October Horrors #13: Graveyard Disturbance (Lamberto Bava, 1988)

So it occurred to me that if there is one thing missing from Halloween movie run-down thus far, it’s *’80s*.

Scanning over potential viewing options for a way to rectify this, I hit upon ‘Graveyard Disturbance’. Yes, Graveyard Disturbance! It’s a great name for a thrash metal album, and hopefully a great name for a horror movie too. It’s helmed by Lamberto Bava shortly after he came off the ‘Demons’ movies, and, as per just about every Italian horror movie of note made after 1980, Dardano Sacchetti is on script duty. Perfect, barrel-scraping ’88 vintage. Party on!

Well, as I soon discovered, asking “what could possibly go wrong?” of a Lamberto Bava movie is always a foolhardy proposition, but, before Italio-horror’s prodigal son delivered the answer in spades, ‘Graveyard Disturbance’ did at least open in precisely the way I hoped it would.

As a second-rate Duran Duran style electro-pop number plays from a dashboard boombox, we see a series of bold images, all of which are soon revealed to be air-brushed onto the chassis of a van belonging to one of the movie’s gaggle of teenage characters. Amongst the things this dude has painstakingly reproduced on his wheels are: the poster to Dario Argento’s ‘Inferno’; the cover of Judas Priest’s ‘British Steel’ album; the famous barbarian-woman-riding-giant-bird poster from the ‘Heavy Metal’ movie; Madonna circa ‘True Blue’; some leering zombie/vampire heads; a photo-realistic representation of a rock band on stage; some big, Rolling Stones style lips on the bonnet, smokin’ a doobie. It is just about the greatest thing I’ve seen in my life.

Riding in this magnificent vehicle are a gaggle of hapless, instantly dislikeable teens, straight from slasher movie central casting. I suppose we must consider the possibility that they may have been slightly more endearing in the original Italian, but the English dub (my only option for viewing) is brutal.

Enraging me right from the outset, the characters irk the van driver/owner guy by variously referring to his beloved van not only as a “heap of junk”, but even more insultingly, as a “car” and, on one occasion, a “truck”. The fucking idiots. I know sloppy post-sync dubbing isn’t necessarily their fault, but I still can’t wait for them to die. Because that’s what happens is these films. Isn’t it? Lamberto, Dardano, can you clarify…?

Anyway, before we get ahead of ourselves - I’m not sure what part of the world these kids are supposed to be from, where they’re supposed to be going, or where they currently are – aside from a single reference to them being on “vacation”, we’re left in the dark. But what does it matter, once the Horror Movie Fun begins. Because, it will begin. Right guys…?

After they ill-advisedly steal some chocolate bars from a convenience store and swerve through a line of red & white tape to avoid a police check-point (what?), our young protagonists find themselves hopelessly lost in a remote, fog-shrouded woodland area of whatever-place-it-is-they’re-in, where, for no reason, they see driverless, Dracula-style coach.

Abandoning the van (nooo) after an unsuccessful attempt to cross a river, they are forced to continue on foot with their camping gear, and their annoyingness intensifies. One guy’s sole personality trait is that he is a would-be wilderness survival type, so he decides what to do (“follow the river, rivers lead to towns”), whilst the others mockingly call him “Rambo”. Another guy meanwhile plays jokes and does a Bela Lugosi voice. Van owner guy (his thing is, he owns the van) rounds out the male trio, whilst the fairer sex is represented by one girl who is “dumb”, and another who has no discernable personality traits, but she does wear glasses and looks grumpy, so there’s that.

The gang soon find themselves in a wonderfully atmospheric set of ancient ruins – a mixture of real locations and studio sets, it is lit with heavy phosphorescent blues and clouds of slightly lit smoke emerging from doorways, creating a look faintly reminiscent of that achieved by Lamberto’s dad Mario in his masterpiece ‘Kill Baby Kill’/’Operatione Paura’ in 1966.

Simon Boswell’s music – a period appropriate mixture of synth, gated drums and fretless bass, quite possibly composed for one of the ‘Demons’ films – comes to the fore here, and it swiftly becomes clear that what we’re actually looking at is the film-within-a-film that the patrons/victims watch in the cinema during ‘Demons’, remade and extended into a full length movie. Not such a bad idea really, and it certainly helps explain the prevailing tone of tongue-in-cheek slasher pastiche idiocy.

