If I Should Die Before I Wake (1952)

Original title: Si muero antes de despertar

School kid Lucio (Néstor Zavarce) is a bit of a trouble maker – at least that’s what his parents and his teachers tell him so often, it can’t help but become true. In truth and to modern eyes, the boy seems perfectly fine and does his darndest to live up to the pressures of a restrictive society – Argentina in the early 50s clearly wasn’t fun and games for a child – and a father (Floren Delbene) who can’t divorce the pressures of his job from his home life. Not that Lucio realizes much of this, of course, unlike the film’s viewers.

When a girl from his class Lucio is sometimes friendly with is murdered, Lucio is the only one who knows about her connection to a stranger giving gifts to little girls in exchange for a vow of secrecy. Then, gift giving and later a disappearance happen to an actual friend of Lucio, who by now has realized there’s a connection between the mysterious giver of gifts and young girls getting murdered. Alas, Lucio has sworn to his friend not to tell anyone about her “friend”, and exactly those pressures that are supposed to make him a “good boy” are now keeping his mouth shut. Not that anyone believes him when he eventually can’t help himself and does talk. Since the grown-up world is of little use, Lucio will have to save his friend all by himself.

This 70 minute Cornell Woolrich adaptation by Carlos Hugo Christensen – at this point still working in his native Argentina before fleeing from the Peron regime into exile in Brasil – was initially meant as the third tale in Christensen’s omnibus movie Never Open That Door but was retooled as a stand-alone movie to keep the other film to a saleable length. This doesn’t feel bloated up for a feature release however. Rather it is a concisely told tale with little fat on its bones – and everything that’s superfluous to the plot speaks very eloquently about growing up as being in a state of perpetual pressure from demands by a grown-up world that never seems to be there when it is actually needed, and so strengthens the film’s theme as well as its plot engine.

This is an entry into the small sub-sub genre of childhood noirs, a group of films – with Night of the Hunter as the most obvious example (unless you don’t count that film as a noir, but we can’t help that, can’t we?) – that typically mix the crueller realities of childhood with the air of dark fairy tales, something that’s bound to resonate well with the dark shadows and intensity of everyone’s favourite non-genre. Christensen commands the space between the visually darkly poetic and the heightened realism of the film’s ideas about childhood alienation (or the child’s world as something separated from the reality of the grown-ups supposedly taking care of them) very well indeed, creating the melodramatic intensity so typically of Woolrich until things culminate in a pretty incredible wilderness (of the fully artificial and therefore particularly wonderful kind) climax, including prayers, traumatized children and a father trying to purge his own failings by violence.

It’s all very impressive, and in mood and style stands shoulder to shoulder with the US noir cycle.

Three Films Make A Post: Torment is just the beginning.

The Butterfly House aka Pernikahan Arwah (2025): A couple’s wedding preparations are disturbed when the groom’s family curse starts making things difficult. For reasons of symmetry, this curse has quite a bit to do with weddings.

I found Paul Agusta’s piece of Indonesian horror to be a pleasant example of the form. It is neither as gruesome as some horror films from the country, nor as soap operatic, instead inhabiting a middle ground of the perfectly decent, with nice enough horror sequences, good enough acting and a decently flowing script.

1978 (2025): I expected a little more of a film set during the Argentinean military dictatorship where some torturers and their victims encounter something perhaps even worse than themselves. Unfortunately, Luciano and Nicolás Onetti’s film makes little use of the metaphorical space screaming to be filled here – the torturers could be any random shit heels from any place and time in history and nothing at all would change about what happens to them and how they react to it, and the occult forces unleashed are run-of-mill Satanic business.

It’s not a terrible movie – some of the effects and monster designs are really neat for this budget bracket, and the directors know how to keep things flowing – but there’s nothing of real interest going on here.

The Big 4 (2022): As much as I usually like the films of Timo Tjahjanto, this action comedy about violent idiots killing other violent idiots for reasons of FAMILY is dire. That the humour is unfunny and ill-paced is bad enough, but somehow, the deeply action-affine director also can’t seem come up with any action set pieces of note. The problem isn’t just the humour, or the somewhat slighter amount of blood and gore than usual in Indonesian action. The film shows a lack of imagination and weight – or the proper kind of weightlessness – I find genuinely confusing coming from this particular filmmaker.

Trenque Lauquen (2022)

Apparently, it helps for a piece of arthouse slow cinema to come from Argentina if it wants my buy-in. Who knew?

Anyhow, if you can make time and mind space for 250 minutes or so of various characters (particularly those played by Laura Paredes and Ezequiel Pierri) in various timelines very slowly being drawn into various kinds of (non-violent) obsession with various mysteries and secrets – including love letters hidden in old books, the disappearance of a woman, an uncategorized specimen of flower, and a monster/child/who knows you’ll never get to see – you might just become as riveted as I found myself.

The slowness, here, turns out to be patience, a willingness to let things develop in their own shape and tempo. Which doesn’t at all mean that director Laura Citarella eschews increasing the tempo when it fits her, probably mysterious, plans. As well, there is a willingness to keep some of the film’s mysteries unsolved, or rather, to admit the ambiguity of leaving space for an audience’s interpretations.

