Meltdown 09: Yellow Days of Summer (Part III)

Blood Link 

(Extrasensorial) 

(1982) 

dir. Alberto De Martino

The ultra-sleaze of this early '80s giallo is, well, unexpected. Two years after filming the delightfully insipid, MST3K-lampooned children's superhero film Pumaman (1980), director Albert De Martino returned under the pseudonym "Martin Herbert" to buck expectations by delivering Blood Link, a Michael Moriarty-starring giallo that primarily concerns itself with scenes of rape and exposed breasts. It doesn't reach Giallo A Venezia (1979) levels of sleaze, but one can't help but feel dirty watching Moriarty apply his usual amiable slimeball charm to truly horrific ends. Consequently, Moriarty doesn't shine as often here as he does in any of Larry Cohen's films, but he sure savors every moment he gets to play off himself while starring as a pair of once-siamese identical twins-- one a doctor, the other a psychopathic serial killer-- who have an inexplicable extrasensory ability that allows them to, on occasion, transmit visual images to each other with their minds. (In one scene, while speaking to his other identical half, Moriarty whistles through his grin, "I'm a very flip character.") When one twin, Craig, sees the vile, sexualized murders committed by his estranged brother, Keith, though his own eyes, he decides to travel to Hamburg to track down his long lost blood relative and prevent any more violence. Much confusion of identities follows as the police hassle Craig thinking he's Keith while Keith impersonates Craig in order to give a wobbly Cameron Mitchell a heart attack and rape/murder a woman that Craig was cheating on his girlfriend with in the hope of framing his not-so-goody-two-shoes sibling. It's often very amusing, in part-- Keith's murderous psychosis was caused by, of all things, seeing his parents making out in the garage when he was a child, to which he promptly responded by squishing them with the family automobile-- but on the other hand the bulk of it is downright unseemly. When Craig's girlfriend, Julie (Penelope Milford), is raped by Keith and, seemingly, enjoys it, we catch shades of a similar moment in Straw Dogs (1971). But De Martino is no Peckinpah: this is misguided titillation at its lousiest, where rape is considered a horrifying cinematic spectacle only if someone "gets hurt." 

So Sweet, So Perverse 

(Così dolce... così perversa) 

(1969) 

dir. Umberto Lenzi

Decades before he played a sad old man in Michael Haneke's Amour (2012), Jean-Louis Trintignant snogged and rode jet skis with Carroll Baker, his mysterious upstairs neighbor, because his character in Umberto Lenzi's So Sweet, So Perverse was really bored. Jean Reynaud (Trintignant) is a wealthy businessman suffering from the pangs of ennui that afflict all of those with too much privilege: he's bored with his mundane high-power job; he's bored with his marriage to his beautiful wife, Danielle (Erika Blanc), and no longer even interested in her "slice of cake" that she's been denying him in bed; he's bored with his mistress (Mabille De Lancré herself, Helga Line) who provides him all the slices of cake he could ever desire. "Life is so boring nowadays," he grumbles, so when the noises of his new upstairs neighbor, Nicole (Baker), being beaten and abused by another man (the ever-swarthy Horst Frank) filter down to his apartment below, Jean is quick to jump into the sleazy soap opera drama of her life and aspire to the role of the rescuing white knight. But Nicole is simply a diversion for Jean-- a beautiful image of the tortured woman who requires assistance-- who will in fact rescue him, however temporarily, from his dull, pampered existence. He's not really interested in the particulars of her sad tale: before she relays her story to him and becomes a defined personality, he admits that he's be more content if she remained a mute image for his fascination: "I much prefer your silence." It's this blind, uncritical pursuit of a seeming damsel in distress that leads our pathetic, bored hero into a bramble bush of trouble and murder as the film progresses. In the second half of the film, our attention is focused on Jean's wife Danielle, who attests early on that she's sick of the antiquated Victorian notion of the dominant male and attempts to rebel against it by denying her husband any of her love and carrying on a lesbian affair. Her story, which comprises the remainder of the film, is a little more typical of the subgenre (i.e. gaslighting galore), but her fate is more tragic than usual: we receive the sense that she actually did care for Jean and her guilt over the plot she enacted against him haunts her until her cruel death. The climax of So Sweet, So Perverse is about as delectably bleak and cynical as these things come, but the film's overall story feels diluted by the mid-point twist, which especially leaves Carroll Baker's intriguing storyline (that of a rape victim who remains psychologically attached and sexually aroused by her attacker) by the wayside. It's not Lenzi's finest or most thematically complete, but it does open with a killer track from the great Riz Ortolani, and that counts for something.

