On the Big Screen: THE LIGHTHOUSE (2019)

The sophomore jinx has hit Robert Eggers, whose feature-film debut was the rightly-acclaimed The Witch from 2015. His new film is another piece of period Americana, this time taking place in 19th century New England. Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe) and his new assistant Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson) arrive on an island for a four-week stint as keepers of its lighthouse. Wake is a vulgar, flatulent, superstitious drunk who drives Winslow relentlessly and tries to goad the apparent teetotaler into imbibing with him at dinnertime. On top of that, he forbids Winslow from entering the light of the lighthouse itself. Ephraim has issues of his own. A scrimshaw mermaid inspires him to masturbate frequently, while one particular seagull seems to make a point of getting in his way all the time. He's warned not to harm the bird -- Wake believes that seagulls harbor the souls of drowned sailors -- but the enraged Winslow finally takes the gull in hand and dashes him to pieces on a rock. As if by coincidence, a severe storm indefinitely delays the arrival of their replacements. If Wake had been somewhat mad before, Winslow quickly catches up with him....

The Lighthouse has no real subject other than madness, and madness as an end unto itself isn't firm ground to plant a film on. While in The Witch Eggers arguably was saying something about Puritanism, patriarchy, family, etc., in his new film the director (co-writing with his brother) seems more interested in evoking mood or genre. It may be wrong to ask what the point is, but viewers can hardly help doing so. The real problem may be that, at 110 minutes, the film is too long for its own good. The length tempts the Eggers brothers into too many self-indulgent twists as their characters struggle for dominance and deteriorate further into insanity. At one moment Wake is challenging Winslow's (and our) sense of reality by contradicting a version of recent events that we saw play out on screen as if it were objective truth. Not long afterward, Winslow has beaten Wake into such canine submission that he will walk, on a leash, into an open grave. But then Wake recalls himself and charges back inside for a perhaps-climactic attack. By this point both men have become so repellent that no rooting interest in either man is likely. No rooting interest is strictly necessary, to be fair, but by this point most viewers have probably lost hope at getting to the bottom of the whole situation. There seems to be no point to the exercise, or to the excellent black-and-white cinematography and production design, other than to have Dafoe and Pattinson act crazy. Dafoe is an old hand at this, but more eyes will be on Pattinson, whom we find at a pivotal point in his career. He is our next cinematic Batman, and by coincidence will have a high-profile role in Christopher Nolan's next film. By two years from now the ghost of Edward Cullen may be exorcised for good and Pattinson's real movie-star career will have begun. Will he be a respected actor by then? Some may argue that his work for David Cronenberg already should have earned him respect, but for most people the jury is still out or the memory of Twilight is still too strong. Can we see the future Pattinson here? He has deglamorized himself with an old-school moustache, several layers of grime and a slightly erratic character voice, while what might ungenerously have been called cow eyes a few years back are now capable of a penetrating gaze. Beyond that, it's hard to judge his interpretation of a character of whom his own author seems to lack a clear conception. We learn that Ephraim Winslow isn't what he initially introduced himself as, and the pressures of his situation further assail his sense of self, but neither Pattinson nor the Eggers brothers ultimately can give him the kind of empathetic reality that even characters in psychological horror films require. The problem isn't that we don't care what happens to him, but that we lose interest in the all too-protracted process.

While Eggers fails as a writer this time, he retains a strong directorial eye. Some of the best scenes are relatively simple but well-shot bits of Winslow struggling through his daily chores. If The Lighthouse feels ungrounded in other respects, it does feel grounded in a particular time and place. Strange as it may be to say, while panning this film I left it with the feeling that Eggers, with his firm sense of period and a visceral sensibility, might be the person to bring Cormac McCarthy's horrific western epic Blood Meridian to the screen. In other words, Lighthouse isn't the sort of disaster that exposes its auteur as some sort of fraud or one-trick pony. Instead, it's a failure that leaves much of Eggers' potential as a filmmaker intact, while leaving us hoping he'll find more critical collaborators next time.

CAVE OF THE LIVING DEAD (Der Fluch der grünen Augen, 1964)

Hungarian director Akos Rathonyi filmed this German-Yugoslav production featuring a mostly German cast, along with African-American expatriate John Kitzmiller, who ends up being the most interesting thing about the film. Known as "The Curse of the Green Eyes" in its original language, the movie follows an Interpol inspector (Adrian Hoven) into a village where a serial killer seems to be at work. There's a lot of superstitious suspicion about the deaths of several young women, but the local doctor dismisses the twin puncture marks on the most recent victim's neck as "superficial scratches." The local witch tells a different story, urging Inspector Dorin to carry protection against vampirism. We soon find ourselves in a whoisit as a number of candidates for the role of the killer emerge, including the reclusive professor (Wolfgang Preiss) conducting blood experiments in an old castle, his lovely assistant, his black servant (Kitzmiller) and a belligerent deaf-mute (Emmerich Schrenk) -- and you can throw the aggressively skeptical doctor in, too, if you're in an expansive mood. Meanwhile, Dorin sleeps through a failed vampire attack thanks to the power of the cross, while a persistently disappearing corpse finally separates the doctor from his skepticism.

