. One member of the household, seeing this prophecy, decides to don a fedora and black gloves in the hope of speeding fate along. Hilarity ensues? 

There are certainly some good jokes to be found in-between all the groan-worthy nonsense: I quite liked the exchange between a confused victim and his killer immediately after the latter has stabbed the former in his side: "What's that?" "A nice stab, can't you see?" "(groans, dies.)" The film contains a few of the warm, fuzzy Old Dark House laughs that you'll receive from watching similar yet superior slapstick murder mysteries like Clue (1987) and Murder By Death (1976). For example, when the power is cut by the killer, the perpetually clueless Inspector Martini (Gianni Cavina) shouts at the others assembled, "pay the bills, guys!" (when the lights flicker back on later in the film, he sighs, with relief, "so they paid it!"). The film's most amusing gag occurs when the gathered family members, led by Inspector Martini, attempt to instruct a pair of dogs to follow the killer's scent from one of his victim's severed hands that they've discovered. They toss the bloody hand to the dogs, who then promptly devour it. There's clearly something amusing about the giallo murder mystery ripe for skewering, but  Everybody Deceased... Except the Dead's parody is far from as focused as it ought to be. When's the last time you saw a giallo that featured death-by-electric anti-masturbation machine?

Kill the Fatted Calf and Roast It

(Uccidete il vitello grasso e arrostitelo) 

(1971) 

dir. Salvatore Samperi

Salvatore Samperi's ultra-rare and ever-so-excellent Kill the Fatted Calf and Roast It deserves a wider audience, for its peculiar cinematic tale would satisfy genre junky and art film connoisseur alike. Far from a straight-razor wielding giallo, the film has as much in common with one of Poe's darkly humorous Gothic family tragedies as it does the more eccentric, atypical products of the subgenre it has been lumped in with due to historical proximity. This sad but inevitable tale of the doomed Merlo family, who are plagued by ancestral madness, Oedipal complexes, incestual lust, and sibling backstabbing, holds artistic pretensions that would place it in line with the demented, sexually-malformed social commentaries of Samperi's compatriot Pier Paolo Pasolini. The film not-so-subtly posits that Italy's rich old families, who have built their vast ancient wealth on the destruction and murder of whole villages of those less fortunate than them, are diseased at the root and fated to poison themselves through desire and aggression turned back on itself now that there's no one left to subjugate. After the unexpected death (or murder?) of the family patriarch, youngest son Enrico (Maurizio Degli Esposti) begins an investigation that places his shady older brother Cesare (Jean Sorel, making his second appearance today) and his dryly seductive cousin Verde (Marilù Tolo) as the primary suspects. At the same time, Enrico also busies himself with creating a creepy shrine for his insane dead mother and carrying on an illicit affair of motherly affection with his cousin Verde, who has sex with him but also dresses in his mother's clothes before offering him her breast to suckle. Sublime, surreal Freudian weirdness runs high throughout: it's the sort of film that inspires one to jot down a note reading "boob/pudding jiggle juxtaposition." Eventually, Enrico wades deep enough into his family's deadly business that he begins to drown, forcibly. The film submits through its title and some internal dialogue that in this way Enrico is like an innocent calf among hungry wolves, but it also becomes clear through Enrico's damaged psyche and the story's grim conclusion that a calf too long among wolves grows sharp teeth.

Death on the Fourposter 

(Sexy Party; Delitto allo specchio) 

(1964) 

dir. Jean Josipovici

An Italian-French co-production, Death on the Fourposter (also known by the less striking title Sexy Party) arrived in cinemas the same year as Mario Bava's Blood and Black Lace (1964), a film of no small importance to the foundation of the giallo subgenre. Consequently, director Jean Josopovici's film doesn't have an ingrained giallo tradition to draw upon when concocting its own murder mystery, and so instead draws upon elements of the Gothic. And yet, those elements of the Gothic that Death on the Fourposter employs-- seances and mediums, chilly castles, returns from the dead-- would soon become as much a part of the giallo tradition as Bava's fashion models and gloved killer. This observation is not intended to give Death on the Fourposter (which is, after all, a rather obscure film) equal or even a significant amount of credit in the development of the subgenre, but it does make clear that Bava's film didn't appear out of the ether: it, like Jean Josipovici's film, was the product of an evolution of a long and storied tradition of murder mystery and Gothic horror cinema in Italy and throughout Europe. That these and other Euro mystery films were, by the mid-1960s, simultaneously beginning to include scenes of more blatant sexuality and bloody violence than those films of previous decades is a sign of the fast-changing times post-watershed horrors like Psycho (1960) and Peeping Tom (1960).

