Summer of Santo: The Diabolical Hatchet (José Díaz Morales, 1965)

 After taking a well-earned break from Mexico’s cinema screens following his memorable visit to The Wax Museum, Santo, The Man in the Silver Mask, returned some eighteen months later to face an altogether more intractable problem in director José Díaz Morales’ ‘The Diabolical Hatchet’ (‘El Hacha Diabólica’, 1965).

Turning to my go-to source of info on Luchadore cinema, the late Todd Stadtman’s Lucha Diaries website, I learn that ‘The Diabolical Hatchet’ was actually one of a series of quickie, low budget pictures The Man in the Silver Mask made for producer Luis Enrique Vergara, following the completion of his prior contract with the slightly more up-market Filmadora Panamericana.

Now, I’ve previously had bad experiences with jumping blindly into these off-brand, Vergara-produced Santo movies (witness the listless Santo Attacks The Witches from '64), but rest assured - though its budgetary constraints are plainly evident, ‘The Diabolical Hatchet’ at least hits way above its class in terms of sheer weirdness - which is the main thing that draws us to these films in the 21st century, let’s face it.

In fact, this one actually turns out to be something of a crack-brained pulp masterpiece, compressing an epic tale of time travel, diabolism, hereditary super powers, atavistic hauntings, Manichean dualism and the cyclical nature of myth into 74 minutes and still finding time for both several extended wrestling bouts and loads of boring footage of people walking from one place to another.

Right from the outset, the film immediately wrong-foots viewers, as we see a procession of hooded, torch-bearing monks bearing a stretchered body toward a funeral service. As the solemn corpse-bearers progress through several moody shots, we gradually realise that the body they are carrying is that of none other than El Santo himself!

Furthermore, when the monks reach their destination, they lower our hero into a tomb bearing the legend, ‘Santo, El Enmascarado de Plata - Year of Our Lord 1603’.

What the hell is going on here?! I don’t know, but I bet you’re dying to find out, right?

After the chief monk has intoned a moving eulogy, declaring that the departed El Santo was “a man who knocked on our door many years ago, seeking peace and rest”, and who “fought against the dark forces which came after him and woman dear to his heart,” the brothers file out of the crypt, only to be replaced at the graveside by menacing figure clad in black boots, a black wrestling tunic and an executioner’s hood, wielding - yes - a bloody great hatchet.

“I won’t ever let you rest,” gloats The Black Mask (for it is he), “I will follow you through time until I carry out my vengeance!”

And with that, we jump forward to the twentieth century, where Modern Day Santo is performing some rather half-hearted warm-up exercises in his dressing room before the evening’s big match at The Coliseum. (I found it spiriting to observe that the champion’s routine actually resembles my own morning exercises - which are no grand spectacle, let me assure you, readers.)

Anyway, our hero’s subsequent bout is rudely interrupted when The Black Mask appears out of thin air waving his axe around, and basically begins trying to fuck shit up. Unfortunately, the villain proves a tough man to bring down, but the combined efforts of El Santo, his original opponent in the match, the referee and several members of the audience eventually prevail, forcing the supernatural blaggard to beat a hasty, spectral retreat.

Understandably spooked following a further incident in which the Black Mask attacks him at night in his bed (the curtains in his high rise apartment are lovely), Santo turns for advice to the latest in a long line of learned scientist-friends whose daughters he happens to be dating. (As his fans will be aware, El Santo’s passion for scientists with beautiful daughters rivals even that of Fu Manchu in those Harry Alan Towers-scripted movies.)

Evidently a man of wide-ranging talents, Santo’s scientist-friend (sadly I have been unable to identify the actor who plays him on this particular occasion) immediately confirms the titular hatchet (abandoned by its own following his night time escapade) does indeed date from the 17th century, and notes that it is inscribed with “a symbol of evil, the powers of Satan” (ie, a skull and cross-bones).

Moved by the doctor’s observations, Santo is seemingly prompted to begin making an absolutely astonishing revelation about his own origins.

So, as it turns out, El Enmascarado de Plata’s iconic mask and cloak were actually bequeathed to him by his father, and are made of a mysterious, indestructible material which also helps charge him with energy in times of need. Sewn into Santo’s mask is a triangle inscribed with repetitions of the word “ABRACADABRA”.

“The word abracadabra comes from the name of a wise man who practiced the science of good, called Abraca,” the doctor informs us, rather questionably, after consulting one of inevitable dusty volumes of occult lore.

This disconcerting discussion of El Santo’s metaphysical origins is interrupted however when, right on cue, lightning strikes, and a female ghost whom Santo is inexplicably able to identify as “Isabel” (played by his frequent co-star Lorena Velázquez) appears, warning our hero that he must destroy The Black Mask, a feat which can only by accomplished by removing said mask and laying bare the evil-doer’s face.

She also says this, which is kind of cool:

How to solve a problem like this then, eh? Well, waiting until the bugger next shows up and pulling his mask off would seem like a satisfactory plan to me, and, clearly conscious of the fact the movie has another 45 minutes or so left to run, the doctor has an alternative suggestion for getting to the bottom of things.

“I can send you into the past, Santo,” he announces within seconds of the ghost’s departure, “you can solve the mystery.”

Naturally, the big man is up for the challenge, and, if you were wondering what that weird machine which looks like a radio set with a kind of modernist wind vane sticking out of the top of it in the corner of the doctor’s under-furnished lab is, well… guess what;

Back in ‘the past’ (presumably the late 16th century), we’re treated to a series of murky, rather poorly staged vignettes concerning a romantic rivalry played out between two Zorro-esque masked caballeros - one of whom of course wears a white mask, the other black - who are competing the affections of the still-very-much-alive Isobel.

These scenes seem to be attempting, rather shoddily it must be said, to replicate the feel of a contemporary historical melodrama, but, even here, high weirdness abounds.

Spurned by Isobel, the Black Caballero retreats to his taxidermy-strewn subterranean lair, where he… kneels before the altar of a moth-eaten bat god named Ariman, apparently.

Considerably upping the ante on his conflict with The White Caballero, the bad guy pledging his eternal soul to his diabolical master, in exchange for possession of Dona Isobel. He is, of course, swiftly transformed into The Black Mask, and heads off, axe in hand, to kidnap his beloved. Returning to his regulation gothic horror dungeon, he then attempts to win her heart by chaining her to the wall and waving piles of the jewels in her face whilst gloating like a fiend, the ol’ charmer. 

