6th July 2009

Night Of The Seagulls

So we come to the final, inimitably named adventure of these towering creations of ambling Euro-horror. Either in deference to a genre institution or merely heightening ambition, ‘Night…’ begins in heady rural Hammer territory as a cadre of Templars snatches a maiden from her village, sacrificing her bloody carcass to a Puzazu look-a-like Sea God effigy.

Cut to present day, and Dr Stein and his wife arrive in a small coastal town to take up residency after the town’s general practitioner decides that ‘anywhere inland’ is a safer option for him during what appear to be Greatly Troubled Times ™. In the bleak, desolate and perpetually shadow-enshrouded village, Stein remains committed to his Hippocratic Oath, despite the dour inhabitants expressing a deep suspicion of outsiders at every grim utterance. When the young women of the village begin to mysteriously disappear, the revelation of a perennial seven-yearly scourge upon the town from the sea can mean only one thing. The pragmatic Stein’s, though, aren’t quick to believe until they witness the horror with their own eyes.

It’s perhaps no surprise (or if it is, it’s a pleasant one) that the film finds the series on firmer footing, with a more ambitious Ossorio creating some lyrically macabre imagery. During the prologue’s sacrifice sequences the most enigmatic shots are the swarm of crabs, which teem toward each violated and abandoned corpse, deftly echoing the mollusc-like husks of the Templars.

Whatever his motives, Ossorio’s direction is defiantly attuned to this ever-evolving world. More formal and ritualistic, it’s no wonder many critics have picked up on the influence of on Howard Philips Lovecraft that washes over this rather stately installment. Shot composition and mood are prominent features of craftsman Ossorio’s approach and the initial flashback ritual features the bloodiest depiction thus far of the occult rites in which the Knights are steeped. From the off, there is also a purposeful, ever-present aural threat: the raging sea flowing and crashing through the soundtrack. Although the Blind quartet is not explicitly inter-linked, it’s impossible to ignore that final image of shore-bound horror in ‘The Ghost Galleon’ casting a shadow over the proceedings, perpetuating the series’ overriding theme of temporal dislocation.

The characters themselves are given a slightly different role here. The Templars are no longer startling marauders, to be mocked as they are feared in some pantomime ritual fiesta. ‘…Seagulls’ present them as an accepted part of a particularly wretched routine. There is no joyful, festive or abandoned compulsion or perversion of modern lust to be quashed here as in so many of the series’ other damned communities. It’s even possible that the very fascism that has doggedly (if coarsely) informed the series’ villains has come full circle. Certainly the crumbling of youthful, forward-looking pysches in the face of grimly predestined traditionalism is an overriding component of ‘…Seagull’’s impact. It’s like the times have final caught up with three films worth of supernatural repression enforced upon the Templar’s victims -- or that repression has sent things spiraling backwards: even the inhabitants’ apparel removes any element of modernity from the township. Berzano represented a vibrant population trying to break the bonds of old world piety in ‘Return…’ but two films later, the Blind Dead undoubtedly prevail. Their ways cannot be countered and succumbing is the inexorable result: a way of life, and death.

Also fascinating here is the character of the departing physician. He’s an older (and, presumably, a worldly) medical man who has lived with the knowledge of this inhuman blight, rather than tragically sitting out the inevitability of evil like so many of the series’ sages and he flees actively, consciously, deliberately from it. The wisdom of three films, like the aural reverberations of the sea, overshadows ‘Seagulls…’, enabling those characters willing to look beyond tradition to the malevolence that informs it and to leave with their life, if not much in the way of salvation. Not your conventional horror elder.

Our leads, somewhat perversely within genre convention, are no more than perfunctory ciphers for the audience (rather than surrogates for them), the game being to wring the tension out of their proximity to the struggle of the village against its sightless foe. They are purposefully dislocated from the action, two proverbial witnesses to the Bible’s inevitable Horsemen. The waves and the ever-present cries of the titular seagulls themselves are given a deathly and poetic significance during the story, all the better to pronounce the pastoral potency of the horror portrayed. This quiet apocalypse is as gripping as any conventional monster mash. The Knights galloping through the churning surf toward a rock-shackled victim on the shoreline is one of the series’ most compelling images -- in the end, it’s not the Stein’s who are in danger, it’s the progression of life and existence itself.