Through almost entirely deficient on the bloody violence count, Death on the Fourposter's proto-giallo cred certainly shines through in its sultry sexual content. There's none of the explicit sexuality or nudity of the '70s giallo canon, but the film's alternately titular sexy party certainly earns that designation. A band of irritatingly rich young men and women whose names invariably end in either "y" or "ie" descend upon a castle for a weekend get-together (one of them quips, "this is better than your father's castle") and their evening soon devolves into a string of naughty parlor games in which there is much seducing, teasing, partner-swapping, wagering, sexy dancing (set, off-time, to a special guest's new hit party record, entitled, naturally, "Sexy Party"), and shattering of illusions. This first half of the film is quite a lot of steamy fun, thanks in no small part to the bewitching presence of actress Antonella Lualdi as Serena, a sort of devilish socialite with devious charm and sex appeal to spare. Serena puts her fellow party guests on trial through her only ostensibly playful games, revealing the others' various hypocrisies and petty vices while she smiles all the while. Serena is such a strong and alluring presence in the film that the action takes a nosedive in its interest for the viewer after she's knocked off at the midway point. Who killed her? Why? Who's dead next? Where are the stolen rings? Who's going insane? These are all questions that the film spends the rest of its length answering, but I would have preferred to have seen some more of Serena putting chinks in high society's armor of respectability.

Cross Current 

(Un omicidio perfetto a termine di legge) 

(1971) 

dir. Tonino Ricci

Like In the Eye of the Labyrinth, Tonino Ricci's Cross Current twists and turns endlessly in its trashy attempt to simulate a Diabolique-inspired murder soap opera. (Also like in that film-- released in the same year, by gum-- the lovely Rosanna Yanni pops up here as a scheming sexpot who favors boogieing in miniskirts. No complaints.) Cross Current isn't as clever or as complex as that other film, but it certainly makes up for that lack in plot complexity. Most of the notes I took while watching the film were mostly intended to help me keep the details straight as it barreled along in its tale of boating accidents, gardener blackmail, midnight stranglings and the like. As is usually the case, everyone here has a hidden agenda and more than likely a hidden lover. More than a few of them "die" before popping up very much alive in order to enact some new nefarious plot. The rich plot and scheme, killing each other and themselves, all over measly business interests. This is the standard score, but Ricci and his crew pull an admirable job by maintaining its appeal. It's kind of hard to frown on a film that ends with a character being so scared by some spooky music playing on the record player that she trips, hits her head, and dies after guzzling down some J&B, only to then have it strongly implied that it was all part of the villain's plan. Ludicrously messy murder-plotting all in good fun, with the added benefit of providing our first sighting of the ever-smirking/ever-dashing Ivan Rassimov this month. No complaints at all.

Paranoia 

(A Quiet Place to Kill) 

(1970) 

dir. Umberto Lenzi

Carroll Baker is a race car driver. If you need me to continue, then your eyes must have skimmed past the previous sentence without fully gleaning its import. Paranoia, Umberto Lenzi's third giallo with the inestimable Ms. Baker and the only in which her character stars as a bonafide prizewinning race car driver, has driven a symbolic race car off of a cliff and into my heart. It might not be the best giallo that this power duo concocted together (my vote would still go to Orgasmo), but-- from its solarized, spoiler-filled opening credits to its closing ironic twist that dooms the villainous victors-- it's awfully close. Three years before the action of the film begins, Helen (Carroll Baker) had all of her money spent by her lazy European boyfriend, Maurice (Jean Sorel, again), before he split, forcing her to spend the next few years making drastic career moves (i.e. race car driving) in order to recoup her wealth and get over her heartbreak. When Maurice's new wife, Constance (Anna Proclemer), sends Helen an invitation to stay at their home in Maurice's name, Helen impulsively decides to take up the offer. What she discovers after arriving is that Maurice is still up to old tricks and that Constance wishes to enlist her help to rid him from their lives, preferably by strategically placed harpoon. However, Helen's rekindled passion for all things Maurice makes her decision a difficult one. A murder, a cover-up, and a guilty conscience later, the film reaches an entirely new level of delirious entertainment when Constance's sultry schoolgirl daughter, Susan (Marina Coffa), arrives at the estate and begins to sniff that something foul is afoot. We're then gifted with a parade of wigs, whiskey abuse, and exploding cars to close events out (complimenting the film's earlier parade of a carrier pigeon, bubble disco dancing, and a frumpy green bikini quite nicely).

There are many neat things to be found in Paranoia for the subgenre buff, but the neatest might be the film's pointed inversion of typical gender roles. It is the film's women, rather than its men, who are the providers. Both Helen and Constance are self-made women, using their earned wealth to lead extravagant lifestyles that cater to the whims and tastes of their hunky but penniless arm candy (like the unemployed Maurice). Helen and Constance both make clear that they've cycled through many young live-in playboys due to lust over the years, as if they've been irresistibly tempted by their masculine charms. This sort of domestic and romantic arrangement is totally typical in giallo films if you reverse the sexes, but Paranoia's evacuation of gendered expectations is unique, and, in a way, sort of total: when the car that Helen and Maurice are driving breaks down on the road, it's Helen who takes a peep under the hood and announces the car's failure while Maurice idles by helpless. Carroll Baker is a race car driver.

March 2013's Footstones

Being a List of the Assorted Horrors I've Consumed During the Month of March, 2013.

