Belated Happy Halloween Everybody.

Well, phew – that was a lot of fun. My productivity both in work and day-to-day life may have suffered, but knocking out over 28,000 words of horror movie reviewin’ in the space of a month proved very enjoyable. Although I’ve fallen one short of last year’s total of fifteen reviews, I’ve still just about managed to meet my self-imposed ‘post every two days’ deadline, despite being derailed both by extra-curricular ‘Train To Busan’ re-evaluation [watch this space], and by the need to bang on for absolutely ages about Mandy. My review of The Monster Club just about made it under the wire at 11pm on Tuesday night… and we’re done.

Huge thanks to everyone who took the time to leave comments, or simply to read these posts – I really appreciate it, and I’m sorry I haven’t had a chance to reply to some of them yet; all have been most apposite and welcome.

I hope that your own October was just as full of gratuitous and irresponsible wallowing in horror movies as mine has been. To finish things off nicely, here are a few brief-as-possible run-downs of some other movies I’ve managed to fit in this month, but have lacked either the time or inclination to write up in full.

All The Colors of The Dark 
(Sergio Martino, 1972)

Making Martino’s other gialli look like light-weight trifles in comparison, ‘All The Colors Of The Dark’ (which I returned to for the first time in a few years late weekend) makes for an oppressively heavy and intoxicating viewing experience. The film’s Polanski-esque immersion into the increasingly unreliable perceptions on a woman on the verge of complete nervous collapse leads to an airless and claustrophobic feel, and, unusually, Edwige Fenech makes for a fairly inscrutable and unsympathetic heroine on this occasion, meaning that the ninety plus minutes we spend following her every move are rather less pleasant than her fans may have anticipated.

The non-supernatural elements of Gastaldi’s script are likewise fairly tedious and over-familiar (a fact not helped by the film’s infuriating habit of introducing characters who look almost exactly like other characters), and Martino seems to struggle at times with extracting his preferred level of stylistic grandeur from the unusually drab British locations.

When he does get his mojo on though, the film crashes into heady, oneiric territory with almost frightening glee. Susan Scott / Nieves Navarro is great as the spaced out, witchy neighbour character, and the castle-bound Sabbath / orgy sequences she leads Edwige to are far stronger and more rapey than I remember from previous viewings - both totally freaked out and genuinely rather upsetting. (My wife was absolutely mortified by the bit where a cute little doggie gets sacrificed. Oops - I’d have held this one back for solo viewing if I’d remembered.)

Meanwhile, Ivan Rassimov drips menace as only he can, glowering mightily in his distinctive fashion, and, as fans will be well aware, Bruno Nicolai’s music is absolutely off-the-hook. One of the most raging, psychedelic Euro-cult scores of all-time, it adds hugely to the film’s overall impact.

Indeed, ‘All the Colors..’ remains an essential slice of full strength giallo / euro-horror business – the cinematic equivalent of being force-fed claret and sleeping pills, more or less – even if it falls to some extent into the “easier to admire than to love” basket.

Black Moon
(Roy William Neill, 1934)

Despite a wonderfully alluring poster and the always welcome presence of Fay Wray, this voodoo / plantation island tale from Neill (who went on to become the regular director for Universal’s Sherlock Holmes series) has never really gained much traction amongst vintage horror fans – probably due to the fact that it is both profoundly mediocre and very, very racist.

Lacking either the dream-like atmospherics of ‘White Zombie’ or the intelligence and subtlety of ‘I Walked With a Zombie’ (and, indeed, lacking any zombies), I suppose you could at least make a case for this one as the go-to template for all subsequent undistinguished voodoo b-movies, but that aside, it has very little going for it – unless you’re scared of black people I suppose, in which case… well, I suggest seeking psychiatric help rather than wasting your time watching old movies.

Actually, my one pertinent observation here is that this film represents an example of prevailing social attitudes having changed so profoundly in the eight decades since it was made that (child sacrifice notwithstanding), the supposed “bad guys” (ie, the black islanders and the white lady who grew up with them and digs their culture) now seem vastly more sympathetic than the stuck-up, slave-owning “good guys”. So, that’s quite interesting, I suppose?

