GORE IN THE STORE - NEW DVD RELEASES FOR 13th NOVEMBER 2007.

The Night Of The Mother Of Tears

Quick newsflash for those not aware from flyers in The Cinema Store – Daemonia, the phoenix-like reanimation of Claudio Simonetti to progtastic live musicianship from the ashes of the mighty Goblin, is playing an exclusive gig at Slimelight in Islington, London on Saturday 1st December. Not really to coincide with anything all that much, it’s still a surprising opportunity to see Dario Argento’s new “Mother Of Tears” in somewhat unique surroundings before anyone else. Kicking off at 7pm, the band -- supported by what I guess is a motley brace of black clad doomsmiths (3rd Room and The Courtesans) -- will be playing selections from Goblin’s back catalogue and tracks from the soundtrack to “Mother Of Tears” with the film being projected during the gig and, more completely, in another room in the Slimelight to chill out and drink absinthe/snakebite/whatever Goths drink nowadays. At least that’s the plan.

Details can be found at www.ticketweb.co.uk or myspace.com/vamp_dionisus

“Brain Damage”: Frank Henenlotter spends much of his current working life toiling away for the delectation of exploitation aficionados everywhere on the prolifically varied output of Something Weird Video. It’s those very same fans, however, that no doubt remember him as New York’s less intellectual, skid row answer to David Cronenberg and a king of 80s body horror.

Henenlotter’s short but pungent filmography sees an abundance of gored, defiled and inventively splattered flesh in titles like the “Basket Case” series and the exquisite “Frankenhoker”. But it is 1988’s “Brain Damage” that remains his most ambitious project, and the one most concerned with those elements of physiological and psychological dependence and fear that Cronenberg mined so effectively in his early films

“Brain Damage” is the touching tale of a boy and his turd-shaped Svengali -- a mysterious alien called Elmer -- who attaches itself to his human host, injecting a euphoria inducing serum in exchange for a nutritious diet of perversely purloined flesh and blood. Blending elements of Robert Silverberg’s sci-fi story “Passengers”, the era’s proliferation for body horror and a deeply twisted and obviously anarchic sense of humour -- there’s honestly not much sport in anticipating the time elapsed until an Elmer-in-the-trousers blow-job scene rears its, ahem, head -- it’s as pure an exhibition of Grindhouse cinema as the 80s achieved before the decline into studio-produced franchise-friendly creepshows. Elmer even gets his own musical number, in a moment that suggests John Waters meeting HG Lewis in a particularly sordid alleyway.

“Society” In an era before the blunt, schedule-friendly satire of “Desperate Housewives”, small town mores and social etiquette were being skewered by some delightfully perverse below-the-studio-radar low budget filmmakers like Daniel Waters/Michael Lehman with “Heathers” released the same year as Brian Yuzna’s “Society”. It might have been no more serious that “Brain Damage”, merely a slightly more sophisticated throwback to Peyton Place, and other soap-land facades, but it’s also an ultra-surreal flesh fantasia. True, “Heathers” does not really share any of the fantastical blood-letting of “Society” but it does share its scalpel-sharp probing of the worryingly psychotic elements behind youthful ennui and alienation of even the most privileged or at least comfortable of America’s youth.

Yuzna’s gleefully sinful satire follows Baywatch mini-hunk Billy Warlock’s decent into madness after he realises that the high-class breeding of his affluent Beverly Hills milieu isn’t quite as human as he once thought. Soon enough, the budding high school basketball star finds that his nagging sense of “not fitting in” is due less to his being left out of social functions and more being left out of some stunningly degenerate orgies of necrophiliac, auto-erotic, somtimes incestuous and always hilariously grotesque quasi-sadism amongst the entire gated community.

Indeed “It’s all about fitting in” was the film’s droll UK tagline -- it’s debatable as to whether or not this relates to Warlock’s status in the community or to his hand and its proximity to a villainous jock’s rectum: when you’ve seen a young man turned inside out through his arsehole via the genius of Screaming Mad George’s f/x work, there are precious few sights worth left seeing horror.

