Devil's Nightmare

Seven tourists, each coincidentally representing one of the seven deadly sins (uh, sorta), fall victim to a succubus when they stay overnight at a creepy, old castle.

Another victim to my terrible memory, I recall Devil's Nightmare not really being any good, but at least providing some sleazy fun. At the very least, there's some gratuitous lesbian action and some silly, gimmicky murders.

What's odd is the seven deadly sins angle. All descriptions of the movie really play this element up, and its obvious who a few of the tourists are supposed to be, but the other folks I watched this with and I could not figure out most of them. Even the deaths, which are supposed to ironically mirror the victim's particular sin, become confusing and seemingly unrelated after a while.

Rating: C

Autopsy

Not going to lie, my memory has already gotten pretty fuzzy on this one. There's a weird rash of suicides that may or may not be caused by sunspots. However, a medical students theorizes that some of the deaths may in fact be murders disguised to look like suicides.

Weird enough not to totally suck, but not weird or interesting enough to really be any good, Autopsy is probably not the best place to start for someone looking for a good giallo. Even at the time I don't think I fully followed the damn mystery, and I'm not sure the premise even makes any sense. I mean, sunspots don't cause suicides, right? That's not a thing. And then some serial killer is also killing people under the guise of the sunspots? Wha...?

Rating: C

The Black Cat (a.k.a. Demons 6: De Profundis)

In the most faithful adaptation of The Black Cat ever made, some filmmakers who are making a film version of The Black Cat in the opening scene (but then it's never mentioned again), decide that they want to make a horror movie based on the same made-up witch mythology as Dario Argento's Suspiria and Inferno. The director asks his actress wife to play the lead role of the evil witch Levana, but it turns out that Levana really exists and doesn't cotton to having someone play her in a shitty Italian horror movie.

Luigi Cozzi's The Black Cat was on my radar because a description I read online made it sound like it was an unofficial attempt to make a final installment in Dario Argento's (then unfinished) "Three Mothers" trilogy. So you can imagine my surprise when the full, on-screen title was Edgar Allan Poe's The Black Cat. Ugh. I love Poe to death, but I swear that "The Black Cat" has been adapted to film more than any other story in the history of literature. (Here are just two versions that I've written about on this blog). I'm getting kind of sick of it. Turns out though, this one really has next to nothing to do with Poe's story or Argento's films. It's just kind of a dull supernatural horror movie with some not-as-clever-as-it-thinks-it-is meta elements, some lame showbiz satire, and a fair amount of accidental comedy. There are enough laughs in this one (like when a character dies and comes back as a supernatural force, exclaiming "That's right, Sarah, I can control time now!") that I don't regret watching it, but even though it caters to some of my guilty pleasures (like really gaudy lighting involving bold primary colors), I'm not going to pretend for a second that this is a good movie. This isn't like the real Demons, where the bad stuff is funny but the good stuff is genuinely good... this is just all bad.

Grade: C-

Something Dan Watched: Madhouse

Just a quick one for you. Over the weekend, I showed my brother Madhouse (a.k.a. There Was a Little Girl, the onscreen title on my DVD copy), a little gem of an early 80's slasher movie that I discovered earlier this year. I talked about it briefly last month, but thought it was time to say just a little bit more about one particular element of the film.

The story, which shares a few plot points with Happy Birthday To Me (coincidentally, I believe, as both films came out the same year), involves Julia, a young teacher at a school for the deaf. Her abusive, crazy, deformed twin sister breaks out of the mental hospital a few days before their birthday. And soon, people close to Julia are vanishing or dying, at the hands of a mysterious killer with a vicious pet dog, who is planning a special birthday surprise.


There's a lot to like in Madhouse, which for a sleazy, early 80's slasher is uncommonly well shot, written, and acted. The clincher, what makes it a minor classic in my esteem, is the way the film (an Italian production that does a good job passing as American) works some giallo-style weirdness into the slasher template. This includes odd touches such as the killer's choice of murder weapon (dog), the killer's fondness for singing nursery rhymes, and the heroine's job working with deaf children (no offense to the kids, who are all sweethearts, but there's something vaguely unnerving about deaf children trying to speak).