Love & Death on the Edge of a Razor 

(Giorni d'amore sul filo di una lama) 

(1973) 

dir. Giuseppe Pellegrini

I suppose that every movie marathon meltdown needs a dud at its center to remind you of the relative qualities of everything else you've been watching. Love & Death on the Edge of a Razor is that dud. Simply, it is the worst giallo I've yet had the displeasure of encountering. This is the only film directed by Italian screenwriter Giuseppe Pellegrini (who co-wrote Renato Polselli's early days Italian horror flick The Vampire and the Ballerina (1960)), and for this I am glad: I would prefer not to feel obligated to watch another film from this man. Despite possessing the most giallo-rific film title in the subgenre's history, Love & Death on the Edge of the Razor is not a horror-thriller. Nor is it anything else of note, besides a partial cribbing of Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958). Forcing a label, it would have to be called, I suppose, a... romance crime drama? Perhaps, if one can earn that label without being romantic, dramatic, or action-packed. As the choppy editing telegraphs great spans of time between cuts, we are given the story of a boy (Peter Lee Lawrence) who meets a girl (Erika Blanc, or, as the credits amusingly re-dub her, "Blank") and who together fall madly in love until the girl dies in a car crash and the boy gets sad for a while but eventually picks up with another girl (Ivanna Novak), except it turns out that the first girl didn't actually die in a car crash but is now working as a journalist staging shady textile importation deals with gangsters because the boy's wealthy father blackmailed her into faking her own death in order to protect her own slightly corrupt father. This paucity of dramatic interest is approximately all that transpires in the film, except it's stretched out from a single overstuffed sentence into ninety minutes. Thankfully, the film concludes with an uplifting message: the power of love can save the lives of those people we hold dear who have large, gory gunshot wounds in their chests. Ugh. I'd rather have spent this lost time with my eyelids forcibly peeled open in front of The Bloodsucker Leads the Dance (1975) again. At least that one had some severed heads made from paper mache: Love & Death on the Edge of a Razor has reminded me to appreciate the simple pleasures.

The Red Headed Corpse 

(La rossa dalla pelle che scotta) 

(1972) 

dir. Renzo Russo

A hidden gem of early-'70s Italian gialli, The Red Headed Corpse takes a manic spin on Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" and sprinkles it with the aesthetic content (if not the social critique) of a few earlier troubled-artist-turned-murderer flicks like Corman's A Bucket of Blood (1959) and Lewis's Color Me Blood Red (1965). A slightly wizened Farley Granger plays a drunken, struggling artist named John Ward whose paintings are no longer in demand from the local dealers. He stumbles around town cursing his luck one day and happens to wander into a park full of hippies. He turns down their offer of a joint to smoke ("you like the world as it is?" one of the hippies asks in astonishment), but he does take home an expressionless female mannequin that the lead hippie gifts to him, with the endorsement that it's "better than the real thing: it doesn't talk back." John makes the mannequin his new art project, and he talks to her while he fixes her up into an object that's "lovely, pure, faithful. Everything a woman should be." Of course, he fails to notice that she's also a hunk of plastic, but that's not about to stop his deranged mind, which imagines the mannequin coming to life one evening as a real woman (Krista Nell), who is referred to in the credits as "The Subservient Doll." The term "doll" is appropriate because this animated female becomes John's mute plaything, embodying his notion of the ideal female who is to be seen (to spill champagne on her breasts, mostly) and touched but not heard. 

