I was first exposed to El Barón del Terror, aka The Brainiac, as a clipped scene in a trailer compilation tape I owned called Horrible Horror. In the included scene, an attractive young woman turns around to discover that the man she was just talking with has changed into a hideous, troll-headed beast with a long forked tongue and fingers reduced to two tube-like prongs--incongruously still wearing a suit and tie. As he walks toward her, someone behind the scenes with a bicycle pump is obviously inflating and deflating the monster's rubber head, giving it a low-tech pulsation not unlike the famous transformations in An American Werewolf in London and The Howling. The girl screams, the monster advances--and then, a scene from The Attack of the Giant Shrews.
Of course I was fascinated. What was this movie? What was this strange creature? Who devised this (for the time) pretty amazing makeup? And could a movie that included such a singular beastie really be that bad?
Well, I got the chance to find out as I spun my dvd copy of The Brainiac, which I now know was filmed in Mexico in 1962. And after viewing the film, like the Brainiac's victims, I am of two minds. But before we get to that, a little about the flick:
We open in Mexico City, 1661, in the court of the Inquisition (no surprise there--EVERY Spanish/Mexican/Hispanic horror film seems to start with the Inquisition!), where the mysterious Baron Vitelius d'Estera is being tried for a laundry list of crimes that would make Alec de Margnac proud, including sorcery, necromancy, and of course heresy. Strangely, no one knows where the baron comes from, or what his family history is--just that he's a bad mamma jamma and no mistake. As the Grand Inquisitor reads the chargers, the Baron only laughs; they describe his trial by torture, and he just smiles. Finally, a nobleman steps forward to defend the Baron, and is sentenced to 200 lashes for his trouble. In the end the Inquisition sentences the Baron to be burned at the stake. But as he's led away, the Baron defies them again by saying, "If my body is to be burned, it will not be in chains," and magically transfers his shackles to the feet of his guards, which causes him no end of mirth. You've got to take pleasure in the little things in life, no?
Flash forward to 1961, 300 years and one comet circuit later. We meet a couple of young astronomy students in love, who under their crotchety old professor are tracking the rare comet as it comes back into view. And find it they do--but strangely, it shoots off a sparkly disco-ball of destruction and then disappears. The young lovers go to investigate, but before they can find it, a passerby witnesses the impact of a mountain-shaped meteorite that lands just like a Monty Python 16-ton weight and then becomes the troll-headed monster from the Planet of the Brainsuckers. Growling like a lion, the beast attacks the hapless hombre, sucks his brains, and magically steals his suit. (He leaves the corpse its underwear, though--apparently, alien sorcerers like to go commando.) Transformed back into Baron D'Estera, the creature meets our young couple and recognizes the boy as the descendant of his defender, the girl as a descendant of one of his judges. Talk about a small world! After some pleasantries, they part, promising to meet again.
Another brain feast (this time from a middle-aged hooker in Mexico D.F.) and an off-screen jewel-heist later, the Baron is back in his palatial estate and planning a party for all his "old friends." Meanwhile a Joe Friday-style police detective and his comic relief sidekick are looking for the brain-sucking fiend who is leaving scantily-clad corpses all over the federal district. After the party the Baron makes his way through each of his judges and their children, freezing them with his Bela Lugosi stare and then transforming and sucking their brains. The best of these scenes involves a history professor and his daughter; the prof, frozen in terror, gives one of the most amazing bug-eye pops in the history of cinema as the Baron first seduces and then slurps the man's daughter. Great acting there.
Caramba!
Sounds great, eh? Well, it is, partly. There are definitely some great things about it. The monster design and early air-bladder fx technology are quite interesting, and the grim conversations about empty-headed corpses whose brains have been sucked out must have seemed pretty intense in 1962. Even moreso the scenes later when the baron, alone at home, breaks out a platter full of brains and goes at them like ice cream! The actor playing the Baron is quite impressive too, with his cold, evil looks and strange allure--he really could be a Mexican Bela. A late scene before the wild finish also seems ahead of its time, as the Baron terrorizes a young chica on her honeymoon, who keeps calling to her new husband, in the bath in the next room. The Baron lets her go to the bathroom and discover her husband, hung upside down from the shower, his head submerged in the running water below! Quite shocking for 62, as are a few of the corpse shots--one of them a charred skeleton. And it's fun to mark the craftsmanship of the numerous painted backdrops, on which no expense was spared, obviously. Pretty much all the outside shots were studio shots, and some painters did a lot of hard work for this, it's clear.
That's the good stuff. The bad is, I'm afraid, that it's all rather boring. I know, sounds impossible, but even at 77 minutes this movie seems to drag quite a bit. After the first kill, every monster scene is pretty much a repeat, and it gets old. The talking scenes in between are very padded, and stop the movie dead. The voice acting is occasionally hilarious (the Jose Friday cop is particularly good, with lines like, "I wish they could find a way to control the subjects a man studies. A maniac with a lot of knowledge is a threat."--yeah, keep 'em stupid, Jose!), but more often just dull. In fact, if it weren't for that slam-bang ending with the shower-kill and the flamethrowers, it might have been a complete dud.
But it DOES have that ending, so like I say, I'm of two minds. In the end I guess I have to give it a 1-thumb "poor" rating, but raised .5 thumbs thanks to that ending, for a final of 1.5--"average" Worth seeing once, but no world beater.