On the way to that not solving of mysteries, the film moves through phases and stages – practically lineated in chapters in a gesture that seems rather more inviting than slow cinema often is – where the focus shifts from different protagonists, to different obsessions, and different kinds of beauty, finding much in small actorly gestures, nature, and the town of Trenque Lauquen and its surroundings, testing and exploring different kinds of connections between people.

There is also a strain of weirdness running through the film I found particularly enticing, perhaps more Magical Realism than the versions of the fantastic I’m most fond of. Some reviewers have found a comparison to Lynch here, but Trenque Lauquen lacks an interest in, or perhaps does not believe in, the deep and uncomfortable darkness that always rears its head with Lynch. Rather, this film’s weirdness feels kinder and more compassionate, with little risk for the characters to fall foul of an uncaring universe or moving into the wrong metaphysical hut for some decades. It’s not such a cosy world, though, for there are still human passions, foibles and dramas.

Not being Lynchian, mind you, is not a weakness. Citarella’s much too interesting a director and writer to need to take on other people’s world views, and has one rather singularly her own.

The Delinquents (2023)

Original title: Los delincuentes

Aging bank employee Morán (Daniel Elías) steals a very particular amount of money from his bank. It’s more or less exactly double the sum he would earn by working for them to retirement age. His idea is this: hide the money, get arrested, and spend three and a half years in prison instead of twenty as a bank employee. The money he gives to his colleague Román (Esteban Bigliardi) who only learns of the plan after the money is already stolen, for safe-keeping until Morán gets out. Afterwards, Román will get half of the money and be free from doing a crap job for the rest of his life as well.

If he doesn’t take the money, Morán will name him as an accomplice, so Román doesn’t feel he has much of a choice in the matter, though his conscience doesn’t always let him rest easily.

The rest of the film concerns Morán’s adventures on the run and in prison, Román’s suffering under the bank’s intensely passive aggressive reaction to the theft, and various matters of freedom, love and sudden influxes of quiet beauty.

Slow Cinema is an interesting thing to me: about half of the films from the not-genre I know, I find insufferably pompous exactly because they’re so fixated on not being pompous but merely ponderous. The other half, I tend to be rather in love with, though these films often aren’t obviously different from the ones I can’t stand at all. It is, alas, a matter of mood, vibes, feeling, or however one might want to call it, something that’s even less quantifiable than most things concerning art (popular or un).

For its first third, I wasn’t really sure if I was on board with The Delinquents’ apparent project of turning heist movie tropes quotidian and drawing them out endlessly. Yet slowly (sorry) but surely, the film did work its particular kind of magic by digressing into directions that have little to do with deconstructing or slowing down heist movie tropes, or making them more “realistic” by making them less dramatic.

Instead, director Rodrigo Moreno starts from the idea of the heist movie as a dream of freedom – freedom  from the shackles of the capitalist project, from the emptiness of the daily drudge – and follows that idea to the many places it leads: love, nature, poetry and sudden bursts – perhaps too dramatic a term for a film that ever hardly is that – of an intense visual beauty achieved through patience and care, a deep interest in the small gestures that make up daily lives as much as in the way small changes of light, a poem read through years and years or hair turning grey and thin can be beautiful.

I’m not sure there’s actually that much intellectual substance to the film’s philosophy, or even depth to its characters, but the longer the film goes on, the less these concrete things turn out to be the point here. Rather, it is moods, feelings and hopes this seems to be about in the end, and that moment when a series of shots in a film overwhelms you not because of any technical accomplishment (though there is a lot of technical accomplishment here if you are into that sort of thing) but because the ineffable way it touches you.

The Delinquents is often very funny as well, in a weird and sideways manner that’ll not be for everyone as much as everything else about this won’t be.

In short: Charly, Days of Blood (1990)

Original title: Charly, días de sangre

Because his son Charly (Fabián Gianola) is introverted, doesn’t date and is just plain weird – at least that’s his opinion - Inspector Santos (Norman Briski) convinces Charly’s best bud Daniel (Martín Guerrero) to take Charly and some friends to the Inspector’s big ass house in the country. Daniel is also to bring a girl for Charly to have sex with, a suggestion the guy takes in his stride, I gotta say.

He also – alas, off-screen - manages to find a proper candidate for the project. The first day of Daniel, Charly, friends and girlfriends at the house does run to what must be Inspector Dad’s satisfaction, but the night brings more than Charly’s sexual hang-ups (if you want to call having performance problems in the house where your older brother burned to his death right in front of you a hang-up), for someone is stalking and spying on the friends.

The next morning starts with a dead cat, and the rest of the weekend away devolves into a whole salad of murder and hysteria.

For the first twenty minutes or so, this Argentinian SOV slasher is one of those perfectly weird movies you can only encounter in this part of the movie world (I mean SOV horror, not Argentina). The – long – scene in which Inspector Dad explains what’s what to Daniel is absolutely incredible, the young man keeping an improbably straight face to the fidgety scenery chewing and bizarre demands of the older man – line delivery and the lines themselves are incredibly bizarre. The scene is capped with a fountain of exposition delivered while the old man is taking a piss. The audience at least is somewhat prepared for this at that stage, for we witnessed an introductory scene in which the good Inspector tells a bewildered colleague - whose “what!” reaction is the most naturalistic bit of acting in the whole movie – that he “loves evil” but “hates evil-doers”.

