In short: The Skin Under the Claws (1975)

Original title: La pelle sotto gli artigli

A murderer not just wearing black gloves but also a black stocking over his head stalks the streets of an Italian city. He seems predominantly interested in murdering prostitutes, but there’s something really strange going on with the killings. The state of the corpses, and the time of death never seem quite to match, and the forensics experts “help” Comissario Rinaldi (Ettore Ribotta), the man tasked with getting to the bottom of the case, with results like “the victim must have hugged a corpse shortly before her death”. Which is only of little help to an ongoing investigation, one has to admit.

Does this have anything to do with the nice discussions between physicians Professor Helmut (Gordon Mitchell), Dr Gianni Dani (Tino Boriani) and Dr Silvia Pieri (Geneviève Audry) about all kinds of mad science philosophy we pop into from time to time? Is it a good idea for Pieri to fall for Dani? And can you hypnotize a corpse?

Nobody will ever confuse Alessandro Santini’s The Skin Under the Claws with one of the great giallos. Santini’s direction is just too bland and the script too unfocussed even for a genre not known for its focus or internal logic. The film meanders between scenes for often only the vaguest of reasons, and even once you’ve learned what’s going on (which makes little sense, obviously, but no matter), it is often unclear why Santini decided to show us certain scenes at all. Usually in a giallo, scenes of dubious narrative worth are in because they look cool, or moody, to the director’s eye, or because they are an excuse to get some more nudity into the movie. Here, there’s really not enough style on screen to make this proposition believable, apart from the nudity bit.

Having said this, I also have to admit that I had a perfectly good time with the film. While there’s really very little of actual quality in it, it does try its damndest to deliver all the giallo and all the mad science tropes it can squeeze into its allotted ninety minutes. For the longstanding fan of the genre like me, this sort of thing has a certain draw. So much so, I’d call the somewhat bonkers last twenty minutes or so actually worth watching despite their complete lack of artistic merit, simply for their perfectly misguided attempts at bringing the traditional mad scientist into the giallo.

Past Misdeeds: La vendetta di Lady Morgan (1965)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

Warning: spoilers haunt this write-up with adorable puffs of smoke!

Despite her rather uninviting name, 19th Century (or thereabouts, we’re in Gothic Horror time here) noble Susan Blackhouse (Barbara Nelli) leads a bit of a charmed life: not only will she very soon inherit one of the greatest fortunes in the country but she has also found love in the hunky shape of French architect Pierre Brissac (Michel Forain). Even better, when Susan declares her love and her determination to marry Pierre, neither her uncle Neville (Carlo Kechler) nor the man she was actually supposed to marry, Sir Harold Morgan (Paul Muller) put up even a bit of a fight.

So, once Pierre will return from a quick trip to Paris, a-marrying they will go. Alas, someone with the same haircut and general body shape as Harold’s manservant Roger (Gordon Mitchell) throws Pierre off the ferry to France, breaking Susan’s heart in the process.

Some time later, and for no explicable reason seeing as nobody was actually trying to push her into it, Susan decides to marry Harold. It’s going to be a bit of a curious marriage, though, for she, her uncle and her husband have made a pact to have her leave the country and stay with Neville right after the wedding ceremony until such a time as she will be actually willing and able to love Harold. We can only assume the patron saint of good plans was on holiday.

While this melodramatic brouhaha is going on, the audience learn that Pierre did actually survive his involuntary swimming lesson. Of course, and to nobody’s surprise given the rest of the plot, he’s suffering from amnesia that’ll only lift when it’s opportune for further developments, that is to say, the film needs a warm body to be threatened by vampire ghosts.

Again some time later, Susan decides she’s willing to move in with her husband who has been living in her ancestral home while she was shacking up with Uncle Neville. But how curious! Harold has let go all of her trusted servants but one, and so the house staff now consists of the not-at-all-murderous Roger, Susan’s least favourite maid, and one Lillian (Erika Blanc), a woman with quite the habit of grim staring. Or is it even…hypnotic staring? So now it’s time for the gaslighting part of the film. However, to give Lady Morgan its due, only few gaslight plots work with the help of a female hypnotist who whispers through a connection between her and her victim’s bed room, nor do many of them succeed in what amounts to the space of two or three nights.

