Past Misdeeds: Evil Face (1974)

aka The Hand That Feeds The Dead

Original title: La mano che nutre la morte

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.


(Not to be confused with Le Amanti Del Monstro aka Lover of the Monster made in the same year, by the same director, with mostly the same cast, shared footage and even shared character names; don't ask, it's the Italian exploitation industry at the absurd height of its power, so everything's possible).

Ye Olden Days. Mad scientist Professor Nijinski (Klaus Kinski) has quite an interesting household. His wife Tanja (Katia Christine) is the daughter of his former mentor Ivan Rassimov (yes, exactly like the actor), and has been disfigured in a fire that killed her dad. Normal medicine can't help Tanja get her old skin back, but fortunately, daddy was a pioneer in skin transplantation, alas a rather primitive kind that for some inexplicable reason not only takes skin but also all of a donor's blood to work. Fortunately for Tanja, her husband does not have too many scruples, and his assistant, a lame, slightly hunchbacked mute named Vanja (the great Turkish bad guy actor Erol Tas) does have even fewer. Vanja's enthusiasm for the work might have something to do with him and Tanja having an affair behind Nijinski's back - that is, when Tanja isn't just torturing Vanja's ears with a tuning fork. Anyway, with two strong mad men on her side, there are always enough young women to go around to build a new skin for her.

In a fit of cleverness, Nijinski has even paid off sexual adventuress Sonia (Stella Calderoni) to stay at their mansion, quite possibly so that there's a skin donor around should he need one on very short notice. Apart from Sonia, there's also the writer Katja Olenov (Marzia Damon) staying at the house. Officially, she's there to research a book about Rassimov, but in truth the young woman suspects Nijinski of being responsible for the disappearance of her sister and is trying to find concrete evidence for her theory. Somehow, she manages not to notice all the murders going on around her.

To make matters more complicated, newlyweds Alex (Ayhan Isik) and Masha (Katia Christine) have a coach accident nearly in front of the Nijinskis' mansion. The Professor is only too happy to take the couple in and help get the hurt Masha on her feet again once he's taken a look at the young bride's face and realizes that she looks exactly like his wife did before her accident. And as luck will have it, Nijinski has left the necessary skin transplants on his wife's face for last. Will anyone notice that something is very wrong in his house before it's too late?

Sergio Garrone's gothic exploitation movie Evil Face is a bit of a difficult film to enjoy. The movie's first half consists of way too many bland scenes setting things up, and way too few scenes in which interesting things happen in interesting ways. For every minute of Erol Tas stumbling through the mansion's garden to reach his mistress before her tuning fork will drive him completely insane, and for every second of Nijinski's fantastic lab (Look at all that brass! And the red, bubbling liquid! The blinking lights! Truly, this is a place where scientific work is being done!), for every moodily framed shot, there are ten minutes of bored, stagey dialogue sequences that just go on and on and on. For some reason, nearly all of the film's big exploitational values - action, breasts, lesbian sex, blood, a premature burial, a deeply unpleasant rape scene, stolen faces etc. - are pushed into the film's last third, a point when it's still possible to appreciate the movie's sudden ruthlessness and interest in keeping its viewers awake, but quite impossible to care too much.

Weirdly enough, even Evil Face's if not action-packed, so at least occurrence-packed final third, has a strange feeling of slowness about it. On paper, there's a whole lot of stuff happening at once, but the pacing still feels leaden and unsure, even for the not exactly sprightly genre that is the Italian gothic horror film.

It's also a bit of a disappointment how little use the film makes of Kinski. It's obvious that the great madman wasn't paid for as many shooting days as his co-stars, so there are quite a few scenes where Nijinski's character disappears nearly completely, or where the back of a stand-in takes Kinski's place. However, even when Kinski is on screen, he isn't completely there. Seldom have I seen the actor this disinterested and bored for the duration of a whole film, with nary a blip of his usual charisma and intensity. Perhaps Garrone should have given him a scene or two with a naked lady not on an operating table?

Because Kinski's never there, most of the physical acts of evil are left to Erol "Dr. Satan" Tas, and the Turkish actor does take the opportunity to show off his special brand of physical overacting, so full of grunting, limping, jumping and eye-rolling that every scene with him is pretty much a winner (or, in the case of the short rape sequence, pretty much as horrible as it should be).

The rest of the actors are decent, attractive, and quite believable as a bunch of characters totally incompetent in everything they do. Actually, I'd suggest that Garrone might be trying to make a point on the ineffectualness and painful blandness of the usual heroes and (sometimes) villains of gothic horror - especially the male ones - here, by leaving two women this sort of film would usually side-line as the involuntary instigator of a villain's deeds and victim number two - the utterly heartless Tanja, and the frequently traumatized yet still courageous and intelligent lesbian Katja - as the characters among the film's cast actually doing more than just going through the motions, making them the film's real villain and hero, respectively. Given the state of the rest of the film, I somehow doubt Garrone did this on purpose, though.