One especially weird detail that sticks out for me every time is that, although I'm not 100% sure about this, I swear in one scene the killer is played by a puppet. Tell me what you think:


It's probably hard to see what I'm talking about without seeing the way "she" moves in the shot, which strikes me as looking somewhat weightless. Here are a few stills of the sister in other scenes for comparison:


The thing is, I cannot figure out for the life of me why they couldn't have used the actual actress in the shot. Is it because they didn't think a person could leap into the frame fast enough? Was the actress not available? Is it because (and maybe I'm getting into mild spoilers here) there's some doubt as to whether the evil twin is really the killer, and the filmmakers wanted to make something about the scene feel "off"?

I like that last theory the best, but I doubt it's true. There are a few other (more obvious) puppets in the film, and they seem more like products of budget limitations than intentional surrealism. Take for example these corpses:


And this dog head:


Yet, my point is that no matter the intent of the twin-puppet, the shot of her stabbing the maintenance man adds to the dreamy, creepy quality I admire about the film.

Anyone looking for a good slightly off-the-beaten-path slasher movie should check this one out.

Demons

I am guessing I have seen Demons well upward of 10 times by now, probably more than any other horror film I have ever watched in my life. Why? What is it about this film that makes it so endlessly watchable to me? In part, it has to do with my life long fascination with so-bad-they're-good movies; it's a treasure trove of bad dubbing, bad dialogue, and nonsensical plotting. But beneath the irony, I genuinely love this film. I love its overblown but awesome visual style. I love the frequently awesome and clever make up and special effects. I love the all the movie-within-a-movie meta jokes. I love that its completely whacked out and unpredictable and doesn't feel like any other horror movie I can think of. And I love that there is a scene where a man rides around a movie theater on a dirt bike, hacking up demons with a samurai sword.

Is it a bad movie? Sorta. Is it also an awesome, supremely entertaining movie? Definitely.

Grade: A

Planet Of The Vampires

After crash landing on a harsh, barren planet, a group of spacemen must fight back against the reanimated corpses of their fallen comrades.

I'm not much for Mario Bava, but I recognize the debt many of my favorite genre films (particularly those by Dario Argento) owe to his work. So, at least once a year I'll give another Bava film a shot. Mostly, that results in me watching a lot of forgettable movies (Shock) and unwatchable crap (Twitch of the Death Nerve, 5 Dolls For an August Moon), but every now and then you find a good one, like Black Sabbath or Blood and Black Lace.

Planet of the Vampires is more in the forgettable category, but that at least is preferable to unwatchable crap. It's a low budget sci-fi/horror film with a promising setup, but a languid pace that sputters its way to an underwhelming climax. What almost saves the film is Bava's style. He gives it a bold, comic book vibe, using sparse sets light with bright, solid colors. It looks cheaper than an episode of "Lost in Space," but Bava doesn't shy away from it, and instead turns the cheapness into a sometimes effective aesthetic choice.

Grade: C

The Bird With The Crystal Plumage (a Poem by Shenan Hahn)

The Bird With the Crystal Plumage is Italian horror maestro Dario Argento's first film, and it's also one of his best and, relatively speaking, most normal. Though not as luridly violent as his later giallos, it is a highly entertaining expression of his visual style, already crystallized (if you don't mind the pun) at the beginning of his career: over-the-top and baroque while still maintaining a certain formal elegance. I think Shenan's adopted style perfectly pays homage to this.

Shenan notes that her poem is "in three parts, with each part from the POV of a different character,and written in a different form; first is the shaped verse with an iambic4-3-5-3-4 foot metric pattern and an abcba rhyme scheme; second is pureiambic pentameter; third is a seriers haikus."

Perhaps we'll try to squeeze in a viewing of our Blu-ray copy of The Bird With The Crystal Plumage this month so I can do a blog entry about it.



