Only now does it occur to me... MACABRE (1980)

Only now does it occur to me... what would happen if Lamberto "son of Mario" Bava took inspiration from Tennessee Williams to make his own Southern Gothic Italotrash horror saga? And what if all he actually remembered from Tennessee Williams was the ghoulishly nutty finale of SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER? And what if the lead character was, for some reason, named "Robert Duval," just one letter's separation from the iconic actor? Well we don't have to wonder about any of this, because we have... MACABRE.

Based on a true story, yeah, okay.

I'm gonna tell ya right off the bat––this review will be full of spoilers. And I don't feel bad about that because there's nothing in this movie that feels "motivated." It's a collection of crazy things that happen without dramatic rhyme or reason. You do you, Lamberto. And for my Italo-Horror enthusiasts, let me tell you that this is way closer to "bottom-tier Fulci" or Joe D'Amato than Mario Bava or Dario Argento. The two movies of which it reminds me the most are probably BUIO OMEGA and CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Within the first twelve minutes, we have some of the sleaziest saxophone and worst child dubbing in the history of Italian film, which is absolutely an achievement. We have an unhappy woman stumbling around in heels and DYNASTY dresses (CITY OF WOMEN and XTRO's Bernice Stegers)

who is having an affair with a guy named Fred. This upsets her––aforementioned, poorly dubbed––daughter (Veronica Zinny)

who acts out by smoking a bunch of cigarettes and drowning her little brother in a bathtub.

The unsighted landlord, Robert Duval (Stanko Molnar, doing some of the best/worst/offensive blind 'schmacting' I have ever seen) 

lazily assembles brass instruments while awkwardly listening to extramarital sex with, uh, "ZATOICHI-esque augmented hearing."

When mom receives the phone call that her son has drowned, she rushes to the hospital with her lover but, unfortunately, they get in a car accident in which Fred is decapitated.

This is already more melodrama than I can shake a stick at and we're fewer than fifteen minutes into this bad boy! Madness, absolute madness.

Mom soon builds a Hobby Lobby shrine to her ex-lover

which I think would get maybe a C+ at my science fair. Comically, she has included his credit cards among the dead man's relics. 

The next hour is where this film really bogs down. She moves into the blind man's boarding house and there's a whole lot of lame tension building about the source of the orgasmic noises coming from her room, where she is the sole occupant. Much hay is made about this mystery.

This was mostly shot in a studio in Italy, but the crew traveled to New Orleans (for three days) to shoot exteriors. This is a nice documentary look at the city in 1979, and visually impressive in some instances:

but usually Lamberto Bava is out here making sure he got his money's worth out of those expensive shoot dates. Generally speaking, every time someone goes from point A to point B, we she them open the car door, get out, slam the car door,

 

walk up to the gate, unlatch the gate, mess around with the gate, open the gate,

 

relatch the gate, walk up to the stoop,

ring the doorbell, wait around for the door to be answered, etc.

It's pretty spectacular, actually, though indicative of how bogged down this movie gets in its middle hour.

Anyway, the secret is finally revealed: mom has apparently been masturbating, nightly, with Fred's severed head.

I really like the placement of the ice tray there. I feel like the thinking was "how's the audience gonna know it's a freezer if there's no ice tray?," but instead you're left with even more questions, like "I get that somebody who masturbates with a severed head every night is not very squeamish about hygiene, but does she really not care when she gets hairs in the cubes?"  

 

 Really goin' to town, I wonder if they used this clip in the Oscar reel

The beauty of all of this is that I've excised no great subtext or rationale; Bava presents it more like: "hey, she loved the guy, so obviously she would love... his head."

This all leads to Robert Duval discovering her secret, whereupon the severed head gains the power of flight and bites him on the neck until he dies!

It is my belief that this scene inspired  ZOMBI 3's greatest moment (a film by Bruno Mattei, Claudio Fragasso, and Lucio Fulci), one I have described as "The Ol' Zombie Head in the Fridge." 

Though the flying severed head in that context at least makes a little more sense because it's in a zombie movie. Later, this ground would be revisited by Michele Soavi in CEMETERY MAN (1994).

