Horror Express 2020: More Short Takes.

Three more shorter-than-usual takes on recently watched Horror films to glide us into the big day itself tomorrow. Including some actual positive comments this time around.

#14 

It Conquered the World 

(Roger Corman, 1956)

When AIP released The She-Creature (reviewed earlier this month) in 1956, it formed one half of a double-bill with this rather more widely remembered little number from Roger Corman. Quite a night out, by my estimation. For the sake of random cyclical completeness therefore, I thought I’d dig out ‘It Conquered The World’ and give it a quick going over, having not seen it for many a long year.

During the first half, I was surprised to note such a high incidence of clunky dialogue, painfully bad line-readings and general meandering tedium, which has no doubt done a lot to aid the film’s retrospective status as a more-or-less definitive cheap n’ cheesy b-movie. In view of the fact that the film's principal creatives were all smart and competent people however, I tend to suspect there was a certain amount of sniggering self-awareness creeping in here, which makes me sad.

As cynical as the production circumstances behind Roger Corman's movies may have been, when it comes to his directorial efforts, I've always appreciated his earnest dedication to making a straight-facedly decent movie out of whatever meagre resources were available to him. So, it’s disappointing to imagine him knowingly signing off on a load of sub-par crap at some points on this one, underestimating the intelligence of his audience in precisely the manner he usually so strenuously avoided. Perhaps Lou Rusoff’s script - just as shamelessly barmy as the one he provided for ‘The She-Creature’ - might to some extent be to blame?

Anyway, regardless, there is nonetheless a lot to enjoy here right from the outset. Surely no genre movie fan can fail to be moved by the sight of a (relatively) young Lee Van Cleef firing up his inter-planetary radio-set (hidden behind a curtain in the corner of the living room) to speak to his friend from Venus? 

Appearing just a few years after he played sneering, homosexual hitman Fante in Joseph H. Lewis’s classic ‘The Big Combo’, Van Cleef’s plummy, pointed-finger-aloft delivery of his dialogue here (“listen Paul - listen to the VOICE!”) must have become an acute embarrassment for him as he began settling into his more familiar taciturn cowboy persona over the next decade or so.

Meanwhile of course, the thunderously obvious nature of the obligatory anti-commie sub-text, expressed through Van Cleef’s interplanetary collaboration with a malign being who promises heaven on earth to mankind in exchange for their emotions and individuality, is so clearly comical that I’d like to believe that Corman - not to my knowledge a rabid McCarthyite - very much did have his tongue in his cheek in this regard.

And, once things get going in the second half, ol’ Jolly Roger really gives us our money’s worth. In fact, as soon as the Best Movie Monster Ever (accept no substitutes) shows up, conquering the fuck out of Bronson Canyon (if not quite the world) with his killer grin and adorable, residual-arm-waggling “just frontin’” moves, it’s all gravy for a surprisingly action-packed final act.

First we get the great Beverly Garland blasting away at the bugger with a shotgun (and, how often do we get see the heroine of a ‘50s sci-fi movie sneaking out from under her husband’s nose to give the monster hell, incidentally?), then the Dick Miller Commandos show up with their bazooka, and finally, an enraged Van Cleef getting up close and delivering the foam-melting coup de grace with an f-ing blowtorch, of all things! His final words: “I bid you welcome to this earth... you made it a CHARNEL HOUSE!”

For all the missteps and faffing about in the first half in fact, this is a thing of beauty and a joy forever - god bless you, Mr. Corman. 

 

#15 

Daughter of Darkness 

(Stuart Gordon, 1990)

Nothing to do with Harry Kumel or Delphine Seyrig, this is a made-for-TV vampire movie shot in Romania, directed by the late Stuart Gordon. In view of the info in the preceding sentence, I'd always assumed it must naturally be a Full Moon/Charles Band joint (some kind of spin off from their Eastern European ‘Sub-Species’ films perhaps?), but when I finally sat down to watch it this week, it immediately became clear that we’re dealing with a different kettle of fish entirely.