I. Guilia
This city’s still-born every morning. Rome’s
been baking steadily
for hours beneath the sun, and thirsting all
the while, she readily
accepts the day in kodachrome

but lies immobile, aches and waits
for all its souls to rise
and take to living just like her. We stir,
pour coffee in surprise
that we’ve awoken, fill our plates

with eggs in awe that such a calm
could show its face when it
had fled and left us here for dead last night.
For now the window’s lit
in gold, ensconced by morning’s balm,

but look- that candlestick! Still stuck
there like a stab wound, eye
inside the hurricane of radiating
cracks, the scars of my
attempts to free myself. I struck

the glass as he was hacking at
the door, but fruitlessly:
there was no exit, no redemption, no
kind God to rescue me
in righteousness. Last night I sat

here witnessing my death, the fight
a loss accepted. Now
I’m told to live again? Beneath that candle,
laughing at how
nightmares linger in the light?


II. Sam
That call- there’s something strange about it still
that haunts me. Something in his voice, perhaps?
Some pitch or timber that I recognize,
a certain brogue or telling turn of tongue
to place the man I heard?

That isn’t it,

it wasn’t him that struck me, captivating
though his homicidal chit-chat was.
It’s what came through between his words-
that noise! Like moaning crickets, menacing
and strange, like lullabies that howled outside
your window as you’d lay, the blankets tucked
around your ears, a child too young to know
just who or what composed the tunes that rocked
the streets at night.

That sound was crying

from the background, singing in a language
distant and entrancing, calling me
to rise as if I were a cobra, rapt
within its rhythms, to pursue it, run
it down, caress it hungrily, to speak
its notes and translate fluently, ease meaning
from its otherworldly aria.

III. Monica
Gallery at night.
Geometric harmony
in marble silence.

No sound can be heard
behind this glass. A turning
key locks in your screams.

Two pairs of olive

legs entwined. A milky tide

of cotton rising.

A half carafe of

Montepulciano left.

Radio playing.

A vigilant clock.

Pillows cold and stiff without

your head at rest there.

But all of this is
elsewhere, out among the world
that lives, even now.

No comforts for you
here, no soft loves, no warm wine,
no story telling.

There’s only you: held
by a knife, by a woman
you thought you knew once.

Dan's 2008 Year in Review Horror Movie Postmortem Extravaganza Part II

Aliens (because they are foreign films, not because they are about aliens)

Last House in the Woods - Italy is the home of the giallo, Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci and gratuitous Edwige Fenech nudity. I like their horror films, which at their best often display an effective mix of high style and unapologetic sleaze. You get your art and your trash all rolled up in one. But this low budget Italian riff on Texas Chainsaw Massacre doesn't really succeed at either. Occasionally it's violent enough to be unpleasant, but mostly it's a bore. And it makes a mistake that I've noticed more and more in horror movies these days: it tries to be both disturbing and over-the-top fun at once, and they cancel each other out. You can't be both Reanimator and Hostel, you have to pick one and stick with it. Also, props to the American distributors for the original title.

Frontier(s) - Unlike Last House in the Woods, this is a French riff on Texas Chainsaw Massacre. As opposed to an Italian one. And you know what, they should really leave this genre to the Americans. Sorry Europe, I just don't think you understand how to make a good cannibal redneck movie. It's because of your lack of barbecue, which is the appropriate way to eat a human. It's just not scary if you make a person into tartar and wash it down with a glass of cabernet.

Inside - This is it, this is my vote for worst horror film of the year. It had potential to be great. It's a home invasion thriller with a twist: the heroine is pregnant and the killer wants to cut out her baby. That's some fucked up crazy shit right there, but Inside blows it by eschewing suspense and tension for a comically high body count and a lot of overdone make up effects that are too over the top to be disturbing and too seriously presented to be fun. I'm becoming convinced that Europeans don't know how to film violence any more. I mean, say what you will about the Saw and Hostel movies, but they at least know how to properly present gore, whether it be for serious or entertaining purposes. I'm guessing these European directors grew up watching the same hyper-violent 80's horror shit that I did, but maybe something got lost in translation and all they understood was that violence should be graphic. They never figured out that it should be a means to an end... to help set the tone of the film, and to provide dramatic payoffs. Anyway, read my lengthy takedown of Inside here.

