21st October 2009

A Month Of Malevolence Part 4.

October 22nd “The Believers” (voodoo) There are countless horror films in which the trappings of religion ravage possessed bodies with gory, anarchic diabolism but not so many that cast an objective gaze at the grisly effects of rock-sure faith in a religion itself: “I Walked With A Zombie”, “The Serpent & The Rainbow” and John Schlesinger’s “The Believers” do just that.

Moving to New York following a literally shocking family tragedy involving a puddle of milk and a faulty electrical connection, Martin Sheen’s Cal Jamieson and his son Chris are settling into a life of normality. But that peace is shattered when a cop (Jimmy Smits) whom police psychiatrist Cal is treating becomes embroiled in a series of ritualistic killings in the Latino heartland of the city. In the wretched heat of the urban sprawl, black magic, Santería and voodoo comingle in a melting pot as volatile as the cultural ghettos through which they flow. For reasons he couldn’t possibly imagine, Cal is about to get drawn into something, for him, unbelievable. But in the face of so many others who do believe, how long can an agnostic remain unaffected?

It’s an intriguing question and one which the picture treats in a surprisingly sober and considered manner -- made in 1987, it was horror picture released at a time of full-on sequelitis in the major franchises and the mischievousness of everything from “Vamp” to “Night Of The Creeps” to “Evil Dead II”. Concerned with character, “The Believers” has more in common with cynical, post-“X Files” supernatural shockers like “Fallen” or “Skeleton Key” (which, of course, hark back to the biting genre classics of the 60s and 70s) than with the tepid turn-of-the-decade programme filler like Rockne S. O‘Bannon’s “Fear”.

Written by “Twin Peaks” and “The List Of Seven” writer Mark Frost from the novel “The Religion”, Schlesinger’s essentially pulp movie treats each bizarre and horrific occurrence with the cool, measured objectivity of a police procedural, tapping away at every rational foothold of the fragile Cal’s everyday life. Faith and belief in all its forms -- in family, in justice, in magic, in the goodness of humanity -- is confronted in a sensitive, literate fashion, building up a series of utterly believable relationships that are ripped apart by some truly horrific incidents. Cal’s broken faith in his own abilities as carer and protector is the film’s main gambit: over the course of the story, the suspense eked out from child/girlfriend/colleague/in-laws in peril is skilful manipulation from a *masterful* filmmaker.

Mining a less cultured vein than that of his more adult thriller “Marathon Man” or the artistic triumph of “Midnight Cowboy” this is, whether planned that way or not, another John Schlesinger picture about the malignant underbelly of New York. It could, and does, stand in for any multi-cultural city in the world yet New York’s prominence as a magnet for urgent dreamers hoping for a better life is a great metaphorical setting for a horror film and Schlesinger has an obvious affection for the place.

Like Luc Besson, Schlesinger shoots the streets and landscapes of New York as an outsider would see them: slightly off kilter; from an angle a native might not be familiar with; and certainly following people who might not normally be noticed in the bustle and daily grind. It’s the perfect place for horror to sneak in undetected, as happens with the malevolent witch doctor that is the catalyst for this blood-curdling chain of events. This unassuming film, so well acted by a stellar cast -- Robert Loggia and Lee Richardson, previously hailed in this month of malevolence, are invaluable presences -- is a similarly unheralded force.

Shock That Rocks: a voodoo-inflicted sore on Helen Shaver’s cheek erupts in a viscous supernatural mess…and then gets really nasty.

Would Go Well With…: “Candyman”

October 23rd “Squirm” (nature runs amok): Jeff Lieberman. It’s a name that invokes words like ‘auteur’, ‘artist’, ‘Cormanesque’. Or perhaps more likely these days: ‘who’? And this, good folk, is a deathly shame, because Lieberman has been responsible for some of the most idiosyncratically eerie moments independent horror has ladled over our collective platters. Yet depressingly few people have actually heard of him.

A master of creating an uncomfortable (and sometimes downright invidious) atmosphere from practically nothing, Lieberman is able to do as much with a simple music cue as Hitchcock could do with a cut. This is no quaint hyperbole: witness the opening montage of his 1976 killer worm feast, “Squirm”. Over a rain-swept street, in a small Southern town, a storm buffets the slick asphalt as electricity pylons and leafy bows sway against the wind. On the soundtrack, a bucolic choir of angelic children’s voices waver over the onscreen tumult -- the effect is so simple, chaos vs. calm, but it’s incredibly unsettling, surprising and unexpected as the opening strains of a picture about….well, cheap looking killer worms. Though Lieberman is often above his (own) material, it’s never beneath him, no matter how schlockly the premise.

