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Friday, July 11, 2008Kill, Panther, Kill! Release Year: 1968Countries: Italy, West Germany Starring: Tony Kendall, Brad Harris, Erika Blanc, Franco Fantasia, Corny Collins, Hannelore Auer, Siegfried Rauch, Erwin Strahl, Gainfranco Parolini, Frank Valentin, Laci von Ronay, Carlos de Castro, Werner Hauff, Jens Herold Writers: Paul Alfred Muller, Gainfranco Parolini, Gunter Rudorf, Giovanni Simonelli Director: Gianfranco Parolini (as Frank Kramer) Cinematographers: Francesco Izzarelli, Rolf Kastel Music: Marcello Giombini Producer: Theo Maria Werner In the opening moments of Kill, Panther, Kill! we see the daring escape, during a prison transfer, of master criminal Arthur Tracy (Franco Fantasia). Tracy has been in stir for four years after thieving a fortune in jewels worth three million dollars. Now his loyal henchmen, Anthony and Smokey, lie in wait beside a desolate hillside road that's apparently intended to be overlooking Malibu -- but is actually some anonymous European location -- as the LAPD van baring Arthur approaches. After dispensing with Arthur's guards in a hail of machinegun fire, the three pile into a getaway car, at which point Anthony (Siegfried Rauch) says he knows of an ideal place for them to hold up. "They're holding a rodeo this week in Calgary", he says. "Nobody will look for us there." And truer words were never spoken. The only thing that I'd be looking for at a rodeo in Calgary would be a thorough ass-kicking. And so the fifth entry in the Kommissar X series finds our heroes Tom Rowland and Jo Walker heading off to Calgary -- and me shouting "No, don't go there!" at the screen. It's not that I have anything against North America, mind you; I live there, after all. It's just that there are places within thirty miles of where I live where I could see burly white people in cowboy hats, and the exotic Eastern locations of the previous four films had accustomed me to a more adventurous breed of vicarious tourism. Still, despite my protests, go they do, and soon we're treated to the spectacle of Tom Rowland riding a bucking bronco and Jo Walker, for reasons known only to himself, wandering around in a sombrero.     With Kill, Panther, Kill!, director Gianfranco Parolini -- working under the name Frank Kramer -- returns to the Kommissar X franchise after handing over the reins to Rudolf Zehetgruber for the previous two entries. And with his return the truce between Walker and Rowland that we saw in the preceding film Death Trip is lifted, and we again see the constant sparring that characterized the earlier efforts, with Walker referring to Rowland variously as "Cheese Brain", "Idiot Head" and "Imbecile", as well as other choice bits of verbal abuse directed at Brad Harris's admittedly odd-shaped head, and Rowland cleaning Walker's clock on more than one occasion. In fact, the two work at cross purposes for much of the film, each withholding information from the other and even seeking at times to actively undermine the other's efforts. Other changes since the last installment include the fact that Rowland is now identified as a captain with the Los Angeles -- rather than New York -- police department, and Walker, for once, is supplied with a clear and reasonably plausible explanation for being in the same place and working on the same case as Rowland. He's been hired by the company that insured the stolen jewels -- which have never been recovered -- and is on Tracy's trail in hopes of finding where they have been hidden. This time Walker also comes with a shapely secretary, played by Hannelore Auer, whose job is to provide plot points while wearing a succession of silly outfits (milk maid, Indian maiden, etc.).     As is usual for the series, Kill, Panther, Kill! hits the ground running, with Walker and Rowland already on the case by the time the credits finish rolling. In fact, despite what I said, it seems that what Anthony said at the film's opening couldn't be less true, because everybody seems to be looking for Arthur Tracy in Calgary -- from Rowland, to a whole squad of Canadian police detectives, to the typically self-interested Walker. Made wise to this, Arthur and his men decide to head on to their real destination, Montreal, where Arthur's twin brother Robert, a wealthy invalid, resides. Arthur had sent a package containing the jewels to his mild-mannered and law-abiding brother prior to his arrest, and now it's time to collect them. Of course, before they can make that exit, we're treated to a lot of travelogue footage of the rodeo, then the aforementioned sequence in which Rowland, tricked by one of Tracy's men, rides the bucking bronco with ego-bruising results, and then an unsuccessful attempt by Tracy to throw the law off his track by having a double killed in his place. Walker, through some sombrero-clad detective work, manages to divine Tracy's destination, however, and, under pressure, shares the information reluctantly with Rowland, after which the two are on to Montreal. And with this switch of location, we're hipped to the real reason for Kommissar X's journey Canada-ward: Expo 67, the world's fair held that year in Montreal. A massive undertaking, consisting of numerous space-age-themed concourses built upon two huge man-made islands in the St. Lawrence river -- with a mass transit rail system built exclusively to service it -- the fair serves as an impressive backdrop for the film's action, and is made ample use of. In fact, even though the site of the fair is the location of one of the film's pivotal events, it does begin to seem like Rowland and Walker spend an awful lot of time hanging around there. There's even a scene where Rowland chases Walker across the entire grounds, passing all of the International concourses on his way, which affords G. Marcell the opportunity to augment his already somewhat cheesy score with the predictable, stereotyped music cues to represent each of the faraway lands name-checked.     Upon arriving in Montreal, Arthur arranges a meeting with his brother at -- where else? -- Expo 67. Tailed by Rowland and Walker, Arthur instructs Robert to join him on one of the aerial cable cars that travel over the Expo grounds. Arthur presses Robert for the location of the jewels, but Robert will only tell him that they are in a safe deposit box and that he has hidden the key. Arthur responds to this by shooting Robert to death and -- by means of switched clothes and some adjustments of facial hair -- assumes his identity, emerging from the cable car with a tale of how he, Robert, was attacked by Arthur and had to shoot him in self defense. Everyone seems to fall for this somewhat obvious ruse, and soon Arthur is back at Robert's villa with Robert's lovely wife Elizabeth (Erika Blanc). Arthur doesn't bother to keep up pretenses with Elizabeth very long, however, and is soon having his minions slap her around and demanding to know where the key to the safe deposit box is. Unfortunately, that key has gone missing from its regular hiding place -- right around the time, we've seen, that Robert donated a small statue called The Blue Panther to a local museum. And it is with this revelation that we realize that the panther referred to in the movie's title is just a statue, and won't be doing any killing at all, no matter how emphatically it's instructed to do so -- a fact which still doesn't diminish Kill, Panther, Kill! as the coolest of any of the Kommissar X movies' titles. Meanwhile, Joe Walker has done his research and determined that Robert's lovely nurse and secretary, Emily (Corny Collins) is his best hope of gaining access to the Tracy family's dark secrets.     And so Joe Walker -- a man who, if he existed in the real world, would be enveloped in a perpetual cloud of mace -- sets about ingratiating himself with Emily by sneaking up on her while she's sunbathing and stealing her clothes. It works, of course, and soon Emily is confiding in him that all does not seem right at the Tracy household -- as it very well might not, given that "Robert" all of a sudden has all of these scowly underlings in tow and is yelling about "where are the jewels?" all the time. At some point someone behind the scenes must have said, "Look, I know that this is basically just a cops-and-robbers story that we're telling here, but, being that this is a Kommissar X film, we should at least have a frogman shoot at Joe Walker with a harpoon gun." And so at this point a frogman emerges from the river beside where Walker and Emily are talking and shoots at Walker with a harpoon gun. Walker overpowers the frogman and demands to know who sent him, but -- in another turn of events that seems to have come from an entirely different movie -- the frogman himself is harpooned by an unseen accomplice before he can answer. Rowland arrives on the scene, and the two trail the accomplices to a nearby gym, where the first of two pretty great fight scenes in Kill, Panther, Kill! takes place. This particular one isn't even plot driven, since the guys they're fighting aren't Tracy's men, but instead a bunch of judo guys who are simply pissed off that Walker and Rowland have barged in on their work-out. The scene peaks with a corny/awesome bit in which Brad Harris picks up a barbell and tosses it like a toy at several burly guys who collectively crumple beneath its weight.     Shortly after this, Elizabeth Tracy secretly approaches Rowland and tells him the truth about Arthur. Saying that she fears Arthur will kill her if she doesn't produce the key, she asks Rowland to help her find it, and Rowland -- the big, soft-hearted lug -- being sweet on her (awww!), agrees. Rowland and Elizabeth return to the Tracy villa to find that it has been ransacked. More surprisingly, they find that Arthur has been murdered, and that evidence left with the body suggests that Emily was the culprit. Meanwhile, Arthur's associates, Anthony and Smokey (the latter played by director Parolini) are holding Emily hostage in the villa's basement, and after some vaguely alluded to torture get her to divulge that the key is hidden in the panther statue. The hoods race to the museum, only to find that that wily cad Joe Walker has beaten them to it and gotten the key for himself. An attempt to take Walker out once-and-for-all follows, which leads to Kill, Panther's second rollicking fight scene, which involves Brad Harris rolling around inside a truck tire, clocking people with expertly tossed bricks, and actually looking grief-stricken as Joe Walker is apparently run over by a bulldozer. I have no idea who the people that Harris and Tony Kendall are fighting in this scene are supposed to be, since Arthur Tracy's entourage -- which, for the most part, appears to consist of only Anthony and Smokey -- seems to contract and expand as the action requires. It's an example of how this movie seems to occasionally strain at its narrative limitations -- in this case, by wanting to provide it's standard issue villain with a super-villain's endless supply of expendable henchmen. In any case, the fight is a jolly piece of work -- no doubt staged by Harris himself -- and, like any other aspect of Kill, Panther, Kill!, shouldn't be robbed of its affable charms by exposure to the rigors of logic.     Once it's established that Walker has the key, a tussle ensues between him and Rowland for its possession. At one point Rowland thinks he has stolen the key from Walker, but once the crooks in turn take the key from Rowland, they find that it leads only to a safe deposit box that contains an 8x10" photo of Joe Walker winking at them. This accumulation of typical Kommissar X nonsense ultimately leads to an antique cliffhanger in which Walker and Emily, tied up in the cellar of the villa, watch helplessly as the lit fuse on a gas bomb that Anthony has set reaches its end -- as meanwhile Tom Rowland lies unconscious upstairs. All of this, of course, is handled with about the same attitude as that exhibited by Joe Walker in that aforementioned photo. In addition to the usual hijinks, Kill, Panther, Kill! features a couple different bits of recurring, Joe Walker-themed business that struck me as a little odd even considering the context. One involves an effeminate, flamboyantly dressed young fellow who, throughout the film, turns up to eagerly tag along after Walker, and whom Walker repeatedly dismisses with annoyance. Of course, this -- like Walker's anti-drug lecturing in Death Trip -- struck me as a disappointment, clashing as it did with my image of Walker as a dedicated hedonist and pansexual. I wouldn't think that he'd refuse an offer of sex from any warm blooded creature, be they male or female -- or that he would even be above dropping a gerbil in his trousers on a slow night -- so why he would reject this obviously smitten young man's advances is a mystery. The second bit involves Walker spending a lot of time throughout the film reading the Bible. For obvious reasons, this is pretty funny on its own, but the way in which this activity is later credited for Walker making a leap of logic that helps him solve the case is pretty weak, and makes you wonder at what the possible reason for including the bit in the first place was.     All in all, the plot of Kill, Panther, Kill is more appropriate to an episode of Columbo than a Eurospy film, which makes the movie by far the most pedestrian in the Kommissar X series thus far. Which is not to say that I didn't find it completely entertaining nonetheless. Then again, I firmly believe that prolonged exposure to any movie series can actually alter the brain's chemistry, and, as such -- while the strains of "I Love You Jo Walker", or the masked face of Santo might, for me, serve as endorphin triggers -- for others they might simply serve to tell them that its time to turn off the TV and pick up a book, or to put one's head in one's hands and slowly shake it from side to side while murmuring disconsolately about the fate of mankind. In other words, while, if you were to ask me if you should watch Kill, Panther, Kill!, I would answer, "Absolutely", I may not be the right person to ask. But you should watch it anyway, just in case. Labels: Country: Germany, Country: Italy, Eurospies, Series: Kommissar X, Stars: Brad Harris, Year: 1968 posted by Todd at 1:19 AM | 0 Comments Wednesday, April 23, 2008Casus Kiran Release Year: 1968Country: Turkey Starring: Irfan Atasoy, Sevda Ferda, Yidirim Gencer, Suzan Avci, Reha Yurdakul, Cahit Irgat, Erol Gunaydin, Faruk Panter, Huseyin Zan, Haydar Karaer, Mehmet B. Gungor, Zeki Sezer, Umil Kader, Mete Mert, Feridun Cakar Director: Yilmaz Atadeniz Writer: Cetin Inanc Cinematographer: Rafet Siriner Producer: Yilmaz Atadeniz It's hard to write about these old Turkish superhero movies--especially those directed by Yilmaz Atadeniz--without making reference to the Republic serials of the 1940s. The problem with doing so, however, is that many of you young people out there, with your newfangled transistor radios and souped-up hotrods, will have no idea what the hell I'm talking about. I suppose the appropriately curmudgeonly response to that would be to refuse to continue this review until you've educated yourselves on the topic, instead filling space with horrific, Andy Rooney-like ruminations on how butter doesn't taste the way it used to and why on earth is the print in Reader's Digest so small until you return with at least one complete viewing of The Perils of Nyoka or some-such under your belts. But, as much as the thought of such an exercise appeals to me, I'm afraid I can't do so in good conscience. The fact is that those serials were meant to be seen in a very specific context, a context which simply doesn't exist anymore. Now, despite what I said previously, I'm actually not old enough myself to have seen them as they were originally presented--i.e in weekly installments as part of a Saturday matinee at the local movie house presented to an audience that I imagine as being made up entirely of young boys in immaculate baseball caps and striped shirts with names like Skip, Biff and Scooter. I did, however, have a vaguely analogous experience of them in that, when I was kid--back in those lean, desperate times when the selection of TV stations barely scraped the double digits--our local "Creature Features" show started featuring old serials as part of their line-up. This meant that every Saturday night, in the middle of a double feature along the lines of Godzilla vs. The Sea Monster and Agent For H.A.R.M., the host, with much ironic fanfare, would present a chapter of King of the Rocket Men, or Flash Gordon, or one of a number of other serials they showed in their entirety over the course of time. This viewing experience provided me with knowledge that allowed me in later years, while viewing the Turkish film Yilmayan Seytan, to remark, "Why, this film is nothing more than a slavish remake of the 1940 Republic serial The Mysterious Doctor Satan!" And, as all you guys out there know, having the kind of knowledge that enables you to let fly with pithy observations like that gets you a whole lot of the you-know-what. You feeling me, ladies?     But the boon that such knowledge was to my budding social life aside, my point is that I was basically able to see these serials as they were meant to be seen: in twenty minute chunks with a week separating them, so that I had enough time to forget just how exactly similar those chunks were before taking in the next one. As such, I was less bothered by how the serials, by nature of their structure and budgetary limitations, were extremely repetitive in their action from chapter to chapter, and depended a lot on expository dialog included to keep people abreast of a story that, for their audience, unfolded over a couple of months' time. Today most serials that are available for viewing at all can only be seen by way of DVDs which contain them in their entirety. And while it's still possible to watch them one chapter at a time, having them in such a format, the natural inclination is to watch them in a sitting as you would a regular movie--and if you want to have an experience that rapidly goes from being mildly engaging to tedious beyond all imagining, that is exactly what you should do. So, in short, young people, I'm going to let you slide on this one. In fact, I'm going to go so far as to say that, if you want a taste of what the Republic serials were like, but distilled down to their essence--and with a lot more near nudity and violence--you couldn't do much better than a Turkish film like Casus Kiran, aka Turkish Spy Smasher. Now, I say "Republic Serials" not because Republic was the only studio that produced movie serials. It's just that, while other studios, such as Universal and Columbia, did produce them, they only did so as a sideline to their main business, whereas for Republic they were a primary focus. As such, Republic developed and honed the particulars of making these films to such an extent that they would serve as a model for makers of low budget action films the world over for years to come. The Republic method, first of all, was to recycle, recycle, recycle. Not just costumes and sets, but also story concepts and footage would be handed on from serial to serial, with scripts and action structured to accommodate as much hand-me-down content as possible. Secondly, the hands at Republic knew that the best way to keep things moving at a brisk pace without having to resort to too many costly stunts or special effects was to feature wild fist fights--featuring as many participants as possible--at regular intervals, a practice which became a studio trademark.     