The mix of fidgeting and improbable non-sequitur dialogue continues for a bit, until the film alas calms down to become a straightforward if slow and competently shot slasher with quite a bit of female nudity (one could argue more than is good for it) that is entertaining enough if you lack taste like I do.

Fortunately, the film takes a turn back to the weirder for the final act, when the killer turns out to be what I can only describe as a were-burn victim, and some pretty good gore gags ensue. This is also the rare slasher lacking a final girl; though I wouldn’t exactly call this a plus. We also get a cop who just shrugs when he sees his boss suffering a heart attack, as well as a downer ending as if this were made in the 70s. By the standards of SOV slashers, that’s rather a lot.

In short: Wild Tales (2014)

Original title: Relatos salvajes

This anthology movie directed by Damián Szifron tells six tales in which mostly members of the upper bourgeoisie (or the stinking rich, as we cell ‘em around here) encounter extreme events that often drive them to rather extreme behaviour. For example one of the tales sees a woman (and the only poor protagonist) encounter the man who drove her father to suicide, her problematically helpful colleague suggesting she might want to apply some rat poison to his meal. Another concerns an architect and expert for the demolition of buildings getting really angry about…having to pay his parking tickets. Another one tells of the highly complicated business negotiations needed to buy one’s son out of hit-and-run trouble.

In tone, these stories tend to the highly sardonically and blackly humorous, usually leading the protagonists through a short series of escalating suspense set pieces of a cynical yet usually exciting bend Hitchcock would probably have approved of (and wished to have made his films in a time and place where he could have gotten away with some of this stuff). Szifron is technically highly accomplished, using the sort of slick direction you could imagine in a high class car commercial, quite consciously making the cynical and harshly satirical plots look sexy, which does at the very least produce the pretty satisfying frisson of a very well told, though pretty bitter, joke.

There is, quite obviously, rather a lot of critique of the bourgeoisie in the modern world involved, though the film’s cynical approach to the matter does leave this critique rather on the surface level, putting too much distance between audience and characters to get much more than entertained sneers as a reaction.

For my taste, the second half of the film is a bit weaker than the first one, the stories there going on a bit longer than the earlier ones in ways their set-ups can’t necessarily carry. Particularly the parking ticket episode is weak, chaining the viewer to a whiny, self-centred asshole for what feels like hours for way too little pay-off.


Wild Tales is still a fine, fun, film, at least on one of those days when one feels rather more misanthropic than usual.

Terrified (2017)

Original title: Aterrados

Three houses in the same suburban street are hit by strange and disturbing events that end in more than just one death, as well as what looks a lot like the corpse of a child digging itself out of his grave and walking back home. The policeman Funes, and his good friend Jano, a former pathologist who has turned into the sort of paranormal investigator purposefully good at burying the terrible stuff, and the team of “specialist” Dr Allbreck and her colleague Dr Rosentok are involved in investigations of separate of these incidents, only to realize they might just be looking into the same series of events from different angles. I’d love to tell you which actor is playing whom here, but the absence of a proper cast and character list online in combination with my general lack of knowledge about more than a handful of Argentinean films and actors makes that impossible.

Anyway, when the characters team up and spend quality night time in the houses where all the strange stuff has been happening, events quickly get out of control completely.

I rather liked director Demián Rugna’s The Last Gateway from 2007. Like the earlier movie, Aterrados is a film very much in the spirit of the Weird and the strange, yet where Gateway sometimes felt amateurish and random (that’s not necessarily a bad thing), Terrified’s older Rugna has full control about the world of the strange and the grotesque he creates here. Watching the film, I still found myself sometimes reminded of Fulci-style cosmic Italian horror (though with far fewer gore effects than the maestro would have included) with its dominating mood of the irrational. However, the Fulci-esque elements have turned into small nods included in a more personal approach to cosmic horror.

And cosmic horror Terrified’s tale of a dimensional rift right in suburbia absolutely is, even if it at first seems to be a more conventional bit of supernatural horror with comparatively conventional, though well realized, shock sequences (at least if you find the idea of a creepy, naked, long-limbed man living and not living under a guy’s bed conventional). That, as it turns out, is the director biding his time until the final act turns towards the kind of strange that reminds even more of Junji Ito’s grotesque cosmicism than of Fulci – a huge compliment, even though I do love Fulci much more than the next guy. Rugna plays an interesting structural trick: the film’s first half, when you still expect a more conventional horror piece, is actually less conventionally structured, non-linearly moving around the plot’s timeline in a way that in hindsight is a spiral movement towards its core. Once the true cosmic grotesquerie starts, the film’s narrative becomes unexpectedly linear. You’d expect it to work the other way around, of course, but Rugna’s control about the Weird stuff – which I don’t want to spoil for those having the luck of going into the film for the first time – is so great the final act is strange enough it doesn’t need added formal strangeness to work how it is supposed to. This structure is also a wonderful way to play with the audience’s expectations, keeping the viewer confused early on until she gets the increasingly disturbing picture of what’s really going on.

