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Friday, October 24, 2008The Dunwich Horror Release Year: 1970Country: United States Starring: Sandra Dee, Dean Stockwell, Ed Begley, Lloyd Bochner, Sam Jaffe, Joanne Moore Jordan, Donna Baccala, Talia Shire, Michael Fox, Jason Wingreen, Barboura Morris, Beach Dickerson, Michael Haynes, Toby Russ, Jack Pierce Writers: Curtis Hanson, Henry Rosenbaum, Ronald Silkosky Director: Daniel Haller Cinematographer: Richard C. Glouner Music: Les Baxter Producers: Roger Corman, Jack Bohrer H.P. Lovecraft may not be one of the best writers in the world, but he's certainly one of the most fun to read -- not to mention imitate. For this reason, I got it in my head that it would be a great idea to read The Dunwich Horror aloud to my wife. She not only loves to be scared, but is so committed to the endeavor that she's even on occasion been willing to meet Hollywood remakes of Japanese horror movies halfway. That's a perfect attitude to bring to Lovecraft, in my opinion, because he's an author you really need to be willing to work with. In cracking open one of his stories, you're making an implicit agreement to be scared; otherwise it's just not going to work. Of course, Lovecraft does his part to help you along in that regard, always letting you know exactly how afraid you're supposed to be, even when the object of that fear remains somewhat sketchily defined, and also modeling the desired behavior by populating his stories with characters who launch into paroxysms of terror at the faintest fetid odor. With the combination of my wife's gameness, Lovecraft's semaphore-like emotional cues, and the fact that the mildewed pages of the 1970s paperback edition of Dunwich I'd found gave off a scent that, with a little imagination, could be interpreted as being primordial, we were, as far as I was concerned, all set. However, after five solid pages describing the blighted landscape of Dunwich town, my wife made clear that she wasn't having it, saying something to the effect of, "What is this shit?" All of which is not to discourage you from reading Lovecraft to your own spouse or significant other; but it's certainly important to make sure you've done the proper amount of prep work.     By the way, the old Jove paperback of The Dunwich Horror that I purchased features a cover illustration that is a very literal depiction, based on Lovecraft's description in the story, of Wilbur Whateley in his true form, which looks like the upper half of Golem from Lord of the Rings grafted onto something that looks like a cross between the lower half of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, a pineapple, and one of those cat-shaped wall clocks whose eyes move from side to side with the second hand. I imagine that Lovecraft's tendency to devote more words to telling his reader how scared he or she should be than to describing the thing to be feared posed a problem to those filmmakers initially assigned the task of bringing his work to the screen. After all, until the advent of modern J-Horror -- whose sensibility is pretty much right in line with Lovecraft's -- the common wisdom would have been that you were supposed to scare your audience by showing them something scary, rather than by just showing them a bunch of people being scared, or, even worse, showing a bunch of people talking about how potentially scary some vaguely defined thing might be if it it actually existed. Furthermore, such filmmakers might understandably conclude that a film whose every character was in a constant state of near-wordless cowering for no clear reason might quickly forfeit audience interest.     It is this last conviction that might explain the casting choices made in connection with director Daniel Haller's first Lovecraft adaptation for AIP, Die, Monster, Die!. A veteran art director, Haller had also worked in that capacity on AIP's initial Lovecraft outing, The Haunted Palace, directed by Roger Corman. While by no means a close adaptation of its source material, Die, Monster, Die! did an admirable job of achieving Lovecraft's patented mood of mounting dread and creeping, formless horror. The only departure from that -- and it's a radical one -- was the placement of American actor Nick Adams at its center, probably the most un-Lovecraftian protagonist imaginable, who would be much more likely to call the great Cthulu a "jerk" and punch him in the nose than to simply be driven mad by the impossibility of his existence. When it came time for Haller to make his second Lovecraft adaptation, 1970s The Dunwich Horror, he and screenwriter Curtis Hanson chose to add another very un-Lovecraftian element to their quintessentially Lovecraftian tale with the introduction into the mix of a sweaty dose of eroticism. Lovecraft's stories, with all their references to tentacles and other undulating protuberances coming out of things at all angles, were certainly sexual -- if in a repressed/hysterical way -- but they were far from sexy. In fact, judging from the man's writings alone, I'd imagine that any attempt by him to describe any normal type of human sexual congress would be one of the most excruciatingly awkward, squirm-inducing things you could possibly read. If there does not exist somewhere a porn parody written in Lovecraftian prose, or myriad examples of erotic Lovecraft fanfic, then the internet truly has no right to exist. It's not for me to put the effort into finding out, though. Of course, the concept seems less strange when you consider that it was no doubt partly a result of AIP fulfilling their early Seventies mandate to serve up at least some explotational content with every offering. But the whole enterprise rockets back into the realm of the unnamable when you consider that the actors they chose to place at the center of all this heat and steam were Sandra Dee and Dean Stockwell.     The Dunwich Horror was something of a landmark for Sandra Dee, in that the Gidget star was required by its action to spend much of her screen-time writhing and moaning orgasmically on a sacrificial altar while in a state of near undress, and even to treat the audience to a brief flash of her -- possibly body-doubled -- breasts. Of course, Dee was at an unavoidable crossroads in her career by this time. The wholesome, girl-next-door image that had propelled her to stardom in the early sixties was now not only hopelessly out of sync with the times, but also impossible to maintain now that she had undergone a very public divorce from her husband Bobby Darin. Given these factors, that she would slam her knockers out in an AIP picture was probably as inevitable as it was surprising. On the other hand, Dean Stockwell's transition from sweet-faced to unsavory had been accomplished long before he arrived on the Dunwich set, with any memories of the adorable child star he used to be forever tainted by roles such as that of the effeminate child murderer in 1959's Compulsion. To say that Stockwell comes off as a "little" creepy in The Dunwich Horror would be the Mona Lisa of understatement. From the nervous sidelong glances, to the unwavering hushed monotone, the speech riddled with odd pregnant pauses, and the intent, wild-eyed staring, his performance is, in fact, the whole creepiness package, without one unsettling tick left behind. Of course, given he was charged with portraying a character who, in the original story, was depicted as being a goat-like, preternaturally intelligent, prepubescent eight foot giant who conceals beneath his garments a body that is part T. Rex , part pineapple and part cat clock, you could forgive him for over-compensating.     By the way, my writing this review gave me the opportunity to allay a misconception about Dean Stockwell that I've been entertaining for quite some time. I've long had this vague notion, which I had the nagging feeling wasn't true, that he had some kind of strong Walt Disney affiliation. This turns out to be due to me confusing him with that star of countless, animal-themed, live action Disney movies from the sixties, Dean Jones, a man who is creepy in his own right, though in a quite different, more Disney-like way than Dean Stockwell. Now, thanks to Teleport City's stringent research standards, I can tell you with utmost certainty that Dean Stockwell absolutely, positively did not star in That Darned Cat!, The Ugly Dachshund, Monkeys, Go Home! or The Million Dollar Duck. In fact, during this period in Dean Jones's career, Dean Stockwell was playing roles like that of an acid-tripping Haight-Ashbury hippy in Psych-Out. So, how wrong can you be, really? Aside from being the movie that tried to generate sexual heat between Sandra Dee and Dean Stockwell, The Dunwich Horror is notable for being one of the AIP Lovecraft adaptations that -- like The Haunted Palace, but unlike Die, Monster, Die! -- directly addresses the author's much vaunted Cthulhu Mythos. Granted, it may not do so with enough authenticity to satisfy fans of the author, but much lip service is indeed given to such touchstone concepts as "Yog-Sothoth", "The Old Ones" and the "The Necronomicon". However, as alluded to above, both the Old Ones -- that ancient race of unimaginable non-human creatures who, according to Lovecraft, once ruled the Earth and are itching to return -- and their followers are portrayed as being much hornier than in any of Lovecraft's tales. Their most fully-formed emissary in the human world, the unnamed "thing" locked up in a mysterious upstairs room in the Whateley house, seems to be most concerned with first ripping off all of its victim's clothes when it encounters its first human prey. Similarly, the rituals that Wilbur (Stockwell) must perform in order to summon the Old Ones back into our dimension seem to mostly involve him feeling up a drugged and prostrate Sandra Dee and reading incantations while standing between her splayed legs.     There is a familiar feel of that smarmy, late-to-the-party seventies version of hippie free love to all this, though, of course, in a much more overtly sinister form. It's a tone that's driven home even by Les Baxter's main theme, a narcotically swooning swinger's revelry with a decadent European sensibility that could just as easily have come from the mind of Serge Gainsbourg or Michel Legrand. Mind you, I don't think this quality detracts from The Dunwich Horror. I think that an adaptation of Lovecraft's work for a more permissive age would have no choice but to address the creepy sexuality that underlies it, and Haller's take here is indeed suitably creepy. That this imperative was put in the hands of a studio like AIP, who was more than happy to deliver on the required nudity and implied sexual shenanigans, just represents a fortuitous dovetailing of interests. The potent sex magic that Dean Stockwell wields in The Dunwich Horror -- at least as it applies to Sandra Dee -- is shown to be pretty much in full effect from the very opening moments of the film. It is at this point that we meet Dee's character, Nancy Wagner, a student at venerable old Miskatonic University. Her professor, Dr. Armitage, has entrusted her with the between classes errand of returning his surprisingly crisp looking copy of the ancient book of forbidden knowledge, The Necronomicon, to the school's library. The mention of the book's name attracts the twitchy attentions of the proximately lurking Wilbur Whateley (Stockwell), a visitor to the university from the nearby town of Dunwich whose consummate creepiness is matched only by his single-mindedness. Wilbur follows Nancy to the library and asks her to let him see the book before she replaces it in its case. She resists at first, but it is only a matter of Wilbur making whammy eyes at her for a few seconds before she relents, despite the objections of her obviously unaffected friend Elizabeth (Donna Baccala). Wilbur makes off to hungrily devour the tome's contents, only to be intercepted by Dr. Armitage, who rents it from his grasp with a stern rebuke. This bit of awkwardness does not preclude the four of them from going out for a drink at the pub later, at which time Wilbur engages Dr. Armitage in a conversation that goes more or less like this: Wilbur: Can I see the book? Armitage: No. Wilbur: Can I see the book? Armitage: No. Wilbur: Oh, Okay, but... can I see the book? Armitage: No.     Dr. Armitage, by the way, is portrayed by the veteran character actor Ed Begley, a man who played supporting roles in almost as many classic film noirs as Elisha Cook Jr. He's a great, if unusual, choice for the role, because, while he's appropriately gray and distinguished, his history of playing tough guy roles gives him a two-fisted air decidedly at odds with the tremulous demeanor of the typical Lovecraftian academic. That may not make his character authentic to the text, but it certainly makes him a more credible opponent to the forces he's up against, and when he and Wilbur face off to shout incantations at one another at the movie's conclusion, you get the sense that you're seeing a dramatic showdown between more or less equally matched adversaries -- a markedly more satisfying and movie-like conclusion than if the makers had stuck with the finale as presented in the book, in which a bunch of frightened old men cower in the rain while shouting spells and praying that Yog-Sothoth doesn't kill them. Wilbur eventually manipulates circumstances so that Nancy has to give him a ride back to his creepy old house in Dunwich, and, once there, sabotages her car so that she has no choice but to spend the night. Nancy is already falling increasingly under Wilbur's sway by this point, so she raises little objection to this turn of events, but Wilbur still drugs her drink just to be on the safe side -- possibly because, in her chemically-induced stupor, she will be less likely to notice the ominous gurgling sounds coming out of the locked room at the top of the stairs. That night, as she slumbers, Nancy dreams that she is being groped and chased by a bunch of hippie mud people who caper around and mug at the camera as if they were auditioning for the Broadway production of Yog-Sothoth: Superstar. This experience seems only to increase Wilbur's hold over her, and the one night's stay extends to a series of days, as, all the while, it becomes clearer that Wilbur is grooming her for a very specific purpose, a purpose that is more than hinted at when Wilbur shows Nancy the ancient sacrificial altar perched atop a desolate hilltop near his home.     Once Wilbur has finally gotten his mitts on the Necronomicon and set in motion the rituals necessary to bringing the Old Ones back into the world of men, The Dunwich Horror, like the story it's based upon, sees out its final act as a pretty sweet little monster on the loose story. The film is helped greatly in this regard by the fact that Lovecraft described the unnamable thing locked up in the Whateley house, once freed, as being mostly invisible to human eyes. This enables the filmmakers to represent it through some pretty effective shots of trees being rent about by unseen forces, an interesting use of negative effects, and reaction shots of the monster's horrified victims (one of whom is played by a very young Talia Shire). All in all, it's a satisfyingly apocalyptic payoff to the slow-burn piling on of unease that makes up the film's first hour, and even survives the fact that, once we do catch a fleeting glimpse of the beast, it appears to be Dean Stockwell wearing a mask made out of plastic snakes. While the sleazy, swinger's leer that The Dunwich Horror affects certainly dates the picture -- and may go some way toward undermining its scare factor for modern audiences -- the film in most respects still holds to the high standard set by AIP's earlier gothic horrors drawn from the works of Poe and Lovecraft. As with those films, the modest budget is compensated for by both a handsome production design and a studious attention to the creation of a pervasive atmosphere of dread and foreboding. Bolstering that is a range of reliable, if somewhat over-the-top, performances by a cast made up of stolid old troopers, among them Sam Jaffe as Wilbur's grandfather and Lloyd Bochner as Armitage's ally, Dr. Cory. Only Sandra Dee, out of all the performers, seems to be holding back, but the fact that she comes off as a bit narcotized is actually in keeping with her character's situation. Still, it's a bit odd that Dee, who had not all that long before been a fairly major star, agreed to take a part in a film in which she really ends up being more of a prop than a character.     And pondering that image of Sandra Dee, lying prone and half-conscious while being the subject of all kinds of uninvited groping, I might be inspired to reconsider my previous statement about what might constitute The Dunwich Horror's true source of horror for modern audiences. After all, isn't the thought of being groped by a leering, permed and mustachioed Dean Stockwell really the definition of horror at its most profound and unnamable? More courageous souls than I have doubtless been prompted to tear off and eat their own faces at the mere thought. In fact, if that's the only way to purge that image from one's mind, I recommend that we all do that right now. See you on the other side of madness!  Labels: Horror: HP Lovecraft, Studio: AIP, Year: 1970 posted by Todd at 9:55 AM | 16 Comments Thursday, June 05, 2008Insee Thong Release Year: 1970Country: Thailand Starring: Mitr Chaibancha, Petchara Chaowarat, Kanchit Khuanpracha Director: Mitr Chaibancha Writer: Sek Dusit (source novel) Producer: Mitr Chaibancha When watching one of the Insee Daeng movies -- or any other existing example of popular Thai cinema from the 1960s -- it's possible to see a separate story being told in the countless pops, skips and scratches that riddle the severely weathered and damaged available prints, much as you might see a story in the lines etched in an aged human face. And that story, depending on how you look at it, can be either a sad one or a happy one. On the one hand, those wounds and blemishes speak of a unique part of world popular cinema that is on the verge of being lost to history -- the ragged condition of each surviving film testifying to the many, many more that have ceased to exist entirely. On the other, as with a child's threadbare teddy bear, that conspicuous wear and tear serves as evidence of just how much these movies have been loved and enjoyed by their intended audience, thread over and over again through projectors -- be they in urban cinemas or makeshift outdoor screenings in small villages -- until there was little left of them to thread; in short, loved by their audience to the extent that today they have been virtually devoured. The filter of age and decay that one necessarily has to watch these films through can also, from a particular vantage point (mine, for example), provide them with an additional layer of beauty and mystique on top of the already strange and distinctive visual experience they provide. After all, in an age when engineered distress and decay are a standard part of the image-maker's palette, it's conceivable that someone would actually make something that looked like this intentionally (and, in the case of Grindhouse, to some extent already has). Adding to this illusion of intentionality is the manner in which most of these films are presented today on disc; to compensate for many of them being filmed without sound -- with dialog and sound effects to be provided by live actors in the theaters where they were shown -- the VCD versions of the films include an audio track with actors reading the dialog along with the movie. The result is a sound track -- complete with anachronistic 1980s music -- that progresses smoothly over the jumping and skittering image we see on screen, accounting for every beat created by the missing frames.     Scenes from Awasan Insee Daeng (1963) As you might have gathered from the above, there is a lot that makes these older Thai films less than accessible to Western viewers. In addition to their far from pristine condition, there is the jarring experience of watching them with the provided audio tracks -- really more a form of dramatic narration than dubbing, since little attempt is made to match lip movement, or to create the kind of aural ambience that would suggest the voices were actually coming from the people on screen. Furthermore, because these are very low budget films, they often depend a lot on long scenes of verbal exposition to move their action forward, which makes negotiating their sometimes convoluted plots without the aid of subtitles near impossible. Still, there is a vibrancy and energy to these films that makes them worth sampling. If for no other reason, they should be seen for their unique look, one that is singular in world cinema: a retina-busting suffusion of burst color, which was the result of the inexpensive 16mm color reversal film stock commonly used at the time (and which, because it yielded no negative, was another reason for the lack of clean prints today). With all of the high-contrast, over-saturated hues on display, constantly shouting for attention, even scenes in which nothing is happening give the appearance of being on the verge of jumping from the screen. Considering all of these factors, I think it's best to approach these films with a goal of immersion rather than comprehension -- aided, of course, by an ample dose of your favorite intoxicant.     Scenes from Awasan Insee Daeng (1963) Since I suppose it's possible that there are people who don't enjoy partaking of inebriants and watching weird movies that they don't understand (though, if there are, I don't want to know them), it's a good thing that there exists the PAL region DVD release of Insee Thong, aka The Golden Eagle, the final film in the Insee Daeng -- or Red Eagle -- series from 1970. Not only does the DVD feature English subtitles, but there is also a subsequently-added Thai language dub track that includes Foleys and sound effects in addition to synchronized dialogue (though the mostly disco-fied music still manages to be conspicuously ahead of period). The condition of the print, however, is still pretty dire -- but, as I've indicated above, that's really part of the whole experience. The character of The Red Eagle was created by popular Thai novelist Sek Dusit in 1954. In a series of books that lasted into the sixties, the author chronicled the adventures of Rome Ritthikrai, a seeming ne'er-do-well who, under the cover of night, would don a red, eagle-shaped mask to take on the forces of organized crime and international communism. Masked vigilante heroes of this type were a common feature of the pulp crime novels that became popular in Thailand during the postwar years, but, of all of them, The Red Eagle proved to be the most enduring. That the character is still fondly remembered today may in large part be due -- as much as to the character itself -- to the fact that, when it came time for the Red Eagle to make the transition to the big screen, the man chosen to portray him was Mitr Chaibancha, inarguably the biggest star of 1960s Thai cinema.     Scenes from Awasan Insee Daeng (1963) A man of humble origins who made the transition from boxer to film actor in the late fifties, Chaibancha at his peak was in such demand that, during the years of his box office reign, he starred in nearly a third of all of the films produced in the country (though other estimates put it closer to half), making literally hundreds of films by the time of his premature death in 1970. While this prolific output made the prospect of him being cast as The Red Eagle a near statistical certainty, Chaibancha, though by necessity capable of carrying off a variety of roles, had a reputation as an action hero that made him an obvious choice. Making his debut as the masked hero in the late fifties, Chaibancha would return to the part again and again, fronting a series of films that extended through the decades' end. In the process he would forge an identification between star and role that survives among his public to this day. As portrayed on-screen by Chaibancha (and perhaps as also portrayed in the novels, though I haven't had the opportunity to read them), The Red Eagle, despite his somewhat super-heroic appearance, doesn't appear to be blessed with any exceptional powers, or even to possess much more than the average amount of strength or agility. In fact, most of his exploits seem to simply require a penchant for breaking and entering into the homes or offices of his chosen prey, tip-toeing around in the shadows, stopping to seduce whatever convenient female he comes across in the process, and then blasting his way out with his trusty sidearms once detected (which seems to happen in most cases). In this sense, he bears a family resemblance to that staple of popular narrative the world over, the masked bandit with a conscience, specifically of the sleek, cat burglar variety we see in Asian films like Chor Yuen's The Black Rose and The Lizard, and -- though in a decidedly more amoral guise -- in European pop culture in the form of characters like Diabolik and Kriminal. True to that model, The Red Eagle, though a patriotic hero, works in opposition to the law, and must often evade capture by the police in the course of his self-appointed mission to protect Thailand from nefarious interests.     Scenes from Jao Insee (1968) Though there are certainly many precedents for The Red Eagle, where Chaibancha really stakes out some unique territory in costumed hero lore is in his portrayal of The Red Eagle's alter ego, Rome. Taking the idea of the effete society boy turned masked avenger to an absurd extreme, Chaibancha plays Rome as, not just a hard drinking playboy, but a hopeless lush, a grown man who drinks like a suicidal frat boy and ends most evenings getting hurled face-first from one or other of Bangkok's most posh nightspots. As he presents himself to the public, there's nothing the least bit suave or charming about Rome. At the beginning of the 1968 film Jao Insee, for instance, we watch the pathetic spectacle of Rome careening haphazardly from table to table, hand cupped over mouth, as well-heeled nightclub patrons duck and weave to avoid the projectile spray that appears to be impending. Of course, it's all an act; and it's a good one. No one would ever suspect this sad, gin-soaked creature of being The Red Eagle, even if he told them that he was -- which is exactly the sort of thing you'd expect Rome, in a drunken stupor, to do. Always on hand at the end of Rome's latest feigned bender, standing by patiently to help pour him into her waiting car, is his faithful girlfriend, Oy, whose back-watching duties extend to Rome's activities as The Red Eagle. Oy is played by the beautiful Petchara Chaowarat, an actress who was paired with Chaibancha in well over a hundred pictures. Their track record of hit films together made them one of Thai cinema's iconic screen duos. As portrayed by Chaowarat, Oy has a substantial role in The Red Eagle's adventures, not only assisting him in strategizing his next move -- and helping him make his getaway when it goes awry -- but also on occasion fighting at his side. In Jao Insee, one of the films in the series that precedes Insee Thong, she even becomes a masked avenger in her own right to help the Eagle capture a particularly elusive villain.     