None of the usual suspects or company logos turned up on the straight-laced opening credits, and once things get underway, the tone is very different from yr usual Empire/Full Moon house style. It’s slicker for one thing, with somewhat higher production values, but also blander and more conventional, as if attempting to appeal to a mainstream TV audience, rather than rabid horror fans.

The plot sees a young American woman (Mia Sara) arriving in Bucharest in search of her long lost father, who turns out to be none other than Anthony Perkins. Along the way, she collides with variety of sinister and/or seductive characters, gets into a few scrapes involving the sinister dragon pendant she inherited from her Dad, has ominous bad dreams in which she traverses areas of the city she has never previously visited, and so on and so forth.

Thanks to Gordon’s brisk pacing and inventive direction, this is all fairly diverting, but unfortunately, once it gets down to brass tacks, vampire stuff in Andrew Laskos’ script is pretty hackneyed, much of the dialogue is fist-in-mouth terrible (the alleged “flirtatious banter” between Sara and U.S. embassy attaché Jack Coleman is especially painful) and the performances (with the exception of Perkins and a couple of the Romanian actors) are extremely poor. This latter point is especially disappointing, given that Gordon's theatrical background and good eye for casting usually helped his films to punch well above their weight in terms of acting and character stuff.

Meanwhile, the obvious requirement to stick to PG-level content also proves a stone drag. Although there are a few potentially memorable horror scenarios, and vampires’ manner of feeding proves a bit of an eye-opener, you can almost feel the director straining at the leash, wishing he could unleash some of the nastiness of his better-known work, but clearly under orders to keep things as mild as possible.

On the other hand though, the film is, as mentioned, very well directed, and the photography (by Romanian DP Iván Márk) is extremely good, making excellent use of the evocative and unusual urban locations. In fact, whereas many American horror films over the years have tried to hide the fact that they were made in Eastern Europe for budgetary reasons, this one makes a real virtue out of being shot under the nose of the Ceaușescu regime, which by my calculations must have been struggling through its final tempestuous final months at around the time ‘Daughter of Darkness’ was filmed.

As such, the film’s evocative and seemingly authentic Bucharest street footage carries an electric and fearful atmosphere, effectively conveying the idea of a city living under a cloud of intrigue and paranoia, and even incorporating a sub-plot about Sara being pursued by the dictator’s secret police.

With a stuttering electricity supply, gun-toting soldiers on every corner, and brief glimpses of breadlines and dishevelled streetwalkers visible as Sara roars through the streets in a broken down taxi, the film suggests an interesting contrast between these symptoms of late 20th century misery, and the older, more dust-shrouded European world represented by the shabby five star hotels, over-priced restaurants and subterranean craft workshops which both she and the vampires are obliged to frequent.

At times, I was even reminded of Zulawski’s use of East Berlin in ‘Possession’ (a comparison further suggested by the fact that this film’s main bad guy, British actor Robert Reynolds, is a dead ringer for a young Sam Neill), but... there the similarities end, unfortunately.

Overall, I’m not sure I’d recommend going to the trouble to track down ‘Daughter of Darkness’ unless you’re a Stuart Gordon completist (or an Anthony Perkins completist?), or unless you have a special interest in films shot in Romania, possibly. But, it is at least a sufficiently respectable effort for me to continue truthfully claiming that I’ve never seen a Gordon film I didn't enjoy. 

 

#16 

Gemini 

(Shinya Tsukamoto, 1999)

To be honest, I've never been much of a fan of director Shinya Tsukamoto, but I am a fan of films based on the writings of Edogawa Rampo, wild gel lighting and buying stuff from Mondo Macabro, so I thought I'd give this one a go.

Results proved…. mixed, shall we say. The basic Rampo-derived story, about a former battlefield surgeon (Masahiro Motoki) being terrorised by his doppelganger, remains very compelling, using an ostensibly simple horror conceit to explore a wide range of uncomfortable thematic territory, touching on the dehumanising effects of war, the collapse of family hierarchies and, most pointedly, the pernicious violence inflicted upon society by the rigid enforcement of socio-economic inequality.

