Cormania: Gas-s-s-s! Or, It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It (Roger Corman, 1970)

If we were to chart Roger Corman’s engagement with socio-political issues in his work upon some kind of hypothetical scale, then at the opposite end of it from the uncomfortably effective The Intruder, we would find ‘Gas-s-s-s!, or, It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It’ [henceforth ‘Gas’, just for the sake of our sanity], an inexplicable, rather hare-brained movie which, over fifty years later, is difficult not to see as one of its directors greatest failures. (I mean, say what you will about Creature From The Haunted Sea, but at least it had reasons for being crap.) (1)

This is extremely regrettable, given that the project represents an important milestone in Corman’s career on a number of levels. Not only does it mark the conclusion of his cycle of ‘counter-culture’ films (following on from ‘The Wild Angels’ in ’66 and ‘The Trip’ in ’67), but also his final collaboration with American international Pictures (following fifteen years of fruitful co-dependence), and in fact his final work as a director of independent commercial cinema in the United States. (2)

So, what’s ‘Gas’ all about then? Well… it’s difficult to say really, and that very uncertainty soon becomes a pretty big part of the problem.

A pastel crayon animated prologue introduces us to some high ranking military officials (including such personages as ‘General Strike’, and ‘Dr Murder’ - and if you find that magazine cartoon level of humour uproariously funny, there’s hope you might enjoy this movie yet), who, in the process of attending a ceremonial function at a chemical research base in Alaska, accidentally uncork a beaker containing a cloud of custom-made poison gas which now promises to spread across the earth, killing everyone aged over twenty-five.

Moving into live action post-credits, we meet a long-haired, wise-crackin’ campus troublemaker (Bob Corff) and his adorable, only marginally less wide-crackin’ girlfriend (Elaine Giftos), who depart Dallas in a salmon pink Cadillac and promptly get involved in a series of tiresome comical capers, eventually joining forces with a group of other sketchily-defined, more-or-less hippie-aligned young people (including amongst their number both a young Bud Cort, and one Tally Coppola, later to become Talia Shire). Together, this merry band traverse a marginally post-apocalyptic version of the American South-West, enduring a multitude of symbolic / quixotic encounters and threats as they vaguely pursue an Oz-like quest to consult an ‘oracle’, whose billboards (including a count-down in miles) they spot along the highway.

And… that’s about it, really. I mean, I wish I could tell you what the wearying procession of factions, marauders, aggressors, cultists, herd-like victims and all-purpsoe extraverted weirdos our protagonists run into along the way were actually meant to represent, but, as the film’s attempts at satirical humour alternate wildly between blunt, eye-rolling obviousness and head-scratching, lost-in-translation obscurity, it is honestly difficult to locate anything here which we squares might term a ‘point’.

Which might have been all well and good, if only Corman and his collaborators been able to wrangle some other value from these narratively unglued proceedings, but, sadly, the kind of pupil-dilating visual excess and subversive, taboo-breaking chaos which defined the era’s more successful underground/counter-cultural filmmaking is in very short supply in ‘Gas’.

Shot in a range of uninhabited / wreckage-strewn desert locations across Texas and New Mexico, the film’s footage soon becomes fairly monotonous, in spite of the natural beauty of the surroundings and some intermittently impressive photography from DP Ron Dexter. The tone of the action meanwhile remains cloyingly light-hearted, employing a gratingly twee take on hippie-era surrealism, whilst the characters remain vacant, distant and uninteresting.

Even the garish, mid-century Americana of the costumes and production design simply remain… standard issue, for the most part. Please bear in mind that I say all this as a viewer who usually maintains an extremely high tolerance for what Kim Newman has termed ‘Weird Hippie Shit’, but in a word, ‘Gas’ simply feels tired.

Just a few short years earlier, Corman could reasonably have claimed to have had his finger on the pulse of the intersection between popular culture and the underground (after all, ‘The Wild Angels’ not only launched a whole new era-defining genre, but provided direct aesthetic inspiration for generations of proto-punk rebels in the process).

The shadow-haunted autumn/winter of ’69 though found Corman and screenwriter George Armitage (future director of ‘Grosse Pointe Blank’ and the fantastic Miami Blues) beginning work on ‘Gas’ at precisely the moment in which the optimism of the 1960s evaporated, leaving something darker and more fragmented behind it, ready to curdle as the decade turned… and ensuring that the film’s happy-go-lucky, flower-child hipster-isms must have felt painfully irrelevant by the time their film finally opened in September 1970. (3)

In this context, scenes which may have passed as wild, Godardian po-mo provocations back in the mid-‘60s (such as the film’s lampoon of a western shoot-out, in which characters point their fingers at each other whilst shouting the names of famous cowboy actors) simply play out as eye-rolling tedium - self-satisfied acting class wheezes dragged out for far longer than is really necessary.

Indeed, for a Corman production, ‘Gas’ feels uncharacteristically bloated and excessive. Shot across multiple locations in several states (and dogged by inevitable weather-related delays along the way), he seems to have become fixated here on mounting vast public spectacles of one kind of another.

The finished film is stuffed full of marching bands and parades, crowds of extras fleeing through the streets of Western town sets pursued by gangs of stuntmen on brightly painted bikes and sidecars, convoys of golf carts, JCBs and tooled up dune buggies (triggering entirely accidental flashes of Mansonoid paranoia), cheerleaders, football teams and hundreds of people crammed onto a remote mountaintop for the film’s conclusion… all, ultimately, to very little effect.

Amidst all this sound and fury, it becomes difficult to avoid the conclusion that the man who once shot a film as beautifully crafted as ‘Little Shoppe of Horrors’ on a single set in two and a half days has lost his way very badly somewhere along the line.

Perhaps the sole quantifiable pleasure I took from ‘Gas’ in fact came from the music - and this is entirely due to the fact that I’m a big fan of the perennially underrated Country Joe & The Fish, and in particular of their gifted lead guitarist Barry ‘The Fish’ Melton, who was charged with composing ‘Gas’s songs and incidental cues (as heard in the rare moments when the brass marching bands, cheerleading chants and honking car horns shut up for a few minutes). (4)

It’s nice to hear the various bits and pieces Melton came up with (recordings never otherwise released, insofar as I’m aware), and we also get to enjoy some choice footage of the band in full flow at some kind of outdoor festival held at a drive-in theatre, backed up by a bitchin’ psychedelic light show, inter-cut with footage of two of the young hippie characters making out during an acid trip, and accompanied by subliminal flashes of underground movie-style abstract imagery.

Arguably the film’s strongest sequence, the overall effect here is only partially spoiled by the presence of Country Joe McDonald (who I’m fairly sure would not have made the twenty-five year old cut-off point required for this movie’s plot, incidentally) doing some kind of terminally unamusing skit about how he’s an omnipotent, god-like figure named ‘A.M. Radio’, or somesuch. (My god, this obnoxiously performative, satire-lite fucking hippie ‘humour’, I swear… it’s enough to make me want to shave my head and enlist in the nearest para-military organisation post-haste.)