Meanwhile, the staged voodoo rituals are filmed with a sweaty, feverish intensity, and the manipulative imperilment of a white child within them would almost certainly not have been allowed once the Production Code kicked in a year or two later…. but, beyond that, nothing much to see here folks – please move along.

In fact, I’d go as far as to say that, unless you’re working on a biography of one of the principal cast members or carrying out a study of colonialist attitudes in 1930s horror films, there is very little reason to watch this in the 21st century.

Dr Phibes Rises Again!
(Robert Fuest, 1972)

It recently occured to me that, although I have naturally seen Robert Fuest’s ‘The Abominable Dr Phibes’ (1971) many times over many years, as is only right and proper, I’d never actually got around to watching the sequel.

With this oversight duly corrected, I can immediately understand why this one is somewhat less well-regarded than its predecessor. Whereas the first Dr Phibes film feels like a perfectly formed cinematic creation, with every detail carefully planned out in advance, ‘..Rises Again’ by contrast is absolutely all over the place, feeling very much like a series of random incidents strung together with little rhyme or reason, leaving all kinds of incongruous bits and pieces flapping inelegantly in the breeze.

This is especially unfortunate given that Fuest’s plan for this film seems to have been even more extravagantly ambitious than the first one, with Dr Phibes’ decision to decamp to a network of cyclopean ancient Egyptian ruins allowing the director to indulge in some of the most wildly imaginative (and, no doubt, expensive) sets and props of a career spent more or less specialising in such things. (Caroline Munro’s Rolls Royce coffin is a definite highlight.)

I’ve not yet had a chance to dig into the various extras on the blu-ray, but one suspects that a perfect storm of budgetary and scheduling problems, studio interference and unsympathetic editing may well have led Fuest to crash and burn here.

No one could accuse him of not giving it his best shot however, and whilst ‘..Rises Again’ is objectively a far poorer film than its predecessor, that thankfully doesn’t prevent it from being an absolute hoot from start to finish – a raving mad car crash of fiendish weirdness, the like of which has rarely been seen before or since, with an extraordinary cast and some murder set-pieces so grandiose and surreal they even eclipse those of the first film.

I mean, really, what can you really say to the sight of Milton Reid getting a golden snake rammed through his brain (I think that might actually be my favourite scene from either film), Hugh Griffith being cast out to sea in a giant gin bottle (rather cruel I thought, given his well-known drinking problem), John Thaw getting his face chewed off by an Andean Condor, and the likes of Terry Thomas, Peter Cushing and Beryl Reid all turning up for no apparent reason to take a bite out of the scenery before disappearing again..?

It would take a hard-hearted movie fan indeed to witness such wonders and still emerge complaining that the script doesn’t make much sense, the humour is puerile and the make-up effects are a bit iffy. Highest possible recommendation.

Zombie Creeping Flesh
(Bruno Mattei, 1980)

AKA ‘Hell of the Living Dead’ and probably about a dozen other things.

Claiming that this is the best film ever realised by the dynamic duo of Mattei and Fragrasso may not sound like much of a compliment, but… there ya go, make of it what you will.

Unfortunately, ‘Zombie Creeping Flesh’ is marred by a veritable avalanche of poorly matched stock footage during its ill-advised cannibal movie-style middle section (not only do we get to see grey elephants stampeding across the majestic plains of Papua New Guinea but I think they cram in enough National Geographic ‘native tribal customs’ clips to cover about three continents) -- but, if we can leave all that aside, I’d argue that all of the legit, men-on-the-scene type stuff with our team of hard-boiled commandos tangling with the zombies is actually pretty damn boss.

The mad laughing, Klaus Kinski-type dude is great; the business with the zombified kid is brutal (but great), the Baader-Meinhof style terrorist siege that introduces us to the commandos is, uh, *kinda* great, the stolen Goblin music on the soundtrack is great, and the whole opening section with the zombie outbreak in the power plant is awesome.

And, nearly forty years down the line, dare I even suggest that the film’s once laughably heavy-handed political sub-text actually now seems pretty on-point, vis-à-vis the developed world inflicting plague and environmental devastation upon poor island communities..? Not least in the eerie (and weirdly audacious) scene that sees New Guinea’s representative at the U.N. angrily pleading his nation’s case to a near-empty chamber.