John and his doll's happy co-existence is one day shattered by John's haunting memory of the rampant infidelity of his former wife (Erika Blanc), who is referred to in the credits only as, interestingly, "The Sensuous Doll." The bulk of the film then occurs in flashback, showing us first Blanc's instrumental hand in gaining John some momentary success as a painter of nude figures with her as his model and then her constant betrayals of marriage by getting randy with just about anyone who asks, including a pimply 16-year-old teen boy on the beach. Her selfish actions eventually lead John to murder... or do they? The film is ambiguous on the point of what exactly is reality and what is the delusion of John's mind. How can John have flashbacks to events that he wasn't present for? Are his memories of his wife's infidelities merely the anguished, misogynistic delusions of some male cuckolding fantasy, one in which a women who says "no" always means "yes"? A man haunted by a bleeding sentient mannequin is not quite an authority on empirical events, so we're never sure what to make of the images and memories on screen. What is apparent is that John is a man torn between two false fantasies of women: he's neither satisfied with the faithful but dull subservient doll who "never asks for anything" or the untrustworthy sensuous doll, whose treachery (real or imagined) is as alluring as it is torturous (the film ends on the kooky but somewhat chilling image of Blanc's giant transparent ghost head imposed over a shot of the outside of John's dingy house, laughing at him merrily as he watches wistfully from the rear window of a car in which he's being carted away to the loony bin). One imagines John's position might have improved if he'd only stopped thinking of women as dolls.

The Devil Has Seven Faces 

(Il diavolo a sette facce) 

(1971) 

dir. Osvaldo Civirani

Osvaldo Civirani tricked me. With a title, poster, and trailer like that bestowed upon his film The Devil Has Seven Faces, is it any fault of mine that I believed I was being set up to watch a Gothic-tinged giallo starring the formidable duo of the ever-present Carroll Baker and that charming rapscallion George Hilton? My brain starts to drool at the very idea of such a movie existing. But Civirani, the lousy scoundrel that he obviously is, tricked me. Barring a pretty cool but aesthetically jarring scene in which Baker descends into a basement with only a lighter for illumination and discovers-- to her horror-- a cobwebbed corpse, The Devil Has Seven Faces is far from what you might expect. Sure, it borrows liberally from the giallo's cabinet of plot curiosities-- we have twins, duplicitous lovers, mistaken identities, concealed identities, frantic chases, wigs, and fakeouts and twists galore-- but there's no obscuring the reality that the film is, at its core, a diamond heist film. On that action-and-intrigue-oriented level, it's a kooky pleasure: I'll watch Carroll Baker climb ladders in tight black short-shorts and smoosh a crazed George Hilton under the wheels of a bulldozer any day. But it's a crap giallo, and yet Civirani, his producers, and his distributors sold it to me as something special. Shame on them. I will, however, give them credit for one thing, for their's is the only film that's allowed me to see Baker's impressive emotive facial acting on display from underwater while her head is being plunged into a tub full of watery torture by some villainous villains. Spoiler.

The Fourth Victim 

(Death at the Deep End of the Swimming Pool; La última señora Anderson) 

(1971) 

dir. Eugenio Martín

Carroll Baker makes her final flirtatious appearance of the day in Eugenio "Horror Express" Martin's Spanish-Italian co-production, The Fourth Victim. This fine, Lenzi-esque film concerns the unusual occupation of one Mr. Arthur Anderson (Michael Craig), described by a prosecuting attorney as "a professional widower": Mr. Anderson marries women, takes out large life insurance policies against them, and then collects his reward when they inevitably perish in one kind of "accident" or another. This unexpected gender reversal of the old "Black Widow" routine helps Mr. Anderson persuade a jury of his innocence when he's put on trail for the suspected murder of his latest wife. A well-to-do man who would lower himself so far as to kill his wife for the money? Who could imagine such a dishonest way for a man to make his living? That's (clearly) wicked women's work. These thoughts are those that-- ostensibly-- pass through the brain of Julie (Carroll Baker) when she embarks on a love affair and eventual marriage with Mr. Anderson (his fourth) soon after their first encounter during a quick dip she steals in his pool. Julie attests that she harbors no suspicion against Mr. Anderson, a claim which even he's skeptical of: it's only after she presents him with a life insurance policy that she's taken out for him in her own name that he agrees to their marriage. Naturally, Julie hasn't told her new husband absolutely everything about herself, and the arrival of puzzle pieces like secretive late-night phone calls, information about years-long psychiatric hospital stays, and a murder-happy Marina Malfatti serve to further complicate an already fairly loopy plot. Still, the film's most bewildering moment occurs in its denouement when, all deadly secrets and murderous intentions revealed, Mr. Anderson and the latest Mrs. Anderson blissfully decide to stay hitched, having taken out-- together-- a joint life insurance policy. This might be the most sneakily cynical ending of all time: happiness in marriage is always knowing that you can bump off that other lethal crook you call your spouse for fat stacks of cash at a moment's notice. Ah, love.