One young filmmaker who was paying attention to the lessons that Republic had to teach was Turkish director Yilmaz Atadeniz. In fact, Atadeniz would take his love of American serials and channel it into an entire subgenre within Turkish action cinema. His 1967 film Kilink Istanbul'da--which featured both a masked villain in a skeleton costume and a flying hero called Superman--was one of the earliest entries in a wave of masked hero films that would flood Turkish cinemas throughout the late sixties and into the seventies. These direly low budget features not only built upon Republic's model by including as many frenetic multi-person brawls as their running time could contain, but also took that studio's recycling ethos to new heights, borrowing freely not only from each other but from the whole of world cinema, lifting ideas and well-known characters--frequently even actual footage and musical scores--from Western films at will with no regard for copyrights. In Altadeniz's case, the homage to the American movie serials didn't stop at a simple appropriation of style, but went on to include actual remakes of them, such as his take on Columbia's The Phantom, Kizil Maske, and the film we'll be discussing here today, Casus Kiran, which was a remake of Republic's 1942 serial Spy Smasher. Now, I haven't seen the original Spy Smasher, though I am aware that it's widely considered to be one of the best of the Republic serials. Being a recovered comic book nerd, however, I am familiar with Spy Smasher himself. The character originated in the pages of Fawcett's Whiz Comics, which was also the home of the original Captain Marvel before DC Comics sued him out of existence in the fifties (proving that the "D" in their name stood for "Douchebaggery"). When Republic set about bringing the character to the screen, they cast frequent serial star Kane Richmond in the role, and placed at the helm one of their premier directors, William Witney, who had also been responsible for the much lauded Adventures of Captain Marvel the previous year, as well as serial adaptations of Dick Tracy, Zorro and The Lone Ranger. The result proved enduring enough to merit a revival in the sixties and, following the success of the Batman TV series, was edited down to feature length for American TV under the title Spy Smasher Returns.     As originally presented, Spy Smasher was a patriotic wartime American hero who did battle against the axis powers. This means that some perhaps less than slight changes would have to be made to adapt him to a 1960s Turkish milieu. One of the most obvious of these in Casus Kiran is that the villains, rather than being Nazis or Japanese saboteurs, are simply rendered as all purpose enemies of Turkey of unknown political bent or national origin. Another change is a result of a certain tendency that these Turkish comic book adaptations have of always making things just a bit more sexy than their source material. As such, Spy Smasher is provided here with a female sidekick/girlfriend in the well-rounded form of Sevda (Sevda Ferda), who accomplishes her end of the spy smashing clad in a black leather tunic and matching knee-high boots. As for Spy Smasher himself, while his comic book incarnation looked like a cross between a superhero and a WWII era fighter pilot, Casus Kiran presents him kitted out in a form-fitting black ensemble complete with cape, Batman-like mask and conspicuously padded chest. Casus Kiran was made in close proximity to Atadeniz' first series of Kilink films, and the director brings a lot of familiar faces over from those movies into the main cast here. Star Irfan Atasoy was an exhibitor and distributor who, at the time of Kilink Istanbul'da's inception, asked that he be given a starring role in the picture, as well as exclusive distribution rights in his territory, in return for providing financial backing. Atadeniz cast him as Kilink's nemesis Superman and would go on to use him as a hero in a number of subsequent films. Fortunately for all involved, Atasoy, in addition to deep pockets, also possessed the rugged good looks and robust physicality necessary for such roles, as he proves handily in his turn as Spy Smasher. Also present is Kilink himself, Yildirim Gencer, who here plays the masked villain, The Mask, as well as appearing unmasked as "Yildirim", which is simply The Mask posing as a mild mannered suitor of Sevda's in order to gain intelligence on Spy Smasher's operations. Finally we have Suzan Avci reprising her role of "Suzy", Kilink's sexy moll--only here she's "Suzy", the sexy moll of The Mask's number two man, The Black Glove (who doesn't wear a black glove, by the way).     Casus Kiran is a film that is in constant, rapid motion from beginning to end, presenting more of a continuous event than an actual story. One furious fight will lead to a furious chase, which in turn ends in yet another furious fight, and so on. As such, trying to impose the strictures of plot upon it is sort of like trying to identify the conflicts and character arcs within a hurricane or brush fire. Making that task even harder is the fact that, despite no doubt heroic efforts by Onar Films, the existing version is missing large chunks of its running time, with many scenes fading out or simply cutting off before they're resolved--suggesting in turn that there are other scenes that were probably lost entirely. Despite this, however, I will make my best effort to assign some kind of coherent structure to what I witnessed as I watched the film unfold. The film begins with a rapid series of scenes showing spies committing various types of mayhem--mostly consisting of blowing stuff up--all over Istanbul. All of these spies are dressed in black with identical hats and skinny ties, which lends sort of an absurd, surrealist air to the proceedings. Over this, a narrator, stating the obvious, notes that spies have become a bit of a problem for Turkey, and then goes on to tell us about a "plucky young man" who, along with his girlfriend, has taken it upon himself to deal with that problem. Soon after that we see Spy Smasher and Sevda in action, roaring in on their motorcycle to the accompaniment of thundering surf music to shoot and punch the black hats into retreat. When the dust clears, the heroes have gotten their hands on a precious tape recording containing the names of all of the spies in Turkey--a tape that will prove to have little consequence at all to the plot, such as it is, of Casus Kiran.     Sevda is the daughter of police Detective Cavit, and she and Spy Smasher use the fruits of their clandestine crime-fighting activities to secretly help him in his investigations. Because of this, everyone thinks that Cavit is buddies with Spy Smasher and knows his real identity, which seems to really annoy him. The fact is he doesn't know, nor does he know of Sevda's involvement in Spy Smasher's activities, yet no one wants to hear it. By the time we meet the old guy, Cavit is so exasperated with this state of affairs that, whenever someone says that he and Spy Smasher must be really tight, what with all of his helping him with his investigations and everything, Cavit just says, basically, "Look, I could tell you I'm not, but you'll just say that I am anyway, so let's just drop it". Beyond the fact that they're sort of making Sevda's dad's life miserable in the course of helping him, another notable thing about Spy Smasher and Sevda is that he calls her "Darling", while she calls him "Spy Smasher". Of course, all of those black hats aren't just running around blowing stuff up all over Turkey of their own accord. That sort of thing requires management, and what better way to meet the men--and woman--in charge than in a scene in which they slap around some chained women in lingerie. At the top of the organization, as I've mentioned before, is the appropriately named The Mask, with the more mysteriously named The Black Glove at his side. Suzy, in her role as moll, seems to mainly keep the home fires burning, but also serves a crucial function by performing some weird musical numbers in the seedy nightclub that rests atop the gang's headquarters (numbers that sound like traditional Turkish folk music despite Suzy being shown performing in front of a standard issue 1960s pop combo). The Mask and his spy ring's main activity seems to be counterfeiting, but there are also repeated references to "product" in "bags" that, in combination with the existence of a laboratory and some suggestions of tests done on human guinea pigs, seem to indicate that they are also involved in drug trafficking, though it's never entirely made clear. At the time of our meeting them, however, what they're really excited about is that they've kidnapped a British scientist whom they hope to use as bait to draw out a rival gang of spies they wish to eliminate. Spy Smasher and Sevda foil this plan, however, by barging in and rescuing the scientist as soon as The Mask's black hats have finished blowing the rival gang of black hats away. With this The Mask decides that the gang's first order of business should be getting rid of Spy Smasher. He, too, has heard that Detective Cavit is cozy with the hero, and so Spy Smasher and Sevda's efforts to "help" her dad result in him being targeted by a ruthless gang of spies who will stop at nothing to get him to divulge information that he actually doesn't have. With this begins a series of attempts by the gang to kidnap Detective Cavit, which lead to a series of furious fights, chases, and narrow escapes. Somewhere in all this The Mask starts showing up at the Cavit residence in the guise of Yildirim, Sevda's suitor. To be honest, you're not supposed to realize that Yildirim is The Mask, but I don't feel that telling you counts as a "spoiler", since trying to maintain an air of mystery around the villain's identity in a film in which Yildirim Gencer appears is a pretty futile endeavor--much as it would be in a Bollywood movie that featured Amrish Puri or Amjad Khan in the cast. Anyway, knowing that Yildirim is The Mask will make you appreciate all the more the hilarity of one particular scene in which The Mask's goons invade the Cavit home during one of Yildirim's visits. When the black hats pressure Sevda to reveal Spy Smasher's identity, she--apparently weary of Yildirim's advances--fingers him as Spy Smasher, and the black hats, apparently also unaware that Yildirim is their boss, give him a thorough working over, during which one of the goons tells him that he "looks like a duck" without his mask on. In addition to each other, Spy Smasher and Sevda also have a constantly muttering comic relief sidekick, Bidik, who performs a number of undercover assignments for them. These invariably seem to result in Bidik bringing back information that leads Spy Smasher and Sevda into a trap, necessitating that they engage in yet more furious fights followed by chases which end in fights. The inclusion of such a sidekick is just one of many similarities that Casus Kiran bears to a slightly later Turkish film, 1969's Iron Claw the Pirate. This is no real surprise, as Iron Claw was directed by Cetin Inanc, a longtime assistant to Atadeniz who was also the screenwriter of Casus Kiran. Like Casus Kiran, Iron Claw features motorcycle riding boyfriend and girlfriend masked heroes doing battle with a masked villain determined to bring ruin to Turkey--though in the case of Iron Claw that villain was none other than Fantomas. One thing that I think Casus Kiran has over Iron Claw, however, is that, as the female half of the team, Casus Kiran's Sevda gets a much better shake than Iron Claw's girl hero Mine, who tended to get sidelined a lot and didn't seem to play a part in the action equal to that of the male hero. Sevda, on the other hand, despite Spy Smasher's top billing, gets an equal amount of screen time and plays a comparable part in the action, even coming to Spy Smasher's rescue on occasion. As Casus Kiran nears its conclusion, The Mask, finding the entirety of his operation foiled by Spy Smasher, starts to plan his exit from the country. As one last, generous act of silliness, he determines that this move necessitates the casting of the gang's massive supply of gold "into the mold for armchairs". The resulting armchairs look like passenger seats from a commercial airliner, which I think may make this an instance of a plot point that is purely salvage-driven. In any case, The Mask's refusal to travel light proves to be his undoing, and the delay allows Spy Smasher and Sevda to catch up with him, leading to the final furious chase and fistfight. More than any of the other examples of Turkish pulp cinema I've watched, Casus Kiran seemed to have a sort of dreamlike quality. Even after repeated viewings, I still had difficulty maintaining a grasp on its details, as if it had somehow eluded comprehension by way of its combined surreal velocity and faded, ghost-like appearance. A state of hypnosis seemed to set in soon after I pressed "play", as if I was watching less a movie than a screen saver featuring men in black hats and skinny ties being perpetually hurled back and forth to a soundtrack of pilfered surf music. Given this, I have to marvel anew at what is one of the true wonders of world genre cinema: that an inspiration as prosaic as old American movie serials could result in an experience so strange and almost uniquely un-movie like in its effect as Casus Kiran. Though it's a movie of many--if perhaps somewhat simple--pleasures, I think that it is this hallucinatory kick that I treasure most of what I took away from it. It just serves to confirm that, as drugs of choice go, mine--meaning. batshit insane movies like Casus Kiran--is a very good choice indeed. Labels: Action: Superheroes, Country: Turkey, Eurospies, Year: 1968 posted by Todd at 10:04 AM | 4 Comments Thursday, March 20, 2008Phenomenal and the Treasure of Tutankhamen Release Year: 1968Country: Italy Starring: Mauro Parenti, Lucretia Love, Gordon Mitchell, John Karlsen, Carla Romanelli, Cyrus Elias, Charles Miller, Mario Cecchi, Agostino De Simone, Teresa Petrangeli, Spartaco Battisti, Bernardo Bruno, Mario De Rosa, Pieraldo Ferrante, Enrico Marciani. Writer: Ruggero Deodato Director: Ruggero Deodato Cinematographer: Roberto Reale Music: Bruno Nicolai Producer: Mauro Parenti Original Title: Fenomenal e il tesoro di Tutankamen Availability: Buy it from Amazon  Like many people, I find that there are certain types of films that appeal so strongly to me on a conceptual level that I tend to cut them considerable slack when reviewing them. Often times, even the very worst of these films, like when Santo is old and fat and spends half the film driving a station wagon to the grocery store, muster enough of the elements I like to keep me satisfied. And one of my very favorite genres is the Eurospy film and the various offshoots and influenced tributaries -- among them the Italian fumetti-inspired films. As we covered in some weird and convoluted fashion in our review of Kriminal and the three Turkish Kilink films, as well as Danger Diabolik, fumetti were saucy Italian comic books populated by sexy, violent anti-heroes and villains. Super-thief Diabolik became the flashpoint for a whole series of comics and related films that drew both from Diabolik and the James Bond movies. Diabolik himself was a throwback to the old pulp heroes like The Shadow, The Spider, and European counterparts like Fantomas -- with a bit of Batman thrown in for good measure. Most of the heroes and villains of fumetti did not possess super powers. They simply liked dressing up in outlandish body stockings and kicking people in the head. Needless to say, the combination of gratuitous sex appeal in the form of various Eurobabes slinking around in mod 60s mini-wear, combined with garish space-age sets and amoral violence really speaks to a sophisticated man like me. So I tend to gravitate toward these fumetti-inspired films whenever I can find them, and I'm always happy to discover new ones (such as the ones from Turkey). However, it ain't all steak and onions, and if the 1968 fumetti film Phenomenal and the Treasure of Tutankhamen proves nothing else, it proves that it is possible to make a film that will disappoint even someone like me with my incredibly low standards.
Phenomenal and the Treasure of Tutankhamen may be infamous to some for squandering an awesome title and the lovely Lucretia Love in a movie that, in its best moments, manages to be a middling affair. To others, it is infamous merely by association. Wait, let's backtrack. To most people, it isn't infamous at all, because they've never even heard of it. But among people who keep track of movies with titles like Phenomenal and the Treasure of Tutankhamen, the film is notable as the debut (or very close to it) directorial effort from Italian exploitation filmmaker Ruggero Deodato. Deodato is a man who has built his entire career on the shoulders of the controversy generated by his infamous cannibal gore films -- specifically Cannibal Holocaust, a film that amazes me in its ability to be simultaneously disgusting and boring, shocking and banal. Cloaked in the taboo surrounding the film's content -- Deodato was put on trial by a prosecutor who was convinced the film contained actual human snuff footage, instead of just actual animal snuff footage -- Cannibal Holocaust has passed into the rarefied airs of the best known and most infamous cult films in the world. What gets lost amid all the stone dildo rape and ass-to-mouth impaling is that stripped of these few Grand Guignol scenes of brutality, Cannibal Holocaust is a really boring film helmed by a largely pedestrian director. Hell, even with them, the movie is still kind of dull, though if nothing else, it serves as a very useful intellectual exercise for twenty year olds in film studies classes, wanting to prove how shocking yet insightful their reading of the film is. And yes, shamefully I speak from first-hand experience. Deodato's short-comings as a director are made more obvious when you have to watch one of his films that doesn't benefit from several minutes of controversial cannibal torture footage. As I am a sucker, I have seen pretty much everything he's done short of the various TV movies he directed, and then something about a washing machine full of dead people or something, and there's really only been two times that Deodato kept me entertained from start to finish. In my younger and more formative years, I admit I was a booster for films like Jungle Holocaust and even Cannibal Holocaust (actually, I admit I still sort of like Jungle Holocaust), but once the initial gee-whiz shock wears off, you're left forcing yourself through a really boring couple of movies.
Really, the only times Deodata succeeded for me was with the outlandish Raiders of Atlantis, which propels itself along under power of its own brain-twisting looniness, and Barbarians, a sword and sorcery clusterfuck that is as infamous for being idiotic as Cannibal Holocaust is for being disgusting and boring. I guess my big problem with Deodata is his need to intellectually justify the basest of his works by casting them as "cautionary tales" of the hoary old "who's the real savage?" vein. Sort of like the endless string of films that teach me heroin is bad for you, or that absolute power can corrupt you. Thanks, movie makers of the world, for these news flashes. I never would have thought to question the brutality of modern man if Deodata didn't force me to, just like I never would have dreamed that people with untold amounts of power might go mad with it until Caligula taught me otherwise. But heck, at least Caligula is funny, and it has even more film school intellectuals attempting to rationalize and justify its excesses. Even with the Deodato films I've enjoyed, it's often been despite his direction, rather than because of it. Raiders of Atlantis gets by on weirdness, and on hot pink-haired Filipino Road Warrior chicks. Barbarians gets by on the astounding yet affable ineptness of its twin bodybuilder stars. Neither of these films could ever be taken seriously -- unless you see Barbarians as a cautionary tale about letting annoying jugglers and mimes have free passage throughout your kingdom -- and that's probably what makes them tolerable Most of Deodato's other work is just as incompetent, but with the added bonus of having a pretentious moral forced in to make the film seem more palatable and smarter. Given that Phenomenal and the Treasure of Tutankhamen has the title Phenomenal and the Treasure of Tutankhamen, and given that it was a comic book movie supposedly cut from the same cloth as Diabolik and Kriminal, I expected to enjoy the hell out of it despite a rookie Deodato being behind the camera. With any luck, his penchant for making boring movies out of intriguing topics would not yet have kicked in. Alas that being boring seems to be the core competency he showed right out of the gate, and rather than ending up being cut from the same cloth as Diabolik and Kriminal, Phenomenal is more assembled as an elementary school art class project out of the scraps left over. Against all logical presumptions based on the title and the subject matter, Phenomenal and the Treasure of Tutankhamen ends up being a barely watchable bore that is notable only for its ability to turn a movie about villains trying to steal King Tut's treasures being foiled by a dude in a featureless black pantyhose mask into something fairly uninteresting.