 Unfortunately for anyone expecting suspense, the perpetrator's true identity isn't that hard to guess, and that lack of suspense only underscores the picture's overall lack of thrills or scares. That leaves only the admirable black and white cinematography by Hrvoje Saric and the subplot involving Kitzmiller's character to admire. It's unusual if not unique for a European vampire film to go off on a tangent about racism, but that's what Rathonyi and his co-writer do here. John, the black servant, serves as sort of a red herring for a while, if only because of his color. He faces in-you-face hatred from the mute, who tosses him out of a tavern despite the innkeeper's own tolearance, and even the witch, otherwise treated as a benign character, mistakes him for a monster when he happens to look into her window one night. The film tries a tricky balancing act, since John is thisclose to being the stereotypical scaredy-cat black servant, but it also shows us that John has real reason to worry, though not so much about the supernatural. This subplot could have been better integrated into the main story; the witch's prejudice might have undermined her credibility with the more cosmopolitan inspector, for instance, maybe making him less likely to adopt her safeguards. As it is it seems all too easy to vanquish the vampires once their lair and leader are identified, but I get the impression that the filmmakers may have seen all the undead stuff as a Macguffin enabling them to say something more interesting about small-town Mitteleuropa. Their message comes across as muddled or muffled, but it's hard to say whether the English dub accurately represents what the creators actually wanted to say. But since the U.S. release was sure to maximize the film's scare quotient, the lack of real scares in that version is pretty damning. Cave isn't a bad film to look at, but I wouldn't make it a high priority when you're scheduling horror movies for Halloween season.

THE GOLEM (2018)

As portrayed by German actor Paul Wegener, the Golem was the first cinematic horror icon. Compared to other iconic monsters, there have been relatively few Golem films, the most notable in English being the 1967 film It! Now an Israeli film, with Doron and Yaov Paz directing Ariel Cohen's script, revives the legend, linking the lore of 17th century Prague with more modern concerns. In this account, a young girl witnesses the destruction of the Prague golem (and its creator) after it had massacred the congregation it was supposed to protect. A generation later, the girl has grown into a midwife and all-around wise woman in an embattled Jewish community in Lithuania. In this same village, Hanna (Hani Furstenburg), has a Yentl-like ambition to learn the Kabbala, volumes of which are smuggled to her in baskets. Hanna's son drowned some years ago and she's been barren ever since -- or so it seems. She's actually taking treatments to suppress pregnancy, but when nearby gentiles blame the Jews for a plague, and their leader threatens the midwife and the village with death if they fail to heal his daughter, Hanna suggests creating a golem for community defense. Against everyone's advice, she performs the ritual herself, but instead of the hulking entity Wegener played, or the shape we saw in the Prague sequence, her golem takes the fleshy form of a young boy, triggering a dangerous maternal instinct in his creator.

Cohen and the Paz brothers reshape the golem myth to fit their thematic concerns and genre ambitions. Hanna develops an empathetic relationship with her golem, feeling the pain it doesn't when it's attacked, while he turns his fury on people, both Jew and gentile, Hanna perceives as threats. When she's unconscious (or preoccupied with sex) the boy golem's own defense instincts kick in. Though the golem looks like a child, it remains a super-strong force of destruction, enabling some cheap and sometimes laughable gore effects. Since the filmmakers didn't have the means to show the boy fighting his enemies, those unfortunates usually get torn to pieces off-screen, their bloody limbs flying across the screen. Better still, this golem is a scanner, causing his foes' heads to explode without touching them. Meanwhile, Hanna goes through the "my precious boy can't be evil" denial arc before the golem's inevitable, indiscriminate attack on villagers and gentile attackers alike forces her to do the necessary thing. That undermines whatever feminist message or other commentary the filmmakers intended while reducing the golem legend to all-too-common horror tropes. The awkward mix of thematic ambition and genre crassness renders this golem film a disappointment and leaves this reader wishing that someone with real ambition and genius would put Marge Piercy's great golem novel (crosscut with science fiction) He, She and It on the big screen. Until then, however, there aren't so many golem movies that people shouldn't try again.

DEVIL'S EXPRESS (Gang Wars, 1976)

First-time director Barry Rosen bet on a Seventies genre trifecta by making a blaxploitation martial-arts horror film, and while I wouldn't call it a good movie it is an often-fascinating document of the fantasy life springing from the grungy state of urban life at that time. In its Mummy-inspired prologue, ancient Chinese monks lower a mysterious casket, with an amulet attached, into a hole in the earth. To ensure that no one knows the location of the burial, the leader of the little group kills everyone else before putting himself to the sword. While he might well have waited until they'd all done something to cover the hole, no one actually discovers the mystery inside until centuries later.

In 1970s Harlem, martial-arts instructor Luke (Warhawk Tanzania) spars with his friend Cris (Larry Fleischman). It's a tense friendship since Luke is black and Cris is a white cop, but as Luke explains to his suspicious students, he owes Cris a favor. In any event, Luke and his student-buddy Rodan (Wilfredo Roldan) are soon off to Hong Kong for some elite training. Rodan's head really isn't into the discipline -- he's more of a thug at heart -- but Luke earns a diploma after a match with the master. After that, Luke is sent to an island to meditate, while Rodan is tasked with watching over him. Bored by it all, Rodan just happens to discover the pit that generations of random explorers and possible treasure hunters managed to miss. Lowering himself in with ease, he snatches the amulet and takes it home to America with him.