Scenes from Jao Insee (1968) It's unclear the extent to which Oy is aware of the philandering that's involved in the Eagle's nightly crime fighting duties, but it's hard to believe that she's completely ignorant of it. In 1963's Awasan Insee Daeng, for instance, it's left to Oy to breach the villain's hideout and rescue a trio of captive beauties, each of whom the Eagle has romanced -- for ostensibly strategic purposes -- at one point or other in the course of the film. If she is indeed aware of it, it's difficult to say whether her apparent blasé attitude toward the fact is indicative of Thai sexual politics at the time or simply a symptom of Rome and Oy having a particularly progressive relationship. In Insee Thong, the final film in the series -- and the first to be both directed and produced by Chaibancha -- Rome and Oy find themselves in a unique situation (though not so unique to anyone familiar with Mexican lucha films). An impostor is posing as The Red Eagle to pull off a string of assassinations. Though Rome has promised Oy that he will give up his crime fighting activities and settle down, he finds this insult to his reputation too much to bear, and so decides to don the eagle mask one last time. Following a logic that is perhaps unique to Rome, he also decides that, until the Eagle's name is cleared, he will need to operate under a new guise, that of The Golden Eagle. This fools no one, of course (The Golden Eagle's costume is identical to that of The Red Eagle, only gold), least of all the police, and soon Rome finds his search for the real killers hampered by the diligent efforts of police captain Chart, a dedicated and longtime believer in the Eagle's inherent rotten-ness.     Scenes from Insee Thong (1970) The real force behind the assassinations is the Red Bamboo Gang, a shadowy organization with ties to Red China whose ultimate goal is the communist takeover of Thailand. While gang member Poowanant goes about murdering the gang's political enemies under the fake Red Eagle guise, their leader, Bakin, sets about extorting money from the country's wealthy businessmen by using an even more unconventional means. Bakin, we are told, learned hypnotism from "the same place as Rasputin", and the real key to his power is that he can not only hypnotize others, but also "himself" and "his soul". The result of this, in the first case, is him somehow being able to physically split himself in three -- which, we are further told, makes him immortal -- and, in the second case, being able to project his image via a red crystal Buddha statue that is given anonymously to all those who fail to meet his blackmail demands. The unvarying result of these poor souls seeing Bakin's fearsome visage emanating from the seemingly innocuous gift is death by heart attack. By means of his usual nocturnal incursions, strong-arm tactics, and tactical dalliances (which this time include the bedding of a gang higher-up's comely niece), The Golden Eagle eventually susses out the gang's plan. After discovering the whereabouts of Bakin's Island headquarters, he notifies the authorities, thus setting in motion a climactic set piece that -- judging from this film, Awasan Insee Daeng and Jao Insee -- appears to be something of a Red Eagle standby: a hyper-violent and chaotic Bondian assault on the villain's compound in which the Eagle, Oy and armies of armed-for-bear policemen run around firing at will at the evildoers' colorfully outfitted foot soldiers, be they retreating or advancing. As this mini D-Day rages on the beach outside, the Eagle slips into the compound to stage his final confrontation with Bakin and his seemingly unstoppable commie voodoo.     Scenes from Insee Thong (1970) Sprinkled throughout the machinations of Insee Thong's plot is a liberal amount of broad humor, as if we needed further cluing in that we shouldn't be taking all of this too seriously. This consists of the usual crowd-pandering comic relief in the form of bungling policemen and officials, as well as Rome's recurring drunken pratfalls, and also (we now know, thanks to the subtitles) lots of lowbrow jokes. It seems that Rome is not only a drunk, but also a bit of a potty mouth; In an early scene he tries to dissuade a friend from opening a possibly booby-trapped gift by telling him "It might have dog shit in it." Also in evidence is that confusing brand of casual homophobia one comes across from time to time in Asian cinema, the kind that expresses hostility toward homosexuals while at the same time seeming to acknowledge them as a common and normal part of everyday life. Still, as groan-inducing as this all may be, Insee Thong has so much on its narrative plate that it never sets its feet in one place long enough for any of these missteps to completely trip it up. Insee Thong's final scene sees The Red Eagle vindicated and suited up in all his restored glory. Triumphant over evil once more, he grabs hold of a rope ladder hanging from a waiting helicopter and is carried out across the sea and toward the horizon. The scene was shot in one long take without a stunt double. Mitr Chaibancha, unable to hold on as the helicopter started out over the ocean, lost his grasp on the ladder and fell hundreds of feet to the beach below. Originally the footage of this fatal fall was included in Insee Thong, but has since been replaced with a freeze frame accompanied by text describing the circumstances of Chaibancha's death. A permanent shrine, featuring a statue of Chaibancha and numerous photographs from his films, was erected at the site of his fall and is still visited by his fans today. His death is further commemorated in one of the strangest DVD extras I've had the opportunity to witness, a documentary short entitled "The Cremation of Mitr Chaibancha", in which attendant's are shown holding Chaibancha's corpse up to the temple windows so that the throngs of fans gathered outside can have a final look at him. As unpleasant as this may be for some to watch, it goes a lot farther than any mere words can to communicate the intensity of feeling that Chaibancha inspired in his public.     Scenes from Insee Thong (1970) When the circumstances of a film's creation are as tragic and momentous as those of Insee Thong, it's tempting to reserve for it nothing but respectful praise. Still, it must be said that Insee Thong, while highly entertaining, is no great film -- and it's not too difficult to assess the flaws in its construction that account for that. There's the aforementioned over-abundance of grating humor, for instance, as well as the fact that Chaibancha obviously isn't in as near fighting trim as he was in previous outings. But to judge the film by those shortcomings would be unfair, because the charms that would mitigate them -- all of those things that are wonderful about Insee Thong -- are less easy to fully appraise. For, even with a forgiving attitude, its difficult for the film's ragged condition not to provide some obstacles to its full appreciation -- especially in those moments when it becomes obvious that there are substantial parts of Insee Thong missing. More than once, major plot developments (such as the death of a main character) are referred to in the past tense without having occurred on screen. In addition to this, the color in the existing print is considerably washed-out, making it possible for us only to imagine just how head-spinning its array of lurid tones might have been had we been able to see them in all their glory. Regardless of all of these concerns, however, the film is an important one that should be seen by anyone with an interest in Thai cinema. And for those who are simply curious, the hint of greater thrills it provides just might be enough to inspire further exploration. In the years since Mitr Chaibancha's death, The Red Eagle has continued to stake out a place in Thailand's popular culture. The late nineties saw broadcast of a Red Eagle television series (notable to martial arts fans for featuring a young Tony Jaa as the lead's stunt double) and, most recently, director Wisit Sasanatieng announced plans to bring the character back to the big screen. This last bit of news is a happy one for all concerned. Sasanatieng's mind-blowing 2001 feature Tears of the Black Tiger (Fah Talai Jone) was widely -- and justly -- praised for its audacious visual style, but many in the West missed the fact that that style -- popping with high-contrast, saturated colors -- was a direct result of Fah Talai Jone being one long, passionate love letter to the very Thai cinema of the sixties of which Insee Daeng was a product. This deep affection, along with Sasanatieng's international stature, puts him in a unique position to update this iconic Thai hero while at the same time introducing new audiences to the joys of that strange and vibrant corner of world cinema past from which he sprang. And broader awareness of those earlier films could only be a good thing, right? After all, it could perhaps even lead to release on DVD of the other surviving films in the Red Eagle series -- which is the type of thing that I'm generally in favor of. But I have to say that, in comparing Insee Thong to those earlier films, I found that the latter film was made somewhat less enjoyable for me by being made more comprehensible. After all, without those subtitles, I wouldn't have known that it didn't really make sense, and so would have remained blissfully ignorant of the fact that it was incomplete. Better just to pop in one of those unsubtitled VCDs of the earlier films and get lost in the colorful nonsense of it all. That to me is pure cinema, after all. And pure cinema is what these movies are all about. Labels: Action: Superheroes, Country: Thailand, Year: 1970 posted by Todd at 1:44 AM | 4 Comments Saturday, March 29, 2008Delinquent Girl Boss: Blossoming Night Dreams Release Year: 1970Country: Japan Starring: Reiko Oshida, Masumi Tachibana, Yukie Kagawa, Keiko Fuji, Hayato Tani, Toshiaki Minami, Bokuzen Hidari, Yasushi Suzuki, Saburo Bouya, Tatsuo Umemiya, Tonpei Hidari Director: Kazuhiko Yamaguchi Writers: Norio Miyashita, Kazuhiko Yamaguchi Cinematographer: Hanjiro Nakazawa Music: Toshiaki Tsushima Producers: Kenji Takamura, Kineo Yoshimine The Delinquent Girl Boss movies are just my speed, because as much as I hate to admit it, I'm a bit of a Pinky Violence lightweight. It's not that I don't like the genre. I do, very much. It's just that it's one that's so fraught with potential pitfalls that watching an unfamiliar entry can be a bit of a risky proposition. In my experience, the most successful PV films maintain an almost painfully delicate balance between sleaze and artistry, and those that don't leave me with nothing more than a ninety minute hole in my life and a feeling of being mildly pervy. It's for this reason that, for all the depravity on display, I can still get a kick out of Terrifying Girls' High School: Lynch Law Classroom, while Girl Boss Guerrilla, from the same director, makes me want to tear my brain out and scrub it with a Brillo pad--or that, while I consider Female Prisoner Scorpion: Beast Stable, with all its incest and bloody backroom abortions, to be a small masterpiece, Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs just reminds me that I should probably wash my hands after handling the discs I get from Netflix. The Delinquent Girl Boss movies, on the other hand, could best be described as Pinky Violence "lite". That is due in great part to their star, Reiko Oshida, who is simply so adorable that you'd never want any of those things that happen to Miki Sugimoto and Reiko Ike in their movies to happen to her. (Not that you necessarily want them to happen to Miki Sugimoto and Reiko Ike, either--but obviously someone does, because it seems like neither of them can get through a movie without having some sweaty yakuza or lesbian prison guard string them up and whip them across the chest.) Though Rika, the character that the baby-faced Oshida portrays, is certainly a tough customer, she's less worldly and careworn than her sister delinquents, and you get the clear impression that her bravado is to some extent meant to cover up for some residual adolescent doofyness. In contrast to the hardened teenage killing machines typically played by Sugimoto or Ike, with Rika there is a faint glimmer of hope of a brighter future lying ahead, and that not only keeps you rooting for the character, but also allows the series as a whole to take on a somewhat lighter tone than other films in the genre. Not that it's all picnics and popsicles, mind you.     Blossoming Night Dreams is the first in the Delinquent Girl Boss series, as well as Toei's first entry in the Pinky Violence genre. Spurred to jump into the game by the success of Nikkatsu's Stray Cat Rock series of female delinquent films, the studio would go on to make the PV genre their own through more brazenly exploitative franchises like the aforementioned Terrifying Girls' High School and Female Prisoner Scorpion films. At the time of this film, the template that those later films followed had yet to be set, and so, while there is a fair share of tits and blood on display, there's nowhere near as much as would become standard within a couple years. Furthermore--and again unlike perennial PV stars Miki Sugimoto and Reiko Ike--Oshida was not required to shed her clothing for her role, leaving the burden of baring all upon her supporting stars. As with Worthless to Confess, the final entry in the Delinquent Girl Boss series (and the only other one that I've seen) Blossoming Night Dreams opens in a girls' reform school, giving us a scene in which the rowdy inmates make a mockery of a presentation on bridal etiquette, using it as an opportunity for what you have to guess is just the latest in a series of regularly occurring wild brawls. This presentation, in which a prim charm school matron delivers such dispiriting bromides as "to look like a bride is life itself", paints a pretty cynical picture of the possibilities that await these girls on the outside, and it's not hard to side with them when they run riot over the thing. Still, these possibilities have to be confronted, and we soon shift forward a year, where we find nineteen year-old Rika back on the outside, trying to put her past behind her and play it straight and narrow. Unfortunately, as countless films have taught us, that's rarely an easy thing to do. Rika first finds work at a laundry, but loses that job when the owner attempts to rape her, and his wife, stumbling in on the two of them, assumes that it is Rika who is trying to seduce him. The next horny male Rika encounters, however, ends up being a little more helpful, as Tsunao (series regular Tonpei Hidari) is able to provide her with an introduction to Umeko, a former inmate of the same reform school who runs a bar and nightclub where a number of the schools' alumni work as hostesses. It seems like Rika may have found a safe haven under the wing of the maternal Umeko, but the old ways start to exert their pull again once she discovers that a local Yakuza clan is trying to muscle Umeko out of her ownership of the club. Just when you think you're out...     As is typical with Pinky Violence movies, pretty much all of the men that the girls in Blossoming Night Dreams encounter are goonish, sex obsessed louts. In the case of the more sympathetic ones, you get the sense that only a thin layer of civility (or, in some cases, just timidity) prevents them from simply taking by force what they want from these women. This conceit makes watching Pinky Violence movies in general a complicated proposition for a male; While you're invited to ogle at the exposed female flesh on display, these films pretty much tell you that, in doing so, you're no different from the leering and slobbering potential rapists that inhabit them. Aside from the odd reformed yakuza, the only nobility you'll see is that displayed by the women, who know that they only have their own community to protect them within a world dominated by ruthless male predators (something that's driven home, as it is here, by the mournful enka ballad that opens so many of the films in the genre--which is usually a tragic rumination on a woman's narrow options in a heartless male world). Because of this, the scenes of stoically endured torture and abuse that you see in some of the harder-edged entries in the genre are as much tableaus of martyrdom as they are mere kinky spectacle. Finally, placing a further obstacle in the way of enjoying these films as pure titillation is the fact that what consensual sex occurs is almost always joyless for these women, with sex presented as just another cynical means of survival. Now, by this I'm not saying that these films are necessarily feminist in their perspective--though they do seem, despite being written and directed by men, somewhat anti-male (which--sorry guys--is not the same thing). I'm just trying to point out that the viewpoint they present is certainly one that's more complex than one might assume. And that complexity provides a framework for, among other things, some well drawn and sympathetic female characters--though not so much the male ones. Don't get me wrong, of course: while Blossoming Night Dreams is pretty tame, a lot of the other films in the genre could fairly be called "dirty movies". But to dismiss them as being only that would be a mistake, and would perhaps deny you a challenging and rewarding movie watching experience... with titties.     Anyway, because suffering is such an important part of these movies--and Reiko Oshida seems to be off limits in terms of baring the full brunt of it--it's a good thing that we have on hand Yuki Kagawa's character Mari. Judging from this and Worthless to Confess, Mari serves as the Delinquent Girl Boss saga's emotional pin cushion. Here Mari is working as one of the bar hostesses, and a major subplot involves her desperate search for her drug addicted younger sister, Bunny, who is on the run after having stolen a stash of drugs from the Yakuza (those same yakuza who are trying to take over the nightclub, naturally). After failing to reach Bunny before the gang can, with predictably tragic results, Mari goes out seeking revenge, only to end up being viciously gang raped. Kagawa gives one of a number of solid performances in the film, investing Mari with a haunted soulfulness that makes her plight all the more painful to witness. Because of that I wish I could say that things improve for Mari as the series progresses, but I'm afraid no one saw fit to give the poor girl a break, as the final film ends with her stricken with a case of TB contracted from her no good yakuza boyfriend. The above is not to say that Rika is wholly exempt from being at the receiving end of some hard treatment and harsh lessons. There's a somewhat surprising episode in which she naively offers herself to the yakuza boss Ohba in return for him waiving a debt he's been holding over Umeko's head. Of course, Ohba avails himself of what's offered (though, unlike with Mari, we're only shown the aftermath) but with no intention of keeping up his end, and he allows the rest of the gang to rough Rika up before kicking her to the curb. Though there is a brief scene in which Umeko admonishes a shame-faced Rika for her stupidity, the film gives only cursory attention to the effect that this presumably traumatic event has had on Rika, and mostly just uses it to provide fuel for the bloody payback that we know is coming. It's not the only time that the series is a little dishonest in how it isolates its star from the worst of what it has to dish out, but for me it was the instance in which that practice was the most distracting. Once every other avenue of recourse has been exhausted, and the accumulated insults and injuries have become to great, the women of the Bar Murasaki determine that screaming, blade slashing, blood spraying vengeance is the only answer. It's at this point that those of us who have already seen Worthless to Confess (which is most of us who would watch Blossoming Night Dreams, given that Worthless beat the first film to DVD by a couple of years) realize that Blossoming Night Dreams has followed pretty much the exact trajectory as that later film: We have the opening in prison, followed by various attempts to go straight in the outside world, which are foiled in turn by the greedy machinations of the Yakuza, and, finally, a number of intertwining subplots that coalesce into a hyper-violent girl-on-gangster finale. This, however, doesn't make the sweet, sweet payback any less satisfying, and it's to Blossoming Night Dream's credit that its predictability doesn't make it any less enjoyable.     While it lacks those unexpected moments of transcendent lyricism that mark Norifumi Suzuki's better PV films--and that can be found throughout the first three Female Prisoner Scorpion movies--Blossoming Night Dreams is not without its instances of visual poetry. Still, its overall look is most representative of the type of high level craftsmanship that was standard in the Japanese commercial cinema of its day. Director Kazuhiko Yamaguchi would go on to direct all four films in the series, and his work here--along with that of cinematographer Hanjiro Nakazawa--shows a studied attention to composition and color that insures that each shot has an appealingly hyper-real sheen. This serves especially well in the psychedelic nightclub numbers, which are largely indistinguishable from the psychedelic nightclub numbers in many other Japanese movies of the period, and are all the better for it (after all, why mess with a winning formula?). I really liked Blossoming Night Dreams. As I've indicated, it won't overwhelm you with its artistry, but it is a handsomely made film, and the performances are uniformly top notch. And because I didn't have to spend half of its running time cringing and hoping that my wife didn't walk into the room, it afforded me the opportunity to savor some of those aspects of the PV genre that are most appealing to me. I imagine that the other two movies in the cycle that I have yet to see are largely the same, but that doesn't make me want to see them any less. The fact is, I would watch them for Reiko Oshida alone, even if they consisted entirely of her reading the Tokyo phonebook to a stuffed ocelot. She's simply one of the most appealing stars of her day, period. Labels: Action: Pinky Violence, Action: Yakuza, Country: Japan, Year: 1970 posted by Todd at 7:33 PM | 0 Comments Sunday, October 21, 2007Count Yorga, Vampire Release Year: 1970Country: United States Starring: Robert Quarry, Roger Perry, Michael Murphy, Michael Macready, D.J. Anderson, Judy Lang, Edward Walsh, Julie Conners, Paul Hansen, Sybil Scotford, Marsha Jordan, Deborah Darnell. Writer: Bob Kelljan Director: Bob Kelljan Cinematographer: Arch Archambault Producer: Bob Kelljan and Michael Macready Music: Bill Marx Alternate Titles: The Loves of Count Iorga, Vampire Availability: Buy it from Amazon  .So far, our examination of old fashioned vampires in modern day settings has covered Dracula, in the Hammer Studios films Dracula AD 1972 and Satanic Rites of Dracula, and some guy named Count Sinistre, from the previously obscure British horror film Devils of Darkness. But this trend of placing traditional vampires in a modern (well, 1970s) setting actually started in America, with a low-key film called Count Yorga, Vampire. At the time of Yorga's release, there were very few people making vampire movies. Hammer was pretty much the only game in town, and they were still setting their vampire films in the Victorian era. Devils of Darkness was one of the first vampire films to transport a vampire into the current era, at least since the 1932 Tod Browning production of Dracula, which was set in what was then modern-day London. However, one can argue that the differences between the London of 1870 and 1932 is markedly less than the difference between 1870 and 1970, and so for our purposes here, Devils of Darkness is more substantial to our little foray than Dracula. It's also less substantial because almost no one saw Devils of Darkness, and without a dedicated distributor or studio, it quickly faded from memory and was almost totally forgotten until it finally found its way to DVD (its first home video release) in 2007. Which means that Count Yorga, Vampire, is really where we can say this short-lived trend began. There was obviously still interest in vampire films. Hammer's late 60s Dracula films still made money, even if it was obvious that the foundation was beginning to crumble. All it would really take was finding a successful way to modernize the monster without completely divorcing it from its Victorian roots (that would come later, after this transitional stage). Leave it to American International Pictures to step up to the plate and take a swing. AIP is a familiar studio for anyone who follows the world of cult films. They were a B-movie behemoth, and a testing ground for a host of directors and actors who would go on to superstardom. But the real linchpin in their creative machine was a guy named Roger Corman. First as director, and later as producer, Corman proved to be amazingly adept at scouting talent, stretching a dollar, and compacting a shooting schedule. One of his specialties was shooting a film, wrapping it early, then realizing that he still had three days left on a rented set or a contract for Boris Karloff. So he'd make another movie, from concept to script, to final shooting, in those three days.