By now, I’ve grown quite used to the fact that even the best Italian Gothic Horror films tend to have plots that only make sense when looked at as products of dream states or as walking and talking metaphors but even in this exalted realm Massimo Pupillo’s La vendetta di Lady Morgan is quite remarkable; it also isn’t a film to which the word “best” applies. However, Pupillo’s film is bad in all the right ways, and I don’t think it’s possible to be bored by it, or not come away from it liking this dubious piece of work that it is quite a bit.

It’s not just that the film’s narrative content is – quite keeping in the style of the original gothic novels, of course, though I doubt that’s on purpose – pretty darn stupid, dominated by coincidences and really bad plans that only work because everybody involved is an idiot, it’s also that Pupillo pretends the nonsense to be very very serious in the most hysterically melodramatic tones he can afford, with no line of dialogue that isn’t commented on by cloying and dominant music, and come to think of it, no line of dialogue that shouldn’t be ended with at least one or two exclamation points.

I can’t help but admire the film for it, though, for there really are few Gothics – quite independent of the country they were made in – whose tone is as consistently shrill; there are also only very few films where the main character has a major freak-out because she’s convinced her husband’s manservant has ONLY PRETENDED TO POUR WINE FOR HER (insert DRAMATIC MUSIC and ZOOMS ZOOMS ZOOMS here!), which honestly is the point where our dear Susan gets her first big breakdown. Who’d have thunk Erika Blanc staring at a girl really hard and whispering “You’re crazy! You’re crazy!”, and a guy not pouring wine could be this effective?

The acting is on par with the writing too (is that artistic unity, or what?), with Nelli portraying Susan as a gibbering emotional wreck on the slightest provocation, Muller making all the evil faces a career of playing the bad guy had provided him with, Blanc looking really, really annoyed – unless when she’s rubbing a man’s face and shoulders, which is this film’s apex of eroticism and her face turns to looking slightly less annoyed – and Gordon Mitchell. Well, and we all know how Gordon Mitchell gets when a director tells him to really let loose with his acting, don’t we?

And this all happens before the film’s final twenty-five minutes or so hit, and the titular vengeance of Lady Morgan finally starts. You see, right at the moment when the evil conspirators have managed to drive Susan to death (spoiler, I guess), Pierre suddenly remembers everything, and promptly returns to Susan’s ancestral home where he and Susan’s ghost proceed to have face and shoulder-rubbing ghost sex, after which she tells him how she spooked her murderers into killing one another with her awesome powers of blowing out candles, turning whiskey into water, letting little smoke explosions off, blowing up a vase, stealing shoes, and whispering. Said conspirators of course treat all this as if it were the height of the scare; well, and reason to kill one another, of course. Oh, and afterwards our now dead bad guys have turned into some kind of ghost vampires keeping themselves undead with the blood of Uncle Neville, whom they had stashed in the cellar when they were still alive to give Gordon Mitchell somebody to whip. Nope, I got nothing.


What I do have is a healthy respect for the grand gestures Pupillo uses to treat the piddling and harmless supernatural phenomena he’s got in his budget, trying and failing merrily to turn that bloody exploding vase into a real event, pretending that all that screaming and shouting through a very limited number of generally overly lit sets were actually utterly horrifying. And really, if I have to watch some third row Italian Gothic made by people who were neither named Bava, Freda or Margheriti, or just plain crazy, I rather prefer a film like this that’s desperate to provide me with all the entertainment it can afford.

La vendetta di Spartacus (1964)

aka The Revenge of Spartacus

aka Revenge of the Gladiators

Spartacus isn’t dead! A band of his surviving companions led by Arminius (Gordon Mitchell) cut him down from his cross (this is Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus, not the historical one who most probably died in battle, you understand), giving hope to slaves and the victims of Empire everywhere. There’s no full-on slave revolt this time around but various small groups of rebels are hitting the power of Rome with guerrilla tactics.

The Roman senate is set on not letting this new slave revolt grow into a full-grown war, and does attempt to quell the revolution with proper Roman military might from the get-go, though with less success than they’d hope for. Particularly senator Lucius Transonius (Daniele Vargas) is pushing the matter hard, though part of his eagerness is obviously bound up with an attempt to make his son Fulvius (Giacomo Rossi Stuart with very distracting hair) the general of the legion(s) quelling the insurrection. That part of Fulvius’s plan isn’t going over too well with the rest of the senate, whose members clearly prefer somebody with more to recommend him than a big head of hair for a military leadership role but Fulvius gives way in that point rather fast. Why, given the rest of his oratorical and political manner, you’d think he has a plan up his sleeve to get Lucius the position one way or the other. For now, Lucius is going to have to play the part of Henchman Number One.