The Hong Kong-New York steamer has another passenger: a Chinese man who suddenly finds himself possessed by some unseen entity. By the time he reaches the U.S. he's a staggering, bug-eyed mess terrified by every bright light and sharp sound until he finds a sort of shelter in the subway system. Now whatever's inside him can come into its own, though the filmmakers don't quite have the money to do more than suggest a chest-bursting exit with a lot of bleeding.

Meanwhile, Rodan and his gang buddies escalate their feud with a Chinese gang after he gets ripped off in a cocaine deal. In a violent variation on West Side Story the Chinese and black/Hispanic gangs perform martial-arts rumbles in the slums of New York, where the producers enjoyed extensive municipal cooperation despite their film's unflattering snapshot of Seventies squalor. As the gang war escalates, Cris and the rest of the police begin investigating a subway serial killer. While his comedy-relief partner invokes urban legends of mutant animals, Cris suspects that the killings are gang-related, despite Luke's vehement pushback against that suggestion. Luke's attitude toward his friends is strangely ambivalent. He warns them constantly against using martial arts in anger, but it's unclear whether he even realizes that Rodan is a drug dealer or if he would care. He lives in a sort of ebony tower, content to make love to his girlfriend and improve his knowledge until the killings come to close to home.

As you might guess, the subway entity is drawn to Rodan for the amulet he wears -- but by the time it finally catches up with him, the Chinese gang has snatched it away. That's how their wise old mentor is finally able to explain the actual situation to Luke, once the Chinese convince him that they weren't the ones who slammed Rodan face-first into a transformer. Only Luke has the mental discipline to defeat the monster, which adds an arsenal of psychic attacks to its arsenal for the final showdown in the tunnels. It takes a variety of forms, including Rodan and later two fighters at once, before trying to convince Luke that trains are bearing down on him. For Rosen it's a brave effort at something trippy and supernatural, but when the monster finally shows its true form and goes for a death grapple the scene is too dark to appreciate either the monster get-up or the climactic action.

While Devil's Express ends on an underwhelming note, it's an admirable B-film in which everyone seems to be trying hard to make an impression. Warhawk Tanzania (who made only one more film) is no real actor but at least errs on the side of excess, and while the fighting isn't much by Chinese standards (and the gore effects are mostly laughable) Rosen and his co-writers manage to invest each encounter with some dramatic urgency. They also find time for gratuitously entertaining stuff like a fight between a male bully and a female bartender at Luke's favorite watering hole and a cameo by misanthropic performance artist Brother Theodore -- he may be remembered from the early years of David Letterman's late-night show -- as a priest slowly driven mad by the subway killings. There's a likable cacophany to the pre-climactic scene where Luke negotiates with the cops to let him go into the tunnels alone while the priest rants to the assembled crowd about dead gods, pestiferous rats and whatnot. Rosen's enthusiasm makes it regrettable that he directed only one more film, though he's gone on to a long career as a TV producer. For Devil's Express he threw a lot of stuff at the screen to see what would stick, and that's almost certain to leave at least something for some of us to like.

LEGACY OF SATAN (1972)

Inside every porno filmmaker, I suppose, is an aspiring mainstream director. The pay is better and you're not as bound by genre conventions, no matter what critics of Hollywood say. The ambition was there, however briefly, in Gerard Damiano, who enjoyed a moment of fame -- somewhere between notoriety and celebrity -- when his film Deep Throat became a surprise hit in 1972. He followed that up with another quasi-crossover hit, The Devil in Miss Jones, in 1973. If anyone was positioned to attempt a crossover into true mainstream filmmaking, it was Damiano. In fact, he had already taken his shot. Filmed in the year Deep Throat was released, Legacy of Satan played double bills with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but to my knowledge the Deep Throat connection went unmentioned. That's just as well, since it would only have created false expectations for a movie that seems closer to a PG rating -- at least in the version I saw -- than the R it received.  It's a shame that Damiano didn't wait until after Deep Throat had hit before trying this, as he could almost certainly have gotten a bigger budget to work with. Instead, while displaying some pictorial ambition, Legacy looks cheap and slapdash, and while more money might have gotten the director better actors, the shabby screenplay is all on him.

The story plays out like an old eight-page horror comic in which wild things happen with little regard for why they happen. After a demonic ritual -- the villains worship an entity called Rakheesh rather than Satan -- plays out under the opening credits -- we sit in on a husband and wife, George and Maya, talking to their friend Arthur, who's quit his job to become a sort of spiritual seeker. Arthur proves to be a kind of talent scout for the cult leader, Dr.Muldavo, who enthuses over a photograph of Maya as if she were his reincarnated lost love. This visibly irks Muldavo's mistress/henchwoman Aurelia, but since she's a mute there's not much she can say about it.

Maya begins to have disturbing dreams and behaves disturbingly, too. One fine day, just before they're scheduled to visit Dr. Muldavo at Arthur's invitation, she deliberately slices her finger and makes George suck the blood. The Rakheesh worshippers are blood drinkers, you see, Aurelia being the current supplier for Muldavo. George isn't sure what to make of all this, while Maya is subject to mood swings that only add to her husband's confusion.

At Chez Muldavo, Maya and George are slipped a couple of Mickeys. For Maya it's like a hit of Reefer Madness-grade marijuana, setting her prancing about the room, while George basically passes out. He's quickly locked away so Muldavo can put the moves on Maya, but before any unholy marriage can be consummated, jealous Aurelia frees George and arms him with a magic, or at least a glowing sword. She gets stabbed for her trouble, but George avenges her by slashing Muldavo's face with the burning blade, sending the cult leader pitching over a balcony.

