The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1986)

Original title: Strannaya istoriya doktora Dzhekila I mistera Khayda

Lawyer Utterson (Anatoliy Adoskin) is worried about his friend and client Dr Henry Jekyll (Innokentiy Smoktunovskiy), a successful and rather virtuous (by Victorian standards of the term) physician. Jekyll has changed his will in a curious way – now, his entire fortune is supposed to go to one Mr. Edward Hyde (Aleksandr Feklistov), a complete unknown without any discernible connections to Jekyll. Curiouser still, Jekyll emphasises that Hyde shall inherit even if Jekyll just disappears for more than three months.

Utterson smells blackmail and dark plans, even more so since he learns that this Hyde is a person of vile tastes, a violent personality, and is perhaps involved in rather serious crimes. Jekyll becomes increasingly withdrawn from society, while Hyde appears to become more active with some dark business, until Utterson finally learns…

Well, what most everyone watching a movie concern this particular strange case will already know – Hyde and Jekyll are the good (more or less) and the evil (totally) side of the same man, divided (in a way) through an elixir Jekyll created in an attempt of completely repressing his worst impulses gone perfectly badly.

But then, it is one of the most interesting aspects of Aleksandr Orlov’s Soviet version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s genre-defining short novel that it mostly attempts to follow the book’s structure more closely than other adaptations – Utterson and theoretically the audience even finally learn the truth reading papers left by Jekyll, as in the novel proper. Though Orlov is still a filmmaker, so said papers lead to a series of flashbacks instead of the Utterson Reading Hour.

Given that Western adaptations of the material nearly always ignore the structure of Stevenson’s book completely, Orlov’s approach feels curiously fresh. Sure, Hyde’s identity won’t be a surprise to the viewer (unlike the original readers of the book, I assume), but there’s great joy in the slow reveal of details and the less straightforward presentation of the narrative that leaves little gaps for the audience to fill.

Visually, this is a fine film, a bit stodgily staged in some sequences but full of life and creativity in the more directly horrific scenes. Whenever Hyde appears – often capering and contorting himself like a character from an expressionist silent movie – the camera becomes particularly mobile, the angles as Dutch as Amsterdam, as if the world were visually coming askew with the presence of a force quite contrary to the slow and measured pace regular Victorian society likes to present. Which visually explains parts of the draw Hyde has for Jekyll – he’s a dancer of a kind in a place where even abominable acts are carried out with a stiff neck.

Increasing the silent movie influence, Orlov uses colours in ways that suggest tinting more than contemporary colour choices, with tones of sepia and blue often denoting the emotional impact of these scenes.

Quite contrary to the Victorian setting, the film’s score by Eduard Artemyev (who also scored various Tarkovsky films, among many other things) is synth based and sounds like the sort of thing you’d hear in an Italian movie of the time, particularly during Hyde’s scenes. This adds an additional layer of mood and peculiarity to proceedings, something this version of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde already has in spades.

Pirates Of The XXth Century (1979)

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.

Original title: Piraty XX veka 

Little does the crew of a Soviet freighter transporting medicine for the Motherland expect the true nature of their cargo - opium. However, what the sailors don't know, a bunch of evil pirates does. A shipwrecked sailor (Talgat Nigmatulin) the freighter takes on board on the open sea is in truth the pirates' man on the inside, bound to destroy the ship’s radio when the time for attack comes. Soon enough half of the Soviets are dead, their freight is stolen, and their ship is sinking.

The survivors, led by their Captain Iwan Iljitsch (Pyotr Velyaminov) and engineer and part-time hero Sergej Sergejitsch (Nikolai Yeryomenko) manage to escape on a life boat without their enemies realizing it, but without supplies and far-off from help, their situation looks none too pleasant. That is, until they come upon an island. As luck will have it, the crew's troubles aren't over yet, though, for it is this very same island the pirates are using as an HQ after having enslaved a village of peaceful pearl-divers. Or rather the female population of it - for the men, the pirates just couldn't find any use.