While all this is going on, Roman Valerius (Roger Browne) returns to the family farm from a stint in the legions, only to find his parents and his young brother slaughtered by legionnaires under the command of Lucius. Valerius’s parents were hiding his badly wounded older brother Marcellus (Germano Longo) who had thrown in his lot with Spartacus and was indeed one of the men taking part in Spartacus’s rescue. Somehow, the Romans found out they did, killing the family, even though Marcellus managed to escape. Valerius makes short work of the three legionnaires still plundering his former home, and is left with a whole load of grudges he doesn’t know where to direct. Fortunately, his family’s former slave – set free by his brother – Cynthia (Scilla Gabel) – sent by the rebels to warn the family of the Roman raid – arrives just before he can decide the way to go is to walk right into the rest of Lucius’s cohort and die heroically. Cynthia, who is very right, and very very pretty, convinces Valerius that 1) the slave revolt is a right and just thing and 2) his best chance of at least finding his brother alive is to join with the rebels, so off they go. Valerius, it soon turns out, is rather a natural in the whole guerrilla work thing, so there still might be hope for true freedom in the Roman Empire.

Whew, and this is just the plot of the film’s first half hour or so. As a matter of fact, Michele Lupo’s La vendetta di Spartacus is one of the rare peplum films that very much seems to pride itself on having a sensible and reasonably complex plot where even the historical freedoms it takes will turn out to mostly fit into the gaps of recorded history, where characters are larger than life as are their plans yet still have discernible motivations (yes, even the bad guys).

So, quite atypical for the genre, the film doesn’t tell a series of vaguely related cool episodes (not that there’s anything wrong with that, mind you) but an actual story, and while there’s not quite enough money going around here to go for the true epic scale of the Kubrick film on whose coattails the film quite obviously rides – in fact, the footage of the Romans losing various skirmishes against the rebels used in a senate session is clearly from another film, what with the Romans enemies looking rather Teutonic – this is a film that puts all its efforts into making what it can put on screen as memorable as possible.

I had the film’s director Lupo generally pegged as more dependable than exciting, but there’s true enthusiasm on display here, as well as what looks to my eyes like an honest attempt at using the actual history. Not in the sense of Lupo actually aiming for or achieving real historical authenticity, of course - this is still a peplum and therefore a pulpy historical adventure but clearly one working from a consciousness of the actual history, using some of it to good effect (the senate scenes may look a bit small scale but do feel a lot like the stuff I’ve read in Latin class in their oratorical approach and the style of their intrigue, for example), and stepping away from it not out of laziness but because this is supposed to be an exciting and melodramatic adventure.

Consequently, the action scenes are rather exciting too, with some of the better stunts you’ll find in a non-mythological peplum and an energy to them that reminded me pleasantly of the best of US serials from decades past. I was surprised by how good the melodrama - usually the parts when I roll my eyes, raise my eyebrows in these movies - worked here, with many a close-up of Mitchell’s, Browne’s and Gabel’s faces in quite effectively realized states of big emotion. Big emotion even, which resonates with the film’s ideas about freedom, loss and betrayal instead of feeling shoved into the script because you need melodrama in your peplum. In the final act, there are also a few poignant scenes, staged by Lupo with a sense of dignity I didn’t really expect to find in the film, giving the latter stages of the film true emotional weight.

The melodrama also fits into the film’s not terribly difficult to see subtext about a democracy (of sorts) at a point in its development when it is only too easily convinced by a strong man, as long as he’s telling it that it can do no wrong and kicks the people who are weakest. That’s something Italians and Germans know quite a bit about, though it does seem like many of us right no prefer to forgot these lessons of history.

Past Misdeeds: Sartana the Gravedigger (1969)

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.

The North Western Bank is supposed to be the most secure bank in the West. Guarded by ridiculously uniformed men, a gatling gun and some choice examples of the art of safe-building, nothing and no one should be able to get away with an assault. But a very tricky gang of robbers manage to get inside and make away with several hundred thousand dollars. One of the bad guys seems to be the famous bounty hunter Sartana (Gianni Garko), or at least a guy with Sartana's dress sense and gun. Turns out Possibly-Sartana is also the mandatory bandit who kills off his partners in crime to have all of their ill-gotten gains for himself.

Understandably, the authorities put a nice little price on Sartana's head.