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
The Brainiac (1962): or, Brains is Brain Food
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman (1971): or, My Love Affair with Naschy Begins
On the night of the full moon, a police inspector and coroner are conversing in the morgue over the recently slain body of Waldemar Daninsky, alleged werewolf. With two silver bullets in his heart, courtesy events in very wild and wooly previous movie (The Fury of the Wolfman--review soon), Daninsky is about as dead as a muscled-up Polish nobleman can get. There is some dispute amongst the conversants, however. The inspector, a village man, believes that Daninsky might in fact be a werewolf--after all, it took silver bullets to bring him down, and he does have El Marco del Hombre-Lobo, a pentagonal scar on his beefy chest. The coroner, a man of science, is having none of that poppycock. To prove it's all just superstition, stuff and nonsense, he removes the silver bullets from Daninsky's heart, reasoning that if he is a werewolf, he should come back to life, which is obviously impossible. Right?
No--he's predictably, tragically wrong. A couple of neck-rips and a snarling exit later, Daninsky is on the loose again, ripping the bodice and throat out of a passing buxom beauty as the credits roll. WHY do they always take the silver out? WHY WHY WHY?
Suddenly we're whisked away to a club in Paris, where Elvira is explaining to her boyfriend and the audience why she's taking an extended trip into the European countryside: she's doing research on the infamous vampire, Countess Wandessa, whose grave is rumored to be around here, somewhere. There's some spectacular flashback footage of the satanic countess holding black masses, sacrificing virgins, and being beheaded, intercut with some even more spectacular French hipster-dancing. Soon enough Elvira is on her way, her incredibly hot friend Genevieve in tow.
They arrive at the rumored gravesite, which just happens to be near Castle Daninsky, where the newly resurrected Waldemar is brooding over his curse. Like Lawrence Talbot before him, all Waldemar wants is release from his curse, even if it's the sweet release of eternal slumber. However, his lycantrhopy makes him effectively immortal, as we've learned. Unable to face another night of slaughtering the innocent, the good-hearted Daninsky is seeking the legendary Silver Cross, a holy relic rumored to have the power to dispel the powers of darkness and break curses. And where is this holy dagger? Why, in the grave of the satanic Countess Wandessa, of course, nestled snugly between her rotting ribs. When Elvira and Genevieve arrive at the castle and learn that Waldemar is seeking the same thing they are (though he keeps his reasons from them), they decide to search together. What are the chances, huh?
Of course they find the grave and remove the dagger from the corpse's chest. In the process Genevieve is wounded, and some of her blood drips onto the dessicated lips of the Countess. Cursed Fate! Before long the Countess stalks again, and has added Genevieve to her ever-growing army of Undead Hotness. Waldemar goes on some more wolfed-out rampages, much to the detriment of the local villagers, and the Countess also takes a bite out of the population. Meanwhile Elvira is falling hard for Daninsky, which is lucky in a way, since he can only be truly killed by a woman who loves him. But first he must defeat the evil he has unwittingly unleashed, leading to a battle of monsters alluded to so subtly in the film's title.
If you aren't grinning with giddy excitement at the prospect of this battle, you may as well get off the train NOW.
This was my first real exposure to the famous Daninsky Saga written by and starring Spanish horror legend Paul Naschy (nee Jacinto Molina, his nom de plume for writing credits), and for me it was nothing less than a revelation. It's such a throwback to the Universal horrors that I absolutely worship, monster mashes like House of Dracula and Frankentstein Meets the Wolf Man (the latter of which Naschy freely admits was an inspiration and model for his film career) that might have been light on the scares but were always heavy on the fun. In an age when others were making films about mad killers and cannibal clans and rape-revenge stories, Naschy was turning his immense energy, creativity, and childlike joy to the classic monsters of yesteryear and giving them new life. And doing it on a shoestring, often making movies with less money than a concurrent Hollywood production would spend on catering.
The Vampire WomanWhich is not to say that it's all so-bad-it's-good stuff. Director Leon Klimovsky manages some great stuff here, particularly the dreamlike slow-motion effects on the vampire women, which really makes them seem otherworldly and weird in the old sense. And Naschy has charisma to burn, striking just the right balance between the tragic human side and the bestial, vicious werewolf. (If you can watch him bounding through the crypts and breaking chains and tearing down doors and ripping strips of human jerky off his prey without giggling, again, just get off the train NOW.) And the story, while admittedly silly, is never boring.
(There's some great, trademark Naschy stuff in his performance in WWvVW that you'll see flashes of in his later movies if you catch the fever: his obvious excitement and enthusiasm when loping through the woods or crypts in wolf form; the werewolf's copious drool; the aforementioned human jerky; and his patented LEAP ATTACK! fighting method. But my favorite moment in this film is right before the showdown with Wandessa, when Waldermar comes in carrying the deadly Silver Cross, having dispatched the Countess's servants. With a hairy swagger he goes to the door and buries the blade in the entrance, effectively preventing Wandessa's escape, as much as to say, "Only one of us is walkin' out of here, bitch, and that person will be covered with hair." AWESOME.)
It's hard for me to write about this movie, because I love it so much and I want everyone else in the world to love it too. But I know this is not the case. In my experience, you either "get" Naschy or you don't--and I don't mean by that to imply that there's some big intellectual secret that smart people watching the movies "get" and dumb people don't, but rather that there's just a certain attitude toward the enjoyment of films like this that you either have or don't. If you don't have it, you will never enjoy a Naschy film. You will get caught up on the admittedly bad acting, the ridiculous plot lines, the low-budget effects and the crazy music, and just shake your head disgusted by the whole thing. This is just not the type of movie for you.