Fatal Frames

(Fatal frames: Fotogrammi mortali)

(1996)

dir. Al Festa

What was all that about gazing into the abyss and it gazing also into you? A bloated vanity project of epic proportions (it's over two hours long), Al Festa's Fatal Frames is both entirely baffling and weirdly satisfying. On the one hand, the film is obviously intended to prop up the career of its leading lady/director's lover/pop star prodigy Stefania Stella, which we can note due to her central presence in the film despite her possessing the acting talent of an exaggerated stuffed animal with googly eyes and her uncanny ability to mimic the sound of a slurred, drunken computer reading the phonetic pronunciation of words whenever she speaks. We also notice this obvious intention of the film during moments in which the action stops dead so that Stefania can flop around in a fountain and record a music video set to her mush-mouthed non-hit "Eternal City." And yet, on the other twisted monkey's paw, Fatal Frames is a loving tribute to the gialli of previous decades (though specifically those of the 1980s). It remains aesthetically consistent with those grimy, glitzed-out films from the likes of Lamberto Bava and Carlo Vanzina by featuring lots of fashion models, the odd seance or two, several male actors who look exactly like Furio from The Sopranos, pit stops for slinky photoshoots, and sleepy performances from a cavalcade of washed up genre vets. (David Warbeck, Alida Valli, Linnea Quigley, Angus Scrimm, and Donald Pleasence all fatally poke their sleepy heads into frame here, though Warbeck gives his performance a bit more energy than you'd expect. Sadly, Fatal Frames would be Pleasence's final film due to his death during production, leaving his performance incomplete. Naturally, Festa wrote him out of the film in the most tasteless of fashions). Fatal Frames should have gone terribly wrong, been insufferable even, but it's reined in enough that it's actually quite watchable and self-indulgent in all the right ways. Think of it as akin to a giallo helmed by Tommy Wiseau, only starring someone with even less of a familiarity with the English language than him. Stefania help me, I actually liked it.

Meltdown 04: Sequelthon (Part III)

The Boogeyman II (1983) dir. Bruce Starr & The Boogeyman 2: Director's Cut (2003) dir. Ulli Lommel

Ulli Lommel's journey from New German Cinema actor (he's an enigmatic presence in some of Fassbinder's best early work) to Warhol collaborator (Blank Generation, Cocaine Cowboys) to legitimate director of bizarro American horror (The Boogeyman, The Devonsville Terror, Brainwaves) to soulless hack (the two films covered here, his numerous recent serial killer exploitation flicks) is perplexing, but it's also the sort of journey that one can take some grim fascination in. These two sequels to his unlikely 1980 hit supernatural slasher, The Boogeyman, are by equal turns mind-numbing and enthralling, infuriating in their utter lack of scruples and sort of snidely refreshing for the same. Dissatisfied with the state of the American film industry (the sort of the film industry that would gladly bankroll a film as uninspired and lifeless as Boogeyman II), Lommel composes these films to be deliberate wastes of time. Collectively, they possess more gall than any other pair of cash-in sequels, and for that they earn my admiration (respect or enjoyment would be going further than I'm comfortable with; I did, after all, have to watch them).

By some luck of the draw, I viewed Lommel's 2003 director's cut first, erroneously imagining it to be the preferred cut. One can only suppose that for Lommel it is the superior version, but I can't imagine anyone else claiming the same: it consists of approximately 90% footage lifted straight from the original Boogeyman, 3% footage from the 1983 Boogeyman II (but integrated into the film as if someone had hit the fast forward button over all of it), and 7% newly recorded standard definition home video shots of Lommel sitting across from the camera, decked in a baseball cap and sunglasses, recounting the "plot" of the 1983 sequel with all the clarity of someone who has never seen it. It is quite possibly the most cynical film I've yet seen. It has all the appeal of a bad special feature on a dollar bin DVD. Lommel's monologue does allow us to part with a few memorable lines of dialogue, such as "I'm an art film director!" and "I'm innocent."