Not to be outdone, the Good Caballero responds to this provocation by hiking out into the desert and consulting a benign, white-haired hermit / wizard man who lives in a poorly wrought polystyrene cave. This is, of course, a descendant of the aforementioned Abraca.

“You will never use weapons to fight your enemies,” the hermit tells his visitor, “for that would destroy your strength and eclipse your heart’s kindness. You will fight against the forces of evil for generations to come. You are now Santo, the Man in the Silver Mask.”

And thus, our hero is born - well over three hundred years earlier than was previously assumed to have been the case.

It’s difficult to convey just how bizarrely off-kilter this hastily bolted on origin story feels, over a decade into El Santo’s real life career as a wrestler and public figure. 

Drawing comparisons is difficult, but… let’s just say that it’s as if you went to see the latest James Bond movie, and Bond suddenly revealed that he was actually part of a lineage of smarmy establishment thugs dating back to the crusades, and that the thread of his tuxedo had been blessed by Merlin the Magician, or somesuch. Unexpected, to say the least.

Given that the spirit of 20th century Santo has travelled back in time to observe the heroic rebirth of his noble ancestor, you would think the natural next step would be for the filmmakers to raise the implication of what happens when he bumps into his outwardly identical 16th century forebear, but… mercifully perhaps, the possibilities arising from that one are skipped over. In fact, I think the implication is that Santo and his scientist-friend have merely returned to the past ‘in spirit’, helpfully allowing them to view a bunch of pre-edited flashbacks.

Anyway, after a bit more uneventful scrapping on the one bit of suitably old looking street which the filmmakers were able to shoot their 16th century segments on, The Black Mask finds himself arrested by the inquisition, who naturally take a dim view of him marauding around the place calling upon the powers of his diabolical gods and suchlike. Thus, we’re treated to one of the stranger reiterations the famed opening of Mario Bava’s ‘Black Sunday’ (1960) you’re ever likely to see.

As 16th Century Santo calmly looks on, the black-clad miscreant is burned at the stake, vowing infernal vengeance against his opponent’s descendants, before - in a winningly peculiar twist on the formula - he escapes the flames by transforming into a particularly scrappy looking, rather overweight bat and making his wobbly, wire-bound exit, accompanied by a deluge of traditional bad guy cackling.

Once 20th century Santo has returned to the present day, back story duly filled in, fight fans in the film’s original audience may have been forgiven for assuming that ‘El Hacha Diabólica’ was finally about to settle down into a pattern of more traditional, down-to-earth luchadore business, as our hero inevitably sets about breaking the curse by removing his supernatural antagonist’s mask in the manner which comes most naturally to a seasoned grappler.

And indeed, several extended, fixed camera bouts between El Santo and The Black Mask do follow in quick succession, but, even here in its final stages, ‘Diabolical Hatchet’ is still determined to be as weird as hell.

In particular, I enjoyed the plot point which sees Santo determine that he must lay to rest the spirit of Isobel, by tracking down the location of the basement in which The Black Mask imprisoned her. Excitingly, The Champion of the People achieves this goal by sitting at his desk, studiously consulting an enormous reference work cataloguing colonial-era buildings.

This pursuit obsesses him to such an extent that, when his latest girlfriend (the daughter of the professor, of course) calls late at night to let him know that, “something terrible is happening here,” as lightning strikes and shadow of The Black Mask looms upon her wall, instead of nobly rushing off to save her as we might reasonably expect, Santo takes an uncharacteristically cynical approach, merely calling the police and informing them that a woman has just been murdered at a certain address, dutifully promising to take his revenge upon the killer, before returning to his reading! 

(“Just tell your boss Santo called,” he growls down the phone line, briefly turning the movie into some kind of morbidly surreal film noir.)

In technical terms, it must be said that ‘The Diabolical Hatchet’ is no great shakes. Though the extensive nods to Poe-derived gothic horror are a nice touch, we're a far cry from the era’s more lavishly appointed Mexican gothics. Morales’ direction is pretty perfunctory, largely comprising awkwardly-framed, point-and-shoot medium shots, whilst the sets are threadbare, the performances muted, and… oh boy, all those extended scenes of people walking from one place to another really become intolerable after a while.

The most egregious example of this phenomenon is a sequence at the film’s conclusion in which, having finally discovered the ancient house in which The Black Mask’s historical depredations were committed, our hero proceeds to walk around every inch of it very s-l-o-w-l-y for six solid minutes… right at the point at which any sensible action-adventure movie would be gearing up for its rip-roaring finale! 

Admittedly, Santo walks like a boss, but still, it is rather perplexing to see this kind of blatant padding employed to such an extent in the midst of a film which, as I think has been demonstrated above, contains enough crazy ideas to keep the wheels spinning for hours, if only the filmmakers had bothered to explore them properly.

Once again though, it is the sheer, shameless weirdness of ‘El Hacha Diabólica’ which makes it worth seeking out. From wantonly assigning a previously unguessed at mystic / supernatural origin story to an otherwise earth-bound franchise character, to creating its own highly specific yet totally random mythology of demons and wizards, to the callous murders of several major characters at the hands of the gloating villain…. its total refusal to give a fuck about the continuity and conventions governing pop cinema storytelling make it feel more like a story written by an imaginative eleven year old than a professional screenwriter.

Three months after ‘El Hacha Diabólica’s release, Santo was back on solid ground, taking on ‘The Strangler’ in René Cardona’s ‘Santo vs El Estrangulador’; must have been a relief after this caper.

I mean, I can't absolutely say for sure, but what’s the betting that, in the course of his myriad subsequent adventures, Santo never again deigned to mention that he and his ancestors were gifted with magical powers by the descendent of a wizard named Abraca, or that his mask and cloak date from the 16th century and convey protective and restorative powers?

Well, modesty is one of the Champion of the People’s many virtues, I suppose. He probably wouldn’t want to shout it from the rooftops, would he? I’m sure a few bewildered kids who ended up stuck in front of this one at the Saturday matinee had a few tales to tell the playground about Santo’s secret origin story, and I’m sure they wished they’d never bothered, as the strange tale of Ariman and Abraca and Santo’s distant Caballero ancestor faded into (probably quite justified) obscurity. 

 

Horror Express: A Reencarnação do Sexo / ‘The Reincarnation of Sex’ (Luiz Castellini, 1982)

‘80s Brazilian sex-horror films don’t come down the pike very often round these parts, so you’ll need to forgive the total lack of cultural context and background info in the review that follows. But, sometimes, that’s the very best part of being a quote-unquote ‘cult movie fan’ isn’t it? Diving in blind and seeing what kind of three-headed guppy you come back up with. Suffice to say, ‘A Reencarnação do Sexo’ is definitely a catch worth making a fuss about.