Things start out fairly promising, as we join a drug smuggling operation already in progress. Unfortunately for our dastardly ne'r-do-wells, mysterious superhero Phenomenal has smuggled himself onto their smuggling boat, and as they approach the docks, he sets about kicking some ass. Notable is that Phenomenal, unlike most of the other fumetti heroes who made it onto the big screen, is actually a hero. Diabolik and Kriminal were thieves, and certainly not above the occasional murder. But Phenomenal is expressly on the side of the good guys, operating with the blessing -- or at least with the appreciation -- of the local police. Also notable is that Phenomenal has the lamest superhero outfit I've seen in a long time. He wears the aforementioned featureless black mask, which he somehow manages to see out of despite the lack of eyeholes, and this mask he accessorizes with...a long sleeve black t-shirt and a pair of plain black dungarees. Seriously? Diabolik took the time to buy himself all sorts of cool latex suits, and Kilink spend a whole week knitting himself skeleton themed bodystockings, and Phenomenal shows up in jeans and a turtleneck? That's like being the obnoxious kid who shows up on Halloween wearing a cardboard box and says he's a cardboard box when everyone else has awesome Frankenstein and Dracula outfits. Unfortunately, Phenomenal's lame outfit pretty much embodies the thrill level of the movie as a whole. To be fair, the opening is good stuff, and exactly what I wanted from the film. And if you, like me, enjoy it, I suggest you watch it a couple times, because that's pretty much the last you'll be seeing of Phenomenal or of action for a long time. The drug smuggling foiled, Phenomenal dives into the bay, and the plot proper kicks in. A priceless collection of treasures from the tomb of King Tut are on display at the local museum, so naturally security is skittish since every criminal gang in Europe is plotting to steal the treasures. Since, you know, that's what criminal gangs spend their time doing, rather than running prostitution and extortion rackets. Seriously, when was the last time you picked up a newspaper and read the headline, "Mafia Steals Tut's Mask! Scotland Yard Baffled!" Maybe I wouldn't have put it past John Gotti -- he liked to be flamboyant, and has a jacket made from the skin of unborn wolves (or so I was once told). But besides him, I think Tut's treasures are safe from any gangs of guys in gold chains and jogging suits. But they are not safe from big Gordon Mitchell, who leads one of the criminal gangs intent on stealing King Tut's treasures. Of course, they're not the only ones after the goods, and things are further complicated by the fact that cheap but convincing copies of the treasures were made for security reasons. Also thrown into the mix is the standard issue fu-loving, Bruce Wayne style rich guy, Count Guy Norton, played by Mauro Parenti. We are immediately lead to believe that maybe he's Phenomenal, but of course, the most obvious character is never revealed to be the masked man -- unless the film is exceptionally clever or exceptionally dumb. In the end, I'm not even sure why the film played coy with Phenomenal's identity, as it never becomes crucial to the plot, and it never manages to make the viewer give a damn one way or the other. I will say that if you do have a secret identity and a signature costume, no matter how lame, you probably shouldn't carry it folded neatly on top of everything else in your luggage when going to the airport. Most of the film revolves around Gordon Mitchell's thugs plotting to steal the treasure, getting double-crossed, and then plotting again to steal the treasure. Seriously, man, you're a super-powerful gangster. Surely you can hire better help, or I don't know. Beat up old people who run delis and make them pay you protection money. Or just open a casino. There are lots of ways for thuggish mobsters to get rich without having to concoct elaborate plans to steal stuff from natural history museums. But maybe I'm being crass and shallow, assuming that it's all about the money. Maybe it's the thrill of cat burglary, or the beauty of the objects d'art. Or maybe Gordon just wants to put on King Tut's mask and run around town making groaning noises and scaring Lou Costello and Buckwheat. I guess I can see the appeal in that.
Eventually, Phenomenal shows up to stand on the rocks along a winding country road, where he can put his arms on his hips and laugh at people. This was Kilink's specialty, but he usually followed it up by doing a plancha onto a gang of bad guys and starting a fist fight. Phenomenal is in it mostly for the standing around with arms akimbo. But at least our title character is finally back in the movie, leading us on what should be a wild chase across Europe and northern Africa as the various sides steal and re-steal the treasures. Unfortunately, by this point, the film has pretty much drained the viewer of any energy and good will at all, so the globe-trotting final half-hour fails to make up for the previous sixty minutes of uninspired tedium and long shots of Gordon Mitchell's living room. My standard disclaimer applies: I hate hating movies. Teleport City has never been about "ripping bad films a new one." I genuinely enjoy enjoying movies, and if my taste is somewhat suspect, that's really only bad for the people who read these reviews and then get fooled into thinking they want to watch Asambhav just because I liked it. And if there's anything I hate more than hating movies, its hating movies I really thought I was guaranteed to like. It never occurred to me, before viewing the film, that I would be anything but overjoyed by Phenomenal and the Treasure of Tutankhamen. So about half way through, I was more than bored; I was genuinely distraught, like something had gone horribly, horribly wrong. "No!" I yelled earnestly and confused at the television as I watched yet another scene of Gordon Mitchell sitting in a recliner. "No! You're supposed to be a great movie! Come on! Quit messing with me!" but by the time the credits rolled, I had to hang my head in sadness and admit that, despite all the rooting I'd done for it, despite the fact that I believed in it, Phenomenal and the Treasure of Tutankhamen let me down like a politician six months after getting elected on appealing campaign promises. My opinion of Deodato, already low as you know, was made even worse now that he had wandered into one of my favorite genres and stunk the joint up. But I try to be positive, and so let me first mention some of the few good things Phenomenal and the Treasure of Tutankhamen delivers. That first scene was short but cool, with Phenomenal wearing that dress sock on his head and punching out a lot of guys. The music that accompanies that scene, and plays throughout, is far better than the movie in which it appears. Bruno Nicoli was one of the stalwarts of Italian film music, and he's rarely not on top of his game, even if the movie for which he's writing music leaves a lot to be desired. And although it's too little too late, the finale is sort of fun, including a great little fight that stumbles into a women's steam room -- a scene for which there exist several stills featuring the women doing nudity. That was either done for some unseen "international" version, or purely as titillation for the promotional stills, because when the fight actually happens, the women all manage to keep their towels wrapped around them, since even a giant guy beating up a dude in black dungarees with a black toboggan pulled over his face isn't enough to make a proper lady forget her modesty. Not that gratuitous boob shots would have helped this movie -- they just wouldn't have hurt. But a couple fun fights and the coy promise of flesh aren't always enough to salvage a film, and Phenomenal and the Treasure of Tutankhamen has more problems than can be compensated for with those meager table scraps. Phenomenal himself is an obvious rip-off of Diabolik, minus the menacing cool streak, hot girlfriend, awesome lair, and cool collection of cars. Where as Diabolik makes love on a rotating bed covered in stolen hundred dollar bills, Phenomenal seems more likely to find a penny stuck to his ass after he's finished jerking off on the couch. He may stand like Diabolik, and laugh like Diabolik, and wear the Wal-Mart Halloween costume version of Diabolik's outfit, but Phenomenal is certainly no Diabolik. But that's OK since Ruggero Deodato is no Mario Bava. Phenomenal and the Treasure of Tutankhamen never achieves that phantasmagoric, sprawling, big budget feel that Diabolik managed without a big budget. Everything here feels small and uninspired.
The performances of the actors deserve a better movie. No one here is bad at all, though Gordon Mitchell does at times look like he's completely forgotten he's in a movie and is thinking about something else. Still, are you going to pick on Gordon Mitchell? He'll kick sand in your face and steal your girl, leaving you in the lurch to contemplate purchasing a "Charles Atlas Secrets of Dynamic Tension" informational package. As Count Norton, Mauro Parenti is serviceably bland. He lacks the smoldering hotness of John Phillip Law, who played Diabolik, and the impish charm of Kriminal's Glenn Saxson, but if nothing else, he's too dull to be bad. It's no big shock that he never became a big star. It's also not a big shock that he was the producer of this film, not that I'm suggesting he made this film purely as an exercise in vanity. Lucretia Love, who shows up as a love interest/possible criminal/possible good guy, is always a welcome sight, but amid a flimography that includes Battle of the Amazons, The Arena, From Istanbul: Orders to Kill, and Seven Blood-Stained Orchids, a lump of a movie like Phenomenal and the Treasure of Tutankhamen tends to just get forgotten. There are probably worse fumetti movies out there, but right now, this one is the bottom of the barrel for me. Doedato disappoints on every level and fails to deliver pretty much everything you'd want from a fumetti inspired film. It's a shame a title like Phenomenal and the Treasure of Tutankhamen was wasted on a movie that can't live up to its promise. You really shouldn't be calling yourself Phenomenal if you aren't. Labels: Action: Superheroes, Country: Italy, Eurospies, Fumetti, Year: 1968 posted by Keith at 6:17 PM | 6 Comments Sunday, November 19, 2006Aankhen Release Year: 1968Country: India Starring: Dharmendra, Mala Sinha, Mehmood, Jeevan, Nasir Hussain, Sujit Kumar, Zeb Rehman, Kumkum, Madan Puri, Sajjan, Dhumal, Lalita Pawar, Madhumati, Daisy Irani, Master Ratan. Writer: Ramanand Sagar Director: Ramanand Sagar Cinematographer: G. Singh Music: Ravi Producer: Ramanand Sagar Availability: Buy it from India Weekly. I try to spend every winter reviewing psychedelic spy films. Unfortunately, almost every year, some weird project pops up that keeps me from writing more than one or two reviews during the entire season. So I thought I'd get a jump on things this year and let you all have an early Thanksgiving treat that tastes of sweet, sweet cranberry sauce. Well, that's for Americans. United States Americans. Not Canadians or Mexicans. Or, you know, South America. The rest of you, I don't know. You can admire the pretty colors of this movie while you sit chained to your shoe-stitching machine with naught but a bowl of watery gruel beside you and a burly, Cockney foreman whipping you mercilessly. Anyway, that's how I imagine the rest of the world outside of the United States is. Well, the rest of the world except for the United States and India, where everything is all vibrantly colored and the sparkling waters of the Ganges and the Mississippi are dotted with Skittles and Chuckles and lazy-accented old riverboat gamblers watching buxom Indian gals staging lavish dance numbers in the saloon. These are things I know about the world. I also know, thanks to the 1968 Bollywood spy thriller Aankhen, that the country of Japan is full of incredibly beautiful Indian/Japanese girls wearing gigantic, floppy green sombreros.
1967 saw the release of You Only Live Twice, a James Bond movie full of hot Japanese chicks, ninjas, hollowed-out volcanoes, egg-shaped monorail pods, and Sean Connery as the world's most convincing Japanese man. The Eurospy trend was still swinging, and even Japan and Hong Kong were getting in on the fun. The result is that, soaked in the psychedelic, pop-art sensibilities of the mid-to-late sixties, the best spy movies ever were being made. Indian cinema, which has always been packed with insane set decoration, candy coloring, and fabulous outfits, would seem tailor-made to pump out more than a few eye-popping entries into the world of psychotronic spyjinks. And they didn't let us down, and 1967 also saw the release of Farz, an Indian espionage thriller that did major business at the box office. A year later, and doubtless under the influence of both Farz and You Only Live Twice, writer-director Ramanand Sagar gave us Aankhen, another great Bollywood spy film, but this time with the budget to trot the globe in classic James Bond style. Well, at least in classic Jimmy Bond style. India is besieged by terrorists. If you are guessing that the terrorists are conniving, villainous Pakistanis, then you've been paying attention. We had our Russians, and India had their Pakistanis, and both sets of stock movie villains were adept at fiendishly twirling the ends of their big Rollie Fingers mustaches whilst wearing monocles. These are the primary traits you need in your villains. If they can't twirl their handlebar mustache and if they don't wear a monocle, then what's the point of fighting them? This is the great and time-tested truism of international conflict. Look at some of our classic villains. The British? Classic handlebar mustache sporters at the time. The Germans? They practically reinvented the monocle. And have you ever seen Kaiser Wilhelm's mustache? The Japanese? Same thing. You saw that guy Bruce Lee punched through the wall and across the courtyard in Fist of Fury. Saddam Hussein? Please. The man had the most famous mustache since Hitler. The Vietnamese, you say? Well, that's right. Not big on monocles, and not big on mustaches...and look what happened!!! The war was a complete disaster. And anyway, Rambo and Strike Commando taught us that we actually spent most of the Vietnam fighting Russians anyway.
Of course, there are scattered exceptions. North Korea eschews the monocle and mustache in favor of a pompadour and senior citizen sunglasses, but don't think for a moment that Kim Jung-il, the most infamous b-movie fan in the world, doesn't have a make-up kit that contains a monocle and handlebar mustache. Where was I? Indian is besieged by terrorists, whose primary mode of operation is to stage acts of violence that will incite the Indian populace into riots against the government, who in turn will think the original violence was perpetrated by dissidents within their own society. Thus, the terrorists can limit themselves to a few surgical strikes that turn India against itself, leaving the terrorists plenty of time to recline in their sprawling underground lairs, laughing menacingly as they put their finishing touches on their spiked-wall torture chambers. But the good and righteous Indian people aren't going to stand by and let their country be torn asunder. Knowing that the government is simply stretched too thin to effectively deal with so insidious an enemy, groups of private citizens have formed their own counter-terrorism and spy rings. One such group is headed up by Major Saab (Nasir Hussain, the police commissioner from the opulent 1967 Dev Anand heist film Jewel Thief), who has a giant global radio system hidden behind a revolving bookcase, which makes marginal sense at best since every time someone calls him on it, the set makes a deafening beeping noise that can be heard seemingly throughout the entire house. The major's star operative is the dashing young Sunil, played by soon-to-be superstar Dharmendra. Since as of this review I'm still very early into my schooling on all things Bollywood from the sixties and seventies, I'd never seen a Dharmendra film before this one. Yet still he looked familiar. I assumed it was because I just saw his picture all the time in other reviews. Then I realized he looks familiar because he looks just like eighties-nineties action star Sonny Deol. And why does he look like Sonny Deol? Probably because he's Sonny's father.
Which is pretty good stuff, since Sonny spent most of the nineties fighting evil, mustache-twirling terrorists from Pakistan. Sunil is the son of India's number one spy and great hero of the war, and as such, he has a lot to live up to. Not that this is a movie about the son trying to emerge from the shadow of a larger-than-life father. I'm sure you can get that in other Indian films, but the tone of this one is basically, "Sunil's dad was a total bad-ass, and so is Sunil." Sunil also spent time in Japan, ostensibly studying to become to a judo master, though we never see anything of his training. I always thought that becoming a master of any martial art demanded that you train twenty hours a day and spend the other four sitting shirtless underneath a waterfall, but Sunil seems to spend most of his training time joyriding around Japan as part of various tourist groups. This gives the movie an opportunity to do two important things: show off lots of travelogue footage of Japanese locations (and I assume Japan was chosen because of You Only Live Twice) and allow for Sunil to meet the unspeakably gorgeous Meenakshi (Mala Sinha, who was actually the top billed star for the film since Dharmendra was still something of an unproven commodity as a leading man). Meenakshi happens to be half-Japanese, half-Indian, with a perfect command of Hindi. It seems pretty unlikely that a suave Indian spy could run into what must be the one Japanese-Indian girl living in Japan, but this is a spy film. Meenakshi falls instantly in love with Sunil, because that's how Bollywood rolls, and in a change of pace, it's she who relentlessly pursues the coy object of her affection through a musical number which showcases one of the worst ensembles any woman in a Bollywood film has ever worn.
Now let's get a few things on the table. First, there is no shortage of mind-blowingly atrocious costuming in Bollywood. However, most of it is so insanely over-the-top that even the absolute worst take on a sort of sublime transcendence and become wonders to behold. And actress Mala Sinha is without a doubt one of the most beautiful and charming women ever to grace an Indian film. She's got a killer smile and a unique look, and if you let yourself go, she's even convincing in her role here as half-Japanese, at least more so than Sean Connery. For the most part, her costumes in this film are as gorgeous as the woman wearing them. For the most part. And then there's the giant floppy green sombrero. I can almost always see what the costume designer was thinking, even when they made what I feel is a bad decision. But I am utterly baffled by the thought process that decided a half-Japanese, half-Indian beauty living in Tokyo would be partial to canary yellow Capris and a huge, bright green sombrero. I'll let pictures of the ensemble speak for themselves. I guess Japan has always been the global capital of gloriously idiotic fashion. I imagine that before she got mixed up with Sunil, Meenakshi spent most of her time hanging out in Harajuku, showing off her sombrero-and-toreador-pants outfit and posing for photos with flabbergasted sightseers while gothic-lolitas in amusing micro-sized tophats pouted and stoodd pigeon-toed waiting for attention to shift to them. Sorry girls, but your little derbys and poor posture just can't compete with a beaming, singing, dancing Indian girl in skintight, yellow bullfighter pants and a gigantic, kelly green sombrero. Come back in thirty years, and you and your lace funerary veil will have your chance.
When jumping out the bushes in said outfit and busting out in song doesn't frighten Sunil away permanently, and when he performs admirably in a scintillating paddle boat chase (at least they weren't in giant swans), she decides he is definitely the man for her. And although Sunil seems interested in this possibly batshit crazy beauty, he's also hesitant to commit since he walks a dangerous path that "rubs hard on death." And so he must spurn her advances and the charming things she does, like stealing his mail and reading all his personal correspondence ("Who taught you how to spy?" the spy asks. "Love!" the insane woman responds back with giddy glee), and return to India, for news comes that his brother has been killed while trying to bust up a weapons smuggling ring that's been shipping guns and explosives from Beirut to India. So Sunil and the movie jet off to Beirut, where Sunil will be meeting both with Indian patriot Mehmood (played by a guy named Mehmood, which is convenient) and a spy ring currently operating under the guise of a traveling cabaret dance troupe -- because what else would spies in a Bollywood film travel as? Every American female spy must go undercover as a prostitute, and every Bollywood female spy must go undercover as a nightclub dancer. And it turns out that the leader of the dance troupe/espionage ring is India's top female operative -- Meenakshi! So it wasn't love at all that taught her how to spy! Sunil soon learns that Mehmood may be a rat, in league with a beautiful princess, but that hot Algerian princesses can be swayed from their evil ways by the swaggering coolness of a manly spy. Meanwhile, because Bollywood films are full of meanwhiles, the dastardly terrorists are strolling about in their secret underground lair and making plans to cause all sorts of havoc. And to make matters more complicated, they kidnap Major Saab's nephew, or something. It's some creepy little kid who spends the whole movie goose-stepping around either in an Indian military uniform or dressed as a Roman Centurion. When the villains put him in one of those rooms where spiked walls close in on you, it's sort of hard to blame them. The kid creeps me out.
