Three Films Make A Post: Evil has a new vessel…

Haunting of the Queen Mary (2023): From time to time, Gary Shore’s and Rebecca Harris’s tourist attraction based horror film gets up to a scene or two of effective, surrealist horror. More often then not, alas, this is one of those movies that confuses “surrealist” with “random”, so there are interminable scenes of the filmmakers just throwing random stuff at characters and audience.

Little of that stuff sticks or lands anywhere interesting, while the film drags through an interminable two hours of non-plot. Good actors like Alice Eve and Joel Fry stand around, do things with little relevance or connection, some dude who doesn’t look like him and isn’t too great of a dancer plays Fred Astaire (did I mention this thing is random?), and little of any actual consequence, impact or meaning happens.

The Red Monks aka I frati rossi (1988): Not really less confused but decidedly more concise is this Italian TV movie (“Presented by Lucio Fulci”) directed by Gianni Martucci. Its tale of sordidness and a bit of murder plays out before an early 40s background it can’t afford to actually portray (again comparable to Queen Mary) but really doesn’t seem to care about anyway. What the film does care about is to put a kind of cheapskate greatest hits of Italian Gothic horror and giallo tropes on screen, mix them up with the help of a surprisingly clever protagonist shift in the final act, and let its audience wallow nostalgically in the TV sleaze.

This will only work for viewers who are really into the beautiful ages of Italian genre cinema and its byways, but for those like us, it is a surprisingly fun little movie.

The Spiral Staircase (1975): This version of the Ethel Lina White thriller drags the somewhat venerable book into the age of the 70s British potboiler thriller. It isn’t exactly art, but Peter Collinson was pretty great at this sort of thing, rushing its protagonist (Jacqueline Bisset) through her private gauntlet of betrayal and mad men with verve and the joyful nastiness of the British thriller of that era.

From time to time, the film teeters on the brink of actual feminism, but whenever it does, Collinson appears to get distracted by needing to do something cheap and schlocky instead. I’m neither damning nor complaining here, for as much as I would have liked the whole affair to just be a little bit more clever than it ends up being, I never could – and certainly still won’t – resist a bit of good schlock. Plus, say what you will about the director, Collinson was pretty great at improbably, schlocky suspense sequences.

Past Misdeeds: A Whisper In The Dark (1976)

Original title: Un sussurro nel buio

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.

A rich Italian family lives the life of the rich and idle in their palatial mansion in the country. Things aren't quite as perfect as they seem, though. It's not just that family father Alex (John Phillip Law) is something of a jerk who cheats on his wife Camilla (Nathalie Delon) with a friend of hers who is staying as a house guest, or that the regularly visiting grandmother is a nasty old bint hiding her unpleasant interior behind impeccable manners, or that the family's two daughters make eardrum-shattering screeching noises whenever they open their mouths, or that Camilla's nerves are so on edge that she's bound to become the sort of hysteric that only exists in the mind of Freudians and filmmakers one day. No, all that is minor trouble when compared to the family's true problem.

Their little son Martino (Alessandro Poggi), you see, has an invisible friend called Luca on whom he seems to be more fixated than can be seen as healthy, but, quite unlike most invisible friends, Luca has a way of making his presence known physically. Luca moves objects around often enough to have Camilla and the nanny Francoise (Olga Bisera) believe the invisible child is more than just a figment of Martino's imagination. What's even more disturbing for Camilla is the fact that the name her son has given to his invisible playmate is the same she and Alex had given the stillborn boy they had before Martino, something the kid shouldn't know about at all.

Luca's presence becomes ever more direct, and though he seems to have the family's best interests in mind, he's not exactly unthreatening. Alex and Camilla decide their son needs professional help, but - not surprising to anyone watching - the usual neurological examinations find nothing at all. Alex manages to get hold of a rather dubious professor (Joseph Cotten) interested in the Weird, who is willing to move in with the family to take a closer look at Martino (and Luca). Although Alex doesn't realize it (obviously, being a jerk he ignores all of his wife's doubts), the Professor's interest in Martino isn't so much that of a doctor wanting to cure a patient, but rather that of a man having found an especially interesting lab rat. Of course, this isn't the sort of thing Luca will tolerate, and he defends his brother/creator/father in a rather lethal way. Alas, once a supernatural entity has begun with the murders, it tends not to stop with them again that easily.

