Scream for Help (1984)

Christie Cromwell (Rachael Kelly) sits wistfully at a lake and peers off into the distance.  In voiceover, she states her name, age (seventeen), and that her dad is trying to murder her mom.  With that feminine-hygiene-product-esque intro out of the way, the rest of Michael Winner’s Scream for Help concerns itself with Christie’s efforts to prove this statement without dying.

For the first two thirds, the film is about Christie’s temerarious attempts to catch out stepdad Paul (David Allen Brooks).  She follows him for several days on her bicycle until she finds where he goes everyday from work.  And how did she come to suspect him in the first place?  She came downstairs in the middle of the night and saw him coming out of the basement.  The camera gazes down the cellar steps, and we hear water.  The next day, a utility worker is killed when he touches the wet electrical box in the basement.  Suspicious?  Maybe.  But Christie wants Paul to be a murderer, because her mother left her biological father (whom we never see nor learn anything about, not insignificantly, I believe) for him.  It is possible that everything Christie discovers or witnesses could be put down as confirmation bias, but the script (by Tom Holland) doesn’t even try to beguile us like that.  It’s blatantly obvious from the giddy-up that Paul has malfeasance on his mind.  I’ve never read a Nancy Drew story (or Hardy Boys, for that matter, but I have seen a lot of Scooby Doo and Clue Club), but the instant that Christie begins her investigation, that’s what I thought of.  I imagine that a Drew tale probably involves more mystery than Scream for Help does, though (and probably less violence, sex, and blood).  

Of course, no one believes Christie.  Even her best friend Janey (Sandra Clark) thinks Christie’s gone off the deep end.  The police commissioner (Tony Sibbald) at first takes her accusations seriously, but after some mindbogglingly shitty police work comes to not only disbelieve the young lady but also to develop a sort of grudge against her.  Christie’s mother (Marie Masters) doesn’t take her daughter seriously, even though, from what I recall, her relationship with Paul is not that old.  Apparently, mom took up with Paul, ditched her husband, and married the other man in a matter of months.  Christie’s allegations are seen largely in this light by the other characters but not by the audience.  Christie watches (and we do, too) as Paul gets it on with Brenda (Lolita Lorre, whom I’d like to believe is related to Peter, but I couldn’t find anything confirming or denying this) multiple times, and his flimsy excuses would raise eyebrows in even the most devoted of marital partners.  It may have been interesting to see the story develop with a more enigmatic approach to what’s going on, but the filmmakers aren’t really interested in that.  Instead, they draw out this cat and mouse aspect just to get to the meat of what the film is actually about.  This is either a master stroke of deception or a happy accident.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

And here’s where it becomes difficult to discuss Scream for Help any further without getting into SPOILERS.  More than anything, the film is about the initiation of Christie into adulthood and how both sex and violence are the means of that inauguration.  Beyond this, it’s about the choice between sex and violence that Christie has to make.  Christie lives in a world where absolutely everyone around her is having sex except her.  When she races over to her friend Janey’s house to tell Janey about her theory of Paul’s murderous intent, she waltzes in on Janey having sex with Josh (Corey Parker, whom most will recognize as the effete Arnold Epstein in Biloxi Blues).  Janey, probably pissed for being interrupted pre-orgasm, is openly hostile to Christie, who, in turn, is pissed at Janey for not telling her that she was having sex at all.  Christie comes home to the sounds of her mother and Paul having sex, and she runs to her room in anguish.  But Christie is, of course, curious about sex, and Paul’s affair with Brenda is the window (literally and figuratively) into this fascination.  At several points, she spies the two doing the job, and it’s always at a remove through a pane of glass (like watching a live Swedish sex show in a porn booth).  Paul asks if Christie is writing “the life and times of a sex maniac” in her journal.  Nope, it’s all about murder.  Intriguingly, Corey is the ostensible love interest, but he’s about as big a jerkoff as every other man in the film.  Christie catches Corey flirting with another girl at school (the day after she caught him with Janey?).  She tries to rope him into helping her out by threatening to tell his father about Janey, and Corey proudly states that his dad would congratulate him.  Rather, it’s the threat of cutting him off from Janey’s pussy that motivates the kid (and puts her own in his crosshairs).  After Janey is out of the picture, Corey and Christie hook up pretty fast.  Corey continues to pressure Christie, telling her he cares about her, but we know that he’s simply horny, and while we can’t necessarily blame him for this, it makes him no less of a douche.

