Sodoma's Ghost (1988)

Nazis make the perfect monsters.  Steven Spielberg has often said this is the reason why he used them more than once in his Indiana Jones films.  They are the embodiment of cruelty, of hatred, of everything that normal, decent people are against.  Further, they allow for a higher (or lower, perspective depending) level of transgression in narratives.  After all, these are people who tortured and murdered millions of human beings for nothing more than the circumstance of their birth.  Depicting the fictitious shenanigans they can get up to feels somehow grimier while also being far easier to believe because of this.  

Sure, there are films which gave their Nazi characters some nuance, tried to make them, if not sympathetic, then at least more well-rounded.  But Nazis function best when they are pure villains.  Pairing them together with attributes of actual monsters just makes them more intriguing.  This is why films like Shock Waves or Hellboy or Outpost work as well as they do (to whatever degree).  This is not to say that they always work.  There are enough Nazi Monster movies that fall flat to make this sub-genre a truly mixed bag (See Oasis of the Zombies, if you doubt).  It’s rather surprising, considering Italy’s rich tradition of Nazisploitation films that they didn’t churn out more of them that added in supernatural components.  But if Lucio Fulci’s Sodoma’s Ghost (aka The Ghosts of Sodom aka Il Fantasma di Sodoma) is any stick by which to measure, maybe that’s for the best.

Six teen jerks (let’s assume they’re American for the sake of convenience) dick around in the French countryside until they wind up at an old villa.  Holing up there for the night, they soon find more than a few surprises waiting for them, not least of which is the fact that the manse played host to an ill-fated Nazi orgy forty-five years earlier.  And the revelers still want to party.

Roger Ebert’s film glossary defines the Dead Teenager Movie as “a generic term for any film primarily concerned with killing teenagers, without regard for logic, plot, performance, humor, etcetera.”  Part of the genius of the Dead Teenager Movie is that (when done right) it makes us want these kids dead.  We watch for the kills.  This is why the virginal female character is typically the Final Girl.  She is virtuous, nice, even bland, but she is worth more to the human race than the remainder of the characters surrounding her.  The rule of thumb with this sort of film is that, if characters do drugs or have sex, they are marked for death.  I could see going one step further (or maybe just putting a little shading on it).  The reason these kids are lined up for death stems from their sense of entitlement.  The majority of times, these are people who behave like the world owes them something, and, goddammit, they’re gonna take it all.  This is why they indulge their every whim like they do.  They don’t care, because they deserve to be allowed to be reckless (the converse argument can be made that this recklessness is from the natural maturation process, and their slaughter is a stymieing of this, a way for youth to be kept in check, but I like my theory more).  With this in mind, the Ugly Americans of this film break into a house they were not invited into, because they are due a roof over their heads rather than having to rough it for their bad decisions.  They eat food and drink wine that doesn’t belong to them, because it’s available, not because they earned it or even plan to pay for it.  They make themselves at home and snoop through the entirety of the estate, because they have no regard for other people’s stuff.  They are takers.  This is much like the Nazis and their orgy.  The Nazis took advantage of every vice they could get their grubby, little dick-beaters on because they were “The Master Race.”  They were entitled to it.  Both the Nazis and the teenagers in the film are punished for hubristic narcissism far more than for acting on their baser impulses.

It’s well-known that the Nazis had a penchant for documenting, in gruesome detail, all of their atrocities.  This translates into Fulci’s film in two ways.  During the prologue, young, rat-stache-having Nazi, Willy (Robert Egon), stumbles around the party with a film camera, gleefully recording everything around him.  At several points, he aims his camera in direct address to the audience, as if he were filming us.  We are partakers in the orgy.  We are enjoying the flesh, sweat, and depravity as much as the Germans, because this is a part of why we are watching this movie in the first place.  Willy’s film is (magically?) developed and screened for the participants (I assumed that same evening, since there’s no separation of time, direct or indirect).  They watch the things we also watched, while we were also being watched.  Moreover, the teenagers that infest the house also engage in this act of looking and self-reflexivity.  As they are separated and “attacked,” each is shown a mirror through which they see their innermost desires and/or selves revealed while being watched by what’s on the other side (the fact that this is done via mirror goes to my point about narcissism, though far more overtly in this case).  Mark (Joseph Alan Johnson) is horny and inebriated, so he sees a naked woman enticing him to the point that he plays Russian Roulette to get her.  Anne (Teresa Razzaudi) sees Willy and is seduced by the promise of rough sex she would never tell anyone she secretly wants.  Predatory lesbian Maria (Luciana Ottaviani aka Jessica Moore) sees her heart’s desire, Anne, getting hot and heavy with Celine (Maria Concetta Salieri), causing a fit of jealous rage.  Everyone in Sodoma’s Ghost, including the viewer is watching and being watched, partaker and partaken.  