Absurd (Rosso sangue) (1981) dir. Joe D'Amato

Absurd is Joe D'Amato and George Eastman's quasi-sequel to their own Anthropophagus (1980). Though the former begins where the latter ends (with a disemboweled Eastman stumbling about), similarities cease immediately thereafter. Something is lost in retrofitting Anthropophagus' moody, often quiet, gore-leaking atmosphere into Absurd's bombastic, Halloween-ripping slasher tropes. It feels wrong to call Anthropophagus a subtle film (if we consider the fetus-munching and all), but in comparison with its successor it's unquestionably the film more willing to allow dread to breed in the viewer through a lack of action. Absurd tries a bit too hard to be an action-packed American slasher (of course it can't completely succeed: this one is Italian to the bone), and so feels more like a tightly assembled Greatest Hits package for the peaking subgenre. Fun, clever, and messy-- assuredly-- but because of its safe (if manic-paced) plumbing of conventionality, Absurd can only express a creative originality through slight twists on stock situations (of particular note is the superbly tense sequence in which a bed-ridden preteen girl must escape from her confining traction apparatus to evade Eastman). A decapitating finale cements my appreciation for the film, but it's fair to say my heart rests more with tortured, sun-blistered, gut-munching cannibals than lumbering, self-regenerating, bearded, wavy-maned night stalkers.

Deadtime Stories (1986) dir. Jeffrey Delman

Deadtime Stories is a horror anthology film that gives an intermittently mid-'80s approach to classic fairy tales, mushing tones and time periods together into an occasionally captivating jumble of stories and ideas that is in fact quite well summarized by casting a glance at that poster to your right. The film does indeed shove a mess of disparate elements down our throats, but despite the pained expression of the poor man in the poster it's not an entirely unpleasant viewing experience. A humorous wraparound about a drunken uncle regaling a sleepless child with sloppily told fairy tales bridges our three increasingly ridiculous segments together. Though perhaps an intentional progression, this devolution of the film into a full-fledged comedy as the uncle becomes restless and annoyed over having to tell yet another story is also a pretty big problem considering the overlong nature of the first segment (concerning some witches and their slave boy) and the fact that the strong sense of demented humor displayed in the final tale (a murderous riff on Goldilocks) leaves it feeling set apart from its more straight-faced peers. Nonetheless, Deadtime Stories is brief and diverting, with fantastic practical special effects throughout. My only true gripe is that the singular 1980s charm is restricted exclusively to the sadly forgettable second story (about a spunky, teenaged, color coordinated red sweater and pants-wearing Red Riding Hood who neglects to bring Grandmother her meds in favor of boinking her boyfriend in a shed) and the film's opening tune, which manages to namedrop Hitchcock, De Palma, and Romero in the same line, leading to comparisons between their work and itself which it should probably wish to avoid.

Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-o-Rama (1988) dir. David DeCoteau

Though far from what most sentient beings would refer to as "a good film," David DeCoteau's exquisitely titled Ghoulies-in-a-bowling-alley flick, Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-o-Rama, is irresistibly enjoyable. Reveling in sophomoric humor and barely competent lunacy, the film takes a largely predictable spin on the old maxim in re: monkey's paws and wish-granting genies: "Be careful what you wish for!" (Though the genie here is more accurately a foul-mouthed, trophy-dwelling imp puppet with a drunken operator.) Though there are moments of pleasing cartoon violence, the bad wishes instead generally result in some kinky sex comedy "eroticism" that allows for the rampant ogling of bosoms, buttressed by some early sorority hazing sadomasochism with a paddle and some rear ends. (A scene that's led one salivating Wikipedia writer to opine: "This proved to be one of the best spanking scenes in mainstream film and helped the film to become a cult favorite.") The star of the film is the incomparable Linnea Quigley as the nihilistic juvenile delinquent Spider, and she's perhaps never been better than here as she forms an unlikely platonic bond with the nerdy Calvin (Andras Jones) and sends the wicked imp back into the bowling trophy from which he sprung.

Black Candles (Los ritos sexuales del diablo) (1982) dir. José Ramón Larraz

While Larraz uses sleazy eroticism in films like The House That Vanished (1974) and Vampyres (1974) in service of his story and in the hope of producing Freudian psychosexual unease, Black Candles-- emerging nearly a decade later when the director had fewer opportunities for getting his films made-- is little more than satanic softcore with the revolting inclusion of a goat in its demon seeded orgies. The film brings erotic horror to new patience-testing lows, its gigantic shrug of a horror plot existing solely to occupy the screen in the bits between the dry humpings. Because the film is so totally uninterested in imparting any feeling or emotion through its copious erotic activity, we're left having to conclude that the film exists solely to titillate, and poorly at that. Authors Pete Tombs and Cathal Tohill report in their book Immoral Tales: European Sex and Horror Films, 1956-1984 that Larraz was embarrassed with the film, and it's not too taxing to discern why.

Boardinghouse (1982) dir. John Wintergate

Boardinghouse is an early shot-on-video horror film, and perhaps the most ambitious and cheekily demented of them all. Writer/director John Wintergate casts himself as Jim, a wealthy and perpetually shirtless landlord who rents the remainder of the rooms in his large house to a gaggle of likewise perpetually shirtless young women. The premise sets us up for a sleazier ego-driven affair than the film ultimately delivers, for which we can all remain grateful. While there's a smidgen of hanky panky, the bulk is devoted to odd spurts of cornball humor, perplexing early video effect-addled slasher killings, and supernatural ESP shenanigans falling somewhere just shy of Blood Beat (1983) on the insanity scale. Clocking in at a flabby-considering-the-paucity-of-story ninety-eight minutes, it's assured to grate on the patience of most viewers, but there's more than enough inventive weirdness for those willing to accept the faults and the decidedly amateurish sheen.