Well, anyhow - it may not be as funny as Zombi Holocaust, as icky and dream-like as ‘Burial Ground’ or as brilliantly mental as Cannibal Apocalypse, but if the clock strikes midnight and you find yourself in the mood for some rock solid Italio-action-horror goodness, this one won’t let you down.

Salem’s Lot
(Tobe Hooper, 1979)

I’ve never been much of a Stephen King fan, so I’ve not read the novel, but I can easily believe that this leisurely three hour TV-mini-series-converted-into-theatrical-feature type effort gives a pretty good impression of what the experience of reading it might be like, complete with reams of extraneous sub-plots and secondary characters, heavy small-American-town-gone-to-seed vibes, and a brave, easy-lovin’ novelist with big glasses turning up to save the day.

Overall, this isn’t a bad vampire story – nothing too earth-shattering, but there are plenty of effective moments; it’s interesting to see James Mason of all people popping up as the sinister, vamp-enabling antique dealer, Elisha Cook seems to have wondered straight in off the set of ‘Messiah of Evil’ six years earlier, the circa ’73 fashions everyone wears already seem to be gathering dust, I loved that little jeep with the canvas door that the playboy writer guy zooms around in, and there’s some choice stuff with the pre-‘Lost Boys’ vampire hunting monster kid character. (DAD: “magic, monsters – what do you see in all this?”, KID: “I dunno, I just like it I suppose – the same way you liked numbers, so you became an accountant”.)

Things take a startlingly apocalyptic turn towards the end (I could have done with a bit more of that), and the eventual revelation that the head vampire is none other than motherfucking Graf Orlok himself is absolutely brilliant – like his silent-era predecessor, he’s a pure monster-vampire who doesn’t mess around, and a truly terrifying figure.

So that’s good, but, ah, I dunno – unless you watched this on TV at an impressionable age or you’re a big King fan, I don’t think ‘Salem’s Lot’ will really knock your block off. *SHRUG* It passes the time well enough, I suppose, but I wouldn’t really recommend prioritising it unless you’ve got a lot of time on your hands.

Actually, perhaps the most surprising thing here is the revelation that cantankerous wild man of genre cinema Tobe Hooper once managed to direct over 180 minutes-worth of blandly proficient TV movie story-telling without freaking out or doing anything crazy (well, not on-screen, at least). I’ve not read up on the background, but I’m guessing that perhaps it was this uncharacteristic fit of good behaviour that got him the gig on ‘Poltergeist’..?

And finally….

Halloween
(David Gordon Green, 2018)

Well, this was a bit of a mixed bag. As is outlined at length by Robert Skvaria’s review at Diabolique, this “forget all the other sequels” sequel to Carpenter’s original faces serious problems with regard to its scripting, its attempts to tell a character-based story and its questionable approach to mental illness. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the opening twenty or thirty minutes are flat-out dreadful.

Some plummy-voiced true crime podcasters go to visit Michael Myers in a Bedlam-style loony bin where the inmates stand in the yard chained to lead weights and howl like dogs. Some doctor is like, “Donald Pleasence is dead now, so I’m here – any questions?”, and everyone goes on and on about the “legend” of Myers, unveiling artefacts and reminders from the original film as if they were The Holy Grail and…. please god, make it stop.

Well, thankfully, it does more or less stop, and from the moment Myers is on the loose, things improve considerably. The strongest element of H-2018 comes via the fact that director Green understands The Shape, and how best to use it – ie, as a purely cinematic conceit, rather than as a flesh & blood “character” (god forbid).

He realises that when the on-screen characters struggle for survival, they are not battling against some guy in a mask, but against the fiendish ingenuity of the filmmakers themselves, and his film proceeds to exploit this forty year old revelation extremely well.

I’ll say straight out that I do not really give a damn about Michael Myers’ psychiatric diagnosis, or about Laurie Strode’s troubled family history, or about her granddaughter’s poorly realised (and ultimately pointless) high school shenanigans – and, more to the point, this film does very little to make me care about them, despite exerting great effort in trying to do so.