Technically, Terrified is a fine film too, featuring camera work whose angles and movements are only ever subtly wrong and some wonderfully “haunted” suburban homes that become stranger in ways a viewer might only notice subconsciously. The only element of the film that doesn’t always quite come together as well as it could are the special effects – while everything is conceptually very strong stuff, sometimes the effects look a bit too much like effects; there are, on the other hand, some very strong moments there too, like the short glimpse of Allbreck’s fate (that’s as wonderfully Ito as things can get).


All this together add up to a film I find very special indeed, at least from the perspective of the friend of cosmic horror on screen. And which right minded person isn’t one?

Three Films Make A Post: Secrets kept hidden for 100 years are now revealed.

Incidente aka Incident (2010): On paper, this piece of POV horror by Argentinian director Mariano Cattaneo sounds pretty awful: a couple of documentarians (whose camera wielding half apparently can’t frame a shot decently to save his life) examining the occult connections of a spree killing of years past and some occultist academics awaken a rather possessive evil; lots of running around of people in various states of possession through a dilapidated industrial building ensues. In practice, and despite the much too shaky camera work, Cattaneo somehow turns this thin bit of plot into an entertaining 80 minutes of film, by what I can only imagine to be sheer willpower. The make-up effects are rather impressive for the film’s budget league, but what really makes this work as decently as it does is a proper sense of mood and pacing, I just wish it had been put to use on a more interesting story, though I do give the film some extra bonus points for its use of actual occult concepts in its backstory.

Hell House LLC II: The Abaddon Hotel (2018): While I enjoyed the first film in what is now apparently a franchise more than this sequel, Stephen Cognetti’s attempt at broadening his haunted house tale towards a more concrete mythology of its own still ends up being a perfectly entertaining little movie featuring some actually thoughtful retconning of elements of the first film, and quite a few scenes that are effectively creepy. Like Cattaneo, Cognetti also understands the importance of mood and pacing for this sort of low budget affair, so there’s none of the feet dragging that can mar indie horror, and a clear sense of purpose to everything we see and hear.

Heilstätten (2018): And here’s yet another POV horror film, this time around from my native Germany, directed by Michael David Pate. Bottom feeding Youtube “personalities” break into a former hospital complex with a very bad past (this is Germany after all). The expected mixture of romantic travails and supernatural and/or slasheriffic violence ensues, as does a double plot twist that doesn’t work terribly well but certainly isn’t boring.


And really, while there’s nothing terribly exciting about Heilstätten apart from it being yet another horror movie from Germany that isn’t just amateur gore hour (though it features some pretty well done bits of the icky stuff as well) or an arthouse flick, it works well throughout, keeps its pace up, takes care to make its characters less loathsome than you’d expect, and seems generally made by people who care about entertaining their audience. I certainly felt moved accordingly for most of the film’s 90 minutes.

Three Films Make A Post: You were right to be afraid of the dark.

Daemonium: Soldier of the Underworld (2015): This Argentinean SF/action/horror film directed by Pablo Parés and apparently written by half a dozen people consequently features a nearly unintelligible and wildly overambitious plot that includes everything you might think of - from battle androids to rebellious arch angels –, characters whose design looks cheap yet awesome in all the right ways but who mostly lack any visible reason to do the things they do, and a running time of nearly two hours where eighty minutes would have sufficed.

Yet this is also clearly a labour of love that looks and feels like the adaptation of an especially bonkers European science fiction comic. It throws visual clichés and inventiveness at its audience with great vigour and enthusiasm, features some wonderfully chosen and framed locations (Argentina apparently looks like a weird far future post-apocalyptic wasteland), and has action scenes that are bloody, clever and much better staged than you’d expect. So, despite its flaws, I find this one impossible to dislike. This was clearly made by my people.

The Frontier (2015): Oren Shai’s deeply 70s cinema and noir inspired and 70s set crime movie is a bit of a mixed bag. Jocelin Donahue’s main performance is excellent, and Kelly Lynch and Jim Beaver lend equally good support, but the rest of the acting is very hit or miss, which is no surprise seeing as the film demands from its actors to approach 70s-style naturalism with a conscious distance. This also follows from a script which at times can feel stilted and too interested in demonstrating its knowledge of gestures taken from other movies than in making its own. The result is a film that often feels artificial for no good reason beyond demonstrating the filmmakers’ ability to make it so. Which, ironically enough, is the polar opposite to the kind of 70s cinema it can’t stop telling us it is inspired by; while the noir way of stylisation (the film’s other hallmark) never was interested in stylisation as an end in itself.

Legend of the Phantom Rider (2002): In theory, Alex Erkiletian’s western/horror mix about two ancient spirits – one good, one evil, of course – doomed to be reincarnated again and again to murder one another this time around having their little spat in the Old West, sounds like a sure enough bit of entertainment. At least if you like your westerns and your horror films and like them even better when they get together (that is, if you are me).

Unfortunately, practice finds this direct-to-video film to be rather tedious, giving us scene after scene after scene supposed to prove to the audience how evil the bad guy is but which mostly demonstrate that watching a bald guy who can’t act for shit (Robert McRay) being a bit off a sadist gets boring pretty damn quick. I have no idea how his henchmen cope with the boredom.