Feeling that this so-called Director's Cut was only giving me a partial picture of Boogeyman's sequeldom, I made the decision to track down Lommel and Bruce Starr's 1983 "original." (Though Starr is credited as sole director, most sources claim that Lommel-- who is also one of the film's lead actors-- co-directed but removed his name after production. Curious, then, that he'd want his on the later cut...). In this go-around the film is bogged down by only about 40% of its running time consiting of repurposed footage from the original, which seems scant in comparison. The new footage concerns the only survivor of the first Boogeyman film (Suzanna Love, oil heiress and Lommel's wife until 1987) stranded in Hollywood and being courted for the rights to her story by studio lowlifes. Apparently, the sequel rights to Boogeyman II were fought over by various studios before Lommel decided to produce the film independently, and his Boogeyman II appears to be simultaneously a screed against studio exploitation and almost exactly the sort of cheap film that a lazy studio would be glad to spit out. I say "almost" because there's no hiding the film's satire of Hollywood ethos, which wouldn't sit well with any backer: in the film, Lommel plays a director named Mickey working on a picture that used to be titled The Age of Diminishing Expectations (!) before the studio changed it to Kiss and Tell; Mickey laments that his producer insists upon the inclusion of a topless scene ("but that would be pure exploitation!") immediately before Lommel/Starr include it for us; Mickey is seen reading a copy of Hollywood Babylon, filmmaker Kenneth Anger's expose of early Hollywood's seedy underbelly, a time which Mickey refers to as "the good old days," drawing our attention to how much worse it must be in 1983; all this, plus every resident of Los Angeles is portrayed as a lecherous non-talent desperate to use status for purposes of cheesy seduction. But the satire seems double-edged-- Lommel is as much taking the wind out of himself as his vapid surroundings. One character declares that "Halloween is over" and that what audiences and studios want now is "suspense and melodrama." Boogeyman II's equivalent? Death by electric toothbrush, shaving cream, corkscrew, and horsehead fire poker.

The effort here is negligible, and Lommel is a competent enough filmmaker that we can't simply call the ineptness on display here an unintentional misstep. Mickey's wife at one point convinces him that he needs to make these sort of cash-grabs every once in awhile so that his next film can the sort of film he really wants to make-- I don't have trouble imagining that the same sort of reasoning justifies this film's existence, despite any nobler satirical intentions, and Boogeyman II is satisfied with giving us nothing more than the repackaged product a sequel demands. It's rubbing our faces in our desire for a sequel-- it's punishing us for lowering ourselves to a level of taste that it finds deplorable. And that takes a lot of gall. One scene features a woman telling Mickey that he could have made fifty profitable movies for the $18 million that MGM wasted on De Palma's Blow Out. I have trouble believing that Lommel thinks Blow Out was a waste, but, having seen these two films, I have no doubt that he could have stretched that budget out across a hundred grinning, mean-spirited Boogeyman sequels.

Basket Case 2 (1990) dir. Frank Henenlotter

Because I went on for two whole grafs on Boogeymen II, I'll attempt to keep these Basket Case write-ups brief: they're both awfully enjoyable films, consistent in madcap tone and their desire to one-up each previous entry. Basket Case (1982) is a classic of grungy NYC exploitation filmmaking in the last decade of 42nd street's relevancy. As humorous and gory as it is, it's almost somber in comparison to the garishness of its two back-to-back sequels. Produced at the beginning of the '90s, Basket Case 2 & 3 are closer in their sensibilities to the Gremlins films or Beetlejuice (in fact, both films' large and diverse stable of mutated folk looks as if it could have arrived on set direct from the afterlife's waiting room).

Maybe the best way to think about these sequels is as a pair of raunchy cartoons for juvenile adults-- I hope it doesn't hurt my credibility to say that I very much enjoyed them. Duane Bradley and his murderous, mutated, once-siamese brother Belial wake up in a hospital after the first film's massacre of the doctors who separated them. They manage to escape with the help of Granny Ruth and her daughter Susan, who manage a sort of secret assisted living center for a whole gaggle of mutants (or "Unique Individuals," as Granny Ruth likes to call them). Belial is quite pleased to be around his own kind (and even more pleased to find among the inhabitants a female version of himself), while Duane wishes to take this opportunity to get away from Belial and start life on his own with Susan, if she'll have him. Maybe it could have worked out, but a nosy journalist discovers the Bradley brothers' location and tries to capture some proof.