But, purpose or not, I'm happy for every hint of actual thought going into a movie. It's not enough to recommend the film to anyone not as deeply into this sort of thing as I am, but since "this sort of thing" in this particular case includes gothic horror, Klaus Kinski, Erol Tas, and possible genre-bending, quite a few of you might still want to take a look at Evil Face.

In short: Django the Bastard (1969)

Original title: Django Il Bastardo

aka Django the Avenger

aka The Stranger's Gundown

A rather creepy gunman with very limited facial expressions - for the movie's first hour, I count one and a half - named, like these gunmen usual are, Django (Anthony Steffen), rides through the West delivering crosses containing the given day as their date of death to various men before he shoots them. Of course, Django is out for vengeance for something that will be explained in a (slightly comical) flashback later on.

The avenger's job is nearly done, too. After getting rid of two of his victims in short order, there's just Rod Murdock (Paolo Gozlino) left, but Murdock is a more worthy opponent than the others. Once he realizes someone is after him (Django ain't one for subtlety), Murdock decides the protection of his mad brother (Luciano Rossi in a role that has a decided whiff of Kinski) and a few men isn't enough, hires a lot more thugs and holes up with them in a town he empties of other inhabitants.

Now having to use various techniques I usually connect with the goddamn Batman, Django goes to work on them.

I always seem to be of two minds about the Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Garrone. On one hand, they are all highly derivative, with hardly any plot point that don't come up regularly in other Spaghetti Westerns, and with characters completely following the expected types, on the other hand, they are also usually highly entertaining and accomplished films.

Django the Bastard may even be Garrone's best Western - it is at least the best I've seen to date - mainly because this time around, there are actually a few elements to the film that aren't quite as often explored in other Spaghettis.

The main point of interest in this regard is the way the film treats its avenging anti-hero. That a Spaghetti Western's protagonist has near superhuman abilities with the gun and incredible tenacity isn't anything new, of course, but for about the first hour, Garrone's and Anthony Steffen's script builds him up as a nearly supernatural threat, putting a bit more of the creepy in their West than is the rule. In fact, the script uses this aspect so intensely that it came as a bit of a disappointment to me when Django turned out to be only a very messed-up and angry man who consciously tries to seem more than merely human, making the comparison to Batman more than just a throw-away joke of yours truly.

Another peculiar pop-cultural resonance of Garrone's film is Django's cruelty, and the strangely ritual elements of some of his killings, that - especially early in the movie - give the impression that he's not just traumatized and angry, but an actual serial killer preying on pretty atypical victims. If you squint, you could even argue that this makes Django the Bastard some sort of proto slasher movie, but then you can say that about nearly all movies with vengeance-driven plots if you broaden your definition of makes a movie a "proto-slasher" enough.

Apart from these aspects, Django the Bastard is very typical of this phase of the Spaghetti Western: a minimal (or minimalist, if you prefer) plot with archetypal characters is executed with true visual panache; actors with very limited range work excellently within their limits (in Steffen's case, this is clearly one of his best performances); rich people are bastards; fun is had by all.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,spaghetti western,in short,sergio garrone,anthony steffen,luciano rossi,rada rassimov

On WTF: Evil Face (1974)

Klaus Kinski! Erol Tas! Fiendish experiments! Skin transplants! Lesbian softcore sex! Mean things! Gothic horror! Possible hidden cleverness!

If any of these things interest you, you will probably also find something to interest you in my weekly appearance on the venerable WTF-Film, and/or in the Italian movie Evil Face aka The Hand That Feeds the Dead I'm surprisingly enough not enthusing about there.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,reviews,horror,gothic,sergio garrone,klaus kinski,katia christine,marzia damon,erol tas,other places

In short: Three Crosses Not To Die (1968)

Original title: Tre croci per non morire

Professional bounty hunter Reno (Giovanni Cianfriglia), professional charmer of women Jerry (Craig Hill) and professional Mexican horse thief Paco (Pietro Tordi) all have to look forward to a nice thirty days of jail time for their professions. Fortunately for them, their special talents are needed, and a group of monks and a desperate Mexican father first organize a very soft jailbreak for them, and then hire the men to prove the innocence of the father's son in a murder and a rape committed in another town. Preferably, the three crooks should solve the crime before the innocent will be hanged in seven days.

There's good money in it for the trio too, so they decide to take the offer of employment on the side of what's right and honourable for once.

But someone really doesn't want them to even start their investigation. Even before they arrive in the town where the crime took place, the three dubious heroes already have had to fight off a fake lynch mob and a band of Mexican bandits. Life doesn't get much easier when the three finally arrive in town. The townspeople do not want to have anything to do with the whole affair, and make for especially unhelpful witnesses. Someone behind the scenes - perhaps the man responsible for the murder and the attempts on the trio's lives - has more violent reactions to them snooping around.

Still, after some snooping, the investigators find out that there was a secret witness to the crime, a woman named Dolores. Might she have anything to do with the woman (Evelyn Stewart) living in an abandoned mill Jerry sets his mind on seducing as soon as he sees her?