Dr. Jekyll & His Women (Docteur Jekyll et les femmes) (1982) dir. Walerian Borowczyk

Dr. Jekyll & His Women is the first film by Walerian Borowczyk I've had the pleasure of viewing, and it has fast made me anxious to devour the rest of his lengthy filmography. Though it significantly-- nearly explicitly (Hyde's giant prosthetic penis, I'm looking at you)-- amps up the sexual and sadomasochistic tendencies only latent in Robert Louis Stevenson's novel, what's incredible is how faithful Borowczyk's film is to the novel's presentation of the Jekyll/Hyde dynamic, if not the particulars of its plot. As in the novel, the sheer primal joy Jekyll feels at being able to transform into Hyde and let his id run wild by shirking his public face is the emphasis. To transform into the rape-happy Hyde, Borowczyk's Jekyll (the fabulous Udo Kier) must roll around in a tub full of blood-colored chemicals, and whenever he does so (which is, greedily, multiple times over the course of a single night) he appears to be at the height of orgasmic ecstasy. This Jekyll, like the novel's, is not at war with Hyde, but is Hyde. The film uses its isolated castle and overnight lodging party guests to reveal-- rightly so-- that Jekyll's condition isn't unique to him, and that perhaps we all have a Hyde within us that we're eager to set loose, if only we can discover some secret formula for evading the hypocritical pressures to behave that society places on us. (See: the General's (Patrick Magee) enthusiastic Hyde-like whipping of his sexually active daughter, and the willing curiosity of Jekyll's fiancee, Fanny Osbourne (Marina Pierro), to experience his chemical freedom and the violently emancipating actions she takes under its influence.) Borowczyk's visual style, replete with extreme closeups and discontinuous editing, is an intimate, claustrophobic marvel, and Dr. Jekyll & His Women is a mature and disturbing probe of the seedier, but perhaps more liberated, side of human nature. Expect to see some further words on this film here at the blog at some future date.

Silent Madness (1984) dir. Simon Nuchtern

One of the more tiresome slashers I've seen in some time. Silent Madness (in axe-flinging 3-D) makes the unconventional choice of mostly neglecting to spend any quality time with its sorority sister victims. Rather, the film centers on a pair of adults-- a medical psychologist and a local newspaper reporter-- who attempt to apprehend a neglectfully released homicidal lunatic in-between sessions of batting their eyelashes at each other. Loading a slasher film with mature protagonists is rarely a poor move, but placing them (for the majority of the film) out of direct peril sucks dry any immediate tension, the abundance of which is a dire necessity in a film in this mode, and the fact that spending so much time with them prevents us from getting to know-- much less distinguish between!-- the sorority sisters makes their inevitable deaths feel all the more perfunctory, as inspired as they might occasionally be. (See: a particularly gleeful-- and particularly '80s-- double homicide involving workout equipment and the arcade version of Dragon's Lair, in 3-D.) If the film has one thing going in its favor, it's an almost un-slasher-like subplot concerning the wild abuses of medical institutions that violate human rights while assuming authority of the management of hostile human bodies. But this queasy sci-fi tangent doesn't elevate the film: it instead leaves the film feeling more confused about what it aims to be. The film is no Hospital Massacre (1982) or Alone in the Dark (1982), both of which easily folded similar medical concerns into the slasher formula and became all the more thematically rich for them. Silent Madness is primarily rich in yawns.

The Uninvited (1944) dir. Lewis Allen

A puzzlingly well-regarded ghost yarn from the classic horror era, The Uninvited is brimming with much too much corny, folksy humor that deflates (one imagines unintentionally) all of the few horror bits, which barely register on the horror scale to begin with. At times the film more closely resembles a less-spirited (pun optional) foray into the contemporaneous romantic comedy genre, though with the perplexing distinction of the central couple being a brother and sister (Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey) cohabiting a (barely) haunted house. This romantic comedy tone becomes an issue when we notice that not even our protagonists are frightened by the ghost that appears every evening in their new abode. If they're not the slightest bit uneasy, how could we possibly be? The film concludes with Milland's character actually laughing and wagging a finger at the ghostly apparition in front of him until it vanishes in shame, back into the ether. The film's needlessly complicated plot doesn't help matters much either, as it serves to only confuse the viewer and dedicate much of her remaining attention to its fruitless unraveling. The architecture of the haunted seaside house is rendered in a mundane contemporary style, and while this is a refreshing move away from the Gothic tradition it's a choice let down by the bland and workmanlike cinematography, which never attempts to capture the eerie quality that even relatively modern domestic structures can possess in the dead of night.