Aside perhaps from hardcore C.J. Fish fans though, it’s difficult to imagine that anyone at the time of ‘Gas’s original release was actually digging what Corman was laying down here. Whilst ‘straight’ audiences must have simply been confused and alienated by all this mystifying hullaballoo, the campus radicals and garage band suburban punks the movie was presumably supposed to appeal to would surely by this point have felt patronised and turned off by its parade of quirky, central casting hippies mouthing half-baked flower power witticisms, long past their sell-by date in the hyper-accelerated climate of mid-century pop culture.

Even within the sphere of disastrous, released-too-late hippie movies, ‘Gas’ ranks low, lacking the lo-fi earnestness of the Firesign Theatre’s “electric western” ‘Zachariah’, the wild artistic vision of Dennis Hopper’s ‘The Last Movie’ or the magisterial visual gimmickry of Antonioni’s ‘Zabriskie Point’.

But the saddest thing of all is that, despite all this, ‘Gas’ seems to have been a project which mattered to Corman a great deal.

He spends over five pages of his 1990 memoir ‘How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime’ discussing the film, acknowledging the gruelling nature of the production, and regretting his decision to begin filming without a finished script. But, he also speaks enthusiastically of his success in creating “an apocalyptic, Strangelovian satire,” - one which, sadly, sounds a lot more exciting in Corman’s recollection than any of the footage which actually ended up on the screen;

“My films and my politics were getting more radical, more “liberated,” as the 1960s were coming to a close. I was truly beginning to believe I could do anything, which is why the picture ran a little out of control. Any idea that came to us, we would put in.” 

[…] 

“We ended up with some pretty wild and surreal images. We had a group of Hell’s Angels riding in their colors in golf carts instead of their choppers. The Texas A&M football team became a band of marauders on dune buggies, terrorizing the Southwest. We had Edgar Allan Poe speeding through the frame on a Hell’s Angels chopper with a raven on his shoulder, making comments from time to time. […] We re-created the Kennedy assassination while it was sleeting. Then we finally got to the Acoma mesa, which is virtually cut off from civilization, accessible only by a steep and winding dirt road.”

Although everything Corman describes can kind of be seen in the movie if you squint hard enough, I think the failure of any of it to actually make much of an impression on the viewer simply goes to prove that, much as I love him, Roger Corman was no Alejandro Jodorowsky. Logic, working within fixed limits and careful advance planning were the engines which powered his best cinema, and the mellow ideals of middle class So Cal suburbia remained his aesthetic base-camp, even as the wily tendrils of psychedelia and European decadence repeatedly threatened to drag him further afield. At the end of the day, maximalist cosmic wig-flipping was simply not his bag, man.

Nonetheless, Corman remained extremely unhappy about a number of cuts he claimed were made to ‘Gas’ in post-production, and which he blamed primarily on AIP’s James H. Nicholson, whom he felt had become increasingly conservative and intolerant of risk-taking in the films his company released, citing these arbitrary cuts as reasons for the film’s incoherence and commercial failure.

Strong words perhaps from a man who in later years would become famous for insisting his protégés’ films came in at under 88 minutes in order to save on film canisters, but above all, AIPs decision to cut the film’s intended final shot remained a source of great bitterness to Corman, ending one of the longest and most productive relationships in the history of independent cinema on an extremely sour note;

“The unkindest cut of all was the last scene. I ended the film with a spectacular shot from on top of the mesa, with a view sixty, seventy miles to the horizon. We had the entire tribe there and everyone else who had been in the film. It was a celebration. The leading man kisses the woman and I zoom back. It was a cliché I had never used to end a film. I did it precisely because it was a cliché. I had the entire marching band of the local high school. I had a whole group of Hell’s Angels. I had a bunch of guys on dune buggies. I had a football team. I had our whole cast in this wild celebration as the camera zoomed back and over the shot. God, who was a running character throughout the film, made his final comments on what went on. 

There must have been three hundred people on top of that mesa. It was one of the greatest shots I ever achieved *in my life*. And AIP cut the entire shot. They ended the picture on the couple’s clichéd kiss - because they didn’t like what God was saying. The Picture ended and made no sense.”

For a more revealing take on Corman’s state of mind during the production of ‘Gas’ though, I think the last word must go to production manager Paul Rapp, quoted in the same book;

“The ‘Gas-s-s-s!’ shoot was the toughest one I ever saw Roger go through. I had never seen Roger in a nasty, bad mood like that. He seemed very down, snarling and weary. The Dallas sequences were around Thanksgiving and they had all-time record cold and blizzard conditions. It was miserable. Roger was shivering the whole time, wearing the same parka he had for ‘Ski Troop Attack’. 

[…] 

The day we set up the last sequence at the mesa Roger seemed really adrift. The Indians were terrible to work with. He seemed isolated, almost directing like a robot. The last scene was a big action shot with the entire cast, dune buggies, motorcycles, and the whole Indian tribe coming together. The first take was a complete mess. Roger just sat there. I got everybody back in their positions for a second take and looked over at Roger. He just nodded. I called action for him, and surprisingly, this time it went perfectly. Roger got up from his chair slowly, thanked everybody, and said very quietly, “Let’s go home.” (5)

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(1)According to IMDB trivia, ‘Gas’s lengthy sub-title was inspired by an unnamed Major in the U.S. Army, who is alleged to have justified the total destruction of a Vietnamese town and its inhabitants on the basis that, “it became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it” - a reference which would have stood as the darkest and most effective piece of satire in the entire picture, if only an effort had been made to draw the audience’s attention to it.

(2) The WWI aerial combat epic ‘Von Richtofen and Brown’, which Corman shot in Ireland for United Artists, saw release in 1971, and subsequent to that he did not return to the director’s chair until 1990’s ‘Frankenstein Unbound’ - a film which I would argue stands more as a one-off vanity project produced by his own studio (albeit, a very worthwhile and interesting one) than as a strictly commercial proposition.

(3) Ironically in view of how badly the film falls victim to it, it’s interesting to note that Armitage’s script for ‘Gas’ is both aware of the hyper-accelerated fashion cycle of the ‘60s, and indeed pokes fun at it via the character played by Cindy Williams, a devotee of ‘old timey’ pop music who hangs around the jukebox listening to “golden oldies” by the likes of Jefferson Airplane and The Grateful Dead; a familiar motif found in near-future fiction written at the time by slightly bamboozled older geezers, and in Thomas Pynchon novels all the way up to 2009.

(4) It seems that Corman had originally planned to make ‘Gas’ with The Grateful Dead appearing on-screen and providing the soundtrack, only to end up - in characteristic Corman fashion - telling them to get lost when they turned up demanding more money than had been agreed upon, and immediately getting Country Joe on the line instead.

(5) All quotes in this review are taken from ‘How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime’, by Roger Corman with Jim Jerome (De Capo press edition, 1998), pp. 162-167.

Horror Express: Night Visitor (Rupert Hitzog, 1989)

It is the 1980s, in anonymous American suburbia. Generic off-brand hair metal blasts from the radios of shiny new convertibles, as obnoxious, sub-Michael J. Fox high school wise-acres cruise around the sun-dappled streets wearing unbelievably garish shirts. But wait, what’s this? Some kind of evil, Satanic serial killer is crawlin’ kerbs in a less salubrious part of town, murdering prostitutes and leaving pentagrams daubed in blood upon walls! What gives?