Story-wise, things get off to pretty mundane start here, as the father of a family living on a remote rural homestead becomes enraged when he overhears his daughter shagging the gardener. Dismissing his wife’s not unreasonable protestations that their daughter has the right to make her own decisions (and that the gardener’s not such a bad guy anyway), the father contrives to drive the gardener to an even more remote spot somewhere down the road, and murders him with an axe.

Thereafter, not for the last time, things get a little weird. The mother appears to take the daughter’s side in the ensuing familial conflict, and together they dig up the gardener’s body, re-burying his severed head in a potted plant, which the daughter then sits next to, looking distraught and rubbing her body with her dead beau’s blood. Subsequently, the daughter appears to become sick with grief, and dies.

SUDDENLY - ten years later! A sleazy estate agent sells a lease on the now empty homestead to a pair of virile young newlyweds. After they move in however, the wife og the couple begins hearing a creepy voice calling her name, emanating from a familiar plant pot in the living room (apparently the décor and contents of the house have remained unchanged over the preceding decade). As a result of this, the wife soon becomes sexually insatiable, exhausting her down-to-earth, wood-chopping husband and causing him to worry for her mental health, especially after she begins stripping off and masturbating at the plant pot-voice’s command.

Soon of course, the plant-voice’s demands become violent, and the wife’s uncle, called in by the husband to provide some help vis-a-vis her troubling behaviour, arrives to find his niece naked and blood splattered, waving the severed head of her husband around like a prize-winning pumpkin.

The next tenant the estate agent finds for the property is an emotionally troubled lesbian whose rich parents are paying for her to live in a rural retreat, apparently so she won’t embarrass them, and…. by this point, it’s pretty clear that ‘A Reencarnação do Sexo’s flimsy supernatural plotline is basically just going to function as a delivery mechanism for near-constant sex and violence. If you’re comfortable with that though, strap in, because it’s gonna be one hell of a ride.

The sex here is of the Jess Franco-style ‘hard soft’ variety, which is to say, it’s clearly simulated, but the cast really go for it nonetheless, leaving little to the imagination, even as director Luiz Castellini tends to favour heavily shadowed long-shots over Franco’s more, uh, intimate approach to capturing the action on camera.

Once it gets going, the film’s tone is shamelessly prurient and exploitative (one of the high/low points [delete as applicable] involves the lesbian character’s lover bloodily choking to death on a vibrator), but, from your jaded correspondent’s perspective at least, the frequent, highly sexualised violence is presented in a manner which never really becomes overly sadistic or difficult to sit through.

It helps of course that the film is pretty well made, with an imaginatively lurid colour palette of toxic purples and greens and all manner of OTT ‘horror’ effects (thunder and lightning, crash-zooms etc) helping to accentuate the fantastical nature of the proceedings, leaving us in no doubt that we’re watching a a crazy, pulpy soft-porn bloodbath, rather than something which aspires to be genuinely degrading or upsetting.

Also adding greatly to the film’s atmosphere meanwhile is the music, which seems to consist of a series of needle drops taken from every LP the filmmakers’ could dig up which sounded creepy or discordant. The opening credits proudly proclaim “music by Vangelis, Penderecki and Pierre Henry”(!), but, hilariously, variations on Les Baxter’s theme from The Dunwich Horror (1970) play during most of the sex scenes.

As the movie goes on, things become increasingly phantasmagorical, eventually descending into total, blood-curdling delirium, as the haunted plant grows toward ‘Audrey II’-like proportions, swinging its rubbery tendrils around in delight, whilst it also receives assistance from the white-clad ghost of the daughter from the film’s prologue, who happily assists with the slaughter; when she’s not standing outside the house as the thunder roars, swinging the huge axe which once killed her lover around like a golf club, that is.

Once a VW vanload of happy-go-lucky hippies take shelter in the seemingly empty house and swiftly find themselves descending into an involuntary blood orgy, well…. all bets for a return to relative sanity are well and truly off, even as cut-aways to “the city” begin to show us the sleazy estate agents guy, in cahoots with the shaky-handed, wheelchair-bound father from the prologue, receiving some hassle from assorted relatives and survivors of the preceding massacres, who understandably want to see this shit sorted out once and for all… but you don’t really need to know about that, do you?

What you do need to know is that ‘A Reencarnação do Sexo’ is staggeringly lurid, hypnotically repetitious and utterly bananas - clearly some kind of a landmark in worldwide-weird horror cinema, even as issues around music rights (aside from anything else) make it extremely unlikely that we’ll be seeing a legit re-release/restoration any time soon. If you’ve read this far without throwing your laptop aside in disgust though, consider it essential viewing. Seek and ye shall find. 

 

October Horrors 2019 # 5: Killer’s Moon (Alan Birkinshaw, 1978)

“It’s one of those nights, Pete. Blood on the moon, one mangled dog, one missing axe and a lost girl who’s just found a body – on the wrong end of the axe! How’s that for the great English outdoors?”

The late 1970s were a dark time indeed for British horror; as opportunities for theatrical exhibition dried up and the prospect of getting projects financed became ever more nightmarish, only the genial Norman J. Warren was really flying the flag for the genre by the time punk hit, and even he was generally making do on budgets more appropriate to a biscuit advert than a feature film.

Under these circumstances, it’s hardly surprising that a project as marginal and bizarre as Alan Birkinshaw’s ‘Killer’s Moon’ fell through the cracks in 1978, and is rarely acknowledged even today in histories of British horror. I’ll freely admit that, although I’ve long been aware of the film, it had not occurred to me until recently that I might actually want to watch it. Aside from anything else, the “escaped mental patients rape and murder school girls” plotline scarcely sounds very edifying, and reviews which tend to write the film off as revolting and amateurish are not exactly encouraging.

As horror fans will be well aware though, holding out this way is a mug’s game. Sooner or later, you’re going to see a bedraggled movie like ‘Killer’s Moon’ looking up at you with dewy eyes from some pile of bargain basement blu-rays, and think, what the hell, let’s give it a try. After all, my British horror palette is so jaded at this point that even such impossibly sleazy ventures as James Kenelm Clarke’s ‘Exposé’ / ‘The House On Straw Hill’ (1976) can sit happily on my comfort-viewing list; how much worse can this one possibly be?

