7th April 2009

“Twilight”:Ignoring the fact that author Stephanie Myer claims to have never read Bram Stoker’s “Dracula”; ignoring the fact that Myer claims never to have watched an R-rated feature therefore dismissing a majority of intelligent, adult-skewed representations of the vampire myth on film (one hopes that she’s at least familiar with Dreyer and Murnau); ignoring the fact that Twilight’s tale itself seems to dismiss the necessarily adult metaphors the predatory mythology of the vampire represents and appears to sidestep that same mythology’s intrinsic precepts of infection, subjugation of the flesh, inversion of Christianity, mutilation, addiction and sexual gratification, to name just a small quantity, in favour of coy teasing and an adolescent sniggering/swooning attitude to desire…

…ignoring all of that, the cinematic adaptation of “Twilight” has earned a mountain of cash and looks set to shift thousands of DVD units. That fact, coupled with its magnetic hold on a certain sub-section of the horror audience, makes it a piece of pop-culture as worthy of examination as either ‘torture porn’ or the slasher film by some enterprising scholar.

I am not that scholar.

Nevertheless, it’s a phenomenon, inexplicable or not and, as such, is probably the week’s most auspicious release.

“Red”: it is a fact that the acclaimed work of Jack Ketchum has had a more tortured journey to the screen than that of King, Herbert or Koontz. It’s perhaps no surprise, however, when you consider Ketchum’s novels are far more tortured in term of raw psychology and literal on-page carnage than his more “commercially” thrilling peers. Savage, uncompromising and rarely filled with narrative catharsis, Ketchum’s novels are in some ways the definition of true horror.

Many of you will have seen at least two of Ketchum’s more cerebral stories come to the screen via the Frightfest screenings of the terrific “The Lost” and the more challenging “The Girl Next Door”. I say ‘cerebral’ because these are stories of almost banal evil that spring from nothing so much as everyday normality and the ostensibly rational: a sense of disillusion; notions of responsibility; the breakdown of social values. Even their titles imply a simple evocation of place (‘next door’) and emotion (‘lost’) that are infinitely more recognisable to you and me than the motives of a masked bogeyman or supernatural entity.

It’s no wonder they’re tricky to adapt into chipper, slickly packaged commercial entertainments.

Ketchum’s “The Offspring”, a brutal, yet slightly more archetypical “The Hill Have Eyes”-style tale of rural savagery, is due for release later this year. Until then we have an adaptation of his 1995 novel “Red” to tie us over. The set up is conventional thriller territory that then proceeds to twist, as is Ketchum’s wont, simple emotions, heightening them to quietly chaotic proportions as Brian Cox enacts a measured, unerring, Old Testament-style revenge on the louts who murdered his faithful dog, the titular Red.

A one time project for “The Lost” producer and “May” director Lucky McKee, who left the project due to undetermined ‘creative differences’, the film was adapted by “The Grudge”’s Stephen Susco and co-stars Tom Sizemore, Robert Englund, “Deadgirl”’s Shiloh Fernandez and the reliably unnerving character actress Amanda Plummer. It’s a fine collection of familiar talents that should appeal to all devout fans of the pastoral horror the 1980s did so well.

“Hansel & Gretel”: it’s perhaps no surprise that South Korea is the place from which a significant amount of films laced with a churning undercurrent of dark whimsy, sly metaphor and insidious, inveigling threat emerge. Its own recent history is demonstrably rife with political turmoil, not least with a neighbour painted as a villain of almost fairytale like zeal.

But it is also a beautiful country steeped in that grand philosophy of many Asian countries that are both deeply religious and have a lingering and pervasive folkloric history that somehow, thankfully, remains unimpinged upon by the progress of technology and modern social attitudes. There is still a great reverence for the past, for history, the people, and the entrenched culture. It is in this culture that fairytales are able to exist so openly, so passionately and this ultra-stylised modern day (-ish) “Hansel & Gretel” is as vibrant an example of this sort of folklore as either the classic Asian ghost stories ‘Kaidan’ and ‘Onibaba’ or the more overtly fantastical, yet thematically cogent work of Del Toro.