George and Maya run for it, but Maya -- how like a female -- asks for a rest. But aha! George was too late after all. Maya has turned, and asked for a time out only so the cultists could catch up and kill her husband. Now she tends to poor Muldavo, who survived the fall but has suffered a hideous, constantly worsening facial burn. Only fresh blood can save him, so Maya sets about exsanguinating some cult members -- but to no avail. To her despair, Muldavo succumbs, leaving her to plead with Rakheesh for some sign that they'll be together again. We get the sign at the very end, when Maya turns her head to reveal a scar like her late beloved's growing on her face. In the absence of any actual character development (or "arc") for Maya, Legacy gives us little more than a nearly random sequence of strange behaviors -- and nobody else has nearly as much development as Maya. Nor can any of the cast act, as far as I could tell here. Legacy  fails as transgressive cinema. What I saw appears to have some gore cut out, unless I'm only noticing editor Damiano's ineptitude, and there's no nudity whatsoever. It ends up reminiscent in ways of Andy Milligan's work, with which Legacy was sometimes associated in double-bills, but without Milligan's splenetic attitude. There's no real personality at all here, and I wouldn't be surprised if students of Damiano assured us that some of his pornos are better cinema. Maybe things would have been different if he did this a little later, flush with success and possibly roaring with ambition, but maybe he'd already found his true medium, and horror movies simply weren't it.

DVR Diary: DEATH BY INVITATION (1971)

On the evidence of Death By Invitation alone I would have dismissed writer-director Ken Friedman as a poor man's Andy Milligan, which is saying quite a bit as far as poverty is concerned. There's a strong resemblance when it comes to subject matter and overall aesthetic sense, but Friedman's oddity, recently featured on TCM Underground, was only the first stage of a career that continues to this day. He's mostly been a writer, most recently collaborating on a yet-to-be released documentary about the hip-hop performer T.I. His big-screen credits include White Line Fever, Heart Like a Wheel, Johnny Handsome, Cadillac Man and Bad Girls. The last-mentioned film, a 1994 western suggests some continuity of concern with Death By Invitation, as it involves violent female empowerment and is pretty dumb. As a director Friedman did only one other film, which probably was wise.

Young and ambitious, Friedman made a film about revenge across the centuries. It opens with unconvincing scenes of 17th century New Netherland, where a woman is tried and condemned for witchcraft to the accompaniment of a loud heartbeat. We cut abruptly to the present day, where a distant descendant of the lead accuser (Aaron Phillips) -- you can tell because they look alike -- presides bibulously over the Vroot family dinner. Arriving late is family friend Lise (Shelby Leverington), who bears a strong resemblance in turn to the accused witch of yore. She entices young Roger to meet her later at her apartment -- despite the father's warning that he shouldn't hang out with "any of those way-out people" -- where she tells a strange story that deserves to be quoted in full, since it's the highlight of the film. Imagine the following told in a spaced-out monotone, like the incantation it apparently is:

Roger, do you know of the Southern Tribes? Well, it was the common practice for one certain tribe that the women were the hunters, while the men were domesticated. When the village needed food, the women would go out and hunt for it. The men on the other hand were allowed to grease [pronounced "greeze"] the women's bodies before the hunt, but they were never allowed off their knees while massaging the oil into the women. When a band of women found a prey, they would rush at it together, all stabbing wildly with their knives, until the blood of the animal flowed upon their bodies, often mixing with their own blood. Then without knives they would rip away at the flesh of the animal with their hands and mouths. They would rub their bodies against the ravaged animal, against his head, against his genitals, and after they had completely satisfied themselves upon the animal and upon each other they would drag the remains back to the men. Now the men would grovel on the ground when the women returned, exposing themselves, hoping to be chosen, for if they were chosen, and if they were good, they were given food.
[Lights cigarette]
But it happened once that one certain man found that he could hunt in the woods and bring in more food than the women could, and that with his rather large body he could satisfy four or more husbands. And with this man as their leader the men began to ignore the women, disobey their commands. They found they no longer needed the women. Whereupon the women came together and met, and they ["greezed"] and oiled their own bodies and they prepared to hunt that man, naked.  We were -- they were naked. They tracked that man in the woods until they came upon him in the clearing. They fell upon him at once, ripping him open and eating his insides. The men were made to watch. They drank his blood and they chewed his bones until all of him was inside of them, but strangely they had raised themselves to passions far beyond their belief, and still writhing with pleasure and desire they fell upon the other men one by one, ripping them open and devouring them all.