Images (1972) dir. Robert Altman

Images is one of Robert Altman's least often seen and talked about films, probably because it's one of his least "Altmanesque." Weird to say, because the film features many of his already-fully-developed signature stylistic touches (overlapping dialogue, ambiguous plot points), but Images differs from its obvious descendant in Altman's filmography, 3 Women (1977), in that it's wrapped snugly around a conventional psychological thriller story and concludes rather neatly with a definite (and not unexpected) closing revelation concerning the psychological state and prior actions of its tortured protagonist (Susannah York). This results in the film occupying a peculiar place in '70s cinema: it's too weird for the bulk of the psychological thriller crowd, but also ultimately too ordinary for the arthouse filmgoers. I think the pat quality of its resolution and some of its symbolism (the film returns on numerous occasions to the protagonist assembling a jigsaw puzzle) distracts from the complex psychological portrait of York's character painted throughout the film: that of a woman at war with her own desires, a conflict creating fluctuating perceptions of the men in her life-- both those present and absent-- that terrify her and threaten to collapse her various lives and identities into one messy, unfathomable jumble. It's an often startling film, with an impeccable score and lush cinematography revealing the vast, isolating nature of the Irish countryside that abandons York among the rolling hills with nothing but her multiple selves for company.

The Seventh Victim (1943) dir. Mark Robson

The Seventh Victim was a revelatory film experience. Frankly, I hadn't previously imagined a cheap horror production from so early in the genre's life could have mined such philosophical and psychological depths to such devastating effect. It's the best of the Val Lewton RKO horror productions I've seen thus far (now that's an accomplishment), and, moreover, one of the best early Hollywood films I've encountered, period. Dripping with stark but softly lit black and white compositions and morose, sleepwalking performances, the film is a dejected, nihilistic, minor-key masterpiece. Regardless of her sparse screen time, Jean Brooks is a captivating stoic presence as the tragic and doomed Jacqueline, pursued as desperately by her own depression as by the sinister forces out to silence her. Even when stripped of its admittedly toothless primary horror element (the passive satanic cult, so easily swayed from its devilish beliefs by only the slightest bit of preaching) the film remains an undeniable-- if experimental and unfortunately neglected-- pinnacle of the genre, wallowing in the most mundane but paralyzing of horrors: that of continued existence.

I Walked with a Zombie (1943) dir. Jacques Tourneur

I Walked with a Zombie is another Lewton-produced horror classic with an atmosphere almost more oppressive and mournful than The Seventh Victim's. The entire film feels like a protracted funeral procession, from which none of the participants wish to depart. Despite being produced in the 1940s and being set in the Caribbean with a largely black supporting cast, the film manages to toe the fine line between exploitation of indigenous cultural beliefs for moody and atmospheric chills and respect for the genuine power those beliefs seem to carry. This balance is probably best observed in the towering, bug-eyed zombie guardian Carre-Four (Darby Jones), who we're allowed to perceive as unnerving before the revelation of his total benevolence. Better yet, the film unambiguously asserts that the villains here (though such a term is difficult to bandy about) are the white settlers who have used the voodoo religion of the natives foolishly and unthinkingly, producing an unnatural (if harmless) creature, an undead physical reminder of their sins that locks their family into a painful and destructive stasis from which they cannot escape, even as it rots them from the inside.

Meltdown 05: Slay Belles (Part III)

 

Black Christmas (2006) dir. Glen Morgan

Most of the (um) creative minds behind the previous decade's horror remakes were quick to try to self-adopt the label of "re-imaginings" for their films. They wanted us to believe that their shameless repurposings of quasi-recognizable titles of horrors past-- Sorority Row (2009), Prom Night (2008), House of Wax (2005)-- are not actually shameless but in fact thoughtful reconsiderations of the themes, premises, and characters of these earlier minor classics. They're full of it, of course, on the whole, but there does exist the odd outlier or two, and Glen Morgan's Black Christmas, a riff on Bob Clark's 1974 original, actually does feel as if it has a bit of imagination fueling it. As a remake it isn't an in-name-only cash grab nor is it a thoughtless carbon copy of its predecessor. Instead, it's a modernized intensification and elaboration of aspects left only ambiguous in its source material. It drops subtlety and mystery in favor of audaciousness and gross-out chuckles as it explores-- in the tongue-in-cheekiest of fashions-- the troubled family origins of the original film's killer(s). In fact, it devotes about half of its length to flashbacks stylishly chronicling this back story, leaving the present day action-- which loosely follows the events of Clark's film-- to be sped through at a hasty rate (a body added to the count every five or so minutes feels accurate). In this way, it resembles (for better or worse) Rob Zombie's Halloween (2007) with a modicum less grimness.

It's the attention lavished upon the stories of its killers that separates this film most significantly from Clark's. While the earlier film was content to leave Billy as an elusive, shadowy menace, Morgan's Black Christmas strives to mythologize Billy and his sister Agnes and position them as new and fearsome silver screen boogeymen for the noughties. I'd call the effort more-or-less successful, even if the series has failed to produce a franchise.These villains are given interesting quirks that set them apart from the traditional horde of costumed villains: Billy was born with sickly yellow skin and enjoys eating fleshy X-mas cookies; Agnes has lost an eye so enjoys popping out and sucking on those ocular orbs of others. Their shared motive is both hilarious and chilling (they kill because their early childhood experiences have taught them that killing is how one expresses love) and their history, revealed in bits and pieces, has all of the seedy, incestuous allure that I've come to expect in a Christmas horror. Perhaps unfortunately, all of the time spent developing these two takes the same away from the group of sorority sisters, who are all unindividuated in their stock cattiness and status as victims-to-be. With a strong stable of recognizable young faces (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Michelle Trachtenberg, Lacey Chabert, Crystal Lowe), it would have been nice is the film helped the viewer to remember anything about them. (As it stands, the best character moment is when Winstead's sheltered heiress is presented with a snow brush and can only exclaim, in horror, "what is that thing?").