When Christie and Corey finally have sex, it’s unpleasant for Christie, but then again, it’s her first time.  It’s painful, and the blood from popping her cherry scares her.  The ties between sex and violence in the film have been leading up to this moment, and here is where Christie chooses which of the two she prefers.  When Corey brings up the possibility of more sex, please, Christie tells him that she “doesn’t want to go to bed with anybody ever again.”  In the last third of the picture, when Paul and his accomplices hold Christie and her mom captive, things come to a head.  Faced with their imminent deaths, Christie, with ho-hum determination, states, “There’s only one way.  I’m gonna have to kill them.”  With MacGyver-ian resourcefulness and icy resolve, she sets about doing just that.  The film becomes Death Wish if Paul Kersey’s wife and daughter fought back (or maybe just Home Alone with corpses).  After the siege of her house, Corey and Christie get down to some foreplay, but violence rears up yet again, and Christie, without hesitation, goes into kill mode.  Sex is something she may still want to do despite her inexperienced protestations, but violence is something she likes.  This is what maturity means in the world of Scream for Help.  That the film is so frank about these facets is rather startling, considering its almost juvenile plot and dialogue, flat direction, and a score that is insanely incongruous (it sounds like it was taken from a Seventies industrial film about the future of plastics mixed with a buddy cop show of the same era).  Nevertheless, this forthrightness is what also makes the film so special.

MVT:  The remarkable depths to which the film dives and the unsparing attitude it takes in going there.

Make or Break:  The vehicular homicide that comes out of nowhere.  It’s fast, brutal, and contains a spectacular mannequin death.

Score:  7/10      

Diary of a Lady Killer (1969)

**SPOILERS**

I tried to keep a diary for a while, way back when (men call them “journals,” damn it!).  It was, essentially, a five-subject notebook, not the sort of leather-bound, classy tomes you see in films like Ko Nakahira’s Diary of a Lady Killer (aka Lie Ren aka The Seductive Accounts of a Hunter aka My Amorousness Ruins My Life).  The thoughts I had at that time were what you would expect from a guy in his early twenties.  That is, a couple of interesting insights/ideas and then a whole lot of grousing, garbage, and emotionalizing.  Re-reading it, even then, it was painful, and I completely don’t regret shredding the whole damned thing.  Sometimes, one’s musings are better left in one’s head, to come and go like a prostitute’s trick (a crass analogy, yes, but apropos, nonetheless).  Sometimes, what you have on your mind is mundane and only interesting to you in the moment because you’re exorcising some tiresome demon.  Sometimes, keeping a diary will only help get you convicted of a crime, as is the case in this film. 

Lin Qiuhua, at the end of her rope (insert rimshot here), flings herself from her upper floor apartment to a spectacular dummy death on the pavement below.  Her sister, Lin Hongzhu (Ha Yee-Chau), suspects foul play, since Qiuhua was six months pregnant at the time of her death, and she had only slept with one stranger six months back.  Enter said stranger, Zhou Guoxiong (Han Chin), a womanizer engaged to Su Xiulan (Fang Ying), a society deb recently returned from Japan.  And then there’s Li Donghai (Wu Fung), an associate of Zhou’s who pines for Su just to complicate matters as Zhou’s former flings start turning up dead.

Diary of a Lady Killer is, first and foremost, Shaw Bros’ stab at a Hitchcockian thriller, and it has all the basic ingredients for this and then some.  There is a slow build of components (perhaps a bit too slow) that are revealed to drop another puzzle piece into place (in a puzzle that is fully assembled to start off).  There is a level of misogyny at play, and Nakahira delivers on some skin as Hitchcock wouldn’t be able (but really, really always wanted) to do until Frenzy in 1972.  There are shots laying out the machinations going on against Zhou, attempting to ratchet up tension.  Most importantly, there is the Wrong Man trope in which Hitchcock specialized.  Zhou is being set up for a fall, and it’s intriguing to watch the aligning of these elements against him (most clever is a bit where a straw broom drops onto his face, scratching his cheek like a woman’s fingernails would).  This being said, Zhou is also a patsy in the most reactive way possible.  These things happen to him, he knows they’re happening, but he does nothing to stop/prevent them, and he’s taken out of the narrative for much of the back third so Su can try to exonerate him.  This wouldn’t be so bad, in and of itself, if any attention had been paid to Su up to this point.  Instead, the film focuses primarily on Zhou and his horndogging escapades, none of which cast him in even a slightly sympathetic light.  Consequently, one couldn’t care less whether he’s railroaded by a false accusation and sent to prison.  I suppose in some way this is meant to be his penance for the way he treats women, but it’s difficult to give a shit whether or not this character is redeemed.  