Fortunately, the Soviet sailors are nearly to a man - there is of course the obligatory "coward" (aka a person who reacts rather more realistically to the whole plot) and the crew's two women are only there to get kidnapped and tortured a bit because why should a Soviet Russian movie be any better about this stuff - improbably competent at the manly arts of sneaking, fighting, and being badass while disco funk plays, so they even have a chance to survive the ensuing cat and mouse game against the much better armed and more numerous pirates. In the end, though, all will depend on Sergej Sergejitsch's ability to do the lone hero bit.

Boris Durov's Pirates Of The XXth Century was the highest grossing movie in the existence of the USSR, which again goes to show that people are the same wherever you go. So if there's a film full of fun violence, an audience will choose it over anything generally considered more worthy every time, no matter where it comes from or what specifically is considered to be more worthy at that given place and time. I say this and make it sound as if it were a bad thing, but obviously, Pirates and films of its type are my bread and butter when it comes to movies, and I'll watch and enjoy a film with shoot-outs and explosions over a treatise about some rich people's marital troubles (or in this case the purity of the working classes) every time.

As an action film - a genre Soviet directors only had limited experience with - Pirates often is a bit awkward, with everyone striking the same poses you'd find in a Hollywood production or something produced in the Philippines, but doing so in a manner that can feel slightly off, as if the actors and the director weren't totally fluent in the filmic language they were speaking. This does only strengthen the film's charms for me by providing it with a feeling of a certain playground innocence, not unlike that found in Turkish pop cinema, although Pirates' creators, not surprisingly, show quite a bit more technical proficiency. Like many action films this is a variation of kids playing cowboys and Indians, just with a greater budget for playing make-believe.

Other elements of the film are completely in keeping with the international language of action movies. There's awkward-yet-awesome white guy martial arts (still better than Chuck Norris because these white guys at least lack the ick factor), the need for people to at least nearly fall off a cliff if a cliff is provided, the naturalness with which everyone who isn't a woman not only knows how to use an assault rifle but is good at it too - all these pleasant clichés and more are there and always pretty fun to watch.

Pirates also offers some choice noises for our ears thanks to a wonderfully late 70s disco funk score by Yevgeniy Gevorgyan that is clearly a brother in spirit to what I like to call Toei Funk and assorted genres of film music, with some added moments of random synth-warbling during the diving sequences (which are pleasantly short and to the point instead of the traditional boring and long-winded).

Pirates is great fun if you don't have to take your action movies dead seriously, but can enjoy silliness for the sake of silliness like a proper cult movie fan should. No worries, though, while the film is as silly as one could ask for, it never goes the frightening and wrong route of conscious camp that has destroyed many a movie over the years. This film's silliness is not a result of cynicism.

It also should be noted that the film's script (by Durov and Desyat Negrityat's Stanislav Govorukhin) eschews the bane of many a Soviet movie, the propagandist speeches about the superiority of the Soviet people, awesomeness of the working classes, communism, and so on, and so forth that have sucked the joy out of many a film (which I suspect to not have been the favourite parts of movies for their native Soviet movie audiences either). There are of course certain assumptions about the way people and the world work that are slightly different from what one is used to from western films (for one, there's a larger emphasis on team play than is typical for action movies of the time without the number seven in their title), but these are the result of people coming from a culturally slightly different place, and will only annoy those who can't cope with others having vaguely different values or ideas about the world than themselves.

So, all in all, Soviet Russia can be proud of having this as its highest-grossing movie.

Past Misdeeds: Desyat negrityat (1987)

aka Ten Little Indians

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 presented with only  basic re-writes and 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.

Warning: this Soviet adaptation of Agatha Christie's novel uses the initial title and version of the nursery rhyme that's so important for its plot, so if you're afraid of that authentic period racism, this is not the adaptation for you. I'll spare you the deeply problematic terminology in the review, though.