AIP's standard operating procedure was to crank out cheap, black and white, double feature movies, and it worked well for them. In 1960, however, most likely heavily influenced by the surprising success of Hammer's big three of Horror of Dracula, Curse of Frankenstein, and The Mummy, Roger Corman approached AIP executives and pitched them the idea for a more lavish color film with a longer shooting schedule and more ambitious scope. AIP didn't exactly jump at the prospect, but the combination of Hammer's success with serious, color horror films and Corman's proven track record as a director who could crank out decent films that always turned a profit for the studio eventually swayed them, and Corman was given a whopping three weeks and the services of Vincent Price to shoot The Fall of the House of Usher. It was designed very much in the style of the Hammer Gothics, full of vivid colors and costumes placed against a bleak and crumbling backdrop. It was a huge hit for AIP, so much so that Corman was given free reign to shoot a whole series of similar films, each starring Vincent Price and based --often extremely loosely -- on the works of Edgar Allen Poe. Despite their modest roots, Corman's Poe films remain some of the best written, most sumptuous American horror films ever produced. By 1970, however, the tables had turned. Hammer was starting to resemble one of the crumbling old castles they so loved to set their movies in, while AIP was increasingly nimble and able to adapt to changing tastes and trends in pop culture. When they felt their Hammer style horror films were becoming too old-fashioned, they started spicing things up with more cynical scripts and more liberal displays of nudity. They successfully branched out far beyond horror to produce a massive array of drive-in and B-movie fare, as well as a second series of Poe films, still starring Price but this time directed by Gordon Hessler. It was AIP that decided the vampire film could find new blood by being adapted to a modern setting, and this time, it was Hammer who ended up following AIP's lead. AIP, at least in the realm of horror, was a child of Hammer, but Dracula AD 1972 would never have existed if not for AIP's Count Yorga films. Of course, many would argue that we would have all been better off without Dracula AD 1972, but I'm not one of those people. Point is, this was a classic "student becomes the master" reversal.
Oddly, the initial idea for updating the vampire tale was to make it a saucy softcore film. Many people claim that the original version of Count Yorga, Vampire -- then bearing the title The Loves of Count Iorga, Vampire -- was meant to be a porno film. Not so, though it was meant to flaunt the bare breasts and other things you could get away with thanks to the increased liberalness of the 1970s. When AIP picked up the independently produced film for distribution, they demanded that the sauciness be trimmed in order to achieve a more teen-friendly GP (PG to you young bloods) rating. Some remnants remain, at least in the current version of the film (which is slightly longer than the original theatrical version), but there must have been a considerable amount left on a cutting room floor somewhere, though some production stills of the unused scenes remain in circulation. With increased sexiness out, Count Yorga's next and far cleverer method of updating the vampire film was to approach it with a more cynical attitude. All of these movies have to feature a variation on the, "Vampires? You must be joking! This is the 20th century!" line, but Count Yorga takes the line to heart. You really must be joking. A vampire, cape and all, in 1970's California? Ridiculous! And Count Yorga's attitude is basically, "Yes, isn't it?" even as the film is biting you on the neck. It's a tricky tightrope act, to both poke fun at and respect the classical vampire film, but what makes Count Yorga special is that it manages to pull it off.
We first meet Yorga, played with acerbic perfection by Robert Quarry, as he presides over a seance attended by a typical group of jaded young couples. As with Sinistre in Devils of Darkness, the long-lived vampire is able to adapt to modern times and fit in by traveling in small circles where quirkiness and strange behavior is easily dismissed. Yorga himself is a bit of a prick, though it's entirely understandable given the fact that the guy has been alive for hundreds of years and probably had to suffer all manner of fools. Quarry is great in the role, mixing this biting sarcasm with a world-weary melancholy to create a character that is undeniably a villain yet oddly sympathetic. Hammer attempted, with far less success, to inject this same sort of world-weariness into Dracula in The Satanic Rites of Dracula, but they didn't study Yorga's game plan close enough to really pull it off. Christopher Lee's Dracula was always a presence but rarely an actual character, even when he was on screen. Yorga, on the other hand, is much more complex and much more human, and thus his attitude is far more understandable. His disillusionment with pretty much everything around him in the "normal" world is an interesting counterpoint to the same disillusionment the modern couples have with the supernatural. "What a bunch of pointless nonsense," both sides seem to be thinking. Nonsense or not, the supernatural bears its fangs when one of the couples gives Count Yorga a lift. The movie's humor is very subtle, very dry, and best characterized by things like a vampire having to bum a ride home after a seance or Yorga's wonderful, "I believe I had a cape" line as he prepares himself to leave. These moments aren't entirely played for laughs, and the film doesn't desperately scream at you and point out things that are supposed to be funny. It's really up to you to decide whether or not you think it's amusing.
Yorga continues to chew his way through the women in the circle of friends, just as the men struggle to come to grips with the idea that there really could be a vampire praying upon them and their girlfriends. This culminates in a bout of verbal sparring in which our principal heroes, Michael and Dr. Hayes, visit Yorga at his estate and attempt to engage the count in one of those battles of double entendres and "I don't know what you really are...or do I?" types of conversations. Yorga is visibly bored and irritated by the whole thing, and the confrontation ends just before sunrise, with Yorga basically doing nothing more than kicking the guys out. The proper finale follows shortly thereafter, in which Yorga's home is raided in an attempt to recover the kidnapped and hypnotized Donna, and Michael and Dr. Hayes discover a bit too late that Yorga's pad is crawling with hungry vampire chicks. As with any low-budget productions, Count Yorga, Vampire has a number of obstacles to navigate in an attempt to turn budgetary limitations into assets. For starters, the concept of an old world vampire in a new world setting is very limited in its scope. There are no scenes of Yorga hitting the town or going to a club. Instead, the film is limited to a few sets, revolving around Yorga's mansion, creating a feeling of claustrophobia and timelessness despite the intrusions of modern trappings like vans and telephones. Yorga is keen to control his environment and keep himself in a setting over which he can exercise more effective control. In the same sense, it allows him to survive in modern times but surround himself with comfort items from his past, like an old fart sitting in his den listening to pre-Rollins Black Flag records and complaining about how punk rock is so crappy now. Yorga can survive because he has learned how to shrink the modern world into a controllable sphere where he can exist on the very fringes, reaching in to pluck out a victim every now and then but generally remaining below the radar of modern society. He relies additionally on the jaded nature of modern people -- obviously, a vampire attack is utterly preposterous. Like all vampires in these movies, though, he eventually screws up and picks on a group of people who are slightly more open to the possibility and also happen to have one of those doctor friends who happens to know a lot about the occult.
Despite the low budget, Count Yorga, Vampire manages to succeed based on the wit of the script and the strength of Robert Quarry in the lead. There are bumps in the road with the script, most likely because of the quick rewrite from softcore titillater to GP horror film, but overall they are pretty easy to ignore. As I said, some remnants of the softcore version remain. Yorga whiles away boring nights by sitting on a throne in his basement and watching his vampire brides make out with one another -- a scene that was probably considerably longer and didn't cut away right before the lip lock and fondling in the original vision of the movie. Additionally, there's a make-out session in the van, because what else are you going to do when you get your van stuck in the mud on someone's private property if not go at it in the back? I mean, that's what you got a van for in the first place, right? Ultimately, and despite erroneous claims that this was originally going to be a porno film, I assume The Loves of Count Iorga, Vampire would have ended up looking like Hammer's saucier 70s vampire fare like Twins of Evil and Vampire Lovers. It wouldn't have harmed the film any, I don't think, but ultimately, I think it works pretty well in the final form, as a very low-key, slow-moving, but hypnotically entrancing study of a jaded vampire that doesn't lapse into either self-indulgent pity or over-obvious satire. How you ultimately react to such a film depends entirely on how you feel about such movies, whether you consider them engrossing or just boring. I really liked it, and I thought that it was wonderful at creating a sort of weird, claustrophobic, and moody atmosphere.
Not that the movie is entirely comprised of guys sitting around debating vampirism. This is a low-budget horror film distributed by AIP, after all. So in between the soul-searching and pondering and Yorga sneering at the mere mortals around him, you get scenes like a woman eating her own cat and plenty of vampire attacks. It’s just that ultimately you come for Robert Quarry's performance as Yorga. Everything else is just dressing. Sweet, bloody dressing. Quarry was a steadily employed television actor before being cast in the role of Yorga, and he really shines here in what is probably his most triumphant role. Many people among the population of those who tend to rank such things, rank his portrayal of the bored and always somewhat irritated Count Yorga as one of the best on-screen vampires of all time. Casting an older, solid actor in the role is a prime example of what movies like this to right that so many modern movies do wrong. When Quarry plays Yorga as a long-lived and jaded vampire, he is able to lend the character the appropriate sighing surrender mixed with annoyance. Yorga has an abundance of life (or afterlife) experience, and Quarry communicates that in a way the current crop of much younger actors cannot. Quarry continued to work well through the 80s and 90s, often in low-budget horror and exploitation fare, before more or less retiring in 1999. however, it looks like his services are being called on once again, as he is apparently appearing in a movie called The Tell-Tale Heart, which also stars scream queen staple Debbie Rochon and another legend of 70s vampire films, Ingrid Pitt, who starred in 1970's Vampire Lovers from Hammer, which contained the nudity and softcore content that was nixed from Count Yorga.
Writer/director Bob Kelljan, whose only directing credit before Count Yorga was the naughtily titled Flesh of My Flesh (he had previously been an actor in both television and low-budget drive-in fare), crafted a tightly framed minor horror classic that manages to be well-paced despite the dearth of action. He used Yorga to become a successful television director, working steadily until his death in 1982. He makes Yorga into a creepy little film that never sacrifices its downbeat atmosphere and general creepiness in the pursuit of comedy, and yet manages to produce a number of -- if not funny, then certainly witty -- moments that will make you smile. It's wicked, and at times, it's even kind of scary, especially if you're watching it late at night -- which is more than can be said for most horror films. Count Yorga, Vampire ended up being a solid money-maker for AIP, and so a sequel was commissioned with a slightly larger budget. Kelljan and Quarry returned, as did some of the rest of the cast, despite the fact that the original's downbeat ending pretty much leaves everyone dead. The Return of Count Yorga is more or less the same movie, only with Craig T. Nelson as a cop. It's quite enjoyable as well, even if it is a rehash but with Craig T. Nelson. Count Yorga's greater effect was to launch that mini-revival of vampire fiction that saw everything from Hammer's two Dracula movies, Marvel Comic's Tomb of Dracula, and two Blacula films that put a blaxploitation spin on the modern vampire story (the second Blacula film was actually even directed by Kelljan). Although largely forgotten and relegated to the back waters of cult film fandom today, Yorga was influential and successful during its time, and DVD has helped a lot of new viewers rediscover this unique twist on an old tale. Labels: Horror: Vampires, Series: Vampires in the 70s, Studio: AIP, Year: 1970 posted by Keith at 2:46 PM | 3 Comments Sunday, May 13, 2007The Dead Don't Talk
DIGG THIS ARTICLE. 1970, Turkey. Starring Aytekin Akkaya, Dogan Tamer, Giray Alpan. Directed by Yavuz Yalinkilic. Buy it from Xploited Cinema.
