Three Films Make A Post: Lust for Blood.

Vampyres (2015): I didn’t hate Víctor Matellano’s remake of José Ramón Larraz’s genre-defining lesbian vampire movie as much as I expected, so put that down as a win. Perhaps Larraz’s involvement with the screenplay (however much here was actually done by him) helped? It’s not as if this were actually better or even vaguely as good as the original: the film is certainly slow going even in comparison with a film from the 70s, the acting’s often ropey in a pretty irritating manner, and even the staging can seem somewhat amateurish for about half of the film. The other half does from time to time reach moments of the kind of intense aestheticization (bordering on the fetishist) of blood and pain that at the very least explains why this remake exists on an artistic level, and while it never comes together as the original did, it does do a bit more than just try to exploit old exploitation fans like me.

The Last Days of American Crime (2020): This abomination financed by Netflix, on the other hand, deserves all the kicks anyone can get in. It’s terrible from start to finish, beginning with the drab, boring and bland design of its near future and certainly not ending with a running time of astonishing 150 minutes that any sane production had cut down to about a hundred in the script stage, while adding something like a throughline to the plot that’s certainly not to be found in the 150 minutes I suffered through. Also generally terrible – as well as drab, boring and bland – is the acting, Edgar Ramírez mumbling and not-emoting through the movie like a sleepwalker, and most everyone else following suite.

As is all too typical for something directed by Olivier Megaton, the explosiveness strictly stays in the director’s name, while the on-screen action has a perfunctory (and yes, drab, boring and bland) quality to it that’s pretty astonishing in what’s supposed to be a professional production made by a man who supposedly specializes in the loud and the dumb. I could go on, but I’ve already wasted 150 minutes of my life on this thing.

The Last Wave (1977): While some of the ways Peter Weir’s classic uses Australian Aboriginal spirituality, setting it against the Western love for rationality arts and philosophy tend to posit (while the Western world acts perfectly irrational), are probably deemed “problematic” right now (though I am too old to be quite as ideologically righteous, I’m never perfectly happy with anything using this particular dichotomy and pitting the spiritually wise brown people against the coldly logical white ones who haven’t a clue myself), it is really hard to argue with the conviction and subtlety Weir uses the reinforce his theme. Nor do I know many other films quite as great at portraying reality slowly dissolving into states of the dreamlike and the supernatural, nor many that structurally use the “as above, so below” dictum with quite so much intelligence.


On a more pedestrian level, one also can’t help but admire any director able to get a really great performance out of Richard Chamberlain in this stage of his career as Weir does here.

Nightmare Cinema (2018)

Warning: if you’re very sensitive about these things, there are spoilers ahead!

One after the other, people find themselves drawn into a cinema where a mysterious projectionist (Mickey Rourke) shows films starring themselves. Cue episodic horror shorts by different directors, until things end on a decidedly unimpressive wrap-up. But then, Rourke is as boring a horror host as you can get for this sort of thing, so any part of the film involving more of him was bound to not be terribly interesting.

We start off with “The Thing in the Woods” by Juan of the Dead director Alejandro Brugués, in which we meet a woman named Samantha (Sarah Elizabeth Walters) who is apparently in the final stages of a slasher movie, having to fight off a slasher named The Welder in semi-comical manner. But is there more going on, and are we indeed witnessing a film from a different horror movie sub-genre than our heroine thinks she’s in? This one’s a fun little beginning to the film, using an audience’s genre-savvy to clever effect, including a fun plot twist as well as oodles of pretty cool gore. Brugués directs with verve and a clear knowledge of the particular sandbox he is playing in, coming up with a segment that feels fun and over the top in all the best ways. Plus, even in the age of the post-post-(post-?)slasher movie, he does come upon about some rather great slasher jokes.

Next up is Joe Dante’s “Mirare”, based on a Richard Christian Matheson short. It concerns the misadventures of Anna (Zarah Mahler) whose doting rich fiancée pays for a bit of plastic surgery to get rid of a somewhat unsightly bit of scar tissue on one of her cheeks. The grandfatherly plastic surgeon on call convinces her that a couple other “improvements” would be nice too. Of course, there are very different ideas of beauty floating around. Just look at Mickey Rourke! Sorry?

This one’s a pretty slight story whose style and twist (if you even want to call it that) could have landed it a room in a 90s horror cable TV anthology. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a fun little thing, though, and Dante, while certainly not at his best, still has a hand for pacing, the grotesque, and sarcastic if superficial commentary on contemporary social mores.