The film's most distinctive feature is its oddball tone, smashing together over-the-top carnage, goofy jokes, and semi-palpable suspense, all set to the sort of mischievous score you'd find in a family adventure film. Theirs is a tough balancing act to pull off, but it's one that Morgan and his partner, James Wong, have proved themselves capable of in their earlier efforts: Final Destination 1 & 3. With a pedigree like that series, it should be no surprise that the film's violence skirts the line between cartoonish and sickeningly brutal. The Christmas atmosphere is more integral here than in some other holiday horrors I've watched recently (a colossal snowstorm strands the characters in their sorority house, and virtually every holiday decoration or artifact is used as an instrument of death at one point or another). And in an obligatory Post-Scream postmodern moment, Lowe's character, between hearty gulps of yuletide wine, points out for the viewer all of the pagan elements of traditional holiday celebrations that have corrupted the religious significance of the annual event. This re-imagining of Black Christmas has an overtly cynical attitude towards Christmas and its notions of family togetherness and peace on earth, here transmogrified into family homicide and resting in pieces. Even more so than the original, it earns the "Black" of its title, and is as a whole best encapsulated by one of its characters' quips: "Fuck you, Santa Claus."

3615 Code Père Noel (a.k.a. Game Over) (1989) dir. René Manzor

 

On Christmas eve, an ingenuous and precocious child is forced to construct a series of elaborate traps in order to stop a home invader with nefarious intent. The child psyches himself up after arming himself to the teeth: "This is my home. I'm gonna make you wish you never came here." John Hughes, you're busted. In reality, the odds that Home Alone (1990) intentionally ripped off this barely earlier French film (it didn't receive a general release in its country of origin until January of 1990) are quite slim. What we're dealing with is more likely a case of Great Minds Thinking Almost Exactly Alike. (And, pointedly,  3615 Code Père Noel takes more than a few cues from the classic EC Horror Comics killer Santa yarn "...And All Through the House," previously adapted in 1972's Tales from the Crypt). But then, it's the differences between these two films that are interesting. Kevin McCallister's wet bandits Harry and Marv are almost cuddly in comparison to Thomas's (Alain Lalanne) psychotic, vaguely pedophilic Santa Claus (Patrick Floersheim). Moreover, Kevin and Thomas couldn't be more different from one another: though they share a similar quick wit and creativity, Thomas is a mulleted, heavy metal-listening, self-styled Rambo with war paint, glistening child muscles, and an inexhaustible arsenal of knives and guns (and, if nothing else, the knives are real). Alain Lalanne plays Thomas with a curious mixture of hardened paranoia and childish naivety-- he still believes in Santa Claus, despite his intelligence and better judgement, and addresses his letters to him, "To Santa, In Heaven." On one level, 3615 Code Père Noel concerns itself with that last gasp of Thomas's childhood innocence, as he learns that the world is populated by monsters-- both literal and figurative-- who are always ready to frustrate your optimistic expectations.

But on another level, 3615 Code Père Noel sort of resembles a disturbing ode to class warfare. Thomas's family is obscenely wealthy (he jokes about selling his surplus toys to Santa-- a budding young capitalist), and his world-weary, gun-toting paranoia-- even at such a tender age-- seems to be a result of his general class consciousness. He holes himself up in his one-hundred-room mansion and builds eccentric devices and traps, preparing for some sort of imminent conflict-- perhaps for when the barbarians begin to storm the gates. The particular barbarian who arrives is a poor, dejected homeless man who, after being spat upon by higher society (and unsympathetic children, who tell him they "don't like his face") once too often, goes a little bit mad, dresses up like Santa Claus, and finds his way to Thomas's abode through conversing with him over a late 1980s Internet chat service for a game of deadly hide and seek. (As if to illustrate the divide between them even more clearly, we see Thomas chatting from his stylish personal computer system and Psycho Santa from a dinky public terminal on the sidewalk). Thomas's endless resources and tireless spirit allows him to prevail against the evil homeless menace, but it's somewhat less than a satisfying victory. While Santa is clearly deranged (he knocks off a handful of folks and one pet dog), we're not totally certain that he's an embodiment of unmitigated evil (for example, he doesn't always seem as if he wants to harm Thomas and at one moment he has a knife to his throat but lets him go, telling him he's now "It" in their jolly game of hide and seek). In a way, Santa's intrusion into the mansion is a misguided, wholly pitiable cry for acceptance from a society that won't even acknowledge him as a human being. He's mad, sure, but isn't the society that fanatically arms itself against him without prompting and would prefer (like Thomas's mother does) to stay at work on Christmas Eve away from her young son in order to make even more money a little mad too?