Yes, as we all know, men are pigs, and this film does its level best to underline this while simultaneously playing to the men in the audience and tickle their libidos.  The opening credits are a series of women in colorfully stylish boudoir settings and various states of undress.  When these women aren’t posing seductively for the camera, the camera is focusing on different naked (sometimes even tastefully photographed) body parts of theirs (alongside frisky kittens; surely, not a metaphor for anything).  When Zhou can’t get Su to give it up for him (she’s waiting for marriage), he instantly dumps her, heads off to a bowling alley, and picks up the first single woman he sees there (totally not skanky).  These flings are manipulations for Zhou.  He claims to have physical needs that MUST be satiated.  Fair play, but he also treats these women like things because things are all they are to him (any port in a perpetually raging storm, so to speak).  Thus, he lies to all of them, giving each a different name or occupation.  When they say they would like to see him again, he agrees and then blows them off (at least once actually showing up to see if the woman is gullible enough to wait for him).  Zhou’s life, what we’re shown of it, is little more than a quest for power fueled by lust.  This could be interesting if any of this had consequences outside of how it fucks over Zhou’s life, but the women in these scenes are merely warm (soon to be cold) bodies, and the scenes don’t build as anything other than a daisy chain of conquests repeated over and over for the express purpose of trying to be a little sleazy.  The film simply spends far too much time detailing these filler encounters (skirting close to being porn without the porn).  While they are important to the main point of the movie (narratively and exploitatively), they swiftly become repetitive, and the viewer is left only with the desire for the plot to move the hell along, already. 

Zhou and Li, the two main males in the film are sociopaths.  They ritually display callous indifference for others throughout the film.  But they have an excuse, and her name is Su.  In Zhou’s diary, aside from depicting the various chicks he’s laid, he includes a statement intended specifically for his fiancée.  Basically, he says that, gosh, he really does love Su and wants to spend his life with her, but her reticence to bang him is what forced him to find other outlets for his concupiscence.  Sure, love is all about spirituality between two people, but it’s also about physical enjoyment, and clearly, the latter trumps the former.  It’s such a dickheaded rationalization for dickheaded behavior, but, naturally, Su buys it lock, stock, and barrel, because the film doesn’t actually give a shit about her.  Likewise, Li looms around Su constantly, desperate to pick up Zhou’s scraps and eager to profess his more earnest love for her.  It’s no surprise, then, when he just can’t help trying to take advantage of a drunken Su after Zhou has been taken out of the way.  Li and Zhou are two sides of the same shitty coin, the only difference between them being that Zhou will fuck anything that moves while waiting for Su to come around, while Li will kill (it’s insanely obvious who the bad guys in the film are from the outset) anything that Zhou fucks while waiting for Su to come around.  And that’s what Diary of a Lady Killer is: killing time waiting for some fucking satisfaction.

MVT:  The film’s premise is solid.  It’s just poorly handled.

Make or Break:  By Zhou’s second pickup, it becomes clear that the film is more interested in these fantasies than it is in what story it has.

Score:  3/10        

Death Carries a Cane (1973)

What do film characters do when they’re not onscreen?  I’m not talking about the sort of people that populate sensitive dramas.  We can guess what they do, because it’s probably the same as us.  I’m thinking of bad guys, mostly: gangsters, monsters, slashers, ad infinitum.  When they’re not busy fitting the generic needs of a pick-me-up for the film they’re in, what are they doing?  Are they bogged down in the minutiae of moment-to-moment life like we are?  What did the Xenomorph in Alien do with his time when he wasn’t jamming his inner jaw through the skulls of the Nostromo’s crew?  Sleep?  Read a good book?  Suffer bouts of existential dread?  It’s the same with human baddies.  We typically enter on a scene where they’re already set up in a quasi-tableau: Hanging around the boss’ office, standing menacingly behind the boss, and so on.  Very rarely do we see them balancing their checkbook, washing their underwear, etcetera.  