From this can't-fail premise, Rupert Hirzog’s ‘Night Visitor’ (also known by the even worse title ‘Never Cry Devil’) unfortunately proceeds to fail spectacularly.

To be honest, I’m not even sure where to begin, but... let’s start with swaggering teen hero Billy Colton (Derek Rydall, of ‘Deathwish 4: The Crackdown’ and ‘Phantom of the Mall: Eric’s Revenge’), who, as was so often the case in this post-McFly/Bueller era, is a complete dickhead.

Though the script is predicated on our ability to sympathise with his plight, everything Billy does is immature, cowardly and irritating. Much of the dialogue he shares with his sole friend Sam (Scott Fults, from a lot of TV), his obvious love interest Theresa (Teresa Van der Woude, from ‘Killer Workout’) and his hard-working single mom (Brooke Bundy, from ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors’) sounds as if it’s been beamed in, garbled, from another planet. I don't care about any of them. I want them off the screen.

The plot, which draws heavily on Tom Holland’s ‘Fright Night’ (1985), involves the voyeuristic Billy witnessing his sexy new neighbour (Shannon Tweed - nuff said) being murdered by his high school history teacher (Allen Garfield, from ‘The Conversation’ and ‘Nashville’!), bedecked for the occasion in his finest Satanic regalia.

Of course, no adults or authority figures believe Billy when he tries to tell them about this, for the eminently believable reason that he’s a complete tit who has presumably never said anything truthful or helpful in his entire life to date. And so, as per Holland’s film but with none of its charm or invention, our feckless hero’s lonely war against his evil teacher begins in earnest.

Unfortunately, the crazy Satanist brothers who comprise the film's villains (Garfield, plus Michael J. Pollard from ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ and ‘Split Second’) are played entirely for laughs, meaning that they never constitute any kind of real threat.

In fact, there's something very incongruous and distasteful about the way they do genuinely nasty things (like keeping kidnapped hookers hog-tied in their basement), but whenever they’re on-screen together, it’s proto-‘Dumb and Dumber’ type goofball humour all the way. It’s all pretty skin-crawling to sit through, to be honest. Very uncomfortable.

But wait - wasn’t Elliot Gould supposed to be in this movie..? He’s top-billed on the opening crawl, and indeed he eventually turns up about halfway through, playing a retired detective who I suppose is meant to be this film’s equivalent of the Roddy McDowell character in ‘Fright Night’ (or Tom Atkins in ‘Night of the Creeps’). His character is very poorly written though, adding nothing to the narrative, and poor old Mr Gould seems confused, embarrassed and disengaged throughout - as well he might.

Richard Roundtree (from…. look, I’m not going to insult your intelligence by going there, ok?) is good as the inevitable cop, but then he always is, isn’t he? It seems as if he’s wandered in from a better movie, just doing his thing.

Actually, the work-a-day cop stuff is probably the least excruciating element of this picture all around. Roundtree’s partner gets the movie’s best line when she says “..we should arrest them just for weirdness” following their initial visit to Garfield & Pollard’s hellhole suburban pad, and there’s also a nice cameo from Henry Gibson (‘Nashville’, ‘The Long Goodbye’) as an expert on occult crimes. (As the surfeit of brackets in this review should indicate, the MVP on this production was definitely the casting director!)

One explanation for ‘Night Visitor’s chronic tonal disjunctures can by found via an entry on the film’s IMDB trivia page, which states:

Writer Randal Viscovich claims the majority of his screenplay was watered down by order of the executive producers. He wrote a trashy and exploitative horror film that included cannibalism and graphic nudity. He was shocked to see it lightened and even the language toned down.

Yep, that sounds about right. Anyway, low-level goofiness and generalised ‘80s nostalgia (plus a few drinks) got me through this one without actively recoiling from it, but honestly.... it was pretty bad. Real wasted potential all round. Rarely has my long-standing “I’ll watch anything with satanic cultists in it” policy come up against such a challenge.

So, what purpose does this review serve then, other than potentially upsetting some of the surviving people who put their hard work into helping this thing reach the screen, on the off-chance they happen to google it up?

Well, first off, it hass always been my belief that negative/scabrous criticism is an important part of the cultural conversation (ie, I always read the bad reviews first). And secondly, on a more practical level, it appears that some maniacs have released ‘Night Visitor’ on blu-ray. As noted above, the plot synopsis sounds pretty cool and the cast is great, so…. I just felt the need to put this out there as a warning. I’m not saying don’t watch it, but - forewarned is forearmed, right? Be careful out there.

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Horror Express / Gothic Originals: Blood For Dracula (Paul Morrissey, 1974)

On first viewing, ‘Blood for Dracula’ was by far my favourite of the two Paul Morrissey / Udo Kier horror films. Long story short: upon returning to the film for the first time in many years, my opinion remains unchanged.

‘Blood..’ has a genuinely funny / sexy premise (helpfully summarised by the Italian release title, which translates as ‘Dracula Seeks a Virgin’s Blood… and He is Dying of Thirst!!!’), and an interesting and unconventional take on the Dracula/vampire mythos, but more importantly, it also feels far more tonally consistent and comfortable in its own skin than Flesh For Frankenstein had a year earlier.

I’m not quite sure how to quantify that impression exactly, but… this one feels more like the kind of European film which an actual European filmmaker might have made, if that makes any sense? It is a film which actually seems to have risen from the culture in which the story takes place, rather than reflecting the perspective of a cynical outsider looking to tear shit up and upset people. As a result, we’ve got less sniggering from the back row this time around, and more actual stuff-which-is-funny. Taken purely as a black comedy in fact, ‘Blood for Dracula’ is often pretty sublime.

Once again, Udo Kier must be singled out for praise here. Dialling it down slightly from his mincing fascist Baron in ‘Flesh..’, his malnourished, hypochondriac Count Dracula is a truly pitiful creation. It is often reported that Kier starved himself to the point of infirmity before taking on the role, and his frighteningly cadaverous, translucently pale visage certainly bears this out. Barely keeping it together during moments when he is required to present himself in public or interact with other human beings, Keir’s performance is, in its own strange way, just as much of a compelling vision of the vampire-as-other as Max Shreck’s Graf Orlok in Murnau’s ‘Nosferatu’.

For all this though, the energy Kier puts into the nauseous bathroom freak-outs we’re subjected to as Dracula expels torrents of tainted blood from his system is remarkable. Both horrifyingly intense and disconcertingly intimate, these scenes of physical collapse prefigure the similarly unforgettable transformations Kier put himself through in Walerian Borowczyk’s ‘Docteur Jekyll et les Femmes’ (1981), whilst the fact that he manages to carry off this disconcerting business without undercutting the film’s comedy is little short of extraordinary. (Indeed, he even manages to deliver one of the greatest lines in film history whilst in the midst of his unnatural convulsions.) (1)

Here though, unlike in ‘Flesh..’, Udo is assisted by the presence of a supporting cast who (for the most part) prove strong and/or interesting enough to go toe-to-toe with him. Arno Jürging is once again very good, playing it less broad and rather more cunning than in the previous film as Dracula’s dedicated valet/servant, and I was also very impressed by British-born actress Maxime McKendry, who is absolutely dead-on as the harried, snobbish matriarch of the poverty-stricken aristocratic family Dracula infiltrates in search of a bride.