Past Misdeeds: The Last Gateway (2007)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

Peace in the small, dilapidated town of Pleasentville [sic] is disturbed by a series of strange events. Kids fish a strange creature out of the creek locals use to drain their excrements in, a very dead looking woman appears in front of hotel owner John (Patricio Schwartz) asking for her son and peculiar strangers roam the town, looking for each other, but especially a man named Michael (Rodrigo Aragon).

Although John is denying it, Michael and his wife Marianne (Salome Boustani) are in fact hiding away in John's hotel. One day, after some strangeness with the walking dead woman and while Marianne is away, Michael decides to explain their situation to John.

Some unspecified time ago, the couple had just moved into a new house. On their very first night in the new home, Michael suddenly started to suffer from terrible pain in the abdomen and hallucinations (or were they?) of something crawling out of him. Fortunately, their closest neighbour was Victor (Hugo Halbrich), a doctor of something or the other, so Michael and Marianne went to him for help. After some back and forth, it turned out that the good doctor also was an occultist who had made a terrible mistake in a ritual. He had planned to open a gate to hell in his house, but botched his spell so that Michael's body became the gate. Victor really did seem sorry for his mistake and seemed more than willing to correct it, but there were more problems in form of a group of cultists (seemingly old acquaintances of Victor), who wanted the newly opened gate for themselves. The best Victor could do was distract them so that Michael and Marianne could get away.

For the following months, the pair had been driving around the country, plagued by the things that regularly clawed their way out of Michael and hunted by the cultists, as well as by a weird duo consisting of a priest and a satanist. Sleeping in Catholic churches gave the pair some protection from the gate, after some time however, the protections of any given place began to fade, crucifixes to burn.

One day, the couple's car broke down in Pleasentville, right in the middle of nowhere and they decided to hole up in John's hotel for a while.
Here, everything will culminate.

I don't much about Argentinean movies, and nothing at all about the Argentinean horror scene, so I'm not able to put Demian Rugna's The Last Gateway into the proper local context.

The film was shot in English, most of the dialogue seems post-dubbed by people trying to put on fake American accents, giving me the first of many flashbacks to Italy of the 70s and 80s the film provides.

The script also has a certain Italian feel to it. It is slow, doesn't always make sense and seems utterly disinterested in the narrative aspects of filmmaking, taking on many of the aspects a Dardano Sacchetti script for a Lucio Fulci movie would have. There's not much plot logic, no proper ending, no explanations for the motivations of characters, flashbacks come and go and come again, important developments happen off-screen, the dialogue is strangely stiff - in short, all narrative aspects of a the film are a complete mess, as if the film was written by someone from an alternative reality somewhat related but not identical to ours.

Of course, when narrative flaws are as amassed in a movie as they are here, the best (possibly only) way to still enjoy it is to just go with the flow, to let one's expectations of how reality is supposed to work just drift sideways a little until one finds a different perspective on what is happening on screen.

To me, the easiest way to get something out of a film like The Last Gateway is to just ignore the narrative and view it primarily as a mood piece. As such, it often reminded me of Lucio Fulci in his best period with an insistence on long, moody scenes without much happening that take place in interiors that look hot, wet and slowly rotting away from the inside.

I'm somewhat surprised to find this kind of mood in a film shot on digital in one of those bleached-out colour schemes filmmakers using digital instead of film seem to love. Often, the digital picture has problems conveying the proper organic feel that is desperately needed when it comes to the cinematic depiction of decay, but something in Rugna's direction, very possible the slow, slow rhythm he gives much of the film and some excellently rotten locations (no warehouses here), manage to overcome this technical burden.

I am also quite impressed by the quality and creativity of the effects. While composition, pacing and flaws of The Last Gateway are very Fulci-esque, the film goes in a different direction when it comes to its effects. Fulci used to revel in showing gore effects even when he couldn't properly execute them, the potential for ridicule be damned as long as the ideas the great man had in mind found some way onto the screen. Rugna, on the other hand, seems determined to only show us what he is able to pull of convincingly, which leads to less effects sequences than in the Italian's films. Having said that, there still is some gruesome stuff on display, as well as some monsters deeply indebted to the creature design in the better modern Lovecraft adaptations, strange masses of flesh with tentacles, spikes and eyes in all the wrong places. I do appreciate a good monster of this kind.

I don't think it is necessary to say much about the acting in the movie, because I don't think "acting" is the point in a film like this. There are people on screen who are there to mouth certain sentences (mostly concerning exposition that doesn't really make sense and a thematic thread about faith that fittingly leads nowhere), to look sweaty and grimy and to die horrible deaths when needed. They do all that well enough.

The Last Gateway is one of those films I find difficult to recommend to anyone although I highly enjoyed it myself. The problem is that much of what I find enjoyable about it - the sense of decay, the feeling that this film does not play by the rules of reality - will make it utterly unwatchable for many other people. Worse, whether a film's mood works for a given person or not is one of the most subjective things in art, so even if you are willing and able to suspend your sense of reality (that is the step after "suspension of disbelief") for the film, there's a certain possibility you still won't get anything out of it.
So, I can't really recommend The Last Gateway, yet I still do.