The film plays out as a bunch of elaborate ruses concocted by Duane, Belial, Granny Ruth, and the rest of the Unique Individuals leading the journalist, her photographer, and a private investigator to their messy deaths. All of this is punctuated by a revolting sex scene between Belial and his new mate (named, appropriately enough, Eve) and a midnight mutant picnic that ends in a pregnancy shocker. It's as simple, as insane, and as fun as I've just outlined. The practical make-up for the Unique Individuals is truly work to behold, although I found the updated Belial puppet to be somewhat deficient-- it's undeniably a better puppet, but not quite as creepy as the original and far below the standard set elsewhere in this film. My favorite mutant is a gargoyle who sits on top of the house and flashes the camera a smile every once in awhile. This is unadulterated delirium.

Basket Case 3: The Progeny (1991) dir. Frank Henenlotter

Picking up directly after Basket Case 2, the second sequel deals with the aftermath of Duane's emotional breakdown and the disgusting Belial/Eve love scene. (In fact, a reiteration of that squishy, bestial humping (I think I can call it that) is the first scene we're presented with here, because once was certainly not enough). Eve becomes pregnant with twelve (!) little Belials, and so Granny Ruth packs everyone (including a straight-jacketed Duane) into a school bus on a trip to Ruth's estranged husband's house for the delivery. (He's a doctor with experience treating Unique Individuals. Also he probably has a high tolerance for gross things).

This film plays up the comedy angle, producing ever more sublime gag sequences: Granny Ruth's schoolbus musical number, a sheriff and his deputies speaking entirely through alliteration ("A bassinet of baby Belials!"), and Belial's drug-induced fantasy (being surrounded by topless women whispering sweet nothings along the lines of "a trapezoid is one of the simplest but most intriguing polygons") are only a few of the yuks spilling from the frame. I suppose that a good deal of the comedy also springs from Kevin Van Hentenryck's tour de force performance as an unhinged Duane. He really brings his sweet earnestness to scenes like the one he has with a teenaged girl while straight-jacketed and stuck halfway out of a school bus window-- he's so uniquely likeable that I have a hard time imagining the role working if inhabited by anyone else. The same goes for his line readings: a still straight-jacketed Duane asking, with determination, "May I borrow a Swiss Army knife?" (Additionally, I adore the gradual evolution of Duane's hair, which finds the curly mop he had in the original film reduced to that of a '50s teen greaser here. Only adds to the schoolboy amiability, I feel).

The gore factor is at its height in this third entry, though-- at the same time-- it's also at its most cartoonish. At the end of the film, Belial duels the sheriff while wearing a human-sized mech suit, akin to the one Ripley uses to defeat the Queen in Aliens. After that, the Unique Individuals storm the set of a chat show and declare to the world that the freaks are taking over. And that's as it should be: you're either with these films, or you're against them.

Look out! Next comes: The Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), The Exorcist III: Legion (1990), & Hello Marry Lou: Prom Night II (1987).

Hotel (2004) dir. Jessica Hausner

Logline: Irene, a reserved young woman, takes a live-in job at a hotel in the German countryside and soon discovers that the girl who previously held her position disappeared suddenly without giving notice. While attempting to discover what happened to her predecessor, Irene encounters the quiet hostility of her co-workers, learns of the legend of a local witch who once lived in a cave, and finds herself drawn deeper into the woods...

Germany and Austria have had a spotty history with horror films. Though the German Expressionist movement gave birth to cinema's first great horrors (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), The Golem (1920), Nosferatu (1922)), the country's horror film history has been colored since then by its sparsity. The Krimi films of the 1960s dabbled in the horrific (bloody murder committed by zany, perverse masked killers), but the 1970s featured an almost total lack of original German or Austrian productions. (Germany did, however, co-finance other European horrors, including several Italian gialli and more than a few of Jess Franco's films.) In the 1980s through the early 1990s, an underground gore movement began in Germany, resulting in fare like The Burning Moon (1982), Nekromantik (1987), and Violent Shit (1987). Since then, all has been quiet.