Unleashed upon the under-populated backwater hamlet, “Squrim”’s electrified nightcrawlers proceed to make slow progress through a variety of eccentrically drawn locals. It’s a real shoe-string production yet, time and again, Lieberman is able to pull the most incongruous of directorial touches out of the bag, deftly sketching the small absurdities of life. He’s the perfect match for a genre that’s all about arcane twists of fate. Nowhere was this more evident than the same year’s “Blue Sunshine”, Lieberman’s picture about a cadre of former student radicals whose dabbling with “the blue acid” comes back to haunt them in their later, (and, importantly, more conservative), years. It presents some of the most startling cinematic incongruities this side of the opening of Sam Fuller’s “The Naked Kiss” here, too, involving a parade of bald quasi-savages.

“Squirm” also introduced the world to yet more ingenious wizardry from a young Rick Baker. His innovatively rendered f/x work for a smattering of skin burrowing crawlers is all the more surprising amid the rough hewn nature of the production. With creaky performances and an uninspiring collection of rural locations in which to shoot them, Lieberman still paints an alarming portrait of an uneasy community under siege. It’s not a township full of Charlton Hestons or Paul Newmans fighting earthquake or inferno but one of toothy simpletons and goofballs unable to comprehend a drifter’s outspoken point of view in the local diner, let alone nature run amok. The nonsense is all so quietly believable under Lieberman’s eye.

He is also a true independent. Like Don Coscarelli, his best-known productions are stamped with both their own eccentricities and those of a casually brutal world full of wild irony. As the climax comes inside a worm-strewn house, you’re not quite sure who will survive, or indeed what will be left of them. It’s an apathetic stance to take toward your heroes, but Lieberman isn’t one to conjure up arbitrarily twee protagonists. His latest, ‘Satan Little Helper’ takes world-weary delight in pushing satirical buttons at the expense of cherubic urchins and their suburban mischief. It’s this delight in the foibles of real characters (and not cut-out ciphers), which makes Lieberman’s pictures bristle with that ‘something’ special.

“Squrim” is book-ended again by the music that eerie chorale when the invasion ends as unobtrusively as it began. For all the picture’s ‘grindhouse’ production values, the effect it not something that’s easy to shake. That lingering impression is a rare commodity in today’s horror cinema.

Shock That Rocks: a character who is affectionately known as “wormface” leering out of a bobbing rowing boat for the first time.

Would Go Well With…: “Ticks”

October 24th “The Sorcerers” (the original hoodie horror)

Michael Reeves was the horror genre’s James Dean. Both were uncommonly talented, youthfully exuberant and ferociously committed to their respective careers. And both were shot down in flames (Reeves, figuratively; Dean, literally) at just the point at which their genius would have surely taken flight. Like so many legendary cultural figures, both men were immortalised by the sheer providence of their untimely deaths. Had they not been plucked (or perhaps rescued) from a burgeoning pre-eminence, it’s quite possible they might never have been able to endure the kind of intimidatingly zealous life to which they and their talents would have surely been fated.

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 marshalled around by Reeves’ baby-faced ingénue remarked to him, “I’ve made 84 films; how many have you made?” Reeves simply replied: “2 good ones!” It’s an apocryphal tale but one not even Reeves can have believed was true: his debut “Revenge Of The Blood Beast” was an exploitable piece of hokum, but it’s not considered to actually be much good. He did however write the first of only three pictures under the name ‘Michael Byron; three being same number of picture made by James *Byron* Dean. It’s the kind of macabre detail of which the director would be proud.

“Witchfinder General” is a zenith for post-Hammer British cinema. It parries the perversely rural idyll of Hammer’s gothic landscapes against the stark, literate and sadistic thrills of a narrative that could have been plucked from an Anthony Mann or Budd Boetticher western. The picture’s subsequent moral ambiguity exposed 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 quandary that the cynical Reeves, who idolised the similarly blunt, stripped down directorial force of Don Siegel, was all too drawn to.

For his previous picture, 1967’s “The Sorcerers”, Reeves explicated the hypothesis of that grand old gentleman Michael Powell, one which consumed Powell’s 1960 masterpiece “Peeping Tom”: voyeurism. Critics and audiences alike had, with an awful lot of piss and vinegar, rebuked “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 a desire all too willingly suppressed in a pre-Swinging Sixties UK. They did protest far, far too much.