So when's the last time you heard someone say, "Man, I really want to go to Turkey"? I ask because the only people I know who've been to Turkey were either A) born there, B) have family there, or C) went there for business trips before deciding they liked it. And when I started talking about going there (which I will do some day), people kept warning me against it because it was dangerous and... y'know, Islamic and Arabic and probably terrorist. 'Cuz I guess most Americans think of Turkey as being Arabic (even though the language is more closely related to Central European languages), and of course it's a predominantly Islamic nation (although the secularity of the government has its roots in the 19th century), and, frankly, I think a lot of Americans seem to think of the Middle East as one big desert, full of terrorists and Allah and surly peasants. In reality, Turkey has a rich cultural history. I'm not just talking about the Ottoman Empire; there are also a plethora of Greek, Roman, Hittite, and other ruins in Turkey. I've repeatedly been told that it's cheap to travel there, that the people are exceedingly friendly (at least outside of the cities), that much of the landscape is beautiful, and that it's touristically like going to Italy for a fraction of the price (though that comment isn't meant to suggest that there's nothing uniquely Turkish about Turkey; I think it was meant as an analogy). It's no real secret that Turkey has a history of weird cinema. I mean, there was an entire chapter of Mondo Macabro dedicated to Turkish films, and reviews of some of those films are becoming more and more widespread on the 'net. The films themselves are in some cases getting easier to obtain, but in most cases it's still hard to turn up so much as a 5th-generation vhs dub of some of the most compelling of these movies... and for your sake, I hope you're not afraid of going in without subtitles. Weird cinema's niche market is positively thriving these days... but overall, Turkish movies, like Turkish culture, seem to be often-overlooked, and scarcely given any of the attention due to them. Enter Onar Films. A small group of people located in Greece are hard at work under that moniker, trying to share rare and neglected gems of Turkish weird cinema with the world... and so far, their work has been vastly under-appreciated. I'll be reviewing a few of their releases in the coming weeks in hopes of drumming up a bit more interest (and business) for these DVDs, which each feature lengthy interviews, useful filmographies (which are hard to find for Turkish figures sometimes), and improved (if necessarily not always perfect) audio and video transfers. So there's the plug. I'm sincere about this; I really would love to see these people continue their work, as there's a whole wonderland of crazy Turkishness out there that sorely needs DVD formatting... A Turkish Rambo with Cuneyt Arkin and zombies (!!!); a Turkish freakout often cited as being weirder than Turkish Star Wars, with Cuneyt Arkin, a zombie/mummy, a bush that eats people, ninjas who kill suburban poolgoers, ninjas who kill other ninjas, motorcycle chases, and some guy throwing a pigeon through the window of Cuneyt's house; a plethora of ripoffs and amalgams of Superman, Batman, The Phantom, as well as foreign comic book heroes like Zagor, Fantomas, and Karaoglan; etc. I don't mean to turn this review into a billboard, but I do want to give the very valuable work of Onar Films its due credit... they're helping to share a significant and generally unknown part of weird cinematic history with the rest of the world. So. The Dead Don't Talk. Let's talk about it. I should mention that the DVD it's on is a double bill; I'm just dealing with one of the two movies here. The other will come later. As the very informative interviews explain, this 1970 film is one of the earlier forays into Turkish cinema. After a semi-'horrific' film in the 40s, 1953's Dracula in Istanbul was a considerable success, based on a Turkish novel which in turn sort of Turkishized Stoker's famous novel, changing the Christian themes into Islamic ones. According to Giovanni Scognamillo, and his student Metin Demirhan, this was the first film in which "Dracula showed his canines"... But horror didn't really catch on afterward in Turkey. The interviewees cite a couple instances of fantastic films incorporating Vlad the Impaler (for instance, as an adversary of serial hero Kara Murat), but really, there have been very few horror films up until the present era, when digital filming, DVD technology, and a crop of young directors seem to be responsible for a sort of "boom" in Turkish horror production. Oluler Konusmazki is one of the few examples of Turkish horror occurring between Dracula Istanbul'da and the films of today. It appears to have been a dismal failure at the box office, so I guess that means that the general demographic of 1970s Turkey didn't experience film like I do. Director Yavuz Yalinkilic is known for minimalistic scripts, low budgets, and action. Since this is meant to sort of be an atmospheric film, the action is somewhat reduced here, but the other two definitely hold up. In fact, to call the script "minimalistic" is really... well, too minimal a descriptor. The running themes in the film are twofold: "Wait... what?" and "What the fuck? No..." This is not a bad thing, as I'll explain, but definitely, if you're a curmudgeon for logical plots and artful and rich exposition, this film might give you an aneurysm, put you in a coma, and then torment you with incomprehensible dreams until you're finally excused to meet the hereafter. (Yeah, that's morbid, but this is a horror film I'm talking about.) We begin, very abruptly, with a young couple, Mehli and Oya, in a scene that sets the tone for the whole film. A man in a carriage rides up and accosts them, telling them to get in. Mehli (played by a young Aytekkin Akkaya, famous to many of you for his supporting role in Turkish Star Wars) asks where they're going and why. The man explains that it's an old mansion, and the only place nearby for someone to stay. As they ride through the forest to the mansion, the man repeats ad nauseam that it's the 15th of the month, and he has to get home soon, because it's the 15th of the month, so he has to get home soon. He drops them off and rides off without payment, because it's the 15th of the month, and he has to get home soon. Shrugging, Mehli takes Oya inside. Yalinkilic has spared us the need to contemplate such trivialities as, say, who Mehli and Oya are, where they're traveling, how they ended up in a town that only boards people in the haunted mansion where people always die, and why they'd let some random and ostensibly unstable guy insist on taking them through the woods in his carriage to anything, whether it be a haunted mansion or, y'know, an abandoned camp. And then there's the matter of what time period this movie takes place in; it could be the 19th century, or maybe it's the 1960s... And we never get the name of the town, either. Not even a silly name like "Nilbog"; nothing at all. So. The house has a habit of automatically slamming doors shut behind people, as one might expect. Oya is scared, but Mehli insists that he doesn't believe in ghosts in this day and age, and they go upstairs to find a table set for two. They split up to look around, naturally, and Oya admires herself in the mirror before screaming when she sees someone staring through a peephole at her. Then the couple sits down to eat. Hasan, the... guy who... well, I guess attends to people at this house, comes in and explains that it's the 15th of the month, so there are always only two visitors, though this is never explained and it never comes up again. He also explains that he opened the door for the couple, though they did not see him. Finally, he explains that the food is always delicious because he makes it, though after saying that he walks off with some of the food that I think the couple was supposed to eat. Hm. Anyway, in between 'conversations,' or if you prefer, 'rapid exchanges of newspeak-efficiency communication,' Mehli digs into the soup, asking, "What's the worst that could happen?" Oya does come up with one scenario, but I'm sure you can come up with a number of them yourself... Then Hasan brings Oya down to "show her something." Hasan, I might add, looks kind of like a Turkish Vincent Price on a vampiric kind of day. He shows her a very old portrait, explaining that Oya is beautiful like the depicted woman. She died, but he lives only for her... Only for her... But the beautiful women always leave him. On cue, Oya retreats from the room, walking the same route they took to get there, but in literal reverse (i.e. backward). Of course, backward and forward are played with a bit in this film, as Yalinkilic delights in the use of mirrors. I think every room in the mansion has at least one full-length mirror, and sometimes it's hard to tell if we're watching a mirror or watching the action really unfold. The soundtrack, I should also add, is... interesting. Often it's sparse: the ticking of a clock, or silence except for the "dialogue." Other times, it's vaguely ominous. Often, though, it's the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey: as the trumpets build, the suspense is supposed to build, with the "freakout" or "startle" moment predictably coming when the drums come in. I was never sure if someone was about to die, or if it was the filmmakers' subtle way of telling us that somewhere else in the mansion, a monkey was cracking ribs with a femur. Anyway, then the couple goes to bed. In separate rooms, it seems. If they're not married, I guess that might make sense in Islamic Turkey, but... well, we'll assume that's the case. Mehli is then attacked by a weird-looking guy wearing a hat and a trenchcoat of sorts who is completely impervious to the bullets in Mehli's gun. I'll try to keep plot summary minimal from here on out (what does that even mean in this context anyway?), but... this guy is worth talking about. He's a stocky Turk with thick, though maybe not bushy, eyebrows, and he laughs like a motherfucker. I mean, seriously. He laughs when he's angry, he laughs when he's excited, he laughs in triumph, he laughs in defeat, he laughs maybe as some form of propulsion (he's a pretty slow walker)... If he's not talking, and usually he's not, he's just laughing. Laughing and attacking people. Laughing one of those "evil villain laughs," mind you, but laughing it with the reckless abandon of those novelty Halloween decorations they sell at drugstores that go off every time someone walks past them. This guy is really the only main character of the film, because he's the only character whose presence persists throughout; everyone else is relatively ephemeral. We're later introduced to some apparent graverobbers who give the film its title (one says to the other that it's all right to dig up graves because "The dead don't talk"). Then the "new teacher" comes to live at Hasan's mansion, where she also gets the soup-and-"I-live-only-for-her"-soliloquy treatment. She lasts a little longer, though, making friends with some guy with a mustache who seems normal--except for the time that she asks about the village, and he screams at her that he doesn't understand his existence. But hell, I have friends who'd probably do that, too, if they weren't too stoned most of the time to scream at all. Eventually, the four characters who close out the movie decide to take on the hat guy using spiritual, and not doggedly scientific, means. Their adversary is apparently some form of the living dead, and he melts in a puddle of blood or chocolate syrup when caught in the sunrise, after talking about the voices of his people, the dead, who are screaming out or calling to him or something. So. The movie is actually negative on the "how much sense does this make?" scale... and I give it props for that. The Dead Don't Talk exists in a weird vortex of logic that undercuts conventional apprehension of film much as its "the power of the spirit" theme undercuts, in its own way, scientific knowledge production as being the end-all be-all of existence. Did the director intend that effect? Hell, I don't know, but does that matter? The disorienting editing, the black-and-white photography, the abrupt start-and-stop use of the soundtrack, the constant, constant, constant laughing, the liminality produced by the lack of a definite (or approximate) setting, the sometimes-effective and sometimes-amateurish use of mirrors... these all have a synergistic effect. The flashes of competence in the film actually join hands with the amateurish failures to make the film feel more oneiric and more surreal. The repetition of some scenes is almost incantatory, and in light of the absolute incomprehensibility of The Dead Don't Talk, I found the film's attempt at horror to occasionally be paradoxically effective. I'm not exactly saying of the film that it's so bad it's literally frightening, but... well, on a certain level, in a certain way, to a certain degree, I think it is. Believe it or not. Even if the horror element doesn't work for you, the film can provoke its share of laughter, and the surrealism of the cinematography and its editing is genuinely artistic at times in a "best-of-Jess-Franco" kind of way... In fact, in some ways this film reminds me of some of Franco's work, except for the lack of nudity and random sex toys with obscure theological significance just laying about on the floor. Of course, I like this film better than I personally like most of Franco's work, but the ideal of Ligottian oneiricism isn't really limited to Franco anyway... The only reason I don't say "Lucio Fulci" is because there's nowhere near enough (or any) gore here to make that comparison. The film doesn't suffer for the lack of overt physical violence, though. Frankly, if you ask me which film is better at evoking the disordered fibre of a nightmare, City of the Living Dead or The Dead Don't Talk... I think my vote is with the latter. Watching The Dead Don't Talk, whether it will leave you laughing or contemplative, requires a sort of zen of movie watching. Don't question things; such behavior will ultimately hurt you. Just roll with it. I concur with Jared at World Weird Cinema on this point (http://www.worldweirdcinema.blogspot.com/): you've just got to sit back and open up your mind, the same way you have to let a shot of liquor just kind of slide down your throat if you want to do it right. And then, when it's all said and done, your head will be spinning in what seems to me to be a uniquely Turkish sort of way. Labels: Country: Turkey, Horror, Turkish Horror Double Bill, Year: 1970 posted by Ryan at 2:00 PM | 0 Comments Saturday, January 15, 2005Scars of Dracula Release Year: 1970Country: England Starring: Christopher Lee, Patrick Troughton, Dennis Waterman, Jenny Hanley, Michael Ripper, Michael Gwynn, Christopher Matthews. Writer: Anthony Hinds Director: Roy Ward Baker Cinematographer: Moray Grant Music: James Bernard Producer: Aida Young Availability: Buy it from Amazon  Promote It: Digg | del.icio.us And we were doing so well! Most movie studios can't sustain the quality of a film series beyond two films -- and quite a few have problems even getting that far. It was no small feat, then, that Hammer managed to produce not one, but two consistently good series. Their Dracula and Frankenstein films set the benchmark for quality horror during the late fifties and throughout the 1960s. And you know, they almost made it to the finish lines with both of them. The Frankenstein series featuring Peter Cushing as the titular mad doctor lasted six films, with only the third film being a misfire - and not a very bad misfire at that. By the time Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell was released, it was clear that the series was at its end, both creatively and financially. Still, it managed to go out with a dash of class, and the final film features the second worst monster in the series (the honor of worst, in my opinion, goes to Kiwi Kingston's shrieking slapdash Karloff wannabe from Evil of Frankenstein) but one of the best stories and finest performances from Cushing. Even if the final film was not a financial success, everyone involved could hold their heads up high and be proud of all six movies. And then there was the Dracula series starring Christopher Lee.
Like Frankenstein, Dracula started strong and managed to maintain the course for five films. Had they stopped with Taste the Blood of Dracula, it too would have retired a successful and respectable series. It was clear, in fact, by the fourth film that no one had much of an idea left regarding what to do with the character of Dracula. Another film in which a group of travelers end up at Dracula's castle and are preyed upon for the remainder of the film just wouldn't cut it. With Taste the Blood, Hammer tried to go in a different direction and make a movie where Dracula was a presence without being an actual character. American distributors, however, refused to buy a Dracula movie that didn't have Christopher Lee skulking about in an opera cape, and so the Count was forced into the story in a rather awkward fashion that gave him very little to do beyond stand in the shadows and count. And that's not what his title is supposed to mean. Still, Taste the Blood was quite a good film even if Dracula's physical presence has little to do with the plot. Like I said, had they wrapped it up with this one, everything would have ended on a positive note. But where as the financial failure of Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell sealed its fate as the final film in the Frankenstein series, Dracula had the artistic misfortune of scoring yet another box office hit with Taste the Blood. And so it was that a sixth Dracula film was to be made, regardless of whether or not anyone had anything interesting to put forward. Scars of Dracula isn't an abominably bad entry into the series (they'd save that for the final two films). It's just completely derivative and pointless, falling back onto the tiresome "doomed souls visiting Castle Dracula" and trying to set itself apart by giving Christopher Lee's vampire count more lines in this one movie than he'd had in all the others combined. They don't fool anyone, though, and while Scars boasts some memorable moments, the gestalt experience is one best forgotten. We have yet another Paul in this film, as well as another Klove (Patrick Troughton, best known to sci-fi fans as the second Dr. Who, or the hobo Doctor as I call him). I think that's two Kloves to four Pauls, and add them to the three or four Hans's from the Frankenstein movies. Okay, two Kloves is one thing, but what's the deal with Paul? Didn't someone look back and realize they'd named the last three stiffs (you can hardly call any of them heroes) Paul, and thus they should go for a different name this time out, like Steven perhaps, or Beauregard? Well, by the time this series is over, a preponderance of Pauls will be the least of our concerns.
The movie wastes no time in letting us know we're in for a bumpy ride as we go immediately to the lamest Dracula reincarnation yet. Now, if you recall the final film, Dracula was transported to London, then disintegrates in an old church, leaving nothing but his trademark little pile of dust. When this film begins, however, Dracula is lying in his coffin back at Castle Dracula. A floppy giant rubber bat wobbles awkwardly into the room on visible wires and proceeds to drool a little of blood onto Dracula's dust. Voila! The prince of darkness rises again! Now you know, even ignoring the horrid continuity between this and the previous films (which went to great lengths to connect itself logically to the end of Dracula has Risen from the Grave), there's no way to ignore that the ragged-looking bat prop is one of the single worst special effects in the history of Hammer horror. Someone wanted lots of bats in this movie; the least they could have done is check to see if anyone at Hammer could create them in a remotely believable manner. No hyperbole here - this thing would be embarrassing in a teenage goth's shot-on-video horror short. How it managed to flop and wiggle it's way into an actual professional production is a mystery to me. Maybe if they'd stopped at one bat, things wouldn't be so bad. But we're going to get lots of them, and each one will somehow manage to be more pathetic looking than the last. Astoundingly, the scene manages to get even worse as Dracula (Christopher Lee, undoubtedly doing the film under protest yet again, as he would so frequently remind people) sits up and the bat begins squeaking at him while Dracula nods his head and listens intently. I expect this sort of thing in a Lassie movie, maybe even in a tender scene shared between Godzilla and Anguilas, but Dracula? "What's that, lad? You say a busty wench is down in the churchyard? Let's go!" I mean, yeah, they stop short of having Dracula jump up, yell "Alakazam!" then shrink down to action-figure size so he can ride the bat around, but I'm sure if it had occurred to them, that would have happened too. Well, Dracula gets his busty wench kill in for the day, but this angries up the blood of the local peasants, and for once they don't just sit around in the tavern staring ominously at each other. In fact, one almost has hope when Michael Ripper, appearing as "Angry Barkeep" for the nine thousandth time, decides they should round up a good old-fashioned torch-wielding mob and kill Dracula off once and for all for the fifth time. Now, this is all right! A torch-wielding mob of peasants within the first ten minutes of a film? That's something I can live with. Unfortunately, they prove to be the most incompetent torch-wielding mob of peasants in the history of horror films, as they proceed to storm angrily up to Castle Dracula and knock on the door. I mean, they do it firmly and with stern looks on their faces, but if you're going up the mountain to kill a murderous vampire and burn his castle to the ground, stopping to politely knock on the door sort of undercuts your entire message. It gets even worse when, despite the fact that they must be aware that Dracula and/or his hairy servant Klove noticed the huge mob of torch-wielding peasants coming up the road, Michael Ripper knocks again and says, "Open up! I'm quite alone!" Since Dracula is asleep, I assume this all takes place in the day time, so really, brandishing the torches angrily in the air probably lost some of its effect as well, but when you're the kind of mob that can be stymied in the rage by a butler who refuses to open the door, torches in the day time are the least of your concern, though you should probably be concerned regarding the efficacy of trying to burn down a stone structure. When they do gain access to the castle (I can't remember if Ripper pulled the old "Okay, I guess I'll leave then," and made fake footsteps like he was walking away so that Klove would let down his guard and open the door), Klove doesn't seem especially upset. He may be a hairy hunchbacked servant, but even he knows that trying to burn down a stone castle with torches may damage a few tapestries, but that's about it. Still, the mob seems to consider it a job well done even though both Klove and Dracula survive. And, umm, the castle is still standing, too. Bravo, gents! Now let's all go down to the tavern for a pint!
When they return from their glorious triumph of getting a few walls slightly sooty (Klove will be scrubbing them for days to get the clean again), they discover that Dracula took the opportunity to send more floppy fake bats down to the town to massacre every last woman and child. This sort of puts a damper on their gaiety for the evening, and one has to wonder how a trio of floppy bats managed to massacre so many people and pull out so many eyeballs. The story then shifts to another town, where the movie solidifies its place in the pantheon of bad films by featuring a wacky comedy sequence in which the philandering Paul (Christopher Matthews) gets chased around by the angry burgomaster after being caught in bed with the burgomaster's daughter. Thankfully, the film stops short of piping in Benny Hill music, but then maybe this entire painful sequence would have been better if they'd thrown in a little "Yakkity Sax," sped the whole thing up, and allowed Paul to pause for a second to pat an old man on the head. The Scooby-Doo style chase eventually leads to the birthday party of young Sarah (Jenny Hanley), who loves that rascally Paul even though his far nicer, less whorish brother Simon (Dennis Waterman) loves her. Eventually, Paul ends up at Castle Dracula, and yes, we realize we're going to get another one of those "Whatever you do, don't go to the castle" movies where everyone goes to the castle. And that's just the first third of the film. It doesn't get any better from there despite the fact that Christopher Lee gets so much more screen time than usual. He hisses and seethes and screams and snarls his way through a series of unmemorable lines as he engages in all manner of brutality, including branding Klove with a hot poker, stabbing someone with a sword, impaling people on pointy light fixtures, and going nuts with the whip (once again on Klove). In fact, this is the first Dracula film where you expect the Count is more likely to just haul off and punch someone in the face than flash his mesmerizing red eyes at them and bite them on the neck. He seems to forget for most of the movie that he actually has vampire powers, and instead acts like a schoolyard bully, albeit a schoolyard bully with a tendency to wear a big cape for no discernible reason. This means Scars of Dracula has more gory action in it than any of the previous films, but none of it has much of an impact. Where's the fun of watching Dracula slap Dr. Who around? Okay, maybe that sounds a little fun, but it's really not. Dracula also stabs a female vampire with a dagger. For some reason, this kills her. At this point, though, I don't even care. I guess if Dracula isn't going to bite people like a normal vampire should, then other vampires can be killed with daggers and so forth. I guess some vampires fear a wooden stake, and others fear a wiggling rubber dagger. On the hero front, what can you say? This film gives you a milquetoast lead in Simon, and a standard issue cowardly priest (Michael Gwynn, who played the "monster" in the far superior Revenge of Frankenstein). You keep waiting for the priest to rise to the occasion and stop collapsing in his pew aisles and weeping, but that's about all he ever does. The Dracula series had been following an interesting trajectory, starting with Van Helsing's explaining Dracula in purely rational terms as a social disease to an increasingly supernatural demon to be combated not with science and reason, but with faith. Here, however, even that is chucked out the window in favor of having Dracula be nothing more than some asshole who happens to command a fleet of shaky rubber bats.
Simon sort of drifts from one scene to the next until he eventually finds himself standing on the roof with Dracula, about to be killed until a bolt of lightning shows up to do his dirty work for him. Boy oh boy, we're a long way from Van Helsing, aren't we? Patrick Troughton's Klove is every bit as over-the-top as Lee's Dracula, and both of them are more laughable than they are sinister. I did say that this film had some memorable moments, didn't I? I mean, memorable because they're good, not because they're so unbelievably awful. I guess what I meant to say is there's the one scene worth remembering. One of the most notable sequences from the Bram Stoker novel involves Jonathan Harker observing Count Dracula entering and exiting the tower of Castle Dracula by crawling up and down the wall like a spider. For one reason or another, this scene had never been included in any theatrical version of the story, so scriptwriter Anthony Hinds and director Roy Ward Baker figured now would be as good a time as any. It does show, if nothing else, Dracula has learned the benefits of putting his crypt in an impenetrable tower with no entrance or exit save for the one window way up high that only a guy with spider climbing abilities can get to. It certainly makes more sense than keeping it on the ground floor with an unlocked door, as was his practice in previous films. Of course, once Christopher Lee went crawling up and down walls, there was no stopping Dracula. Frank Langela did it in hazy slow motion with billowing cape and romantic string music playing. Gary Oldman did it all herky jerky while wearing a big red robe. It just goes to show you that a scene of Dracula scurrying around don the wall may be cool, but it can't save the whole movie. Even the trademark Hammer look isn't on display here, as cheap budgets make for cheap sets. Fire damage explains away the spartan appearance of Dracula's castle, but that doesn't make it interesting to look at. More than ever, the people who made fun of horror movies with cardboard characters and cardboard sets had plenty of ammo for their attacks. It can be fun, but you never once forget you're watching a dreadful movie. There's a reason this emerged as the goriest of all Dracula films, and one of the goriest Hammer films, period: they had to cover up the threadbare production with something. Scars of Dracula isn't quite a disaster, but it's everything bad about Hammer films, and everything that critics unjustly accused Hammer films of being - only this time, there was no defending the product. Hammy acting, clumsy comedy, wretched special effects, weak characters - heaving bosoms is about all this one has going for it, and you can get those in any Hammer film, even the good ones. 1970 was simply not a good year for Hammer, with this, the awful Horror of Frankenstein (not part of the actual Frankenstein series, and not starring Peter Cushing), Creatures the World Forgot, and Lust for a Vampire overshadowing the studio's two good films from that year: the wonderful Vampire Lovers and the acceptable Lady Bathory exploitation film, Countess Dracula. Scars of Dracula ends up being a highlight reel for anyone who ever wanted to showcase the lowest common denominator Hammer film. Hinds was a good scriptwriter, and Baker was a more than competent director. So what went wrong? It can only be that, in the end, no one but the accountants gave a damn about making another Dracula movie. Unfortunately, it didn't stop there. Scars of Dracula once again made money, which meant that, impossible though it may be, yet another Dracula film would inevitably be made. Fans grew hopeful when they heard Peter Cushing was back in the game as Van Helsing. They grew suspicious when they found out Dracula would be visiting the year 1972. Their suspicions, it would turn out, were well founded. Dracula, A.D. 1972 would show everyone who thought Scars of Dracula was the worst Dracula movie Hammer had made that they hadn't seen anything yet.  Labels: Horror: Dracula, Horror: Vampires, Stars: Christopher Lee, Studio: Hammer, Year: 1970 posted by Keith at 4:04 PM | 0 Comments Tuesday, December 14, 2004Taste the Blood of Dracula
1970, England, Starring Christopher Lee, Ralph Bates, Geoffrey Keene, Linda Hayden, Michael Ripper, Peter Salas, Ilsa Blair, John Carson, Martin Jarvis. Directed by Peter Sasdy. Available on DVD (Amazon).