Best-known for her work in the fashion industry, McKendry was seemingly cast here as a result of her friendship with Andy Warhol (perhaps his only tangible contribution to these films, beyond lending his name to their American release), but she is so good, it is almost impossible to believe that this was her only acting credit.

Her matter-of-fact response to walking in on the sight of her youngest daughter being raped by the gardener is one of the film’s blackly comedic highlights, although her doddering, crackpot husband, played by no less a personage than Vittorio De Sica, proves equally amusing, seemingly improvising the lion’s share of deeply eccentric performance.

Elsewhere, Elsa Lanchester-lookalike Milena Vukotic is also memorable as the family’s eldest daughter, and even ol’ Joe Dallesandro is served better here than he was in ‘Flesh..’, despite making no effort either to exhibit any emotion or to disguise his incongruous New York drawl.

Once again, Joe is called upon to embody the brutish, proletariat assassin of Kier’s aristocratic entitlement, but the script’s decision to go all out in making his scowling, sex pest gardener an early-doors communist proves inspired; the sheer misery he manages to pile upon the poor Count’s head, quoting simplified Marx-Leninism as he shags his way through through his employer’s assorted daughters, is comedy gold.

Meanwhile, ‘Blood..’ is, if anything, even more grandly appointed than ‘Flesh..’, with the familiar Villa Parisi, which serves as the film’s primary location, looking absolutely beautiful here, augmented by Enrico Box’s exquisite set dressing and Luigi Kuveiller’s hazy, diffused photography. Ancient and austere yet decrepit, chilly and depressing, the villa provides a perfect visual metaphor for the fading, dysfunctional dynasty who dwell within it, whilst its bright, airy spaces offer a stark contrast to the dusty, shadowed chambers occupied by both the film’s peasants, and its vampires.

Claudio Gizzi’s stately, orchestral score feels more appropriate here than it did amid the comic book slaughter of ‘Flesh..’, particularly during the film’s strikingly melancholy Transylvanian title sequence, during which we see Dracula swathed in near total darkness, painstakingly applying the make up which allows him to pass as human in preparation for his reluctant departure from his ancestral estate.

Largely devoid of camp/comedic intent, these opening scenes are in fact extremely sad. In spite of everything, we feel for the Count, as he is pulled away from his crepuscular world of taxidermy and dried flower arrangements by the ugly realities of seeking sustenance in a cruel world which no longer defers to his aristocratic pedigree.

Sequences such as that in which Kier and Jürging inter the remains of Dracula’s now-expired vampiric sister (Eleonora Zani), who after untold centuries has expired from her ‘thirst’, are simply fine, atmospheric filmmaking, and, in using vampirism as a prism by which to explore aging and mortality, Morrissey even finds himself pre-empting the funereal tone of Tony Scott’s The Hunger to some extent. (Which also makes this pretty much Goths on Film 101, children of the dark should take note.)

Assuming viewers are prepared to roll with the total absence of sympathetic characters (pretty much a given for a Paul Morrissey film), ‘Blood for Dracula’s greatest flaw is probably the performances by the actresses playing the family’s other three daughters. Despite including ‘Suspiria’s Stefania Casini and poliziotteschi stalwart Silvia Dionisio amongst their number, one suspects that these ladies were probably not cast for their thespian talents (their participation in the film’s soft focus sex scenes is both lengthy and relatively explicit), and insisting that they recite their dialogue in heavily-accented, phonetic English strikes me as having been a really bad decision.

Contrary to standard practice in the Italian film industry, my impression is that these Morrissey films must have been shot with live sound, but I wonder to what extent Casini, Dionisio and other Italian performers were aware of this? To my ears, much of their dialogue in the film sounds akin to a ‘guide track’, waiting to be replaced with something better in the dub, and as a result, much of what they have to say is both excruciatingly delivered and also somewhat incomprehensible.

(To be fair, De Sica also suffers from the same problem, but it’s less of an issue given that his character is supposed to be a rambling old duffer who rarely says anything of narrative importance. And yes, SDH subtitles would no doubt help, but I watched the film on this occasion via an old DVD copy which offers no such luxuries.)

Aside from this unfortunate throwback to Morrissey’s earlier bad-on-purpose methodology however, I was surprised at just how well ‘Blood for Dracula’ stands up. Both effective and actually quite affecting in parts, it’s an accomplished social satire and an intriguingly clever / self-aware take on a late period gothic horror film - but most importantly, it’s also still uproariously entertaining despite its decadent languors, easily capable of winning over a suitably cynical/open-minded crowd nearly half a century later. The next time I find myself idly mulling over a list of ‘best vampire movies’ or ‘best horror-comedies’, I definitely feel it’s earned itself a spot.

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(1)Amazingly, it has only just occurred to be that there might actually be a tangible connection between these two Morrissey films and Borowczyk’s ‘The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne’, or ‘Bloodbath of Dr Jekyll’, or whatever you wish to call it. I mean, obviously Borowczyk brought a very different sensibility to the table, and his film was made nearly a decade later, in a different country, but think about it. Intense performance from Udo Kier in the lead; chaotic / anti-authoritarian feel, ‘shocking’ content and overwhelming emphasis on cruelty, excess and perversion. Plus, if you’ve already done Frankenstein and Dracula, Jekyll & Hyde is the natural next step, right? Not that I’m suggesting Borowczyk was directly influenced by these films, you understand, but could the idea of the Jekyll film forming the final part of a trilogy have been floating around somewhere in the background when his film was being conceived and financed..? Who knows.

Horror Express / Gothic Originals: Flesh For Frankenstein (Paul Morrissey, 1973)

 As part of my portfolio of horror-related activities this October, I decided to belatedly revisit the two “Andy Warhol”/Paul Morrissey horror films for the first time in many years, purely to try to decide whether or not I actually like them.

Of the two films, ‘Flesh for Frankenstein’ in particular never really clicked with me back in the day, leaving a bad taste in my mouth which has endured for nearly fifteen years since my last viewing. Long story short: I found a lot more to enjoy in it this time around, but I can definitely still see where my younger self was coming from.

There’s a lot of rather good, really funny and innovative stuff going on here, but at the same time, much of what surrounds it feels tiresomely bad-on-purpose or sophomorically ‘offensive’, conveying a sense of full spectrum cynicism which makes the film difficult to fully engage with, or to even really get an angle on.

By which I mean, it’s hard to shake the feeling that, even as he was leaning heavily on the talents of the exceptional crew which producer/instigator Carlo Ponti had assembled for him (DP Luigi Kuveiller, Production Designer Enrico Job, Second Unit Director Antonio Margheriti and special FX maestro Carlo Rambaldi foremost amongst them), Morrissey still arrived on set thinking he was somehow better than these crazy Eyetalians and their silly horror movies. Newsflash from the Eurohorror Fan Gazette: he was not.