Well, long story short, I’m glad I took the plunge, because I absolutely loved ‘Killer’s Moon’. I’m not sure what it says about me that I managed to find a film about a gang of maniacal, animal-mutilating rapists so thoroughly charming, but…. there’s just something about ‘70s British horror, isn’t there? That sense of haunting, otherworldly mundanity and whimsical oddness that just seems to rise atavistically from the landscape itself, completely defusing my critical faculties…. and ‘Killer’s Moon’ has it in spades.

The film certainly gets off to an appropriately foreboding start, as a bus carrying a group of teenage choristers and their two teachers, apparently taking a fairly extensive diversion on their way to Edinburgh, breaks down in a remote and inhospitable corner of the Lake District. Subsequently setting out on foot, they eventually find themselves seeking shelter in a gloomy manor house-turned-hotel, closed for the winter and occupied solely by an accomodating caretaker. (I loved the way that, when the teacher rings the doorbell, the caretaker opens the door immediately, as if she were waiting on the other side in anticipation of random visitors.)

Although nothing untoward has really happened up to this point, the threat of impending violence is palpable during these opening scenes. Arthur Lavis’s grainy photography imbues the damp woodland with the same kind of dark, overcast malevolence found in Jose Larraz’s ‘Vampyres’ and ‘Symptoms’, whilst the film’s surprisingly accomplished score, by John Shakespeare & Derek Warne, creeps and burbles along nicely, mixing devilish clarinet and piano figures with glockenspiel, free improv percussion and disconcerting electronic pulsations, echoing such folk-horror touchstones as John Scott’s music for ‘Satan’s Slave’, or Marc Wilkinson’s work on ‘Blood on Satan’s Claw’.

This sinister ambience jars very pleasantly with the naïve, Children’s Film Foundation-style performances delivered by most of the cast – “just say line loud enough for soundman to pick it up, luv” seems to have been the extent of the direction offered to the young performers here. It’s all quite lovely, but, at the same time, the pervading tone of bleak uneasiness means we can easily believe that some harrowing, ‘Last House..’ style awfulness could be coming down the pipe in due course.

Our first hint of the film’s slightly more, shall we say, ‘whimsical’, agenda arrives when we cut away to what purports to be a ministerial office in Whitehall (not sure about the wallpaper), where a government minister is being debriefed by a psychiatrist and a representative of the police force, who basically give us the sum total of this film’s narrative exposition in one easily digestible dose.

A quartet of psychopathic criminals, we learn, have escaped from a cottage hospital in the wilds of Cumbria. As if that weren’t bad enough, all four of them were taking part in an experimental treatment programme involving “lysergic acid in conjunction with dream therapy”. The net result of which is that, not only are the escapees presumably blitzed out of their minds on acid, they are literally “..walking around believing they’re in a dream”.

“My god”, exclaims the minister, neatly foreshadowing the action to come, “in my dreams I murder freely, pillage, loot and rape!”
“You do?” replies the policeman in surprise, before his superior swiftly changes the subject.

Despite the blackly comedic tone of this interlude, the mood back in the woods remains foreboding, as we trudge through an agonisingly extended build up during which the escaped maniacs remain largely unseen.

Instead, we spend time with Pete and Mike, a pair of jack-the-lad young campers who have pitched their tent somewhere in the vicinity of the ill-fated hotel. As if to prove that he can get his leg over even in the middle of a rain-sodden, uninhabited wilderness, Mike, when we first meet him, has just finished shagging Julia, the maid from the hotel, who has apparently popped out to meet him during her lunch hour. (Julia, incidentally, is played by Jane Hayden – sister of Linda, no less!)

Meanwhile, we also have the pleasure of meeting the area’s taciturn gamekeeper, an old geezer who keeps muttering about sensing that “something’s not right out there tonight”, and so on. (Perhaps he can hear the music on the soundtrack?)

Fears of very bad things to come are only increased by our first few encounters with the deeds of the elusive maniacs. Firstly, the campers are taken aback when a dog which appears to have had one of its legs hacked off hobbles into their tent (don’t worry folks, the genuine three-legged dog who was smeared with fake blood for this role looks perfectly content), after which they discover that their wood axe is missing. (1)

Needless to say, this is very much the point at which any responsible citizens would call a halt to their camping holiday and find a way to contact both the police and an emergency vet ASA f-ing P, but, as we will be continuously be reminded over the course of the next hour or so, common sense holds little sway in the inverted dream world of ‘Killer’s Moon’. So, Pete and Mike merely bandage up the poor old doggie, who dutifully limps off into the night, and proceed with their sojourn in the great outdoors as if nothing were amiss.

Our first proper sighting of the escapees meanwhile comes when one of their number – a lumbering brute in white hospital scrubs – infiltrates the cottage the groundskeeper shares with his wife, who, as you’d imagine, is not long for this world. The invader’s first order of business however is to menace the elderly couple’s cat, and, though the effects shot is obviously fake (thank god), a close up of the cat’s front paw supposedly getting sliced off is still outrageous – a shocking moment, and a clear indication that we’re dealing here with filmmakers who are unafraid to “go there” when it comes to gleefully tackling a few censor-baiting taboos.

Shortly thereafter, the campers encounter one of the schoolgirls, who is fleeing alone through the woods, having discovered the body of the murdered bus driver whilst on an errand to the phone box at the bottom of the road. Thereafter, the unhappy trio are also joined around the campfire by Julie, who is in a bit of a state. Whilst on her way back to the hotel, she matter of factly states, she was attacked and raped by three men in white overalls.

Gosh, that’s a bit of a rum do, approximates the sympathetic response of the boys to this grim news, but heaven knows, it’s not as if they can just head to the nearest town to seek help. I mean, it’s five miles away for heaven’s sake, what are they supposed to do, walk for a couple of hours?

In fact, the continued failure of the characters in ‘Killer’s Moon’ to make contact with the outside world become increasingly funny as the film goes on. On multiple occasions, various groups set out to make it to that nearby town or village, where they might “wake up the shopkeeper” or “look for a phone”, but none of them ever actually succeed in this relatively straight-forward task, repeatedly turning back, having decided that they’ve forgotten something, or can’t abandon their friends, or simply being chased back into the woods by the lurking maniacs.

If my tone seems rather flippant in view of the grim subject matter under discussion here, well, such is the strange frame of mind this film lulls us into. As soon as we actually get to spend some time with the dreaded maniacs, we find ourselves breathing a sigh of relief as we realise that nothing that bad is going to happen here.