Last time we saw the prince of the undead, he was impaled on a cross and turned into that pink sawdust bus drivers sprinkle on the floor when kids throw up. For just about anyone, even the common vampire, that would signal the end, once and for all. But this is Dracula we're talking about, and if Dracula Has Risen from the Grave proved to be a financial success for England's Hammer Studio, then you could bet good money on the fact that they'd find yet another way to bring the Count back from the dead, even if he'd been impaled on a cross and even if series star Christopher Lee was back out on the streets again telling anyone and everyone who would listen that the Dracula movies were awful and he would absolutely, positively, under no circumstances ever play Count Dracula again. Anyone who knows the cycle knows that means that the next film in the cycle, Taste the Blood of Dracula, stars Christopher Lee as the titular count, and that in turns means we'd have to read even more quotes from Lee about how he was practically forced to do this film, but that he'd sure as heck never do another one. There are two common paths of thought regarding Lee's frequent and increasingly irritating complaints about Hammer's Dracula movies. The first is that, well, Christopher Lee is just whiny and annoying. The second is that he made these statements with the full blessing of Hammer and with every intention, despite what he was saying, of reprising the role so long as the movies proved profitable. Having the star of a film out there talking about how horrible it all is and how he never wants to do another one is a surefire way to get people curious. Certainly Hammer seemed to have suspiciously peculiar luck with convincing Christopher Lee to go back on his bold proclamations. So either Lee is an obnoxious talker who never lives up to his own assertions, or he's just a cog in a clever Hammer marketing ploy, or Hammer has some bundle of pictures or other bunch of material that they use to regularly blackmail Lee.
In fact, Taste the Blood of Dracula was originally scripted by Anthony Hinds on the assumption that Lee would make good on his boasts and refuse to appear. Much like Brides of Dracula before it, Taste the Blood of Dracula was going to employ the threat of Dracula and his disciples without actually featuring the bloodsucker himself. As originally written Taste the Blood was going to be a showcase for Hammer's great young hope, Ralph Bates, the man they hoped would serve as the banner star for a new era of revitalized Hammer output. It seems like a good idea. Christopher Lee was becoming more difficult by the day, and one has to assume that despite the man's marquee value, Hammer would be happy to just move on without him for a spell. And Ralph Bates was certainly an able man around which to structure the faltering studio. Where as Cushing and Lee and the previous generation of Hammer actors had represented an older, more distinguished presence, Bates was young and handsome and would appeal, Hammer hoped, to the younger kids who were fast becoming the bread and butter of the movie industry. Bates was one of the studio's first attempts at a matinee idol (Oliver Reed could probably be considered their first). As the studio entered the 1970s, they were beginning to feel the weight of a faltering British film industry, a dearth of ideas for new movies that would keep Hammer fresh, and most of all, the feeling that Hammer films were simply outdated and old-fashioned. Behind the scenes, Hammer was rudderless and without any real leadership or idea of where the studio was going. As a result, Hammer's output during the 1970s was notoriously uneven, though several high points managed to rise above the widening pool of substandard Hammer fare. One of the keys to Hammer succeeding in the 1970s involved a serious update of the stodgy and old-fashioned reputation. This meant, among other things, more daring scripts, less naïve looks at life, and above all, some new blood in the acting department that would appeal to existing horror fans as well as those shaggy-haired hippies and burn-outs with their bell bottoms and their Sergeant Pepper albums. Unfortunately Warner Brothers, who distributed the films in the important US market, wasn't going to buy any of this. They didn't know who Ralph Bates was, and more importantly, they didn't care. If Hammer wanted their Dracula film distributed in the United States, then it damn well better have Dracula in it. American audiences wouldn't put up with a bait and switch, and if Warner couldn't have Christopher Lee in the film, then the film couldn't have distribution in the United States, at least not from Warner Brothers. Hammer scrambled to appease Lee in the same way but for much less money than the producers of the James Bond films begged and bought Sean Connery back into the Bond series (at roughly the same time. Diamonds Are Forever came out in 1971, but given the speed with which Hammer films were made versus the more liberal schedule of a Bond film, it's likely this sort of desperate buying back of established stars was happening at around the same time). With Lee on board again, under protest as he couldn't stop reminding people, a hasty rewrite of the script was in order so that Dracula could actually appear in the film to see who it was that going around tasting his blood. Taste the Blood begins with a clever intro that signals the film's intention to put more work than usual into the process of reviving Dracula. A merchant traveling via coach with a couple of your standard issue gruff, superstitious villagers is bragging about the rare wares he has acquired during his recent antiquing sojourn through the Carpathian hills. While he may be proud of his knick-knacks, the villagers aren't as impressed, and when the merchant mentions a certain village, they just haul off and kick him out of the coach. Stranded in the woods at night, the merchant begins to hear the standard "stranded in the woods at night" sound effects. Owls, scurrying, and a howl that may or may not be Oliver Reed from Curse of the Werewolf. When a blood-curdling shriek fills the air, the merchant realizes that some seriously foul things are afoot in this cursed forest. By and by he falls off a ledge and comes face to face with the thrilling climax of Dracula Has Risen from the Grave. Once that movie finishes up, the merchant twists up his courage and sneaks down to collect the remaining artifacts, which include, as the title suggests, the blood of Dracula, or at least the powdered "just add water" variety we're used to seeing once Dracula finishes dying. Some time later, we meet three upstanding citizens of Queen Victoria's England, and as you can guess, all three of them aren't nearly as pious as they pretend. Ring leader William Hargood (Geoffrey Keene, who appeared in Cromwell every James Bond films beginning with The Spy Who Loved Me in 1977 and concluding with The Living Daylights) is the most despicable of the bunch as he beats and berates his daughter for smiling at a boy and engaging in other acts of harlotry while, the very same night, gathering his cronies together for a night of exotic pleasures at the local brothel. Hargood and his fellows form sort of a mini Hellfire Club, though their indulgences in the forbidden pleasures of the world consist almost entirely of going to same brother every month under the guise of "charity work" and then sitting in a room, drinking liquor, and watching foreign women dance naked. I'm not saying that isn't a fine night out on the town, but as far as experiences the taboos from the farthest reaches of the globe go, it's pretty unimaginative, pedestrian stuff. Hargood seems to realize this, and their boredom with their panty-waist sin leads them to seek out eccentric dandy Lord Courtley (Ralph Bates), who is one of those broke counts who gads about town in the finest high society frippery, scamming free meals from expensive restaurants and mooching off exquisite looking women of loose morals and poor judgment as he twirls his walking stick, doffs his top hat, and snaps his hankie about. In other words, a perfectly fine role model. Courtley is rumored to have dabbled in the black arts of Satanism or voodoo or something sinister, and so the three upstanding gentlemen seek out his company, though they never stop insulting him - which seems to me a poor way to treat the madcap young fop you're asking to initiate you into the next level of debauchery. Courtley sees in the gentlemen the perfect opportunity to get enough money to do something he's always wanted to do: namely, visit that merchant from the pre-credit sequence, buy Dracula's stuff, and mount a ritual to return the count to life. Reason? For the hell of it, it seems, which is as good a reason as any, I suppose.
As one would imagine, the ritual goes awry when Hargood's friends balk at actually guzzling down the thick, foaming blood of Dracula milkshake with which Courtley presents them. The ensuing argument results in Courtley's murder as he thrashes and writhes about after drinking the blood himself. Hargood and Co. high tail it out of the ruined old building in which the fun was taking place, and Courtley, not surprisingly proves to be just the vessel Dracula needs to return from the dead once again to wreak his unholy vengeance upon those who murdered his assistant, which doesn't make a whole heck of a lot of sense when you remember that Dracula has no idea who Courtley is, and that Courtley's death was necessary for Dracula to return to the land of the living. But what do you want when the script gets rewritten at the last minute? The remainder of the film sees Dracula (Christopher Lee) gaining control over the sons and daughters of the three men against whom he bears this grudge, so that he can have them murder their own parents, which frees Dracula up to stand nearby in the shadows and count down the number of people against whom he has successfully extracted his revenge. Considering there's only three of them, it's not much of a countdown. One of the things that sets this film apart from previous Dracula films is that Dracula, like Godzilla, is arguably the hero of the film. Though we still have to see him destroyed in the end, there's little doubt that he's no more vile than the men he's hunting. When he manipulates Hargood's battered daughter Alice (Linda Hayden, Blood on Satan's Claw) into smashing her wretched father's head in with a shovel, one almost feels like cheering, especially since this comes after a grotesque scene in which a drunk and leering Hargood viciously beats his daughter and looks on the verge of flat out raping her. Previous Dracula films have had gray characters - the self-righteous blowhard Monsignor from the last film springs immediately to mind - but those characters always had redeeming qualities. Hargood possesses no such qualities. He is despicable from beginning to end, and the audience has no problem feeling that he got what he deserved. The only thing wrong with his death, as I see it, is that it's the first, leaving the other two far less revolting characters to carry the plot when, if you ask me, Hargood's death should have been the climax of the story. Instead, we get Dracula hunting down the remainder of Hargood's cabal while milquetoast Paul (yet another Paul - nearly as many of these in Dracula films as there are Kloves, or Hans's in the Frankenstein movie) tries to save the soul of his beloved Alice Hargood and, in the process, send Dracula back from whence he came. Taste the Blood represents a more savage critique of Victorian society than any previous Dracula film. There has always been an undercurrent in the films of the ongoing struggle between enforced morals and repression and the wild animalistic abandon represented by Dracula. But in previous films, the scripts always came down on the side of society, preferring its ordered repression to the lust and passion of Dracula. Here, however, the tables are turned and if Dracula's lifestyle isn't exactly championed, it's at least shown as being no worse than the hypocrisy and deceit of modern society. The point is made in rather a heavy handed fashion, but so it goes. Although a more counter-culture, youth-friendly message about freedom triumphing over repression was nothing new in 1970, Hammer was still a relative neophyte studio when it came to tapping into the anti-authoritarian trends that had defined and all but escaped Hammer during the 1960s. With Taste the Blood, they're attempting to play a bit of catch-up, so one can forgive the ham-handed way in which they deliver the message. Dracula is, once again, little more than a supporting player, a sort of shadowy puppet master with very little screen time who does precious little more than lurk in the shadows rattling off the body count like the Count from Sesame Street. But then at the same, time, he doesn't have any less screen time or involvement in things than he did in most of the previous films. What Taste the Blood does is the same thing that Horror of Dracula and Prince of Darkness attempted to do, which is to keep Dracula constantly present as a threat, an ominous atmosphere of dread, even when Christopher Lee himself is nowhere to be seen. Only in the finale, which is admittedly half-baked, does Lee get to do his crazed thrashing about, though one has to wonder if the lord of the undead couldn't think of a better way to fight off a weak opponent like Paul than standing on a balcony and throwing garbage at him. It's just one step away from having Dracula swoop down and whack Paul on the head, then flutter up into the rafters to taunt him. The rest of the cast is spectacular. Paul (Anthony Higgins, Vampire Circus as well as a small part in Raiders of the Lost Ark) is more boring than the previous Paul, but no more boring than any of the other straights we've had on parade. Linda Hayden is one of the most attractive women Hammer ever put on display, and she acquits herself well as the other half of the boring romantic couple. The real strength of the cast lies in everyone else, an impressive assembly of solid character actors that perform above and beyond the call of duty, with Geoffrey Keen and Ralph Bates in the lead. For the couple scenes where he's allowed to spring to life, Christopher Lee is as good as he always is. Michael Ripper, who seems to have appeared in just about every movie Hammer ever made, gets promoted from the role of "suspicious barkeep" to "lackadaisical inspector." It's probably one of the best casts ever assembled for a Dracula film, and although it's common to bemoan the lack of Peter Cushing as Van Helsing, there's really no place for him thematically in this film, where the humans are generally so contemptible. Van Helsing's compassionate authority figure would have stood out like a sore thumb.
Taste the Blood continues to take Dracula further and further away from Van Helsing's theory that Dracula is is a perfectly explainable creature well within and soundly defeated by the powers of human reason. In fact, by Taste the Blood, Dracula is hardly even a vampire any more so much as he is some kind of supernatural demonic force. If ever he was the human made monster, you wouldn't know it at this point. The more secular means of dispatching a vampire -- garlic, running water, so on and so forth -- that were previously employed have, by this movie, been dispatched almost entirely in favor of religious iconography. Although Taste the Blood is as steeped in religious imagery as Dracula has Risen from the Grave, it doesn't have any particular comment to direct toward religion the way that previous film did. Religion is simply a matter of necessity as Dracula has become less the prince of darkness and more the Antichrist himself. Or wait, are those the same? Whatever the case, Taste the Blood again presents us with a monster which, unlike Dracula as we knew him in the first couple of films, exists entirely within a religious -- or sacreligious -- realm where bravery and reason have less to do with destroying him than do faith and Christ. Despite the weak ending, Taste the Blood is an exceptional entry into Hammer's Dracula oeuvre. Director Peter Sasdy eschews the ultra-vivid palette that characterized the Terence Fisher films and goes for a more subdued hue to the film, something more akin to reality and less stylized. Buildings and street are dark rather than brightly lit, and there is a palpable sense of decay in everything. Even Christopher Lee grudgingly admits that it turned out to be a good film, though to this day he won't stop going on about how corny the title is - and at least on this, one kind of has to agree with him, though I'd pay good money to see something under the same title debut on the Food Network. Being the final Hammer Dracula film, it was nice to see the series go out on such a respectable note. I'm kidding of course. Taste the Blood would prove successful, and thus there would have to be another Dracula film. We can only wish that Hammer stopped with Taste the Blood, because from here on out it's not so much downhill as it is straight off a cliff and into the abyss. Labels: Horror: Creepy Cults, Horror: Dracula, Horror: Vampires, Stars: Christopher Lee, Studio: Hammer, Year: 1970 posted by Keith at 1:17 PM | 0 Comments Monday, September 20, 2004Scream and Scream Again
1970, United States/England. Starring Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Alfred Marks, Christopher Matthews, Judy Huxtable, Yutte Stensgaard, Marshall Jones. Directed by Gordon Hessler. Available on DVD from Amazon
What the hell? It's rare these days that I have that reaction to a film. By this point, I really have seen just about everything, and the one thing that keeps that from being a depressing revelation is that sometimes something will pop up to remind that I haven't seen anything. This movie was apparently based on a book called The Disoriented Man, and while watching it, that was definitely an apt description of me. Scream and Scream Again seems for much of its running time to be three completely different movies. By the end, of course, things will be tied together, but not in a way that necessarily makes much sense. The end result is not unlike watching one of those Thomas Tang/Godfrey Ho ninja movies where they'd buy bits and pieced of a couple old Hong Kong films, splice them together with some scenes from some unfinished Italian action film, then stick in a series of newly shot scenes featuring white guys in red and yellow ninja outfits with headbands that say "Ninja!" on them and call the whole hideous Frankenstein's monster a movie. If I lean a little heavily on plot summary for this review, please forgive me. I do try and avoid that these days, but sometimes you just have to tell people what's happening. Film number one in Scream and Scream Again begins during the opening credits, as a jogger sprints about London without a care in the world until he keels over and wakes up in some weird hospital room where a silent nurse in six pounds of make-up keeps insisting that he keep that spittle vacuum hooked to his lip. When she leaves, he struggles to sit up, throws back the covers, and realizes with horror that one of his legs is gone. Truth be told, it's a comical but unsettling and effective way to kick off the film, which goes from there straight into the second film, in which the most British cop in the world, Superintendent Bellaver (Alfred Marks), harrumphs and mumbles like a character actor turned to eleven as he investigates a series of grisly murders in which young women are found to be completely drained of blood, though there's no pool of blood at the scene. No sooner have we been introduced to this plot thread than we pick up a third plot, in which agents of some make-believe Eastern Bloc (do I have to tell the kids what that means?) nation obviously modeled after East Germany, sit around in a room discussing vague plans until one of them whips out the touch of death and kills his leader. Eventually this requires Peter Cushing to come into the room and smoke a cigarette before he, too, has the touch of death put on him. Now I'm going to probably get some of the series of events out of order as I forget at what point the film switches to one of its three plots, but it really doesn't matter all that much. Meanwhile, Bellaver goes to interview the former employer of one of the serial killer's victims, and that turns out to be esteemed research scientist, Dr. Browning (Vincent Price). Then another girl gets killed. While that guy in Fake Germany is using his weird Vulcan Nerve Pinch to make Peter Cushing drip blood from his mouth, the cops set up a sting operation using an assortment of pretty female police detectives scattered around London's swinging clubs in hopes that one of them will be picked up by whoever is doing the vampiric killing. Sure enough it works. But wait, I think maybe before that, the guy from the beginning of the movie woke up and found that his other leg had been removed as well. The police find their vampire killer and engage in one of the longest chase scenes ever committed to a cheap nonsensical horror thriller. That the vampire killer is a young mop top in a frilly lavender Medieval Faire shirt make sit all the more fun. He leads the cops on a car chase, then a foot chase, then a climbing chase before finally falling down, getting handcuffed, ripping off his own hand, and starting the whole thing over again. Eventually he ends up in Vincent Price's barn, where he escapes the cops by jumping into a giant vat of acid hidden beneath the floor. But no, no, no! There's so, so much more! That Fake German guy with the touch of death seems to be taking over the country in the easiest coup ever staged, since various