Rogue - I'm convinced Australian director Greg McLean is going to do something great at some point. His movies look nice, know how to build tension and have much stronger performances and character work than your average horror movie. But so far, he's given us two movies with a lot to like and also some serious flaws holding them back from being as good as they should be. Oh well, maybe next time. The first 2/3rds of Rogue is one of the best monster movies in a long while, but it loses it's way with a final act that drags on, and when they finally show all of the giant crocodile, it's an unconvincing special effect that kills the mood. McLean is going for the tried and true approach of leaving the monster offscreen to build tension and then revealing it with a classic payoff, but you wish he would have just skipped the payoff and left the croc as a mostly unseen presence. If I'm being a little hard on the movie, it's because it's a good horror movie that had potential to be an excellent one.

Mother of Tears - Maybe this is a bad one, I don't know, but I was so excited to finally see a Dario Argento film in theaters that I didn't notice. I'll admit that it's not his best. But it has baby murder, a woman being strangled with her own intestines, slutty witches, and Asia Argento's tits, so I'm pretty sure I enjoyed it. And like Phenomena and Inferno and some of his others, I suspect it may improve with multiple viewings, at least on the level where you appreciate just how fucking weird the thing is. Still, I'm disappointed that Argento didn't use the same colorful, hyper-stylized look he went for in the other Three Mothers movies, and instead made it look like his other less visually intense recent movies. I was expecting a throwback to his glory days but what I got was a reminder that his best films are probably behind him.

The Orphanage - I did a longer write-up on this one here about my disappointment with the film. Unlike Inside, however, it was because I admired a lot of what the movie attempted, but didn't feel it was properly executed. If I recall, The Orphanage received very strong reviews on it's release in the US, and I can understand why, it's looks nice and seems competent and lacks a lot of the sleazy elements that critics normally object to. But I would venture to guess that, now that time has passed, most of them have forgotten this one, and that few horror fans are finding this one worth revisiting. Any tension they would have felt the first time is ruined by a bad, sorta twist ending that makes everything before it seem completely unscary. So what you're left with is a long, slow horror movie with no tension, some atmosphere and dreary tone that isn't powerful enough to get under your skin, but just effective enough to make the movie a bummer.

Cruel Summer

Untraceable - I think we can officially say that 2008 was the year that torture porn went mainstream. How else do you explain how a blatant Saw ripoff like this movie was made starring fucking Diane Lane and Colin Hanks. Those aren't the names you'd associate with a transgressive horror film, those are the heroine and gay best friend in a romantic comedy. Hell, just sign on Matthew McConaughey to the lead role and you're ready to start shooting Must Love Failing to Launch a Guy in 10 Days. The once derided torture porn genre has been domesticated, it's now no more threatening to our values than Paul Blart: Mall Cop. Oh and in case you couldn't guess it, this movie sucked.

Trailer Park of Terror - I guessed that this was a horror comedy going in to it, but if it was supposed to be funny then the filmmakers and I do not share a sense of humor. Even though this has evil undead trailer park rednecks as its villains, it's surprisingly sick and and cruel in places. One character gets skinned and then boiled alive in grease. In another scene two teenagers are forced at knife point to have sex on camera for the villains' pleasure. So we're not really talking about an Evil Dead 2 style romp here. For what it is, it has some effective moments, but... I still don't understand how this silly premise lead to this dark movie.

Saw V - I've enjoyed this series more than any reasonable person should, I think mainly because I'm excited to have an honest to goodness Friday the 13th or Nightmare On Elm Street style franchise where they shit out a new movie every year. Too bad this was, after two highly ridiculous and entertaining entries, the worst one since part II. Too short, with not enough crazy over-plottedness. Still some satisfying violence and other insanity, but I'm hoping they kick it up a notch with part VI later this year.