As with much Korean cinema, its ability to bend, meld and cross-pollinate genres with the flick of a camera angle means the trailer alone passes through early Tim Burton, Henry Sellick, Jan Svankmeyer and Jean-Pierre Jeunet with an ease and dexterity that makes the full feature all the more enticing.

It should be mentioned that “Hansel & Gretel” is released in the UK by new distributor Terracotta Media, a terrific company intent on beginning the best of less hyped Asian cinema to your unwavering attention amidst the more commercially-minded enthusiasm for Park chan-wook and Bong joon-ho and the other celebrated Asian filmmakers being propelled, quite justifiably, to international stardom.

GITS: From The Vault?

Irony abounds as the following really is from the vault. Or at least the dark recesses of the internet where old ‘Gore In the Store’ columns -- from an era when about 3 people read the column (as opposed to the current 7) -- go to die. So, in response to some typically industrious posting on the forums, I wish to humbly cannibalise my own ramblings and thrust the following unceremoniously in your eager and willing faces.

“The Sorcerers” Michael Reeves was the horror genre’s James Dean. Both were uncommonly talented, youthfully exuberant and ferociously committed to their respective careers. Both were shot down in flames (one might say figuratively and literally, respectively) just at the point at which their genius would have surely taken flight. And, like so many legendary cultural figures, both were immortalised by the sheer providence of their untimely deaths. Had they not been plucked (or perhaps rescued) from burgeoning genius, it’s quite possible they might never have been able to endure the intimidating burden of expectation their talents would have surely been fated them to achieve.

There’s a feisty anecdote attributed to Michael Reeves on the chilly Norfolk set of “Witchfinder General”: the picture’s weary, culture-shocked and extraordinarily veteran star Vincent Price, in a theatrical huff at being marshaled around by Reeves’ baby-faced ingénue remarked to his director, “I’ve made eighty four films; how many have you made?”, to which Reeves simply replied: “Two good ones.”

Reeves’ untimely death left but one further, even better picture to this delicious apocryphal tale, making his contribution to cinema just three pictures in total. The first of these, “Revenge Of The Blood Beast”, he wrote under the pseudonym ‘Michael Byron’. It so happened that three pictures was same number made by James Byron Dean. Just another of life’s macabre jokes.

“Witchfinder General” is quite rightly heralded a zenith of British horror cinema. During its running time, Hammer Studio’s perversely bucolic, gothic landscapes are thrust against the stark, literate and sadistic thrills of a narrative that could have been plucked from a western by Anthony Mann or Budd Boetticher. The picture’s resultant moral ambiguity exposes the dark underbelly of human desires on both sides of the “law”: so much for the clean division of black and white hats. It’s a delectable quandary to which the cynically-minded Reeves, who idolised that scathing and similarly stripped down directorial force Don Siegel, was all too drawn.

For his previous picture, 1967’s “The Sorcerers”, Reeves explicated, for anyone still willing to listen, a hypothesis previously explored by that grand old gentleman, Michael Powell. It was a idea that consumed Powell’s 1960 masterpiece “Peeping Tom”: voyeurism. Critics and audiences alike had vehemently and vociferously pelted “Peeping Tom”’s none-too-subversive notion that their complicity in that film’s (and thus cinema’s) perverse gaze was an open admission of lustful desire. It was a sentiment keenly suppressed in a pre-Swinging Sixties UK. They did protest far, far too much.

As if in some reverential allegiance to the shamefully outcast Powell, “The Sorcerers” gives us the tale of an ageing scientist and his wife, Marcus and Estelle Monserrat, who have constructed a machine which enables the user(s) to submit to the exact physical and psychological sensations experienced by another. In this instance, the ‘other’, letting his mind be blitzed by this unholy amalgam of Pandora’s Box and Monkey’s Paw, is incorrigible bad boy Mike Roscoe, played with splendid insouciance by Ian Ogilvy. Mike is ultimately (and all too easily) coerced by the tragic Marcus (an exquisitely cast Boris Karloff) into assisting in their experiment and we soon discover that the Monserrats are two souls held in the grip of the ravenous realization that they have precious little time left in which to indulge in all manner of sensations, both savoury…and decidedly not. These are sensations which, during their staid, humdrum lives, have, alongside fleeting years, vitality and perverse libido, passed the Monserrats by.