C'mon, what else do you NEED?However, if you can enjoy the passion that is brought to bear on every Naschy flick, his obsession with the old school Universal monsters , the kitchen-sink nature of the scripts, the sometimes surprising prrversity (naked Eurobabes are a staple), and yes, the camp factor, then you simply cannot have a better time watching movies than with a Naschy production. You'll laugh at him, you'll cheer with him, you'll be pleasantly surprised by the periodic successful shots or interesting, unique plot developments. Even his re-use of the Waldemar Daninsky character and plot elements in different films* adds up over time to a sort of tapestry mythology that is unlike anything else in film. No, I'm serious. It is.
*In the more than a dozen movies Naschy made in the Daninsky saga, only a few have any continuity with each other. Certain elements--the Silver Cross, attacks by highwaymen, the doomed love affair--are used again and again, but with different settings and situations. As Naschy writes in his wonderful autobiography, Memoirs of a Wolfman, Daninsky is "free to move throughout time and space"; sometimes modern, sometimes medieval, and once even turning up in feudal Japan!
Anyway, like I say, if you're not on Naschy's wavelength, nothing I can say will make you enjoy The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Women. And I feel bad for you, I really do. Because if you are on that wavelength, there aren't enough thumbs to rate it. So let's just set this at a suitably excessive 3 dozen thumbs and call it a day. To find out whether you agree, just watch it. Now.
Note: a few years back Anchor Bay put out a spiffy release of this under its original English title, Werewolf Shadow. This is a good disc, but I prefer the WWvVW edit--better music, and the film benefits in some scenes, I think, by not having the greatest print. But hey, that's just me. See for yourself.
Friday, August 24, 2007
The Demon (1979): or, Halloween 3 on Earth-4
The Demon is one weird flick.
This is a movie that literally surprises you. I don't mean that things jump out at the screen and make you squeak, nor that you're sitting there at the end thinking "How surprising, that was actually pretty good" (though you might be doing that too). I mean that things happen in this movie that seemingly come out of nowhere and completely waylay you. Plot developments out of nowhere. Shocking entrances and exits of characters, completely against the cliches you've been conditioned to expect. And an ending, a last 20 minutes that had me--grizzled horror vet that I am--saying to myself "WOW. Just WOW."
Thank you once again, 50 Chilling Classics and Mill Creek Entertainment! I should really send you guys some more money. It feels like I'm stealing.
We start out with an over-sexed 14-year-old girl (!) talking with her mother about...something. Before you can get too far into the conversation, however, the mother is attacked by a Hulking Shape out of the darkness, her hands bound and a plastic bag tied around her neck. As she's left to suffocate (very disturbing visual here with the woman gasping, eyes wide with terror, breath pulling the plastic into her gaping mouth), the Hulking Shape moves upstairs and grabs and bags the girl as well. The husband arrives home to find his wife almost expired and pulls the bag off her in a nick of time, but it's too late for their daughter--she's gone, kidnapped by the Hulking Shape, spirited off into the pitch black night.
Scary, shocking, disturbing--a VERY promising start!
Searchers comb the woods near the house, looking for the girl. Later that night, a good Samaritan picks up a hitchhiker--a huge, muscular man whose face we never see, and who of course quickly proves himself to be the Hulking Shape. He dispatches the driver, showing immense strength by tossing the body over a fence like a rag doll, then drives away. Is he human? Something else? All options are open.
Then we're back at the house, where Mom and Dad, frustrated with the police force's efforts, have called in ex-military man and psychic bloodhound Cameron Mitchell. It must be said that the actors in the parental roles are so terrible they actually make Mitchell look good. Cam expositions overtime about his "gifts," then goes upstairs and does some very strange sniffing of the girl's bedclothes to get the "vibes, as the kids would call them." When the shocked parents find him sweating with his face buried in their daughter's ripped-up pillow, he says "This must look like witchcraft." No, Cam, it looks like pervy-ness! But he's got the scent, and we're ready to follow him as he tries to find the Hulking Shape and rescue the girl, right?
WRONG. In a sharp right turn we're introduced to a perky blonde American (Jennifer Holmes) and her not-quite-as-perky English cousin, who are teachers at a day care. (Did I mention we're in England? We are, even though the film posits an unrealistically high Yank-to-Limey ratio.) The perky blonde notices a Hulking Shape outside the daycare, and he seems to be watching her. But when she looks again, he's gone. She goes shopping for a dress in a sequence that goes a LONG WAY out of the way to show some female skin--not that I don't appreciate the extra effort, mind you--and again sees the Hulking Shape on the periphery, only to have him disappear. This is all starting to feel familiar... Meanwhile, Cam is getting weird POV flashes from the killer, watching him workout his huge muscles, intercut with scenes of a surging sea. What does it mean?
Somebody goes to Boobs Disco (yes, BOOBS DISCO), but nothing happens except some boogeying. The Hulking Shape stalks a woman down an alley and attacks, when suddenly the near-slashing turns into a motorbike showdown! Two bikes speed down the alley out-of-nowhere, and the Hulking Shape clotheslines them both, leading to a fiery bike asplosion! Action, drama, intrigue! Back at the missing girl's home, Cam shows some composite sketches of the killer, which look great except they have NO FACE. Cam intones ominously, "He's less...than a man...and MORE than a man. Much more." Again, something familiar, something that makes me think of the blackest eyes, the devil's eyes...
Then things slow waaaaaay down. Perky Blonde is stalked some more. Not-as-perky Cousin meets and dates American Playboy with a Southwest-themed penthouse. The girls talk almost entirely in innuendo. Sexy meditation happens for no reason. Girl's dad drives around...and around...thinking of revenge. More street fighting with Hulking Shape, to no purpose. Cheery English Neighbor tells Perky Blonde he'll be over with his .38 special if she needs him. Don't they have gun control in England? Dad drives around some more..and some more...and FINALLY finds the killer, whereafter we're put out of his acting misery in a very familiar way. A creepy discovery is made by some English kids. Cam tells widowed Mom that "The time of the Demon...our demon...is drawing close." Then something extraordinary happens. What's that I said about gun control?