“Bride Of Reanimator”: the writers of “Society” were also behind Yuzna’s own sequel to his debut production of Stuart Gordon’s “Reanimator” and it shows in the pictures more exotically imagined cadre of Dr Hill-sanctioned, batshit insane beasts and body parts. Coming off more like a far bloodier Harryhausen or Corman picture (a markedly wicked departure from Gordon’s own more dour, grim and taut post-“Reanimator” works) it’s a patchier but more energetic piece, buoyed perhaps by Yuzna’s growing confidence as a director after the success of “Society” and its envelope-pushing levels of grotesque invention.

It’s business as usual on all creative fronts with Combs, Abbot and the late great David Gale -- or at least his head -- in particular providing a picnic basket’s worth of prime ham sandwich. The delectable Barbara Crampton is nowhere to be seen in this sequel, her heart being transplanted into the serum-infused torso of Kathleen Kinmont. While no Elsa Lanchester, she strikes a wild-eyed and striking figure, all stray body parts and ghoulish dementia. It all makes about as much sense as West’s inexplicably miraculous escape from the rogue innards at “Reanimator”’s gonzo climax. But with a wealth of sick, slick effects work, the picture -- alongside Yuzna’s rather fabulous “Return Of The Living Dead 3” -- is a staunch reminder that the sequel was once a playground for experimental fun and games, rather than by rote regurgitation.

“Les Diaboliques”: A year or so ago, I wrote about my wish for cinema to have been blessed with a Jean-Pierre Meville horror film. With his unique approach to taut codes of human behaviour and the tacit emotion he was able to elicit for his audience, he was, with a masterful run of artful suspense thrillers, as successful as the most manipulative modern blockbuster director without resorting to an ounce of bluff or bluster. So what if he applied these skills to a horror picture? After all, Meville’s empathisable -- if existential -- nature and textbook precision can’t help but recall his fellow master of suspense: Henrie-Georges Clouzot.

Clouzot gained a hardy reputation through lean, mean crime thrillers and adventures like ‘Le Corbeau’, ‘Quai Des Orfevre’ and ‘Wages Of Fear’ in the early 1950s before delivering one of the key pre-‘Psycho’ horror pictures: 1955’s ‘Les Diaboliques’. Responsible for one of the genre’s great twists-cum-cliché, a device endlessly yet rarely as effectively worked over to this day, it’s a spare, chilly study in character and guile. Its story of two lovers fighting over the same -- despicable -- man, it couldn’t be more French. Yet taking his cue from the post-war US cinema so beloved of European cineastes (so much so they named the unequivocally American strand of filmmaking as its own genre: ‘film noir’) and his story from the writers of “Vertigo”’s source novel, Clouzot produced a slick, measured and surgically precise piece of technical filmmaking with a style that is a virtual template for many a latter 20th Century English language thriller. Luring the audience along with our two leads, Simone Signoret and Vera Clouzot we’re witness to an almost grotesquely fairytale world of grim discovery, duplicity and palpable dread inside a seemingly very ordinary closeted boarding school. Its final reveal is as legendary and iconic as Max Schreck rising from his filth encrusted casket. A subtle and cunning bona fide masterwork of horror.

“Halloween Night”: brazen bandwagon bandits The Asylum strike again with this….astonishingly brazen piece of bandwagon banditry. Teenagers, All Hallow’s Eve, masked killer, blah blah blah blah blah…. Not quite as outrageous as their newest productions -- the Mark Dacascos-starring “I Am Omega”, the rather inert exploitation “Invasion Of The Pod People” or the P.T. Barnum-level cheek of “Transmorphers” (yes, you read that right) -- you have to admire the utter Teflon-plated balls attached to the company for them to attempt such audacious slices of humbug. This has a better cover than Rob Zombie’s picture as well.

One wonders whether or not The Asylum worry all much about box office receipts, projections or ultimate failures, surely something that much come into board-meeting conversations when deciding which tent pole studio franchise to take advantage of in the coming year. Still, with over 40000 units of their cash-in “Snakes On A Train” sold in the UK to date, either the public’s appetite for glorious schlock is at an all time high, or their immense gullibility and inability to read is. Whichever it is, the very canny The Asylum seem to be banking -- in both senses of the word -- on it to an exceptional degree.

It’s nothing Corman, Arkoff, Subotsky and their ilk weren’t doing for most of the 20th century.

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