Marcello Aliprandi's A Whisper In The Dark is Italian horror cinema of the 70s at its most typical: stylishly directed, beautifully photographed and drenched in a dream-like mood that is heightened by a fantastic Pino Donaggio soundtrack. It's a film occupying itself with creating an atmosphere for the audience's minds to inhabit, and not so much one interested in telling a clearly defined story. The film's pace is slow, very slow, from beginning to end, and what might sound like a clear increase in dramatic tension when looking at the plot on paper never feels as such when one is actually watching the film, because Aliprandi doesn't do dramatic tension as it us usually understood. Instead of working by the dramaturgical rules of the thriller, the film stops and starts, interspersing moments of tension and drama with scenes that prefer to circle around the things that are happening, or just hint at the things that might be happening or the motives that might be lying behind the characters' actions. For example, the film clearly insinuates that Cotten's Professor isn't wholly trustworthy through a certain shiftiness in the actor's behaviour (and the fact that he likes nothing more than let the family's maid bring him iced vodka to his bathtub, something he calls "imperative" for his mind to work), but it never outright shows or tells how bad his plans truly are, so that it never becomes clear how much of an act of self defence by Luca and/or Martino (again, if Luca is a telekinetic product of Martino's subconscious or his dead brother or something else is kept ambiguous) his murder truly is.

As an audience, we can speculate about the clearly supernatural, we can put our interpretative faculties into understanding it, yet we can never really know it.

Aliprandi uses a similar technique when it comes to the thematic underpinnings of his film. It's quite obvious that a part of the film's subtext is circling the way the child they have once lost has influenced the marriage and life of Camilla and Alex, and that Luca might be more of an externalisation of Camilla's inability to let go of her lost child (which in turn might be responsible for Alex being like he is), an interpretation that is certainly strengthened by the film's ending, but this isn't the sort of film ever willing to get concrete about, well, anything. Instead, A Whisper in the Dark hints and insinuates, and let's the audience do the thinking for themselves.


That's probably the point where friends of clear, linear narratives and directness in their horror movies will throw their remotes disgustedly at their TVs, but A Whisper in the Dark, like many of the most interesting European horror movies of the 70s, was not made with ideas like clarity and directness as virtues in mind at all, and therefore wasn't made for anybody expecting these things. It's all about the mood, the things that might be, and the things that happen inside of a viewer just willing to take a look, to feel and to speculate.

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

In short: L'occhio dietro la parete (1977)

aka Eyes Behind The Wall

If you have seen enough movies of a genre that was a local and temporal phenomenon, you'll in the end reach a point where a large part of the films in it that are still new to you just aren't very good at all. Case in point is my relationship with the giallo, so it is like a minor gold find when I encounter a film in the genre I haven't seen before that isn't complete crap. Giuliano Petrelli's movie (the only writing and direction work by an actor) is such a film, and certainly worth watching for the more jaded giallo fan.

Sure, the film suffers a bit from typical 70s psychology (including some really unpleasant ideas about homosexuality) and the resulting character clichés it pretends to be deep characterization, there's dialogue that confuses pseudo-intellectualism for intelligence, and a dominant wish to underplay the script's most lurid elements as if Petrelli were a little ashamed of them and would in truth have preferred to make a more straightforward psychological thriller about voyeurism and bourgeois sexual desperation without wandering too deeply into the fields of melodramatic sexual perversion it can't quite keep away from. Or it might be Petrelli thought he was being subtle about the sexual melodrama of his plot instead of a bit prudish.

Be that as it may, the film still has things to recommend it: some solid acting by Olga Bisera, Fernando Rey (how often did that poor guy have to play an impotent man in a wheelchair in his career?) and John Phillip Law (who applies himself so much he even has a frontally nude muscle training sequence, so fans of nude John Phillip Law can very much rejoice), a script that from time to time manages to not just shy away from certain genre conventions but actually manages to surprise by subverting them a little, a Goblin-esque soundtrack by Giuseppe Caruso, and stark yet stylish visuals that make the film look more thoughtful and precise than it actually is.

At this point in my giallo-watching career, Eyes Behind the Wall is a minor discovery worth celebrating.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,in short,giallo,giuliano petrelli,john phillip law,fernando rey,olga bisera

On WTF: A Whisper In The Dark (1976)

Original title: Un sussurro nel buio

One of the things I love best about the Italian horror movies of the 70s is their insistence on hiding ambiguity, incongruity and a total disinterest towards classical narrative techniques behind highly polished surfaces.