The Demon had me, then lost me, then got me again BUT GOOD. Ten minutes of strong opening gives way to 50 more of excruciating padding, bad acting, and a meandering, frankly baffling plot line. But if you can just hang on though that dry season, the last 20 minutes brings the rain in a BIG way. To say more would be to cheat you. Avoid further summaries. Just see it.
Now, that Halloween thing. In many ways The Demon is a Halloween-clone. But unlike most of the other H-clones I've seen, Demon gets it RIGHT. The implacable, unstoppable, possibly-supernatural killer--he's the Boogeyman, The Shape before The Shape had a name. His strength, his reasonless stalking, his complete, inscrutable evil...it's creepy shit. And the final confrontation, while almost a copy of the same sequence in the original Halloween, gets the tone so right and the suspense so tense, it's hard to count its copying as a fault. Plus, it does some things different--some very good things. I don't want to rob you of the surprise, but trust me on this. If your tastes in movies are like mine, you will be amazed and appreciative.
I give The Demon 2.75 thumbs. It would be 3 or 3+ if not for the painful padding, but still it's a strange little movie that should be seen. Like Halloween made in a parallel universe, and I mean that in the best possible way. If you're one of those folks who just can't get into Halloween 3: Season of the Witch because there's no Michael Myers in it, let The Demon be your Halloween 3. It almost deserves that title. Watch it NOW.
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Crypt of Horror (1964): or, the Devil is My Magic 8-Ball
Part 2 of the Chris Lee/Dollar Tree Double Feature; having already partaken of the fog-shrouded witch-enriched goodness of Horror Hotel, I decided to turn over this pancake of evil and check out the 1964 Italo-English production La Cripta e l'incubo, or more prosaically, Crypt of Horror.
Can you EVER go wrong starting a movie with a buxom woman wearing a nightie or less running through a forest from some unseen horror? If you can, I've never seen it, and Crypt of Horror is no exception. In very darkly-tinted black & white we see a young woman in a flowing white nightgown exit a horse-drawn carriage and run into a foreboding forest, from what we don't know. She leans against black skeletal trees, gasping, only to discover in front of her a different, darker coach, drawn by black horses and itself as black as the tomb...or crypt, even. It's actually a pretty creepy, gothic scene, as she runs again only to discover her way blocked by the dark carriage, this time pausing long enough to see the door open with a chilling creak, revealing an inky abyss inside that beckons her. She falls to the ground with a scream, and we see her lying lifeless, eyes wide, whether killed or dead of fright we can't tell.
Meanwhile at Castle Karstein, miles away, Laura Karstein awakens from a nightmare, screaming, sure that her cousin (who is coming to visit her) is dead. The spinstery governess Rowena tries to calm her, but apparently the young countess has had these visions before, and they've often come true. Rowena promises cryptically that they'll "find out the truth."
Meanwhile, the next day...Count Karstein (a dashing young Lee who hardly looks old enough to be Laura's pop) welcomes a young historian/document specialist to his castle. The young man has been hired to go through the library and other records of the castle, looking very specifically for a physical description of a witch who was condemned and crucified centuries earlier. The story goes that on the pyre before she died, the witch cursed the house of Karstein (naturally--don't they ever think of slapping a gag on these chicks? You'd think they would learn...), saying she would return in the form of a Karstein descendant, and through her the house of Karstein would be destroyed and Count Karstein killed. Lee, as the current Count Karstein, doesn't want this to happen, and fears Laura might be the prophesied one--so he wants to know what the old witch looked like, and see if there's a resemblance...you know, just to be sure.
It isn't long before the young man finds a strange piece of paper with a 5 pointed star cut out of it, and lots of info on the witchy legend (occasioning the requisite flashback, though we don't get to see the witch's face, we do hear her curse). Later that night, Rowena and Laura go to a basement room with the missing star in hand, and while Laura strips and lies down on the floor (!), Rowena summons Satan and the spirit of the dead witch to tell them whether or not the cousin is dead (!!). Apparently neither Laura nor Rowena knows of the storied curse--though Rowena does know enough to summon the witch by name (?). It's a crazy ceremony, and reveals little except the back of Laura's shoulders and the lengths to which Rowena is willing to go to answer a Magic-8-ball level question.
The document specialist begins to make googly-eyes at Laura, while the Count is having it off with the head maid, who desperately wants to be a Karstein. (I should note that in several scenes Lee wears the most fantastic smoking jacket I've ever seen--I want a replica for Xmas.) Not long after that, a near-carriage wreck in front of the castle results in a new visitor to the castle, a fetching young lass named Luba (who lives on the second floor). Luba's aunt, in a hurry to get on, unceremoniously dumps Luba on the Karsteins, without so much as a by-your-leave, and hey-presto, new blood in the castle. Luba and Laura quickly become the best of friends, and soon more than friends--though there's nothing explicit, there are several scenes absolutely fraught with erotic tension where the girls are holding hands, hugging, nearly-but-not-quite kissing--which I admit put a little spring in the cigarette holder, IYKWIMAITYD. Meanwhile the young man, jilted, keeps looking for a rumored portrait of the witch that may exist in the castle, Rowena keeps asking Satan to help her find the killer so Laura can clear her name, Luba keeps getting hotter for Laura, and it all ends in bloodshed and a reveal that's only a little nonsensical before the whole mystery is solved.