In conclusion? Ending as enigmatically and ambiguously as it began, the saga is conceivably no more than a single blow in a bloody swath of possible Templar mythology. There are untold permutations of these preternatural assailants, beyond John Gilling’s unofficial follow-up ‘La Cruz del Diablo’ and countless flatteringly sincere imitations. Perhaps they are overdue resurrection.

Almost granular, the transfer is a justifiably grainy and bleak affair, totally in keeping with the photography. It is well detailed and damage free. Trailers accompany.

The last two films in the series are presented in only English dubs in the Anchor Bay UK box. But the language of terror is universal.

Surveillance: ah, the new film from the once promising Jennifer Lynch. Okay, I admit that the “promising” tag rests upon: a) her being the progeny of a bona fide master craftsman (the trauma of her club feet at birth was the alleged basis for “Eraserhead”’s deformed-baby-nightmare-imagery, don’t you know); b) her writing the quite spicy “The Secret Diary Of Laura Palmer”; and c) her first picture looking like it was going to be quite intriguing when I was 16 what with all the supposed Sherilyn Fenn nudity and the hilarity of Julian Sands wanking himself into a sweaty coma and all -- then it was released and it was neither titillating nor funny and had far too much Enigma in it and she was no longer promising.

So the “could have been promising” Jennifer Lynch? Well, on the basis of “Surveillance”, which I have yet to see, she can still shoot a picture, since despite splitting critics into those who thought it was ridiculous and those who thought it was awful, many conceded it was at least very stylishly filmed awful ridiculousness. But on reflection of the quite scathing reviews it garnered on release, perhaps it was something better suited to the mid-90s craze for twisty serial killer pictures á la “Kalifornia”, “Natural Born Killers” or “Liar” starring Tim Roth than a post-modern “Rashomon” for the 21st century.

Still, any picture where Bill Pullman is playing less of his tiresome milquetoast shtick and more of his “Zero Effect” eccentricity is something that has more than passing interest.

Jennifer Lynch, on the other hand, has something far more alluring coming up with her quasi-mystical/bug-nuts insane looking Indian snake woman horror movie ‘Hisss’. For that, I am deeply, genuinely excited.

“House By The Cemetery”/”Sleepless”/”Macabre”: after Shameless comes…Masters Of Giallo! Arrow Films’ new imprint follows in the illustrious wake of Argent Films in embracing the spirit, aesthetic and wholehearted chintz of that glorious age of the VRA and all the splendid artwork it brought with it.

Though the roots of the other parts of Fulci’s remarkable run of “zombie” films at the turn of the decade owe more to H.P. Lovecraft, 1981’s ‘House By The Cemetery' might be the picture that most effectively captures the delightful sense of the unease possessed by Stephen King’s ‘The Shining’, a story from which Fulci and his writers must have, in part, taken inspiration for this tale of a family in a ‘house with a past’. With a genuinely uncanny sensibility and uncomfortably rendered sense of temporal dislocation amongst the shoddy dubbing, clumsy plotting and occasionally riotously OTT special effects, courtesy of maestro Giannetti De Rossi, it’s not the most accessible of Italian horror films, but compared to, say, the similarly arcane but completely anodyne “Manhattan Baby”, it’s a masterpiece of gothic peculiarity. Great score too.