In some tacit allegiance to the outcast Powell, “The Sorcerers” is the tale of an ageing scientist and his wife, Marcus and Estelle Monserrat, who have invented a machine that enables the user(s) to submit to the exact physical and psychological sensations experienced by another. In this instance, the ‘other’ who lets his mind become blitzed by this unholy amalgam of Pandora’s Box and Monkey’s Paw, is bad boy Mike Roscoe, played with grand insouciance by Ian Ogilvy. Mike is ultimately (easily?) coerced by Boris Karloff, cast with iconic poise as the sublimely tragic Marcus, into mercenarily assisting in their experiment. The Monserrats are people who feel they have precious little time left in which to indulge in all manner of sensations, both savoury and decidedly not; sensations which, during their staid, humdrum lives, have passed them both by alongside fleeting years, vitality and perverse libido.

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 mild banter, 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 to feed their new found lustful urges.

Considering how those 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’ awesomely shameless metaphor. Palpable, isn’t it?

Reeves is a little less ambiguous than Powell was about the role our complicity plays in cinema’s voyeuristic nature. Or perhaps he wanted less to analyse our urge to “see” and more to revel in the effect this “seeing” has on us once we’ve succumbed to it. Certainly, there’s less of a helpless impulse in the Monserrat’s (and Mike’s) primal indulgences than in Mark Lewis‘s impotent and paternally scarred psyche. “The Sorcerers” is a far more cynical and jolting a comment on the ennui of contemporary society than “Peeping Tom”’s brilliantly artful meditation. It’s a thrill ride, very aware of the thrills that horror films propagate on the screen for our express amusement and ghoulish gratification.

It’s a roughly hewn and riotously wicked piece of independent exploitation. Full of spiky camera work and brief but affecting directorial ticks, it’s a bracing “little” picture full of ideas more inspired and inquisitive about the malignance of human nature than many “big” pictures of the era. If Tony Tenser, rather than Ivan Reitman, had brought Cronenberg to feature filmmaking, you can imagine him turning in an assignment a little like “The Sorcerers”.

Mercifully shorn of much of the camp, nudge-nudge humour and ‘zowee daddio!’ inflections blighting ‘youth’-skewed 60s productions like Michael Armstrong’s “Haunted House Of Horror”, “The Sorcerers” is far closer in tone to the wonderfully degenerate scrapings from the bottom of David McGillivray’s imagination mind-barrel displayed so gaudily in pictures like “Frightmare” or “House Of Whipcord”. In fact, Catherine Lacey’s Estelle 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 overshadowed 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, as the archetypal kind of sullen, introverted patsy Stephen King would use so well in stories like “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 split equally across both parties’ eventual eulogy.

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

Shock That Rocks: the first, gleeful glint in the eye of Mrs Monserrat, as Mike Roscoe commits his first unspeakable act of violence.

Would Go Well With…: “Brainstorm”

October 25th “Torso” (giallo): Sergio Martino, as many Italian exploitation aficionados might tell you, is kind of like the Tony Scott of giallo cinema: consistently inventive, industrious and ultimately passed over in favour of the more high profile, “legitimate” thrills of Bava or Argento [read: mainstream critics aren’t as open to, and therefore negate, his tangible pleasures]. But he’s arguably done as much for the language of exquisite terror in which the giallo revels as Scott Jnr. has for the visceral energy of the modern action film.

‘The Case Of The Scorpion’s Tail’ and ‘The Strange Vice Of Mrs Wardh’ are the best of his more typical murder mysteries but ‘Torso’ is his crowning achievement. A brutally efficient plot sees student Mimsy Farmer’s university peer group being bumped off by a sadistic, libidinous killer. So far, so generic slasher template (a year before “Black Christmas” but still….also sometime after “The Spiral Staircase”: see below.) What sets “Torso” apart from most giallo is its willingness to delve right to the heart of a device noted and dissected vigorously by cinematic psychoanalysts in discussions of horror in general: carnal cruelty. The original Italian title translates, in fact, as the wonderfully squalid “The Corpse Displays Traces Of Carnal Violence”. Martino’s simple, rigorous agenda with this picture is to objectify his human victims’ bodies the way a killer -- and indeed his killer -- does. It’s a clever conceit, ably deconstructing the basic tenets of the giallo while remaining a deft and rewarding tale of suspense and surprise itself.