 

Elves (1989) dir. Jeffrey Mandel

An abridged set of notes compiled during a screening of the movie Elves, starring Dan "Grizzly Adams" Haggerty: "girls are the master race -- anti-Christmas League, forest coven -- cut hand, blood on ground, elves born -- parental and grandparental abuse: 'Are you hurt? Good.' -- peeping tom preteen brother to sister: 'I'm not a pervert; I like seeing naked girls. You've got big fucking tits and I'm gonna tell everyone I saw 'em' -- Agamemnon the Cat, 'I'm living a cliche' -- elf vision -- 'let's goof on Santa' -- on Santa's lap, as he cops a feel: 'Santa said oral' -- Santa doing coke -- Agamemnon drowned by girl's mother in toilet -- rampant crotch violence on Santa -- Haggerty: 'First you're Santa, then you die [...] in my case they piss on you' -- Nazi conspiracy, pure genetic line, New World Order -- Department Store Detective Santa Haggerty, smoking and brushing his teeth simultaneously -- 'it's not too tuna, is it?' -- girl in department store fashion show: 'I'd rather be raped' -- Nazis want to help elves rape so more Nazis? -- elf finger fetish -- mother calling operator for the number to 911 (Tim the Tool Man Taylor moment) -- typology at work: Genesis' 'little creeping things' = Elves! -- incest (naturally) -- 'roast beast' -- elves are perfect assassins? the characters keep comparing them to ninjas -- 'Daddy, what's elfs?' 'Elves!' -- plot: Santa Haggerty must stop Kirsten from being raped by Nazi elves --  'are we gonna be alright?' 'No, Willy. Gramps is a Nazi' -- swastika breast doodle (connect the dots) -- 'we have to get the crystal from grandfather's study!' -- did she just call the troll a 'little faggot' and did he then explode? -- final line, peace on earth: 'Shh, it's snowing.' -- elf fetus end credits sequence -- where's Haggerty?" 

What, precisely, defines a great film? Based upon any criteria I've ever encountered, Jeffrey Mandel's Elves is about the farthest thing from one. Nevertheless, I can't escape this pestering feeling that it deserves a spot among the hallowed greats. Conventional standards don't apply: Elves looks horrible, sounds horrible, probably actually is horrible. Attempting to intellectualize the movie to any extent seems a foolhardy endeavor. But it remains an undeniably enjoyable cinematic experience, uncomfortably coexisting with a dual sense of clever self awareness and absurd earnestness. When Haggerty's grizzled yet gentle department store Santa detective ponders aloud, "what the hell are these Nazis going to do with these elves?", we're made aware that the film knows how preposterous that sounds... and yet this is exactly the plot that it will continue to pursue, wholeheartedly, until its conclusion. One wants to call the approach self-deprecating (another dejected and incredulous Haggerty line, after being pointed in the direction of the Demonology section at the local library under the nonexistent Dewey Decimal call number of '666': "you're kidding me, that's got to be a joke"), but that doesn't rest quite right. It's a film of seemingly endless no-budget ambition and whacked-out creativity tinged with a sense of irony that is less snooty than matter-of-fact: marvel, for instance, at a trio of horny teens foaming at the mouth while banging on a steel door for their girlfriends to let them into the department store after hours who then stop short, shrug, and deadpan a rationale for their behavior-- "hormones." Elves is an unrivaled experience and a nonsensical pleasure-- I couldn't recommend it more highly for your holiday season's viewing.

Better watch out for a next entry is coming all too soon to town: Silent Night, Deadly Night I-V (1984-1991) & Silent Night (2012).

Baby Blood (1990) dir. Alain Robak

a.k.a. The Evil Within

Logline: Yanka (Emannuelle Escourrou) is a circus performer who becomes the unwilling host of a parasitic, telepathic, prehistoric creature who wants nothing more than to be born. Unfortunately for all the men in Yanka's world, this baby needs their blood in order to grow strong.

The constant spray of arterial blood throughout its running time may belie Baby Blood's more passionate concern: exploring the rotten, unfortunate position of women in "a man's world." The world that Yanka, our heroine, occupies is nightmarish in its treatment of the female sex. Its men prey upon its women without mercy or cognizance of their shared humanity. But when Yanka begins to turn those metaphorical tables by becoming a sexualized predator herself, dispatching men in the goriest of fashions, this lack of human empathy makes sense, for this may be a man's world but man is surely an animal. The intimations of humankind's bestial nature are bubbling just beneath the film's surface, discernible through symbolism (the large, predatory circus cats going wild in Yanka's presence, just as the men do) and a bit of provocative lip service. This latter hint appears in a discussion between Yanka and the telepathic spawn residing in her womb: Yanka admits to liking men "who look unhappy," while her parasite questions whether or not "unhappiness is a sign of intelligence," pointing out that the primary difference between humans and animals is that animals don't know that they're unhappy. The blind, unemotional sexual compulsions of the film's various men make it apparent that any sort of self-awareness is beyond their ken, but the tragedy lies in the fact that Yanka's own awareness of her situation is eroded over the course of her travails. She trades one form of violent male dominance for another, as she smiles blankly through the numerous murderous transgressions her situation forces her into and only intermittently pauses--bathed in blood--to realize her own unhappiness.