While not as good as Castle of Blood (but what is, eh?), Crypt of Horror does share some of that movie's strengths--the setting/location is absolutely fantastic, and almost becomes a character in the film. Apart from Castle Karstein itself, which is a gorgeous gothic ruin of a manor, there is also an actual ruined village that figures prominently: abandoned, falling down, but with a lone bell tower in which the bell still tolls when the wind blows. The ringing of that bell sets up several atmospheric and creepy scenes, building up of course to a scene in which it tolls and the girls realize that there is no wind...*shudder* The b&w cinematography is also good, though the print damage is severe in places. A particularly nice example is when, after Rowena dies (of fright, while summoning the witch to pester her for a recipe or something) a thunderstorm interrupts her funeral, blowing out the candles and giving a nice lightning strobe with some pretty freakin' creepy results. And the lesbonic elements of the plot are carried out very nicely, if in a necessarily obscure manner. There's even a little pillowcase gore, done again in an understated but creepy way. The flick's got atmosphere to spare, and isn't boring.
There is some silliness though, too--Rowena's Satanism for daily use is pretty funny, and never really explained or even winked at by the virginal Laura, even as she takes part in the rituals. The fact that Rowena seeks to use the power of Satan for good is also kind of humorous. The dubbing is pretty bad in most cases, except for Lee's, who did his own voice in the looping, naturally. There's an out-of-nowhere "gotcha" in the crypt at the climax that is explained rather unsatisfactorially, and the twist, while unexpected, doesn't really make sense--though they do their best to set it up with a tell-tale hankerchief. You are still left scratching your head.
All in all, I give CoH a soft 1.75 thumbs, trending higher if you love this kind of thing and can forgive its silliness. It's not a bad flick, just a little above average, but worth seeing once if you've got nothing better on the burner. One or two genuinely creepy scenes, and some nice eroticism, but not much more than that.
Highlights not previously mentioned--hunchback peddler in the Crazy Ralph role, with his catchy catch-phrase "There are some houses where Death is a tenant..."; Rowena stalking the halls of the castle with a corpse-hand candelabra, begging Satan to show her who the real killer is (why didn't OJ think of this?) ; Lee smoking the longest cigarette in cinematic history up to that point; Laura's genuinely frightening nightmare sequence featuring a skull-faced cousin, that nonetheless doesn't stop her from inviting Luba into her bed; and the Dept. of Redundancy Dept. line: "This crypt shall be your tomb!"
You know what? Actually I'm amending my rating to a soft 2 Thumbs, just for that line.
"THIS CRYPT SHALL BE YOUR TOMB!"
That kills me.
Horror Hotel (1960): or, I know a Lot about Witchcraft, but I'm Foggy on the Details
Here at Mmmmmovies, we love the public domain. Any time we can pick up a handful of creaky old classics we've never heard of for less than a lunch off the Super Value Menu, the Duke and I are a couple of happy aristocrats. Because let's face it--if you pay $15+ for a special edition dvd of some obscuro horror flick and it turns out not to live up to your expectations, you feel not only cheated, but more than a little like a jackass for buying it. On the other hand, if you buy a 10 movie set for $5, or better yet, 50 Chilling Classics for $20 (deal of the century, folks! Get it NOW!) and they're not that great, you're out 40, 50 cents per movie, tops. But if three or four of them turn out to be keepers, well, you feel like some kind of movie shopping god! And believe me--though you do have to sit through a lot of crap in these compilations, there are plenty of great flicks hiding on them too. A truly amazing ratio, really.
So anyway, before I discovered the 50 Chilling Classics, the Duke and I had already raided the Halloween displays at Dollar Tree for their entire line of double feature horror discs. 50¢ a movie--how can you go wrong? Answer: you can't. Sure, I sat through Blood Thirst, but I also discovered the amazing Castle of Blood and got my first exposure to Naschy with Vengeance of the Zombies and Dr. Jekyll vs. the Werewolf. That's value that can't be measured, folks! Anyway, one of these Dollar Tree discs was a Christopher Lee double feature, and we love Chris, yes we do. So the top half of the Lee double feature was the 1960 B&W chiller, Horror Hotel. Was it worth the half-dollar? Read on.
Short answer: yes. Despite not achieving the lofty heights of the aforementioned wonders, Horror Hotel, aka City of the Dead, was a pretty cool, very atmospheric tale of witchcraft and mystery, with plenty to recommend it to the b-movie connoiseur and fans of the cinematically Satanic. Well worth the dollar I spent for the disc all on its own, it's a movie that, even though I won't be hunting down a better version for my permanent collection (a la Castle of Blood), I'm still glad I bought, because I wouldn't have seen it otherwise and for a fan of old horror flicks, it's definitely worth seeing.
The movie starts out with almost exactly the witch-burning scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, except in Puritan New England (the township of Whitewood) rather than medieval England, and done seriously instead of for camp. Elizabeth Selwyn is being condemned for consorting with the devil, and her accomplice in the crowd, Jethrow Keane, can do nothing to help her without facing the Big Barbecue himself. It's actually a very well-filmed scene, with the condemned woman in heart-rending terror (you don't know yet whether she's guilty or not) as the townspeople taunt her with animalistic glee, their angry faces looming gargoyle-like out of the thick fog that blankets the streets of Whitewood (more on this later). The b&w cinematography is great, and when Elizabeth is on the stake and Jethrow says a prayer to Lord Luc1fer to aid her, there's a nice creepy moment before the expected "I curse you and all your descendants!" trope. Nothing groundbreaking, even in 1960, but still effective and tone-setting. I was very much drawn in.