‘Killer’s Moon’ has often been compared to ‘A Clockwork Orange’ (the bowler hat prominently worn by one of the fiends alongside his boots and overalls can’t help but be read as a deliberate reference), but to be honest there is very little resemblance between the menace and physical dynamism embodied by Alex’s gang in the Kubrick film and the lackadaisical berserkers on parade here.

To put it bluntly – this lot are fairly goofy. Two hefty, middle-aged chaps and two younger, somewhat foppish skinny ones, all four of them gurn up a storm, hamming it up as if they were stomping around in a local panto or something.

Although the film’s central rape scene, and a couple of subsequent low level molestations and stranglings, are inevitably pretty unsavoury, things remain reasonably restrained here compared to the kind of mean-spirited exploitation films that were coming out of Italy or the USA in the late ‘70s, and, basically, it’s difficult to take these awful acts seriously when the perpetrators are capering about the place, lip-smackingly referring to each other as “Mr Trubshaw” and “Mr Muldoon”.

Likewise, the whole business about the escapees believing they’re taking part in a shared lucid dream is just so utterly bizarre it’s difficult to know what to make of it, but it’s more or less played for laughs from the outset, as they intersperse their raping and pillaging with banter about who may or may not be a nurse or a hospital psychiatrist in real life, and hammer the kitchen table wondering why they can’t magic up some steak and chips. “Don't worry, she’s just a figment” Mr Jones cheerfully reassures his comrades as they look down at one murder victim, “I think I had her identified with the radiographer”.

In moments like this, it’s difficult to judge whether the makers of ‘Killer’s Moon’ were revelling in pitch-black humour, or whether the film’s assorted hilarity is entirely unintentional – an accidental result of the affectless, non-professional performances and giddily absurd situations.

Perhaps the most jaw-dropping example of this ambiguity comes when the most level-headed of the girls (who will later do in one of the killers with a sickle) comforts one of her violated friends by blankly telling her; “Look, you were only raped. As long as you don’t tell anybody about it, you’ll be alright. […] And if we ever get out of this alive, well, maybe we’ll both live to be wives and mothers.”

When you’ve picked yourself off the floor and wiped your eyes after this line is delivered, you’ll no doubt begin to wonder whether it is a bit of razor-sharp satire aimed at the sexist attitudes traditionally embodied by horror films, or alternatively something a male scriptwriter in 1978 might actually have considered a legitimate response to the situation.

And at this point, we should probably turn our attention to the fact that writer-director Alan Birkinshaw is the younger brother of the celebrated author and essayist Fay Weldon, and that, remarkably, it has been widely reported that he called in his big sister to entirely rewrite the dialogue for his ‘Killer’s Moon’ script prior to shooting.

This revelation certainly helps explain a few of the film’s tonal peculiarities, as well as pretty much confirming the satirical interpretation of the infamous lines quoted above, and helping ‘Killer’s Moon’ to top even Rita Mae Brown’s script for ‘The Slumber Party Massacre’ when it comes to unexpected collisions between literary feminism and misogynistic horror movies.

Weldon, for her part, seems to have suffered from a pretty bad case of sour grapes when it comes to her (uncredited) contribution to the film, telling an interviewer at some point that; “In the original script, the girls were ciphers. I gave them characters, which had the unfortunate effect of turning the film into a cult movie. I should have left it as it was. Picture dialogue: A. Picture movie: D. A terrible mix.” (2)

Sad to say, this verdict strikes me as both unduly self-regarding and entirely unfair - not only because, as discussed above, some of the film’s visuals are actually quite accomplished, but also because, despite Ms Weldon’s best efforts, the schoolgirl characters remain chronically underwritten and largely undistinguishable from one another.

Nonetheless, I think it’s safe to assume that there are a number of moments in ‘Killer’s Moon’ in which the mordant wit of the woman who once tried to popularise the slogan “vodka gets you drunker quicker” whilst working in the advertising industry [source] can be seen shining through – not least the Monty Python-esque exchange which occurs whilst one of the campers is being pursued by a gun-toting maniac.

“Go to hell you bastard, you’re mad!”, our hero yells. “What sort of a reply is that from a National Health psychiatrist?” responds Mr Trubshaw, still convinced he’s in a dream at the hospital, “I knew I should have gone private.”

An extremely strange film by any yardstick, ‘Killer’s Moon’ ultimately fits into no known lineage of British horror, despite the atmospheric similarities outlined above. To my happy surprise in fact, it reminded me not so much of any rape-atrocity film, slasher or ‘Clockwork Orange’ knock-off, but rather of the kind of films Jean Rollin was making at around the same time on the other side of the channel.

An unexpected comparison, I’ll grant you, but just think about it for a minute; we’ve got artfully framed shots of girls in night-gowns taking long walks through atmospheric woodlands and uninhabited buildings, off-beat, naïve performances and surreal, dream-like situations, all underpinned by the looming threat of hideous (yet reassuringly unrealistic) sexualised violence. I think I know where I’ve sampled this complex bouquet before. Swap around the national stereotypes and rejig the tone of the humour a little, and ‘Killer’s Moon’ could easily have slotted into Rollin’s filmography, somewhere between ‘Les Raisins de la Mort’ (1976) and La Nuit des Traquées (1980).

And, like each of Rollin’s films, ‘Killer’s Moon’ is an unforgettable, idiosyncratic experience too. To paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson, we’re looking here at a freakish mutant of some kind, never even considered for mass production; too weird to live, too unique to die. It’s up there on the shelf next to ‘Exposé’ the next time I need something easy-going to cheer myself up.

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(1) According to an anonymous contributor to ‘Killer’s Moon’s IMDB trvia page: “Hannah, the three-legged dog used in this movie, was cast from a local dog agency. Moreover, Hannah had lost her leg after saving her master in a robbery at the pub that she lived in.”

(2) Unfortunately I can’t find a source for this quote, but again, it is reproduced in full on the film’s IMDB page.

October Horrors # 12 / Thoughts on… Mandy (Panos Cosmatos, 2018)

1.

“Where the mystic swims, the psychotic drowns,” attentive listeners may hear Nicholas Cage growl during his climactic show-down with Linus Roache’s narcissistic, Mansonite cult leader towards the end of Panos Cosmatos’ ‘Mandy’. I’m unsure of the origin of this phrase (it sounds like it could be an unattributed quote from somewhere or other?), but it certainly seems to hit the mark re: Cosmatos’ apparent desire to leave both his characters and, potentially, his audience struggling to keep their heads above water amidst a veritable tsunami of sensory overload.