Anyone who hears the name Lucio Fulci in association with this movie might get a little excited to check out one of his lesser known works.  Don’t be.  This film is a mess from front to back, technically, stylistically, and logically (I realize few people watch Fulci’s films for their logic, but the best of them have some internal sense of it that they follow to some extent or another).  The use of handheld camera is out of control and sloppy, even when it’s motivated.  The editing is disjointed (the best example of this is a sexual rendezvous between two characters that ends abruptly and is followed by a scene where one of the characters despairs that his sex partner turned into a monster, which we are deprived of seeing entirely; I get that there was no budget for this thing, but come on).  Outside of the grating characters, the shit dialogue, the turgid melodrama, the plank-like acting, is the ultimate discovery that there is absolutely nothing threatening about anything that happens (with one exception), and these grabassers just spent eighty-four very long minutes of YOUR life learning diddly-shit other than that they should just continue with their tour of France as if all of this never happened.  I guarantee you, if you watch Sodoma’s Ghost, you’ll wish you could continue with your life as if it never happened, as well.

MVT:  It’s the obvious co-winners of the copious female nudity and some decent gross-out effects.

Make or Break:  The finale and denouement are just infuriatingly unsatisfying.

Score:  2/10

Something Creeping in the Dark (1971)

It was a dark and stormy night.  Ten jerks find themselves in an old, dark house, and weird things start to occur.  This is the premise for Mario Colucci’s Something Creeping in the Dark (aka Qualcosa Striscia nel Buio aka Shadows in the Dark), and this set up, if nothing else, is one of the most clichéd of the horror and mystery genres.  The reason is obvious.  Storms act as visual portents, bad omens of things to come.  They also give dramatic tension to scenes, because the characters are usually a bit stressed from the effects of the storm (the dangers of driving, being stuck out of doors in the rain, etcetera).  Maybe they bicker more than usual.  Maybe they’re a bit more anxious or cranky.  But, assuredly, they reveal themselves, because the strain and tumult of the tempest makes them forget their normal polite facades.  The director opens this film with his characters driving through the rain, and many shots are obscured by it, keeping the viewer off kilter, never quite sure of what they are seeing while still being recognizable enough.  Like the characters, the audience becomes embroiled in the restlessness of the environment in this way.

Storms also act as a means to gather a disparate group in one location and see what happens when things go south.  Here, the characters wind up in the manse of the late Lady Sheila Marlowe (a clear reference to Christopher Marlowe, the author of Doctor Faustus, played in portraiture only by Loredana Nusciak), a place that looks as ornately musty yet still kind of like a medieval dungeon as any ever put to film.  Rather cleverly, the film gives us an Agatha Christie-esque layout, and the expectation is that any oddities that happen will be explained away by the end as the doings of a human.  It’s a classic weird pulp framework, those stories that, essentially, became the formula for every episode of Scooby Doo (and quite a few gialli).  However, Colucci takes a sharp right turn and brings the actual supernatural into the mix, and the film plays both sides of the fence up until its conclusion, even while it tells us flat out that a specter is involved.  This is done by the introduction of Spike (Farley Granger), a “homicidal maniac” whom Inspector Wright (Dino Fazio) has captured and is bringing to justice.  This means that the characters can act out some of their darker impulses, because they have an easy scapegoat.  For example, Joe (Gianni Medici), the housekeeper, threatens his girlfriend (Giulia Rovai) with murder, knowing he can lay it off on Spike, who makes a habit of escaping throughout the film.  Sylvia (Lucia Bosé) fantasizes about seducing and then murdering Spike, a sharp contrast to the dull, bitter relationship she has with her husband Don (Giacomo Rossi Stuart).  Basically, the storm washes away all but the innermost desires of the film’s characters.