Flash forward to the present day (i.e., 1960) where a very young and handsome Christopher Lee is relating the tale of Elizabeth Selwyn's immolation to a group of students in his college office. He's giving an informal lecture series on the history of witchcraft in New England, and one of the students, Nan Barlow (a wolf-whistle-worthy blonde in the classic Hitchcock mode), is obviously more into the subject than the others. I have to say right off the bat that Lee is just arrestingly intense in this role, doing an understated American accent pretty much perfectly. It's clear from the first moment that his sympathies lie with Selwyn and his antipathies toward the religious fools who burned her, but that's okay, this is a horror movie, not a whodunit. Nan's boyfriend, Tom, makes light of the story, and is treated to a patented Lee glare that I'm surprised didn't singe his eyebrows off. Nan, however, stays after class to discuss her term paper with Professor Lee, who helpfully tells her of a little town off the beaten path where she can probably find some great historical documents--yes, Whitewood. He recommends the Raven's Inn, where if she mentions his name to the proprietress, Ms. Newless, she'll be sure to get good treatment.
After this Nan's brother Richard (always referred to as "Dick"), a professor of science at the same college, comes in and pretty much belittles Lee with his skepticism. Bad idea, of course, but they never learn, the fools. Anyway, Nan is a headstrong, independent young woman, and over her brother and Tom's objections she decides to go to Whitewood to do her research.
The trip to Whitewood is a real tour-de-force, as Nan, in her motor-car listening to the jazz on her wireless, is enveloped by the thickest, soupiest fog I have ever seen on screen. Really, it's dangerous to be out driving in, so she's lucky it's only poor-man's process. We get a wonderful gas-station attendant who gives her directions, and then an even more wonderful shot of her arriving at the crossroads to find a mysterious stranger waiting there, needing a ride to Whitewood. why, he looks just like Jethrow Keane! And his archaic manner of speaking is most strange...
Well, I think I'll stop with the blow-by-blow synopsis there and leave the rest to your discovery. Suffice to say they don't take kindly to strangers in Whitewood, and Professor Lee had his own reasons for sending his nubile young student there. More highlights include a great "Crazy Ralph" character in Whitewood's blind old priest, with a wonderful "This town is evil!" monologue before disappearing into the shadows of the church; a very surprising choice of underwear by our plucky young heroine; a Hitchcockian shift in focus that I admit caught me by surprise; and one of the wilder climactic battles I can remember seeing in a movie of this type and vintage, wherein a mortally wounded character (complete with knife sticking out of his back) uses a 6-foot cross as a sort of holy bazooka on the coven of witches, causing their robes to burst into flame! Crazy stuff, and actually pretty exciting. And the last shot before the credits recalls Hitchcock once again, so that even though this movie came out the same year as Psycho (only 2 months later) it seems incredible to think that it wasn't referencing that film specifically (though without the cross dressing angle...you'll see what I mean).
Apart from Lee and Selwyn and the surprisingly strong and independent Nan, the acting here is really hit and miss. Dick is obviously a stage actor with little screen know-how, as he over-plays every emotion and always booms from the diaphragm. Both he and Tom seem to be having trouble holding onto their American accents, as well. That's okay, though, b/c the real stars of the movie are the town of Whitewood itself and that incredible fog. I am not exaggerating in the least when I tell you that Horror Hotel is far and away THE FOGGIEST MOVIE I'VE EVER SEEN. Period. It's foggier than The Wolf Man, which was damn foggy. It's foggier than any of the Universal classics. Hell, it's foggier than THE FOG. And what a fog it is! The dry-ice budget for this film must have been completely off the charts. But it works--Whitewood is dreamy, surreal, a place out of time, and the journey there is a journey to the dark and sinister past. Again the cinematography is great, very atmospheric and creepy at times. And Lee, while not the "star" of the picture, really steals the show.
So 2 thumbs easily for Horror Hotel. Not anything earth-shattering, but very well made and entertaining, and worth seeing at least once. Bonus points for a scene with Christopher Lee in a Doctor Strange cape sacrificing a bird to Satan, then having to clean it up quickly before his students come in. Check it out.
Monday, August 20, 2007
Scream Bloody Murder (1973), Or You Got A Hook In My Throat, Baby!
Scream Bloody Murder tells us the story of the hapless Matthew, whom we first see out in the fields with his pa, who is trying to get a tractor running. Matthew, being the inquisitive sort, and harboring an obvious bias against authority figures, hops on the idling tractor and proceeds to run over his father, who screams at the slow plodding tractor, at the blinding speed of 2mph. Realizing his crime, young Matthew makes a break for it by jumping off the still-moving tractor only to somehow land and fall, allowing his hand to be crushed by said machinery. Matthew is quickly thrust into the care of some helpful nuns, who promise to raise Matthew in the grace of the Lord.
Fast forward to the next scene and Matthew is all grown, looks to be about 17 or so I’d say, and is sporting a nice, clasp-like hook that so many amputees affect. Matthew has received correspondence from his mother in which she informs him of her helpful man-friend, without whom she just wouldn’t have been able to make it all these years. This drives Matthew into a blinding rage and brings forth the single longest paper crumple shot in the history of cinema. If the overdrawn, methodical way Matt crumples his mother’s letter is any indication of how he’ll be as a homicidal maniac, we are in for a treat my friends!
After the 5 minute paper crumple we are off with Matthew as he returns home, sack of clothes in hand, all eager to see his mother, who unfortunately isn’t home upon his return. Pretty soon a car drives up and out hops his mother… with her new groom! Seems she went off and got herself married, much to Matt’s chagrin. He lets each of them know his displeasure with a tantrum that would make an infant proud. Next we have Matt’s mother and her new beau taking a nighttime stroll through the woods where we get a mild crotch-rub but not much else (thankfully!). Begging off so as to “check on the cows”, the new man leaves his bride only to be stalked by Matthew.