people in his way on the path to glory just get invited into the room with him, where he kills them with his magic fingers. After that, no one seems to raise any questions as to why the leaders of the country keep dying when they go into a room alone with him. Eventually, Christopher Lee shows up to talk about this guy. Wait, no. Let me give them names. The touch of death guy is Konratz, the most Commie fake Russian-German name they could come up with. He's played by Marshall Jones, who would also show up as a priest to help Vincent Price torture Pagans in Cry of the Banshee before finally having acid thrown into his face by Herbert Lom in Murders in the Rue Morgue. Really, you know one of the things I like about both Hammer and AIP films is that after a while, it's all one big family and everyone becomes a familiar face. Christopher Lee plays Fremont, an agent in the service of the British secret police. While we're getting know them, that one guy wakes up and finds that now his arms are missing. The hell? And that nurse still insists that he keep the spittle vacuum firmly attached to his lip. This is the guy you're going to feel most like while watching Scream and Scream Again. This is also a good movie for those who appreciate hot naked women in really baggy, ill-fitting bald caps. How can this movie possibly pull together its three plots and five or six genres? Well, how about by revealing that the vampire killer is a superman who has been constructed in Vincent Price's lab using various body parts collected from unlucky joggers is experiments funded by that weird Fake Germany country so that they can take over England and then the world with their race of supermen, that is unless secret agent Christopher Lee can stop them. Unless he, too, is a synthetic being. Or something. Man, don't look at me. And if you are wondering why that one guy can make Peter Cushing spit up blood or why the guy in the purple poet shirt drinks blood or why the movie spent so much time on two people trying to escape Fake Germany (one of whom is Yutte Stensgaarde, who we'll see much, much more of in Hammer's Lust for a Vampire) when they have no connection whatsoever to any of the other plots, well then you're just going to have to be happy with the fact that Scream and Scream Again managed to tie together as much as it did. To give the film some final sense of having come full circle, just about everyone in the cast who is alive by the final scene ends up in that pit of acid into which the vampire killer jumped. Adding to the overall sense of chaos is the fact that there is no central character. With three horror heavy hitters in the line-up, you'd think at least one of them would be a main character. But Cushing is killed off in one scene, and Price and Lee have about an equal amount of time in their separate plots. Konratz isn't really a main character, nor is Inspector Bellaver. I guess the closest thing we have to central characters are the young Dr. Sorel (Christopher Matthews, who would go on to battle Christopher Lee the following year in Hammer's Scars of Dracula) and his policewoman girlfriend. Sorel is the man who shows up at the end so Vincent Price can give his mad scientist speech (and it's a good one) as several of the disparate plots are loosely tied together, or more accurately, brought together in that sort of tangle that happens to the cord of your headphones when you take them out of your bag. So while you can't say it doesn't make sense, since by film's end it has drawn together in a wildly convoluted fashion, you can at least say it doesn't make very good sense. If the plots aren't enough to make your head spin, then take into account that it's all set to a jazzy lounge score with occasional bouts of acid rock. That means nothing about this movie is menacing, and even what I assume were supposed to be suspenseful or heavy scenes come across as light 'n' breezy. At it's best, Scream and Scream Again feels like something taking place in the Avengers universe, where a combination swingin' 60s meets espionage meets horror meets sci-fi meets Frankenstein meets police thriller meets political caper would be right at home. The sheer weirdness of this movie makes it enjoyable, though there are a number of things that could tick off the ill-prepared viewer. Chief among these annoyances is that they took three screen legends and once again keeps them separated. Cushing appears with neither Lee nor Price. As they would in The Oblong Box, Lee and Price have one scene together, again with minimal dialogue and only lasting a minute or so. But if you've ever wanted to watch Christopher Lee stare at Vincent Price in "hypno-eyes" fashion, then this is the moment for which you've been salivating. Lee has next to nothing to do and wouldn't make an impression if he weren't Christopher Lee. Peter Cushing gets to smoke a cigarette and talk about how important public relations are to a military dictatorship. Only Vincent Price gets a chance to strut his stuff during the aforementioned mad scientist speech. The rest of the cast performs in suitably hammy fashion. Inspector Bellaver in particular is in serious jeopardy of crossing into Monty Python's Mr. Gumby territory as he Cockney's his way through a variety of lines about san'wiches and 'oigh tinsel steel. Given the utter absurdity of just about everythign that happens, Gordon Hessler's direction is shockingly dull. He doesn't do anything wrong. He just does everything so...competently. And competent is fine most of the time, but subject matter this ludicrous demands something more daring and innovative in the direction department. But then, maybe it's Hessler's matter-of-fact workman's job of directing that makes the film seem even more unsettled, like some weird old man telling you the foulest, most twisted story imaginable but in a very sane and calm and rational sounding voice. Scriptwriter Christopher Wicking split his time between AIP and Hammer, and his work on both sides of the Atlantic was equally bizarre and uneven. In a way, he seems to have been the perfect match for Hessler, and the duo worked together on Scream and Scream Again as well as the previous three AIP gothics we've reviewed: The Oblong Box, Cry of the Banshee, and Murders in the Rue MOrgue. His Hammer credits include the exceptional Blood from the Mummy's Tomb and the film that is alternately known as "the film that destroyed Hammer" and "the film that showed us full frontal Nastassja Kinski nudity," To the Devil...A Daughter. If you're not worried about a film making very little sense until the very end, and even then just barely, then Scream and Scream Again is a pretty enjoyable romp. It's absolutely cracked in the head. As long as you're not bothered by huge chunks of film that have nothing to do with anything else or big blaring questions that remain unanswered or the fact that the police catch a vampire killer then leave him unattended so they can all go stand around the captain as he calls in a report, then Scream and Scream Again will have you giggling with confused and bewildered glee. It doesn't matter if you have high, low, or no expectations for this film. It will manage to confound them all. Labels: Horror: Just Plain Weird, Netflix Diary, Stars: Peter Cushing, Stars: Vincent Price, Year: 1970 posted by Keith at 11:44 PM | 0 Comments Saturday, September 18, 2004Cry of the Banshees
1970, United States. Starring Vincent Price, Hilary Dwyer, Carl Rigg, Patrick Mower, Essy Persson, Marshall Jones, Elisabeth Bergner, Stephen Chase, Sally Geeson, Hugh Griffith. Directed by Gordon Hessler. Available on DVD from Amazon
I'm guessing child protection agencies today would cringe at the thought of a wee sprout staying up until two or three in the morning just so he can thrill as Boris Karloff lurks in some shadows or Vincent Price bugs out his eyes at some fantastic and horrible sight. But for you Teleport City readers, such behavior should be par for the course, and I figure its healthier than watching Nelly swipe a credit card through some stripper's ass cheeks. The first AIP horror films I remember seeing were Cry of the Banshee and The Terror. I would see Cry of the Banshee pop up once every couple of years, and then when I got cable television, The Terror seemed to pop up every other night. Cry of the Banshee, as I recounted back in my review of Plague of the Zombies, I first saw on a wildly enjoyable night that also boasted broadcast of the Hammer version of The Hound of the Baskervilles and Darby O'Gill and the Little People, from back when children's movies used to be fun and imaginative and sometimes even dark, scary, and not filled with sassy pre-teens driving go-carts and having sleepovers. Ironically - at least, I think it's ironic -- Darby O'Gill and the Little People not only featured the leprechauns you would expect, but also featured a banshee, and a fairly chilling apparition it was to my young eyes. Cry of the Banshee, however, did not feature a banshee, or even a regular ghost who simply fond of howling. It did feature some crying, but with a title like Cry of the Banshee one expects a banshee. That didn't stop me from loving the movie, however, and as the years passed I mistakenly thought that the banshee I was remembering was from Cry of the Banshee. I mean, that makes sense, right? After all, I was young and it was already pretty late. I also remembered a weird glowing dog that I assume was something out of The Hound of the Baskervilles, though now that I think about it, it probably wasn't. I guess I'll find out soon enough, since The Hound of the Baskervilles is coming up soon.
But anyway, a few weeks ago I was watching Darby O'Gill and the Little People on TV and well, what do you know? There was that banshee! I figured it was abut time, then, that I sat down and refreshed my memory as to the actual contents of Cry of the Banshee despite the fact that I'm always a bit hesitant to revisit childhood favorites - not because I'm afraid I'll realize how awful they are, but because I still won't realize how awful they are and will thus go right on praising the merits of a film like Cry of the Banshee even when the whole of the free world has pronounced it rather on the shabby side. But Cry of the Banshee doesn't just have nostalgia on its side. It also has Vincent Price, and a film has to phenomenally bad before Vincent Price can't make it watchable. He's one of my five favorite actors of all time, sitting on his thrown alongside the likes of Cary Grant, Peter Cushing, Robert Mitchum, and Michael Caine. In the case of Cry of the Banshee, he's sitting on his thrown while also wearing huge poofy Henry VIII robes. Price more than any other actor understood exactly how far over the top he had to go for every film he was in. Movies like Laura proved he was an accomplished and well-trained dramatic actor who, had he been given the chance, could have become known as such. But it was horror for Price, and horror is all the better for his participation. He knew when a film was could and thus could be played straight, but more importantly, he knew when a film was bad and required that he chew some scenery. The worse the film, the more Price would escalate his character, though he never crossed over into the realm of intentional wink-at-the-camera irony unless it was specifically called for. What made him so good was that even at the height of his hamminess he always made you believe the character. As we've discussed in relation to Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee and all the actors at Hammer, Price goes about portraying each character with gusto and total conviction. He was also one of the most well-respected intellectuals that acting ever saw, which puts him in the company of Christopher Lee, among others. Believe it or not, there was a time when you could go through movies and still find some gentlemen who cherished intelligence, culture, and wit. Price was reportedly a startlingly well-informed man of the world who could discuss with authority any number of topics from art history to the arcane. It'd be nice if there were more stars around today like him, but I reckon the fact that there aren't makes men like Price and Lee all the more impressive. The fact that they were in movies like Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs and Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf respectively, didn't keep them from being men of dignity, refinement, and sophistication. So remember, when you get up in the morning, to try and live your life a little more like Vincent Price and Christopher Lee. Another similarity between Price and Lee is that both men were so, so damn good at being evil on screen, and in particular and playing evil figures of authority. Price was the defining figure in just about all of AIP's Poe films, and he spent much of the time relishing his role as a thoroughly horrible figure of menace who, despite how horrendous he is, you can't help but kind of like since Price injects each character with his own undeniable charisma and glee for the macabre. His most famously rotten villain is perhaps that of the witchfinder general in AIP's wonderful Conqueror Worm, a film that is criminally MIA on DVD at the moment. Following not too far behind is the vile Lord Edward Whitman in Cry of the Banshee, a character so totally devoid of even the faintest trace of likeability that he inhabits a film constructed entirely around the anticipation of seeing this right bastard get his comeuppance. Whitman and his aristocratic family lord over a small Scottish town with an iron fist. Whitman is particularly fond of tracking down Scotland's few remaining pagans and either forcing them to convert to Christianity or simply torturing them to death. It doesn't really matter which, as long as he gets to burn someone alive. As is par for the course, many innocents suffer at the hands of Whitman and his thuggish bunch, but when they cross an actual group of witches with actual dark and mysterious powers, the Whitmans find themselves suddenly under a curse that sees the family members dying off one by one in the most spectacularly gory of fashions, generally at the hands, or paws, or claws of a hideous werewolfy sort of thing played in human form by Patrick Mower, who we last saw on Teleport City in The Devil Rides Out. The guy just can't seem to keep himself from getting involved with witches, can he? He worms his way into the Whitman family by romancing young Maureen Whitman, played by AIP regular Hilary Dwyer (aka Hilary Heath), who also starred alongside Price in The Conqueror Worm and The Oblong Box. She plays the closest thing this film has to a sympathetic character in the Whitman family, though her willingness to turn a blind eye other father's brutality flaws her character, just as her more enlightened and educated brother, Harry (Carl Rigg, also in AIP's The Oblong Box), seems at first to be a sympathetic character, right up until he starts slitting witch throats in defense of his father's reign of terror. You may be asking yourself one of two questions. First, what does this have to do with banshees? Second, what does this have to do with Edgar Allen Poe? The answer to both is that it has about as much to do with banshees as it has to do with Poe, which is very little, if anything at all. The "Poe films" was the blanket term applied to all of AIP's period horror films, even though quite a few of them had nothing to do with the works of Poe. For that matter, the ones that did often did little more than borrow the title and maybe throw up a convenient quote from Poe. Sometimes it would even be from the same work as that used for the title of the film! But the plots rarely bore any resemblance to the source material. I'm not unfamiliar with the works of Poe, as any self-respecting fan of horror and chills should have read at least a portion of the man's work, but I'm no student of Poe. I don't think he ever wrote anything called "Cry of the Banshee," at least not that I could find.
So a Poe film that isn't a Poe film is par for the course when it comes to AIP gothic horrors. It was just easier to relate all the movies to Edgar Allen Poe and be done with it, sort of like making all Italian sword and sandal films about Hercules. But what about the whole lack of banshee thing? That just doesn't seem proper for a film whose title primes you for some serious banshee action, or as much action as a banshee can afford. I reckon for my non-Scottish brethren who are also unacquainted with the various types of spooks and spirits we have haunting the moors in our homeland, I should tell you what a banshee is. It's a ghost, a female ghost, who appears and howls out the name of some unlucky soul, signifying that within 24 hours of hearing the banshee's howl, that person will meet their demise. If banshees do much more than that and scare Darby O'Gill, then I missed that part of Scottish supernatural heritage class. But it doesn't matter so much for this movie, in which there are no banshees. One scene pays lip service to banshees when a howl of the damn arises from outside. Someone says, "Hmm, must be a banshee. That sucks." Maybe that isn't the exact quote, but it's close. Anyway, anyone who has ever been locked in mortal or immortal combat with the forces of the supernatural will recognize that the howl isn't from a banshee' it's a werewolf's howl, an identification seemingly confirmed by the fact that a killer wolf creature shows up to dispense witch's justice. The reason Cry of the Banshee is called Cry of the Banshee even though it doesn't have any banshees in it is because AIP was in the practice of coming up with a title, selling the film based on the title, then drumming up a script to go with the title after the fact. According to director Gordon Hessler, who shot many of AIP's most sadistic gothic horror films, the original script for Cry of the Banshee was awful, so he and an associate set about doing rewrites. By the time they were finished, it was an entirely different picture, and AIP was upset since there was no banshee in the film. Some more rewrites were done to work in a mention of the banshee, and that was that. How bad the original script was and what sort of banshee quotient it contained remains a mystery. But frankly, given his track record and the evidence of his rewriting, Gordon Hessler was hardly the guy to be criticizing scripts. I like a lot a Hessler films (The Oblong Box, Scream and Scream Again, Murders in the Rue Morgue, and even his foray into ninja cinema, Pray for Death), even love a few of them (Golden Voyage of Sinbad, Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park). But it's not like he was making high art. The script for Cry of the Banshee as it is filmed isn't exactly a stunner. As with lots of AIP films, there is a lot of talking. Some of it interesting, some of it less so. An uneven pace hampers the film, made worse by the fact that you either hate or don't care about any of the characters, meaning the only thing you have to look forward to is their inevitable death at the hands of Itchy the Werewolf Thing. Cry of the Banshee does manage to contain everything you need to have a successful "burn the witches!" movie. You have the dirty peasants. The rack. The hangings. The random accusations of witchcraft. And as was de rigueur for all AIP gothics, the random "bawdy ale house" scene where patrons shout a lot and spill their ale as busty wenches dance on the tables and have their blouses ripped open for the requisite gratuitous boob shot. What sets Cry of the Banshee apart from other similar period witchcraft movies is that, first, it ends up containing actual witches instead of just a bunch of hot but innocent women accused of being witches, and second, the witches are the nominal good guys. Oona the head witch, played by Elizabeth Bergner (who worked mainly in German and Austrian productions) looking kind of like Debbie Harry does now but with wilder "crazy witch woman" hair, wants nothing but to be left alone so her and her coven can frolic semi-nude in the woods like a bunch of rejects from some community theater production of Hair. As far as pagan rites go, theirs are pretty lame and consist mostly of sinewy extras thrashing about and doing "jazz hands!" The whole thing reminds me that I want to start a "take back paganism" movement meant to reclaim the Old Religion from the bunch of crystal-wearing hippies and new age sweetness and light freaks who have turned it into the most gutless and goofy pseudo-religion around. I mean, look at the old pagans. Scottish highlanders. Vikings. You think these cats pranced about all blessed out and talking about Goddess and greeting everyone with a hug and a "Blessed be!" Hell no! They ate each other, for crying out loud! Now I'm not saying that we need to start eating each other, but paganism really does nee dot get back to its pre-hippie roots. Except, umm, except for those cute goth girls who are into it. They can stay. Silly though they may be, Oona and her crew don't bother anyone. In fact, most of the villagers seem nominally Christian at best, forced into paying lip service to the belief but not-so-secretly still sympathetic to their native religion with its camping trips, drunken revelries and nudity. Who wouldn't be? You gonna willingly trade that in for a religion full of dour-faced old men with bulldog jowls barking on about how sinful you are as they whack your knuckles with a ruler and tell you to stop showing so much ankle in your dress? But the Whitmans and their sidekick priest will have no pagans in their territory. They harass Oona and even murder the guy who leaps about as if joyously proclaiming, "Behold! I am a fawn! A spriteful fawn!" Thus, you know, the curse and all.