Each time I’m getting ready to turn it off in disgust and cue up some hearty, proletarian fare like Lady Frankenstein instead though, something sufficiently extraordinary or weirdly beautiful happens to keep me glued to this unsavoury epic, come what may.

Along with the sterling work of the aforementioned technicians, the main thing which got me through the film I think is Udo Kier’s performance as the Baron. He is absolutely fantastic here - OTT in precisely the right way to suit the material. Just a perfect, Python-esque lampoon of an effeminate Nazi aristocrat, he fills the oft-torturous dialogue assigned to him by the the script with unexpected, lip-smacking emphases, managing to make almost every line reading laugh-out-loud funny. (I won't quote the famous line at you again, but his despairing “zis is all YOUR fault!” as he throws his own severed hand in the general direction of Arno Jürging’s Otto at the film’s conclusion is pretty hard to beat.)

It’s a shame then that most of the rest of the cast fall so far short of Kier’s form that they might as well crumble to dust and blow away in the breeze when he’s going full throttle next to them. Jürging delivers a solidly furtive/dislikeable turn as the Baron’s dim-witted assistant, and it’s nice to see the iconic Nicoletta Elmi present and correct as one of the Frankensteins’ silent, creepy children; aside from that though, everyone else pretty much just plain stinks (a circumstance which I can well imagine Morrissey, in keeping with his Warhol/NY camp background, finding just heee-larious).

Monique van Vooren in particular is nails-down-a-blackboard bad as the Baroness (I’m surprised to discover she’d been acting since 1950), whilst Joe Dallesandro is stiff as a board, stubbornly ignoring anything in the painfully wordy script which might call upon him to emote or develop a sense of character (a decision I can only assume was deliberate, in view of the far better performances he went on to deliver in other European movies).

Along similar lines, issues like the confusion of the Baron and Baroness’s husband-wife / brother-sister status also grate. Committing to one scenario or the other could have allowed the characters to be more sensibly fleshed out (sorry), their assorted transgressions made more tangible, but mixing/merging the two feels either like a tiresome bit of “oops, we changed the script, lol” meta-bollocks, or a cheap attempt to shock easily offended viewers, depending on which way you choose to look at it.

That said though, the film’s overall level of perversity, combined with the extremity of Rambaldi’s gore effects, is undeniably pretty audacious. Outside of H.G. Lewis and his competitors in the depths of the Southern U.S. grindhouse circuit, I’m not sure that any filmmakers to this date had dared push their viewers’ faces into the realm of violated human innards with quite the pathological glee Morrissey exhibits here.

Placed alongside the film’s determination to pull every last unhinged erotic possibility from the corpse of the Frankenstein mythos, it’s fair to say that, in terms of pure bad taste excelsis, ‘Flesh..’ takes us to places no horror films had previously explored, and which few have dared return to subsequently (within the commercial/popular sphere at least), even as the kind of graphic splatter pioneered here became de-rigour through the 1980s; an achievement which it is difficult not to admire on some level.

Meanwhile, I also found myself reflecting this time around on the way that, rather than merely taking the piss out of gothic horror movies (which, let’s face it, is all too easy), Morrissey aims higher here by invoking many of the primary themes of mid-century European art-house cinema (bourgeois hypocrisy, echoes of fascism, the fading of the old aristocracy, masochistic sexuality, etc) and playing them as complete farce, as if, as an American, he thought all this wacky Euro shit was just a laugh riot, be it high-brow or otherwise.

Making things feel even weirder meanwhile is the fact that he chooses to express this using a variation on the era’s low-brow British humour (complete with our beloved funny foreign accents, etc), meaning that every scene which takes place outside the gore-splattered laboratory keeps threatening to turn into ‘Carry On Visconti’ or ‘Up Bunuel’ or something - a result only avoided due to the fact that the cast (aside from Udo) are too clueless or disengaged to really wring any laughs out of the absurd material they’ve been presented with.

On relfection, I don't really know whether this approach to socio-cultural satire is a good thing, or a bad thing, or what really, but it's certainly... something.

Which, now that I think about it, actually seems like a pretty good verdict on the entirety of this uniquely troublesome, badly behaved film. 

---

Weird Tales: Holy Disorders by Edmund Crispin (Four Square, 1965 / first published 1946)

Though on the face of it this paperback looks to be yet another enticing, horror-adjacent offering from ‘60s New English Library imprint Four Square, readers familiar with Bruce Montgomery aka Edmund Crispin’s Gervase Fen novels will realise that the publishers have actually been pretty disingenuous in presenting this reprint as a straight Satanic thriller.

As the aforementioned readers will be well aware, the Fen novels are in fact broadly comedic, foregrounding an idiosyncratic campus humour pitched somewhere between P.G. Wodehouse and Bruce Robinson’s ‘Withnail & I’, leavened with cheeky, fourth wall-breaking asides and enough literary/classical in-jokes to make anyone who has not committed Palgrave’s ‘Golden Treasury’ and Bullfinch’s ‘Age of Fable’ to memory feel slightly inadequate as a human being.

Not everyone’s cup of tea, to be sure, but personally I’m happy to indulge Montgomery/Crispin’s whims, and find his books fairly amusing. More-so, I suspect, than the hypothetical 1965 reader who came into this one expecting some serious, Dennis Wheatley type affair, only to find our protagonist, retiring church music composer Geoffrey Vinter, blundering around causing havoc in the sporting goods section of a London department store during the first chapter, as he struggles to obtain the butterfly net which his friend, Oxford literary professor and amateur detective Gervase Fen, has ordered him to bring forthwith the the fictional Devonshire cathedral city of Tolnbridge.

Vinter, it transpires, has been summoned to Tolnbridge to stand in for the cathedral organist, who has been hospitalised after being bashed about the head by unknown assailants. Before he gets there however, we get to share at some length Geoffrey’s dismay at navigating Paddington Station during rush hour, his attempts to buy and imbibe several glasses of beer as he awaits his train, his developing friendship with the hapless shop clerk who has followed him from the department store in search of adventure, and his lengthy and tormented interactions with the other occupants of his train carriage, only a small handful of whom will go on to play any role in the unfolding mystery.

Amidst all this, the fact that several shambolic attempts are made on Geoffrey’s life during his journey thickens the plot, but otherwise scarcely seems worthy of note.

By chapter three (page 31), our man has finally arrived in Tolnbridge, which I take to be modelled to some extent on Montgomery’s adopted home of Totnes, although it differs from that fine town in a number of important details, not least the dominant presence of a cathedral, around which most of the book’s subsequent “action” (if such it may be termed) accumulates.

Significantly, Tolnbridge is also notrorious for “..a frenetic outburst of witch trials in the early seventeenth century, and the equally frenetic outburst of witchcraft and devil-worship which provoked them, and in which several clergy of the diocese were disgracefully involved”;

“‘This was the last part of the country,’ said Fen, “in which the trial and burning of witches went on. Elsewhere it had ceased fifty or sixty years earlier - and then hanging, not burning, had been the normal method of execution. The doings in Tolnbridge stank so that a Royal Commission was sent down to investigate. But when the Bishop Thurston died, the business more of less ceased. One of the last celebrated witch-trials in these islands was the Weir business in Edinburgh; that was in 1670. Tolnbrige continued for forty years after that, into the eighteenth century - the century of Johnson, and Pitt, and the French Revolution. Only a step away from our own times. A depressingly fragile barrier - and human nature doesn’t change much.’”