She's unhappy, at least partially, because the men in her world are extremely unpleasant creatures who beat her, gawk at her, control her, swindle her, and attempt to rape her. Up until her final moments on screen, the men of her world objectify and devalue her. Regardless, it seems a little too easy to read Baby Blood as an unsubtle, tactless horror film that celebrates the violent reprisals of women against male violators, propped up under the banner of some skewed male notion of feminism. (Director Alain Robak is, of course, a man). I'd argue that Robak's film is a more complicated and nuanced (though maybe ultimately more ambivalent) iteration of the same female revenge theme present in a film like I Spit on Your Grave (1978). In the latter film, no matter how queasy such revenge can be, one never notices the film questioning Camille Keaton's character's actions; her rapists are awful human beings, and her violence against them is "justified" in the narrative's logic. Baby Blood's narrative is less certain of Yanka's bouts of murdering, as is--occasionally--Yanka herself: few of the male characters are at all sympathetic, but should they be killed for eying her breasts or agreeing to sleep with her?

Yanka is less in the position of doling out revenge than aggressively preying upon men. She tempts several men to their deaths in order to feed her parasitic child (and sometimes kills total innocents to protect him), but most of the time she's initially reluctant to do so. The only man who has seriously wronged her is her boyfriend back at the circus, who would beat her and keep her confined to their trailer, and she actively struggles against her creature's telepathic influence when he commands her to kill him. At the same time, she's not totally without culpability: her murder of a man who proposes to her is one of only a few that are not egged on by her child's bloodthirsty voice-over, perhaps implying that (parasite or not) she is independently resistant to men trying to dictate the course of her life. This all leads to the film's central irony: Yanka violently revolts against the control of men while under the control of a man. True, her child parasite is a prehistoric creature, but he's certainly coded as male and even intimates throughout the film his essential human characteristics. (Not to mention his creepy, phallic implantation of himself inside of her and the fact that he can writhe around while in there in order to give her pleasure). So, because he physically tortures Yanka (ripping at her insides, causing her to spit up blood) whenever she disregards his orders to kill, we see him as only a further extension of the selfish, thoughtless abuse men have brought upon her (because, as he tells her about another man's cruel actions towards her, "that's the way things are in a man's world").

Because of her lack of autonomy, Yanka's experiences don't restore order or deal out justice. They are, in the scheme of things, meaningless, making of her not an avenging angel but an empty host. (Chillingly, when asked by another character what she's accomplished in her life she responds, "Nothing. In my life I've done nothing"). Her unhappiness (and so, by extension, her humanity in an inhumane world) is what's at the center of the film's thematic concerns. She dislikes being abused and controlled, but she's also not a fan of killing in retribution. She maintains that not all men are evil, though every one that she encounters is a disappointment. She has hope for her totally hopeless world, so much so that in the film's final moments it appears that she doesn't wish to see this new organism she's birthed take it over (though it's fair to admit that the conclusion is a tad ambiguous on this point). If Baby Blood is a feminist film (which I'd argue it is), then it is so because of its rather harrowing representation of the emotional effects of men's abuse of women, not because of any celebration of slaughtering.

Baby Blood is a dour French horror film, it's general melancholic air standing in weird juxtaposition next to its manic, cartoonish intestinal splatter. I think the default--and faulty--reaction would be to read the film as a trivial bit of nonsense. This is, after all, a movie about a woman who is having conversations with her homicidal, blood-guzzling belly. Its many unexpected moments of sudden and copious gore give the film a late '80s/early '90s visual aesthetic somewhere between the works of Frank Henenlotter and those of Tromaville. (Though the film does, intermittently, shoot for a surrealism a bit more firmly placed on the artistic side of things; see: a Fantastic Voyage-esque journey through Yanka's innards down to her heart). But even total cartoon moments--like when Yanka kicks the head off of a man she's driven against a wall with a taxi cab--are never funny. The film plays everything completely straight, excepting the boorish performance of Yanka's weaselly admirer, Richard (Jean-François Gallotte), who I suppose we can call the comic relief. The sombre tone is a benefit, reenforcing the themes mentioned above while using its brutal, bombastic aesthetic to jolt the audience out of its complacency. That the violence may sometimes seem comical is an unintended effect of its morbid excess. In a lot of ways, Baby Blood is a film working in the same mode as Andrzej Zulawski's Possession (1981), though it's a bit less frenetic than that earlier film's domestic grand guignol. As Isabelle Adjani does in Possession, Emmanuelle Escourrou powers through her every scene as a force of nature, giving everything to her role with nary a concern that she be presented in a flattering light. Her arc is a fascinating one, with her beginning as a repressed and demure kept pet and ending up as a powerful but conflicted woman. (Especially at the film's start when she's creating psychic connections with tigers and leopards, Escourrou resembles--in both appearance and demeanor--Nastassja Kinski in Paul Schrader's Cat People (1982)). But what's most remarkable is her ability to remain distant and aloof throughout this development. But then, I suppose Robak intends the entire film to be distant and aloof-- an art film dressed up, unabashedly, in incongruous B-movie clothing.