Following our heroine and her friends to a remote idyllic hideaway in the Italian countryside to escape the homicide (already subverting the giallo formula by rejecting the urban environment so typical of the genre and its mindset -- middle class, often bourgeois perversion) we culminate in a scene set for a masterclass in suspense filmmaking. My friend, filmmaker Ben Robinson, has spoken of this having the best 3rd act of any giallo. He’s not far wrong. Mimsy Farmer, through various plot machinations, is awoken after a debilitating accident and subjected to an excruciatingly tense 20-minute ordeal of fear that is quite simply breathtaking. There’s little doubt Alexandre Aja and many of the new French school of extreme horror have used the exemplary skills Martino displays in this picture as a template for their own wrenchingly suspenseful endeavours. Martino manages to deliver a stunning, yet extremely atypical giallo sequence in this 3rd act: it doesn’t seek to churn out yet more red herrings or devious plot twists, merely to put its helpless final girl through the wringer as the faceless maniac methodically dissects her girlfriends while edging ever nearer to discovering the vulnerable Farmer’s hiding place.

Like many of the great gialli, “Torso” belies reverence to one specific illustrious forebear over and over: this is a film filled with some of the most the most overtly Hitchcockian sequences -- alongside Argento’s opening of ‘Bird With The Crystal Plumage’ -- in a genre known more for its stylistically baroque flourishes. It’s one of many reasons to pick up this exemplary Italian thriller

Shock That Rocks: the terrific swamp chase, filled with an unusually pungent sense of sleaze and fear. It’s a sequence shrouded in as much unease and atmosphere as Fabrice Du Welz’s “Calvaire”

Would Go Well With…: “Body Parts”

October 26th “Nightbreed” (fantasy): Clive Baker is like a modern day Grimm Brother. Only his cautionary tales aren’t of wicked witches, big bad wolves and duplicitous woodcutters…or perhaps they are. They certainly *are* cautionary tales, only in his fictions, the witches are diabolical wives looking for a good fuck, the wolves are folkloric bogeymen haunting decrepit housing projects and his duplicitous woodcutter is every tentative, pliable anti-hero, drawn by a more cunning and diabolical forces into a web of intrigue, venality, kink, and more often than not murder. Barker’s heroes are rarely innocents -- if they were truly snow white, the darkside wouldn’t exhibit the allure it does to them. In his protagonists the spark is always there, the benign gene, the prospective impulse, the insidious potential to be something more than placid human.

In “Nightbreed”, we join that story already in progress. The wretched Aaron Boone’s fragile psyche is being edged toward full psychosis by the iniquitous Dr Decker, played by David Cronenberg at his most acutely, terrifyingly methodical -- like he’s been studying from the Mantle Twins Guide To General Practise. Laying the blame for his own series of brutal murders at Boone’s rather unsteady feet, we discover that Dekker is less interested in playing the ‘domestic psycho’ storyline out than he is in plying Boone for information. A decent blue collar citizen in every way save his dream-plagued mind, Boone has, under this intensive therapy, been rambling about a mystical world called Midian, populated by the ravenous and exotic ‘nightbreed’. For a very human monster like Dekker, it seems like a haven and he’ll do anything to discover its fabled location.

What’s fascinating, what is ‘so Clive Barker’, is that the story isn’t the expected hero saving the day for all mankind. It’s about a man saving himself from mankind.

After narrowly evading capture by the police for Dekker’s brutal crimes, Boone discovers this place of his dreams when he is mortally wounded -- the sacrifice as a means of ‘travelling beyond’ plays on those iconographic totems of basic belief systems, but perverting them at every step. It is this and not the feral instinct to rip flesh apart that lets the troubled but ultimately stoic Boone enter the world of Midian. It is something the cowardly psychopath Dekker will never understand, to his eternal frustration and damnation to a more mundane hell.

Although it’s revealed very early on that he did not commit the murders, Boone’s mind is pliable because the animal inside him has always been there. Dekker isn’t the one to unleash it, but he provides the scenario for that transformation to take place. It was part of the prophecy of this new order: again, leave it Barker to invert religious mythology in such an inventive, perverse manner.

These creatures are, like many beasts, essentially noble exhibiting, with few exceptions, none of the corruptions, vices and weaknesses mere humans display. For those unsatisfied with the mortal plane, it’s a terrifying leap of faith but one that will guarantee a relative eternity of incorporeal pleasures. And all without anyone hammering pins into your head.

If it sounds pretty heady stuff for a fantasy creature mash-up, production company Morgan Creek would agree with you. Quite what they thought they would get, however, from the indefatigable imagination that conjured the equally dark and perverse “Hellraiser” when they asked Barker to adapt his own very visible novel “Cabal” is anyone’s guess. Before the picture was delivered, it was a problem child. Cut down, neutered and diluted to a supposedly more palatable, mainstream-oriented monster movie, it was still too weird for general audiences and unsatisfying for some of those rabid fans of Barker’s dark prose who were geared for a morally grey excursion into a bitter interspecies battle for souls.