Seed - What happened to my beloved Uwe Boll? The man responsible for some of the most unintentionally hilarious films of all time has gotten boring in recent years. Seed, his attempt to cash in on the torture porn genre, sucks mainly because Boll seems to think that he has a real serious, disturbing, provocative horror film on his hands, when it's really just an especially cruel Jason movie. I haven't seen Postal or In the Name of the King yet, I'm hoping those reach the levels of transcendent camp that he achieved with House of the Dead and Blackwoods. However if he keeps trying to make serious films, I'm giving up on him.

Pathology - The guys who did Crank wrote this, a fairly entertaining and amusingly sick movie about a bunch of young hotshot doctors who get off on murdering random people in ways they won't get caught for. What follows is a respectable amount of nasty gore, transgressive sex and dark humor. Not great, but good sick fun.

The Red Queen Kills Seven Times

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Like you could resist that title either. This is, all around, a pretty unremarkable giallo. It has all the staples of the genre, but not enough of a sense of style, or energy, or how to build suspense. Of course, for me, even a below average giallo like this one is at least watchable.

Murder Rock: Dancing Death

Monday, October 27, 2008

An open letter to my brother Andy:

Hey Andy, have you seen this one yet? It's one of Fulci's mid-80's efforts. You and I have both plowed through the ass-end of his filmography, including Aenigma, Demonia, Voices From the Beyond and Sweet House of Horrors, so if you haven't seen this one, you probably should. However, if you still need convincing, here is a list of reasons of why you should see Murder Rock:

1) It is an attempt to cash in on the 80's dance movie craze, but it's still a horror movie. So what I'm saying is that Fulci made a giallo in the style of Flashdance.

2) The opening credits show a bunch of people (who I don't think are characters in the movie) breakdancing to some 80's music. When the credits end, they are immediately followed by another dance sequence. It's like a good 6 minutes of screen time before there's any dialogue and people stop dancing.

3) There are several dance sequences in the film, and they are pretty much all extraneous.

4) Remember the classic song "Head Over Meels" from Fulci's Aenigma? Well, Murder Rock's entire soundtrack consists of crap like that.

5) Garetta Garetta, the black chick from Demons and Rats: Night of Terror has a supporting role.

6) There are several dramatic speeches made by characters, and the movie seems to take them pretty seriously.

7) There is a lot of nudity for a Fulci film, although most of it is of dead chicks. So we're talking Torso territory here, although no lesbians.

8) The killer chloroforms women so they pass out, then sticks some weird ceremonial needle through their heart.

9) I don't know if he had a decent budget or what, but this is, from a technical standpoint, one of Fulci's best shot, best lit, best edited, best constructed films. It doesn't have his normally foggy, soft-focus nightmarish feel, it's more of a classic giallo.

10) Despite that, it still has a lot of accidental comedy.


So there you go, 10 reasons why you should consider seeing this one if you get a chance. I wouldn't bump it to the top of your queue or go out of your way to see it, but if you like this kind of crap (and I know you do) then it's worth your time.

Mountain of the Cannibal God

Monday, October 14, 2008

My first experience with an Italian cannibal movie was bad enough to turn me off of the genre for a long time. That movie was Eaten Alive (Umberto Lenzi's, not the weird-ass Tobe Hooper movie), and I guessed I watched it about 2 1/2 - 3 years ago, when I was still in college. It was one of the few horror movies I've seen that I, on some level, objected to. Something about it actually offended me. At least part of that was the (actual) animal cruelty depicted in the movie... I'm not an animal lover, but I don't need to see people cutting open living creatures. Mostly though, I think it was the pervading sense of misogyny in the film. I actually wrote a paper in college defending horror movies from charges of misogyny, but Eaten Alive is not a film I would stand up for. There is so much violence directed towards women, almost pornographically shown, in addition to numerous gratuitous sequences of rape, and all with no point. Last House On the Left is another movie with a lot of rape and violence directed towards women, but it is made with some level of skill and artistry. Eaten Alive is a corny, shitty, poorly made, low-rent Italian exploitation film with no real point except to depict human suffering, preferably of the women.