I recall director Ben Wheatley, in interviews around the release of his (excellent) film ‘A Field in England’ a few years back, lamenting what he saw as the disappearance of the “Head Movie” – a phenomenon he saw as being exemplified by films like ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ and ‘The Holy Mountain’ – from contemporary screens, and declaring his intention to add his own modest contribution to this seemingly defunct canon. Cosmatos, we assume, must have felt a similar absence… but his own reaction to it is anything but modest.

Refracting its director’s apparent desire to create the Ultimate Acidhead Movie through the lens of what I take to be his own childhood aesthetic obsessions, and further filtering it through the grand stylistic excess of some his contemporaries in nouveau-cult cinema (Winding Refn, Strickland etc), ‘Mandy’ is, inarguably, one hell of a trip.

Like a powerful psychotropic experience, it is a film that leaves a long, pungent aftertaste. It’s the kind of movie that sits in the back of your mind after viewing, like a big mental snowball of unearned experience, just waiting to be poked with a stick.

The fact that many of ‘Mandy’s on-screen characters spend much of their time tripping balls provides a none-too-subtle hint that this is indeed a valid way to read the film, but there is far more going on here than just some ‘Fear & Loathing..’/‘Inherent Vice’ styled stoner fantasia. Applying this phantasmagorical portrayal of chemically-altered perception to an ultra-violent horror/fantasy framework, the film offers us characters whose psychotropic intake has taken them to the very edges of humanity, and in some cases terrifyingly far beyond them.

At the opposite end of the scale from those who approach drug-taking from the comfortable, new age perspective of guided meditational growth, this is a film for those wild(wo)men who prefer to go into it weaponised – with extreme metal in their ears, darkened woods or concrete hinterland as their surroundings and physical danger close at hand, as if daring the expanded universe to tear them apart.

I am very much not one of those people, but, so long as it all remains safely within the confines of a motion picture screen, with sound properly balanced and the camera safely mounted on a tripod, I can surely dig it.

Based on reviews I’ve read so far, ‘Mandy’ seems to have left writers unable to resist the temptation to resort to dubious, hyperbolic sound-bites in an attempt to encapsulate the experience of watching the film, so, here’s my shot at the pull-quote bulls-eye: ‘Mandy’ is like watching Jodorowsky direct a ‘Death Wish’ sequel written by Robert E. Howard, as your pupils expand to the size of dinner plates and your fingers begin to wriggle before your eyes like Lovecraftian spaghetti.

If that sounds like a recommendation to you, I highly recommend finding time to catch this one theatrically whilst you have the chance. Please take this opportunity to search for screenings in your local area.

In the meantime, the following numbered thoughts and tangents may be best appreciated by those who have already seen the film, but if you haven’t, I shouldn’t worry – it’s pretty difficult to “spoil” a story that can be expressed in its entirety in one sentence, and that was probably first carved in stone by some ancient scribe before the dawn of recorded time.


2.

‘Mandy’ has rather strange relationship to reality… and not just because of all the acid, either.

In one sense, the film, particularly during its opening (pre-revenge) section, is a detailed and highly specific evocation of a particular time and place (a mountainous area of the USA, 1983). (1)

Every prop, item of clothing, vehicle or piece of furniture, and each small aspect of the web of cultural reference points that drift through the idyllic existence of Red (Cage) and Mandy (Andrea Riseborough) – all of these have been carefully chosen to scratch a nameless, deeply buried nostalgic itch that many viewers (particularly those born in the ‘80s) will not even have been aware of until they watch this movie and feel a touch of it in their bones. (2)

These temporal conjurations extend even to the texture of the film itself. Though evidently shot with all the smooth, HD clarity that the 21st century has to offer, ‘Mandy’s photography simultaneously swarms with a thick, almost intrusive layer of film grain, recalling more than anything the unique ‘feel’ of 16mm footage blown up to 35, as exemplified during the ‘80s by break-out low budget features such as ‘The Evil Dead’ and Jim VanBebber’s ‘Deadbeat at Dawn’.

Within this scheme, visual textures are deliberately tweaked scene by scene to sink hooks into deep-buried memories. When we see Red engaged in his work felling trees, climbing into a chopper with his co-workers for the ride home, the heavy grain is combined with washed out greens and browns, recalling any number of ‘80s Vietnam / forest survival type movies, whilst a later scene in which he and Mandy drift in a boat upon shimmering lake adopts a blown-out, over-saturated VHS kind of look, flashing us straight back to the gently psychedelic drift of a ‘70s bigfoot documentary.

In this regard, ‘Mandy’ is an exercise in high level aesthetic alchemy – a creative excavation of the recent past comparable to that which the Ghostbox label have carried out for the UK of the 1970s. As an evoker of *feel*, as a wrangler of the wildly divergent strands of temporal-cultural suggestion, Cosmatos here proves himself a master.

Naturally, the more obvious and potentially comedic signifiers of the era have for the most part been avoided; by and large, things are more subtle. This may, for instance, be the most METAL film not to actually feature any metal on the soundtrack. (3)

The use of fonts, cult-ish visual signifiers and the occasional t-shirt is as far as it goes, but the essence of METAL (in capitals) nonetheless runs rich and deep through these two hours. Fans of the genre will be left no doubt that Cosmatos is one of their own, though nary a power chord is struck nor a devil horn thrown. (A battle axe is forged in the shape of the ‘F’ from the Celtic Frost logo however, so… what more proof of good faith could fans possibly require?)


3.

But, on the other hand… well, speaking of battle axes, let’s just say that my reference to Robert E. Howard above wasn’t just plucked out of thin air. After the prolonged and appalling home invasion/murder sequence that constitutes ‘Mandy’s transitional central phase, it becomes increasingly clear that a hologram of Howard’s Hyborian Age has been super-imposed upon the USA of the early 1980s.

(A not inappropriate collision of worlds, given how thoroughly the sword & sorcery genre suffused that era’s popular culture, with John Milius’s 1982 ‘Conan the Barbarian’ in particular instigating an unsettling communion between Howard’s might-is-right prehistoric philosophy and the equally fantastical macho individualism of Reagan-ite political discourse; a heady fusion that, nearly forty years later, still filters through to ‘Mandy’s otherwise rather contradictory notion of a fuzzily nostalgic vigilante revenge story.)