Eight strangers - among them a retired judge (Vladimir Zeldin), a secretary and governess (Tatyana Drubich), a former policeman (Aleksei Zharkov) and a soldier/mercenary (Aleksandr Kaydanovskiy) - arrive at an isolated island mansion (on what I shall call N-word Island). They all have been invited, each guest for a different reason, by a certain U.N. Owen, a person quite unknown to everyone. On the island, the group is awaited by a freshly hired couple of servants (Aleksei Zolotnitsky and Irina Tershchenko), who have neither seen nor heard their new employer. Supposedly, Owen has been held up on the mainland and will join the party the next day.

Owen and his various promises to the various guests turn out to be lies once dinner time arrives. A gramophone recording explains the sins of all ten guests; everyone is responsible for the death of at least one other human being, and everyone, the recording explains, is going to pay for their sins. Which is exactly what happens: one after the other, the guests are killed in ways echoing an old British nursery rhyme that just happens to be posted in everyone's room. Soon, the guests realize they really are the only people on the island, so the killer must be one of them. But who is it, and will they find out before everyone's dead or broken by the situation?

I am, in general, not much of an admirer of the works of Agatha Christie. In part, it's a problem I often have with the cozy subgenre - I just can't bring myself to care if it was the butler or the young relative who killed Lord Arsebutton for his money, and really, why should I? Christie's case is further weakened by her love for perfectly annoying detectives (why isn't anyone murdering Poirot and Miss Marple, for Cthulhu's sake?), her classism, and the intensely improbable construction of many of her mysteries.

I do make an exception for novels like Ten Little N./Ten Little Indians/And Then There Were None, though, because there is little that is actually "cozy" about them - but who'd call a literary sub-genre the "bleaky"? Ten (let's make it easy on ourselves with the title) is a novel whose basic set-up has fascinated many a movie director, too, but some of them have balked from giving the film its proper, grim ending. Certainly not Soviet director Stanislav Govorukhin, whose Desyat negrityat not just keeps all the uncomfortable elements of Christie's original novel including its ending, but focuses on them to create the psychologically dark period piece the novel deserves to be.

In Govorukhin's hands, the sometimes somewhat dry book turns into a claustrophobic nightmare that at times feels like a horror film. The director often uses consciously cramped framing - even in shots taking place outside the house - to emphasize how the situation the murderer constructed for his victims throws them back onto themselves, their guilt - even though not all of them feel guilty, and this isn't a movie where a feeling of guilt saves anyone from anything anyhow - and the pasts deeds whose consequences they can't escape anymore, if they ever could or did. There's an incredible sense of tension running through the movie that belies the surface talkiness of its script (though Govorukhin knows quite well when to let his characters stop talking, which becomes clear in the last stages of the film), the seeming simplicity of Govorukhin's direction, and the film's length of 129 minutes. On paper, this might still sound like your typical cozy mystery plot, but in practice, this is a film interested in, and awfully good at, exploring the existential darkness inside of and around its characters. And, if we want to give the film a political dimension instead of one sitting between philosophy and psychology, can it be an accident that every character in the film - the killer of killers being no exception - has at one point not just killed, but killed by misusing a position of authority and trust?

The actors, especially Drubich and Kaydanovskiy, are fantastic, selling the moments of naturalistic break-downs as well as those of heated melodrama. They - and the script, of course - also manage to turn what could have been only a series of vile people who get exactly what they deserve from somebody no less vile who gets a friendly nod for it (let's call that the "Dexter hypocrisy syndrome") into complex characters who have at one point in their lives given in to weaknesses that - this seems to be a particularly important point for the film - are universally human. These aren't all "bad" people, or "good" ones, or "misunderstood" ones, but just people deserving of compassion even though they have done horrible, or callous, or weak, things. Which, on the other hand, doesn't mean Govorukhin is willing to pretend his characters are the sort of people acting well under outside pressure.