Something Creeping in the Dark is a brooding film, filled with a sense of doom, and it contains much superficial philosophical musings on existential matters.  The characters recognize their flaws, and the inescapability of their situation traps them inside themselves (in much the same way that they are trapped in the house).  They are left to act out their repressions or be consumed by them (possibly both).  The ghost of Lady Marlowe is the impetus for this.  She passes from character to character, possesses them for a time, and either kills them or shows them up for what they are.  Susan West (Mia Genberg) is the flinty assistant to Doctor Williams (Stelvio Rosi).  The doctor was en route to perform an emergency surgery, something which he quickly gets over when he finds out that he won’t get there in time.  Susan clearly harbors unspoken feelings for him, and Marlowe provides her the opportunity to express them.  Yet, after they consummate, Susan doesn’t feel freed of her emotional constraints.  She feels violated instead of satisfied, and she rejects Williams’ attempt to console her.  Rather than bring them together at long last, the playing out of Susan’s desirous impulses may keep them apart forever because her agency was taken away (or was her “possession” an act she now regrets?).  

The filmmakers portray Marlowe’s ghost via a high angle tracking camera (with fish eye lens) that floats down hallways, extinguishing lights as it approaches.  It is an omniscient viewpoint, and Marlowe is, virtually, God (and a capricious God, at that).  She toys with her playthings, enjoys making them dance for her amusement.  It is also conceivable that Marlowe’s possession of various characters is her own attempt at breaking out of her purgatorial/existential prison, of finding some meaning to the spiritual torment she is in.  Finding no satisfaction in this, it’s just as easy to kill her toys in a spiteful, childish lashing out against ineluctable circumstances.

The film is difficult to recommend, though I really would like to.  It takes tropes and plays with them, juggling between the corporeal and the preternatural.  It is loaded with style, and Colucci dives into some psychedelia, but he makes it work by anchoring it within his characters’ minds rather than as some overwrought visual display to take the audience on a “freak out.”  The director also takes about a half a page from Robert Wise’s book (i.e. his direction of the superlative The Haunting), using suggestion as much as he does directness.  It is entirely possible that human hands are behind the film’s nefariousness.  It is entirely possible that the human hands behind the film’s nefariousness are being manipulated by a supernatural force.  It is entirely possible that a malevolent spirit alone is behind the film’s nefariousness.  And Colucci allows that it may be all three simultaneously.  The major problem with the film is that it is both repetitive and sluggish.  Spike makes off into the nearby woods and has it out with the cops not once, but twice.  The Spike character is also, in my opinion, underutilized, considering his potential (and Granger’s talent; he does give his all here).  When the characters aren’t standing in the living room talking circularly or shooting barbs at one another, they are in their individual rooms talking circularly or shooting barbs at one another.  Interesting ideas are brought up and then left floating, and the climax is both predictable and a bit silly in its aftermath.  Something Creeping in the Dark is a film worth seeing (I finally made up my mind), though maybe not on a dark and stormy night, because you may fall asleep during it.

MVT:  Colucci brings a thoughtful sense to his direction.

Make or Break:  The séance scene is tense and creepy, while being distinctly Italian and a little goofy.

Score:  6.5/10

Tracking (1986)

Lisa, Stephanie, and Natalie are three teenaged girls left alone in Lisa’s parents’ house.  As they indulge in whatever games suit their fancy, Stephanie relates a story about her dad’s experience in the Algerian War.  Afterwards, a phantom soldier continuously visits the three, menacing and raping them.  

Pierre B Reinhard’s Tracking (aka Ghost Soldier) is a difficult film, not so much because of its subject matter but because of the way it treats it.  The movie, by and large, is about the aftermath of rape, the PTSD suffered by its victims, and the arbitrariness of victimhood.  Each of the girls is attacked at least once, though Lisa seems to get more attention than the other two.  These attacks happen randomly and suddenly.  The Soldier is usually represented via POV handheld camera, and it’s interesting that the faces of all the male characters are never shown clearly.  This ghost is something called forth from the spinning of a tale, which recounts itself in the first present-time attack scene.  Stephanie’s dad used to tell her this story, about how he had sex with a peasant girl in Algeria for a bottle of champagne.  That night, Lisa is assaulted and violated with a champagne bottle.  Importantly, this scene plays out at first as if it were a flashback with the protagonists playing the roles of the peasants.  It boggles the mind that Stephanie’s father would not only relate this story to his daughter (though not his wife) but also tell her how it’s the best memory he had from his time in the military.   