It remains frustratingly incomplete, mostly of character moments: of the existential crisis Boone’s commitment to this new existence; of his relationship with the creatures and their cruel laws; of his girlfriend Lori’s genuine devotion to understanding what has been inside of his all these time, something her pure heart and virtuous sexuality can never fully grasp. As with so much Barker, a lot of it is about the sexuality and what’s so potent in the book makes for a blandly passive damsel onscreen. Rumours persist of a fabled directors cut; hope persists too for an eventual DVD release of it.

Yet for all it flaws “Nightbreed” is an as wildly inventive and tangibly imagined world as any that modern fantasy film has created. Barker’s ability to prise apart the mundanity of quotidian existence with flashes of delirious, dark worlds waiting for us, beckoning us, urging us to take that first unwavering step out of the light is what makes his storytelling so magical. .

Will James Cameron’s “Avatar” would be as daring and savage in detailing its hero’s immersion into a feral new existence, threatened by the vile technology of mankind’s merciless desire to control all? I think not.

Shock That Rocks: Boone’s first encounter with a genuine ‘nightbreed’ in a city hospital as the seemingly insane creature claws off his own face as a sacrificial offering of ‘meat for the beast’.

Would Go Well With…: “Freaks”

October 27th “The Spiral Staircase” (the slasher prototype): many a column inch has been expended in the name of rectifying a great ‘slasher’ wrong: namely that “Halloween” kick-started the whole kit ‘n’ caboodle in 1978. Bob Clark has done rather well out of such discussion, and rightly so. His classic 1974 picture “Black Christmas” -- especially in the UK where its reputation is as luke-warm as that of Clark’s other perennial jollity, “A Christmas Story” -- has been fully embraced into the pantheon as a superb psycho-drama, more skulk than slash but all the more affecting for it. Realigned lineage or not, it was far from the first picture to see vulnerable types fall foul of crazed killers in such a salacious and manipulative fashion as the ‘slasher’ genre would present for our voyeuristic pleasure.

 Most notably, Clark’s seasonal shocker arrived shortly after the influx of gialli from Europe. Most pertinent among these was one that Mario Bava had unleashed upon an unsuspecting exploitation audience three years earlier, the wickedly satirical “Twitch Of The Death Nerve”. With it, Bava had, in the eyes of some genre aficionados, truly set the slasher craze in motion. Intended to be as much a subversive and horrific answer to bourgeois Italian comedies as it was a gory giallo thriller, what with its underlying class struggles mirroring that of the multiple killers’ to bump off whomever they could, it’s a picture that’s as famous for possessing a few delicious slices of highly influential horror cliche. An ace card in film quiz trivia, it’s well documented that the picture is quite vital in the evolution of the “Friday 13th” series and a sure influence in Steve Miner’s Jason Vorhees-introducing first and second sequels, right down to the bloody modes of dispatch used for horny teens.

 Bava, of course, exhibited an even more prototypical whodunit formula with his seminal black gloved “Blood & Black Lace” in 1964, an even earlier benchmark for the start of the slasher. However, the same brand of visual fetishism, and particularly that one stark motif, found its way back further still -- most likely via Edgar Wallace’s krimi novels -- into the mainstream(ish) cinema with Robert Siodmak’s terrifying and elegant 1946 masterpiece, “The Spiral Staircase”.

 In a New England town in the early 1900s, a young woman so traumatised in her youth that she is now unable to speak, lives with and cares for a grand old rich maid in a cavernous mansion. Also living there is a small assemblage of close and not so close family, associates and employees. One dark and stormy night, after the brutal murders of a series crippled and infirmed damsels have rocked the small community, the isolated house is invaded by the assailant. A mute girl, dark house, crazed killer: it’s a paradigm of delightful proportions.

 Siodmak, best known for the sharp crime/noirs “The Killers” (also 1946) and “Criss Cross” (1949) delivers a picture that’s as atmospheric as it is astutely honed. A deeply Hitchcockian dilemma still in use today -- the character of the taciturn heroine was also plundered by Anthony Waller for his terrific debut “Mute Witness” in 1994 -- it bares the embryonic hallmarks of the best psycho-sexual shockers with which the 1980s would later bloody cinema screens in droves. The mystery is less labyrinthine than, say, a standard Poirot potboiler -- there are, after all, barely ten main characters, two of whom are asleep for half the picture’s running time (bare with it, it’s integral to the plot). There are only a couple of murders shown on screen. Yet it’s the way in which they are presented which intrigues. It has an eerie and thoroughly unnerving reveal when the time to unmask the killer finally arrives. More interestingly, though, the picture introduces us to that kinky, black-gloved villain driven by his own furiously perverse devises and desires to wring a pretty neck. In this case, necks of the imperfect yet nubile.