Penumbra (2011)

Once a year, lawyer Marga (Cristina Brondo) has to leave her native Spain for Argentina for work reasons. It's quite horrible for her, for she hates Argentina, Argentinians, the poor, and poor Argentinians, particularly when any of these people aren't acting properly servile towards here. Not to put too fine a point on it, but she's a bit of a prick.

While she's in Argentina, Marga also attempts to rent out a rather run-down apartment she owns. Things don't go well with it. First, the real-estate agent doesn't appear when and where he's supposed to appear, then she finds him, a guy named Jorge (Berta Muniz), rummaging around in front of the apartment door, and acting rather strangely. However, on the positive side, Jorge can offer a client willing to rent the apartment for a preposterous amount of money.

The only problem is that the deal has to be closed on the very same day. Jorge and Marga only have to wait in the apartment until the mysterious client appears. From here on out, Marga's day gets worse and more bizarre by the minute. She tangles with homeless and the police, kills a poor helpless fish and telephonically deals with her married lover and scheming colleagues. All the while, more and more of Jorge's colleagues arrive at the apartment, all of them acting exceedingly strange, increasingly bordering on threatening. Why, it might even come to a point when our unpleasant heroine will have to fight for her life.

Adrián García Bogliano's Penumbra (so called because it takes place before and during a solar eclipse) is a pretty perfect example of how you can take a little plot, a lot of weirdness, and a dark sense of humour and turn them into a fantastic film by virtue of absolute concentration. While the film's pacing and structure might seem slow and loose to a certain type of viewer, Bogliano's film is actually a master class in pacing and tightness, where every scene escalates the dramatic stakes and/or prepares a pay-off further down in Marga's increasingly disordered day where everything becomes stranger to her the closer the solar eclipse comes.

Bogliano makes much out of the handful of sets and locations the film takes place in, providing the audience not just with a sense of place in the more abstract meaning of the phrase, but also managing to impress upon us how the handful of places hang together geographically. The latter is particularly important to understand to be able share in Marga's experience of slowly running out of room to manoeuvre in - in a very real as well as in a metaphorical manner.

Marga, as note-perfectly played by Cristina Brondo (like other members of the cast an actress with quite a bit of TV experience), is an interesting central character too. She is, obviously, absolutely vile (though the film does subtly and not so subtly suggests reasons for her unpleasant character), and still, at least from a certain point in the plot on, there's little of a feeling that what she experiences are her just deserts. While the film has a bit of fun with letting her suffer and seeing her reaction to her very ordered life breaking down, there's also a sense of compassion on display I found surprising, as well as a certain relish in letting her be as unpleasant as she is.

The compassion with Marga on display rubs strangely against the sense of capital-W weirdness running through the movie. The Weird (here represented by the increasingly insane way everyone around Marga acts, and by what we learn of what the gang of real estate agents actually wants, as well as what happens with through these plans) and more human compassion aren't regular travelling companions, but the way Bogliano handles both, it's clear they can be when they are in the right hands.

Going by the quality of Penumbra, I really have to hunt down some of Bogliano's earlier movies, which are supposed to be quite a bit more violent (well, there is a decapitation here), and whose screenshots look a bit more like your typical piece of "indie horror" where this one has more of a proper old-fashioned movie look. I am quite looking forward to finding out if the striking sense for rigorous visual composition on display in Penumbra is something Bogliano slowly acquired over the years, something that just suddenly appeared, or something he always had.

Technorati-Markierungen: argentinian movies,reviews,horror,adrián garcía bogliano,cristina brondo,camila bordonaba,berta muniz

Satan's School For Ghouls: El Mariscal Del Infierno (1974)

aka Devil's Possessed

aka Marshall of Hell

This October, the agents of M.O.S.S. are digging deep into the heart of Halloween, taking a look at films about demons, the devil, and every kind of fiend (except US presidents and presidential candidates). You can find our collected annals of evil here.

Speaking of the devil, what would our old friend Satan be without worshippers? And how awesome would these worshippers be if they were played by Spanish super-wolfman Paul Naschy? Actually, not very, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

It's the middle ages. War hero baron Gilles de Lancré (Naschy) feels his influence on the king dwindling, and decides to concentrate even more than before on his true interest: finishing the Great Work of alchemy, so that he can afterwards replace the king (man why doesn't the guy trust him!?) and rule the world. So let's hope for him that Great Work isn't meant quite a metaphorically as some scholars believe.

Gilles's mad plan is driven on by the occultist (and con-woman) Georgelle (Norma Sebre). The two are lovers with quite a Macbeth-ish relationship, for when Gilles's pet alchemist (and Georgelle's co-con-person) tells him he needs virgin blood - and lots of it - to finish the Work, she's the one talking him out of his mild attacks of conscience ("Even more murders!?"). And she's right, too - surely, there can't be nothing wrong with sacrificing young women to Satan? Though it has to be said the film awakens doubts about Gilles's understanding of the word "virgin", seeing as how the way to the sacrificial altar seems to begin in his bed; at least if he's not inconvenienced in the act by an epileptic fit.