Now that's a come-hither speech, and it works! Roger can't resist approaching this alluring and long-winded bacchant, and of course he gets what's coming to him, to the extent that Friedman's budget can visualize it. Practically speaking this means we get a shot of Roger from the neck down as several streams of blood begin to flow down his naked back. Lise's plan, you may not be surprised to learn, is to work her way through the Vroots, killing them indiscriminately, the women as well as the men. She takes out two daughters at once, though one is more or less accidental, the younger girl recoiling from the sight of her elder sister getting decapitated until she falls down a flight of stairs and brains herself. While synopses usually describe Lise as a descendant of the accused woman of the past, her slip of the tongue during her speech raises the possibility that she somehow is the fiend herself, though we have only the word of the accusers that that woman did anything wrong. In any event, while the local police are helpless to stop here -- they're comedy relief figures out of a 1940s B-movie -- Lise has not reckoned on another family friend, Jake (Norman Parker), whose virility overcomes her power. At the climax she tries repeatedly, in increasingly pathetic fashion, to repeat her Southern Tribes speech, as if she needs it to get sufficiently worked up, only to have Jake interrupt her repeatedly with his own come-ons, until old Peter Vroot charges in trying to finish what his ancestor started. Parker and Phillips share what might be, in spite of everything else, this film's strangest scene when Jake visits Peter at his office. Peter Vroot likes his Muzak, apparently, and has the stuff cranked up so loudly -- I recognized one familiar theme from a Tom and Jerry cartoon -- that he and Jake have to yell in order to hear each other in Peter's allegedly impressive sanctum sanctorum. You could believe that Friedman had the music playing on the set, and it may even be possible that he meant this to be funny. If so, it'd be one of those rare and serendipitous moments when a comedy scene is unintentionally funny. Some may say the whole film is that way, but that Southern Tribes bit is genuinely jaw-dropping and could well stop the snarkiest viewer in his or her tracks. To my shame, I found myself wishing that Friedman had had the means to put that story on film, though such a film probably wouldn't be something I could review here.

APOSTLE (2018)

Gareth Evans, the director of the Raid movies, arguably the best martial-arts films of the 21st century so far, returned to his native Wales to make an action-horror period piece set in Edwardian England. It starts slow, introducing us to former missionary Thomas Richardson (Dan Stevens), who infiltrates a Welsh island that's been taken over by a religious cult. The cult, which has scriptures of its own and a putatively charismatic leader in Malcolm (Michael Sheen), has kidnapped Richardson's sister and is holding her for ransom. They've been reduced to that because a once-flourishing community has seen harvests fail, but some cult members believe that even more extreme measures are necessary to revive the crops.

Probably because Evans is more interested in the fantastic horrors to be revealed later, Apostle makes it hard to believe that Malcolm's cult could attract as many people as it seems to. As Malcolm, Sheen simply isn't that charismatic, and we see pretty much nothing to explain the cult's appeal. Evans himself seems to realize the limitations of the Malcolm character, since about midway through he builds up Malcolm's second-in-command, Quinn (Mark Lewis Jones) into the real villain of the piece. Quinn disapproves beyond all reason of his daughter's romance with the son of another cult leader, finally killing the girl, framing the boy for the crime and executing him with a gruesome machine that bores a hole through the back of his head. By this point Quinn has gone over the edge entirely, determined to overthrow Malcolm and take the leader's daughter Andrea (Lucy Boynton) -- as well as Thomas's sister (Elen Rhys) -- as a broodmare sex slave.

While Malcolm is at best a half-baked conception of a cult leader, Quinn proves a villain worthy of an Edwardian horror story. By this point in the picture we've learned that the cult leaders had some time before captured a sort of earth goddess (Sharon Morgan) who subsists on human blood. By sacrificing to her, the cultists initially enjoyed good harvests. But just as she seemed ready to die when they found her, so she seems reluctant to go on living on the diet they offer her. It's bad enough that Malcolm sheds his own blood to force-feed her and has others do the same. Quinn quite explicitly wants to treat the goddess like a machine, hoping to jump-start her power by gorging her with full-scale human sacrifice. That rings true as a particularly 19th century (or so) form of villainy or industrial-strength hubris combined with control-freak patriarchal insanity. Jones runs with the idea and his over-the-top villainy pretty much saves the picture.

It helps, too, that the latter half of the film has more action, allowing Evans to show off his real strengths as a filmmaker. The two big scenes are Thomas's fight with a "Gimp"-like henchman who operates a human-sized meat grinder for Quinn and his final battle, assisted by his sister and Andrea, with a nearly indestructible Quinn. Jones has been such a despicable villain that Quinn's gruesome demise is the picture's indisputable highlight. Unfortunately, Apostle still has to resolve Thomas's character arc. He lost his faith, you see, when his church was burned and friends were killed in China during the Boxer Rebellion. Were this a different sort of film, you might expect his struggle against real evil to revive his faith, but faith doesn't come into it, since he instead encounters, for all intents and purposes, a real god. Better still, he gets to become a real god by the end of the picture as the old goddess passes her mojo on to him. Is this a good thing? Much of the cult village has been burnt down by this point, but Malcom is still wandering around and gets to see Thomas's transfiguration. Does that mean the cult gets to start over again, only better this time? It's probably better not to ask. Apostle adds up to less than the sum of its parts, but there is genuine horror in it, just enough to justify its presence on Netflix over the past Halloween season, and maybe enough to justify a look at other times of the year.