What happens next is that the bedraggled teens rather unexpectedly stumble upon a bar (well, a pub, taverna, what you want to call it) operating out of one of the mouldering dungeons, complete with a neon Miller Lite sign hanging outside in surreal fashion.

Initially, things don’t look so good for protagonists as they enter to find that the place hasn’t been refurbished (or cleaned) since the middle ages, whilst some scraggly-haired troglodytic types hack away at hunks of meat behind the bar and the only other patrons glare at them with glowing eyes. But, things improve as they engage in some banter with the one-eyed inn-keeper (who throws a rousing “Ar-HA-Ha-HAR” into his speech after, and frequently during, each sentence), swap gags with one of the scary customers and enjoy plates of sausages, hunks of bread and cold beer all round.

Clearly this place rules. As a veteran of numerous camping expeditions, I can scarcely express how happy I would be to stumble across such a hospitable joint in which to spend the evening, but, being a bunch of graceless idiots, our teens (aptly described by the inn-keep as “chicken-hearted sprattlings”) don’t quite see it that way, and keep bellyaching about how scared they are and how much they want to leave.

They begin to get a bit more interested however when they notice a big bell-jar stuffed full of cash, gold trinkets and priceless jewellery. The inn-keeper explains, in between garrulous guffawing, that the roots of this go all the way back to some guy who once attempted to steal the legendary thirty gold pieces from Judas Iscariot. Eternally cursed for his trouble, he was buried beneath these ruins, and thereafter the denizens of the tavern have for many centuries made a wager with passing travellers, asking them to add their worldly goods to the bell jar, whose entire contents will be their reward if they can spend but a single night in the catacombs. And of course, none have ever returned (AR, Ha-Ha-HAR, haar).

Now, as much as I appreciated the ambience of the tavern, I will nonetheless cop that handing all your money over to the proprietor and his friends and allowing them to lock you in the basement overnight doesn’t really sound like a very good idea. But, as we have already established, our gang of teens are card-carrying idiots, so naturally they like those odds, and are well up for the challenge.

For my part meanwhile, it was shortly after this that I began to feel that I had signed up for a similarly idiotic wager when I suggested to my wife that we might want to watch this movie on Friday night.

Up to this point, I’ll freely admit that I was quite enjoying ‘Graveyard Disturbance’; even the bad dubbing had generated enough sniggers to keep us going. But, this enjoyment rested largely upon the promise of some good ol’ Italio-horror business yet to come – a hope was to be cruelly dashed at every turn for the remainder of the movie.

Had I taken the time to seek out but one review of ‘Graveyard Disturbance’ before taking the decision to watch it, a few vital facts would undoubtedly have been made clear to me. Firstly, despite being widely issued on VHS etc as a stand-alone feature, the film was actually produced for Italian television (as part of the ‘Brivido Giallo’ series of TV movies that ran 1988-89).

Secondly, as befits its TV origins, ‘Graveyard Disturbance’ is NOT the violent / exploitative horror film promised by the name, poster and personnel involved. Instead, it is a PG rated, family friendly type affair, akin perhaps to Lamberto’s take on ‘The Goonies’. Which is to say, a take on ‘The Goonies’ in which all the characters are interchangeable, charmless assholes and all of the humour falls completely flat.

Imagine if you will, the kind of slasher movie set-up I’ve described in the first few paragraphs of my plot synopsis above. But, rather than being killed off one by one as tradition dictates, the dislikeable teens instead all live happily to the end of the picture, whilst we meanwhile spend the best part of an hour trapped with them as they troop back forth across a handful of claustrophobic sets, nattering incessantly in an ever more grating and ignorant fashion.

Yes folks, it’s a grim prospect. Without wishing to sound too much like a gore-fixated psychopath, I’m afraid this party is *over*.

What is most frustrating about the decision to turn ‘..Disturbance’ into.. this kind of movie.. is that, if they had gone all out for a full strength horror film instead, the potential would have been there to make a pretty good one.