Whimpering like a 5 year old girl, Matt’s step dad repeatedly entreats his pursuer to show themselves, which Matthew finally does… by swinging an axe into his step father’s chest! After hacking him up good, Matthew is quietly contemplating what to do with the body when his mother walks up. Despite her horror he repeatedly assures her that this is for the best before finally slaying his own mother as well, the murder being done by forcibly throwing her down so as to crush her head on a rock.
This begins Matthew’s life on the run, mainly on the run from the ghostly visages of his mother and step father, presented to the viewer as blurry, haunting images in which his mother and others repeatedly taunt him. During his travels he slays a newlywed couple by first smashing the groom’s head in with a large rock and then drowning the bride, and he also befriends a prostitute. This friendship proves pivotal in Matthew’s life as he quickly becomes obsessed with her, but not in a sexual way. In fact, he murders the next person to sleep with her by slicing their face and throat up with an artist’s spade-like instrument. Did I mention the whore paints? Yeah. Ok.
Anyhoo, as anyone knows, to impress a wh0re you need a fancy mansion and vintage car, so Matthew takes off and finds a suitable house. Feigning the need to use the phone, he uses a cleaver on the black housekeeper after gaining entry and then proceeds upstairs, where he finds the old lady of the mansion. The next scene has to be seen to be believed: The old lady rushes at him and attacks poor Matthew while dual-wielding canes! Seriously, this old lady looks like a martial arts master whipping these two canes around, but alas she gets snuffed with the ol’ pillow-over-the-face trick. Great stuff! The old lady's dog is sitting nearby, quietly watching all of this. Matt turns to it and says “Come on, boy. You’re next” and picks the dog up, takes it downstairs to the kitchen, lays it on the table, and uses the cleaver to chop its head off! Thankfully we are spared the sight of this.
Driving his newly acquired vintage auto, Matt picks up his woman and brings her back. Unfortunately for her, Matthew’s plan involves tying her up and forcing her to live with him, to paint for him and generally be his companion. She finally gets a bold idea and asks him to untie her so she can disrobe and bathe, all the while Matthew is trying not to look. Unfortunately for the viewer, we get zero nudity here, and it is a shame because the hooker is a redhead with a nice rack. Matthew also tries to impress his new woman by getting her stuff, which brings about the most laughable scene in the movie as we get one quick cut after another of Matthew ripping off various stores and performing purse snatchings.
Anyhoo, this allows the redhead to attempt escape after being untied for her bath. She first heads to the kitchen where she attempts dialing a rotary phone… with her tongue! This failed attempt brings about the single most mind-blowing scene yet after Matt catches her: The whore hits Matt in the back of the head, knocking him loopy, as they are sitting on a bed in an upstairs bedroom. She then rushes out of the bedroom, down a small hallway, down a long flight of stairs, across a spacious foyer and then opens the front door…. Where Matthew is standing easy as you please waiting for her on the other side, whereupon he rips her throat out with his hook hand. WTF?! Wasn’t he JUST upstairs? Yes, he was. The only explanation I can come up with is that he’s capable of teleportation.
Distraught over his final act, Matthew runs away, steals a car, and makes his way to a church. Haunted by ghastly visions, he seeks refuge, only to be confronted by the most shrill organ music known to man, as well as the ghosts that were haunting him. There’s a long shot of the ghosts, clad all in black, surrounding Matthew, in perfect focus this time, and it’s simply awesome; really, the only part in the whole movie that made me shiver a bit. Matthew then commits ritualistic seppuku by ripping himself from groin to sternum, diagonally, with his own hook hand.
In the end I give SCB 1.5 thumbs up. It wasn’t the best movie by any means, but honestly I was never bored. Once the first murder happens, the others come in quick succession. I look forward to you giving it a go.
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Haunts (1977): or, Swede Child of Mine
Brian over at Horror-Movie-a-Day (if you haven't visited his blog, get clickin'!) wrote something I thought was very perceptive about why some movies, even when you can't in any way define them as "good," still get inside your brain and under your skin with their weirdness. For me he struck perceptive gold when he wrote of the 1973 oddity Scream Bloody Murder (the Duke's review of which to follow soon, I hope!):
"...the true highlight of the film is the strangely angry tone in much of the dialogue. Lines ...are delivered with such intense hatred, one has to wonder what the hell the writer’s problem is."When you've watched as many obscure movies as I have, you start to pick up on these little strangenesses of tone, the things that pervade a movie and make you wonder, as Brian said, just what the hell the writer or director's problem is. Often the psychological mysteries presented by these observations add another level to the film you're watching, and elevate what some would see as a sub-par genre exploitationer as something else entirely--a psychological portrait of a possibly fringe personality, an expression of the filmmakers' unique philosophical psychoses. Which of course makes it all the more interesting to a b-movie nut like me.
So while 1977's Haunts might not be quite the desperate, despairing cry for understanding that something like SBM or Abel Ferrara's The Driller Killer so plainly are, it's still got that little something going on under the surface that is just a bit, well, off--
Luckily, it also happens to be a pretty good movie.
We start off with a family sitting around the table, having a good old-fashioned family dinner. It's typical East cost-to-Midwest Americana circa 1977--the sideburned, frizz-haired dad with tinted spectacles and a plaid shirt; the similarly bespectacled and stringy-haired mother; the kids in softball shirts with 3/4-length sleeves; the youngest kid with his name, EDDIE, printed across his chest in 3-inch, iron-on, doubtless velour-textured letters. Enjoy this scene, because it's the last time we'll see a group comprised of happy, well-adjusted people in THIS movie.