ERREMENTARI (2017)

The Spanish affinity for traditional gothic horror extends to the Basque country, which gives us Paul Urkijo Alijo's grim fairy tale of a film. Based on a European legend that also influenced the "Howling Man" episode of The Twilight Zone, Errementari is set at the time of the First Carlist War in 19th century Spain. A deserter from that war is Patxi the blacksmith (Kandido Uranga), who made a pact with the minor demon Sartael (Eneko Sagardoy) in order to be reunited with his wife, only to find that she, presuming him dead, had shacked up with another man and had a daughter, Usue (Uma Bracaglia). The tragedy results in  the other man killed, the wife a suicide, Usue a despised outcast raised by foster parents taunted with tales of her mother suffering in Hell, and Patxi the keeper of a terrible secret. The arrival of a government official with stories of a hidden stash of gold at Patxi's forge hastens the revelation of the secret, but it's Usue, hoping that the smith can repair her headless doll, who makes the discovery. Believing the smith a fresh murderer (in fact, a trespasser has died by accident), Usue discovers evidence that Patxi is keeping a child in a cage. Naturally, not having watched The Twilight Zone, Usue frees the pathetic victim, who promptly reveals himself as Sartael in all his folkloric if not cartoonish splendor: red skin, horns, presumably cloven hooves, etc. The demon tries to avenge himself on Patxi, but the blacksmith could not have held a demon captive in the first place without being knowledgeable and resourceful. In folklore, demons are very vulnerable. Far from invulnerable to physical attack, they're also hypersensitive to the ringing of bells and, like some vampires, they're compelled to count chickpeas cast on the ground. Worse, mess with the pile and the poor creatures have to start counting over again. It soon becomes clear that for all his frightful appearance and taunting, Sartael's actually a pretty pathetic excuse for a demon, a laughingstock among his peers, and especially his superiors, for getting himself trapped and detained so easily by a mortal. When another hellish emissary arrives, planning not only to claim Patxi's soul at last but also to demote Sartael to a fate worse than death in the infernal hierarchy, old enemies will join forces, each seeking redemption of a sort through kindness to Usue and the memory of her much-wronged mother.  Boasting lavish art-direction, lurid cinematography and a satiric attitude toward Carlist conservatism (their side supported absolute monarchy) that echoes in Europe and elsewhere today, Errementari feels like a crossbreed merging Spanish historical gothic and a more Burtonesque sensibility in its sympathy for a devil who never entirely becomes a good guy. Available for streaming on Netflix in its native language and an English dub, it may be the most charming new horror film you'll see this Halloween season.

THE WEREWOLF AND THE YETI (La Maldicion de la Bestia, 1975)

The turning of the blowing of the leaves again turns my thoughts toward horror and monsters, and so it's time again to visit with Jacinto Molina and his onscreen alter ego, Paul Naschy. "The Curse of the Beast" is his reboot, authored by himself and directed by M. I. Bonns, of the saga of Waldemar Daninsky, who here turns into a wolfman again for the first time. Anthropologist Daninsky travels to the Himalayas with a team of European scientists in response to seeming photographic evidence of the existence of the legendary Abominable Snowman. The yeti, however, proves to be literally the last of Waldemar's worries. Losing track of an injured comrade, our hapless hero ends up in the clutches of a pair of witches who love him up into a werewolf. The territory actually is infested with witches. One, bearing the totemic name (for Naschy) of Wandessa (Silvia Solar) is the power behind the local warlord, Sekkar Khan (Luis Induni). The Khan is plagued with ulcers on his back, but Wandessa eases his agonies with skin grafts flayed from the backs on captive women. Relief never lasts, so the Khan constantly sends his head minion Temujin (Jose Luis Chinchilla) to fetch more captives, including the members of Daninsky's expedition. Whatever his own problems, Waldemar has got to save the day, though there's something of a selfish motive behind his heroism. He's been told by a local mystic, who unsurprisingly gets killed by the bandits, that the leaves of a certain plant, mixed with the blood of a young woman, will cure lycanthropy. Surprise follows surprise as only a small amount of his girlfriend's blood is needed, and the cure works-- but not before the filmmakers square things up with the audience by pitting werewolf Waldemar in perfunctory fashion against a yeti that appears in the worn, much-edited print I saw as little more than a tall blur. To use Naschy's Universal reference points, what we have here is a little bit of Werewolf of London (the Himalayan origin), a little bit of House of Dracula (the happy ending) and a bit of the old studio's Arabian Nights pictures thrown in, with the usual extra bits of sex and sadism thrown in to satisfy Seventies audiences, though not so many for me as in an uncut print. It's far from Naschy's best, but I like the way his imagination ran rampant here in directions I didn't anticipate. And of course this was not the end of Waldemar or his curse, but it's nice to see that in one part of the multiverse things turned out all right for him.

KNIFE OF ICE (Il coltello di ghiaccio, 1972)

For four years, and over four films, erstwhile Hollywood "Baby Doll" Carroll Baker was the muse of Italian director Umberto Lenzi. Knife of Ice was the last of their collaborations, and apparently an effort by the producers to get in, quite late, on the Edgar Allan Poe racket. The title is allegedly rooted in a Poe line describing fear as a "knife of ice," but if you google that phrase and the name Poe, all you get are references to the Lenzi film. Whatever. It looks like they took footage from Francesco Rosi's Moment of Truth to lend a touch of morbid spectacle to the opening credits as Baker's character, Martha, watches a bullfight. Lenzi spares Baker a trip to the dubbing studio this time by making her character a hysterical mute, traumatized since childhood by the death of her parents. I suppose it's because she's not deaf that she's never learned sign language, communicating instead mostly by pantomime, sometimes by writing notes, and on the telephone by rapping on the mouthpiece in a manner presumably intelligible to her intimates. She receives a gift in the form of a recording she made as a little girl, a morbid recitation about a trial and execution. In short order, people around her start dying.