None of the pagans save Oona have much of a character, so even though we're allowed to identify with the oppressed indigenous religion, we can't really identify with them. Even Oona is pretty one-dimensional, and you can't side with her entirely since she choreographed such lame pagan rites. Luckily, the Whitmans and The Church TM are so vile, so reprehensible, so thoroughly corrupt that Oona doesn't have to do much to be better than they. The casting of the witches and pagans as the good guys, and Christianity as the murderous oppressors seems bolder than it actually was for the time. Looking back from an era in which being negative about any organized religion is once again a taboo, Cry of the Banshee's pro-witch agenda seems daring. But remember that the 1970s were a time in which people were actually willing to make risky political and social statements. The late 1960s had paved the way via a series of films that cast Satanists in a more sympathetic, if not entirely heroic, light, and witch movies in which the church is portrayed as vicious and corrupt were a dime a dozen in the 1970s. Even so, it's nice to see the underdog represented and, for a change, even victorious over the wretched forces of the Inquisition. The other thing Cry of the Banshee has in common with the witch hunt movies that would come before and after it is a sadistic vicious streak a mile wide. Interrogations are extreme and the witches' vengeance doesn't stop to consider that some members of the Whitman family are not as evil as their father. Cry of the Banshee doesn't revel in or sexualize torture to the point of the most infamous title in the witch hunt sub-genre, Mark of the Devil, but the torture is still plenty explicit and manages to work in a couple gratuitous bare breasts. Everything is augmented by the film's nasty demeanor. The acting is uniformly good. Price's character lacks the depth and nasty appeal of his best villains, Matthew Hopkins from Conqueror Worm and Prospero from Mask of the Red Death, but he's suitably evil and Price is always a joy to watch as he scowls, sneers, and makes his bug-eyed "aghast" face. The supporting players are all good as well. Mower as the bestial Roderick shows suitable menace and, in line with the film's nasty streak of cruelty, never shows any remorse over the fact that he transforms into a hideous beast that claws out throats, even though he's mostly murdering the Whitman women before getting down to extracting a vague but undoubtedly deliciously gory vengeance on Lord Edward during the film's eerie finale. There's also a great score by famed exotica composer Les Baxter, who aside from writing tunes about pyramids and Polynesia and various sorts of globe-trotting adventure, was also an accomplished compose of music for films. AIP used him frequently either to score their own films or provide replacement scores for imported and dubbed films like Black Sunday, Baron Blood (both films by Mario Bava), and a pile of sword and sandal epics. Baxter's score sets the mood perfectly, as do the bizarre animated opening credits by none other than Monty Python's resident animator and future director Terry Gilliam. The main problem with Cry of the Banshee is that all of this should be a lot more interesting than it turns out to be. With naked witches, pagan rites, vengeful landlords, corrupt priests, witch burnings, and a ratty werewolf tearing out throats, Cry of the Banshee should be a thrilling, chilling, grotesque affair. It manages a few chills, a fair deal of grotesqueness, but definitely no thrills until perhaps the very final shot. As I said earlier, too much of the film is taken up with unlikable characters saying uninteresting things. If I was coming into this film without a bias toward Price and costumed gothic horror films, it would probably be less enjoyable and a whole lot more boring. But those biases are firmly in place, as well as my own nostalgia over watching the film as a kid, so Cry of the Banshee is still an entertaining film for me. Not Price's best, by far, and not AIP's best gothic horror or even their best witch hunter movie. But good enough and mean enough to satisfy the darker, more malicious parts of my brain. Labels: Director: Gordon Hessler, Horror: Poe, Netflix Diary, Stars: Vincent Price, Studio: AIP, Year: 1970 posted by Keith at 11:26 PM | 0 Comments Sunday, September 12, 2004Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter
1970, Japan. Starring Meiko Kaji, Rikiya Yasuoka, Tatsuya Fuji, Jiro Okazaki, Yuki Arikawa, Tomoko Aki, Yoko Takagi, Akemi Nara, Setsuko Minami, Mari Koiso, Mie Hanabusa, Nobuko Aoki. Directed by Yasuharu Hasebe. Available on DVD from Amazon
During the 1970s, Japan's Nikkatsu Studio became famous, and yes most likely infamous, as the number one home for sleazy sexploitation, violent pink films, and just softcore porn in general. Although hardly the stuff of highbrow cocktail party conversations, the thoroughly exploitive nature of the Nikkatsu films doesn't mean there wasn't a lot of boldness and innovation thrown into the mix, resulting in more than a few highly enjoyable and daring films. Yeah, there was a lot of crap, but there's always a lot of crap, and usually even the crap had something about it that was so bonkers and just not right that you couldn't help but nod your head in its direction. In other words, where as Europe during the 1970s was constantly making ponderous, over-inflated films that begged the question, "Is it art or is it porn?" Nikkatsu was more concerned with generating the answer, "I don't know if it's art, but it sure is cool." Somewhere in the process, though, studio producers became so lax in what messages they would allow in a film - so long as they were surrounded by the requisite blasts of sex and violence - that Nikkatsu became a haven for directors and writers who wanted to make controversial social and political statements in criticism of Japanese culture and found the best way to do so was to disguise their pointed arguments in the clothing of an exploitation film. On the surface, they were just making the Japanese equivalent of drive-in movie fare, but running throughout many of the films was a subversive current of dissent and radicalism that never would have been allowed on screen in a more direct fashion. Certainly you'll find very few Japanese films that are willing to criticize Japanese culture despite there being some very juicy targets for the more liberal-minded; specifically, Japanese conduct during WWII and subsequent denial that there was anything done wrong, and the fact that though not in a malicious "cross burning" fashion, Japan is also one of the most racist countries in the world and a country in which the racism is so ingrained in society that most people don't even recognize it as such - like the fact that people of Korean ancestry continue to have to register as foreign aliens, even though their relatives came to Japan five or six hundred years prior. It is this second big theme of Japanese racism that Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter takes on, albeit in the guise of a girl gang pulp film. One of the studios most successful series came when they blended tawdry titillation with delinquent girls in outlandish 1970s outfits - and I mean outlandish even for the 1970s. Floppy wizard hats and hot pants abound in these delinquent girl films, and no matter what violent outrage is depicted on screen, it pales in comparison to the crimes committed against a simple sense of fashion. The five Stray Cat Rock films are poised to be the highest profile series of these violent girl gang gems thanks to the third film in the series (or second film -- critics seem to be uncertain) getting a release through HVe in the United States. Previously, various titles like the Sukeban Blues and Sukeban Boss films have been available only as fan-swapped bootlegs, and even then without subtitles. The ridiculously named Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter is, along with Female Convict Scorpion #701 the first film in this highly entertaining and morally dubious (isn't it always that way) subgenre to see legitimate release in the United States. It works pretty well as a barometer for the films in general. It is not as exploitive or bare-boob-packed as some titles, but it is a little deeper (if also utterly confused) in terms of story. While not the best of this type of film, it's a decent place to begin, and one hopes HVe will continue to release films from this and other series.
The plot, if you want to call this loose assembly of violent episodic adventures a plot, revolves around gang leader Mako, played by Meiko Kaji. She was a Japanese cult film icon of the 1970s, starring not just in the Stray Cat Rock and Female Convict Scorpion films, but also in the bloody Lady Snowblood samurai films and Kinji Fukasaku's Yakuza Graveyard. If you wanted a tough chick for your film, the only way you could do better than Meiko Kaji was by hiring Etsuko "Sister Streetfighter" Shiomi. Mako's gang spends their nights engaging in the usual street thug hooliganism that helps bored and disaffected youths pass their time. This consists largely of donning screamingly loud outfits and walking around the neon-lit streets while a cool-as-hell jazz-funk soundtrack blares away in the background. When they aren't doing that, they're mugging squares, going on shopping sprees, getting into fights, or buying drugs from Baron, the leader of the local guy gang The Eagles. Although peddling drugs brings in the yen, Baron's real passion is beating up and, if he's lucky, just outright murdering "half-breeds," anyone who is of half-Japanese, half-Caucasian persuasion. He does this, so he says, because his sister was raped by a Japanese serviceman in the days after World War II - symbolic, one would guess, of Baron considering Japan itself raped by America during the post-war occupation. Adding to this symbolic smorgasbord is the fact that though he's a macho, loudmouth braggart, Baron is, in fact, impotent. His assault on these mixed-race citizens is as much, perhaps more, out of his own sexual frustration than out of any sense of moral outrage over what happened to his mother. Rather than coexist with these people, who Baron secretly sees as bigger, more attractive, and more virile than himself, Baron takes out his complex by whooping like a madman as he and his gang tear around town in old US military jeeps, always on the prowl for someone of mixed blood they can beat the crap out of. Although it's not as important thematically, he also seems physically incapable of buttoning mor ethan the bottom-most two buttons on his big, ruffly shirts. Mako and her girls tolerate The Eagle's shenanigans, mostly because they don't really give a rat's ass about race and race relations. They are, in a sense, representatives of the Japanese population at large, only in bigger hats and higher platform shoes. They don't consider themselves racist, but they blind to the racism running rampant in Japan. At least, that is, until Meiko's Alleycats come into contact with a mixed-race gang led by the hunky Kazuma. He's in town looking for his lost sister, and naturally he catches the eye of both Mako and Baron, leading to an inevitable showdown when The Alleycats are dragged into the light of racial awareness by encountering this mixed-blood gang and watching them preyed upon by Baron and his jeep-driving goons. I'll take time out for a quick disclaimer here in hopes of heading off some undoubtedly well-meaning but misguided email. Japan is about to get taken to task in this review for being, at least traditionally, a heavily racist and xenophobic society. I think it's a wholly defensible assertion, and I also think that the times they are a-changin' and one day - soon, with any luck - the characterization of Japan - and by that I mean average, everyday Japan - will no longer be applicable. A criticism of any one part (or even multiple parts) of a country or a people certainly doesn't apply to everyone, and it certainly doesn't equal a blanket condemnation of said peoples or country. Additionally, if your initial reaction is to think, "You should take a look at your own country" then let me stop you right there. I already know about America and American racism. But this article isn't about America or an American movie. It's about a Japanese movie, and just because I'm taking time out here to touch on the subject of Japanese racism doesn't mean I'm not aware of its existence elsewhere. So with that in mind, allow me to bore you with the following bloated self-important analysis when, given my own intelligence, I should just stick to talking about floppy wizard hats and go-go dancing. You don't really have to see any of the subtext in the film, though I think this is definitely a case of it deliberately being present rather than something simply read in by critics at some later date. The film is as saturated with East-meets-West imagery as it is with lurid colors and gang fights. Frequently, action takes place in a setting with some neon advertisement for an American product blazing in the background. When Mako and the Alleycats take revenge on The Eagles for selling them out to a bunch of horny businessmen for a gang bang, they throw Molotov Cocktails made from Coca-Cola bottles. And during a club scene, the group Golden Halfs - famous for being ridiculously hot half-Japanese women - perform. The only real problem is that while the film wants to make a comment about racism in Japan, it doesn't seem entirely certain what the point of it should be. Obviously "purity of Japan" racists like Baron are cast as screwball assholes while the more open-minded Alleycats are the good girls. At the same time, the frequent focus on American brands dominating the night skyline seems to imply that this loss of Japanese culture to Western consumer pop culture is something of a tragedy. Ultimately, the film may be saying that maintaining and cultivating your culture is one thing, but violence and racism is flat out nasty.
Baron himself seems to represent a conflicting duality that is common in Japanese culture to this day: he is the racist who hates all others but the Japanese, yet he and his gang love those American jeeps and Western fashion. Japan has, since probably the Meiji Restoration and certainly since the end of World War II, had a crisis of identity in which it wants to remain fiercely Japanese and superior but, at the same time, is endlessly fascinated by other cultures and quick to adopt their trends. In the past, it has frequently been American-Japanese culture, but as divisions and lingering bitterness over the war fades with each subsequent generation, and as Japanese culture continues to affect American culture nearly as much as American culture does Japanese, this is becoming less of an issue. More at the forefront now is a lingering feeling of superiority to Koreans struggling with the youth culture's fascination with Korean cool. If one wants to dismiss the political agenda of a film like Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter, one should probably think about how, when intellectuals and politicians have failed, its simple and often exploitive pop culture that has and continues to smash the cultural barriers that have been erected between people. Just as each subsequent generation of Americans sees (one hopes) their racism slip further away as we enter a truly global and connected community, the same thing happens to young Japanese. And Chinese. And one would hope just about everyone else as well. Of course, when something as engrained in so many people's character as racism starts to be challenged on such a grand scale, there is inevitable backlash. It is, after all, a fight and a progression, and no one said it was going to be easy just because white kids starting listening to hip hop, black kids started watching anime, and Japanese kids fell in love with Bruce Lee. I might also add, if you'll indulge me in just one more bit pompous rambling, that it was very forward-thinking of the film to cast the women as the peacemakers and the more open-minded members of the population. I'm probably dipping into social issues that demand far more time, explanation, and analysis than I can beat out in a movie review, but I guess I've gone this far already. It's no secret that Japanese workers - and by that, I largely mean the Japanese men who dominate the business world - have traditionally been obsessed with their jobs. Tales of salarymen working from the rise of the sun and well into the wee small hours of the morning are commonplace. Japan is one of the few places that has an actual clinical term for literally working yourself to death and dropping dead at your desk. With the burst of the bubble and the grim discovery of things like unemployment, layoffs, and uncertain futures, things have changed a little, but let's set ourselves firmly before that time. With men so committed to employment, relationships between men and women were bound to suffer, or if not suffer then become just one more formalized function. Women, for their part, were starting to discover that sitting at home, rearing children, and rarely seeing your over-worked husband wasn't as much fun as some might think. Some started fighting for equality in the workplace, for the right, I guess, to drop dead at their desks right alongside the menfolk. Others, however, started rebelling against this social system by becoming more adventurous, by traveling around Japan and around the world, and perhaps most daring of all, by befriending those wild-eyed, hairy foreigners.
As a result of their dissatisfaction, free time, and willingness to brave the white edges beyond the map of Japanese culture, Japanese women started freaking out the men by becoming more worldly, more liberal, more aware, and just plain smarter when it came to knowing something outside the office. As usual, there was a backlash against such adventurous women, partly out of "defense of Japanese society," but more likely motivated by the fact that men who committed themselves to a lifetime of obsessing over their job realized they were boring and largely ignorant of the world. But once something like this begins, all the uptight businessmen in the world can only hope to slow it slightly, at best, And with the collapse of Japan's previously unstoppable economy, one expects the men to get with the program as well. What was my point? That it was very telling in 1970 for director Hasebe to see women as the ones who will be the first to break away from traditions of xenophobia. So grand congratulations to Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter for being such a socially radical film and for saying something that most everyone would consider completely outrageous, even if it's right. But as I've said time and time again, good intentions and laudable politics might make an admirable film, but they don't necessarily make a good film. Thus we turn from the assertion that Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter is a progressive film that is much smarter, more subversive, and more radical than you might first realize and instead ask another important question for assessing the overall value of a film: is it entertaining? Well, I think so, though I wouldn't count it as a must-see. The film has some awkward flaws, not the least of which is that it spends its entire running time building to a violent, out-of-control gang war between the Alleycats and Eagles, then doesn't deliver. Instead, the finale is a rather dull showdown between Baron and Kazuma, with the previously firebrand Mako suddenly crumpling and cowering in the corner as if we hadn't just spent an entire film building her up into a tough-as-nails but open-minded bad ass. The film seems to pull the rug out from under itself by falling back on the mano-a-mano battle between the two men - especially since "she's a bad-ass" is about as deep as much of the characterization ever bothers to go. There's not much reason given to us to invest any emotion in the outcome of the film. And the plot is an uneven mess with no real direction. Luckily, Meiko Kaji effortlessly oozes charisma, and the sheer over-the-top madness of some of the action and all of the art direction keep the eyes occupied when the mind isn't. Hasebe had already proven himself a master of mind-blowing pop art with Black Tight Killers, and while his visual flourishes were largely absent in the previously reviewed Bloody Territories, they return in full force with this film. Everything is draped in garish colors and shot from weird angles. The shaky handheld camerawork that would come to dominate much of Japan's action cinema output in the 1970s shows up here, mostly to good effect since it was still novel and not entirely headache-inducing as it would later become. You'd also have to go to Roger Vadim picture to find loonier costumes. Hasebe takes his exploitation picture and elevates it to high-concept and high camp territory, which is refreshing. And despite the title and it's position as a Nikkatsu production from the 1970s, Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter is relatively tame in its sexual content. The most difficult bit is, of course, the scene in which The Eagles set the Alleycats up to be raped by a bunch of horny businessmen, but even that is played more for outrage and disgust than sleazy titillation the way it would have been in many later films. There's still enough sexploitation in the movie to stop you short of celebrating it as bold feminist filmmaking, but within the context of the genre, it's one of the more sensible entries as it features more gratutious jeep driving than nudity. Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter is probably one of the most thematically ambitious of all Nikkatsu's post-Seijun Suzuki films, and that along makes its release in America worthwhile. It is not, however, the most entertaining of their girl gang pictures. Perfectly adequate, yes, but not a blow-away triumph. I hope it opens the door to more sukeban mayhem in the very near future. Labels: Action: Pinky Violence, Action: Yakuza, Country: Japan, Director: Yasuharu Hasebe, Netflix Diary, Year: 1970 posted by Keith at 7:08 PM | 0 Comments Sunday, August 01, 2004Meatrack/Sticks and Stones
1970, United States. Starring Craig Dudley, Fernando Ascencio, Gary Bennet, Robert Case, J. Will Deane, Gene Edwards, Jimmy Foster, Danny Landau, Robert Nero, Kim Pope, Maureen Sadusk, Wyn Shaw. Directed by Stan Lopresto. Available on DVD from Amazon.