 Anyway. MACABRE, ladies and gentlemen.

Only now does it occur to me... DEMONS

Only now does it occur to me... that DEMONS gets to have its cake and eat it, too.  Of course it's eating it with disgusting, mutated, rat-like demon-teeth,

but that's neither here nor there.  Let me explain what I mean.

The four collaborators on the screenplay comprise a veritable who's who of 80s Italo-Horror [Dario Argento (SUSPIRIA, DEEP RED), Lamberto Bava (son of Mario, A BLADE IN THE DARK, BLASTFIGHTER), Franco Ferrini (ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA, PHENOMENA), and Dardano Sacchetti (THE BEYOND, 1990: BRONX WARRIORS)] and apparently couldn't decide whether or not they wanted a zombie movie, a supernatural horror flick, a giallo, or a post-apocalyptic thriller... so they made DEMONS all of them.

It's like a child deciding that he's going to grow up to be a rock star, pro athlete, astronaut, and judo master (which, incidentally sort of sounds like Buckaroo Banzai)... but then actually following through with it.

Hell, this movie throws everything at you but the kitchen sink.  I wouldn't dream of telling it all, but for starters it has:

Horror director Michele Soavi (STAGEFRIGHT, CEMETERY MAN) as a New Wave Phantom of the Opera handing out fliers to unsuspecting lasses in subway stations:
 

a movie-within-a-movie about stabbings and Nostradamus... with a Mötley Crüe soundtrack:
 

 a green-goo-spewing Rick James zombie-woman:

who goes on to kill a couple of lovebirds in a moment that has provided me with the only occasion I have ever had to write "double-makeout-strangulation" in my screening notebook:


YAHHH

a carload of German punks snorting cocaine out of a Coke can,

one of whom has computer chip earrings:


a blind man having his eyes clawed out in a gratuitous, grotesque moment that prompted me to say aloud, "Well, at least he was already blind..."


and, the coup de grâce– a Samurai Dirtbike

Note: poster for THE TERMINATOR in the background.

that's eventually used (adhering to Chekhov's rule of Samurai Dirtbikes)

to mow down legions of zombie/demons amid hard rockin' tunes in what might actually be the most "metal" tableau ever staged.

Finally, our heroes make the acquaintance of a European gun-nut survivalist family in a Jeep (?!):


and the youngest son is none other than Italo Horror "that kid" Giovanni Frezza, who can be found in A BLADE IN THE DARK, THE NEW BARBARIANS, MANHATTAN BABY, and THE HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY:


Furthermore, the movie is accompanied by an insane soundtrack featuring Claudio Simonetti's (of Goblin) synthesized re-imagining of "In the Hall of the Mountain King" and hits by Billy Idol, Rick Springfield, Go West, Saxon, and The Adventures.  Whew!

So yourself a favor and see this movie.  Do it some Saturday night.  Get some beers, some pizzas, some popcorn, some friends– and watch the hell outta DEMONS.

Only now does it occur to me... A BLADE IN THE DARK

Only now does it occur to me...  it's not a spider, it's a cockroach!

Film Review: KILL, BABY...KILL! (1966, Mario Bava)

Stars: 4.3 of 5.
Running Time: 85 minutes.
Notable Cast or Crew: Starring Giacomo Rossi-Stuart (THE LAST MAN ON EARTH, ZORRO '75), Erika Blanc (I AM SARTANA TRADE YOUR GUNS FOR A COFFIN, SHOOT GRINGO SHOOT!), Fabienne Dali (LE DOULOS). Assistant directed by Lamberto Bava (DEMONS 2, BLASTFIGHTER). Music by Carlo Rustichelli (DIVORCE ITALIAN STYLE, BLOOD AND BLACK LACE).
Tag-line: "Makes you shiver and shake!"
Best one-liner: "AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"

A woman screams. "NO, NO, NOOOOOO!" She dashes across a garish, Eastmancolor landscape.