When Red hits up his enigmatic pal Carruthers (a wonderful one scene bit from 80s/90s action vet Bill Duke) to reclaim his crossbow, we’re presented with a fistful of the kind of ominous exposition you’d usually expect some D&D players to receive from an aged traveller in a remote tavern. There have been “rumours of dark riders”, they were last seen heading for such-and-such a place, he “once glimpsed them upon the horizon”, and so on.

Leaving aside the question of exactly what kind of druggy, Satanic grapevine Carruthers picked up this info from, given that he seems to be a total recluse, we may find ourselves rubbing our eyes and wondering where exactly we are again..? The United States in 1983 suddenly seems very far away.

Indeed, from front to back, this is a story that, with a few minor adjustments, could have happened to Conan or King Kull, rather than a 40-something lumberjack played by Nicholas Cage, and the simplistic, video game-like storytelling favoured by Howard predominates from the moment Red’s quest for vengeance begins. [You know - Conan/Cage obtains weapons, confronts enemies, is captured. Escapes, kills enemies, reclaims weapons, proceeds directly to next set of enemies, and so on.]

We know this is not a post-apocalyptic world, because there’s stuff on TV, and people have jobs and visit grocery stores, but at no point do we actually visit a human habitation that comprises more than a single building. Isolated, makeshift homesteads and compounds dotted around the wilderness provide our only points of reference, and signs of wider societal organisation are entirely absent. No vehicles that are not directly connected to our story travel the roads through the forest.

Much of this I think is this is simply the result of Cosmatos’ desire to cut absolutely all connecting tissue out of his narrative. Acting less on the basis of conventional, A-to-B cinematic story-telling and more like some restless, ‘Metal Hurlant’ style comic book artist, this director doesn’t really give a damn about how his characters get from one place to another, or how they find out where they’re supposed to be going in the first place.

Instead, he is happy simply to teleport his hero (who, lest we forget, is actually wielding a battle axe) straight from one spectacular action set-piece to the next, wringing maximum value out of each epic confrontation, with no time for any non-epic messing about in-between.


4.

Boy, those Cenobite bikers (can we go with “Cenobikers”?) are quite a piece of work. I won’t go into their “origin story” (as it is one of the few details of ‘Mandy’s plot that it is probably best for viewers to discover as they go along), but, jesus - what a terrifying conception.

The moment when they are first ‘summoned’ – interrupting what up to this point has been a film ostensibly set in the real world, and a richly detailed version of it at that – is truly startling, causing us to share to some extent the fear we might actually experience if we found one of these creatures standing in front of us.

Deep, nasty dread is henceforth infused into all that follows, and I found the subsequent strobe-lit nocturnal kidnapping almost impossible to watch; it is just too horrible to contemplate, recalling the ghost of childhood anxiety that, no matter how unlikely it seems, or however often your parents tell you otherwise, such horrors – as expressed through the somehow-very-‘80s biker / serial killer / demon composite that I’m sure I recall all too clearly from some nasty comics that my parents should probably have not let me read at the time - may actually be out there somewhere.

And, indeed, they might. One of the things that makes these particular monsters so ghastly is that, though they may lurk at the very far end of unlikelihood and have no real life analogues (I hope), the explanation that is eventually offered for their existence is not actually a supernatural one. As a ready-made urban myth ready so be shared wherever young people gather to take drugs and get up to no good in the dark, they are wonderfully potent. (I mean, there’s a whole slasher movie franchise just waiting to happen there, at the very least.)

Also: along with this fairly direct tribute to ‘Hellraiser’, one of the relatively few blunt, Tarantino-style “homages” that creeps into ‘Mandy’ involves a big shout-out to Phantasm II, of all things. We’re among friends here, no doubt. (4)


5.

Ok, the Nicholas Cage thing. Let’s get on with it.

Personally, I really ‘cannot hang’ (as I believe the phrase goes) with this comedy/meme thing that’s built up around Mr Cage in recent years. To be honest, I prefer to think of him as just a extremely fine actor whose apparent willingness to say ‘yes’ to just about anything, though admirable, doesn’t always help his reputation in these days of social media snark.

To misquote Norma Desmond, it’s not his playing that’s too big, it’s the pictures that are too small. Like a modern day Klaus Kinski, he might get a bit goofy and OTT in the mediocre, run-of-the-mill assignments that take up much of his time, but, once in a blue moon, a project arrives that is worthy of his particular, highly tuned sensibilities - and at that point, you can just wind the fucker up and watch him go.

A few years back, Werner Herzog (funnily enough) gave him one such opportunity with the brilliant (and seemingly quite under-rated?) ‘Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans’ – and, needless to say, with ‘Mandy’ Cosmatos gives him another chance to strut his stuff on the level where he truly belongs. Once again, he does fantastic work here. (5)

I would leave it at that, were it not for the fact that many attendees the screening I attended evidently thought differently in this regard, having apparently pitched up with the primary intention of wringing maximum Cage-laffs from proceedings.

There is, it must be said, a lot of intentional humour in ‘Mandy’. There are zany one-liners and everything, and these tend to be mixed up quite jarringly with passages that are otherwise harrowing or savage. So, I appreciate that people may get a bit disorientated by this and take a “what can you do but laugh?” approach to navigating the choppy waters of this singularly intense and unusual movie.

There are other sections here however that are clearly not meant to be funny. The already infamous ‘bathroom scene’ is one of them, but, in view of the unspeakably terrible things that happen to Cage’s character during this film, I don’t believe he is overplaying here at all. Hell, if anything, he’s underplaying. Few of us, I’d imagine, would proceed in quite such a reasonable manner in similarly dire circumstances.

Seemingly channelling Warren Oates’ devastating portrayal of masculine grief in Peckinpah’s ‘Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia’ (a divisive head-trip of a revenge film with which ‘Mandy’ shares more than a few eerie parallels, now that I come to think of it), Cage is pretty on point here, and I could really have done without the chuckles in the row behind me.

I’d assume that at least some of these chucklers were the same people who were already loudly yakking away on their phones about other things in the queue ahead of me as they left the auditorium, whilst the closing credits were still rolling. I mean… c’mon man. Maybe you liked the movie, maybe you didn’t, but please - give it a few minutes to settle in before you’re planning tomorrow’s fucking brunch.

Thankfully though, these were not the only people who made it to this sold out city centre screening. A middle-aged couple with matching straight black hair, silently putting on their matching leather battle jackets. A big guy with impressive wrist tattoos and an unreadable metal band logo t-shirt, smoking a rollie with shaking hands on the step outside the cinema. Various other lone, scraggle-haired individuals, quickly striding off into the late afternoon shadows; heading straight back to their black light basements, I would like to think.