As is often the case, Aankhen is a pretty straight-forward film padded out with musical numbers and a multitude of subplots, all of which are pretty good. Aankhen is slower and less over-the-top than later spy films, like the Great Gambler or Shaan, but it's still chocked full of all the great stuff I demand from a superior spy film. There are more secret passages and trap doors than I can keep track of; there are hidden cameras, hidden transmitters, underground lairs, quick-change disguise kits, fist fights, machine gun fights, femme fatale princesses, swank nightclubs, scantily clad dancing girls, and guys in slim-cut suits and Wayfarer sunglasses punching each other in the face. There's boat chases and car chases and guys dressed as Arabs. There's gorgeous travelogue footage of Japan and Beirut from back when Beirut was actually the swinging, hip, liberal capitol of the Middle East. And of course, there's a villain with a monocle, and he puts a little kid dressed as a Roman soldier into one of those spiked-wall- chambers. Everything drips with that highly stylized pop-art look that defined sixties spy films.
Although they put a lot of money into this film, there are still some pretty noticeable short-comings. Or maybe I'm mistaken, and these are actually clever spy gadgets. Like the opening scene, where a terrorist is able to detonate a cache of dynamite using nothing but a bicycle tire pump. Perfect! The Indians will never suspect a thing! Or there's the magic guns that don't even have to be fired. You just sort of shake them as if in pantomime of them firing because you couldn't afford blanks, and even though there is no smoke or muzzle flash, guys still fall down dead. Pretty cool, huh? And these guns shoot high-tech bullets that are able to wound you without actually putting holes in your fab 60s spy film outfits.
There are also a couple things that set Aankhen apart from other spy films of the period as well as from other Bollywood films in general. For starters, most spy films played it tongue-in-cheek. Politics almost never entered into the picture. Sure, James Bond may have been fighting the Russians, but he wasn't really fighting the Russians. You didn't go to a James Bond film to get all worked up about hating the Soviet Union. In fact, real-world politics were nothing but window dressing for an espionage fantasy world, so much so that the Bond movies quickly dropped SMERSH and the Russians as their primary villains and relied on the shady comic-book style secret society SPECTRE for its go-to villainy. The European Bond knock-offs were even more fantastic and less concerned with serious politics. They were escapist adventure, set against the backdrop of the Cold War, but not reflective of any sort of reality and not really concerned with communicating any sort of meaning other than, "Drinking a martini while wearing a tuxedo looks cool." Aankhen on the other hand, takes its central patriotic politics very seriously. The action is punctuated by public service announcements about the righteousness of fighting for the glory of Mother Hindustani. They're never so ham-handed and heavy as they would get in the eighties and nineties, both in India and the United States (why did we really ever take Red Dawn seriously -- I mean, Cubans invading Colorado???), but they're still far more serious about it than, say, Derek Flint films were about teaching us the evils of Communism and the deliciousness of Communist ballet stars. Lucky for me, whatever patriotic bravado may be present may be serious, but it also seems mostly like last-minute lip service, the heroic justification before we get back to guys in sheik robes shooting at each other with machine guns.
Something else that sets Aankhen apart from other Bollywood films is female lead Mala Sinha. Not only is she willing to wear the green sombrero, she also splits her time between shouldering the bulk of the movie's musical numbers and gunning down evil spies. Bollywood women -- and let's face it, women in cinema from all over the world -- were still spending most of their time in action films waiting to be rescued by the hero. Not Mala's Meenakshi, though. She's slinking about in a cocktail dress in one scene, then prowling about the ruins with a machine gun in the next. She's the leader of the spy ring. She's the one that does the romantic stalking. And although the day is inevitably going to be saved by Sunil, it's nice to see Mala Sinha busting out the competent woman action chops years before Zeenat Aman became the poster girl for such independent women. Her romantic obsession might be a bit melodramatic, but that's just the style of these movies. It doesn't detract from the fact that she's a character who manages to be both believably feminine and a gun-toting, Capri-pant-wearing ass-kicker, rather than being either the damsel in distress (that role is reserved for Sunil's sister, who is the mother of the kidnapped kid), the saintly mother, or the butch femme fatale. Mala (who I believe was Nepalese, or Nepalese-Indian mix) was famous, however, for both being one of the first actresses to demand more from a female character than being window dressing, and for showing a keen interest in using the fame that came her way to help launch the careers of young up-and-commers -- like her co-star here. Starring opposite Mala is Dharmendra, still early in his career. It's remarkable how similar he and Sonny are, not just in appearance. They're both fighting the Pakistanis (although this movie only ever refers to them as "our enemies to the north"). They both handle the action well and can't dance worth a damn. Owing to the fact that Dharmendra got to make this movie in 1967, he's infinitely swanker than his son would ever be, saddled as he was with bad eighties and nineties fashion -- the "casual Friday" look having infected everything from Bollywood to James Bond during that era (Oh, Timothy Dalton -- are you wearing a members Only jacket???). Sunil looks every bit the dashing, globe-trotting spy in his array of suits and sunglasses. H's never quite as cool as Bond, but who was other than Derek Flint and Diabolik? Dharmendra turns in a credible performance, handling himself well in the movie's action scenes as well as during its swinging romantic interludes.
The rest of the cast performs admirably as well, and everyone dresses fabulously, except for when they're in disguise, as the disguises are either the aforementioned sheik robes or Sunil's two choice disguises -- the crazy fakir and the Turk in a loud blazer. The villain is absurdly, gloriously evil, and spends the whole movie laughing in an evil fashion while wearing a monocle. He gives a classic arch-villain speech about evil during the final self-destruct countdown. Zeb Rehman, who stars as the evil princess Zehnab, didn't have much a film career, and though her role here as the femme fatale who is redeemed by the coolness of the hero is relatively small and unchallenging, she's still memorable because, well...OK, the woman is just really, really sexy. OK, so let's review. Suave hero. Hot dames. Villain with a monocle. Kid in a spike chamber. Good action scenes. Exotic, globe-trotting locations. Cool outfits. Big green sombrero. What's left? Oh yeah, the musical numbers, most of which are staged by Mala and/or her troupe of spy-dancers. Rather on the sexy side, if I do say so myself. One of the numbers involves Sunil's sister singing to Krishna to save her missing son. Could have done without that one, really. But the number with Mala and her troupe dressed up as belly dancers makes up for just about anything that smacks of religious piety. The songs themselves are performed by the big names of the time: Mohammed Rafi, Lata Mangeshkar, and Asha Bhosle. They're all pretty good, and the background score is a swinging combination of orchestration, cocktail jazz, and twanging guitar spy music.
At 177 minutes (nothing out of the ordinary for a Bollywood film), the film may meander a bit too much for some viewers. I thought it was great, and entertaining throughout. Even with the breaks for filler and a woman on her knees singing to Krishna, we still get a film that fills most of its running time with sneaking about, secret chambers, spying, and gun fights. It was a big budget production for Bollywood at the time, and they make sure every penny shows up on the screen. I mean, we're not talking a Ken Adams hollowed-out volcano or anything, but the film is at least as slick and jet-set looking as your higher echelon of Matt Helm or Eurospy films, and the combination of typically overblown Bollywood opulence with psychedelic sixties pop-art is a sure-win situation. Aankhen doesn't do anything out of the ordinary, but it executes the sixties spies formula with panache and energy. It's not quite as deliriously cracked as I had hoped, but it was still pretty damn fun. I had a lot of expectations regarding what a swingin' sixties spy film from Bollywood should be, and Aankhen satisfied me on pretty much every level. Labels: Bollywood, Espionage, Musicals, Stars: Dharmendra, Year: 1968 posted by Keith at 6:23 PM | 5 Comments Monday, December 13, 2004Danger! Diabolik
1968, Italy. Starring John Phillip Law, Marisa Mell, Michel Piccoli, Adolfo Celi, Claudio Gora, Mario Donen. Directed by Mario Bava. Available on DVD (Amazon).
This lavishly colorful and thoroughly enjoyable comic book romp features what is without a doubt one of the swankest moments in all of cinema, if not the swankest. Having just completed a major heist, our cool-as-liquid-nitrogen anti-hero, Diabolik, returns to his sprawling, space-age underground lair full of cool mod furnishings, where he and his staggeringly beautiful girlfriend, Eva, proceed to make love on a gigantic rotating bed covered in piles upon piles of the money he's just stolen. When I was young, and even not so very long ago, I always looked at this moment as the goal to which all men should aspire. Our lives should be like this, lived with ferocity and daring, panache and style, sexiness and suaveness. I swore, on that day, that I would work tirelessly toward such a destiny, never resting until I, too, could collapse into my rotating bed covered in cash and roll about with the woman of my dreams. As it stands right now, rather than going out drinking with socialites, rubbing elbows with countesses, and dancing the night away in a fancy club before stepping out to steal priceless emeralds and sapphires (I always preferred those stones to diamonds), I spent the evening sitting at home drinking bourbon, watching Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and cutting out little color cover printouts for all the VHS tapes I'm finally converting to DVD-R in the name of conserving precious space in my ever-shrinking Brooklyn apartment. Diabolik would weep for me, or rather; he would slap me and laugh heartily before bounding off to live his dreamlike, lusty life of adventure and romance. Make no mistake about it. Though I may dress better than many of my fellow movie website masters and perhaps be in slightly better physical condition (though tonight's dinner of bourbon and cake could put an end to that), I'm still pathetic in my own special, desperately lonely way. I mean, I don't even have a hundred Friendsters yet. Granted, Diabolik would look at the whole Friendster thing and shake his head in amused disbelief as he hopped in his Jag to go punch a criminal kingpin then make sweet love to his woman all night long. The 1960s were defined by different things to different people, and while some saw the paramount of the decade as a bunch of scruffy hippies wallowing in the mud for a few days in upstate New York, I always looked at the defining moments of the decade as the films Barbarella and Danger! Diabolik. That or the violence at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Or, um, the start of American involvement in the Vietnam War. Or the Bay of Pigs. Or maybe the assassination of the Kennedy Brothers and Martin Luther King, Jr. Or the arrival of The Beatles. No, it was Barbarella and Diabolik, if for no other reason than they were the exclamation points at the end of an era of which I am particularly fond, that being the carefree Swingin' Sixties that brought the world pop art, slim mod suits, mini-skirts, go-go boots, lots of spy films, and that cute pixie haircut sported by Twiggy. Although born a shade too late to enjoy the proceedings, it's the time with which I most closely identify and still attempt to recreate in my own impoverished and pathetically undaring way. With the escalation of the war in Vietnam and ensuing civil unrest and violence, not to mention the whole hippie movement destroying any vestige of standards in the realm of courtesy, manners, social grace, and dress, there was really no way the swingin' era could survive. Being care-free was taboo, even though hippies tended to spend a large amount of time smoking pot, dropping acid, and staring at their hands. Likewise, adhering to a uniform anti-code of dress became the standard. I won't argue that increased social awareness is a boon to an individual, though I would argue against anyone who claims those who defined the latter portion of the 1960s were any more politically aware than those who came before them who were seen as shallow because they enjoyed go-go dancing more than that weird wavy-hand dance. I know many of you enjoy the ultra-casual, anything-goes world in which we live thanks in part to our hippie forefathers, but I can't count myself among you. I don't wear a shirt and tie because I have to; I wear one because I want to. I like it. It's comfortable to me. Granted, I didn't always hold this sentiment, and there was a time when I could deliver a wild-eyed sermon against the chains of suit and tie oppression as well as any other young punk rocker. But as you get older and start having more important things about which to worry, such as how you're going to get that rotating bed covered in money and a delicious European blonde to accessorize it, you realize that punk, casual - everything is as much a fashion uniform as anything else, and there really is no sin in putting a little effort into things. The only sin, really, is in wearing pleated, relaxed-fit Dockers. The mod era was on its way out, and what better way to send it off than with a duo of eye-popping, self-indulgent, cinematic flings? In 1968, director Roger Vadim gave the world a zero-G striptease by his then-wife Jane Fonda, who was without a doubt in her prime as far as bombshell status is concerned. Dino De Laurentiis, famous for throwing big-budgets and low-budget genre ideas, produced this phantasmagoric, Technicolor acid trip adapted from a French comic strip about a sexy space agent plying the galaxy in search of missing scientists and lustful encounters. It was such a hoot that De Laurentiis decided more of the same would be in order. Again he turned to European comic strips for his source material, this time setting his sights on Diabolik, the ongoing saga of a master criminal who confounds both the police and the established criminal underworld. On paper, it was supposed to be a spiritual if not narrative follow-up to Barbarella. De Laurentiis snagged Mario Bava to direct, and it couldn't have been a better choice. Since his first film in color, Bava had been a mater at playing with light and creating surreal atmospheres even on the tiniest of budgets. Films like Blood and Black Lace (1964), Planet of the Vampires (1965) and Kill, Baby...Kill! (1966) continue to influence films to this day for their bold, convention-bucking use of color and lighting, not to mention violence. With Diabolik, Bava would be allowed to indulge his sweet tooth for candy colored psychedelia equipped with a budget that dwarfed anything with which he'd previously been supplied. Not that the bigger budget mattered to him. In fact, though De Laurentiis granted Bava some $3 million for the film. Bava brought it in right around $400,000, though you'd never know it. The film looks like he spent the full budget, and one can only imagine how out-of-this-world it would have been had Bava not been so conditioned to make the most of every single cent - or lira, or whatever currency applied. French star Jean Sorel (Short Night of Glass Dolls, Lucio Fulci's One on Top of the Other) was slated to portray the suave super-villain/anti-hero Diabolik, while the beautiful Catherine Deneuve (Indochine) was to star as his partner and lover, Eva. Mere days into the production, however, Bava determined that Sorel simply wasn't right for the part, and he was replaced by John Phillip Law, who had starred as the blind angel Pygar in Barbarella and would go on to appear as Sinbad in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. Law was a jaw-dropping hunk with phenomenal good looks, but he was never the greatest actor on the block. Still since the idea behind Diabolik was not style over substance but rather, as with Barbarella, style as substance, he fit the bill perfectly and certainly looks the part. His reserved - some would say wooden - acting style clicks nicely with the character. Casting woes continued, however, as Deneuve refused to do the nudity required for the aforementioned "making love on a pile of money" scene. Bava had always thought more of concealing than revealing, and while there is certainly plenty of flesh both male and female on display in the scene, there is no actual nudity per se, as in no one sees the earth-shatteringly taboo bare bottom or nipple. All the strategic areas were suitable strategically covered by piles of money. But the scene had to be shot with both actors in the buff, and Deneuve balked. She was quickly and, for us viewers, blessedly replaced by European starlet Marisa Mell. Mell is every bit Law's physical match. A beauty so great as to cause men to drop tot heir knees and weep, she ranks right alongside some of the all-time most beautiful women to ever grace the screen, which is a list that for my money is topped by Nicole Kidman and also includes Halle Berry, Maggie Cheung, Sylvia Koscina, and Kim Novack. As the sophisticated and liberated sidekick to the devil-may-care Diabolik, I can imagine no one else better than Marisa Mell. A serious auto accident in 1963 had left her partially disfigured, and after years of rehabilitation and reconstructive surgery, she emerged looking like some incredible kind of goddess, with the only lingering side effect of her accident being a quirky upturn at the side of her mouth which, just about everyone agrees, amplifies her beauty tenfold. It is most unfortunate that her life would take a drastic downturn not too long after this film. She was relegated to B and C-movie status, then more or less forgotten, making ends meet by posing in a nudie mag and reading poetry to try and supplement what was, by most accounts, rather a wild lifestyle. In the end, Marisa Mell died from cancer in 1992, relatively penniless. A melancholy note, but still she exists on screen in this movie as one of the great and timeless images of grace and beauty. It is that way that I think she is best remembered, as a stunning woman with an impish and playful curl to her lip. For the roll of Diabolik's foils on both sides of the law, Bava had experienced French actor Michel Piccoli as the dogged Inspector Ginco, and the robust Adolfo Celi, still relatively fresh off his memorable turn as the vastly enjoyable villain Emilio Largo in the James Bond film, Thunderball (1965), as the flamboyant Mafia boss, Valmont. It was as solid a cast of character actors as Bava had ever had. He plucks them down into a world that isn't quite real. One of Bava's great strengths, and the element that perhaps made his horror films so successfully eerie, is his ability to warp the familiar, to twist the mundane into something foreign and menacing. Here, he's pulling the same stunt, but purely for laughs. The world of Diabolik is not the world in which we live, though it bears a striking resemblance. It is, instead, a campy pop-art extraction. Money is transported in bags marked with huge dollar signs on the front. Stylistically, it has the most in common with Bava's previous Blood and Black Lace and forthcoming Five Dolls for an August Moon and Four Times that Night, both of which revel in trippy modernist fashion and psychedelic over-indulgence. It wouldn't be surprising to see the characters from any one of those movies show up in the other, though Diabolik is, in my opinion the most realized stylistically and conceptually. It is Bava at his most impish and playful. The story, as stated earlier, was adapted from a long-running European comic strip, or fumetti. Although I'll admit to being a comic book reader in my youth, with intellectual fare like G.I. Joe and the ten thousand or so Spider Man titles that littered the 1980s being at the top of the list, I don't really count myself among the legion of comic book fans. I have no interest in them now, and even the ones that people insist I'll like because they're intelligent and mature, leave me cold and a bit disappointed. Even the ones where people tell me, "no, this one is different," still fall flat. It's not that I deny their power or their artistic merit, even if I find some of the obtuse attempts to appear more "adult" by adding more violence, sex, and cussing, to be monumentally tedious. There are, to be sure, plenty of superbly written comics out there, and none of them appeal to me. Not the big names, not the plucky little independents. It's just a matter of taste, and since my taste in literature these days consists primarily of travel essays, Tony Hillerman Joe Leaphorn/Jim Chee mysteries, and old espionage novels from the 1960s, I'm hardly one to pass judgment on anyone else's reading material, though I am finally getting around to reading John Dos Passos' American trilogy, which I suppose is something every American ought to do. One of my goals for the current phase of my life, after all, is to finish up the many classics and essentials I missed during high school, college, and those heady post-college years when I spent too much time watching pro wrestling. That said, these European comic strips from the 1960s seem like they would have been a lot of fun. Considering they birthed such chain-smoking, sexy anti-heroes as Diabolik, Barbarella, and Modesty Blaise, all clad in skintight fetish gear. Well, I guess that last one is pretty common, actually. Having never read any of the original Diabolik comic strips, but having at least glanced over some English-language plot summaries, I don't think the storyline for the movie is lifted from any single episode, though bits and pieces may have come from all over the comics. The main characters certainly come from the comic strip, and here we get to watch them as Diabolik goes through a series of heists that get him on the bad side of both the police and the old crime syndicates - the establishment, basically. Chief of police Ginco sets a number of traps for Diabolik, but each time Diabolik outsmarts the inspector and makes his getaway with the loot. When one of his heists angers crime lord Valmont, Ginco hatches an unholy alliance with the mob to finally catch this thorn in both their sides. Each heist is more or less a little self-contained episode building toward Ginco's plan to melt down the whole of France's gold reserve in order to lure Diabolik into a trap. The heists are exciting and outlandish, this again being a fantasy world in which the standard laws of common sense and logic do not apply. In his quest to steal a priceless jeweled necklace, Diabolik defeats the inspector's trap by pulling the ol' "stick a photo in front of the security camera" gag. He later smuggles the jewels to safety by fashioning them into bullets, using them to kill an opponent, then posing as said opponent's