So Gilles begins a reign of terror among his serfs, kidnapping and killing young women and bleeding everyone else financially dry to finance the alchemical experiments. He's so enthusiastic he earns himself the nickname "the Marshall of Hell". But even medieval serfs can only take so much, so Gilles soon has a small peasant revolt going on. The serfs' leader, however, is quite easily captured and gotten rid of. Things change when Gilles's old war buddy Gaston de Malebranche (Guillermo Bredeston) comes home from time spent as prisoner of war. Even though the two men were fast friends, Gilles's and Georgette's love for tactically catastrophic violence soon turns Gaston into the baron's most dangerous enemy.

After a failed attempt on his life, Gaston decides to seek out the remnants of the resistance against his former friend, and soon enough turns what had been the demotivated shells of Gilles's enemies into a sub-chapter of Robin Hood's Merry Men. I'm sure Satan would help Gilles out if he actually existed inside of the fictional world of the film, but as it stands, all hope seems lost for the cause of evil, even though Gilles still has a few tricks up his sleeve.

When I started with my films for this October's M.O.S.S. project, I didn't suspect how difficult it would be to set eyes on films that actually contain the devil, demons, or at least supernatural fiends outside of their marketing material. Il Mariscal is not the film I was looking for, for what tries to look for all the world like a horror film variation of the career of Gilles de Rais, is at its heart a rather lame and tame swashbuckler whose bad guy just happens to sacrifice "virgins" to Satan.

Apart from this core disappointment, the film suffers from all the typical Naschy weaknesses: important, possibly exciting plot developments are talked about rather than shown (the build-up of the rebel army - happens off-screen; that first rebel leader - captured off-screen; and so on); a dubious sense of the way time works; a lack of production values that leaves most sets nearly empty; Naschy's obsession with trying to make his bad guy characters look sympathetic by having them whine a lot about what poor dears they are, which is a bit difficult to buy when talking about a character who mass rapes and murders women. Not that we'd actually get to see much of the depravity, because, unlike most of Naschy's films, this one is rather lacking in nudity and gore to help keep the audience awake.

For most of its running time, the film also lacks the secret weapon that keeps many of other Naschy's other films that share Mariscal's flaws at least watchable, often even brilliantly entertaining: an endearing love for the wrong-headed, the bizarre, and the improbable. Naschy's love for these things seems absolutely stunted in this outing, with little happening on or off screen that I wouldn't call quotidian.

I'd be less down on the film if it were any good as a swashbuckler (after all, "Robin Hood versus Satanists" sounds rather great, doesn't it?), but the swashbuckling is so rote and charmless it's impossible to get excited about it. It doesn't help the film's case how little visual imagination Naschy's regular collaborator León Klimovsky brings to the table here. Everything is very brown and slow and realized without passion, as if no one was even trying to let the film look like anything other than a handful of people in school play medieval garb waddling through brown, depopulated locations and sets without a designer. Just look at the so-called tourney with two horses and twenty guys standing in a row in the middle of nowhere and despair!

Among Mariscal's few positives is an expectedly melodramatic and physical performance by Naschy (his antagonist Bredeston is unfortunately not Errol Flynn, or even Richard Harrison). Naschy-the-actor really gets into his character's increasing mental deterioration; unfortunately, Naschy-the-writer doesn't provide him with much of interest to do. The final fight between (a stuntman clearly standing in for) Naschy and Bredeston is also relatively remarkable, with much better choreography and execution than anything that happens before it. In fact, if the rest of the film's action were of this standard, this could have been a rather more decent swashbuckler than it actually is.

That final fight is also the only point where the film does something actually surprising and interesting. Despite all genre conventions and being the designated noble hero of the piece, Bredeston loses the fight against his enemy, and it's the job of the peasant rebels to shoot the enemy of virginhood with arrows. This scene is staged as the only moment of true Naschy weirdness in the movie, with Naschy ranting about the awesome power the devil has provided him with, and the rebels just shrugging and turning him into a porcupine; the working classes finally asserting themselves.

Technorati-Markierungen: satan's school for ghouls,reviews,spanish movies,argentinian movies,paul naschy,leon klimovsky,norma sebre,guillermo bredeston,adventure,horror

The Warrior And The Sorceress (1984)

A lone swordsman dressed in black - whom the end titles in their incredible originality call Kain (David Carradine), but who is never named in the film itself, so I''ll just call him Toshiro - comes to a desert town somewhere on a two-sunned planet in sword and sorcery land.

Two bands of thugs are competing for dominance of the village's well, and with it its citizens. One of the gangs is lead by an overweight guy named Balcaz (William Marin) and his pet lizard doll person, the other by the only slightly more impressive Zek (Luke Askew) and his captain of the guard - if you want to call about a dozen badly armed hollering yokels a "guard" - Kief (Anthony De Longis).

As will come as a complete surprise, Toshiro plans on putting both groups even more at each other's throats than they already are, hoping to achieve a nice profit and possibly a thugless town in the process. The swordsman is rather good at his job, too. At a later stage in his plans he even manages to put the reptiloid slave trader Burgo (Arthur Clark) to good use.