In aspirational terms at least, these folks feel more like my kind of people, and it is spiriting to see that word of mouth (or word of wi-fi, at least) has already connected ‘Mandy’ to its real audience.


6.

For all its savage violence, drug-damaged black humour and kaleidoscopic visuals, and despite the crassness of its neanderthal boilerplate revenge storyline, ‘Mandy’, like ‘..Alfredo Garcia’ before it, is a love story.

I mean, the clue’s in the name, man. Cosmatos could easily have called his film “Demon Fire” or “Serpent’s Eye” or something, and would probably have sold some extra tickets to people who might currently be apt to mistake it for a romantic comedy whilst scanning the listings - but that’s not what it’s about.

Without Mandy, and the thirty or so minutes we spend with her, none of the other stuff in the film would matter a damn. It would be some huge, empty, post-modern, lol-worthy mega-action laff-fest, and I probably would have concluded my thoughts on it far earlier than this.

Like ‘..Alfredo Garcia’, this is a film split into two halves, hinged around a transitional moment of blackest desolation at its centre. And, as with ‘..Alfredo Garcia’, it is the first half – slow, almost meditative in tone – that will eventually live longest in your memory.

So, how can I best put this? I have a very strong, very good feeling about Red and Mandy’s life together in the early part of the film. Their house and its surroundings are beautiful, the pace of their life and the time they spend together is beautiful. I mean, I may not particularly want to go to work as a lumberjack, but that aside – their life is about as close to a vision of an ideal existence as I could possibly imagine.

Perhaps not everyone will share this feeling, but as we have established, ‘Mandy’ is probably not a film for everyone. For those within a certain age-group though, or those who hark back to the recent past, or enjoy things like rock music, or science fiction, or solitude…? Well I’d imagine that if you’re reading this weblog, you’re probably in the club, let’s put it that way.

Mandy herself is not some generic, pretty wife character who exists solely in order toprovide moral justification to Arnie or Charles Bronson as they embark upon their regulation seventy minutes of cathartic violence. Mandy is different. Mandy is cool.

In spite of a necessarily limited amount of dialogue and screen time, Andrea Riseborough does an amazing job of building her into a fully-formed person (and, she is probably going to have to deal with people staring at her on the street and silently mouthing “mandy” for years to come as a result).

We’re perhaps not going to fall head-over-heels for her like Roache’s creepazoid cult leader does, but she is someone we would all like to play a bit part in our lives. She is the kind of acquaintance we would always think of warmly, wondering what she’s up to, but confident that it must be a-ok, whatever it is – and most of all, we’d appreciate what a good thing she has with Red. She’s the kind of affirmative, self-contained person who might send you a postcard now and then, and you’d always be very happy to receive it.

We in the audience might all chuckle at it when it plays out the first time, but in retrospect, the scene in which Red and Mandy sit together on the sofa, distractedly eating their dinner whilst completely enraptured by Don Dohler’s ‘Night Beast’ (1982) as it plays out on their fuzzy portable TV, is… well it’s something that will stay with us, let’s put it that way.


7.

Perhaps the soul of any revenge movie can be judged by what the revenger does after his or her labours are complete. It is always a tricky, uncertain moment, determining what we will be left with after the fleeting catharsis of vengeance has faded, and there are many directions a story can be taken in during those vital few minutes before the credits roll. Something though tells me that any such film in which the protagonist brushes off their hands and goes home, congratulating themselves on a job well done, is probably not a good one.

As Nicholas Cage sits dazed after his final confrontation, he is closer - in appearance, mental state and deed - to one of the Cenobikers he has recently dispatched than he is to the man who initially set out on his quest for vengeance. He has tasted their sacred acid and worn their armour; he is just as plastered in blood and filth as they were, and has committed acts scarcely less horrendous.

The thought of his returning to any kind of quote-unquote ‘normal’ life after all this is unthinkable. This netherworld of drugs and psychosis and mindless debasement would seem to have swallowed him whole. Has he indeed drowned, as per the aphorism he so recently muttered?

We might worry at this point that the film, along with its central character, has rather lost touch with  where it began, left empty and exhausted after a solid hour of mind-flaying, hysterical madness.

But then – that flashback. Perfectly placed. Devastating. I’ll spare you the details.

Tears in our eyes at the end of a film in which Nicholas Cage snorted a faceful of cocaine off a shard of broken glass after crushing the head of a demon biker?

I know this film has had a lot of hype already, but really – believe it.

Movie of the year? Are you kidding..?

Like Mandy listening to that cult leader’s hippie folk song, I survey the competition and laugh.

Stay metal, friends.

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(1) Suitably vague, the film’s stated location of “The Silver Mountains” generates search engine hits for areas in Washington, Idaho and Michigan, and ‘Mandy’ was seemingly filmed in Belgium, rather surprisingly.

(2) Oddly enough, the one thing that didn’t really ring true for me in the film’s production design was Mandy’s Motley Crue t-shirt. She and her husband are more-or-less in their 40s, we presume, and it seems unlikely to me that someone who was this age in 1983 would have much use for Nikki Sixx and co. (They would, in fact, be baby boomers pretty much – of the same generation as the psychotic hippies who proceed to persecute them.) All is forgiven however, when she wears a Black Sabbath T in the next scene. Spot on.

(3) Admittedly, doom-lord Stephen O’Malley’s contributions to the late Jóhann Jóhannsson’s soundtrack probably help in this regard. Before any arguments erupt, we should also probably note at this juncture that the use of the one pre-existing song featured in the movie – ‘Starless’ by King Crimson – is both totally sublime and hugely appropriate… but calling it metal is probably a stretch, for my purposes at least.

(4) FUN FACT: Christopher Figg - producer of the original ‘Hellraiser’ and subsequently of Neil Marshall’s ‘Dog Soldiers’ (2002), amongst other things - can be found prominently listed in ‘Mandy’s production credits. For his apparent role as a behind-the-scenes instigator of superior horror cinema across four decades, we salute him.

(5)As an aside, I wish that Herzog could / would return to his brief dalliance with making fictional, Hollywood-type movies. I mean, we all know he can draw a few thousand quid from the bank and make a weirdo Werner Herzog documentary without breaking a sweat, but the strange collision between Werner wackiness and mainstream genre movie aesthetics made both ‘Bad Lieutenant’ and ‘Rescue Dawn’ fairly extraordinary, IMHO.