But, each time the switch flicks into “horror mode” (and thankfully it stays there for the entirety of the second half), the game is on, The Shape is in play, and the pay-offs are extremely satisfying. Forget all that script stuff, revert to your lizard/survival brain, and enjoy, because as well-crafted stalk n’ slash hokum, mixing wink-nod references to the original with some new surprises, H-2018 really does the business.

(It’s nice to hear Carpenter and his boys back on soundtrack duty too. I wouldn’t say that their re-working of the original score is exactly a knock-out, but I appreciated the way they held back the main theme for so long – just dropping it when it really counts – and the addition of some squelchy, doom metal guitar chords sounded nice through the cinema’s sound system.)

Oh, and the eventual message of all that Strode family hand-wringing by the way? Seems to be that becoming a paranoid, survivalist prepper may alienate you from wider society, harm your children and destroy your family relationships in the short term – but they’ll all come running back to you in tears as soon as a monster shows up, so it’ll all turn out good in the end. Hey, I can dig it. Sure makes a change from “love conquers all”.

Happy post-Halloween November drudgery, everybody!

Arrow Round up: Eaten Alive (Tobe Hooper, 1976)

Independent producer Mardi Rustam must have thought he’d hit the grindhouse horror jackpot when he signed up the director of ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ (then still knocking people’s socks off on its initial theatrical run) to make a movie about a backwoods hotel proprietor feeding his guests to a giant alligator, starring a bus load of old-hand Hollywood character players and a handful of pretty girls.

Forty years later, when I threw this disc on without much prior research to headline a Friday night of mindless horror movie fun, I’ll confess I had broadly similar expectations…. but as it turns out, fate dealt both Mardi and I a pretty ugly hand on this one.

To put it plainly: ‘Eaten Alive’ (also widely known as ‘Death Trap’) is a real fucking weird one, and not necessarily in a good way. Despite the foolproof simplicity of its drive-in friendly premise (‘Psycho’ + alligators + tits & gore = $$$, basically), the film that eventually emerged from the production’s evidently quite troubled set is one of the most ramshackle, disquieting and uniquely off-putting attempts at making a commercial horror film I’ve ever seen. (1)

The reasons for this are many and varied, but I suspect, at the end of the day, there was simply a bad moon on the rise (or some equally calamitous astrological conjunction) the day that the film’s creative principals convened on a low-rent Hollywood sound-stage to throw this thing together. There is just something.. off.. about the whole venture. Depending on circumstances and personal taste, some may find that this freaked out, weirdie vibe could add greatly to the film, but…. well, let’s just say that on this occasion it didn’t do a lot for my proposed programme of popcorn consumption and solfa-based relaxation, and leave it at that.

Although ‘Eaten Alive’s consciously artificial, set-bound visual style – all glowing red gel-lighting, swathes of candy floss fog and garishly camp costume/set design – suggests an intention on Hooper’s part to take a 180 degree U-turn from the realism of ‘Chainsaw..’, the spirit of that film was clearly still very much on the director’s mind, and his actual direction here is just as disorientating and stylistically extreme as it was on his earlier classic. Dutch angles, sweaty facial close-ups and prolonged sequences of twitchy discomfort are all very much in evidence, whilst the director’s favoured soundtrack (recorded in conjunction with Wayne Bell, as per their work together on ‘Chainsaw..’) comprises a genuinely alarming selection of jagged, atonal noise loops that, combined with a near-continuous barrage of shrieking, squelching, canned animal noise and incoherent radio chatter, makes the film a constant, low level assault on the senses. (2)

Whereas this approach worked very well for ‘Chainsaw..’s assaultive “descent into hell” structure however, it wreaks havoc with the slower, more conventional narrative utilised here, leaving viewers lost and confused, unable to grab hold of anything to help us connect with or understand the parade of increasingly grotesque insanity unfolding on-screen.

One of the main problems here (if indeed you see it as a problem) is that, of the distractingly large cast of characters, most appear just as unbalanced and unpredictable as Neville Brand’s psychopath hotelier, leaving us searching in vain for the kind of vaguely sympathetic protagonist figures necessarily to anchor (and more importantly, drive the suspense of) this kind of slasher / bodycount set-up.