Rest assured however, this is all treated by Tsukamoto more as a visceral, ero-guro tone poem than some high-minded political allegory, as he adapts his jarring, dissociative audio-visual style (often likened to the cinematic equivalent of a tape cut-up or extreme noise record) to the needs of a slightly more refined period setting, delivering some truly shocking and bizarre moments for us to, uh, ‘enjoy’, in the process.

Former pop idol Motoki does fine work too in what is a challenging pair of roles to put it mildly, with his portrayal of the ‘evil twin’ character in particular standing as easily the most unsettling display of skin-crawling evil I’ve encountered during this October season.

In many other respects though, I’m afraid I just didn’t dig the approach Tsukamoto takes to this material. Although there is some beautiful photography in places, the ‘extreme’ colour schemes used through much of the film are achieved through ugly-looking post-production filtering rather than actual, on-set lighting and production design, with the unfortunate effect of making a lot of the footage feel as if it’s been brutalised by the pre-sets on an arty teenager’s iPhone, whilst the director’s fixation with lo-o-ong sequences of people silently maintaining creepy/natural postures or just generally freaking out in front of the camera for minutes on end likewise got on my nerves.

Ultimately, these questionable aesthetic decisions served to distract me from the central narrative (which I was enjoying) to a sometimes catastrophic degree, ultimately making the whole venture feel a bit pretentious and uninvolving.

I’m also not really sure why the occupants of the film’s early 20th century “slums” all needed to be crazy, Noh-dancing neo-primitive cyberpunks, but hey, you hire the guy who made ‘Tetsuo: The Iron Man’, that's what you get I suppose.

VHS Purgatory/Exploito All’Italiana: The Squeeze (Antonio Margheriti, 1978)

Not to be confused with the excellent, Stacy Keach-starring British crime movie of the same name, THIS Squeeze was shot in New York with a largely American cast by our old friend “Anthony M. Dawson”.

Given how little known it remains amongst the Euro-Cult contingent, I was pretty stoked when I fished this VHS copy out of some mouldering old cardboard box somewhere about five years ago. Apparently I wasn’t sufficiently stoked to find time to actually watch the damn thing however – that’s a pleasure I left until the clock was approaching midnight last Saturday, and…. well it wasn’t a moment too soon, let’s put it that way.

The plot here sees Lee Van Cleef’s retired master safe-cracker lured out of retirement when the needy and weak-willed son of his former boss (Edward Albert) drops into Lee’s Mexican ranch to explain that his life is on the line if he can’t successfully pull off a daring diamond heist for some nasty German mobsters he’s involved with. Out of loyalty to the kid’s dad, Van Cleef reluctantly agrees to help him out, and soon finds himself on the wintry streets of NYC, with only a full length white overcoat and a furry Russian hat to protect him from the thrills and spills that one imagines will inevitably ensue.

Lionel Stander – looking more like Ernest Borgnine than ever – gets a substantial role as Van Cleef’s old time fence/pawnbroker buddy, Karen Black is the – uh – “kooky” next door neighbour who inexplicably turns up to care for a sullen Van Cleef whilst he’s holed up in a rented apartment with a leg wound, and Robert Alda is the cop hot on their trail.

Although the print under review here is an absolutely brutal pan-and-scan job, it's still clear that cinematographer Sergio D'Offizi (an Italian exploitation vet whose credits include ‘Don’t Torture a Duckling’ and ‘Cannibal Holocaust’) extracted some great atmosphere from the snow-covered Brooklyn and Manhattan locations, and composer Paolo Vasile also keeps things ticking over nicely with some cracking ‘70s cop show music.

So far, so good but… oh man. How can I best put this? If you watch this one at all, don’t do so late at night. I took the plunge, and my battle to keep my eyes open until the end proved more epic than anything than unfolds in ‘The Squeeze’.