Of course, everyone's favourite cloaked bounty hunter is innocence itself and feels the dire need to find out who framed him for the robbery. To make his job more difficult, quite a few of Sartana's colleagues (and supposed friends) in the bounty hunting biz decide that they'd very much like to have Sartana's bounty, the moral and practical problems (surely, there must be easier prey than Sartana) notwithstanding.

Sartana's search for his enemies leads him at first to his old acquaintance and friend, the hobo thief Buddy Ben (Frank Wolff). Buddy sends him to a guy named Dynamite Butch who probably helped outfit the bank robbers, but Butch is murdered before Sartana can talk to him. That will be a repeating problem in the bounty hunter's pursuit of his hidden enemies. Whoever knows something gets killed before Sartana can acquire the information he wants.

And then there are Sartana's colleagues to cope with, guys with names like Shadow (Jose Torres), Deguejo (Gordon Mitchell), or the delightful Hot Dead (Klaus Kinski), who is only in the bounty hunting business to pay off the debts his incredibly bad luck at gambling brings him.

Somehow, the man in black still manages to follow a trail I didn't manage to actually comprehend and arrives in the perfect little town of Poker Falls where he will spend the last thirty minutes of the movie, killing people and having fun.

The ground rules I have set when writing about some of director Giuliano Carnimeo's other Spaghetti Westerns also apply to Sartana the Gravedigger. That is to say, the film is lacking in the depth the films of directors like the Sergios brought to the genre. Neither politics, nor social commentary, nor even slightly complex (and complicating) character work seem to interest Carnimeo. Words like "light" and "fluffy" come to mind, and if I were a less happy-go-lucky kind of guy, I'd probably spend most of this review complaining about the film's utter lack of subtext.

That would of course be quite unfair to Carnimeo's achievements in this particular movie. I believe the director must have put quite a bit of energy into excising every Spaghetti Western cliché and archetype that could even vaguely be connected to a reality outside the film; the only element that could be read as even vaguely meaningful for the world at large is the inevitable evilness of rich men, but even this aspect is treated with so little interest by the director that the greatest effort couldn't convince me to interpret this point as even slightly politically motivated, be it consciously or subconsciously.

Instead of using his imaginary West as a place to apply his theories about the nature of man, the corruptive influence of capitalism, or to break the American concept of Manifest Destiny into little pieces, Carnimeo treats his West as a giant playground. Seldom is the Spaghetti Western as close to the spirit of kids playing Cowboys and Bandits as it is here, but it's also seldom that a Spaghetti Western's utter lack of earnestness works as well as it does here.

Sartana the Gravedigger is dominated by a sense of the absurd and the whimsical that at times makes it feel as if it had been scripted by a very clever child, following every idea that comes to its mind whenever it does come to its mind. If you expect a strong, clear narrative, you'll probably run away in terror. This is the sort of movie that doesn't have any problem with just leaving its hero and the main narrative behind for ten or fifteen minutes just to check in and see what a minor character with little actual importance to the main plot like Kinski's Hot Dead is doing on his search for Sartana. Not much of import, as it turns out, but who cares about that as long as what Kinski is doing is fun to watch?

Looking for fun instead of meaning or narrative structure is very much what Carnimeo makes his business here. The film merrily flutters from one scene to the next, not very concerned with how everything hangs together, but very concerned with making every single scene fun to watch for its audience.

Carnimeo shows itself to be a very creative director when he needs to be. The director goes from (actually funny, for once) comedic bits to exciting and inventive action scenes, to the sort of iconic looking shots that give the Spaghetti Western genre some of its power as if it was the easiest thing in the world. While the film's script is as loose and episodic as they come, Carnimeo's direction feels tight and assured - a far cry from the Wtf-style other light Spaghettis like Ferdinando Baldi's The Stranger Gets Mean utilize.

The director is assisted by a bunch of character actors - basically everyone you see in every second Spaghetti Western - visibly having a blast with their weird and exalted roles. Even often wooden Gianni Garko shows a bit of charm, even enthusiasm, and Kinski is as funny and relaxed as I've ever seen him.

With so much sparkle coming from the screen, one would be quite a curmudgeon to not like Sartana the Gravedigger. I, for one, won't be one this time.

Past Misdeeds: Blood Delirium (1988)

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.