Marcello Aliprandi's A Whisper In The Dark (made with a pretty fantastic cast including Nathalie Delon, John Phillip Law and Joseph Cotten) might be the poster boy for this technique. My write-up on WTF-Film tells all!

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,john phillip law,nathalie delon,joseph cotten,reviews,horror,marcello aliprandi,other places

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

Death Rides A Horse (1967)

A group of bandits attacks a small family farm to get at the wagon full of money that is kept there for the night.

The bandits don't just kill the guards, though, they quite senselessly slaughter the family and burn down their farm. One of the killers takes pity on the smallest boy and hides him from his partners. The child hasn't seen the face of his savior, nor many of the faces of the others, but he has seen some distinguishing marks on each of them, and he doesn't look like he's ever going to forget them. The only physical trace the men leave behind is a peculiarly formed spur.

Fifteen years later, the boy, whose name turns out to be Bill, has grown into John Phillip Law, and the way he trains with his guns and never seems to take his eyes off of them shows that vengeance is the only thing he is living for. Alas, the last fifteen years have never brought any of his family's killers close to him. Bill is sure they are still out there, somewhere, but he doesn't know where to look for them.

That changes when Ryan (Lee van Cleef) comes to town. Ryan has spent the last fifteen years in prison, betrayed by the same people who killed Bill's parents. For some reason (and what might that be?), the first place he visits when coming to town are the graves of Bill's parents.

Ryan doesn't even have to look very hard for his former friends like Bill does, no, his first night in town two gunmen try to kill him in his sleep. Of course, he is played by van Cleef and therefore not in the habit of letting himself getting killed that easily. Ryan now knows very well where he has to go, and leaves behind two corpses wearing quite peculiarly shaped spurs.

When Bill sees the spurs, he rides off in pursuit of the older man, convinced that Ryan can lead him to his objects of vengeance. Ryan himself doesn't want a partner in his endeavors and manages to leave the angry young man behind without a horse. This is not the last time one or the other of the men does this, but they always end up helping each other out in the end, even though Ryan's idea of vengeance on his "friends" consists in getting money out of them.

One doesn't get the impression that he minds too much when they are getting killed, though.

Bill and Ryan really need each others help, too, because the bandits have become well situated in various communities, with lots of henchmen and unsavory plans.

I'd like to put Death Rides A Horse into the larger context of its director's Giulio Petroni's work, alas I have seen nothing else by him, and the Internet's not exactly full of deep essays about his body of work.

Fortunately enough, the film is an excellent Spaghetti Western even without such context.

Its plot does sound like an Italian Western by the numbers, but its execution elevates the generic to the archetypal and mythical with an effortlessness you don't see all that often.

Sometimes - usually when I have drunk too much Green Tea - I like to try and see films not as worlds made from moving pictures, but as rhythm made visual. Death Rides A Horse is perfectly easy to watch - or rather feel - that way, with its sense of perpetual forward motion and its fantastic, yet weird Morricone music. The music is really very important here. It is at once a typical Morricone soundtrack, rhythmic and minimalist and always dancing with the things we see on screen (or is it just making them dance?), but it's also always threatening to drift into the atonal and weird, as if what we witness on screen is of such mythical proportions that there's no other way to react to it than to leave musical structures behind.

Petroni's direction is often brilliant, eschewing dialogue whenever possible, preferring a telling hand movement of Van Cleef or Law's merciless, empty gaze to reams of dialogue. The viewer knows the character archetypes here anyway; there's truly no need for explanations, and what human depths are needed are better provided through physical acting, camera placement and movement than words.

This tactic could backfire badly with less capable actors in the lead, but Van Cleef and Law are both doing perfect work here. Looking at Van Cleef's body of work this is not all that surprising, but Law isn't the type I would have expected to be all that great in a Western. I tend to be wrong frighteningly often, though, and Law really steps up to Van Cleef's presence here and even provides his hate-driven character with an underlying sense of compassion.

The film is structured rather episodically, I wouldn't however call its structure "loose" - it's more as if the film's forward motion started out in more than one place, yet inevitably (and there is true capital-I Inevitability on display here) finds its end in the same place.

What we have here seems to me like a perfect Spaghetti Western, just slightly below the quality of the best films of the three Sergios, yet also a little less cynical, angry and hurt than much of the output of those three is. The latter is no point against Petroni's film. Sometimes it's good to have a film with a belief in compassion.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,reviews,spaghetti western,lee van cleef,john phillip law,giulio petroni