The film's only weakness in my eyes lies in the construction of its plot, or rather, how artificially constructed it is. There's a central plot point - and we can thank Christie for that - that just beggars believe when you stop and think about it for a second (and, to digress for a parenthesis, it is ironically a plot point contemporary movies like the mildly diverting Saw series seem to have fallen in love with wholesale), needing everyone still alive at a particular moment to be outrageously dense or credulous, and the killer to be extremely lucky and talented in the ways of the pulp yogi. However, Govorukhin's direction is so strong I couldn't help but look with raised eyebrows at the solution of the film's mystery, yet still be decidedly enthusiastic about the film as a whole.


The mystery isn't the point of the film anyhow. Desyat Negrityat is all about showing what made its characters what they are, and what they become.

Past Misdeeds: Zemlya Sannikova (1973)

aka The Sannikov Land

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 presented with only  basic re-writes and 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.

During the later stages of the existence of tsarist Russia. His - most probably revolutionary - politics have brought geographer Ilyin (Vladislav Dvorzhetsky) into exile in a town near the polar circle. Ilyin dreams of being the first man to set foot onto Sannikov Land, an area north of the polar ice that is green and fecund instead of icy and barren. Some pretty talk about gold that might be found there with the local evil (as he does of course not actually intend to share the gold with the geographer) capitalist earns Ilyin, who is clearly much less interested in gold than exploration as a goal in itself, the funding for an expedition into the white north.

The expedition isn't exactly large: Ilyin, the local manly man/drunk/singer of horrible pop songs and fan of the Tsar Evgeniy Krestovskiy (Oleg Dal), and the capitalist's beleaguered right-hand man and odious comic relief Ignatiy (Georgi Vitsin) - who also seems to stand in for the oppressed working classes from time to time - make up the whole of the expedition, until revolutionary and doctor Gubin (Yuri Nazarov) sneaks on board the ship carrying the trio northwards. Gubin has escaped from prison, and is initially planning to hijack the ship to sail to America, but since he and Ilyin just happen to be old friends, and Ilyin really is quite convincing in his ardour to reach Sannikov Land, he becomes part of the expedition and the trio turns into a quartet.

Once they have set foot on icy land, the expedition doesn't go too well at first. The corpses of an earlier expedition also looking for Sannikov Land are something of a bad omen, and the Inuit our expedition has hired as guides while the camera wasn't looking turn back halfway, taking the dog sleds of the expedition with them (note to self: if you ever go on a polar expedition, bring your own dogs and sleds).

Just when all seems lost and our heroes start with the infighting and the dying, they reach Sannikov Land. It turns out the place is a valley kept warm by volcanic activity (uh oh), and really as green and pleasant as Ilyin had hoped. It's also populated by a tribe of phenotypically very diverse natives (from Caucasians in slight brown-face to a lot of Asians with blond and red wigs) called the Onkilon. While the Onkilon aren't as threatening as their demeanour initially suggests, their chief does not want anyone in the outside world to learn of the existence of their home. He's not a bad guy, though, for he is perfectly willing to provide the strangers with places among his tribe and (how romantic!) women of their own - as long as they never leave again.

This could be the beginning of a somewhat wonderful friendship (if one doesn't mind the imprisonment and shotgun wedding aspect), but alas, the tribe's shaman (Makhmud Esambayev in a performance somewhere between Iggy Pop and the worst Hollywood Indian you can imagine) has a different opinion. He sees that the strangers are threatening his power over the tribe and decides he needs to get rid of them; and while he's at it, he might get rid of that darn liberal chief for good measure.

Zemlya Sannikova is based on a novel in the Lost World mold by early Russian SF writer and man with a highly interesting life (just look at his Wikipedia page!) Vladimir Obruchev, and - as far as I can tell - is still something of a classic in the former Soviet Union. This is another indication (as if we needed more) that people at their core really are the same all over the world, political and cultural differences notwithstanding, for Zemlya Sannikova is exactly the sometimes cheesy, sometimes silly, sometimes awe-inspiringly beautiful kind of adventure movie people all over the world would love, featuring manly, bearded and morally upright heroes (except for the Tsarist, who just happens to be a bit of a prick), an insane shaman, various daring deeds, beautiful women in horrible clothing, and a basic idea that should make everyone's inner twelve year old gleefully happy. Naturally, there are a few differences in the movie's stereotypes when compared to western movies - the capitalist is evil in a slightly different way than capitalists in western movies are, for example. The film's ideology also is a bit different than one is used to from other adventure movies - the film ends on the heroes planning a rescue expedition for the threatened tribe instead of killing them all and taking their stuff, for Marx's sake! - though I think this internationalist streak is rather refreshing. Still, below these surface differences waits the archetype of the adventure story.