These characters are not intended to have lives outside of those specifically portrayed on the screen.  Even when they talk about what they’ve been doing elsewhere, it doesn’t feel like anything touching reality.  It’s the character speaking as the character.  It doesn’t matter how colorful, or well-rounded, or logically motivated they are, these guys exist solely to function as antagonists.  We’re not supposed to think about what they’re doing when we don’t see them.  We’re meant to be involved with how the protagonists are engaged.  But I can’t help it.  I find myself thinking often of what banal tasks Jason Voorhees is getting up to offscreen.  He can’t stare at his mother’s mummified head all the time, after all.  This doesn’t mean that I want to see films based on this concept, per se (I think Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon pretty much covered this base sufficiently).  All that would mean is my wandering mind would instead focus on the good guys in the same capacity.  It’s like going to the bathroom.  How many movies have we seen where characters wake up somewhere and immediately spring out of bed and get moving without obeying nature’s call first?  Yes, there are reasons for not showing us this.  It’s just one of those things that occurs to me, the same, I’m sure, as the fact that most handguns don’t hold an infinite number of bullets occurs to gun enthusiasts.  Maurizio Pradeaux’s Death Carries a Cane (aka Passi Di Danza Su Una Lama Di Rasoio aka Maniac at Large aka The Tormentor aka Trauma aka Devil Blade) partially satisfies this obsession of mine by not only giving its heroine a nervous bladder (“I’ve gotta go pee pee!”) but also using this to instigate the action of the finale (yes, really, kind of).

While waiting for her fiancée Alberto (Robert Hoffmann) to show up and see off her relatives, Kitty (Nieves Navarro aka Susan Scott) glimpses a woman being murdered through an observation telescope.  Next thing she knows, witnesses are dropping like flies, and everyone takes a poke at playing red herring.

It’s no stretch to imagine that Death Carries a Cane is heavily concerned with The Gaze.  Not just the Male Gaze, though that’s a large part of it, but also the simple act of looking and how this affects the characters.  The opening titles are shot through an observation telescope as two horny guys completely miss the point of the instrument and wind up looking at just about everything except women (until the credits end, that is).  Kitty gets involved with the plot by accident, but she was still eager to look through the telescope, so The Gaze’s influence is felt on her, as well.  Similar to Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Kitty follows her desire to see what’s going on around her, observing without being observed, playing voyeur and suffering the consequences.  The Gaze has a price.  

Kitty and Alberto make and photograph blank-faced dummies that they stab and tear apart as part of their art.  The dummies replace real bodies, obviously, and the act of photographing them in “death” speaks to the loss of self and autonomy which comes from being the subject of The Gaze.  Also playing into this idea, Alberto takes naked pics of Kitty while she sleeps.  There is a focus on eyes with a great many closeups to drive the point home.  These are usually done in tandem with POV shots.  For example, when the killer visits the lowly chestnut vendor’s house, we watch through a cruddy window as the man eats his evening spaghetti (with a spoon!).  The camera tracks in on the vendor’s eyes as he looks out at us in Direct Address (this is external to the POV shots as its not handheld, if memory serves, though it goes to The Gaze on both sides, as viewer and viewed).  Of course, this wouldn’t be a giallo without a lot of female nudity, and the filmmakers serve it up often, playing to the prurient interest of the audience’s Gaze (as is often the case, the sex scenes don’t quite fit outside of being sex scenes for a movie; for example, Kitty has sex with Alberto immediately after he catches her trying to leave because he makes her nervous).

Every suspect in Death Carries a Cane has an infirmity.  Alberto has a sprained ankle.  Musician Marco (Simón Andreu) is impotent.  Silvia (Anuska Borova), twin sister to Marco’s girlfriend Lidia (also Borova), uses a cane.  Naturally, this is so that we have different characters on which to cast suspicion.  It also points to the damaged psyche of the killer, as he/she is crippled inside and out.  

Pradeaux’s film hues closely to the rules of gialli, with plenty of stylish, bloody murders (using more handheld camera than I’m used to with these types of films, although the set pieces are nicely orchestrated, by and large), some titillation (without somehow feeling totally sleazy), and an end reveal that comes so far out of left field you really have to consider if it was improvised on the day of shooting.  The film doesn’t rise above the crowd, though it’s solid enough in its group.  The thing that hurts it the most, in my opinion, is its choppy editing.  Its cuts are jagged, not meshing and flowing, and there is always the possibility that this was intentional in the same way that its extensive use of handheld was.  Maybe the two were meant to go hand in hand in an effort to create an off-kilter atmosphere.  Unfortunately, the discordance is discursive.  Not enough to make Death Carries a Cane a failure (as a giallo or otherwise), but enough to make it a lesser film with sparkles of greatness in it.

MVT:  Pradeaux’s ambition is on display, and he is to be applauded for the attempt.

Make or Break:  The witnessing of the initial murder does a nice job of inciting the plot and opening a proverbial can of worms.

Score:  6.75/10