You know, I was sitting around the other day thinking about how Teleport City is full of heterosexual sleaze and how, by comparison, I've let the gay community off pretty easy. This hasn't been so much a result of my unwillingness to delve into the wild world of homosexual sleaze as it has been a reflection of the fact that, for the most part, the movies just aren't readily available. Now I'm not talking about one of those movies where guys in sweaters struggle with their homosexual tendencies against a backdrop of quaint West village eateries and coffee shops. No no, I'm talking stuff on the level of all the other works of art we've reviewed on this site. You know, something shot on a grainy film stock, featuring seedy locales, horrible acting, and lots of gratuitous nudity. Sleaze baby! The fuel for the grindhouse fires that made the 1970s such a wonderland. So it was then, by sheer act of availability, that we found most of the sleazy movies we were coming across (and we came across a lot of them - you'd almost think we actively sought this stuff out) highlighted naked female flesh, sometimes naked female flesh upon naked female flesh, but really short-changed that desire I know we all have to see grimy, sweaty, hairy-asked guys with weird looking penises and dirty feet rubbing against one another in fleapit hotel rooms. Well, Something Weird heard the cry for some vintage gay sleaze of the most unappealing and unerotic variety and answered the call with a double-feature DVD containing two prime examples of Something Weird's knack for finding movies that sound hilariously entertaining on paper but are an unsufferable bore to actually watch. Still, Teleport City does have a decently sized gay readership thanks to all those Hercules movies we watched, though I can't say whether or not dragging these grubby old films into the shining light of day is any sort of proper "thank you" for your patronage and patience as we worked our way through a variety of reviews involving boobs. If nothing else, these two gay exploitation films work well as an example of just how polished exploitation filmmaking has become these days. I'll review both films on the disc as a single piece, partly because they're thematically and physically linked on the DVD, but mostly because quite frankly I doubt I can work up enough words on either one individually. Before I launch into all that, though, perhaps I should give a brief summary of my personal attitudes, and thus the attitudes of this website as a whole, toward homosexuality. The succinct breakdown is that I really don't give a damn. It's not that "I don't give a damn as long as they keep it to themselves and don't let anyone know" sort of thing. It's more just "I don't give a damn in the same way I don't give a damn whether someone is heterosexual." None of it makes any difference to me. I'm more interested in whether a person has funny stories to tell and can handle themselves well on a difficult hiking trail. Whether or not two guys are holding hands or sneaking smooches from each other is no concern of mine, and my reaction to the usual "Homosexuality is okay as long as they don't try and force it on me," is usually, "How often do gays actually try and force homosexuality onto someone?" or alternately, "Hey, how come those guys aren't hitting on me?" I may not be interested but, you know. You may also notice that I make fun of the guys in these homosexual grindhouse follies more than I would a woman in a similar film. This, again, has nothing to do with my opinion of homosexuality, and is instead directly related to the fact that, gay or straight, I consider us all men and as such and as a member of the population of men, I feel at ease making fun of other men in a way I wouldn't feel comfortable about women. In other words, I apologize now for the crudeness that is to follow, but that's what happens when guys get together. Which brings us, in our usually roundabout way, to the first film on this sordid double-bill, the sleazy, cheap, and grubby Meatrack. Hey, already we have an appetizing title. I don't think the average gay man is any more interested in a film with a title like The Meatrack than a heterosexual guy would want to rush out and see something called Janine's Ham Pamphlet, but I've always been turned off by comparisons between genitalia and supermarket meat products. There is just nothing arousing for me about luncheon meats. But as I said, The Meatrack is one of those movies that sounds like a must-see mindwarp when you hear bits and pieces of it recounted to you: a bisexual hustler working his way aimlessly across the country has flings with a fat guy in a dominatrix outfit and cheap wig who makes him dress as a little sailor boy, and eventually ends up being forced to make a porno movie with some lady while being menaced by a couple of knife-wielding drag queens, all the while reflecting back on how his tramp of a mother drove him into this life of shame. To please grindhouse patrons who actually will sit through just about anything, some of the characters also fool around in a theater showing The Screaming Skull. First of all, if you were looking for z-grade sleazy kicks and a handjob from a raincoat-wearing stranger in some seedy 42nd Street theater, you were probably pretty surprised to have picked such a brutally nihilistic, mean-spirited, and thoroughly unappetizing slice of slime. The Meatrack is one of those movies that just makes you want to take a shower, the cinematic equivalent of rubbing KFC original recipe all over yourself, but with much worse odors. It's the kind of movie that just makes you squirm, and not in the way that stranger was hoping. Gay or straight, I can't think of anything less appealing than a close-up of some dude's soaped-up hairy 1970s ass shot in washed out, grainy 16mm film. Ugh. It's as sexy as filiming similar close-ups of a guy with bad teeth and a scraggly mustache licking his over-plump lips while drinking milk. Sorry about that visual. My point is that considering the downbeat subject matter of The Meatrack, it's really not the sort of film you might want to sit through if you're just looking for some pervy kicks. The picture it paints of its young hustler is relentlessly downbeat and grim. On top of the general feeling of congealed chicken grease that this film imparts in the viewer, it also manages to be intensely dull and dreary. The director attempts to inject some arty moments in, playing around with the camera, switching to black and white stock, that sort of thing, but none of that masks the fact that we're sitting through a painfully unexciting trough full of cinematic swill. Who knew knife-wielding drag queens could be so boring? I've always been of the opinion that more movies, if not every movie, should feature knife-wielding drag queens menacing the straights, but apparently even something that fabulous can't save a movie this wretched. It's not even worth commenting on the acting and dialogue. After all, these were movies made so people could meet each other in the theater and fool around. Some respite from the torturous first film can be found in the second feature, the gay '70s Fire Island travelogue Sticks and Stones which, although certainly more playful and entertaining, also manages to pack in a lot more frontal nudity than the less interesting but somehow far dirtier first film. Sticks and Stones has no plot of which to speak. Gay couple Peter and Buddy walk around Fire Island in Speed-O swimtrunks. Buddy is drunk and stoned most of the time, which is fitting since he sort of looks like Peter Fonda, and frequently does little more than mumble his way through conversations. His boyfriend Buddy is insufferably bitchy, the kind of guy who gets a wild party house on Fire Island then spends most of his time whining, "Come on, it's time to go home." You can't help but feel for Peter, decadent as he is, because Buddy is such a bitchy drama-queen with no sense of humor and no sense of fun. Oh yeah, I guess I should throw out a quick explanation about Fire Island. Well-known among New Yorkers and gay couples up and down the east coast, Fire Island is a lovely stretch of beach jutting from Long Island. While the southern portion of Fire Island is your typically overcrowded New York area beach, the further north you travel, the gayer things become until you hit the heart of Fire Island, a mecca of escape for gay couples with enough money to rent beachfront vacation homes. Sticks and Stones, if nothing else, is a humorous snapshot of the island thirty or so years ago, and frankly very little has changed other than people own better sunglasses and have tamed the hair in their asscrack. In fact, while whiling away a fine summer day a couple years ago on the nude beach up on Fire Island, I saw a guy with a Robin Williams-esque pelt of thick black hair all over his body except for his ass, which was shaved as bare and smooth as a newborn babe's. And in case you're wondering - yeah, a nude beach frequented by gay men is a perfectly acceptable place to hang out even if you're not gay. Aside from getting to swim naked, the beach is much cleaner, much less crowded, has fewer children, and absolutely no teenagers blasting 50 Cent on their radios. Buddy and Peter are throwing a big 4th of July bash on Fire Island, and they've invited everyone, including the horrendous Lavender Guru, who proves that rambling, full-of-shit new age gay hippies are just as annoying as their straight counterparts. The guy just doesn't shut up, and the film's most painful moment comes when it sticks with his pointless, exhausting rambling. Still, he calls himself the Lavender Guru, so I guess that counts for something. There's also Prince Albert with his famously pierced manhood, two guys who give us the wacky "coupla queers tryin' to change a tire" scene, some surprisingly attractive lesbian named Kim Pope (who would go on to star in tons of sleazy 1970s grindhouse films including The Amazing Transplant and Jackie Starr - X Reporter), who gets to do a wild naked dance with chaps-clad Prince Albert, and a host of other zany characters. The party itself is sort of ridiculously entertaining, but the movie can't help but cut to scenes of Buddy moping and whining and starting arguments with a stoned Peter. You know, petty bickering and sniping is boring and annoying enough in real life. I don't want to pay to see more of it. That's why I skipped out on that reality TV craze. Sticks and Stones feels pretty much like someone's home movie of a wild party intercut with a poorly written and acted soap opera. The film's best scene, besides the aforementioned tire changing scene and naked dancing, shows some of the partygoers boarding a train in Manhattan and attracting curious and sometimes judgmental glances from the uptight straights. While I don't think anyone would argue that Sticks and Stones is some sort of milestone in the history of gay cinema, it's at least a far more positive and sympathetic glance than that Meatrack thing, not to mention managing to be a lot less boring. But being less of a bore than The Meatrack still leaves plenty of moments for tedium, all ofwhich culminate in the most frustratingly drawn-out and ponderous "final argument" I've ever fast-forwarded through. Still, there's enough pre-AIDS slice of life decadence here to make the film worth a look, though if you're hoping for something really outrageously over-the-top and flamboyant, you're still going to find yourself drifting off to sleep. If nothing else, at least most of the guys are better looking and not as matted and hairy as the Meatrack crew. Still, from a purely aesthetic point of view, I'll always believe you can't get any uglier than a rear shot of some hairy-assed dude bending over with his yarbles flopping about lifelessly. Really, now, it's a silly looking set of organs to begin with, and this is its least flattering angle. Speaking of flopping manhood, the thing that makes most Something Weird discs worth owning regardless of how godawfully boring the actual films turn out to be are the extras. They pack a lot of them onto each disc, and this one has a good hour's worth of some of the most hilariously awkward and unarousing gay nudie loops and shorts you could possibly imagine, provided you're prone to lying around trying to imagine laughably unsexy gay nudie loops. Things begin slow with a look at a 1970s gay pride parade on the West Coast, which does little more than show you haw far these parades have come. It's all pretty threadbare and sad looking, though I'm a big fan of whoever made the sign that said, "More Deviation, Less Population." Then there's footage of some Howard Cosell looking newsman interviewing people at a "Gay In," most of whom are spaced out hippie types, and one of whom is some surly gay biker who makes fun of everyone for being blessed out and wimpy and into balloons. Dude, if you're so tough, why'd you come to the hippie Gay-In in the first place? Things get utterly ludicrous as we launch into our first nudie loop, which features an all-naked, all-male country band sunning themselves on rocks and playing instruments while some beefy Rudy Ray Moore looking black guy does some of that horrible shuffling and jig dancing you're most likely to see being done by slaves in old movies. Jesus! To make things even more surreal, whatever music they were actually playing was never recorded, and so the film is dubbed over with some Lawrence Welk type music. This is pretty much the theme for the rest of the shorts, which features naked guys wrestling with one another, posing for one another, and in my favorite bit, playing buck naked pool. It's all so matter-of-fact as to be utterly devoid of any gay sex appeal. The pool players, in fact, spend so much time stretching and contorting themselves in penis-and-ass exposing stances that you'll soon lose any shock and the sheer amount of naked flesh on screen and just start thinking to yourself, "God, these guys suck at pool. Just stand normally and get this fucking game over with." So, as you can probably guess, this DVD isn't what would fall into the category of "standard viewing," not for anyone. For starters, the first film is dismal and without any entertainment value whatsoever. The second film drags colossally in places but at least is a little more enjoyable. The extras are hilariously silly. I wouldn't recommend any of this to anyone really, not even my hardest up gay friends. There are a lot of packages on display for all the world to behold, but none of them are presented in a way that could arouse, and they're surrounded by movies that can't entertain. So what's left? But if you're gay, easily amused, or simply in to really astoundingly bad, bottom-of-the-barrel grindhouse fodder, you might want to take a look at least at Sticks and Stones as a timewarp back to an era that was actually less innocent than our own and as a curiosity on the highway of gay cinema and acceptance. But mostly? Our gay readers deserve something a lot more entertaining than this stuff. Like Spartacus or something. Labels: Netflix Diary, Sexploitation, Year: 1970 posted by Keith at 5:42 PM | 0 Comments Sunday, November 11, 2001Companeros
1970, Italy. Starring Tomas Milian, Franco Nero, Iris Berben, Jesus Fernandez, Jack Palance, Gino Pernice, Giovanni Petti, Giovanni Pulone, Fernando Rey, Lorenzo Robledo, Claudio Scarchilli, Karin Schubert, Gerard Tichy, Victor Israel, Simon Arriaga, Francisco Bodalo, Jose Bodalo, Eduardo Fajardo, Alvaro de Luna. Directed by Sergio Corbucci. Available on DVD (Amazon).
No genre is so simple that it's well suited by being made a genre, just as no individual member of a race is justly served by being made part of said race. But in the quest to classify or define easy descriptions, these broad-sweeping categories are the best we people can come up with. It is a concept that dismisses any sense of variation or individuality, and while I admit that generalization is often a necessity for making it through everyday life, it's also a big part of why we tend to miss out on so much wonderful stuff. Take the Spaghetti Western, for example, or the Western, since that's how most people tend to see it. I can't even begin to process the number of people I've spoken to who hate Spaghetti Westerns even though they've never seen one. They equate the Western with polished American films, with John Wayne or Gene Autry, or they simply hate country music, thus they hate cowboys, thus they hate Westerns. An entire genre of film is thus dismissed despite the fact that there are hundred of films that break the mold, that would prove entertaining to these people if they could only get over the fact that the people in them are from the wild west. But whatever. There's no convincing some people. And if they decide not to like Rio Bravo or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance even though they've never seen them, well ultimately that's no concern of mine. Among cult movie fans who are open enough to delve into the Western genre, most immediately take a shine to a subgenre within that greater umbrella: the Spaghetti Western. So named because of their European (primarily Italian) origin, many of the films that are thought to be the great classics of the American Western are in fact the work of our European neighbors. Once Upon a Time in the West, A Fistful of Dollars, and For a Few Dollars More -- films that have come to define the Western to many people. All three are the work of Italian director Sergio Leone. Spag Westerns often prove unpalatable to fans of the classic Western with it's clear-cut good guys and bad guys, with it's ultimate family-value wholesomeness. Spag Westerns are a different breed of Western altogether. Much grittier, much more violent, and much more likely to blur the lines between good and evil. American Westerns are replete with tales of bad men who become good, who seek and eventually find forgiveness and redemption for their evil deeds. In Italian Westerns, however, it's generally not so cheerful an outcome. More often, rather than bad men becoming good, it's good men turning bad, or even more often, men who are neither good nor evil, but exist above such classifications, often as the embodiment of revenge. The most common plot in Italian Westerns is the "vengeance seeking stranger" model: a man who has been wronged in some way returns as a mysterious, emotionless loner seeking revenge on the men who did him the injustice. They usually center around some sort of frame-up or murdered lover, and very often both. Today It's Me...Tomorrow, You is an example of an average but enjoyable entry into the genre, but far and away the greatest example of the vengeance seeking stranger is Charles Bronson's mysterious "Man With a Harmonica" in Sergio Leone's epic Once Upon a Time in the West. Well, you can only make so many movies about vengeance seeking strangers before people start to get tired of the formula. This is what started happening toward the end of the 1960s with the Italian Westerns. Society was in an upheaval, especially in places like America (which was being torn asunder by the Vietnam War) and Italy (where revolutionaries and terrorists had turned the cities into virtual war zones). Simplistic tales of revenge were beginning to lose the audiences, and so a new type of Western was born: the revolutionary Western. They were usually set during the Mexican Revolution but obviously reflected the tumultuous modern times as much as they did the turn of the century. They generally dealt not just with the revolution, but with people struggling to come to terms with the rapidly changing world around them. Just as the end of the 1960s was seen as a wild time full of fast and out-of-control change, so too were the late 1800s, as the wild west slowly began to die, giving way to the industrial revolution and modernization of America and Mexico. Sam Peckinpah's brutal Wild Bunch has been seen by many as the punctuation mark that ended the golden era of the Western, bringing it to full maturity from the singin' cowpoke films of the 1930s through to the gory, bleak revelation that the wild west was a place populated not by sequin-wearing crooners, but by murderers, thugs, opportunists, and innocent people caught in the cross-fire. Peckinpah's bloody opus about the death of the old ways and the men who lived by them may be the best known of the revolution Westerns, but it is by no means the sole inhabitant of the sub-genre. Nor is it alone in its brilliance. Sergio Leone clocked in with the good but flawed A Fistful of Dynamite, but for my money, the Italian productions that rank alongside Peckinpah's masterpiece are Quien Sabe? (aka A Bullet for the General) and Companeros. Both films have quite a bit in common. For starters, the hero is Mexican, or rather, he's supposed to be Mexican. Usually, he's really Italian, but for the sake of illusion, we'll call him Mexican. Whatever the case, it's quite a departure from American films. With rare exceptions, Mexicans and Native Americans were portrayed in US productions as either murderous bandits in need of exterminating or as helpless cowards. To see Mexicans as the heroes in these two films is refreshing. The second similarity is that in both films, the heroes start out as morally ambiguous only to eventually blossom into full-fledged freedom fighters. They spend much of the movie telling themselves they are not involved. In the end, they emerge as both heroes and leaders. Sharply different characters than the old vengeance seeking strangers. Both films rely heavily on characterization. Many Spaghetti Westerns rely on the character as archetype rather than the character as character. The vengeance seeking stranger need only squint and kill. In these movies, however, since they are about discovering things inside oneself, it's important that the characters be written and acted in a way that makes the transformation believable, engaging, and moving. The characters must be human, complete with flaws, humor, confusion, and the whole range of emotions. In Quien Sabe?, that task fell on veteran actor Maria Gianni Volare, and he pulled it off wonderfully. In Companeros, Tomas Milian proves every bit Volare's equal in talent. And finally, both films feature fair-haired Americans/Europeans as both foil and sidekick. Companeros is among my favorite films. It's fast-paced, brilliantly acted, wonderfully scored (by legendary Italian composer Ennio Morrocione), and superbly written. Franco Nero, who made a name for himself as the coffin-toting killer in the excellent Spaghetti Western Django, and later embarrassed himself in the goofy but influential Enter the Ninja stars as Yolaf The Swede, a gun running hustler making a buck amid the turmoil of the Mexican Revolution. Tomas Milian, the Cuban-born actor who made a name for himself as an actor in Italy, plays Basco, a ruffian who hangs with a seedy general who claims to be championing the cause of the common man when in fact he's little more than a thug doing his best to amass a fortune for himself. It's probably no coincidence that Cuban-born Milian looks a hell of a lot like famous Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara, a man who used to have a political meaning before being turned into a trendy t-shirt and pop marketing phenomenon in the United States. It probably is a coincidence that Milian starred in one of the many rip-offs of Franco Nero's classic Django, a surreal and often silly film called Django, Kill!. Occupying the same town as Milian and his gang are a group of true revolutionaries who believe in educating the people, non-violent protest, and the teachings of a distinguished professor named Xantos who is really championing the cause of the people of Mexico rather than using it as an excuse to get rich or flex his muscle. The students and revolutionaries are lead by the fiery Lola (played by the absolutely stunning Iris Berben). Here's another marked difference between the revolutionary Western and the older vengeance seeking stranger films, as well as another similarity between Companeros and Quien Sabe?. In the older films, women were little more than murder or rape victims, window dressing and symbols of redemption (not unlike how they would be used in the films of John Woo later on, who was obviously influenced by Italian Westerns). In the revolutionary Westerns, woman are on much more equal ground. In Quien Sabe?, a woman is more or less the second in command of Chuncho's gang, and in Companeros, Lola plays the intelligent and passionate leader of the intellectual revolutionaries. In true little boy form, Basco (Milian) develops a crush on her, and expresses it by endlessly tormenting her in childish ways, including cutting off her hair (she looks great with short hair, though!). The scumbag general gets a hold of Xantos' safe, which contains a valuable treasure upon which Xantos was going to build his revolution. The general hires Yolaf to open the safe, but Yolaf soon discovers it can't be done. He must get the combination from Xantos, who isn't likely to give it, not to mention that he's currently a prisoner in the United States. His crime? Nothing really. But the US was profiting heavily from the confusion in Mexico, and if Xantos was able to lead a well-educated, organized opposition, then the war could be over before America had made every cent it could off the blood of others. Thus, Xantos remained an unwilling guest of Uncle Sam. Yolaf and Basco are sent to "rescue" the general, even though they can't stand one another. It's the classic buddy movie, but the chemistry between Milian and Franco is great. Matters are complicated when John, a one-handed killer with a pet Hawk arrives. John is played by the legendary Jack Palance, and he turns in a performance that is just over the top enough to be psycho and amusing, but not so over the top that he seems hammy. He reminds me of vincent Price when Price hit a role on all cylinders. John smokes pot, freaks people out, and was once crucified, though his Hawk pecked his hand off in order to save him. With John and his lackeys hot on their tail, Basco and Yolaf spring the professor and high tail it back to Mexico. Along the way, Basco and Xantos continuously argue and debate revolution and education. By the end of their journey, Basco is having second thoughts about his allegiance to the general. When the general orders the mindless slaughter of unarmed students in order to force Xantos to give up the combination, Basco's mind is made up. He joins Lola and asks Yolaf to do the same. He's not exactly wild about the idea. But Yolaf is the classic reluctant brigand, much like the later Han Solo. He has no interest in revolution, or so he tells himself. Yet when it comes down to it, he finds himself taking up arms alongside his companero, Basco, in a seemingly hopeless fight with the general's forces. In the end, Yolaf can't shake the desire for treasure. Xantos fortune was less than exciting, so Yolaf decides to steal the statue of the local saint, right when Basco is awkwardly professing his respect and love for Lola. Basco is enraged by Yolaf's sacrilege, and the movie draws to a close as it opened, with the two companeros staring one another down on the train tracks, ready for a showdown. It's rare that an Italian Western is "charming," but stars Nero and Milian make Companeros just that. They temper the film's politics and violence with ample humor and a great repoir. Watching Nero buried up to his neck about to be trampled by horses, but still struggling to maintain his suaveness is classic, and Milian shines as the scruffy revolutionary who discovers the true nature of revolution. People were shocked by Jack Palance' comic ability when he made the film City slickers, but anyone familiar with the man knows he can tongue-in-cheek it with the best of them (how can you take yourself toos eriously when you played the mighty space wizard of Gor in Outlaws of Gor. He shines here, alternately creepy and hilarious. This movie, much like Quien Sabe? has tremendous spirit and energy, which is what really puts it ahead of the pack. I enjoy Italian Westerns, but it's rare I enjoy myself while watching them (and I don't mean the same way i enjoy myself while watching a certain other genre of film), but I did just that with Companeros. It's a fun movie. The feel of it reminded me of My Name is Nobody, by far the wackiest of the Italian Westerns. There's just no over-stating how great this film is. Political films often become dry and boring, with the movie grinding to a halt so characters can sit for hours on end discussing issues. Not so here. It manages to be intelligent and still stay action-packed. The evolution of Basco is engrossing and believable. And let's not forget the music. The score is as important to a Spaghetti Western as the script itself. Ennio Morricone turns in another excellent piece of work. The theme song is great -- it will make you want to start a revolution of your own, or at the very least, you will be like me and sing along even though you don't know the words. I just mumble some and then yell, "Companeros!" whenever the time is right. Director Sergio Corbucci does a wonderful job bringing everything together. though less known in the US than fellow Spaghetti Western director Sergio Leone, Corbucci is just as important to the genre as Leone. If you pick the best movies of the genre, there's a good chance on of these two men directed it. Companeros works on every level: as an action film, a romance, an adventure, a political film, and as a human story. You can't really beat that, can ya, companeros? Labels: Director: Sergio Corbucci, Spaghetti Westerns, Stars: Franco Nero, Stars: Tomas Milian, Year: 1970 posted by Keith at 4:59 PM | 0 Comments |
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