Robert Englund’s smirking cowboy rapist, Stuart Whitman’s sleazy, ineffectual sheriff, Carolyn Jones’ doddering brothel madam – all of these are potentially intriguing characters, but they’re also almost comically dislikeable and entirely absorbed in their own strange tangents, giving the film a rambling, “lunatics have taken over the asylum” feel that persists despite the belated introduction of Mel Ferrer and Crystin Sinclaire as a theoretically sympathetic (but actually also quite dysfunctional) father / daughter team about halfway through the run-time. (3)

I don’t know what kind of advice and/or freaky treatment Hooper gave his cast here, but, whether their characters demand it or not, just about everyone on-screen is completely out-to-lunch, which doesn’t exactly help matters. This is most evident early in the film, when a bickering family unit of rent-a-victims (the parents played by Brian De Palma regular William Finley and ‘Chainsaw..’s Marilyn Burns) pull up outside Brand’s decaying boarding house. Finally, we think, some normal people to help put things in perspective… but it’s not to be.

Shot dispassionately from above as they stomp around their hideously decaying hotel room, Finley and Burns’ domestic disagreements soon assume the quality of shrieking, operatic hysteria, with Finley in particular going so far off the map it’s hard to believe anyone let him get away with it. By the time he begins scrabbling around on the floor, apparently channeling some acid-damaged reject from a way-out experimental theatre production as he mimes a search for his “eyes”, which he accuses his wife of having scooped out of his skull, we’re forced to wonder whether the couple’s terrified child – currently hiding under filthy bed sheets having already been traumatized by the sight of her pet poodle getting chomped by the alligator – wouldn’t be better off taking her chances with the muttering, brain-damaged axe murderer downstairs.

So yeah – it’s that kind of movie.

At the centre of all this derangement, probably the most genuinely disturbing (as opposed to just fingers-down-the-blackboard grating) aspect of ‘Eaten Alive’ is the casting of Neville Brand in the central role of the aforementioned psychopath.

Apparently one of the most highly decorated American veterans of World War II, Brand often claimed that he initially turned to acting (with a particular emphasis on The Method) as a means of coping with the ravages of what we would probably now term Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (back then, they probably just went with “shell shock”, or did that ‘silently tapping the side of yr head’ thing). Though extremely successful in his new career (his filmography is quite a read), by the time he got to ‘Eaten Alive’ Brand had also resorted to treating his condition through the more traditional means of raging alcoholism, resulting in a tendency toward dysfunctional behavior that shines through all too clearly here.

It is often difficult to discern how much of Brand’s incoherent performance is a result of his “immersion in the role” and how much is simply a reflection of his damaged mental health at the time of filming, but either way, he makes for an extremely uncomfortable presence on screen. Constantly muttering to himself and occasionally raising his voice to make odd, fractured pronouncements to whoever happens to be around, the vast majority of Brand’s dialogue is either inaudible or meaningless, meaning that, although we spend a great deal of time following him stomping about his living space as distorted country n’ western blares on the radio, we learn very little of his character’s personal history, or the motivation for his apparently random crimes.

He does sometimes seem to experiencing flashbacks or hallucinations of a military nature, suggesting that the character, like the actor playing him, is a traumatised veteran of some kind (thus aligning ‘Eaten Alive’ as a potential distant cousin to the sub-genre of “shell shock” horror flicks represented by Bob Clark’s ‘Deathdream’ (1974) and Buddy Giovinazzo’s ‘Combat Shock’ (1984)), but this is never really explored, and again, the ratio of “stuff that was in the script” versus stuff that Brand was simply improvising on the spot remains unclear.

All we can say for sure is that, based on opinions culled from the extensive extras on Arrow’s release of the film, most of the cast and crew were frightened of Brand, finding his behaviour threatening and unpredictable (one interviewee recalls him eating from a huge jar of honey between takes, like some perverted Winnie the Pooh), whilst many of his scenes convey the impression of a man suffering from severe dementia who has been pushed onto the set and left to fend for himself.