relative to collect the jewels after cremation. Obviously, there are some logistical problems with this plan, not the least of which would be fitting jewels into a revolver, but this is a comic book world. We're not meant to take anything seriously or worry about realism. This is part of the reason it's also easy to accept Diabolik as the hero of the story even though he is, without a doubt, a villain. He kills cops. Not corrupt cops, but regular guys just doing their job. He has no concern for anyone but himself and his one true love, Eva. When he dynamites the nation's tax records, he doesn't do it out of any sense of Robin Hood-esque duty to the poor and oppressed masses. He simply wants to screw with The Man -- which leads to one of the film's funnier moments, in which the Minister of Finances makes a public plea to all the outstanding citizens to come forward and voluntarily pay the taxes they owe. Comedic touches like this, along with the purposeful disregard for realism, keep the movie light-hearted and chipper even when our main character is committing acts of a most heinous nature. It's not that Diabolik is immoral, however. If anything, he is adamantly amoral, completely rejecting the standards by which society judges the concepts of good and evil. He's not an evil person. In fact, he's quite likeable, almost childlike, even when he's clad in a skintight white leather outfit and scaling a castle wall to rip someone off. At his heart, he is 1968. He is the social upheaval, the youthful rebellion that was engulfing countries across the globe. It's no coincidence that the two forces most opposed to him are established law and established crime - two sides of a coin in which Diabolik sees no difference. They are the old guards; the outdated, out-of-touch generation whose lack of modern sophistication and intelligence is best exemplified by the fact that Valmont's gangsters dress anachronistically, looking like something out of a 1930s mob movie. They don't understand Diabolik's approach to crime, his use of modern technology and embracing of modern ideals. Likewise, on the other side of the coin is Inspector Ginco, a man who seems to respect Diabolik in a way, just as Diabolik respects him. In fact, it's possible that Ginco could catch Diabolik, best him, if only the inspector could break away from the established way of thinking. Unfortunately, he is a man too mired in the old ways, and thus destined to be one step behind Diabolik. If only he could escape the constant supervision and micro managing of the bureaucrats, Ginco could make real progress. In a way, Ginco must envy Diabolik his freedom of thought. It is in this way, more than through the story itself, that Diabolik achieves the depth so many people seem to claim it lacks. It is a tale of a super criminal versus the cops on one level, but on a deeper level, it is a tale of the generation gap, of the culture conflict between young and old that characterized the late 1960s. Diabolik and Eva are the new way, feared and misunderstood by their elders. They are the iconoclasts, perhaps more symbols than actual people, as is Valmont. Ginco is the man in the middle, who knows things and times must change, but not by the methods employed by the amoral and self-serving Diabolik. He is, despite being the supporting character and foil to Diabolik, the most sympathetic and human of all the characters. He is, in effect, most of us, dissatisfied with the establishment but still committed to some sense of orderly progression and society. The relationship between Eva and Diabolik is further example of the film's hidden but most definitely present depth. They are in love, deeply and passionately. Ginco seems to forego romance in favor of duty, and Valmont can see women as nothing more than playthings. But Eva and Diabolik are liberated and modern. They are sexually attractive and have an insatiable appetite for one another, but they are also in love. Diabolik steals for Eva, but Eva does not stay with him because he steals; she stays because she loves him. Stealing is simply what they do, a game, and an amusement. Another way for them to thumb their noses at the generation that does not understand them. Their relationship is strong, and they are willing to sacrifice for one another. In the face of a world that wants to rub them out, they always have each other. Sometimes, they have each other on a rotating bed covered in money. So Diabolik is not an example of style over substance as much as it is an example of style as substance. The mod, liberated, pop art lifestyle of Eva and Diabolik is a stark contrast to the buttoned-up, confining world inhabited by Ginco and Valmont. Not that the style lets itself be overshadowed by the substance. They walk arm in arm, and even if you disregard anything Diabolik might have to say, there's no denying it's look. That Mario Bava pulled this off on a miniscule budget is staggering. With the possible exception of Barbarella and some of the wilder Bond adventures from the 1960s, few films look as sleek and sophisticated as Diabolik. The fashion is impeccable, and for a man like me who has endless admiration for the mod styles of the 1960s, it's like some crazy kind of dream come true. Every outfit donned by Marisa Mell is gorgeous enough to make you cry, especially when it's draped upon someone as beautiful as she was. Likewise, Diabolik's fetishistic head-to-toe leather outfits are beautiful, leaving as they do only John Phillip Law's intense and deep eyes visible. Their underground lair is a sight to behold, as are the old Jags they both drive. I love me a good Aston-Martin, but if I had to chose, I'd go for a 60's Jag. They're just about the coolest cars ever manufactured - taking nothing away, of course, from my dust-and-road-salt-streaked black Honda Accord. Diabolik is, indeed, a mod man's dream, even more so than the more outlandish Barbarella. After all, someone out on the town dressed as Barbarella would turn heads but ultimately look just kind of silly; someone out dressed in the mod fashions displayed by Marisa Mell would simply look breathtaking. This isn't the type of film where you fret over the details, and if you do, you're just going to miss the point. Like I said, it exists in a fictitious comic book world. It's not meant to be any more realistic than any other superhero/villain movie or comic book. What does count is the pace of the story, and Bava keeps things moving along at a fair clip. It's not an action-packed movie, not by today's standards where something big must explode every ten minutes in between a sequence involving bikini girls freak dancing. But it is expertly and briskly paced, with a light-hearted tone that keeps you from worrying too much about the fact that the man we're supposed to love is a murderer and a thief. Ultimately, of course, Diabolik is a criminal and must pay for his crimes. The film's ending is vague in its resolution but absolutely fitting. Ginco must prevail, after all. The exuberance and reckless abandon of youth must be tamed. And so we are left with Diabolik encased in a coffin forged out of his own greed, a gold plating from which he cannot escape. Or can he? We'll never really know. De Laurentiis was so pleased with the fact that Bava brought the movie in $2.6 million under its $3 million budget that he practically begged for a sequel. Unfortunately, the reportedly mild-mannered Bava could not bear the oppressive and often dictatorial producer, so no sequel ever came about. We are left, then, with the final shot of Diabolik imprisoned by his own greed, laughing either slyly or maniacally, protected by his special suit from the molten gold but unable, as far as we can tell, to escape. His rebellion, after all, was not perfect. And while the establishment is able, at least for the time being, to contain Diabolik and his socially challenging threat, while they may suppress it, it's unclear as to how long that will be the case. It could always resurface. It is a beautiful tongue-in-cheek ending, one that even works quite cleverly in conjunction with the fate of Valmont, who finds eventually himself on the more fatal and literal end of greed. Although it would seem, at first, to be a major departure from Bava's greater body of work, most of which up to the point had been gothic horror and giallo, Diabolik still manages to cover most of the director's pet themes and thus fits quite perfectly into his oeuvre. Diabolik is an outsider who rejects what those around him see as established common sense. Appearances are, as always, deceiving at their very best. Diabolik's use of disguises and his foiling of Ginco's trap by using a photograph of an empty, peaceful room are the most obvious examples. And like most of Bava's anti-heroes, Diabolik eventually gets his comeuppance. For my money, Diabolik is an unabashed success on all levels. The art design is without parallel. The script is crisp, witty, and fast-paced. The universe Bava creates is wild and enjoyable. And the performances - yes, even John Phillip Law's - are wonderful. It is the ultimate super-villain movie, with a villain so charismatic that you forget he isn't the hero. Campy, clever, and never taking itself as seriously as some dim-witted critics seem to think it does, Diabolik is one of the best, if not the best, European comic book/fantasy/sci-fi films, not to mention of the most breathlessly beautiful and fun films of the 1960s. Labels: Action: Superheroes, Director: Mario Bava, Espionage, Eurospies, Year: 1968 posted by Keith at 6:20 PM | 1 Comments Sunday, September 12, 2004Dracula Has Risen from the Grave
1968, England. Starring Christopher Lee, Rupert Davies, Veronica Carlson, Barbara Ewing, Barry Andrews, Ewan Hooper, Marion Mathie, Michael Ripper. Directed by Freddie Francis. Available on DVD (Amazon).
When a creature is so vile, so evil, so much an affront to the nature of the world and of God himself as is the vampire Count Dracula, there is no easy way to destroy him and keep him down. So it is that in every episode of man's struggle against this infernal prince of darkness, we mortals seem to succeed in wholly destroying this spawn of Satan only to see him find some way to cheat death yet again, as he has for so many centuries now, so that he may once again rise up and cast his long shadow of terror and bloodshed across the countryside. It seems this notorious bloodsucker has any number of ways he can reverse the effects of his apparent destruction, but the most powerful one by far is making certain that his movie provide bushel baskets full of money for the producers. With the power to produce so much green, it was a given that Hammer Studio's Dracula would find a way to resurrect himself after being trapped under the ice at the end of Dracula, Prince of Darkness. Death by running water seemed a more easily circumvented fate than actor Christopher Lee's emphatic statements regarding his unwillingness to portray the caped one again. Lee made a big name for himself with his turn as the undead ghoul in Hammer's ground-breaking Horror of Dracula, but he was determined that the name he made wouldn't be Dracula. So he bowed out of the sequel, Brides of Dracula, and didn't return to the role until he was comfortable that he'd established himself as something more than the vampire count. But 1967's Dracula, Prince of Darkness proved that audiences were still bloodthirsty not just for Dracula, but for Christopher Lee as Dracula. That people were so quick to revert to identifying him solely with Dracula made Lee squeamish about reprising the role yet again, though the outstanding success of Prince of Darkness meant that Hammer could hardly pass on making another film. So would begin a long and sometimes irritating cycle of Christopher Lee making a Dracula movie for Hammer, complaining about what crap the film was and how he would absolutely never, ever do it again, then appearing in Hammer's next Dracula film a year later. Although Lee did have his viable points for being dissatisfied with the role - chief among them that it grew increasingly unlike anything portrayed in the original Bram Stoker novel - in the end his continuous complaining coupled with the fact that he'd always show up to do another one "under protest" kind of makes you want to tell Christopher Lee to shut the hell up. Hey, I like me the Christopher Lee, but it's not like the man built for himself some legacy of impeccable artistic integrity. He did show up in Chuck Norris films and other things far worse than even the least of his Hammer Dracula films. But that's Christopher Lee for you. Sometimes he's just a bit of a blowhard, but that doesn't make his turn in these films any less enjoyable. So obviously, despite Lee's public bellyaching, Hammer managed to sign him on for a sequel to Prince of Darkness. There was really no reason to tinker with a winning formula, and so they figured they might as well bring back Terence Fisher to direct and Jimmy Sangster to do the screenplay. Things didn't quite work out that way though, and when Fisher was injured in an auto accident, Hammer turned to Freddie Francis to fulfill the directorial duties. Additionally, Anthony Hinds ended up writing the screenplay (under his frequent pseudonym of John Elder). As good as the Sangster-Fisher team was, there was nothing to mourn in having Francis and Hinds working on the picture. Both were solid company men with a lot of good work to their credit. In fact, Freddie Francis' tendency to experiment more with dreamlike, experimental set-ups would be a nice change from Fisher's meticulous concentration on realism and detail. The film lets you know right away that it isn't going to mess around, although this warning turns out to be a bit of a fib since the movie does end up messing around a bit. But we begin with one of the finest opening sequences Hammer would devise for a Dracula movie, as a young boy goes to fulfill his duty as the local church's bell ringer only to find the corpse of a young woman - drained completely of blood - dangling inside the bell. It's a fantastic image in a film whose main strength is going to be in its imagery. This all occurs, we are lead to understand, sometime during the events depicted in Prince of Darkness. The film then picks up some months after that one ends, with the local priest a hopeless drunk and the church abandoned. When a loudmouth, obnoxious monsignor rides into town, he berates everyone for still being afraid of Dracula even though he was indisputably destroyed by that rifle-toting monk in Prince of Darkness. To prove his point, the Monsignor insists on dragging the parish priest up to Dracula's now-vacant castle to exorcise the grounds and scatter assorted religious iconography about the place. Unfortunately, while he's doing this, the drunken depressed priest takes a tumble off a ledge and cracks open his head right on top of the ice beneath which lies the perfectly preserved corpse of Dracula. As blood from the priest's head trickles through cracks in the ice, it touches Dracula's lips and, well, there you go. Instant vampire resurrection. This process of reviving the count seems a little, you know, unimaginative. Last time, someone had to be strung above his ashes and completely gutted before Dracula was revived, but this time it just takes a couple drops of blood and a convenient ignoring of the fact that, blood of a disillusioned priest or not, Dracula was still trapped beneath running water and should have just died again instead of being able to burst forth from his icy tomb to wreak terrible vengeance upon the world. This method of bringing Dracula back would, however, look positively inspired by the time the series got to Scars of Dracula, where the count is brought back to un-life when a random rubber bat flies into his crypt and drools some blood on him without any sort of build-up at all. The first thing one notices about this whole opening, which is really one of the best procession of images in any Dracula film, is the pervasiveness of religious imagery. Well, I guess the first thing you might notice is how the drunk priest's head is gushing blood in one shot and is entirely healed mere seconds later in another shot. But the religious imagery is strong, too, and indeed Risen from the Grave will emerge as one of the most potently religious of the films, continuing the progression of the series from the relatively secular adventures of Van Helsing (he pays lip service to God, but his primary faith is in science and reason, and he sees vampirism in terms of being a disease) to the "I'm religious but I'll trust my gun to do the Lord's work' view of Father Sandor in Prince of Darkness, and now into the realm of Dracula not as a plague, but as a supernatural force that exists apart from and in defiance of the laws of a rational universe. The Van Helsing-esque voice of the enlightened man of reason comes, somewhat more pathetically than with Van Helsing, from the character of Paul, a student and avowed atheist who is in love with the Monsignor's niece, though the Monsignor is none too thrilled to have a Godless screwball courting a member of his family. The battle between the forces of secularism and religion is almost more prominent than the battle against Dracula, who eventually discovers that the Monsignor has stuck a big golden cross on the castle door and thus seeks ruthless revenge on the Christian defiler by enslaving the weak priest and moving into the basement of the inn where Paul works. If you're thinking this is kind of a lame ultimate revenge against all mankind, then you'd pretty much be right. But Dracula also enslaves a buxom bar wench, so it's not a total wash-out. Dracula plans to eventually get around to making a vampire out of the monsignor's niece, but he doesn't seem to be in any big hurry, which means that while he gets to spend a lot of time hanging around in the cellar being illuminated by eerie green lights, we have to spend a lot of time watching him hang around the cellar being illuminated by eerie green lights. It does indeed make for some frighteningly effective imagery, which seems to be the entire point of this film, but a procession of eerie images doesn't necessarily assemble into a completely enthralling or entirely coherent film. Things do drag a bit in the middle as we watch Dracula push around the wench and the priest while Paul and his love engage in late-night rendezvous' on the rooftop. We know that eventually Dracula is going to kidnap her and there will be a scene of horses wildly pulling a carriage toward Castle Dracula. We just wish there wasn't so much dead time before that happens. This movie does contain one of the scenes that really set Christopher Lee off to ranting about how awful all the films are. Paul manages to drive a stake - and quite a large one at that - through Dracula's heart, which Dracula proceeds to yank out and throw at Paul. Turns out you have to stake the vampire, yeah, but it's meaningless unless you also pray while you are doing it. Paul, being an atheist or perhaps somewhat versed in vampiric lore, refuses to pray. Who's heard of such a thing? You just slam the stake in, cut the head off, and then you're done for the day. This particular scene drove Lee nuts. He still brings it up even today. Everyone knows that once you drive a stake into a vampire's heart, he's done for, prayer or no. Gaffs like that aside, this is really rather a better entry in the series than Christopher Lee would have you believe. The story, though uneven, benefits from greater depth than usual, with the battle between secularism and Christianity adding some real meat to the non-Dracula bits. Of course, any attempt to extract some sort of final message from the film is bound to be confusing. It's religion's fault that Dracula gets resurrected. If the Monsignor had listened to the superstitious peasants, none of this would have happened. And it's Paul, the atheist, who must come in and save the day when Christianity fails to get the job done. But Paul also wind sup perhaps more open to belief in Christ by the end of the film, which is full of redemption and vampires getting impaled on big golden crucifixes. So I guess the overall religious message of Dracula Has Risen from the Grave is, "don't be an asshole." Don't be intolerant or a zealot, because then you just open the door for Christopher Lee to go stand on your roof while enveloped in purple mist. And while it may be cool to have Christopher Lee on your roof for a while, eventually he's going to start asking about eating some of your chips and stuff like that. Appearnace-wise, Risen from the Grave is the best looking of all the Dracula films to date, and really one of the best looking films Hammer ever produced. The atmosphere in the film seems to be heavily influenced by the more phantasmagoric look of Mario Bava's films, and the result is a Dracula film awash in otherworldly colors and swirling camera filters. It gives the movie a more dreamlike, hallucinogenic mood, which is perfectly fitting to mark the series' move toward more supernatural, less "man of reason" fare. The next in the series, Taste the Blood of Dracula (it's salty!), would contain even more overt references to Dracula not as some sort of social disease that can be explained with and combated by science, but as a creature straight from Hell imbued with the powers of Satan himself and able to be both resurrected and defeated through a series of religious or sacrilegious rituals. Lee's appearance, likewise, is even more ghoulish than previous incarnations. Each film sees him get more pallid and cadaverous, while his eyes get more bloodshot. He's in snarling animal mode here, throwing people around wildly and smashing windows. He gets a few lines this time around. It was watching this movie that I finally had my little epiphany about Dracula's behavior. I'm slow, so you'll have to forgive me if this was obvious to everyone else long ago. I was always a bit annoyed by the fact that although he is four or five times stronger than a regular man, Dracula's answer to a fight is to turn tail and run. I mean, Paul isn't exactly an imposing figure. Then it hit me, and well, all I can say is "duh." Dracula is a vicious beast, but a beast never the less, and even the most vicious beast in nature is more likely to turn around and run away than fight. It's a simple animal reaction to being challenged. Unless he's really hungry, Dracula would rather take off. Not that I'd recommend combating all vampires by waving your arms in the air and yelling, "shoo!" but it seems to work sometimes. Dracula is only fierce-acting around people he already knows are weaker than him. So there you go. I'm not especially clever, but it's a cleverly profound way to portray the count. Dracula has Risen from the Grave is a nice gothic horror despite some slow spots. It's got a decent cast, though as always Peter Cushing is sorely missed. It has a tremendous look, smart direction, the usual great James Bernard score, and a script that shoots for more meaning than usual. Lee is less of a presence here than in the last film, and his shadow doesn't seem to loom as powerfully over everything when he's not present as it did in Prince of Darkness. But when he does show up, he looks exquisite. Although Lee himself runs down these later films in the series, it's actually quite good, and the next one would be even better. Sadly, it was all downhill after that. Labels: Horror: Dracula, Horror: Vampires, Netflix Diary, Stars: Christopher Lee, Studio: Hammer, Year: 1968 posted by Keith at 2:10 AM | 0 Comments Thursday, September 09, 2004The Devil Rides Out
1968, Great Britain. Starring Christopher Lee, Charles Gray, Nike Arrighi, Leon Greene, Patrick Mower, Sarah Lawson, Paul Eddington, Rosalyn Landor. Directed by Terence Fisher. Available on DVD from Amazon.