Often, the film is very good at what it does: Zemlya Sannikova's early stages not only convey the romance and pathos the kind of expedition our heroes go on carrries, but also a subtle sense of melancholia that will return in the film's final scenes; there's something desperate and beautiful in the history of human exploration of the world, and the early parts of Zemlya Sannikova really want to make that clear. Of course, that feeling of melancholia (already broken by two really quite horrible pop songs early on) soon enough makes room for one of slight insanity once the focus shifts from the exploration to the natives. For while the film tries its hardest to talk about some serious themes when it comes to the Onkilon, its treatment of everything surrounding the tribe is deeply cheesy and silly as is tradition in all Lost World type films. It's not just the fact that these "natives" are dressed up in ridiculous wigs and costumes no actual human being would ever have worn in any kind of wilderness, nor just that their culture - as far as we see it - does not make the slightest bit of sense (we're in full grown "they are big children, Jean-Jacques" territory here), nor is it the combination of these factors alone. Rather it's that their treatment as being the ultimate naïfs seems even more naive than they themselves are supposed to be, as if the film's only idea of how hunter and collector societies work came from a third grade version of Rousseau and Marx.

The latter gentleman truly comes in once we take a look at the film's main bad guy, the shaman, who is clearly supposed to be an example of the destructive power of religion (opium of the people, etc) - more evil than capitalism! - as a way to control the minds of a people. Of course, I can't say I disagree all that much with the film's views of organized religion, it's just that Zemlya Sannikova is simplifying a complex web of human wishes and desires until it turns into a ridiculous farce. That matter sure isn't helped by Esambayev's - a professional dancer who shows his talent in here in adorably ridiculous ways - hilarious performance. Even if one ignores the ideological aspect, it's pretty difficult to take a villain seriously who spends as much time shimmying, wobbling, shaking, hip-swinging and doing the funky chicken while chewing scenery as Esambayev does. On the other hand, while the man's performance might destroy any semblance of seriousness the film had until he appeared, he sure as hell is perfectly entertaining to watch.

Add to that elements like a soundtrack by Aleksandr Zatsepin that reaches from the (still horrible) pop songs to weird, moody synth noodling to Peter Thomas like psychedelic lounge electronica, or ideas like the marriage rites of the Onkilon (basically, they're playing catch), and you have a film as strange as one could hope for. All the silliness (and the sad, scientifically correct absence of dinosaurs and monstrous animals every lost world is supposed to contain) and the many scenes that are just as cheesy as those in a comparable Hollywood adventure movie would be come together into something highly diverting, if not exactly the film I had expected going in.


Directors Albert S. Mkrtchyan (last seen here directing the excellent Priskosnoveniye) and Leonid Popov manage this strange mixture of the earnest, the bizarre, the dogmatic and the plain fun with aplomb, using - often impressively beautiful - nature shots as the best special effect of them all, and treat every aspect of the film with dignity, never mind if the aspect at hand actually deserves any dignity. It might be a cliché, but there's just never a dull moment on screen in Zemlya Sannikova.

On WTF: Pirates Of The XXth Century (1979)

Original title: Piraty XX veka

Most people probably would not expect the highest grossing Soviet movie to have been a non-propagandistic action movie about heroic Soviet sailors fighting for their lives against pirates, but that's exactly what it was.

My column on WTF-Film explains how international the language of face-punching and shooting truly is.