Sergio Garrone's Three Crosses Not To Die is one of those films that are easiest praised by complimenting aspects of them that sound like they should be normal for any film, but usually aren't. There's an air of professionalism and competence about the movie that all too often just signals boredom and a lack of imagination. In Three Crosses' case that air is more the effect of a director and a script more interested in coherence and telling a simple and linear story cleanly than one is used to from Spaghetti Westerns.

There is, I think, something to be said for this approach, especially in a genre that usually doesn't take it, and instead tends to drift off in all directions. That drifting is something I like films to do too, obviously, but Garrone's peculiar way of being conventional makes for an interesting change, surprising in its lack of surprises.

It does help the film's case that Garrone still delivers much of what is needed in Spaghetti Westerns: people in ridiculous brownface pretending to be Mexican (Evelyn Stewart as a Latina? Really?), lots of close-ups of men making shifty-eyes, shoot-outs with a body count of the "the more, the merrier" sort, and a standard-for-its-genre yet rousing enough musical score. The movie's even well paced.

It's all quite traditional, but also very entertaining, really. The only true surprise the film offers lies in the fact that its script tends to the more American type of characterisation: the film's protagonists are really heroic beyond reason and not much given to the bouts of sadism and asshattery common in the European Western hero. In this respect, I was also a bit disappointed how much the ending pulled its punches - I didn't necessarily expect The Big Silence, but what Garrone does is too much of a cop out for my tastes.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: spaghetti western,in short,italian movies,sergio garrone,craig hill,evelyn stewart

No Room To Die (1969)

aka Hanging For Django (which is an interesting alternative title for a film without a Django or a hanging)

Some time after the US Civil War. A town near the Mexican border whose surrounding landscape looks a lot like autumnal Italy is the centre of a rather nasty affair. The local land owners, especially the evil Mr. Fargo (Riccardo Garrone, director Sergio Garrone's brother), have invented a fantastic method to replace the slaves who aren't working their farms anymore. Their henchmen smuggle in illegal Mexican immigrants to whom they have promised a better life and money to send back to their families. Obviously, the capitalist menace treats them even worse than they once treated their slaves. If it is convenient to kill the Mexicans to evade discovery by the cavalry trying to stop the human cattle trade, so be it. After all, there are a lot of desperate poor people left where the last batch came from.

It could all go well for our capitalist friends, if not for the fact that most of the people they employ to do their human cattle trading for them have prices on their heads. That sort of people tends to attract the attention of bounty hunters, and it doesn't take long until the first of those arrive. Johnny Brandon (ole wooden face Anthony Steffen) and the preacher Everett Murdock (William Berger) aren't working together, yet still manage to disrupt Fargo's business in their separate but equally bloody ways.

It is getting so bad that Fargo has to lead his next human buying spree in Mexico himself. As if the man didn't have problems enough already with his non-reciprocated love for Mexican landowner Maya (Nicoletta Machiavelli) and his tendency to have expressionist black and white flashbacks!

Brandon proposes to Murdock that they team up and make a little trip to Mexico themselves, so there's no rest for the wicked Mr. Fargo and his men there either.

More dead henchmen later, the capitalist tries to pay the bounty hunters off. Murdock - being a preacher and all - is quite susceptible to bribery, but Brandon isn't in the bounty hunting business for the money alone.

As far as I can remember No Room To Die is the first of the handful of Spaghetti Western directed by Italian Sergio (and isn't that a promising first name in this genre?) Garrone I have seen, and if the rest of them keeps what this one promises, there are quite a few films for me to look forward to.

As is usually the case with Spaghetti Westerns from the second row of the genre, Garrone's film is far from being flawless. It is a highly derivative film that grabs as many stylistic elements from the genre-defining works of those other Sergios, throws them in a hat and pulls them out in a rather random fashion. Fortunately, luck and Garrone's directorial talent (I wouldn't dare to decide which of those two has the greater share after having seen only one of Garrone's films) conspire to let these random elements add up to a surprisingly entertaining film. We might (I certainly have) have seen everything here before, from the Anthony Steffen's crotch to the incessant shots of people staring to the strange rifle (shotgun? mini gatling gun?) Berger uses, but we haven't seen these elements put together in exactly the same way. That doesn't sound like much, yet leads to a very entertaining little film.

When you decide to live with No Room to Die's derivativeness, you can start to admire the cheap but classical form all those stolen elements take here.

And yet, having said that, I also have to say that a feeling of nervousness seems to be lying below the usual emotionally calm but physically brutal surface of the film that isn't stolen or borrowed from anyone else's films, but belongs to Garrone alone. Even the physical and tactical superiority of the violent heroes feels somehow more brittle than usual, not only in the obligatory torture sequence, but even in the most banal of shoot-outs. One could nearly start to think these protagonists are only human.

How much of that feeling got into the film on purpose and how much just happened to manifest itself is for the people who made it to say (and they could very well be lying).

It is also possible I have just made all of this up based on the slightly shaking hands of William Berger and Anthony Steffen's atypically numerous facial expressions. The thought of the latter is a bit disconcerting any way you look at it. Either I have gotten so used to Steffen that I by now count every slight movement of his face as a change in expression, or he really shows at least three and a half different emotions here!

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,spaghetti western,sergio garrone,anthony steffen,william berger,reviews