One evening, while she is bare-naked and preparing dinner for soon-to-be-arriving boyfriend Gregory, French concert pianist Sybille (Brigitte Christensen) is suddenly accosted by some of those pesky interior winds, blue light and a female voice from nowhere. The voice tells her that she has come to warn Sybille, and that she is Sybille, yet not Sybille, "like two flames coming together" and that she comes from the future. Too bad the ghostly voice never does bother to utter a somewhat more detailed or practical warning. This way, Sybille is just a little out of it, frightened and bewildered. Later a mysterious gust of wind blows an invitation to the art exhibition of the paintings of a certain Charles Saint Simon (John Philip Law) into the room, which Sybille now plans on visiting.

In something that must be a very long flashback or the film's chronology would break down, which would however make a lot more sense if the voice had said it came from the past, we see the source of Sybille's ghostly voice. Christine (also Brigitte Christensen), the muse and wife of Charles Saint Simon and a pianist like Sybille, is dying, very much to the dismay of the Maestro (as everyone calls him). He seems mostly pissed that she won't be able to inspire him to more art, though, and less by the "his beloved dying" thing.

And look there, he really isn't able to paint without her, leading to wonderful moments of insane rambling and ranting in front of his servant Hermann (Gordon Mitchell). Hermann can't complain about his boss too much, though, since Charles caught him trying to have his way with Christine's corpse. I'd like to know what the servants union has to say to that one.

Be that as it may, even snatching Christine's maggoty yet also already skeletal corpse out of her grave, putting a rubber mask on her head and draping her skeletal hands on a piano can't awaken the Maestro's talents again.

Fortunately, he meets Sybille at his art exhibition and - after some mad rambling about her sharing a soul with his dead wife that would send most women not the pianist running - convinces her to spend some time in his castle as his model.

Once there, even someone as thick as Sybille soon understands that her host is a raving lunatic, what with his insistence on being the reincarnation of Van Gogh, the room with the electrified lash and his ranting breakdown when he still isn't able to paint again although she is modelling for him. It's really the fault of his dead wife's ghost mocking him with laughter and glowing globes.

It turns out that what our Maestro also needs to paint is fresh blood. What luck that Hermann isn't only a necrophiliac but also a hobby rapist who prefers his women unconscious or better dead, and so able to deliver a bit of blood by way of his victims. The corpses are either taxidermied and put in the cellar or just fed to the dogs and dissolved in one of those useful acid vats every good castle has.

When Sybille witnesses Hermann getting rid of a corpse, she makes a half-hearted escape attempt, but soon finds herself drugged to sleep, put into a bridal gown and laid out in a glass coffin, with regular visits from dear sleeping women loving Hermann.

From time to time I still find a film so batshit crazy that I'm not too sure what to say about it, because writing sensibly about it would be an experiment in applied paradoxicology much too difficult for a simple man like me. Blood Delirium truly is such a film.

The above plot synopsis does make a lot more sense than the film makes when you are actually watching it. Out of a sense of responsibility for other people's sanity I have been trying very hard to make life easier for those of my readers who aren't permanently touched in the head by Italian horror like me. The trick is to just leave out some of the absurd details the film piles on and on and on and not to mention the glorious and idiotic way Charles gets his final comeuppance. Yes, the film truly makes even less sense.

You might know Blood Delirium's director Sergio Bergonzelli from his utterly puzzling, yet stylish giallo In the Folds of the Flesh. The difference between the two films is probably mostly down to the different decades in which they were made, with the stylish one being made in the 70s and the visually decidedly bland Blood Delirium in the far less stylish 80s - and surely on a comparatively small budget. However, what Bergonzelli's work has lost in visual inventiveness in the years between, it has won in insanity. While In the Folds never actually did make a lot of sense in the way we usually understand the word, it was still trying for something vaguely resembling a narrative and characters with human psychology. Blood Delirium has given up on silliness like this and does only exist to do three things: being sleazy, being tasteless and being as bafflingly insane as its main character. It succeeds admirably on all three counts.

As I said, visually the film is mostly ugly and non-descript in a "we couldn't even afford coloured lights, but look at the impressive castle ruin we are not going to use as it deserves!" way, however it is too mad a work for this to truly matter.

On the acting side, there is at least John Philip Law to mention. I suppose he must have been in dire need of money to stoop as low as appearing in this one, but like the true professional he was, he does some wonderful shouting, ranting and bug-eyeing and also does his best in trying to look like Van Gogh. Brigitte Christensen doesn't truly register beside him and Gordon Mitchell just has to do the silent straight-man lunatic next to Law's raving one.