 From a stark, shocking opening to graceful chills in the Gainsborough mould, Siodmak certainly keeps things wry and spry. The inaugural killing is an archetype for the genre and takes place in a hotel room directly above a makeshift silent cinema showing a wittily sexualised picture entitled “The Kiss”. Upstairs, a crippled beauty is seen grabbing a gown from her closet, revealing the piercing eye of the assailant staring out from behind the swathe of hung and rumpled clothes. In a moment presaging “Tenebre” decades later, she struggles to get the gown over her head as the killer strikes. It’s as good a metaphor as any that while this despicable deed is being enacted for us above, it’s subverting the ‘proper cinema’ going on below -- “The Kiss” is the only kind of coy picture conservative turn-of-the-century temperance types might deign to gather and engage with in such well-heeled establishments.

 So we witness this imperfect woman mutilated by a fellow outcast in the room just upstairs. So far, so unoriginal. But this was 1946. The leap from there to “Black Christmas” and “Halloween” is thirty years. Yet so little has changed thematrically. There’s a scene in “Friday 13th: The Final Chapter” which also recalls this terrific opening (which may be giving Zito and his writers more credit than they deserve): amorous prankster Teddy is left alone, trounced in his quest to get laid by ‘dead fuck’ Crispin Glover, and is splattered by Jason against his own silent movie screen, while watching antique porn far more salacious than a mere kiss. The point of this observation isn’t the presence of any probably smart homage (though it would be awesome if it were). It’s that these ideas, these concepts and these stock situations have been in the lexicon of the genre for an age -- longer than modern genre lore might have led us to think. It’s enormous fun to encounter the same tropes and tricks being used as effectively in pictures over four decades apart.

 There’s a more dispiriting flipside of course: “The Spiral Staircase” remains rewarding and packed with sheer intrigue and delightful menace it also remains rather unsung with horror audiences. At the same time, eleven entertaining but flighty Vorhees follow-ups remain evergreen fan favourites. It’s both a relative shame and a distinct puzzle.

 Not for want of pedigree though, clearly. “The Spiral Staircase” is beautifully shot in austere black and white (and the odd frenetic burst of gothic tempest) by Nicholas Musuraca and exquisitely scored by Roy Webb. This pair were of course part of the team responsible for a slew of RKO productions under Val Lewton including “The Seventh Victim”, “Ghost Ship” and “Cat People”, pictures which are far more legendary in status, due more to an exemplary array of set pieces than for the brand of sub-textual character study they share with “The Spiral Staircase”

 The first giallo, then? Perhaps not. There were, after all, Hitchcock’s “The Lodger” and myriad krimi adaptations, creaky murder mysteries from Edgar Wallace in the half-decade preceding Siodmak’s grand triumph. The first great slasher picture in American cinema? You could very well say it. There are few as dripping with shadowy peril and impeccable dread. Track it down

Shock That Rocks: the opening ‘Tenebre’-inspiring murder: silent, swift and brutal

Would Go Well With…: “The Girl Who Knew Too Much”

October 28th “In The Mouth Of Madness” (Lovecraft) One thing as vital and dear to most all fans’ hearts as creature features or a classic gialli is the grand old horror novel. From Poe to King via Stoker and Lovecraft in the last century and half alone, there’s plainly a broader spectrum of terrors stretching back into the annals of horror literature than could line even the most voluminous of DVD shelves. What better marriage of form and content in cinema, then, than a picture which cannily exploits the creation of fictional ids and the grotesque monsters (and men/women/whatever) that inhabit them?

John Carpenter’s “In the Mouth Of Madness” sits squarely in Lovecraft country. The unnameable demons conjured by AWOL author Sutter Cane from his tenebrous enclave in the small town of Hobb’s End are to bring about the end of all things and big city insurance-investigator-cum-eternal-pragmatist Sam Neill is there to bear witness. It’s both classic Carpenter and neat post-modern spookshow with its distorted realities, canny small town satire and Möbius-strip narrative. Julie Carmen is the alluring and possibly duplicitous publisher who seems to know more about Cane than she’s letting on. And as the afflicted author himself, the wonderfully pit-faced Jurgen Prochnow (who never fails to suggest a more sophisticated Robert Davi -- what a Bond villain he would have made) makes for an enigmatic reprobate.