A director who spent most of his career making competent, impersonal mid-tier genre movies, Margheriti seems to have taken the opportunity to strike out in an uncharacteristically bold direction with ‘The Squeeze’. Unfortunately however, that direction involves ditching the action-packed hi-jinks viewers might reasonably have expected of a film like this, and instead attempting to craft an under-stated, melancholy thriller in the vein of, say, ‘The Conversation’ or ‘The Friends of Eddie Coyle’, perhaps even drawing slightly on ‘Midnight Cowboy’ in its attempt to concentrate on the oddball friendship that develops between the Van Cleef and Albert characters.

The thing is though… (deep sigh)… making a film work on that level requires a few things. Like excellent writing, good direction, and a convincing set of performances. With all due respect to the combined talents of the cast members I’ve listed above, no one working in any of these capacities on ‘The Squeeze’ seems to have felt the need to raise their game much beyond the level you’d expect of a run-of-the-mill late ‘70s Italian crime flick.

Which is to say, ‘The Squeeze’ basically plays out like a run-of-the-mill late ‘70s Italian crime flick in which nothing whatsoever happens. There are no real action scenes as such. No fights, no running around. No sleaze or violence, no crazy shenanigans, not even any amusing dubbed dialogue. The characters are one dimensional, the plotting is predictable and boring. The cast spend most of their time sitting around moodily, muttering dialogue that you feel might have carried some meaning in an alternate universe where it hadn’t been knocked out by a team of writers who were just treading water between the ‘Death Wish’ rip-offs and the ‘Rambo’ rip-offs.

There’s a big explosion after Van Cleef pulls off the diamond heist, but one explosion does not an action movie make. Thereafter, Van Cleef spends most of the remaining run time hiding out with a bad leg, trading sullen banter with Black’s genuinely rather insufferable ‘ditzy single chick’ stereotype.

In one of the film’s weirder touches meanwhile, Albert is arrested for the heinous crime of playing the display drum kit in a shop window without permission (I kid you not) – a caper that apparently lands him with a stretch in maximum security, where he spends much of the rest of the movie playing poker with some Black Panther type dudes.

(Even more unfeasibly, Van Cleef is shown reading about this in the papers the next morning, where we briefly see a headline along the lines of “LOCAL HOOD DRUMS HIMSELF TO JAIL” topping a full page story – it must have been one hell of a slow news day in NYC.)

Whilst all this is going on, the film’s primary antagonist – the nasty, Boris Johnson-lookalike German mobster – has been unceremoniously rubbed out by some thugs working for the guy they stole the diamonds from, and so, with its two protagonists both cooling their heels in confined locations and its main villain out of the picture, the movie proceeds to ramble on toward…. what exactly?

I mean, I’m sure Robert Altman or Sidney Lumet or someone like that could have pulled some compelling drama out of this lackadaisical scenario, but – again, with all due respect to his achievements in the field of broadly decent exploitation flicks - Antonio Margheriti, not so much.

The film’s eventual conclusion is, admittedly, nicely played out, with a bit of a melancholy kick to it, but it’s more of an “I guess I should be feeling something here?” kind of deal than anything else, and the faux-profound closing dialogue between Van Cleef and Stander, like much that has proceeded it, falls flat.

In closing, it’s worth noting that my tape of ‘The Squeeze’ ran about eighty four minutes, whilst the box states ninety three minutes and IMDB gives a run time of ninety nine. Could it be possible that I’ve just subjected myself to some kind of heavily neutered TV version of the film with all the good bits cut out? Or alternatively, is there an uncut version out there somewhere that is even more monumentally tedious? Or, is the ninety nine minute thing on IMDB just a mistake, and the differential in the video run-time just a result of those always mind-boggling PAL / NTSC conversion issues? Answers on a postcard, please.