After arriving at the wrought-iron gates of the clergy-house, Vinter and newfound pal Fielding are introduced to the assortment of ecclesiastical hangers-on who will go on to comprise the story’s pool of suspects (if you don't know difference between a Precentor and a Canon, you’ll be pretty much at sea here). With Fen - effectively the Holmes to Geoffrey’s Watson - stubbornly failing to make an appearance however, there’s little for the pair to do but retreat to the nearest pub - which in this case is the ‘Whale & Compass’ (perhaps based on Totnes’s late lamented Kingsbridge Inn, or so I’d like to imagine).

To cut a long story  short, Gervase Fen eventually makes his appearance a few pints later, on page 58. Each of Crispin’s books seems to feature the detective adopting a new, loud and disruptive hobby, and in ‘Holy Disorders’ he is inexplicably fixated with capturing, and apparently performing unspecified experiments upon, various insects - hence both his demand for a butterfly net and his extended absence during daylight hours. The reason why Fen is residing in Tolnbridge, apparently at the expense of the church, is never sufficiently explained insofar as I recall, but be that as it may - with our sleuth finally accounted for, we can finally get on with the murder mystery component of the novel.

In addition to the fate of the aforementioned organist (who has been poisoned in his hospital bed, following the earlier assault), this comprises a ghoulish and somewhat surreal variation of the Locked Room mystery, in which the widely disliked Precentor, a Dr Butler, is inexplicably crushed beneath the colossal tombstone of ill-regarded medieval luminary St Ephraim - a tragedy which seemingly occurred when all doors to the building were locked, and no one else was inside.

Eccentric though his writing may be in most other respects, Montgomery/Crispin remained staunchly dedicated to the conventions of the old fashioned whodunnit, and as such, much of the text from hereon in is taken up with the gathering and consideration of alibis, methods and motives, all of which is unpacked at a length liable to prove excruciating to readers who are not fans of classic drawing room mysteries, including the provision of both a map of the crime scene and a lengthy suspect-by-suspect recap to help logically-minded readers reach their conclusion prior to what passes for ‘the big reveal’.

Although published in 1946, ‘Holy Disorders’ was evidently written during the war years, which lends an interesting backdrop to proceedings, reminding me somewhat of Powell & Pressburger’s bucolic wartime fantasias (particularly ‘A Canterbury Tale’ (1944)). 

There are frequent references to the war effort, to idle soldiers hanging about hither and yon awaiting orders, and to the latest news from overseas, and it is little surprise therefore that a further quirk is added to the already over-stuffed plot when it is revealed that the powers-that-be have detected illicit radio transmissions emanating from the vicinity of the cathedral, leading the discovery of a radio set hidden in an inaccessible part of the building, and the subsequent assumption that a cabal of Nazi spies must be abroad in sleepy Tolnbridge.

Amidst all this incident meanwhile, there is even room, surprisingly, for a little romance, as Geoffrey Vinter finds himself smitten with the daughter of the ill-fated Precentor - a graceful and demure young lady who, much in the manner of female characters in novels like this one, uncomplainingly acts as den mother and cook to the assorted oddballs hanging around the clergy-house. Like any good ‘Brief Encounter’ era Englishman, Geoffrey delivers his proposal of marriage whilst staring fixedly ahead at a row of radishes. (“Brutish roots,” he reflects, “what do they know of the agonies of a middle-aged bachelor proposing marriage?”)

This whole business is actually surprisingly affecting, forcing us to reflect on the fact that, whilst Edmund Crispin may have adopted the voice of a gout-addled college rector for his writing, Bruce Montgomery was actually only twenty-five years old when he completed this novel, and presumably subject to the same passions as other young men making their way in the world, and what have you.

With the novel’s rambling plotting already so loaded with under-developed tangents, it’s no surprise meanwhile to discover that the Black Mass / devil worship angle - though assuredly present - never amounts to much more than fairly half-hearted diversion. The irony here however is that the brief passages in which Crispin’s writing shifts away from comedy to explore more macabre subject matter are actually extremely effective, evoking an atmosphere worthy of the era’s horror/weird fiction greats;

“They paused by the hollow where the witches had burned. It was overgrown, neglected. Weeds and brambles straggled over it. The iron post stood gaunt against the fading light. They found rings through which the ropes and chains had passed. The air of the place was almost unbearably desolate, but in imagination Geoffrey saw the hillside thronged, above and below, with men and women whose eyes glowed with lust and fright and appalling pleasure at the spectacle to be offered them. […] A woman they had known - a next-door neighbour perhaps - a familiar face now become a mask of fear in whose presence they crossed fingers and muttered the Confiteor. Who next? And in the breast of that woman, what ecstasy of terror or vain repentance or affirmation? What crying to Apollyon and the God of Flies…? It needed little fancifulness to catch the echo of such scenes, even now. And here, they had accumulated - week after week, month after month, year after year, until even the crowds were sick and satiated with the screaming and the smell of burned flesh and hair, and only the necessary officers were present at the ending of these wretches, and the people stayed in their houses, wondering if it would not have been better to face the malignant, tangible living rather than the piled sepulchres of the malignant, intangible dead.”

I mean, you certainly don’t get that sort of thing in the middle of a Jeeves & Wooster.

Thereafter, this sense of a lurking evil underlying the city is given an atavistic twist via an extremely sinister (though underdeveloped) sub-plot which sees Fen interviewing a teenage girl who has been brain-washed through the use of drugs into participating in the Black Mass and carrying out the diabolical whims of her masters.

Sadly, the contemporary Satanic ceremony which Fen and Vinter subsequently manage to infiltrate proves both boring and rather farcical - it seems that the novel’s villains are merely using diabolism as a front for their more legitimately nefarious goals, again for reasons which remain somewhat unclear - but those ‘Witchfinder General’ / ‘Blood on Satan’s Claw’ vibes are really nailed down again during a section of the book in which (for reasons which appear entirely superfluous to the central narrative) our heroes are invited to read the long supressed secret diary of seventeenth century witch hunter Bishop Thurston. A section of this diary is reproduced in full, effectively comprising a short-story-within-a-novel, and once again, it is excellent stuff - a nasty little tale with a supernatural twist which could easily have found a home in any given ‘70s horror/ghost story anthology.

More representative of overall tone of the novel however are incidents such as that in which Fen and Vinter encounter a ‘Royal Professor of Mathematics’ who seems intent on reciting the entirety of Lewis Carroll’s ‘The Hunting of the Snark’ from memory, only to lose him again a few pages later following yet another visit to the pub, or the chapter which finds the investigators extracting much merriment from a visit to a potential suspect whose home boasts a pet raven resting upon a bust of Pallas above a chamber door, and a wife named Lenore, yet who pleads complete ignorance of the work of Edgar Allan Poe. (“I haven’t much time for verse - he’s good, is he?”)