As with many of his later films, Hooper himself doesn’t seem to have been an easy collaborator either, and his constant clashes with ‘Eaten Alive’s producers appear to have led to his walking off and returning to the production like a yo-yo, with many cast members recalling pivotal scenes instead being directed by cinematographer Robert Caramico (whose attitude could be summarised as “LET’S GET THIS FUCKING THING DONE AND GO HOME”), or by Rustam himself.

Under the circumstances, it is a testament to the strength of Hooper’s vision that the finished film continues to embody his directorial sensibility so strongly, but his obvious absence from large chunks of the shooting nonetheless lends ‘Eaten Alive’ a fragmented, piecemeal quality that makes it an even stranger viewing experience, full of threads left hanging, entirely gratuitous bits of character business and some sequences whose very existence remains entirely inexplicable.

An example of the latter is provided by one extraordinary diversion during a scene set in a local bar, when David Haywood, the wondering cowboy with the violin case from Robert Altman’s ‘Nashville’, turns up, apparently playing the same character he portrayed in that film. Haywood proceeds to be terrorised in an exceptionally odd manner by two unsavory gentlemen – cohorts of Englund’s character – who rival Brand in the “authentically fucking creepy” department, in a meta-textual bit of pre-Lynchian menace that defies any kind of rational explanation.

Buried somewhere beneath ‘Eaten Alive’s distressed, almost avant garde surface is a great little fun-time horror movie (the one Rustam initially wanted to make, presumably) just fighting to get out. It is ironic that, despite turning off most of horror crowd with its sheer, rambling weirdness, the film’s actual murder set pieces are outstanding. More audacious and explicitly gory than most mid-‘70s American horrors, they border on the cartoon splatter of ‘80s Italian fare in their best moments – in fact I’m sure a carefully assembled trailer of the bloodier highlights could have had gore-hounds queuing ‘round the block, were it not for the fact that the total failure of the movie’s animatronic crocodile (alligator? I dunno, who cares..) simultaneously undercuts the laudable achievements of the film’s effects team in other areas, making a laughing stock out of any hopes the producers might have had of scoring some topical, ‘Jaws’-style action.

The more acclaimed classics of 1970s American independent horror might have gained a rep for their dark, twisted innovation, but for sheer berserk extremity I think ‘Eaten Alive’ pretty much tops them all, even whilst it’s lavishly eccentric production design instead seems to hark back to the ‘60s gothics, or early Technicolor melodramas. Going considerably further in its audience alienation tactics than most viewers are liable to tolerate even today, I can only assume it must have been met with consternation, walk-outs and general bafflement when it first made the rounds of America’s grindhouse/drive-in circuit back in the mid ‘70s.

Like most of Hooper’s post-‘Chainsaw..’ films, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that ‘Eaten Alive’ is a ‘good’ or artistically successful film – and it is certainly not one I’m be liable to recommend to anyone for the purposes of ‘entertainment’ – but it is definitely a unique experience, and that counts for something. Whatever you make of him as a director, Hooper’s bloody-minded pursuit of his own peculiar vision, combined with his apparent refusal to ever actually make the film his producers or audience want him to, is difficult not to admire.

Just spare a thought though for poor old Mardi Rustam, head in hands beside his account ledger a year or so after ‘Eaten Alive’ wrapped, wondering what the hell went wrong.

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(1)Other AKAs include ‘Horror Hotel’, ‘Starlight Slaughter’, ‘Legend of the Bayou’, ‘Brutes and Savages’ (appropriate?), ‘Akuma No Nuwa’ [‘The Devil’s Swamp’] in Japan and, as demonstrated via the superb poster above, ‘Quel Motel Vicino alla Palude’ [‘The Motel Near the Swamp’] in Italy.

(2) I’m sure all this has been widely discussed before, but with my “music fan” hat on, I can’t help but reflect on how ahead of their time Hooper & Bell were with their scores for ‘Chainsaw..’ and ‘Eaten Alive’, and how influential they must have been on the emergence what we’d today classify as ‘harsh noise’ or power electronics. I mean, who else, outside of the farthest reaches of avant garde composition, was busting out this kind of thing in the mid-‘70s?

(3)Amusingly, the perpetually dignified Mel Ferrer also ended up appearing in Umberto Lenzi’s ‘Eaten Alive!’ (1980).