“In The Mouth Of Madness” is concerned with chilling and arcane literature. The books it details are the kinds which are unable to contain the horrors of their supposed fiction, horrors which eventually spill from the page and into the real world. Creating all manner of chaos, not to mention a terrifically sticky mess, across an urban sprawl already rife with man-made crime and violence, all this supernatural commotion seems quite at home on the mean streets. It’s a great narrative conceit and this is a terrifically exuberant picture at the expense of it.

Carpenter was, by this point, operating on auto-pilot, his more zealous days overridden by his weary acceptance of the way things were within a new, ever more demographically calibrated industry and genre. Here though, he was working from an uncharacteristically sharp, if on-the-nose, screenplay by New Line’s future ex-President Of Production Michael De Luca. (De Luca was infamous for subjecting the world to the indignities of Frederick Krueger’s 6th and 3D escapade -- perhaps the only thing more disheartening for the once great icon of terror than his resurrection by flaming dog slash in Renny Harlin’s otherwise frisky “Dream Master”.) The early 1990s, on the heels of one of the most creatively rewarding decades for which any filmmaker could ask, had yielded only the moderately entertaining “Body Bags” and ill-fated “Memoirs Of An Invisible Man” for this ‘scope-loving Howard Hawks disciple. “In The Mouth Of Madness” may not have signalled a return to an aesthetic zenith but its blend of subtle shocks, dark wit and sporadic creature mayhem proves a thrilling throwback to the glory days of the early 1980s (not to mention the comic book glories of EC and schizoid imagination of Lovecraft himself).

Shock That Rocks: when you fid out what’s under the old lady’s desk in a charming Hobb’s End hotel

Would Go Well With…: “The Shining”

October 29th “American Movie” (documentary): “Anvil” for the horror nerd generation, Chris Smith’s (the other one) portrait of Mark Borchardt, struggling father, errant son, devoted best buddy, bumbling genre advocate and sporadic, delusional yet endlessly passionate filmmaker is a wake up call for every burgeoning Romero or Carpenter reading this blog.

It details with startling candour, some affection and, on occasion, brutal objectivity the often excruciating efforts of Wisconsin cinephile Borchardt to create his masterpiece: a grossly pretentious sounding piece of black and white urban poetry called “Northwestern” that seems part-Jarmusch, part-Cassavetes, part-Bela Tarr and all strung-out film student mired in neo-realist naval gazing. Borchardt quickly realises that, without proper financial resources this project is going nowhere at a drunk’s steady, hazy pace. Of course he also happens to be in a perpetual state of not only emotional adolescence, but living at home with his parents and, approaching mid-30s, stoically broke. The solution is simple: use his minimal assets to recapitulate production on a short horror film, sell approximately 3000 VHS copies by mail order and use that capital to finally get “Northwestern” into production. The horror film in question is a gnarly cult shocker (with a Cassavettes edge!) called “Coven” (pronounced ‘c-oh-ven’, a discussion on the absurdity of which is just one of the many bizarre highlights of this wonderful documentary).

The journey toward Borchardt realising/not-realising/part-realising his modest dream is more affectionate than you might imagine this Todd Solondz-lite scenario to be (Solondz would actually cast Borchadt’s neighbour, foil and best friend, the irrepressibly substance-shocked Mike Schank, in the second half of “Storytelling” as Paul Giamatti’s useless cameraman). A Romero-referencing, perennially optimistic disaster of a human-being, Mark Borchardt is a subject every bit as endearing and engaging as George Hardy was in this year’s Discovery Screen hit “Best Worst Movie”. He’s like a character from “Fargo” who wandered into an episode of “The Wonder Years” written by Joe Dante.

Smith the filmmaker, true to his documentary ethics, cannot help Borchardt out in any way with filming or financing “Coven”. You sense, however, that along with the audience he really is willing Borchardt to pull off every insane, inspired, incomprehensible and plain misguided idea he has along the tumultuous journey to the creation of this earnest, gothic, blue-collar horror short.

Because, ultimately, Borchardt is not a terrible filmmaker. He’s a devoted nerd who knows his stuff. He’s learned, paid attention, studied and dreamed of filmmaking for most of his life: from bizarre teenage slasher shorts “The More The Scarier” and its copious sequels to this new avant garde European-styled occult thriller, Borchardt has vision and passion and, demonstrably, some skill.

He’s just a rather hopeless kid in an adult’s body.

He’s everything us burgeoning filmmakers fear we might be, yet he’s also filled with something most of us can never completely allow ourselves: utter belief and conviction that he will make it. It emerges as the antithesis of “Overnight”: a man with an idea you genuinely want to see come to fruition if only because he embodies the hopes and dreams of anyone who ever thought up a wacky old story to be filmed on beautiful black and white reversal stock. I’ll leave you to find out whether he does and what becomes of the witches and Satanists of “Coven” for yourself.