As Mike Roscoe, a scowling, brusque bastard (and a strangely self-persecuting alter ego for director Mike Reeves), skulks around Swingin’ London looking for quick fixes of sex, drugs and the odd spot of mildly offensive badinage, Marcus and Estelle hitch a cerebral ride for a vicarious feast of the very same. Until that, too, becomes a little tired for the ripe old dears. Emboldened by the sensational rush this literal handle on a young man’s life and vitality gives them, the Monserrats push Mike further and further toward insidious, invidious and wholly murderous experiences on which to feed their new found lustful urges.

Considering how the hubristic fixtures of the conservative press hounded Michael Powell for “Peeping Tom”’s orgiastic take on audience culpability, imagine the merriment they must have made in the face of Reeves’ shameless metaphor.

Reeves is less ambiguous than Powell about our complicity in cinema’s voyeuristic nature. Or perhaps he was less concerned with analysing our urge to “see” and more with revelling in the effect this “seeing” has upon us once we’ve succumbed to it. Certainly, in the Monserrat’s (and Mike’s) primal indulgences there’s little of the frustrated helplessness exhibited by homicidal peeping tom Mark Lewis‘s impotent and paternally scarred psyche. In that sense, “The Sorcerers” is a far more misanthropic and jolting a comment on the ennui of contemporary society than “Peeping Tom”’s brilliantly artful meditation. It’s a thrill ride, very wary of the thrills that horror films propagate on the screen for our express amusement and ghoulish gratification.

Low-fi and tub-thumpingly acted in parts, “The Sorcerers” might lack the grace and subtle artistry of “Witchfinder General”. That elegiac, darkly luscious production suggested such a significant leap in creative accomplishment that, had Reeves lived to make more pictures, would certainly have seen his talents explode prodigiously well into the 1970s and beyond.

But what Reeves did leave us with in “The Sorcerers” is a ragged, roughly hewn and riotously wicked piece of independent exploitation. Full of spikey camera work and brief but affecting directorial ticks, it’s a bracing “little” picture full of ideas more inspired than many “big” pictures of the era. If Roger Corman or Tony Tenser, rather than Ivan Reitman, had brought us Cronenberg, the resultant work may have been ingrained with just such distinctive elements.

Mercifully shorn of much of the camp, ‘nudge-nudge’ humour and ‘zowee daddio!’ inflections that blighted other ‘youth’-friendly productions of the era -- I’m thinking of Michael Armstrong’s otherwise nastily enjoyable “Haunted House Of Horror” -- “The Sorcerers” is far closer in tone to the wonderfully degenerate scrapings from the inside of Peter Walker and David McGillivrey’s minds. Nowhere is this better exemplified than in pictures like “Frightmare” or “House Of Whipcord”. In fact, Catherine Lacey’s Estelle Monserrat has the same air of Edwardian-gentility-by-way-of-Lady-Macbeth that made Sheila Keith such a beloved icon of mid-70s exploitation aficionados.

Boris Karloff, too, is a quiet tour de force here, bettered at this late stage in his career perhaps only by his similarly dignified performance in Peter Bogdanovich’s “Targets” the following year. Here though, he’s like the very darkest brother of that wearily philanthropic horror film star, Byron Orlock. Marcus Monserrat is every bit a stately, academic gentleman. Yet he’s trapped in a decrepit existence with an inert perversity waiting in stasis for someone like Mike Roscoe with a wicked spark to come along and ignite it. It’s a great, sad performance in a genre so often blessed with mere pantomime mugging and insincere theatrics.

Ian Ogilvy, given the kind of sullen patsy role Stephen King would utilise in “Christine”, pulls a commendable amount of pathos into an essentially (and it is essential for the picture to work) unlikeable role. When the fiery climax arrives, the picture’s villainy and heroism (or perhaps ‘empathy’, since there’s precious little virtuous behaviour on display) can be applicable equally across each parties’ eventual eulogy.

“The Sorcerers” remains a fine and provocative curiosity from when independent pictures were just that, in mind, body and spirit.