His names are legion. His name is Legion. But maybe you know him as Scratch, or Ol' Gooseberry. The Devil himself, if you will. He's one of the most compelling literary figures of all time, despite, I imagine, the original intentions of the writers of the Old Testament. Milton turned the Devil into a brash anti-hero, and for many intellectuals who see religious fundamentalism as stifling to the pursuit of knowledge. He's remained in his cool cat corner with lots of stories being written about him. Something about Lucifer lends to storytelling. It's his unpredictability. You never know if you're getting the wretched evil Devil or the suave rebellious one. Or the witty one. With Jesus, you pretty much know what you're going to get, and his story is pretty well documented and confined by the completeness of the New Testament and actual historical events. It's not that there's anything wrong with Jesus - Christian or not, you have to admire some crazy dude from Nazareth who took on both the Romans and the religious establishment, told people not to submit to a corrupt priesthood, and then said you shouldn't always be bashing each others' heads in. But where do you go from there? That's why the only people who ever tried to write the further adventures of Christ were the Mormons. Satan, however, is a wide-open playing field with a mythology and character that has outgrown its Christian origins. In fact, most of what is considered common knowledge about Satan comes not from The Bible, but from Milton and Paradise Lost. With Satan, we're free to fill in his back-story and make up adventures for him. With Jesus, you can only tell the story of Jesus. But with Satan - well for Old Nick you can pretty much make up any damn thing you want. You can even have him fight Santa Claus and Merlin. Certainly there is a legion of films about Satan, and some of them are even good. I know I still have a few readers who haven't taken my pleas to heart and have yet to delve into the rich history of "old" films, so to them a movie about Satan and Satanism is most likely something about a serial killer or something about a vengeful teenager or that thing where Arnold Schwarzenegger punches Satan in the face. That all started to happen in the 1980s. In the 1970s, movies about Satan usually involved boring people in robes stomping about in a circle and droning, "Hail Satan" in a listless monotonous style. But in the 1960s movies about The Devil usually featured Satanists who were part of high society, global elites who had reached the limits of human knowledge and were now seeking the expand their intelligence into more arcane and sometimes diabolical spheres. Not being a Christian myself, but always keen on learning more about arcane and esoteric tidbits, I've often entertained fantasies about becoming a member of one of these well-heeled groups of Satanic intellectuals. Unfortunately, my position as a Plebe means I'm forever doomed to keep running into Slayer fans or groups of people who all wear those goofy Anton LaVey devil horns. Still, a fella can dream, and one day I'll make a movie about a young blue-collar gentleman's struggle to climb the Satanic social ladder. Although it seems like The Exorcist and, to a lesser degree, The Omen are about the only Satanism movies anyone can remember, the best two for my money are Rosemary's Baby and Hammer's superb The Devil Rides Out, which frankly sounds like the title to a spaghetti western. The Devil Rides Out is another one of those Hammer title's I'd not seen until now, though I'd frequently read about it and how fantastic it was. Generally, very few movies are as fantastic as they're made out to be, but if The Devil Rides Out isn't fantastic, it's only because it's something slightly better than fantastic. Released in 1968, The Devil Rides Out populates that time in Hammer's history when they were really beginning to lose their footing. Revolutions in filmmaking and changes in what was permitted to be shown on screen seemed to have passed the studio by, and their once cutting edge Gothic horror shows now seemed anachronistic and even quaint. By the late 1960s, the studio was floundering, and by the 1970s it had all but collapsed. But from this late era, a few gems - indeed a few of Hammer's very best productions - were made. The Devil Rides Out is definitely among them, a classic not just of late-era Hammer but of all Hammer; and not just of Hammer horror, but horror in general. In a rare twist of fate, king of the studio Christopher Lee gets to be a good guy, though he's something of an ambiguously "good" good guy. He stars as the Duc de Richleau, an upper class British gentleman who is meeting up with two old friends for their annual reunion. When one of them, the young Simon (Patrick Mower, later to appear in AIP's Vincent Price vehicle, Cry of the Banshee), fails to show up, de Richleau and Rex (Leon Greene, who starred as Little John in Hammer's A Challenge for Robin Hood) pay him a visit at his stately country manor. There they find Simon is having a dinner party with his new astronomy club, though de Richleau is instantly suspicious of the gathering when he learns there are thirteen members. Queer behavior from Simon and a quick examination of his observatory reveal the truth: this is a Satanic gathering, and Simon is to be the newest member. de Richleau spirits Simon away - it's difficult to say whether or not he rescues or kidnaps the young man, since we're unsure whether or not Simon was dabbling in the black arts of his own free will or because he was under the spell of local occult bigwig Mocata (Charles Gray, probably most recognizable as the narrator from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which itself owes a great deal to Hammer's Frankenstein movies). Eventually, the film leans toward "under the spell," but the whole thing seems very fuzzy, which allows the viewer to interpret the movie either as a straightforward "good versus evil" tale or a more subversive look at the subjugation of free will and intellectual curiosity at the hands of the ruling elite. The latter reading may sound a tad over the top, another one of those "reading meaning into the meaningless" things in which critics so often indulge, except that Hammer's previous record of anti-authority, anti-elitist themes (most notable in the Frankenstein movies) make it harder to dismiss, and so we can spend the entire movie wondering if de Richleau's denial of Simon's free will is any better than Mocata's taking advantage of the young lad. Complicating this even further is the fact that, though they are ostensibly supposed to be evil, most of the Satanists seem rather polite and friendly and only interested in the pursuit of knowledge deemed "forbidden" by some guy in a funny hat down in Rome. Well, later, one of the Satanists will be revealed as possessing horrible driving manners, but that's about the extent of their evilness. Mocata is annoyed that Rex and de Richleau have rescued his would-be apprentice - and taken the new girl with them, to boot. He's determined to use spooky eyes and the forces of evil to reclaim his prize, complete his coven, and summon Big Sugardaddy Lucifer for the Sabbath. There's plenty in The Devil Rides Out that could come across as outlandish were in not for the fact that the cast is so committed to the film - something that, by now, you should recognize as one of the great hallmarks of Hammer productions. Raised as we are today on a steady diet of tongue-in-cheek horror films that don't want to commit to being horror films, The Devil Rides Out is refreshingly free of irony. Richard Matheson's script, based on a novel by occult-thriller writer Dennis Wheatley, strives to maintain a high degree of accuracy in its presentation of occult rituals, and Christopher Lee, who was a close personal friend of Wheatley's, did extended research on the subject of Satanism and the occult and oversaw the entire project to make sure everything was presented as realistically as possible. The result is that even when bloody-eyed specters in loincloths are appearing, everything seems believable. Matheson also never panders to younger audiences. Where as today's horror films are made for teenagers - and fairly stupid teenagers at that - Hammer always liked to consider their films more adult fare. The Devil Rides Out frequently tosses around arcane terminology, much of it taken from the writings of Alistair Crowley or other more ancient texts (the Goat of Mendes and the goat-headed image of Satan was derived by Christianity from an Egyptian cult that worshipped a Bacchus-like goat god) without bothering to explain what they mean. You're either expected to already know, be smart enough to figure it out, or be smart enough to go to the library and look it up. The film' biggest asset is the cast. Allowed to be a hero for the first time, Christopher Lee shines as the complex de Richleau. He is doubtless the good guy, but there remains something sinister about his charisma. For a man who isn't a Satanist, he sure does know a lot about the rituals and doesn't hesitate to use black magic to fight black magic. Lee brings a stern but warm authority to the figure. Even though the film doesn't depict him as infallible, he's the kind of guy you would want watching over you if Satanists were in hot pursuit. On the flip side is Charles Gray, whose Mocata embodies the best of everything about being a villain. He's painfully polite and polished in his ways, but also possessed of a wicked streak a mile wide. His best scene comes when he visits de Richleau's friends in an attempt to regain control over Simon and the woman Tanith (Nike Arrighi). He is the very picture of a perfect English gentleman, but his act slowly transforms as he gives a rational and, frankly, convincing explanation of the goals of following the Left Hand Path, then uses his powers to try and control his host. When his attempts are interrupted, he has the film's best line when he simply says calmly and with composure, "I shall not be back, but something will. Tonight. Tonight, something will come for Simon and the girl." Both Gray and Lee are completely convincing in their roles. Lee, in particular, though known for Dracula, was born to play de Richleau. There was talk of continuing with a de Richleau series as he appears in several other Wheatley novels, but unfortunately nothing ever materialized and Christopher Lee was soon back to playing Dracula in a series of increasingly awful (but never the less enjoyable) films that finally sputtered and died with Satanic Rites of Dracula not too much before Hammer itself closed up shop in the latter half of the 1970s. The supporting cast performs with workmanlike competency, as they always do in a Hammer film. Nike Arrighi was unique in that she was not one of Hammer's typical big-bosomed blond damsels in distress. She doesn't fit the stereotype of a Hammer girl at all, though that wasn't for lack of the studio trying. But director Terence Fisher, who was Hammer's best director and responsible for the films that put them on the map, was apparently adamant that the role of Tanith be played by Arrighi. It was a wise position. Leon Greene is equally superb as the baffled friend who finds himself spending a couple nights of his life fighting Satan. His voice, it seems, was dubbed in and is actually that of Patrick Allen, who was also in Hammer's When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth and Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell, among others. Whatever the reason, they make a good team. Fisher's direction is as stylish yet unobtrusive as fans had come to expect of the man who brought Hammer's visions of Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Mummy to the screen. Although there isn't a lot of action in the film, the pace is relentless, fueled by a growing sense of dread as the forces of evil close in on our heroes, until they are literally standing back to back in a magic circle surrounded by a whole array of creepiness. James Bernard's grand score only adds more drad to the creeping sense of terror. It is here, unfortunately, that the film's main - and really, only -- weakness shows itself. Hammer was never a studio that relied on special effects. At their most complex, they were usually dangling a fake bat from a wire. One Million Years B.C. and Moon Zero Two were the first big special effects films for Hammer. One Million Years B.C. had the services of Ray Harryhausen to carry it (not to mention Raquel Welch in a little fur bikini). Moon Zero Two was Hammer on their own, and it showed why the studio should have continued to shy away from complicated special effects shots. The finale of The Devil Rides Out begins with an assault on de Richleau and friends first by a giant tarantula, and then by the Angel of Death himself. The tarantula in particular is a wretched failure of special effects that lets the film down. The tension built by the plot is grand, and it gets the carpet pulled from under its feet by the sorry spider effect. The Angel of Death is more successful but shot in a way that also weakens its impact, especially the part where looped film has Death's horse doing a little dance. The rest of the movie is powerful enough to disregard these ill-advised attempts at special effects, but one can't help but wish they'd either been better executed or simply left out entirely. The weird red-eyed giant in a loincloth was far creepier and menacing than any of these later concoctions, and that was nothing but a big guy standing there with an evil grin while he wore Dracula's contact lenses. Similarly, the scene in which Mocata succeeds at summoning the Devil is effective because the effect is low-key. Satan - the Goat of Mendes - simply appears on a rock in the background, and the make-up effects are either quite good or never shown long enough for the flaws to be evident. It would have been nice, in this scene, if the British censors had allowed the wild debauched orgy of the Satanists to contain something more daring than fully-clothed actors sort of just jumping around and rubbing each other's faces. But it was enough that they were allowing Hammer to make a movie about Satanism, which had previously been a taboo subject not allowed by the BBFC. So we can forgive the fact that their occultists had to keep their robes on while AIP's occultists in films like 1970's Cry of the Banshee got to romp around in the nude. One would hope that a string of strong films like The Devil Rides Out and Frankenstein Must be Destroyed would signal that Hammer had found its footing again and would remain viable in the 1970s. Sadly, that wasn't the case. They struggled on a few more years, but films of a quality as high as The Devil Rides Out proved to be the exception rather than the rule. Hammer's final horror film was also based on a Dennis Wheatley novel, but 1976's To the Devil...A Daughter was a far cry from the sophisticated, brilliantly executed occult thrills and chills delivered by The Devil Rides Out. And though the future may have remained unsteady, Hammer should take pride in the fact that they crafted what is, in my opinion, the very best of all the Satanism movies and one of the best, most intelligent and sincere horror-thrillers of all time. Word on the street is that Christopher Lee is still interested in doing a sequel/remake and has been shopping the idea around. Whether or not his Sauruman powers can convince some studio executive to make a horror film that isn't aimed at dolts remains to be seen. Fighting off Satan is one thing, but as they say, "against stupidity, the Gods themselves contest in vain." Labels: Horror: Satan, Netflix Diary, Stars: Christopher Lee, Studio: Hammer, Year: 1968 posted by Keith at 7:01 PM | 0 Comments Wednesday, July 21, 2004Spirits of the Dead
1968, France/Italy. Starring Jane Fonda, Peter Fonda, Alain Delon, Brigitte Bardot, Terence Stamp. Directed by Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, and Federico Fellini. Available on DVD from Amazon.
Uh-oh, it's Roger Vadim again. Man alive that cat sure is popping up a lot around here these days, isn't he? Brigitte Bardot has been showing up a lot lately as well, though frankly, I have no problem with either one of them paying me a visit more frequently. Anyway, looking ahead I think this might be all the Vadim and Bardot we're going to hit for a while, and at least here they're neither working together (Vadim had since moved on to his next project, which was Jane Fonda, also present in this movie) nor commanding the proceedings in this trilogy of Edgar Allen Poe adaptations as conceived by three of Europe's maverick directors. Well, two directors and Roger Vadim. Frankly, the man was lucky to ever get lumped into the French New Wave. Sounds like a pretty good idea, and as you know anytime someone begins a write up with "sounds like a pretty good idea," it's usually the case that it wasn't. Or that if it was a good idea, which I reckon this was, it's not as good a realization of that idea, which this isn't. Most people recommend that you dismiss the first two stories entirely and pretend that only the third exists, but we're in this for the long haul and will kick things off where they begin, with Roger Vadim's "Metzengerstein." Anyone claiming that Spirits of the Dead isn't a good movie is probably only just saying that because Vadim's contribution to the anthology is so sloppy and unengaging. It's certainly not the way you'd want to start a film. As was par for the man, Vadim casts his current sexy main squeeze in the lead, which just happened at the time to be Jane Fonda. The duo were fresh off Barbarella, and this story was originally envisioned as a feature film follow-up to that piece of sci-fi pop art. How they could have every stretched this thing out to a full running time is beyond me, though it's not as if Vadim wasn't a pro at stretching out thin-to-nonexistent plots and pasting them together with eye-popping, mind blowing costume and set design. And for the record, those of you who don't know just how indescribably hot Jane Fonda was in the 1960s really should check out Barbarella. Actually, I guess she's not exactly un-hot now, if that's a word (and I don't think it is). She just tends to take herself too seriously these days, and that's always a bit unattractive to me.