Until the first of these three possibilities is proven to be the case however, I’m going to let this rather dispiriting review stand – partly just for the purposes of consumer advice, and partly to highlight the superb poster artwork reproduced on the VHS cover. (Aside from the explosion, and Lee Van Cleef holding a gun, absolutely none of the details depicted in this painting are reflected in the film itself, by the way.)

I suppose it’s possible that, at some point in the distant future, you might run across this movie on late night TV and, noting the intriguing cast, the great locations and the cool music, think to yourself, “gee, this looks like a good movie”. Maybe, if you can call to mind the merest fraction of what I’ve written here today, your evening could still be saved. Take heed.

Arrow Round up: Day of Anger (Tonino Valerii, 1967)

Lacking in either the stylistic grandeur of Leone, the sweaty political heft of Sollima or the transgressive pulp grit of Corbucci, Tonino Valerii’s first Spaghetti Western initially seems a pretty routine affair, very much channeling the workaday professionalism of the kind of movies Joel McCrea or Randolph Scott were headlining in America ten years earlier.

This being post-Leone though, there’s also a strong strain of blood-thirsty, samurai-style lone wolf violence in the mix here too, and whenever things hustle toward a showdown, Valerii steps up to the plate with a controlled, dramatic directorial sensibility that, if somewhat more retrained than those of his aforementioned contemporaries, nonetheless delivers the goods just the way we want ‘em.

Needless to say, Lee Van Cleef is a total bad-ass in this one, playing one of his best ever ruthless, squinty-eyed gunfighters (which is saying something, given the extent to which he cornered the market in ruthless, squinty-eyed gunfighters), and if you like your westerns full of the kind of lightning fast, unpredictable kill-shots that raise an involuntary “woop!” or “hell yeah!”, ‘Day of Anger’ has you well covered.

Meanwhile, a miscast Giuliano Gemma as Van Cleef’s protégé / successor plods through his “zero to hero” story arc divertingly enough as various crooks and baddies (Harry Alan Towers regular Walter Rilla and the great Al Mulok amongst them) creep and seethe on the margins, awaiting their comeuppance. Ernesto Gastaldi’s script is pretty good as far as these things go (by which I mean pacing is solid and the characters consistent, with only occasional outbreaks of errant nonsense), but when Van Cleef is off-screen and folks start yapping, things inevitably simmer down a bit, hitting a comfortable “dusty ol’ B western” comfort zone.

The film’s second half has a lot of great stuff with Van Cleef building a grand, quasi-psychedelic casino/saloon whose visual aspect is just as awesome as it is historically questionable, and generally striding around in ass-kicking “I own this town” type fashion, all of which is splendidly enjoyable for those of us who always find ourselves cheering for Van Cleef even when (as usual) he’s playing an utter bastard.

‘Day of Anger’ is also notable for featuring one of the most absurdly contrived set-pieces I’ve ever seen in a non-comedic western, wherein some guy appears out of nowhere and challenges Van Cleef to a duel, before specifying that this is to take place on horseback, with powder & shot muskets. Valerii and co. obviously thought the resulting sequence was a big showstopper, but in truth it simply comes across us ridiculous (not least because it causes us to wonder why this sinister stranger specified such an unusual manner of engagement, given that he is apparently not very good at it).

Elsewhere, Riz Ortolani’s music is none the worse for sounding like it was mainly knocked up on a few electric guitars and a pair of bongos, and the movie’s US poster [reproduced above] is one of my all-time favourites. According to IMDB, no less a personage than Paul Naschy pops up here as an extra, but I didn’t spot him.

Despite the attempts of both Gastaldi and Italian critic Roberto Curti to attribute grand mythic weight to ‘Day of Anger’s storyline on the extras to the Arrow edition, this movie is basically a pure potboiler, largely devoid of politics, realism or any but the most basic thematic significance. Whilst it can’t pretend to measure up to the work of the three Sergios or the other one-off masterpieces that comprise the A-list of Spaghettis though, it’s certainly entertaining and, for want of a better word, COOL, enough to give it a top table position on the genre’s B-team.