So what I'm trying to say is that I thought it was a slightly below average movie. And from what I've heard about other Italian cannibal movie classics like Cannibal Holocaust and Cannibal Ferox, I should stay away. But there was something tempting about Mountain of the Cannibal God, something different. For one, it stars the sexy Ursula Andress and the badass Stacy Keach, which is like way classy for this kind of movie. The production values looked on the higher end, and it seemed less sleazy and depraved than Eaten Alive... while still having an appropriate level of sleaze and depravity. And it was directed by Sergio Martino, whose Torso I just watched for YVIAHMMAOIHTNQ and enjoyed, and who also did some other decent giallos.

And I'm glad to say that this movie didn't bother the way that Eaten Alive did, this was much more in the spirit of the sleazy B movies that I like, despite some unfortunate and unnecessary animal violence. Sadly, though, it wasn't a very good movie either. Ursula Andress gets naked, which is great, and there are a handful of entertaining moments of action and violence, but it's too slow and long for one of these movies, and with a weird structure. Things that seem like they should be major events barely register. Stacy Keach is positioned as the male lead in the film, but then about 30 minutes from the end he just kinda slips off a waterfall and dies. After that, the remaining characters are captured by the cannibals, and the movie starts to get weird with a crazy cannibal sex orgy (including graphic female masturbation, and a man fucking a giant pig). It seems like it's heading towards something big... but then they just kind of escape, and there is a brief fight with some cannibals, and the end. It's a surprisingly indifferent finale. In fact it's a lot like Turistas in that regard... it has all the obligatory exploitative elements for one of these movies, but it's all indifferently staged and doesn't leave you feeling like you watched much of a movie.

Shock

Sunday, October 12, 2008

Maybe I should take back those compliments I gave Mario Bava in my Black Sabbath post. Outside of maybe a few cool visuals and Daria Niccolodi's naked butt, this one bored the shit out of me. Of course, this was his last film and I don't think his later works are considered to be very good, so maybe I should still give one of his earliest movies a shot. Shock actually felt more Argento-y in tone, with the funkier score and graphic violence and Daria Niccolodi, but like an indifferent, shitty Argento.

Of course, this wasn't terrible like Five Dolls For an August Moon, so I'm still no longer convinced that Bava is the worst director ever. I'm just probably not ever going to become an actual fan of his.

Torso

Thursday, October 9, 2008

Yes, this is what I'm talking about. You have to sift through a lot of mediocrity to find a giallo this good. This is one from Sergio Martino, and it's easily the best one of his I've seen. I'm thinking the quality of his films is inversely related to the greatness of their titles. i.e. Torso is the best movie, Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I have the Key is his worst, The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh and All the Colors of the Dark fall somewhere in the middle.

I can't remember the last time I saw this many sexy, sexy naked women in a giallo. Maybe never. Maybe this is the record. The first 2/3rds of Torso is entertaining if standard giallo fare, but then in the last act one of the supporting characters wakes up, and goes downstairs to find that all of the other major characters have been murdered, and oh shit the killer is still in the house, sawing the limbs off of the corpses and sticking them in a bag. And I must say, the last chunk of the film, where this character tries to hide from the killer, genuinely manages to stir up a little excitement and suspense.

Did I mention all the nudity? Also: lesbians.

Black Sabbath

Sunday, October 5, 2008

Obviously, I'm gonna include some italian horror films and giallos in YVIAHMMAOIHTNQ, that's a given, I love that shit. Which is why it was so surprising on Saturday when I popped on the awesome sounding giallo The House With Laughing Windows and couldn't even finish watching it, it was so fucking boring. It lacked style, violence and nudity, and nothing happened for an hour. I don't know, maybe it gets great during the final third, but I didn't care enough to find out. And shit, that almost never happens to me.

But I feel like I made up for that a little bit by watching Mario Bava's Black Sabbath, which was surprisingly good. I say surprisingly, because within the past few years I saw Bava's 5 Dolls for An August Moon and Twitch of the Death Nerve, and they were both unbelievably awful and boring (I actually finished watching them, though). After that I wrote him off for a while, but I kept reading good things about Bava. I'm thinking now that maybe I just happened to watch two of his worst films first... last year I caught Blood and Black Lace and it wasn't half bad, and Black Sabbath was downright good.