Here she plays the Countess Metzengerstein, heir to a vast fortune she squanders by throwing lavish orgies and torturing the underlings. Actually, they're really rather dull and lifeless orgies. You know, orgies always seem like a good idea until you try and hammer out the logistics of the whole thing. As for me, I'd be too worried about people knocking stuff over. Anyway, she delights in hurling barbs over the fence at her more modest cousin, played by none other than Jane's brother, Peter. Eventually, she becomes sexually obsessed with him - kind of, well, you know, but then this is Roger Vadim we're talking about, and it was the sixties - until he rebuffs her advances. I mean, heck, Henry was probably already pretty steamed at the both of them for being a coupla hippies. As revenge, the mad Ms. Metzengerstein burns down his stables, and he in turn dies in the fire trying to save his horses. Or so it would seem. A big black stallion bursts through the flames and gallops to safety, but there is no record of such a horse in the stable. Metzengerstein becomes convinced that the horse is the reincarnation of her beloved cousin, and her obsession with the horse crosses into madness and, frankly, borders on bestiality. Despite all the weird stuff thrown into the mix, this is a decidedly dull and uninspired way to kick off the film. The costuming, usually one of Vadim's only strong points, is relatively without shock or beauty. Jane dons some navel-exposing Little Lord Fauntleroy type outfits, but everything else looks like it's on loan from the local community theater. The cinematography is listless, and Vadim's usually striking composition of scenes is non-existent. In addition, everything is shot in soft-focus "Playboy-o-vision." The English speaking actors are dubbed into French in the currently available version, which means the only way we can judge their performances is through body language, most of which consists of them staring half-stoned at the camera. The tone of the film is all wrong too, at least in my opinion. A tale of mystery and the bizarre, as this is meant to be, should have some sense of menace and the macabre, some sort of tension. There is none of that here, and the film instead unfolds like a languid, ethereal, and intensely boring dream. Fairy tales and Cocteau Twins songs conjure up more darkness and dread than this supposed Edgar Allen Poe tale. There are some nice crumbling castles and decaying seaside scenery, but Vadim doesn't seem to understand how to take thematic advantage of it or relate it to the decaying morality and mental state of his central Nero/Caligula-like figure (though I must say I bet Jane Fonda's figure is better than Nero or Caligula's). When you fail to match even someone as hit-or-miss with similar atmosphere as, say, France's Jean Rollin, you know you're way off the mark. It's like Vadim wasn't even trying here. The hilariously silly ending was repeated in Vadim's 1973 film Don Juan (Or if Don Juan Were a Woman), which we covered right up there at the very beginning of this journal.
This story has actually been deleted from some prints, not because it was so provocative, but mostly because it was such an awful way to start the film. While I tend to think a film should be left intact regardless of how bad it may be, there's not much arguing that this first story is indeed pretty damn shoddy. Things pick up, but only just, for the second story in the trilogy. Luis Malle directs "William Wilson." Malle is probably most infamous for flirting with child pornography when he introduced the world to Brooke Shields in his 1978 film Pretty Baby. Before that, he was a member of the French New Wave, which helped get him this gig. He's pretty far off his game for this outing, though, turning in an entry that manages to be less ponderous and a little more tense and eerie than Vadim's meandering hunk of nonsense, but it still just doesn't play out the way it should, perhaps because the story itself has been done so many times and this one offers nothing new. French heartthrob Alain Delon stars as the titular Wilson, whom we meet as he stumbles into a confessional and claims to have killed a man. Through a series of flashbacks, we learn the history of Wilson, who in every regard is a grade-a prick. As a young boy attending a military school where his classmate was no doubt Damien from The Omen II, he encounters a boy with the same name as he who seems dedicated to countering everything he does. He encounters this double, who even grows to look exactly like him, throughout various points in his life until, ultimately, they face one another in a fencing duel. There's very little to surprise here. The man fighting his doppleganger, and by killing it killing himself, is nothing new, and Malle's approach is so straight-forward and by the books that the story, while decent for a single viewing, has nothing more to offer. Like Vadim, Malle seems to almost be phoning it in just to collect his paycheck. The primary difference is that the performers, native French speakers, are better and the story is, as I said, OK at least for the first go-round. Brigitte Bardot shows up briefly in a gambling scene. All in all, the segment isn't bad. Direction is nice, acting is good, and it moves at a fair clip. There are also a few effective moments, chiefly the scene of a young Wilson lowering a new student into a barrel full of rats and a later scene in which Wilson, now a medical student, seeks to practice his dissection technique on a living subject. So OK, it's not bad. It's just not that interesting.
If you make it through the awful first story and middling second, they pay-off is Federico Fellini's entry, the final piece in the trilogy and easily one of the most delirious, grotesque, and utterly insane forty minutes of film you'll ever come across. Fellini was known for a lot of things, not the least of which was his fondness for the absurd. If you're familiar with the director, and you should at least try to be, then try to imagine everything about him and his style distilled down and concentrated in one forty-minute sequence. Quite frankly, it's almost too much, and that's simply divine. His story is "Toby Dammit," based loosely on Poe's "Never Bet the Devil Your Head." A wild-eyed, completely mad looking Terence Stamp stars as Dammit, a drunken, wild British film actor who seems to be hovering on the brink of a career collapse. He travels to Italy to star in a film in which Jesus is reincarnated as a pioneer in the American West, but nothing about his trip to Rome is the least bit ordinary. Fellini saturates his film in colors, and they're all the wrong ones for what should be going on. Think of film that has been cross-processed. The world of Toby Dammit is awash in red and yellow, billowing orange clouds and dust, like driving through someone's hallucination of the end of the world. Given the Biblical nature of the film Dammit is to be starring in, it wouldn't surprise me if Fellini's own inspiration for the look of the film came straight from the Book of Revelations. Dammit's biggest problem, besides his addiction to and disdain for fame, is that he is haunted by visions of a smiling young blonde girl (shades of Mario Bava's Kill, Baby, Kill) who he believes to be The Devil himself. We follow Dammit onto a bizarre talk show, an even more bizarre awards show, and finally a manic, out of control car ride as he attempts to escape the increasingly bizarre and artificial landscape around him (people on the street are frozen in mid-motion, and eventually become mannequins).
The difference between the two French directors and the Italian Fellini couldn't be more obvious. He seizes his story with gusto, indulging every bizarre notion that crosses his mind and throwing it all onto the screen with a madcap zeal totally lacking in Vadim's entry and an absolute lack of predictability as seen in Malle's. Nothing is the slightest bit real. It's all highly stylized and has its grotesque alien factor cranked to the very top. Everyone is grossly overdone. Their make-up is outrageous; their movements are more the movements of stage props and puppets. Lights flash and glitter from every angle, and a non-stop of psychedelic detail and sheer lunacy require that you watch the segment several times just to catch everything that goes on in each scene. And standing above this gaudy, gorgeous horror show, this gleeful dissection of fame and the film industry (or rather, the industries that affix themselves to the film industry) is Terence Stamp, white-faced and genuinely looking like he's just come of a weeklong binge. He's haggard and sweaty and pasty and looks utterly spent, while at the same time seeming completely and utterly hysterical. Although in the currently available version all his dialog has been dubbed into French, unlike the Fondas in the first segment, he gives you plenty more by which to judge his frenzied performance. He's a whirlwind of agitated energy, and it's one of the best performances in the career of one of England's best actors. It's impossible not to compare him here to Malcolm McDowell's equally cracked performance in 1971's A Clockwork Orange. I'm no expert on the film, but I'm willing to bet Stamp's turn as Dammit (right down to the wild driving scene) was a major influence on both Kubrick as director and McDowell as actor. Spirits of the Dead is owned by Fellini's segment, and Stamp owns that segment. It is sublime, and a must-see.
Where Vadim and Malle try, or we assume they try, to invoke dreamlike and Gothic horror atmospheres respectively, grounding themselves in historical settings and costumes, Fellini sets his film in a warped and twisted version of the present, a fever dream where the mood he goes for is more one of psychosis and hysteria than creeping dread (or oozing boredom, in Vadim's case). "Toby Dammit" is as funny as it is warped. It is a celebration, in it's own way, and by dispensing entirely with the "typical" Poe setting, Fellini seems to have achieved the only truly eerie Poe feeling in the entire anthology, though it might be Poe on one of his famous drug binges. Every scene drips with the promise of menace, albeit a completely absurd one, and his ending is as comical as it is spooky. And those images of the maniacally grinning little girl/Satan? Positively brilliant. The whole thing is an orgy of a psychotic, surreal Hell on Earth populated by annoying comedians and glittering women in gigantic false eyelashes. So skip the first segment. Sit through Malle's middle segment, but for the devil's ball-bouncing sake, don't miss Fellini's finale. It's the sort of lunatic filmmaking that makes you happy to be watching a movie. It's a five-star segment trapped in an otherwise two-star film, but more than justifies the effort of getting through the film. Labels: Director: Frederico Fellini, Director: Roger Vadim, Horror: Ghosts, Horror: Poe, Horror: Satan, Netflix Diary, Stars: Brigette Bardot, Year: 1968 posted by Keith at 11:16 PM | 0 Comments Thursday, April 17, 2003Destroy All Monsters
1968, Japan. Starring Akira Kubo, Yukiko Kobayashi, Kyoko Ai, Jun Tazaki, Yoshio Tsuchiya, Kenji Sahara, Susumu Kurobe, Hisaya Ito, Yoshifumi Tajima, Nadao Kirino, Andrew Hughes, 'Little Man' Machan, Haruo Nakajima, Teruo Nigaki, Ikio Sawamura, Hiroshi Sekita, Susumu Utsumi. directed by Inoshiro Honda. Available on DVD (Amazon).
They call it the Wrestlemania of kaiju eiga, and they are correct, as they so often are. Eerie, huh? Toho pulls out all the stops in this wild giant monster free-for-all in which Godzilla and the monsters of earth team to smash some buildings and kick a little alien ass! Set in the near future of, well, this year (it was the future a little while ago), we find earth doing relatively well. all the monsters who wreaked so much havoc have been rounded up and placed on a tropical paradise called Monster Island. Rodan whiles away the hours with a little fly fishing. Godzilla and Minya take leisurely strolls down the beach. Mothra and Spiga have web spittin' contests. It's an idyllic life for the monsters, who stop just short of donning Hawaiian shirts and Panama Jack hats. You're going to get a lot more wrestling analogies before this review is over, so if you don't get it, you better start brushing up now. It's only going to get worse. When they aren't teasing the monsters with their helicopters, the humans spend time flying around in space and talking to each other on the space phone. And then, just when things seemed so perfect, pink smoke fills the room (never a good sign), and before you know it, everyone in the Monster Island control room is sawing logs while the monsters head straight for the major metropolitan areas of the world! The men in space are upset by this, and soon we learn that a sexy race of space women in silver robes are coming to take over the earth. I guess maybe my allegiances are questionable, but I keep asking myself the same question over and over in countless sci-fi films. Often, the Earth is threatened by sexy women in space clothes who want to conquer us and make us their playthings. And you know, try as I might, I can't really muster up any sort of opposition to the idea. I wish the monsters and Mexican wrestlers would lay off for a while and just let the ladies try their thing. I mean, is it so bad? I'd rather be ruled by a superior race of dangerously cute space women than the lot of war-happy, frustrated old men who run things right now. Would it be so bad to let the space ladies take the wheel for a spell? Well, that's neither here nor there. I can sit here, quietly biding my time and patiently gearing up to sell my planet out to the first cute space girls who happen by.Back on the Earth of the Future, Godzilla is smashing up my home of New York City. Since this is set in 1999, that means at some point this year, Godzilla will attack my city and I'll get to meet those space women. It's looking to be a good year despite my many troubles at work! While Godzilla smashes the Big Apple up a bit, Mothra, Manda, Spiga, Rodan, and assorted other famous Toho monsters make rubble out of the various national monuments across the world. And then, as is so often the case, they all converge on poor Tokyo, who diligently rolls out the Maser cannons for their ceremonial ass whuppin'. The space ladies announce that if humans turn over the Earth, they'll call off the monsters. However, we humans are a resourceful lot, at least when scripted by Inoshiro Honda. Our space guys locate and attack the alien base on the Moon while the earthbound forces track down and destroy the alien monster control devices. Free from the evil influence, Godzilla leads an all-out royal rumble of monsters against the alien headquarters on Earth. Ghidrah does a run-in to try and even the odds, but Godzilla is like, "How many times do I have to kick this guys's ass?" The faces tromp the heel, adding insult to injury by letting annoying little Minya deliver the Hulk Hogan leg drop of doom to snuff ragged ol' Ghidrah once and for all. The space ladies, God bless 'em, have one last trick up their sleeve, a fiery UFO. But this is Earth, baby! We'll take your UFO down and make a tourist attraction out of its crash site! The earth is saved, if you agree with that, and all the monsters are rounded back up and returned to their home on Monster Island. Destroy All Monsters is a non-stop monster-fest. The effects are pretty standard for the time, with the usual superb miniature work. It's nice to see the monsters get a few blows in against other famous cities, however briefly, before settling back down to smash up Tokyo. It gives an international feel to the film, and I'd like to think Godzilla and company returned with all sorts of little stickers on their luggage. This is considered by many people to be the final film, the exclamation point if you will, of the Golden Age of Kaiju Eiga. Godzilla's next appearance would be in his most hated film of all time, Godzilla's Revenge, which I love. Go figure. Despite that, I do recognize DAM as the end of an era. Well, they certainly made sure they went out with a bang. Oh yeah, Varan's contribution to the battle is staggering. I guess you could say, that he was even stuck into the final five seconds of the film is unbelievable. Labels: Country: Japan, Science Fiction: Kaiju, Year: 1968 posted by Keith at 1:09 AM | 0 Comments Friday, July 13, 2001Superargo and the Faceless Giants
1968, Italy/Spain. Starring Guy Madison, Ken Wood, Luisa Baratto, Diana Lorys, Aldo Sambrell. Directed by Paolo Bianchini.