Eccentric touches early on – the van, the inn-keeper – are great, and, as has been mentioned, the sets, lighting and production design in general are all very nice here too; pleasantly atmospheric and full of loving nods to the way Bava Senior and Uncle Dario used to do business. The special effects used to realise the film’s assorted ghouls and zombies meanwhile are actually really good, probably even a step up from the workmanship seen in the ‘Demons’ movies – which makes it all the more disappointing that they basically just pop up occasionally and wander about a bit, without presenting any kind of real threat.

Probably the most memorable and accomplished sequence in ‘Graveyard Disturbance’ in fact is a scene in which a family of ghouls – including a ‘mother’ figure in a Marie Antoinette dress with multiple eyes, and a “heavy metal” kid with a single massive front tooth and a Kiss t-shirt – pop out of their tombs and enjoy a grand meal of slugs, spiders, worms etc. As a standalone effects set-piece, it’s rather delightful, so again, it’s a shame it doesn’t play into anything that happens in the rest of the movie.

But, as is probably clear by this point in this review, the whole thing is a shame. A damn shame. All the ingredients for a minor classic of shamelessly trashy, late period Italian horror were lined up and ready to go. With whom then did this idea of trying to turn it into some kooky, teen-friendly caper originate? The result is a film that fails on all levels and most likely appealed to absolutely no one, so please, can we get someone to blame up here? Was it the producer’s fault, or the TV company? Lamberto? Dardano? Would you like to take the stand?

Meanwhile, I’m afraid my advice to anyone faced with the prospect of viewing ‘Graveyard Disturbance’ must be: watch the first forty minutes, then turn it off and spend the remainder of your evening drawing pictures of what you think should have happened in the rest of the movie. Then perhaps post them to Lamberto Bava. Trust me, it will prove a lot more fulfilling.

October Horrors #12: The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb (Michael Carreras, 1964)

 It’s funny how, when it comes to mummy movies, the fortunes of Hammer’s entries in the sub-genre during the 1960s/70s almost exactly mirror the pattern established by Universal three decade earlier – i.e., an artistically accomplished but commercially under-performing initial film, belatedly followed by a series of considerably less ambitious, lower budgeted sequels that are generally considered the lowliest entries in their respective catalogues of horror movies.

Could this really have been an accidental case of history repeating itself, or were James Carreras and Tony Hinds to be found flicking through The Big Book of Movie History in the early 1960s, asking “right, where did Universal go next”..?

This many decades down the line, who can say, but, either way, I have an inexplicable fondness for the mummy sequels of both eras, and I feel that Hammer’s efforts in particular get an undeservedly bad rap. ‘Blood From The Mummy’s Tomb’ (1971) is a fine example of weird, contemporary-set ‘70s UK horror, and whilst ‘The Mummy’s Shroud’ (1967) is certainly no classic, it nonetheless has some strong elements and is, I believe, a lot better than its dismal critical reputation would tend to suggest.

That just leaves us then with 1964’s ‘The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb’, which until this month was one of the few Hammer horrors I had never seen. So, now that I’ve finally ticked it off the list – time for a review!

And, well – ahem - this one is a b-movie alright, there’s no question about that. Written, produced and directed by son-of-the-boss Michael Carreras, ‘Curse..’ might as well begin with workmen constructing the sets behind a board reading “utilitarian supporting feature mummy movie in progress – apologies for any inconvenience”, such is its straight-down-to-business determination to deliver the expected mummy movie ingredients with a minimum of fuss.

Set in 1900, what we have here is an entirely predictable tale of an ersatz-Carter archaeological team uncovering the lost tomb of the great Pharaoh Ra-something-or-other, and falling victim to the titular curse when they ill-advisedly go against the advice of the Egyptian government(!) and ship the whole caboodle back to London.

The Egyptian stuff in Carreras’s script (written under his Henry Younger pseudonym) seems to have been derived purely from comic book cliché without the slightest resort to genuine reference material, and… basically things proceed exactly as you would expect them to within the established remit of a mummy movie, so I won’t bore you with the details.

The only note of narrative interest in the initial plot set-up arises from the conflict between the earnest archaeologists (Ronald Howard and Jack Gwillim) who want to see their discoveries properly persevered in a museum, and the crass American huckster who funded their expedition (Fred Clark), who wants to take the Pharaoh’s mummy on the road as part of a corny sideshow attraction.