The exception is Jessica Hausner's Hotel, an exquisite, subtly menacing film that--lacking a cinematic heritage--finds its roots in a different art form with a long tradition in Germanic cultural history: the fairytale. The fairytale influence is understated but always present. Here we have, at its simplest (which is not to call the film itself simple), a cautionary tale about an innocent seduced by evil temptations and gobbled up for her transgressions. We have the folksy rural setting, a witch living in the forest, and a lucky pendant that (the film strongly implies) provides physical protection. Some of the fairytale symbolism is overt: Irene, decked out in her red hotel uniform and sporting the missing employee's red-framed eyeglasses, looks as if she's on the way to Grandmother's house, while her new, local lover--smiling widely and lasciviously as they ride the elevator to her room for some late night rule-breaking--has some awfully big teeth. Irene is repeatedly drawn to the forest, despite its dangers, outside of the cold, sterilized modern protection of the hotel (dangerous in its own way, perhaps), her curiosity leading her to an inevitable end. We receive the sense that the forest and its purported witch have a long tradition of swallowing up fallen innocents (Irene discovers the name of the missing hotel employee, along with the names of several other young women and their lovers, carved into the bark of a tree outside the witch's cave), and that Irene could not put a stop to her metamorphosis into this fairytale archetype even if she desired to-- which, of course, we're not sure she does.

The film's pacing, visual style, and sound design are entirely its own. Long, brooding shots of poorly-lit vacant lobbies, corridors, and rooms are filled with the creaks and hums of a location with horrid vitality slumbering in its very foundations. A regularly-repeated audio motif of sourceless screams echoing from the trees punctuates the forest's timeless menace. The hotel and its surrounding forest have the ability to create endless walls of shadow at will, beckoning Irene to probe their depths and borders. All of the film's technical competencies converge to produce a terror without release, almost unbearable in its relentlessness. At scant over an hour, any complaints over the film's lack of action (eg. "NOTHING HAPPENS!") are absurd and issue from a shallow reading. Hotel is a piece of modernized folklore at its finest, as ambiguous as it is ambivalent, and sodden with a brand of creeping unease that contributes mightily to its veritable feast for the film-going senses. The fact that it has taken me this long to even hear of the film is inexcusable, but points toward the film's need for increased awareness from the horror community.

Despite my belief that most dedicated horror viewers and scholars would appreciate what's being offered here, Hotel also exists as a fairly unique film in genre cinema. One can't even make critical connections between it and other films without sounding convoluted: it's as if, halfway through filming Hotel Monterey, Chantal Akerman decided she'd rather make Polanski's The Tenant infused with the mythological ambiguity of The Blair Witch Project. I suppose someone could attempt to make the case for the film transcending its genre trappings, but doing so would seem to be missing the point. Hotel, along with other recent European horror films like Claire Denis' Trouble Every Day (2001) and Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani's Amer (2009), is working towards reconfiguring the genre, shirking high concepts, body counts, and typical frights in favor of reducing horror to its fundamental, archetypal essence. (That these films are being created primarily by female directors is all the more exciting. In the long history of horror cinema, women have rarely been at the helm, and the fact that these three women have been independently responsible for three of the strongest horror films of the new millennium serves to demonstrate what a colossal loss it has been by keeping horror a boy's club). If these films have the sort of influence that I hope they will, we could be looking at a new European horror renaissance-- one fueled not by the lengths to which the films will go to shock, as do those entries of the regrettable New French Extremity*, but by the desire to give expression to those fears that lurk down in the very depths of the human condition.

*Denis' Trouble Every Day has long been--I feel erroneously--linked to the New French Extremity. If you need me to explain the differences between what Denis' film is doing and what something like À l'intérieur (2007) or Martyrs (2008) is aiming for, well, how about this: Trouble Every Day brings the themes of monstrous sexuality hinted at in Harry Kümel's Daughters of Darkness (1971) to a boil, while À l'intérieur and Martyrs are content to throw gallons of blood onto the screen and entice their actors to never stop screaming.