The presentation of this sequence, however, and of the girls themselves, is pure prurience.  Natalie is threatened with a straight razor while in the bathroom.  When Natalie is attacked the first time, she is backed into a shower, which is turned on.  The Soldier then slices her clothes off, and the camera gawps at her exposed breasts and sopping wet lingerie.  When the girls are initially introduced, Lisa is focused on, prancing around in her underwear.  When the three play dress up, Reinhard focuses intensely on their naked bodies as they get changed.  It raises an intriguing question: Do these girls deserve what happens to them (by dint of the fact that the film is so obsessed with their physical attributes, which they show off freely), and if not, how does the viewer’s enjoyment of the attacks (they are, after all, shot from the audience’s perspective) reflect on their own attitudes toward the subject?  Reinhard does not separate the horror of the act from the exploitation of it.  On the one hand, it’s serious about the situation, on the other, it’s serious about turning the viewer on with its kinks.

Another aspect of the film is the maturation of these girls into adulthood or, at the absolute minimum, the desire to do so.  All of their parents are absent.  Lisa’s aunt (?) Christina appears periodically to chastise the girls, plug the telephone back in, and remind them to take birth control.  Yet, Christina is ineffectual in her “guidance,” partly because she’s far too casual about allowing the girls free rein and partly because the girls resent her presence as an authority figure.  The girls, like teenagers everywhere, know everything there is to know about everything, so they don’t need to pay attention to some “old” person who may have been where they are.  In fact, the girls hate Christina so much, they actually try to murder her with a rifle.  As Christina drives up to the house, she is tracked through a set of crosshairs.  As she drives away, Lisa finally takes a shot, blowing out Christina’s car tire.  The teens then lament not being able to kill her on the open road, because some passerby stopped to assist with her car.  The girls play house, having dinner and booze, and they begin to roleplay in an adult (not in the porn sense) fantasy.  Lisa becomes the wife, Stephanie the husband, and Natalie the husband’s mistress.  As the film winds on, the protagonists go so far as to dress their parts in an effort to protect themselves.  Nevertheless, the façade is not enough to deter the attacks.  The maturity the girls attempt to emulate is, more or less, like a beacon for the Soldier, their introduction into “adulthood” a trauma.  It carries an air of “be careful what you wish for” while also bearing a certain statement on the callous treatment of women by men (the reason we never see men’s faces is because they are every man, everywhere).  “Sex is life,” the message left on a mirror by the Soldier, is both honest and ominous.

How the girls deal with their ordeal is also key to the film’s theme.  Both Lisa and Natalie have flashbacks to their assaults when they come in contact with the objects with which they were attacked (a bottle and a straight razor, respectively).  The two have meltdowns, and Lisa even tries to run off into the woods at one point.  Stephanie appears to be (on the surface, at least), the strongest of the three.  She tries to be the masculine defender of her “family.”  She is the one who carries the rifle.  She searches the grounds for the Soldier in an endeavor to confront him, become the hunter not the prey.  She is comforting to Lisa and Natalie, and she continues to put up a brave front when it becomes plain that she will have her turn.  Rather than resist, she offers her body to the ghost, attempts to bargain her sexuality for the removal of the violence which accompanies his attacks.  She figures it would still be unwanted sex (read: rape), but perhaps it can be made less harrowing.  Even she breaks down, however, when her time comes.  She lashes out, shooting the rifle randomly, an impotent venting of rage against something ineffable and unerasable.  The film becomes muddled because it throws cause and effect out the window, but this is also a large portion of its point.  To make it all black and white robs it of any impact it may have.  But still, the grey that the film immerses itself in is just as problematic due to the overt sexualization of its leads.  Ultimately, the girls carry their damage onward, and there is an exorcism of a sort, though its efficacy is in serious doubt.  After all, how do you destroy something so primal in the hearts of men?

MVT:  For as scattershot as it makes itself, Reinhard’s approach to the story is admirable in its daring, if not in effectiveness.

Make or Break:  The moment you realize you’re not watching a flashback, and you’re not watching a traditional ghost story.

Score:  6.5/10