Reading between the lines, I can’t help but speculate that this plot line might to some extent have reflected tensions within Hammer at the time; as Terrence Fisher, Cushing and Lee all laboured away on the creatively ambitious but somewhat uncommercial The Gorgon, might Carreras have felt himself charged with saving their bacon by knocking out a goddamn, no-nonsense mummy picture to pull a few undemanding punters into the ensuing double-bill…? Again, who can say.

Leaving such speculation aside and getting down to business however, ‘Curse of The Mummy’s Tomb’ suffers in the first instance from a notable lack of recognisable Hammer ‘faces’. Which is not to say that the cast members who are here don’t acquit themselves perfectly adequately, but the lack of the kind of larger-than-life presence that even Hammer’s ‘second division’ leads like Andrew Keir or Andre Morell could have brought to proceedings is sorely felt.

Probably the most charismatic person on screen in fact is leading lady Jeanne Roland, who, speaking with what I assume to be her natural French accent, emerges as one of the most dynamic and adorable of Hammer’s ‘60s heroines, even though, regrettably, her character is appallingly written – a supposedly intelligent, highly educated woman who becomes a simpering ninny the moment obvious villain Terence Morgan puts the moves on her, casually two-timing her fiancée without even seeming conscious of her actions. (“Do you know, you are the first man I’ve met who has ever realised what a home can mean to a woman,” she tells Morgan in one particularly cringe-worthy moment.)

Accompanying this casual misogyny meanwhile, we have some wholly predictable casual racism too, as the Egyptian characters (primarily represented by Hammer’s go-to guy for ‘ethnic’ roles, George Pastell) are portrayed as a sly lot of fez-wearing so-and-sos who all live in tremulous fear of their Old Gods (when they’re not sneaking about stealing and murdering on their behalf, that is) - even within the highest echelons of the nation’s government, or so it is implied.

Whilst we’re at it, it should also be mentioned that the mummy himself, when he eventually turns up, is a bit of a let down. To be frank, stuntman Dickie Owen looks a bit chubby in his costume here, which is not really what you want from a mummy (I’m reminded of the fat skeleton in Shaitani Dracula), and I’m pretty sure you can see the outlines of his clothes poking through the bandages slightly too. Not so good. Several of the rejuvenated Pharaoh’s ‘shock’ entrances meanwhile seem directly modelled on those of Christopher Lee’s far more impressive and intimidating regent in 1959’s ‘The Mummy’, to sadly deflated effect.

‘Curse..’ is at least extremely gory for a 1964 UK horror, revelling in the inclusion of several severed hands, and a rather startling scene in which the mummy crushes a character’s head beneath his bandaged boot – the latter prompting a hilarious moment when a shocked police inspector, having just witnessed this ghastly incident, instructs his men to “follow it, see where it goes… but best keep a safe distance”.

The scene in which mummy tosses the body of Clark’s character into an (off-screen) Thames, shortly after the latter has gallantly gifted a few guineas to a shivering prostitute, also has a gleefully pulpy feel to it, as do some nocturnal ambushes and sundry sneaking about in the Professor’s fire-lit study.

In fact, ‘Curse…’ is largely saved from ignominy by the sheer dedication and technical acumen of the crew behind the camera. Bernard Robinson’s detail-packed sets often belie the obvious cheapness of the production, and, skilfully lit by hands unknown, Otto Heller’s surprisingly lavish scope cinematography emerges as absolutely gorgeous in places. The film is tightly paced, with some sinuous camera movements and effective POV shots keeping things visually interesting, whilst Carlo Martelli provides a score that is livelier and more varied than the usual James Bernard bombast, despite hitting up the expected “middle eastern” signifiers as shamelessly as you might expect.

All of this helps ensure that, in spite of the aforementioned deficiencies, that inimitable Hammer ‘feel’ is in full effect here, as reassuring as a roaring fire and a glass of sherry on a cold winter’s eve. Against all the odds therefore, ‘Curse of The Mummy’s Tomb’ remains eminently watchable throughout, standing as proof that, during their Bray years, Hammer couldn’t make a truly bad horror film even if they tried (which certainly seems to have been the case on this occasion).