As is so often the case with the films I might make sound sort of enticing, Blood Delirium is only recommended to the advanced viewer of cult cinema. So, if you think Black Magic Rites is one of the greatest achievement in the history of the cinematic arts (and golly, do I think that), this is one for you, if you are still at a point in your cinematic life where you'd rather watch films with some redeeming qualities, it probably isn't.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,john phillip law,sergio bergonzelli,gordon mitchell,reviews,horror,wtf,past misdeeds

On ExB: La Vendetta di Lady Morgan (1965)

Many of the lesser entries into the Italian Gothic Horror cycle tend to be a bit – or often rather a lot – on the boring side, with little visible effort put into making the things actually entertaining.

Massimo Pupillo’s tale of the vengeance of Lady Morgan is a bit different there. Not that it’s a good film or anything exalted of that kind, but it certainly is a very entertaining one, and most certainly one that’s working hard for its audience. Let me tell you more about it over in my column on Exploder Button.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,reviews,other places,horror,gothic,massimo pupillo,barbara nelli,erika blanc,gordon mitchell,paul muller

Three Films Make A Post: Blood-curdling giant fly creature runs amuck!!!

Le Saut de l’ange (1971): This is a grim, rather cynical revenge movie by Yves Boisset about a bloody election in Marseille, or rather Jean Yanne coming back from a self-imposed Thai exile to take revenge for his wife and kid who are (quite uselessly) killed for reasons of politics and money he doesn’t actually have anything to do with anymore. In Boisset’s hands, it is a somewhat dry, deliberately paced crime movie with jabs of intense, sharp violence, a basic feeling of hopelessness, and a sense of barely repressed political anger. It is, as they say, quite a good film if you like that sort of thing, which I do, particularly when it includes the handful of moments of brilliant filmmaking this one does, moments when the film stops being dry completely and somehow turns its quite down-to-earth idea of how horrible violence works mythical without actually changing its posture at all. Call it alchemy.

Because Boisset is a director of taste, the film also features fan (that would be me) favourites Gordon Mitchell, Senta Berger and Sterling Hayden.

Espion, lève-toi (1982): Speaking of Yves Boisset, there’s also this spy movie with Lino Ventura as a French sleeper agent situated in Switzerland who finds himself reactivated only to stumble through a business so labyrinthine, he doesn’t even know if the people who tell him he’s working for them are actually who they say they are. On the pacing level, this is also rather slow, but it is again a sure-handed slowness the film needs to get to breathe. It’s less overtly violent than the older movie but that’s because it is really much more useful for the film’s goal of having its audience share its protagonist’s feeling of alienation and confusion to keep the violence off-screen and ambiguous.

If you’re the type to enjoy films that are structured like a peculiarly nasty kind of chess – abstract until they become all too personal – like I sometimes do, this is a pretty perfect example of it. Parts of the film are really about what very abstract strategic goals do to the people who are part of the strategy, the moment when the blind and indifferent forces of politics turn against you, or rather, use your personal loyalties, your humanity, to make you their chess piece until its time for you to disappear forever.

Breakout (1975): If there’s a place in your heart for middling 70s action movies, that’s where Tom Gries’s film probably lives. It’s not a bad film at all, but one that doesn’t make enough use of a great cast (Charles Bronson! Robert Duvall! Randy Quaid! Jill Ireland!), and could do quite a bit more with the basic set-up of a charming rogue (surprisingly enough Bronson) trying to get an innocent rich American (Duvall) out of jail because he’s rather fond of the rich man’s wife (Ireland). And money. I know, it’s “based on a true story” but when has that ever stopped a movie from changing the truth into something more entertaining?

Despite its lack of depth, it’s still a fun enough film, if only because it provides an opportunity to witness Bronson smile and emote and wisecrack.

Technorati-Markierungen: french movies,american movies,action,thriller,spies,yves boisset,jean yanne,gordon mitchell,senta berger,sterling hayden,lino ventura,charles bronson,robert duvall,jill ireland,randy quaid

Three Films Make A Post: In the wilderness you can't dial 911

Mask Maker aka Maskerade (2010): If you're in the mood for a pretty generic slasher, Griff Furst's Mask Maker should scratch that itch well enough. It's competently directed and acted, features the obligatory mini role for Michael Berryman, has a smidgen of gore, even a bit of atmosphere, an impressively crappy ending, steals/quotes from many a more original film, and even has one or two scenes that are actually suspenseful instead of reminding you of other movies' suspense. If this sounds a bit like damning with faint praise, that's a fair assessment of my tone. For what the film is, though, it's perfectly watchable.