Meanwhile, outside, a ski-masked killer stalks. The straight-haired dowdy daughter is sent to the outbuilding to get something or other, and from the killer's POV we watch her go. (Am I wrong to think this is a conscious emulation of Tourneur's famous girl-goes-to-the-store sequence from The Leopard Man? Probably.) The masked one attacks, but luckily is driven away before the girl can come to too much harm. The credits finish up. Family harmony established and then disrupted: hey ho, we're ready to go!
Next we meet Aldo Ray as the sheriff trying to deal with the sudden rash of sex killings in his small town, assisted by the town doctor, a man with some of the most amazing eyebrows I've seen this side of Ox Baker. Stress of the job has apparently driven Aldo to alcoholism, or maybe he's was that way before. A few weird exchanges with Dr. Eyebrows and I was starting to feel that weird, something's-not-right-here tingle.
In the next scene, FINALLY, we meet our protagonist Ingrid, played by May Britt. Ingrid is a tall blonde Swede in early middle-age but bears the signs of having been a real Nordic beauty in her youth, and in fact still looks great (or did, in 1977). She lives alone on her parents' farm--they died when she was young, and she inherited the place after she came of age. Her first scene is a doozy, as milking a goat apparently makes her feel both nostalgic and sexy--we get strange imagistic flashbacks mixed in with some of the most suggestive creamery ever committed to film. Again, something's off here, but we won't know quite what for a while.
We follow Ingrid around town, shopping, hearing rumors of the attempted rape/murder in the credit sequence, and meeting some of the eccentric people who populate the town. First there's Ingrid's Uncle Carl (a restrained performance by Cameron Mitchell), who doesn't like fraternizing with the townsfolk and is strangely secretive. There's also the creepy butcher/Lothario who apparently stole a young Harrison Ford's DNA, the chunky-but-vivacious town tramp, and the couldn't-possibly-look-MORE-suspicious out-of-towner who just joined the church choir where Ingrid is the star singer. In fact the town is full of piggish men to suspect of the killings, so the who-dunnit lover in me perked up his ears and started taking notes, eager to figure it all out.
We don't have to wait long for action, as on the way home from choir practice Ingrid is attacked and nearly raped by the ski-masked stalker. When she fights back and escapes back to her farm house, she tearfully tells Uncle Karl what happened. His response? "It must be your imagination--probably a rabbit or a deer." Again, her clothes are torn, she's visibly upset, and her only blood relative tells her it must have been a bunny that startled her. Something is off here, and it serves to disorient and disquiet the viewer.
And things just get weirder from there. We learn almost as an aside in a police interview that Ingrid is a total religious nut; again, something's weird about that. Later, when she's raped by the butcher/Lothario guy, once again no one believes her. Why? Even the priest, her comforter, responds to her confession about being attacked by threatening her with hell. And what do these weird, disturbing flashbacks she keeps having mean? All becomes more or less clear by the end, but along the way I never felt truly comfortable or aware. Which actually is the film's big strength.
So that's a plot summary, and it's not bad--but there's a lot more to this movie bubbling just under the surface. Completely apart from the main plot, there are some really weird things going on in this town. For instance, when Ingrid calls the sheriff to report her first attack, we cut to the sheriff's house where his wife has answered the phone. She nods and carries the phone into the bathroom, where Aldo Ray is on his knees by the toilet PUKING DRUNK! To coin a phrase, WTF? Though he takes a few nips through the rest of the film, nothing is ever made of his obviously rampant alcoholism. So why's it included? Was the writer's dad/director's mom a drunk, and he had to get it out there? Was there some other reason for it I missed? That's one of those mysteries I was talking about.
Furthermore, relationships between the sexes in this movie are uniformly, inexplicably, and completely and totally NOT GOOD. The butcher/Lothario who rapes Ingrid and may or may not be the killer also has a jailbait girlfriend he smacks around, calls a bitch, and dumps on the side of the road. When creepy choir guy tries to make time with the town tramp in the local watering hole, it ends in a venom-filled screaming match. And when Ingrid meets up with the Lothario's girlfriend later, she also gets an earful from the little girl, a hate-filled warning to stay away from her man. The sexual antipathy in this goes beyond the plot reasons for it revealed in the startling final scenes; there's some other thing going on here.
Oh, btw, the butcher/rapist's girlfriend? She's the sheriff's daughter. In another not-central-plot-related scene, Aldo finds out (from the priest!) that his daughter is pregnant with butcher-boy's seed, and he storms to the boy's apartment, busts in, and handcuffs him to the bed. Then he turns to his daughter, screams "You dirty little BITCH!" and smacks her! Again, WTF? Where does this come from? Why is it necessary?
Haunts is a movie that I find...well, haunting. The film itself is very artfully done--a great creepy soundtrack, some nice visuals and cinematography (particularly in the flashbacks and a few red/white color motifs), and a genuinely twisted twist ending (you'll THINK you know what the twist is...). But as much as I enjoy it on those levels--and I do--it's that seedy underbelly of the film that keeps me thinking about it.
Anyway, I give it 2.5 thumbs, because I really think it should be seen by more people. And since you can get it on the mad movie deal of the year, the 50 Chilling Classics pack which also includes Scream Bloody Murder, Driller Killer, and many of the other movies I've reviewed or will be reviewing here (check the post labels!), there's really no excuse. Buy it now, thank me later.
And if you figure out what the Haunts peoples' deal is...let me know.
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