‘Sleepless’ is, to date, the last gasp of the classic Argento sensibility. Working with cinematographer Ronnie Taylor and a re-energised Goblin (who contribute a terrifically riff-laden theme), there are, amongst the strangely inventive and beguiling yet still plodding, awkward and rather absurd plot, touches of greatness, glimpses of the old madness with which ‘il maestro’ once infused works like “Suspiria”, “Tenebre” and “Deep Red”. These were pictures that that, in the words of the man himself, came from within, were filmed “from instinct”, not from any great master plan. That admission becomes harder and harder to fathom as the years go by; it’s difficult to conceive that those nightmares, so painfully precise and exquisitely produced in the mid-70s/early 80s, were so unplanned when these latter day efforts look like the work of an artist more and more out of touch with contemporary aesthetics while still adrift from the tightly wound genius that made his name. If those indelible early pictures were thrown together on feverish whims, his pictures since “Opera” must surely have been conjured up using the internet’s tremendous, if hardly trustworthy, ‘Do It Yourself Giallo Generator’.

http://www.braineater.com/misc/giallo_intro.html

BUT…this seems an unfair diversionary diatribe to unleash when ‘Sleepless’ has more moments of genuine delight than most gialli produced in the last 20 years. If it is a final gasp of the genre as we knew it, it’s an entertaining, if not wholly successful, one; a whodunnit that inspires unease, generates suspense and delivers some old fashioned set-piece shocks before the final, deliciously absurd reveal. It’s nasty, at times evocative fun, and nothing more, but it’s enough. ‘Deep Red’’s Gabrielle Lavia supplies the nostalgia, Max von Sydow the gravitas and Asia Argento the unsettling and brutal nursery rhyme upon which the script’s killer bases his diabolical murders.

‘Macabre’ this is the picture I’m least familiar with in this collection, and with whom I’m always left the impression of distinct ambivalence. Is the last minute twist in Lamberto Bava’s tale of a wife so devoted to her now dead lover she’ll kill to preserve his ever lasting memory, a shock that is clearly illustrated on most every piece of promotional material for the film since its release… is it meant to be, well, surprising? Perhaps it’s the dread of the perverse situation that is meant to instil fear and loathing in the viewer, rather than the unleashing of surprise at that final scene by the refrigerator. To be fair, when viewed against the guignol of classic Italian splatter of the period, not to mention his father Mario’s less bloody but toweringly atmospheric shockers, it’s hard to be totally objective. But there is a heady brew of sultry lust and wanton vice that Bava Jnr concocts in his tale of New Orleans horror (one that stars Mrs Mike “Donnie Brasco”/”Four Weddings & A Funeral” Newell, fact fans). It’s just a long way from the gooey and explosive delights engendered by ‘The Beyond’’s bayou barbarity or ‘House With the Laughing Widows’’ truly disturbing pastoral terror. As b-movie Polanski-inspired exploitation though, it’s certainly well worth experiencing.

Masterminded by the same wonderful folk behind Shameless, this Master Of Giallo series features oldies but goodies (and filled with goodies, thanks so some work by Calum Waddell on a set of new documentaries accompanying each film). If you don’t own them this might just be the most perfect opportunity since 13th July 1984 when those lovely big VHS boxes were pilloried by an asinine nanny state.

Thief: I beg special indulgence to mention a non-horror essential to all the legitimate cinema nerds who read this site: Optimum’s re-release of Michael Mann’s indispensible debut theatrical picture.

This tale of a small time safe cracker’s Carlito Brigante-esque journey out of an all too magnetic life of crime features James Caan, Tuesday Weld, an absolutely terrifying Robert Prosky, as far removed from his charmingly jovial turn in something like “Gemlins 2” as it is possible to get and some of the most lustrous, evocative photography of any picture of the 1980s.

It’s a timely reminder that, in the age of blustering, facile often ponderously moronic so-called-gangster films, it’s possible to be thrilling, meaningful, romantic, gruff, sharp, authentic, tragic and hard as fucking nails all in the same modest, unassuming and rather intimate story. Still need convincing? Then watch this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfetsPmDWAk

As a primer for “Public Enemies”, another pointed Mann-mounted depiction of the criminal’s life that book ends his career thus far, it’s fascinating; as a movie in its own right, it’s genuinely terrific.

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