This is followed by Ryuhei Kitamura’s “Mashit”, and if you’re now asking yourself if it will contain some of the director’s trademark slow motion sword fighting, I can answer this with a resounding yes. How does that fit into a tale about possession at a Catholic orphanage? Well, how else would you stage a sword and knife fight between a priest, a nun and a bunch of possessed children? So yeah, this segment is about as tasteful as [insert grotesque contemporary politician of your choice here], but Kitamura plays the whole thing as such a loving homage to Italian gore horror (even the music is right), I as a lover of that sub-genre myself can’t help but be charmed. Plus, before that anti-money-maker of a scene, the director also includes some moody and creepy moments like the scene where the girl children rise from their beds synchronously, so you can’t really say Kitamura is only going for shock value here. Just once he does, he really does, which I found pretty damn admirable.

The following This Way to Egress by David Slade takes a turn from the awesomely tasteless and weird into the true Weird (and into black and white footage), telling the tale of Helen (Elizabeth Reaser), who – together with her two children – has come to the office of one Dr. Salvadore (Adam Godley) with a rather peculiar problem. She, as well as the audience, sees the people in her surroundings, as well as these surroundings themselves, transforming in disturbing ways that suggest decay and wrongness. Slade does wonders in creating the atmosphere of strangeness needed here, the disturbing feeling of things around you (and Helen) changing just when you aren’t looking, of having drifted into a place where you don’t belong anymore. He is ably supported by Reaser here, who puts a naturalistic face on the reaction to the unnatural, which makes it all the more unnatural.

Alas, Nightmare Cinema does end on “Dead”, the long, tedious and unfocussed tale of Riley (Faly Rakotohavana), who is clinically dead for some minutes after being shot by the same random crazy guy who just killed his parents. Afterwards, Riley does of course see dead people, among them his mum who wants him to die for under explained reasons. But in what I can only assume must have seemed like a good idea for a plot to director/writer Mick Garris, said random crazy guy is still alive and kicking and trying to kill Riley, so there’s also a bit of badly staged suspense added to the whole “I see dead people” shtick. Frankly, like most of what Garris directs, it’s a mess - badly paced, full of details that never come together, showing little visual style and feeling like one of the really bad episodes of one of those 90s cable TV horror shows Dante’s episode reminded me of in a more positive way. Which is no wonder since that really is where Garris comes from. I don’t want to be too down on the man, though, for while I still think he’s a mediocre director at his best, I do absolutely admire his ability to get projects like this (or “Masters of Horror”) off the ground, as well as his quality as an interviewer of genre heroes.


Apart from its final segment and the wrap-around (also directed by Garris, by the way), I had quite a bit of fun with Nightmare Cinema. I’d just recommend to stop the film before the Garris segment, which should leave the prospective viewer fully satisfied with the anthology film.

In short: The Three Musketeers (1973) & The Four Musketeers (1974)

(I treat both films as one because there's really no good reason not to, seeing as they were filmed back to back and absolutely belong together).

It is always a dangerous proposition to visit one's childhood favourites again, particularly when those favourites are comedies like Richard Lester's version of Dumas's Three Musketeers. Once, most of us found farts inherently funny, and now - hopefully - we no longer do.

So it is a particular delight when one can watch movies like the ones at hand and come out with the feeling that one was a particularly clever gal or guy when one liked it, already of impeccable taste and with an eye for strangeness.

For strange Lester's film surely is: turning the romantic splendour of the previous versions of the story into a mixture of the comedic, the veracious, and the absurd with the help of "Flashman" writer George MacDonald Fraser does not sound the most - or even fourth-most - obvious way to go about another adaptation of Dumas's novels, but Lester and Fraser really pull it of. A large part of the films' charm is based on the way the often very broad humour and the greater than usual in a swashbuckler authenticity collide, showing off much of what is splendour in other versions of the tale as just as silly as the fashions and mores of our times will look a few hundred years on. The past, the films make clear, was another, quite muddy and rainy (even in undramatic moments), country where people lived and loved and dressed and acted like fools, and where France was overrun with people with - or at least pretending to have - various British accents who were totally unable to agree on a pronounciation of D'Artagnan.

The Three Musketeers could easily have drifted into the realm of deeply cynical deconstruction with this approach, but the film looks at its strange people and times with a look that is as much one of wide-eyed wonder and compassion as it is one of mockery, as if Lester and Fraser had begun with cool distance to their material but soon enough fallen in love with all its inner ironies, its unconscious naiveties, and its sense of adventure that transcends morals.

Add to this a cast of actors like Oliver Reed, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Faye Dunaway, Geraldine Chaplin, Christopher Lee, Michael York, Frank Finlay, Raquel Welch and Richard Chamberlain in a very good mood (well, Welch is absolutely dreadful and has zero comical timing, but that was to be expected), and Lester's hand for heroically ridiculous (or is it ridiculously heroic?) swashbuckling action, and you have a film I'm inordinately proud to already have loved as a little boy.

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