She flings herself from a great height, impaling herself on the spiked fence below. Cue opening credits. That's Italian horror for you in a nutshell- gory, stylish, and abrupt. As such, KILL, BABY...KILL is an untamable mini-masterpiece. Sure, you may never really connect to the story or the characters, but... oh, the spectacle! The artistry! The ingenuity! The cobwebs! It's Edgar Allan Poe and M.R. James fed through a rainbow-colored meat grinder and transmogrified into batshit crazy Italo-Gothic fettuccine. It's full of striking, stirring imagery: Four red-hooded men solemnly convey a coffin across the countryside in silhouette. The camera wanders through a mist-enshrouded graveyard full of moss-covered masonry lit by a deep, dark blue sky. Bava's frenetic zooms and pans (i.e., a POV shot of a girl on a swing) elevate those basic cinematic techniques to new pizzazz-y heights: the sheer, intoxicating joy with which he tackles these simple elements recalls the boundless imaginations of cinema pioneers like Méliès or Lumière. Consequently, Bava's (and this film's) influence on cinema is staggering: Argento, Kubrick, Fellini, Burton, and Lynch have all followed in his wake at one time or another.



As an aside, this film's influence on TWIN PEAKS cannot be understated. We have out-of-town experts and inspectors carrying out an investigation of one in a series of murders, which are blamed on an ambiguous, localized evil. During the autopsies, coins are discovered- inserted into the corpse's hearts (á la BOB's fingernail messages). Later, when entering the mansion which apparently is the locus of said evil, our hero must chase a doppelgänger of himself through a looping, interdimensional hallway- a scene duplicated almost exactly with Agent Cooper is in the Black Lodge in the Season 2 finale:





Giacomo Rossi-Stuart catches up with himself...

...as does Kyle MacLachlan.

In the end, who says you need narrative coherence to make a superior film? Not Mr. Bava! Almost five stars.

-Sean Gill

Film Review: PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES (1965, Mario Bava)

Stars: 4 of 5.
Running Time: 88 minutes.
Notable Cast or Crew: Barry Sullivan, Samuel Z. Arkoff, Antonio Perez Olea, Lamberto Bava, Ivan Rassimov.
Tag-line: " This was the day the universe trembled before the demon forces of the killer planet!"
Best exchange:
Captain: One entire crew lost; two of our own crew gone. Bert dead, Eldon disappeared. And this unknown enemy keeps getting closer.
Doctor: The enemy is also becoming visible.
Captain: What do you mean by that?
Doctor: Well, you saw something. Something not quite identifiable out of the corner of your eye.
Captain: Ah, yes. As if it were composed of little globes of light, something fleeting, nothing definite. And the minute I looked at the things directly, they were gone.

Alternate titles: Demon Planet, Planet of Blood, Space Mutants, Terror in Space, The Haunted Planet, The Haunted World, The Outlawed Planet, The Planet of Terror, The Planet of the Damned, Terrore nello spazio (original title).

Bava strikes again, with basically FORBIDDEN PLANET meets DANGER: DIABOLIK. This film has been a tremendous influence on subsequent sci-fi/horror from ALIEN to GHOSTS OF MARS, but its American title is about as appropriate as if THE THING had been named THE VAMPIRE, or if MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE had been called MAXIMUM VAMPIRES. The setup is this: starships investigating a phantom signal decide to land on a mysterious planet, whereupon the crew starts, without provocation, whaling on and beating the crap out of each other.


Then they investigate and find some enormous alien skeletons. If that doesnt sound like a terrific setup to you, then you probably shouldnt be watching these sorts of (Italian) movies. In fact, theres a line near the beginning of the film that is a beautiful metaphor for this type of cinema (lets say Bava, Argento, Leone, et al.): "Without this meteor rejector, we'd look like a piece of Swiss cheese, our ship would be down in less than a minute." In this metaphor, the meteors are plot holes, incomprehensibility, and bad dubbing. They can kill any movie in seconds for almost anyone. But what is the meteor rejector, you say? It's the mise-en-scene. It's style over substance that works! It's imaginative sets, colored fog, breathtaking matte paintings, inspired theatrical lighting, kickass costumes-

(black and yellow leather uniforms with insanely popped collars), blinking control panels and other made up technology- in short, it's the crazy Italian spectacle. And in the hands of an operatic virtuoso director, it works almost every time. Bravo, Mario!

-Sean Gill