Il coltello is more a whodunit than a giallo, as there are no setpiece kills. Rather, bodies are found after the fact and clues collected mostly pointing toward some local Satanic cult. When an irreverent hippie is caught skulking around he looks all too guilty, but as the killings continue he proves a red herring. There are more likely suspects, according to movie logic, in Martha's inner circle, from the family doctor to an uncle with eccentric scholarly interests. Martha herself seems to be losing it, constantly flashing back to eyes watching her and the friends and loved ones she's lost, as someone finally comes for her.

Who done it? Could it be Satan??? 

There's some nice suspenseful business toward the end as Martha, feeling threatened, tries to make noise to get the attention of a motorcyclist, only to have the sounds drowned out by his revving engine. As clutching hands close in on her, Martha finally screams, and for a moment I thought the film was going to prove a tremendous fakeout with people pretending to be murdered so the poor woman could get her voice back. It turns out, however -- take this as a spoiler warning -- that the restoration of Martha's speech is only a side effect, the real purpose of the final attack being to take the true murderer into custody. You see, Martha didn't like it that some people could speak while she couldn't and so, possibly unbeknownst to herself, she occasionally killed them, including a beloved niece. She could confess all this in writing, so the only benefit of getting her voice back is that now, apparently totally bonkers, Martha can recite the bit from her childhood recording. None of this explains why someone had to come at her like a strangler, but the idea there, of course, is to fake the audience out one more time. In the end, Knife of Ice is mainly an exercise in audience manipulation and misdirection. While handsomely directed, its gimmickry renders it little more than a trifle that will certainly disappoint anyone expecting stronger stuff from Lenzi.

INQUISICION (1976)

If no one expects the Spanish Inquisition, how is anyone gonna deal with the French Inquisition? That's the challenge of Jacinto Molina's directorial debut, a vehicle for his on-screen alter ego, Paul Naschy. Filmed in Spain while longtime dictator Francisco Franco was still dead, the production probably was careful not to give Spanish Catholicism a bad name. Naschy plays itinerant judge Bernard de Fossey, a hammer to witches who takes too much pleasure in his work. He struggles to suppress the sexual arousal he feels reading accounts of witches consorting with the Devil, and takes his distress out on accused witches who are almost invariably attractive and tortured in the nude. Bernard's not after your typical hag; that would kill his buzz more than he actually wants it killed.

Bernard stirs up hysteria when he arrives in town, especially when the boyfriend of Catherine (Daniel Giordano), a comely local lass, is murdered by hooded highwaymen. Obsessed with getting justice, Catherine consults an actual witch (Tota Alba) who shows her how to get in touch with Satan, who may, if he's in the mood, give her the key to the mystery. It's not quite that mysterious to us, because we've seen how Bernard looks at Catherine -- and veteran Naschy fans may have noticed something familiar about one of the highwayman's leaping attack on the victim. Sure enough, under the influence of a potion -- if not also Satan! -- Catherine envisions Bernard removing the hood. She decides to take the fight to him, fulfilling his own fears of temptation, but events quickly spiral out of either person's control.

One of the subplots in Molina's screenplay follows Renover (Antonio Iranzo), a one-eyed professional informer who spreads rumors of witchcraft out of misogynist resentment of women who won't give the poor scumbag a chance. When his aggressive advances on Catherine's friends end with two women dead and himself mortally wounded, he uses his ante-mortem statement to denounce Catherine and her witchy mentor. Bernard actually has tried to protect Catherine from prosecution but has no choice now but to put her through an ordeal. He seems taken by surprise when Catherine confesses, and then denounces him, after which damning corroborating evidence promptly appears to seal his fate. While Catherine goes to her death screaming in terror, Bernard seems resigned to his fate, if not relieved by it.

For an actor-turned-director Naschy/Molina was unusually self-effacing. I don't know how many people knew that Naschy and Molina, who'd already written many Naschy pictures, were one and the same, but I'd expect exploitation film producers not to take chances and tout director Naschy as the next Cornell Wilde or something similar. Make what you will of his creative split personality, but Inquisicion is clearly an ambitious work for a first-time director. Visually it's quite attractive in the way of many Euro horror films that take advantage of ancient locations, but also effectively expressionist in cinematographer Miguel Fernandez Mila's use of lurid reds in Catherine's vision of the Sabbat (with Bernard as the Devil) and Bernard's vision of Catherine as a crimson temptress. As a writer, Molina plots things fairly well, though his conclusion, with Catherine's denunciation following Renover's fatal encounter, feels anticlimactic, if only because we expect something more hair-raising from Paul Naschy. That he closes the film that way suggests that, despite the sleaze of the torture scenes, Molina saw this as something more than the typical Naschy vehicle.

Naschy's film is a late entry in a continental cycle of witchfinding pictures, a subset of a larger "history of cruelty" genre. While its torture scenes put it in the exploitation category alongside pictures like Jess Franco's Bloody Judge, Inquisicion sustains a more subtle ambiguity on the subject of witchcraft and the devil. The old witch is plainly a witch in the most mundane sense, knowledgeable about potions and such, but we're left to judge for ourselves, prompted by the film's one voice of reason, whether Catherine saw the Devil or not -- or whether Bernard even was in on killing Catherine's lover. Our only evidence for his guilt is Catherine's vision, the authority of which we're forced to question. If Catherine's community is cursed by anything, it's by a common human malice and hypocrisy that consumes clergy and laypeople alike. Overall it's an impressive debut, though it came a little too late in the history of Spanish horror for Naschy to build on it as he might have had he stepped up a few years earlier. It still goes down as one of both Molina and Naschy's best efforts.