Technorati-Markierungen: soviet movies,reviews,action,adventure,boris durov,nikolai yeryomenko,pyotr velyaminov,talgat nigmatulin,other places

On WTF: Desyat Negrityat (1987)

aka Ten Little Indians

I'm not exactly Agatha Christie's biggest fan, but this, the only adaptation of the book you may also know as "And Then There Were None" that is faithful to the original, is still an excellent movie. At least, if you like your movies Soviet, bleak and grim.

My column on WTF-Film has all the details.

Technorati-Markierungen: soviet movies,mystery,stanislav govorukhin,vladimir zeldin,tatyana drubich,aleksandr kaydanovskiy,aleksei zharkov,other places

On WTF: Zemlya Sannikova (1973)

Lost World movies are a most excellent thing, seeing as they mix the already wonderful adventure genre with all sorts of improbable and exciting elements.

The Soviet Zemlya Sannikova wears the marks of its genre proudly, and even though it avoids dinosaurs, black magic and aliens, it still manages to stuff in all kinds of (ideologically approved) awesome nonsense, including one of the silliest bad guys I ever had the pleasure to watch. Read my column on WTF-Film to learn more!

Technorati-Markierungen: soviet movies,adventure,other places,albert s. mkrtchyan,leonid popov,vladislav dvorzhetsky,oleg dal,makhmud esambayev,reviews

Curse of Snakes Valley (1987)

Original title: Klatwa doliny wezy

More than thirty years after having stolen a statue and some scrolls from Indochina, soldier of fortune Bernard Traven (Roman Wilhelmi) - hopefully not related to the writer - finally finds somebody who can translate the language on the scrolls.

Polish orientalist Tarnas (Krzysztof Kolberger), working in Paris, is just about the only scientist who believes in the people who used that language, and he's just too happy to get an opportunity to translate the scrolls. One of them has a secret hidden inside - a map that "smells like the jungle", as Traven explains. The map points to a valley "of wisdom and power". Something's more curious about the map than just its smell, though, for once Tarnas has discovered it, he and Traven are attacked by poisonous yet strangling snakes, which, as far as I know, is not the sort of thing that happens often in Paris.

The snake attack awakens the interest of reporter Christine (Ewa Salacka), who won't leave Tarnas in peace, not even when Traven and he decide to go to the former Indochina (I suspect Laos, well actually, I suspect the writers didn't care) to look for that mysterious valley.

Christine isn't the only one interested in the discovery of the map. Shady people who may belong to an evil corporation or an evil secret service think the valley contains a powerful weapon. Not only will the two Ts have to travel with Christine, cope with the guys following them, or the fact that Traven is pretty untrustworthy himself, they'll also have to fight further snakes and some choice traps guarding the secret of the valley.

The Polish/Soviet co-production Curse of Snakes Valley demonstrates nicely that the Indiana Jones-alike adventure movie wasn't just the province of Cannon Films and the Italian genre film industry - basically, everyone who could put a silly hat on a man could play that game.

Production value-wise, Curse is above the sort of film somebody like (house favourite) Antonio Margheriti could have fielded. Mostly, because parts of it look like they were actually filmed in South East Asia, making the obligatory scenes of our heroes trampling through the wilderness and some old ruins that decisive bit more attractive. The film's effects, on the other hand, are pretty much sub-par. There's an especially stiff giant snake thing attacking in the film's final third that may be mechatronic but carries the whiff of bad puppet theatre, and an alien transformation sequence that's of the technical standard of the 1940s. Of course, even when the execution might be as dubious as it is here, I'm never really going to complain about statues that shoot laser beams from their eyes, giant snake things or alien transformations in my 80s adventure movies, because those are exactly the sort of thing my inner five year old desperately wants to see; and as you know, Jim, inner five year olds don't care about believable execution, which seems to be a value they share with the film's director Marek Piestrak.