Cry of Death aka Carogne si nasce aka If One Is Born A Swine…Kill Him (1968): Talking of films that aren't exactly brimming with originality, house favourite Alfonso Brescia delivers a Spaghetti western with slight mystery elements. While the film's supposed twists and surprises are anything but surprising, Fausto Rossi's photography is pretty good, Glenn Saxson and Gordon Mitchell (as a gunman with a most disturbing smile and the most excellent name of - depending on the version you see - Donkey or Mule) seem to enjoy themselves quite a bit, and Brescia's direction keeps the film generally entertaining and somewhat stylish. As it goes with competent films, there are two or three stronger scenes that seem to belong to a more intense and complex movie.

Entity (2012): The final film in our Trilogy of Competence (the anthology movie Amicus never quite got around to make), Steve Stone's Entity is actually a wee bit too good for its companions, what with it ending on a pretty great fifteen minutes that give it something not exactly common in horror movies - a genuinely good and fitting ending that's not pissing away everything that's come before to set up a sequel. The only reason why Entity still belongs in this company (and doesn't warrant a full write-up) is that it still is another "film team stumbles through haunted industrial building" movie, containing exactly the kind of scares you'd expect from it, only really distinguishing itself by rather more than just decent acting (particularly Charlotte Riley and Dervla Kirwan are strong), and the decision to use some elements of the POV sub genre yet to still go for a more standard filming style. It would have been great if the visible talent of Stone and his cast had been used for horrors of a rather less trite sort, but one can always hope for the next movie. This one is at the very least worth watching once, which is more than a lot of industrial building strollers manage.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,italian movies,british movies,in short,horror,spaghetti western,griff furst,michael berryman,alfonso brescia,glenn saxson,gordon mitchell,steve stone,dervla kirwan,charlotte riley

Endgame - Bronx lotta finale (1983)

aka Endgame

The world as we know it has ended again, and what may or may not be the Bronx (actual connections to other Bronx-based Italian post-apocalyptic movies are strenuous at best) is ruled by a military dictatorship that counts among their members good old Gordon Mitchell and black clad goons wearing what looks a lot like SS signets on their helmets. To keep the populace distracted, the rulers hold a Running Man variation called "Endgame" that is even organized in some sort of league system, which seems rather useless given the lethality rate of the whole affair.

One of the best Endgame fighters is Ron Shannon (Al Cliver). While he's running through the dangerous parts of town attempting not to be killed, a woman named Lilith (a clothed Laura Gemser, for no discernible reason listed in the credits under the nom de plume of "Moira Chen") hires him to guide and protect her and a group of associates out of the city to a place in the wastelands. Lilith and her associates are telepathically gifted mutants on the run from the government but they are willing to pay in gold.

After winning the Endgame round by cheating his old friend/enemy/rival Kurt Karnak (George Eastman) with Lilith's help, Shannon assembles a team for the trek through the wastelands. It seems the city is full of people like the imaginatively named martial artist Ninja (Hal Yamanouchi), and mutant-hating strongman Kovack (Mario Pedone), so Shannon acquires his team easily enough.

More trouble starts in the wastelands, where our heroes have to defend themselves against an army of evil blind monks and a half-animal biker gang. I don't know why the animalistically mutated gang has as many fish people as they do, what with the near total absence of water in their surroundings, but hey: fish people!

And can it be a good thing for our heroes that Karnak is following them?

I am not exactly an admirer of Endgame's director Joe D'Amato. Sure, he always was a pretty great director of photography, but a large part of his directorial output tends to the needlessly and tediously boring. Endgame is among the exceptions, though, for while it's not up there with the best (read: most insane) Italian post-apocalypse epics it is rather good fun.

It is clear that D'Amato was not exactly swimming in money for the production, so most of the film takes place in a handful of brick-walled tunnels and in the outside area around a rundown agricultural building but to make up for it, there are also quite a few motorcycles on screen, and rather more stuntmen costumed as various goons and henchpeople around than you'd expect. D'Amato makes good use of what he has available, too, and while there isn't that much advanced silly stuff going on, Endgame is stuffed full of enough silly, cheap, and fast action sequences to fulfil the basic entertainment needs of any friend of Italian pieces of post-apocalyptic nonsense.