I think you call this an anthology or omnibus; it's 3 short horror stories put together to make one movie, and they are all pretty good, although stories 2 and 3 never top the first one, which is straight up giallo and I would imagine an influence on the work of my favorite, Dario Argento. None of them are truly scary, but some suspense is generated, and a lot of the entertainment comes more from the style.

Okay, so good job Bava, I think I might watch Shock or something this month too.

Tenebre

Monday, September 22, 2008

Firstly, kudos to me for watching 3 movies on a week night. That's a rare feat for me lately.

Next off, seems the current trend is that my appreciation for an Argento movie goes up when I see it for a second time. And I love Argento as it is. I liked Tenebre the first time I saw it, now I think it rocks even more.

I think the key is, there's something about Argento's movies where the flaws seem less severe with time. You learn to forgive them or ignore them during subsequent viewings. Hell, sometimes the supposed "flaws" make the movie better... a lot of the plot holes and weird storytelling make his movies seem more nightmarish. I would say this fits into that category. And I also appreciated this time around how suspenseful Tenebre is. Argento's movies are normally strange, fascinating, stylish, entertaining, awesome, but not often scary. This is no classic, mind you, but there are a handful of sequences that pretty deftly increase the tension. It's not white-knuckle suspenseful, but it's at least perk-you-up-in-your-seat suspenseful.

Phenomena

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

I was glad to see this one again. It's not one of Argento's best, but I would venture to say that it's his most bizarre. Which is saying something. This time I was able to accept that the movie is a little too slow, not as well shot as most of his movies, not as well constructed, etc etc and really just focus on its stunning weirdness, Like the voice over narration that shows up about 15 minutes into the movie, just long enough to say one line, and then never shows up again. Or the part where a young Jennifer Connolly, who can communicate with insects,  teams up with a fly named the Great Sarcophagus and tries to find a dead body. Or the subplot where a helper monkey's master is killed, and the monkey finds a knife and tracks the killer down for revenge. If nothing else, there really isn't another movie like Phenomena.

Trauma

Friday, August 8, 2008

This might be Dario Argento's most unfairly underrated movie. There's really a lot to love here, with a lot of great sequences of violence, suspense and high style that rival some of his best work. It also happens to have some pretty atrocious acting, some weird technical mistakes and the worst plot twist ever. So it misses the mark of being a great movie, but there's so much to love here that I still think it ranks with his better work. There's a sequence where a little kid sneaks into the killer's house that's one of the most exciting things Argento has ever filmed. And all sorts of other cool touches, like the butterfly POV shots, or the killer's particularly unsettling means of dispatching their victims. Definitely a must-watch for fans of this type of stuff.

Zombie Holocaust

Saturday, July 19, 2008

Another one of those awful Italian horror movies where it seems like they didn't decide whether or not it was a zombie flick or a cannibal flick until they were halfway done shooting it. Actually, this one is like a 3-way collision between a bad zombie flick, a bad cannibal flick, and a bad mad scientist flick.

But you know, it's corny and it's Italian and it has tits and gore, so I can't resist. Sadly, this one is pretty much completely unmemorable... for all it's problems, Hell of the Living Dead at least provided some classic bad movie moments. This one has a few chuckles, but not much else.

Sweet House of Horrors

Saturday, July 5, 2008

Well, we did a lot of celebrating this weekend, what with finishing moving in, and the Fourth of July, and Shenan's graduation party, so it seemed appropriate that we throw some bad horror movies in there somewhere. What can I say, we love that shit.

We actually also put on a giallo called Seven Blood Stained Orchids (great title!), but it seemed pretty boring and we all pretty much stopped paying attention within the first half hour. So I'm not counting it.