Our hero's life gets a bit more difficult when he discovers that Zek keeps Naja (Maria Socas and her perpetually unvovered breasts), a sorceress/princess of a now fallen empire Toshiro had once sworn allegiance to, as a prisoner. For some reason, Zek wants the woman to make him a magical sword whose usefulness besides its sharpness the film never bothers to explain.

Toshiro for his part has not freed himself completely from his old oaths and tries to help Naja (or her breasts?). That is not going to make his life any easier.

I like to imagine that, like the character David Carradine always played, the actor drifted from country to country for most of his career, sprouting wisdom of the east he didn't have a clue about, lending his dubious acting talents to whomever payed him enough needed him. His wanderings must have lead him onto the set of this US/Argentinian sword and sorcery rip-off of Yojimbo some day, and because its director John C. Broderick gave him a bit of money and promised him many scenes of interaction with pretty, bare-breasted women, the veteran of looking bored while carrying a weapon stayed.

Keeping in mind the type of guy who usually starred in cheap sword and sorcery flicks, a professional sleepwalker like Carradine is an improvement. At least he looks like an interesting human being and not like a bodybuilder and has some experience in looking not completely ridiculous in fight scenes. Of course, a lot of Carradine's acting here still consists of him looking bored or stoned, possibly both, but that's still a better performance than Miles O'Keefe ever delivered. From time to time, Carradine even looks somewhat awake (I blame Maria Socas). Sometimes, he even looks as if he is having a bit of fun with trying to imitate Toshiro Mifune's body language out of Yojimbo, or at least the part of it that consists of rubbing his face or his chest.

The rest of the actors is about as good as you'd expect from a film like this. Maria Socas looks quite striking but doesn't have anything to do, while Askew and especially Marin do look appropriately silly/menacing.

Not surprisingly, while he's stealing merrily from both directors, Broderick's work on his film is neither on the level of Kurosawa nor on that of Leone, but he does a solid and unremarkable job of the point and shoot type. The film's pacing is also kinda alright. This outpour of relative technical competence alone does put The Warrior and the Sorceress on the higher tier of Sword and Sorcery films for me. Yes, I am damning with faint praise, but what can you do?

At least, the film tries for a bit more internal coherence than typical of its genre on screen. It might be a bit generous to speak of believable world building, but the characters at least seem to have a past that has something to do with the history of their surroundings. I'd even go so far to say that a better scriptwriter could have used the characters' pasts to produce a bit of tension here.

Of course, there was only John C. Broderick, and so the tension is replaced by sometimes competent, sometimes dreadful fights, a four-breasted woman with a poison tentacle, some rubber monsters, a lot of naked women with a more normal amount of breasts, an unfortunately also nearly naked fat guy and David Carradine. That, however is entertaining enough for me, so I'm not going to complain.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,argentinian movies,sword and sorcery,fantasy,reviews,david carradine

In short: Deathstalker (1983)

A slack-jawed swordsman with the not exactly confidence inspiring name of Deathstalker (Rick Hill) sets out to acquire two magical items from his fantasy land's evil magician king Munkar (Bernard Erhard) to get a full set of three together with his magical sword.

On his way to Munkar's castle, he meets some dude who will later betray him and the warrior woman Kaira (Lana Clarkson), a pioneer in not covering her breasts while fighting.

But Munkar has a plan. No, he's not going to make a full set of clothing mandatory for his subjects, he opens up a tournament. Publicly, he plans on making the winner his heir, but secretly, it's all a fiendish trap to kill all able warriors who could be even the slightest bit dangerous to him. I'm sure an evil overlord does not have any need for warriors in his army, ever.

On his way to the final confrontation with Munkar, Deathstalker will have to contend with a minor brawl, some lackluster fighting, an equally lackluster betrayal, and one of the magician's men being transformed into the form of Princess Codille (Barbi Benton), which puts quite a dent into Deathstalker's rape plans for him/her.

I think the short Sword & Sorcery boom brought us more crappy, painful films than any other boom in exploitation filmmaking. While films like Ator are at least entertaining through wilful stupidity, Deathstalker is mostly boring.

Director James Sbardellati seems to know only one way to keep his audience awake, and that is by flashing breasts at it. Usually, I wouldn't call nudity a problem in film, but breasts alone can't safe a film that has nothing else going for it.

The acting is execrable, not even the evil magician manages to be any fun, and Rick Hill is about as charismatic as a wall.

It doesn't help the film that there is no visible effort made to show anything interesting beside the naked actresses and a guy with the head of a pig, or that not much of interest is happening in it.

Pig headed dude and the very silly gender transformation scene are the only memorable elements on display, but the latter is also marred by Deathstalker's extremely irritating love for rape. I counted half a dozen attempted rapes in the film, not one of them needed for reasons of plot, character or theme, because those three things don't exist in the film's script. The final rape attempt is even committed by what is supposed to be the film's hero and only stays an attempted rape because the victim turns out not to have a vagina, for Cthulhu's sake!

The only difficulty Deathstalker leaves me with is to praise how artfully it manages to be boring and offensive at the same time, so I won't.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,argentinian movies,sword and sorcery,fantasy,in short