Plus, there are various favourites among European cult cinema actors showing off their facial hair. This particular post-apocalyptic future may still possess TV where - in one of the film's funnier ideas - the biggest sporting event known is sponsored by a brand of vitamin pills that's good for basically everything, but shaving utensils are quite a different thing, it seems. On the other hand, the film does treat the generally non-bearded, peaceful mutants as the future and hope of the world while the poor hairy men of the rest of the cast are standing in for the past, so I'm just going to pretend Joe D'Amato cared enough about the movie to put in this kind of (ridiculous) metaphorical stuff. Then I'm going to laugh till I cry.

Be the symbolic status of facial hair as it may, for a man wise in the ways of Italian post-apocalypses like me, what Endgame has to offer (basically: people in leather killing each other) is more than enough to keep me entertained (though I could have survived quite well without the fish man/Gemser rape scene), so I am quite satisfied with what I got here.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,reviews,post-apocalypse,joe d'amato,al cliver,laura gemser,george eastman,hal yamanouchi,gordon mitchell

On WTF: Sartana the Gravedigger (1969)

My interest in the fluffy Spaghetti Westerns of Giuliano Carnimeo continues, and reaches something of a high point, with this whimsical epic about the adventures good ol' Sartana has when he is suspected as a bank robber.

Learn more about him and people with names like Buddy Ben, Hot Death and Dynamite Butch in my review on WTF-Film.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,spaghetti western,giuliano carnimeo,gianni garko,frank wolff,klaus kinski,gordon mitchell,reviews,other places

In short: The Sewer Rats (1974)

The car belonging to a man with a crippled leg (Richard Harrison; throughout the film only identified as "Cripple") breaks down in the muddiest part of nowhere. The only thing amounting to civilization close by is a muddy conglomerate of hovels populated by a handful of men (among them Gordon Mitchell) of dubious sanity and clearly lacking morality. Oh, and there's a single woman, Rita (Dagmar Lassander), the wife of one of the men. While everyone is busy keeping dangerous secrets and looking for gold in an old abandoned mine, she spends her time sleeping around with most  of the men, and laughing maniacally.

Although he has been greeted without enthusiasm, the nameless man decides to stay around for a while, sending everyone around him scuttling to find out what his hidden reason for staying might be. Is it after one of them? There are so many secrets going around that it's hard for the men to decide. Rita for her part tries her best to add the stranger to her collection of trophies, but he's a hard sell, driving the poor woman into provoking the other men even more.

It will just need a little more effort until everyone will be at each other's throats completely.

The Sewer Rats is a nice, grimy and decidedly muddy thriller that has ambitions on being a neo noir. Everyone here is basically a sleazier variation of one noir character type or the other, mixed up by throwing the more Spaghetti Western hero-like Harrison into the fray with them. The men (and the woman) are all decidedly unpleasant, but the film isn't as cynical as it could be - a few of them get slightly redeeming qualities, which proves helpful when the time of the big violent denouement comes and the viewer should care about what happens to them. Between the sleaze and the grime, the film shows some humanist strains - mostly in the way Harrison treats some of the other characters - that I found thoroughly surprising and quite satisfying.

A film like this always risks to become just a bit too cynical and falling a bit too much in love with wallowing in the mud (figurative and non-figurative). For me, films that go too far into that direction sometimes tend to lose the punch they are supposed to have. When everyone is an irredeemable bastard, I find it hard to care about anyone.

The Sewer Rats' Director Roberto Bianchi Montero avoids that pitfall more or less. While especially everything to do with Rita is as sleazy and exploitative as possible (and can well be read as quite misogynist), there are also moments of unexpected compassion for her, and it is this compassion that makes the downbeat tendencies of the film work all the better for me.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,thriller,gordon mitchell,richard harrison,dagmar lassander,in short,roberto bianchi montero

On WTF: Blood Delirium (1988)

This week on WTF-Film, I spend far too many words on trying to explain the inexplicable,

namely Blood Delirium, a Sergio Bergonzelli epic about the reincarnated Van Gogh needing a woman who shares half of her soul with his dead wife to paint. Well, her and fresh blood provided by his necrophiliac rapist servant. I should probably mention that the men are played by John Phillip Law and Gordon Mitchell, respectively. For the rest, you know where to go.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,john phillip law,sergio bergonzelli,gordon mitchell,reviews,horror,wtf,other places