Some time in the early 80's, Lucio Fulci stopped making cheap, kinda awful horror movies that never-the-less had some sort of effective, unique vision to them, and just started making cheap, completely awful horror movies that are borderline unwatchable. Sweet House of Horrors sucks every bit as much as Demonia, Aenigma and Voices From the Beyond, which luckily also means that it's good for a few laughs. I especially liked the part when the bad guy (the same actor who played Ripper in Demons) screams "I have to murder you! I have to murder you both!" while killing some people. Thanks for announcing that, dude.

What's weird here is that the movie starts off with a really violent scene, but then slowly becomes less violent as it goes along, eventually becoming more like some stupid kids movie than a horror film. I have no idea what the hell Fulci was going for.

Mother of Tears

Sunday, June 8, 2008

It's a great time to be alive. This weekend saw the release of not one, but two highly anticipated horror movies from two of the greats of the genre, Dario Argento and Stuart Gordon. I have the coolest girlfriend in the world, who was not only willing, but actually enthusiastic about doing a double feature. Life is sweet.

First up is Dario Argento's Mother of Tears, the completion of a loose trilogy of films about evil witches, following Suspiria and Inferno. And the main thrill here is... well, Argento is an all-time favorite of mine, and for the first time in my life I saw one of his films in the theater. That's a real joy right there, and I'm glad I finally had the opportunity. One day I hope to catch a revival of one of his klassiks, but if that never happens then at least I'll have been to one. It's a milestone.

As for the film itself... I'm gonna have to go ahead and label it "For Argento Fans Only." It's got serious problems. You have to take it for granted that 9 times out of 10, in an Argento picture, the acting won't be too hot (and often poorly dubbed), and the story won't always be entirely coherent. Sometimes this actually works in the movie's favor. I mean, it's all the strange acting and weird, counterintuitive plot developments that give Opera a real unique feeling. And Inferno probably wouldn't be any good at all, if it weren't for it's dreamlike, illogical story. But the problem here is that there is SO MUCH acting and plot, and none of it is good, and it dominates much of the movie.

There's this part in Suspiria that I absolutely hate, where this one guy, in a rather long winded fashion, explains the backstory to the heroine, which essentially boils down to "witches exist." But then he tells the heroine that he knows someone else who is more of an expert, so this other guy comes out and even more longwindedly explains that, um, there are witches. And the thing about Mother of Tears is, it's probably made up 30% of scenes like that. Maybe more. People rambling on and on and a plot that isn't particularly hard to grasp, and not very interesting. All performed by characters who seem over-developed, yet completely without personality.

As far as the triolgy goes, this isn't as beautifully shot and stylish as Suspiria (in fact, I'm super dissappointed that Argento dropped the over-saturated color look of the first two films), and it's not as nightmarish and structurally fucking crazy as Inferno. It's easily the worst of the three.

Yet, I still liked it. It's true that I'm more forgiving of some of his recent work than most others (I'm actually quite fond of The Card Player) but it's clear that Argento isn't what he used to be, and will probably never reach the heights of greatness/style/lunacy that he did in the 70's and 80's. So once you accept that his klassiks are behind him, you can watch the movie for what it is, and enjoy what he does well.

And what he does well here is extended sequences of batshit crazy violence and debauchery. This is probably his most violent film, and at times really wallows in some gross-out moments. In places it's almost like a slicker, more skillful version of a Lucio Fulci movie. There's disembowling, flaying, baby murder, cannibalism, hacked-off limbs, slit throats, a spear up the vagina, not to mention scads of copious sex and nudity, including lesbianism and some extreme sadomasochism. This is an obvious comment I'm going to make, but the best parts of the movie are when Argento plays to his strengths, i.e. contrasting his classy (though baroque) visual style with his impulses towards lunacy and sleaze. There's an electricity to all the scenes of lurid sex and violence here unqiue to Argento; nobody does debauchery quite like him.

He's not the stylist he used to be, but he's still got some of the old magic, and he'll never stop being a fucking nutcase. I mean, even his shitty movies are more interesting than 90% of other horror movies. No one else has ever quite captured his brand of weirdness, so it's comforting that Argento is still churning them out.