SEVEN DEATHS IN THE CAT'S EYE (La morte negli occhi del gatto, 1973)

Like many an Italian giallo, Antonio "Anthony M. Dawson" Margheriti's film takes place in that hotbed of horror, the United Kingdom. The time is the early 20th century, a point when the theories of Sigmund Freud are still a novelty. The location is, more specifically, Scotland, where Corringa MacGrieff (Jane Birkin) is returning to the ancestral stead, Castle Dragonstone, to visit her mother. It's a tense reunion. There's a fight over whether or not to sell the castle, and the family eccentric, Lord James (Hiram Keller) is being an arrogant jerk as usual. Also, there's some sort of ape in the castle. It gets worse from there.

Corringa's return to Dragonstone Castle exposes her to menaces in many forms.

When Corringa's mother is killed, there are many suspects to choose from, from her bitter sister (Francoise Christophe) to her lover (Anton Diffring), who's two-timing her with the apparently bisexual French tutor Suzanna (Doris Kunstmann) to Lord James and the ape, also named James. Once more people start to die you have to add another suspect to the list: the mother herself, who if the family legends are true will have returned from the dead as a vampire. The family cat jumping on her coffin is one of the tip-offs, and as the title indicates, this grumpy cat is a malign presence most of the time and a witness to (if not a perpetrator of) most of the killings.

Margheriti's direction isn't really ambitious or audacious, but Carlo Carlini's cinematography has its moments.

More gothic than giallo -- the murders are rather simply staged -- Seven Deaths follows a whodunit formula only to blindside you with a final revelation that you most likely won't have anticipated while trying to separate the real suspects from the red herrings, yet is typically gothic itself. Generally more spooky than sleazy, Margheriti's film benefits from a genre-perfect location and appropriate cinematography by Carlo Carlini. The performances, including English dubbing, are what they are and seem right for the setting, even if some of the dialogue sounds even more stilted than is typical in translation. The versatlie Margheriti may do nothing special visually here, but nailing the mood the way he and Carlini do is most of the battle, and the rest is just a matter of having fun with the undemanding horrors and the extra bits of Euro weirdness that make this genre so endearing.

DVR Diary: GHOST OF YOTSUYA (1959)

Starting in the late 1950s the horror genre exploded into a bold new world of color. Japan's answer to Fisher, Bava and Corman was Nobuo Nakagawa, who brought an oft-filmed 1825 kabuki play to livid life at the end of the decade. It's a simple story of greed and its supernatural comeuppance that wouldn't be entirely out of place in an American EC comic of the time. An ambitious ronin, Iemon (Shigeru Amachi) wants to marry Oiwa (Katsuko Wakasugi) won't take no for an answer when her dad. apparently a good judge of character, turns him down. Encouraged by his mephistophelean minion Naosuke (Shuntaro Emi), Iemon kills the old man, and a few others, covering his trail so Oiwa is none the wiser. Married life proves less comfortable than Iemon hoped for, as he's quickly reduced to walking the streets as the Japanese equivalent of those guys who wore sandwich boards in old American movies, advertising that wonder remedy, "Dutch medicine." When an opportunity arises to marry into more wealth, Iemon decides that it's time to move on and leave no loose ends behind. Resourceful Naosuke provides him with some European poison to mix into Oiwa's face cream to ensure a painful, disfiguring demise, but Iemon's taking no chances. He recruits the hapless Takuetsu (Jun Otomo) to seduce Oiwa so the aggrieved hubby can rush in, in a cruel variant on the old badger game, and exercise his conjugal prerogative by killing his adulterous wife. Takuetsu quickly loses his enthusiasm for the project when Oiwa applies the face cream and is, as planned, painfully disfigured. Deranged by pain, she tries to kill Takuetsu but ends up impaling herself on a knife. Not to worry: Iemon promptly arrives to make sure Takuetsu doesn't tell the truth. We learn that Iemon's prerogative extends to nailing the "adulterers" to shingles and cutting them in half, but he's content to dump their bodies in a swamp.

The problem for quickly-remarried Iemon is that Oiwa died cursing him, and in Tokugawa Japan you can't write that stuff off as mere delirium. She and Takuetsu have a bad habit of turning up on intimate occasions, while Iemon has the worse habit of trying to kill ghosts with a sword. Worse still, his aim is pretty accurate, but there usually are living people -- temporarily living people, that is -- standing where he sees the ghosts.  In short, Iemon goes Sword of Doom on his new family. Meanwhile, his old family isn't done with him. Oiwa's brother, whom he and Naosuke had thrown down a waterfall earlier in the picture, reappears as a living, angry avenger. He teams up with both a live sister and, indirectly, a dead sister to mete out samurai justice to the villain. In many respects Yotsuya is basically a samurai film or the cynical, debunking variety with supernatural trappings, but some of the spooky stuff is quite effective, particularly the surprise reveal of Oiwa's ghost crawling on Iemon's ceiling. The best scene from the horror standpoint is Iemon's out-of-control rampage, which has you fearing helplessly for innocent people once you realize that whenever he starts waving his sword at a ghost, somebody real is going to die. Tadashi Nishimoto's cinematography strikes a stylish balance between natural locations and expressionistic set lighting, but overall Nakagawa's work in color here is a dry run for his real calling-card effort in Jigoku the following year.Yotsuya is still a nicely done film in its own right that did much, in retrospect, to put Japan on the global horror film map.