There is a place unlike any other; a place where the women are all bombshells, the scientists are all mad, and masked wrestlers are consulted frequently regarding affairs of state. It's a place where the fate of millions is entrusted to the hands of a man in ill-fitting tights whose primary qualification for the gig of "protector of the masses, champion to all" is his ability to take out a dozen henchmen with a well-executed plancha. In the place, the police are impotent and the henchmen are either mystical and wise Asian masters or super-strong midgets in devil-red leotards. It's a place where a man in a silver mask and three-piece-suit can cruise down the boulevard in his boss little convertible sports car and not be thought of as a freak. A freak? Not only is he not a freak - he's a hero, ready do dispatch evil with a flurry of dropkicks, forearms to the head, and figure four leglocks. Such an assault may seem outdated, even quaint in this day and age of high-tech computer glitches and military targeting blunders, but think for a second about how simpler this world would be if Arafat and Sharon simply locked it up in the squared circle to settle this thing once and for all. Imagine if, when asked what he was doing in response to some touchy and complicated situation in the Middle East or anywhere else in the world, the President of the United States could look squarely into the camera and, with a voice dripping in confidence, tell the world, "There's nothing to worry about; I've got the Nature Boy Ric Flair on the case." Unfortunately, this place seems to no longer exist, though for a time Mexico came pretty damn close. The Mexican masked wrestler movies that peaked in quality and popularity during the 1950s-1960s constructed for us a world in which men with names like El Santo and Blue Demon saved the world, or at least Mexico, from any number of vampires, vampire women, aliens, ninjas, gangsters, werewolves, mad scientists, and countless midget henchmen in devil-red leotards and capes. The Santo movies spanned decades and pitted a masked Mexican luchadore against all manner of opponents, and in the process El Santo became one of the biggest legends in Mexican wrestling and film history. In his wake, a legion of masked wrestlers launched similar careers, often fighting alongside El Santo for the good of all humanity. The Mexico of the lucha libre sci-fi adventure films is just about as close to our version of the Promised Land as you can get. I'd gladly turn in our world of turmoil, suffering, and nouveau French cuisine for a good chimichanga and a world where the biggest news comes when pro wrestlers have to thwart the diabolical scheme of some mummy. Oh sure, no one is going to be crazy about a world full of mummies all walking around with their dusty heads full of diabolical schemes, but once you get over the shock of "Hey, look! A mummy! Is that a midget in a cape next to him?" things really are not so bad. The mummy might kidnap a sexy chica in a flimsy negligee so he can carry her around a bit, and he might injure some old pipe-smoking man by knocking him out with the patented "chop to the shoulders" blow that seems to comprise the mummy's only real offense, but that's about it. In the end, you know the mummy poses only a minor threat to the world as a whole, and Santo or Mil Mascaras will be around eventually to bodyslam the mummy and burn down an old castle. Compared to what we have to deal with in the real world, I'd much prefer luchadores duking it out with mummies. Wrestling heroes were not limited to Mexico however, though that's certainly where the best of them hung out. America got in on the scene with a handful of rather lame wrestling films that were little more than juvenile delinquency films, completely lacking all the outlandish imagination and supernatural trappings of their south of the border compadres. Closer to the mark were the few notable European entries into the heroic wrestler genre. Germany had a couple entries into the scene if I recall, but Europe's big winner was Superargo, a Spanish-Italian co-production Superargo and his European compatriots were not, however, simply stealing the Mexican formula and plopping it down in the middle of the BeNeLux powers. While Mexican wrestling movies mixed grappling action with science fiction and horror (and the occasional gangster or ninja storyline), European wrestling superhero films generally selected from different genres, mixing their costumed crime fighters with the equally popular Eurospy films that came in the wake of James Bond's success. Superargo is equal parts Santo film and swank Eurospy adventure, with more than a little influence being drawn from American superhero shows like Batman and Green Hornet. The result is a film that is heavy on elements from each genre but ultimately lacking the eerie atmosphere achieved in the better Mexican films. More Umberto Lenzi, less Mario Bava in feel. Since Eurospy films often incorporated elements of science fiction into their espionage storylines, you get plenty of that here -- including zombielike robots, a mad scientist, Indian mysticism, and assorted ray guns -- but there's something crips about it, a failure to conjure up the gothic, otherworldly feel of the Santo films. Not that what Superargo has going on is bad. It's just a different approach. Superargo got his start in the film Superargo Vs. Diabolikus, where we met the superhero secret agent who retires from the ring after accidentally killing an opponent, only to return to action when his special powers - like telekinesis, levitation, and "fast coagulating blood" that allows him to accelerate the healing process - cause the secret service to enlist his aid in a case. Since his Superargo mask and tights brought him luck in the ring, he insists on wearing them on the case as well, no doubt causing no small amount of embarrassment to the men who hired him. Superargo returns in this sequel, Superargo Vs. The Faceless Giants, a curious title since the opponents Superargo must overcome are neither faceless nor especially gigantic. Sure, some of them are big, but none of them are Andre the Giant size, and all of them not only have faces, but many of them have very large faces. A psychedelic credit sequence clues you into the fact that this isn't going to be business as usual. I wonder why it is that European and Mexican wrestling movies were so far-out while American wrestling movies were so mundane. I guess part of it was the more colorful nature of Mexican wrestlers. Clad in masks and capes, drawing on a rich history of masked warriors, the Mexicans looked like superheroes right out of the gate. All it took was Santo beating up some Martians, and the wrestlers found themselves occupying the same territory as other costumed crime fighters. Lou Thesz was an incredible in-ring performer, but by contrast, no one would accuse the man of being especially flashy. Besides, American already had plenty of comic book heroes running around in garish, skin-tight outfits. Still, you'd think if someone was going to go through all the trouble of making a wrestling movie, they'd at least through a wolfman into it. Superargo's action begins where it always should - in the ring. A tan, shaven man (thus the good guy) is pounding the tar out of a hairy, pasty dude (thus a bad guy). The good guy's post-match celebration is cut short when a gang of saggy-faced (but not faceless) guys in black leather body suits and huge, unwieldy silver helmets rush him. Well, they don't actually rush him. They sort of stagger very slowly toward him in that style of walking that is meant to signify to the viewers that the people doing the walking are, in fact, robots or zombies. No matter how slow they walk, the robot zombies are still able to surround our hero, who is overwhelmed by the sheer number of exceptionally slow moving lunkheads wandering to and fro and emanating an extremely annoying electronic "bing" noise. The robots kidnap the wrestler, and unfortunately for him, Macho Man Randy Savage isn't there to make the save by jumping on top of the van while wearing a big-ass lime green foam cowboy hat. The wrestler's sister, Claire, does manage to escape by walking slowly away from rather than towards the assailants. It is a technique that could have saved a lot of people a lot of trouble if only it had been employed on a more consistent basis. No matter how many times it happens, and no matter how well I know that it's just one of those things, I can't help but ask why people are always being overtaken by lumbering, slow-moving lugs. A child walking at a brisk pace could outdistance these things and have time to stop and buy a Rocketpop from a pot-smoking ice cream man. Yet in movies, as we all know, even the very fit are unable to outmaneuver or outrun villainous assailants who exhibit all the fleet-footed dexterity of Manny Yarborough. Part of the reason I always appreciated Tom Savini's remake of Night of the Living Dead is because Patricia Tallman as Barbara takes a look at the zombies and surmises that she and her cohorts could escape simply by walking in a speedy and orderly fashion away from the ghouls. Then later on, she does just that. Problem solved. Alas, she is one of the few in horror film history who has proven able to outpace attackers possessing a quarter of her speed. The police are baffled by the case of the loud robots. You know, there is a lot that is good about Europe: Scandinavian women, ancient buildings and castles, fine food and spirits, Bjork kicking the shit out of reporters. There's plenty of good stuff about Europe, but if Eurospy and superhero films are to be believed, one can never offer too few compliments to the police force of any European nation. Not only to the British insist on wearing outdated, goofy hats, but every single time we see the police force, even those geniuses at Scotland Yard, they're baffled and at a dead end. Even the most trifling of cases has some moustache-sporting inspector throwing his arms into the air and whining, "That's it! We're stumped!" These guys can't issue a parking ticket without having to first phone up some womanizing globetrotter named Super Dragon or some guy who insists on conducting official police business while wearing a red body stocking and a black leather mask. The only police officer that was more useless than the police in a Eurospy film was that guy Mahoney who hung around Commissioner Gordon in the old Batman TV show. How the hell did that guy even keep his job? Maybe they would have depended on Batman less if they fired Mahoney's sorry behind and got someone more competent, like McCloud. With no leads and no hope of solving this bizarre case, even though slow-moving robots with giant metal headgear aren't exactly capable of blending seamlessly into society, the government decides to once again call upon the services of Superargo. To put this in context, try to imagine the confidence you would have instilled in you if the police and FBI had been unable to solve that mailbox pipe bomb case, and their solution to the problem had been to call a press conference and announce to the country that, "I think La Parka might have some insight into the situation." Oh sure, it works in a comic book, but the whole concept of costumed crusaders doesn't stand up too well to real-world analysis. Of course, the real world is also where we pay taxes and have to get the timing belt replaced on our car, so it's not as if I'm totally married to everything having to be just like it is in the real world. No one wants to see a movie about someone getting their timing belt replaced, or at least I don't want to see that movie -- not unless while the mechanic is working on the car, the garage is besieged by a Frankenstein monster. Still, it's amusing to think about the idea of comic book superheroism being applied to the real world. Can you imagine if, during the hellish civil war between Tutsi and Hutus in Africa, a guy in a purple leotard and mask came riding out of the jungle and yelled, "The Phantom commands you to stop this madness!" Or for a less sinister example: anyone remember that talk show where they had the guy on who really thought he was Batman? He would skulk around the city all night long in his homemade Adam West duds just looking for crimes to fight. All this reminds me of a story once relayed to me, I think by my friend Pat, though i could be wrong. Anyway, he knew a guy who was making a movie or a Halloween costume based on the Stainless Steel Rat character. The guy had crafted this whole sheet-metal get-up and was trying it on one night when a burglar, unaware of the fact that anyone was in the isolated work room, broke intot he house. Upon hearing the noise, the guy grabbed a bat or a crowbar or something and, in full Stainless Steel Rat armor, rushed the burglar, who was suitably freaked out by seeing a big-ass armored rat charging at him. Apparently as he was being arrested, the criminal kept babbling about the freak in the rat suit, not unlike people int he comic books do about Batman. So I don't know. Maybe there's more validity to costumed crime fighting than we think. Whatever the case, I wouldn't have made it very far in life if I was the sort of person who sat around whining about how Spider-Man wasn't realistic because he wears a silly costume. I mean, the dude can crawl up walls and make wavy black lines emanate from his head when danger is near! Who am I to judge his fashion sense? Complaining about the inherent nuttiness of costumed superheroes is like complaining that Star Wars is unrealistic because you shouldn't be able to hear all that sound in space. We first meet Superargo as he's practicing his levitation skills with his personal swami and sidekick, Kamir. When the police arrive, Superargo proves his power to them by doing the whole "I knew you were going to come here" thing, meaning that so far, Superargo has proven himself at least as capable as Mistress Cleo. When the secret service rep seems less than enthused about employing a pro wrestler (perhaps he was familiar with the cinematic body of work attributed to one Terry "Hulk Hogan" Bollea), Superargo further impresses all parties by concentrating for thirty seconds in order to crack a vase using nothing but his astounding mental powers. Never mind that he could have just walked over and kicked the thing in a lot less time than it took him to whip up his Force abilities. I'm not saying that if I could break priceless ceramic antiques using just my mind that I wouldn't do it, but in a pinch if it came down to focusing the sum total of my chi powers for thirty seconds versus just slapping someone, I'd go with the slap. I know it's not very metaphysical of me, but that's the kind of guy I am. The government is still hesitant to entrust the fate of the country to Superargo and Kamir, at least until the robotic zombies strike again, this time robbing a bank. For some reason, the police run right by the van parked on the sidewalk in front of the bank, with its hatch open. You'd thin they would at least take a passing notice to such a prominent getaway vehicle. They might also at least pretend to be interested in the guy sitting in the black sedan next to the van with the big blinking control box in his lap. But what do I know about police work? In classic dumb movie cop form, they realize the robots are impervious to bullets and respond to this revelation by shooting even more bullets. Superargo soon surmises that someone is kidnapping the world's best athletes and turning them into slow-moving robotic zombie minions. Exactly why you would take the time to kidnap the worlds best and brightest athletes, the fastest and strongest people in the world, then turn them into shuffling buffoons is beyond me. Seems like you could really be kidnapping any old slob and getting the same ultimate outcome. Superargo also figures that Claire, being an acclaimed swimmer, is still a target since nothing is handier to your sluggish robot army than having one of them who might be a decent swimmer were it not for the pounds and pounds of electronic equipment strapped to its head. Superargo devises a genius plot involving Claire hiding in one room while he waits in the other for the robot men to come after her. His plan works wonderfully. She stands in one room, and he's in the other getting his ass handed to him by the robotic thugs. For some reason, one of them is carrying a medieval mace. What the heck is his deal? If Superargo's plan included getting beat up and allowing Claire to be successfully kidnapped, then it all worked out pretty well for him. Superargo gives chase in his keen little sports car, the kind that all spies and heroic wrestlers seem to own. Fat lot of good having a fast car does him, because the Faceless Giants with big faces manage to shake him. For his next plan, Superargo decides to stage a dramatic comeback in the world of wrestling, figuring that this will make whoever is behind the kidnapping want to kidnap him too. At Superargo's request, the German secret service sets up a match. I didn't know that among the police force's many duties were booking and promoting pro wrestling matches, nor that these matches would be nationally celebrated affairs reported in all the papers. Despite the blatant transparency of his ruse, a plot so feeble and obvious that there is no way the mysterious villains couldn't recognize it as a trap, it still works. The Faceless Giants show up and kidnap Superargo - except that it's not Superargo at all! It's an impostor, and Superargo is following close behind in his inconspicuous sports car. It might be easier if he had allowed himself to get captured, but that's just my stupid plan. I do know that by this time, all Superargo has managed to do is break a vase and get two innocent people kidnapped. By this point in the movie, El Santo would have wrestled three matches, judged a beauty contest, and punched Frankenstein in the face. Kamir and Superargo begin wandering aimlessly around in the woods in the general vicinity of where they last saw the robots. Superargo's bright red body stocking aids him in blending into the dull brown background of the woods. Kamir sees one of the kidnapped athletes making a run for it, and this athlete was obviously not a track star. He moves like Rerun from What's Happenin', with arms flailing wildly in little circles at his side. What was this guy's sport? Maybe rowing? Or curling? Unable to help for some reason, possibly laziness, Kamir and Superargo regroup back at the road, only to be discovered by a sultry beauty in a car every bit as sporty as Superargo's own ride. She seems especially unimpressed that a pro wrestler and his Hindu sidekick are wandering around in the woods, like that sort of thing happens all the time. I know I'd be pretty shocked to see Honky-tonk Man and Mr. Fuji in the city, let alone loitering along the side of a dirt road out in the middle of nowhere. We soon learn that the woman works for the man creating the robot army, and that man is none other than famed iconoclastic rock star Elvis Costello, or at least someone strikingly similar in appearance. Superargo and Kamir get attacked in the woods, and once again one of the robots is lugging around one of those spikey morning star things. What the hell? You have the technology to turn the world's greatest athletes into awkward, clumsy robotic minions, yet the best you can do for arming them is some Renaissance Festival surplus? Look, I know Europe has a rich medieval history and all, but give your guys some guns or something. Who robs a bank or fights heroic costumed superheroes with a mace? Superargo, in turn, throws trees at the robots. So I guess on top of mental powers and fast-coagulating blood and levitation, he also has super-strength. Doesn't that sort of make his in-ring career even more of a sham? I mean, how heroic is it for a guy with supernatural strength and mental powers to pick on lugs whose only real power is a mean hammerlock? Meanwhile, for all his metaphysical mumbo jumbo, Kamir's only power seems to be to yell "Superargo, help!" really loud when he is getting choked by robots. He does this in pretty much every scuffle the duo gets into, making you wonder why Superargo even brings the guy alone. Sure, he may be an ace at helping you develop your telekinetic abilities, but that obviously doesn't translate into him being a good fighter. Chun this guy is not. Superargo does manage to kill and capture one of the Faceless Giants. After struggling to get the thing into the tiny back seat of his European sports car (I bet Superargo wishes he'd bought something a little more sensible now), he takes it back to HQ where it is operated on by Jeffery Combs and Will Farrell, or at least two more striking look-alikes. They don't tell him much except for what he already knows, but it does cause him to remember some crazy old scientist who had been doing robotics research before going totally insane. While Superargo and Kamir visit the mad scientist in a building labeled "Asylum for the Criminally Insane" (would they really advertise that so prominently?), the diabolical Dr. Wond hypnotizes Claire into trying to kill Superargo. The remainder of the movie involves a lot of running around in the woods and Kamir screaming, "Superargo! Help me!" before everyone ends up in Wond's underground lair for the big final showdown. Wond could have avoided a lot of trouble if he just killed Superargo with a knife or a gun or something instead of some goofy mad scientist way (gas chamber). To his credit, at least Wond does try and kill Superargo instead of pulling that "I want you alive so you can see the fruition of my mad scheme" nonsense that most mad movie scientists pull. All in all, Superargo is a pretty cool little superhero film. Thanks to it being a European production from the 1960s, there's a lot of trippy phantasmagoric stuff. His powers are okay, I guess. I mean, I wouldn't complain if I could throw trees and levitate. Superargo is no Santo, and this isn't nearly as cool as the better Santo films, but it's still a fun adventure with a few twists and turns in the plot. Granted they're very predictable twists and turns, but what do you want from a movie about a superhero wrestler battling robots? It delivers chuckles and thrills, which is enough to keep a lowbrow chump like me satisfied. Although there are scenes of "deduction," the movie generally eschews exposition in favor of more scenes involving Superargo having to pull Kamir out of quicksand. Can't he just levitate out? Anyway, that's a good example of the "show, don't tell" rule, though when my composition teacher told us that, I don't know if she had in mind red-tight-wearing superhero pro wrestlers pulling swamis out of quicksand. Superargo manages to pull off a ludicrous costume fairly well, though I still don't know how comfortable I'd be with Superargo being the last, best line of defense against the forces of evil. I guess he's better than Hulk Hogan, but what I'd really like to see is a group of villains that have to contend with Abdullah the Butcher or Cactus Jack. Superargo's wrestling outfit is no more outlandish than The Phantom's sweet lavender tights -- and that guy was in the jungle! -- or Adam West's pot belly-enhancing spandex. At least Superargo looks fit beneath his tights, a feat that is actually harder to pull off than you might think. Even big, muscular Henry Rollins type guys tend to look silly and skinny in long-sleeve bodystockings, which is probably why most of them opt for those bodybuilder tank tops with the foot-wide arm openings. When Rollins had on the Superman outfit for one of his videos, he looked like a scrawny goofball, yet weirdly enough, when the decidedly non-muscular Christopher Reeve had the blue and red on, he looked okay. All things considered, I'd rather have Adam West looking goofy in tights than any of those absurd "built-in fake muscles" suits that have been so popular since the Tim Burton Batman movie. At least Adam West and Superargo can turn their heads. What the heck was Batman thinking when he made that costume? And then when he had the chance to revise it, what did he do? Add head mobility? No, he added fake nipples. Man, I hope SUperargo kicks his ass some day. Acting-wise, there isn't much to gauge here since my copy of the movie is dubbed. Besides, when you don bright red jimmies and a leather mask, those tend to do the acting for you. The rest of the cast is pretty stiff it seems, but honestly, are you watching Superargo and the Faceless Giants in hopes of spotting the next F. Murray Abraham? Or M. Emmet Walsh? The cops are there to huff and say, "Well old chap, I'm completely baffled." The women are there to scream or say, "Superargo, you will protect me, won't you?" The mad scientists are there to say, "Those fools will pay for laughing at my research!" And Superargo? He's there to kick a little butt. Dr. Wond comes across as a bit of a weak villain. Sure, he has a keen underground lair full of random scientific equipment, and he has the beautiful female assistant who isn't as evil as she thinks, but where the heck are his midget henchmen? Although I would have appreciated a little more in-ring action from a wrestling superhero movie, the action overall is pretty good. The fights are well-choreographed, with only a few of those horribly telegraphed stunt set-ups. I wonder why the only time Superargo uses his super strength is when he throws the tree at the robots. Maybe I'm wrong and that wasn't a super power at all. Maybe it was one of those surges of adrenaline you read about in the papers. The rest of his powers are pretty useless. He gets to levitate once, but he misses the chance to really piss off Dr. Wond by using mental powers to shatter the madman's assortment of antiques. Superargo was spoofed in the film Incredible Paris Incident, and while this movie isn't nearly as goofy or as fun as that one, it's still plenty goofy and plenty fun. With so many people attempting to make superheroes dark and serious and "adult" (or as adult as a costumed crime fighter can be), this campy, wacky throwback to a simpler time is positively delightful. Unless the success of Spiderman reminds Hollywood executives that superhero movies can actually be fun rather than all somber and sour-faced, then at least we know we can look back to the golden age of the 1960s, when all you needed to save the world was a bulletproof bodystocking, a mask, some telekinetic powers, and a turban-wearing sidekick. Hey, what ever happened to that guy who pretended to be Superargo in that one scene? Labels: Action: Luchadores, Action: Superheroes, B-Masters Roundtable, Eurospies, Year: 1968 posted by Keith at 5:49 PM | 1 Comments |
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