In conclusion, you might say that, if Montgomery/Crispin had taken a slightly more serious approach to is storytelling there and had engaged more thoroughly with the more macabre elements of his tale, he could have written an absolutely splendid horror novel here. But, I suspect that’s rather like saying that if Noel Coward had ditched all that camp stuff and got a bit more into the rugged outdoors, he could have written a cracking western. 

At the end of the day, the Crispin/Fen novels are what they are. They are entirely reflective of the peculiarities and obsessions of their unconventional creator, but if you can angle your antenna somewhere in the vicinity of his preferred wavelength, they remain thoroughly entertaining, and certainly a little different from anything else you’re liable to find knocking about in your local Oxfam. 

 

Nippon Horrors / October Horrors 2019 # 7: Unbalanced Horror Theatre: A Mummy’s Love (Seijun Suzuki, 1973)

Sometimes, it’s difficult to know where to even start with these things.

So, let’s try this.

The narrative that has developed around the late Seijun Suzuki has tended to suggest that he more or less disappeared into the wilderness following his dramatic dismissal from Nikkatsu studios in 1967, only re-emerging when he helmed his critically acclaimed ‘Taisho trilogy’ in the early 1980s. In reality however, reports of Seijun’s invisibility during the 1970s have been greatly exaggerated. As his fans in Japan will be well aware, the idiosyncratic director actually kept busy and remained to some extent in the public eye throughout these ‘lost years’.

Indeed, viewed in the light of Nikkatsu’s decision to dedicate their resources entirely to the production of low budget ‘roman porno’ features from late 1970 onwards, and the subsequent collapse of the contract-based Japanese studio system as a whole in the mid-to-late ‘70s, it could easily be argued that Suzuki’s early dismissal basically just gave him a head-start in adjusting to the situation that most directors of his generation found themselves facing a few years later – interspersing more low-key, independently-financed films (if they were lucky) with voluminous quantities of TV work and commercials.

Which brings us neatly to ‘Kyôfu Gekijô Umbalance’ [‘Unbalanced Horror Theatre’], a weekly anthology series produced by the legendary Tsuburaya-Pro (home of ‘Ultraman’, etc), thirteen episodes of which were broadcast on Monday nights on the Fuji TV network, beginning in January 1973.

In terms of its creative ambition and production values, this series seems to have represented something akin to a Japanese take on the BBC’s celebrated ‘Ghost Stories for Christmas’, and it also seems to have acted as a bit of a ‘life line’ to other struggling Nikkatsu directors, with Suzuki’s erstwhile colleagues Yasuharu Hasebe and Toshiya Fujita also contributing episodes.

Suzuki’s entry in the series however was the first to be broadcast, and is thus far the only one I’ve been able to track down with English subtitles. And, purely on this basis, I’m inclined to think that ‘Unbalanced Horror Theatre’ was pretty aptly named. To not put too fine a point on it, ‘Miira No Koi’ [roughly, ‘A Mummy’s Love’], first broadcast to the nation on 8th January 1973, is absolutely mental.

Frankly, even the series’ opening credits, in which twisting patterns of psychedelic flames are back-projected onto the looming silhouette of a roaming cat, to the accompaniment of shrieking, discordant strings and electronics, were enough to get me jumping out my seat, but once the story proper gets underway, all bets are off.

Suzuki’s reputation as a devil-may-care surrealist is immediately in evidence here, as he begins by cutting in a disorientating fashion between seemingly unrelated shots - close-ups of red warning lights at a railway crossing, and visions of a scraggly-haired skeleton in meditational pose floating toward the viewer – whilst voiceover narration, in a gentle female voice, also competes for our attention.

The woman who is speaking to us, it turns out, is a widowed employee of a publishing house who is travelling to visit an elderly and infirm professor, who has been working on a new translation of a work known as Harusame Monogatari (‘Tales of the Spring Rain’) – a genuine collection of folkloric tales, compiled by the famous writer and scholar Ueda Akinari in the years immediately preceding his death in 1809. The narrator describes this book as a “maddening and terrifying work”, and, on the basis of the story from it we’re treated to here, I’m inclined to take her word for it.

Pausing at the railway crossing, the woman encounters a small family car, driven by a chauffeur in full top-hatted finery, who gets out and doffs his hat to her. Inside the car are a Buddhist monk and a woman in formal, Edo period garb (complete with bakeneko type eye makeup). Our narrator is alarmed by the appearance of the monk, whom she declares conveys an “uncanny impression”, “like a doll”.

Before we realise what’s happening, we cut to a series of expressionistic studio tableau shots, reminiscent of some of the primary coloured effects Suzuki used a decade earlier in his masterpiece Gate of Flesh. We see the woman who has sitting in the car performing some kind of ritual before a bare tree branch, as the narrator’s voice fills us in on the nature of the ‘Nyujo’ Buddhist sect, whose adherents apparently attempted to attain enlightenment by confining themselves in wooden boxes and being buried alive.

Another sudden jump cut takes us back into the top-knotted, Shogunate past, where a studious young man named Shoji lives in a remote village with his mother. Shoji finds himself bothered by the sounds of a bell ringing somewhere in the vicinity of their house during the night, and, determining that these sounds emanate from the bottom of a disused well, he announces that they must belong to a “bodhisattva petitioning to return from the Pure Land”.

So, the young student starts digging, attracting a crowd of local on-lookers in the process. Eventually, the villagers succeed in unearthing a desiccated, mummified ancient sage, who was apparently buried in the lotus position.

Suzuki marks this discovery by suddenly cutting to a shot of an explosion taking place in some kind of thatched building, and a freeze-frame of the young student leaping in the air in front of it, after which the villagers begin hysterically laughing and bickering, kicking the polystyrene mummy prop around as if it were a football and cursing the unearthed monk for his apparent uselessness. Vaseline or something similar appears to have been smeared all over the lens for these shots, giving everything a woozy, unclear feeling, as if viewed through cataracts. (I’d also bet money that none of this was in the script.)

As the student and his mother set about resuscitating and caring for the revived ancient, whom the villagers have nicknamed ‘Nyoju no Josuke’ [very roughly, “guy in a trance”], it turns out that the predictions of his uselessness were entirely justified.

One of the monk’s first actions upon regaining consciousness is to attempt to molest a local woman (he is discovered in the rafters of a barn, making bird noises after she flees in terror), and, much to the villagers’ chagrin, he subsequently turns out to be a mute, drooling simpleton who displays no evidence of his apparent enlightenment.

Indeed, in stark contrast to the asceticism one would expect of such a high level sage, his sole interests in life seem to be stuffing his face, leering at women and giggling like a creep. This sends the young student who unearthed him into an existential rage, as he angrily questions the very basis of his nation’s Buddhist beliefs.

Before long, Josuke - who, hilariously, is played by none other than cult writer/director Atsushi Yamatoya, who worked with Suzuki on the script for ‘Branded To Kill’ and helmed a series of notable avant garde pink films, including 1967’s ‘Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands’ - has become a kind of despised village idiot figure, bumbling around in a dirty nappy and performing simple chores for the villagers.