In form and structure, Curse is just like an Italian Indiana Jones rip-off, with all the running around, the plot convolutions, and the dubious ideas about foreign countries that implies (though it has to be said that the film treats the teleporting South East Asian monk with a degree of respect, and actually disapproves of stealing treasures that belong to other cultures), some mild action sequences and a female lead who is mostly there to get snakes, corpses etc dropped onto here until the script gets around to remembering why she's in the film except for having breasts. The silly and fun ancient alien nonsense that underlies the whole affair is exactly what you'd expect from a film like this - it makes decreasing sense (just wait for the next to last scene and guffaw with joy), but it's not taking itself seriously enough to become annoying (unlike a certain CGI fest about a crystal skull). Even the soundtrack by Sven Grünberg fits into the Italian mold with generic minimal synth plonks puckering generically along, Grünberg's reputation as something of an avantgarde musician notwithstanding.

The only real difference between Curse and other adventure movies of its type is the immense passivity of its protagonist Tarnas, who never actually does much of any impact, not even the kind of impact a fist has when it meets a human face. I think that may be what happens when David Warbeck isn't around to take the leading role.

Apart from that, Curse of Snakes Valley is another film out to demonstrate that the common language of exploitation filmmaking is truly international. Since that means more 80s adventure movies for me to watch, it's clearly a good thing.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: polish movies,soviet movies,marek piestrak,krzysztof kolberger,ronan wilhelmi,ewa salacka,adventure,sf

In short: Semya Vurdalakov (1990)

aka The Vampire Family

A newspaper sends a young reporter (Igor Shavlak) into the Russian countryside to make a nice, sensationalist yarn out of some strange stories going around about things are supposedly happening there. Our reporter friend, who might or might not be called Igor, isn't too enamoured of the job, seeing how he is supposed to get married in three days, but his boss is sure that he'll get his story in no time at all and sends Igor anyway.

Once in the countryside, Igor is accommodated by a peasant family living right in the middle of nowhere close to a ruined church. There, his story awaits him. The family is convinced that their dead patriarch, only going by "grandfather", will return from the dead as a blood-drinking fiend exactly nine and a half days after his demise, which would be right during Igor's first dinner with them. Frighteningly enough, when it's dinner time all electric lights go out, and the old man appears. He seems unaggressive enough, but when everyone's asleep, he lures the family's young son to him and drinks of his blood. This is only the beginning of some terrifying days for Igor and the family, during which the reporter still manages to fall for the daughter of the house. That's not necessarily the best thing to do when the dead have grown cold and hungry.

Ah, the wonders of the Internet and the films the efforts of fansubbers can bring you in contact with! I know next to nothing about Semya Vurdalakov, except that it was directed during the last gasps of the Soviet Union by a gentleman called Gennadiy Klimov (and possibly co-directed by its lead actor Igor Shavlak) and is based on the same short story of Alexei Tolstoi that Mario Bava used for the Wurdulak episode in his Black Sabbath. The whys and wherefores of the production are closed to me as someone who doesn't speak or read Russian.

What I do know about the film is what I have seen. A mood piece, slowly but surely gliding through pictures of the sort of poetry of decay and dilapidation that spells doom in every horror film, beginning in a comparatively bland and naturalistic Moscow and (just as Igor does) growing into a more dream-like sense of space and time in the country, as if the landscape itself would dislocate the protagonist (and his audience) from space and time as he knows and understands it. The narrative grows consistently less linear and logical until what once was clear becomes murky, difficult and utterly ambiguous. In the end, even a return to Moscow can't put in order again what was unhinged.

Klimov makes excellent use of not quite real seeming landscape and run-down buildings, using nature and man-made structures as markers of an entropic movement that grows in tempo the longer the film runs. On a more prosaic level, the director also really knows his stuff when it comes to the uses of different types of lighting. There's not much more effective than the first time the film shows the old, dead man by gaslight, his family already looking as dead as he is in the light he brought with him; foreshadowing actually does work when used like this.

The truly exciting thing about Semya Vurdalakov though is, that a scene like the one I just described isn't an exception in a workmanlike film, but typical for the way Klimov imbues everything on screen with additional meaning, until it's impossible to divide the symbolic and the concrete from each other anymore.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: soviet movies,in short,horror,gennadiy klimov,igor shavlak