Shock That Rocks: the cinematic trickery Mark uses to put his leading man’s head through a thick wooden panel: actually pounding his leading man’s head though a thick wooden panel.

Would Go Well With…: “Ed Wood”

October 30th “Intruder” (post-modern): one passage of my misspent youth -- wiling away pre-GCSE summers convincing video store staff I was indeed 18 years of age -- began when I was in fact 14. Having to invent both a fictitious day job and the travails that went with it simply so I could banter with the increasingly friendly till clerks with the required plausibility was tricky. But it seemed all worth it once I encountered the blood-drenched gems I was exposed to in those formative years due to my scurrilous exploitation of genuine goodwill. Mr Marcasi, I am truly sorry. But *thank* you.

One such gem was this lesser-known gimmicky slasher picture about a night crew of supermarket shift workers being terrorized by a maniacal madman. It was the directorial debut of Scott Spiegel, until that point known only for co-writing “Evil Dead II”. A few years before his friendship with Quentin Tarantino and the Splat Pack gave Spiegel ample environment with which to flex his creative muscles helping to revitalize the genre as partner in production company Raw Nerve, this low-rent, Coen Brothers-esque blood bath was a self-reflexive gag reel that appealed to just a few die hard horror geeks. Or so it seemed.

This was a long time before Kevin Williamson was (wrongly) heralded as bringing a tirade of smirking awareness to a supposedly tired genre. And a long time before the internet joined rabid fans of cinematic dementia together in some sort of maniacal support group. “Intruder”’s seemingly characteristic parade of gore gags permeating a generic stalk ‘n’ slash narrative was perceived as simply generic by an indifferent audience. What they seemed to overlook was the sharp, slacker tone of the whole enterprise, the gleeful revelry in the visual language of the horror film and cinema itself. It’s no masterpiece, but it was made by people who patently dug the same pictures, and in much the same way, as you did. That much was a blessed certainty.

Before Tarantino made it cool to be self-aware (and a long time after people had forgotten a host of directors from decades past who were just as knowing and ironic), Spiegel and his band of collaborators, including producer Lawrence Bender, the KNB f/x crew and fellow director Sam Raimi hamming it up alongside his brother Ted in a featured supporting role, were having a merry old time creating just the breed of inventive gore picture that the up-and-coming horror heroes of today -- Adam Green and Joe Lynch to name just two of our dear friends -- have been springing upon appreciative audiences in the last 3 years.

Now available uncut in the UK -- in truth it was never a graphic gala of torture and mayhem though it did include a commendable cavalcade of cleaved flesh at the mercy of the wide variety of butcher’s implements one might expect to find in a supermarket -- it’s well worth hunting down. For slasher completists, it’s a must have. For the merely curious, it’s still the kind of terrific time you thought you might never again enjoy with such abandon with a relic of the 1980s.

Shock That Rocks: bandsaw meets head

Would Go Well With…: “Midnight Movie Massacre”

October 31st “Masque Of The Red Death” (AIP): in this day and age of instantaneously accessible programming, micro-budgeted DV features and the grindhouse culture permeating the mainstream, it’s easy to become complacent about just what immense beauty and gothic turmoil Roger Corman was capable of amid the gleeful Dick Miller cheapies, million eyed beasts and camp Hell’s Angel theatrics. No doubt buoyed by the decade-long success of Hammer’s Technicolor nightmares, this 1964 production of Edgar Allen Poe’s apocalyptic fever dream set inside a baroque castle besieged by a virulent plague raging outside is a lavish production against any measure of success, budget big or budget small. Not a masterpiece of shock cinema, perhaps, but the very definition of malevolent. It’s a benchmark in independent genre filmmaking from which many of today’s enfants terribles could gain some very simple lessons in class and atmosphere.

Corman’s trademark frugality may have been at full-tilt to garner such lavish production values, but you’d never know it. From the swirling, crimson title sequence onward, the picture is effortlessly elegant, laced most importantly with the intoxicating luminescence of cinematographer Nicholas Roeg, six years before he became such a vital director himself. Vincent Price acquits himself with typical, well, Vincent Price-ness, delivering an as flawlessly eccentric performance as only that voice and stature can produce. This is quietly indispensable and a devilishly appropriate picture to sling on for guests trapped inside a ghoulish gathering this Halloween night.

Shock That Rocks: Death dealing out tarot cards, cackling unsettlingly at the tragic inevitability of it all

Would Go Well With…:”Flesh & Blood”
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