Josuke’s antics, it should be noted, are accompanied by an incredibly strange music cue, which appears to blend digeridoo-like devotional chanting of Buddhist sutras with a light jazz/funk drum beat, effectively complementing the story’s crudely heretical themes, and cementing the surreal / comic mood. [IMDB credits this episode’s music to famed analogue synth maestro Isao Tomita, but I’m guessing he probably just provided the series theme tune, leaving the authorship of this weird music a mystery.]

When Josuke is discovered hiding in a haystack by a fornicating couple upon whom he is spying, they proceed to taunt him, with the woman suggesting he’d have more luck with the ladies if he were reborn as a kabuki actor – prompting our drooling bodhisattva to take on an even more grotesque appearance, plastering his face with theatrical make up, and wearing a handkerchief on his bonce in imitation of a kabuki head-dress.

Thus far, the portrayal of Josuke seems to have been inspired to some extent by the classic Karloff ‘Frankenstein’s Monster’ archetype. Abandoned by his creator (or, uh, resurrector I suppose in this case) and shunned for his ugliness and inability to communicate, he gazes at his reflection in the river and so forth, inviting our sympathy. But, Karloff’s creature was never characterised as a goon-ish, slovenly sex fiend, and Frankensteinian mythos certainly offers us no analogue for what happens next, as Josuke’s new look unexpectedly succeeds in attracting the attentions of an impoverished young widow, to whom he is promptly married, or so the narrator (who has now become an elderly, croaking male voice, incidentally) informs us.

The narrator further relates that “Josuke had held within him an appetite for women for hundreds of years”, as a result of which, the couple make love continuously for seven days and seven nights. On the eighth day, they take a quick breather, and the woman collapses in pain, screaming that she is about to give birth. The frantic ringing of Josuke’s bell attracts the attention of the villagers, who, upon arrival, find clouds of bright pink smoke billowing from the widow’s house.

When the men, led by Shoji, break into the house, they find the woman dead, and, well, I don’t know how to tell you this, but… she appears to have given birth to dozens of tiny, gold-skinned Buddha people, who are crawling around all over her corpse like little human worms, ringing their miniature bells.

Understandably maddened by this terrible sight, the young student pretty much loses his mind, and begins crushing and stomping the little people, who collapse into dust at his touch. “What is a Buddha? What is resurrection? What have we been praying to all this time? Kill them all!” he cries as he tramples the tiny golden monks, encouraging the other villagers to join him in the destruction, kicking up clouds of Buddha-dust which soon cover them all.

Josuke meanwhile flees the scene with an angry mob in hot pursuit, commandeering a hay cart whose under-cranked progress drives him straight over the edge of a nearby cliff-face to his doom.

At some point subsequent to these awful events, Shoji takes a bride, but as soon as the young student and his partner attempts to consummate their marriage, they are interrupted by the tolling bell of the feral Nyoju no Josuke, who lurks cackling outside in the shadows.

Wondering the land in a daze, looking increasingly filthy and unhinged, the young man begins obsessively digging up the ground in the various locations where this story has taken place, in search of the ringing bell which plagues him. “From that point on, Shoji never touched a woman again,” the narrator tells us. THE END.

Still reeling, we cut back to the 20th century, where the woman whom we were following at the start of all this has arrived at the home of the professor who was working on the Harusame Monogatari, and has been transcribing his recitation of the tale outlined above.

The professor seems to pretty much at death’s door, far gone with some kind of consumptive illness, and his rooms are cramped, messy and seedy. Despite his illness however, the prof’s manner is intense and unnerving. He rambles on weirdly about the story of the resurrected monk as if it were verified truth, insisting that such things have actually occurred, and he further upsets his visitor – a former student of his - by unexpectedly producing a photograph of her late husband, who died as a young officer in the Pacific War.

Amid his ravings, the professor tells the widow he believes her husband is still alive, “like Nyoju no Josuke,” and that he has seen him walking around the era. He then becomes lecherous and grabby, attempting to assault the widow, who promptly leaves the house, suitably unnerved by her experience.

These scenes are sweaty and claustrophobic, with Suzuki slowly tracing his camera back and forth across the characters’ prone bodies, cutting between extreme close-ups of their eyes, as if it were some twisted Jess Franco sex scene, emphasizing the feeble desperation of the professor and the crushing loneliness of the widow, culminating in an intensely uncomfortable moment in which the professor’s sinister nurse attends to his needs with an incontinence bottle, whilst the sound of an air raid siren is heard on the soundtrack.

On her journey home through the stormy night, a shortcut takes the widow to the ruins of the air-raid shelter where her husband died. Some of the photography here is hauntingly beautiful, employing rich primary colours, deep blacks and chaotic compositions which again momentarily remind me of ‘Gate of Flesh’ – notably I think, another work which sought to exorcise the trauma of war through a kind of melancholic, sexualised desperation.

In order to leave the reader with at least some surprises should they seek out this TV show, I will break off my synopsis at this point and leave the story’s conclusion a mystery, but needless to say – it’s unpleasant, horribly ambiguous yet perversely beautiful -- and a final smug, Rod Serling-like farewell from series host (and future mayor of Tokyo) Yukio Aoshima does little to ease our frazzled senses or let us tie the threads of our conflicted emotions after all this startling business concludes.

Though I’ve drawn some comparison to Suzuki’s earlier work above, viewers familiar with Japanese genre cinema will inevitably emerge from ‘Miira No Koi’ with the name of ero-guro specialist Teruo Ishii on their lips. Indeed, this episode’s unsettling mixture of goon-ish comedy, twisted sexuality and malign visionary surrealism feels very much of a piece with the extraordinary series of “torture” films Ishii produced for Toei in the late 1960s, whilst the tiny, gold-skinned Buddhas seem to have been drawn straight from the same well of imagery as Ishii’s controversial Horrors of Malformed Men. Even Yamatoya’s performance as Nyoju no Josuke seems, when he initially appears, to echo the style of Iishi’s most distinctive collaborator, the pioneering Butoh choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata.

Going further, you could even make the case that there are moments here which recall the mad, performative psycho-analytical freak-out feel of Alexandro Jodorowsky, but really, such comparisons count for little. Ultimately, the clammy, unsettling feeling ‘Miira No Koi’ leaves us with is unique, even within Suzuki’s work.

In its own crazy way, this story seems determined to push the envelope in directions viewers tuning in for a more traditional ghost story would never have anticipated, interrogating themes that Japanese audiences in particular are liable to find deeply disturbing to this day. Not only do Suzuki (and writers Fumiko Enji and Yôzô Tanaka) treat the Buddhist traditions of resurrection and reincarnation which underpin much of their nation’s shared culture with nigh-on blasphemous scorn, they go one step further in suggesting that these received metaphysical notions have been chronically warped and devalued by the abusive lusts of a patriarchal social order, whilst simultaneously evoking harrowing memories of the personal loss and grief embodied in the mass death of the Second World War (still, lest we forget, well within the living memory of many viewers in 1973).

Digging into some deep, sticky psychic wounds, the goat-ish humour of this initially frivolous and absurd tale gradually gives way to some far more disturbing; safe to say, it must have left an impression difficult to shake off in minds of its initial viewers.