GORE IN THE STORE - NEW DVD RELEASES FOR 17th SEPTEMBER 2007.

“Roger Corman Collection”: in this day and age of instantaneously accessible programming, micro-budgeted DV features and a grindhouse culture somewhat permeating the mainstream, it’s easy to become complacent about just what immense beauty and gothic tumult Roger Corman was capable of amid his gleeful Dick Miller cheapies, million-eyed beasts and camp Hell’s Angel theatrics. Buoyed by the decade-long success of Hammer’s Technicolour nightmares, and no doubt eager to return to the grand gothic stylings with which studios like Universal had continued to reap modest creative success for the US genre scene in the decades since the heyday of Carl Laemmle’s classic monsters, Corman offered fans a riveting parade of ghoulish delights.

Edgar Allen Poe’s apocalyptic fever dreams have remained a touchstone in the history of the moving image and none has been more potent than those that Corman produced in the 1960s for AIP. Somehow, effortlessly tapping into the sickeningly claustrophobic madness that laced Poe’s simple (im)morality tales, Corman creates, out of mere creative ingenuity, a series of vivid shockers, positively churning with all that makes good horror great. Many picture have been set inside dank, cavernous abodes but few have evoked so deliciously the hopelessness that being trapped in such a location with such an assortment of madmen and evildoers. Lavish productions against any measure of success, budget big or budget small, they’re not a masterpiece of shock cinema perhaps, but as benchmark in independent genre filmmaking, they’re something vital from which many of today’s enfants terribles could gain some very simple lessons in class and atmosphere.

‘Masque Of The Red Death’ sees the inhabitants of a baroque castle mercifully cut off from a virulent plague raging outside, but trapped with a more lethal madness within. 

From the swirling, crimson title sequence onward, the picture is effortlessly stylish, embellished with the intoxicating luminescence of cinematographer Nicholas Roeg’s images, six years before he became such a vital director himself. Vincent Price, as the insidious Prince Prospero, acquits himself with typical, well, Vincent Price-ness, delivering an as flawlessly eccentric performance as only that voice and stature can muster.

“The Pit & The Pendulum”, not quite as barking mad as the Stuart Gordon/Lance Henrickson re-imagining of 1990 is still and agreeably mean-spirited, and eerily surreal affair. John Kerr retreats to Spain to uncover the tragic circumstances behind the death of this beloved sister Elizabeth. That she was married to a particularly wild-eyed Vincent Price indicates the prognosis is….not good. Indeed, it’s revealed that the doomed Elizabeth has been treated to all manner of nefarious mental and physical anguish and worse at the hands of Spanish Inquisitor. Scripted by “I Am Legend”’s Richard Matheson, it’s an sinister, inexorably grim and tragic trip to a particularly fetid sepulchre. Genre siren Barbara Steele -- in a welcome, if rare, 60s turn in an English language production -- is a wonderful sparring partner for Price. Even their glorious, silent movies star faces, so perfectly and beautifully ghastly together, tell a tremendously, ill-fated story of diabolical love and death. Less gaudy than the later “Masque…” this is, perhaps unsurprisingly given Matheson’s input, a more literary, though no less crepuscular, delight.

“The Fall Of The House Of Usher” remains, for me, somewhat shamefully, an unknown quantity. It delights me no end that, given the masterful qualities exhibited by these other two companion creations, I still have the lusty immoral virtues of a final full-bloodied Poe masterpiece to savour in the not too distant future. I can’t wait.

Corman’s trademark frugality may have been at full-tilt to garner such lavish production values for this trio or terror, but you’d never know it. These are quietly indispensable in the most elegant tradition.

“Creepozoids” if you’re not familiar with director David DeCouteau let’s spell it out thusly: if Jim Wynorski is the poor man’s Roger Corman and Fred Olen Ray is the poor man’s Jim Wynorski, David DeCoteau is the poor man’s Fred Olen Ray. With me? Actually, strictly speaking he’s the gay man’s Fred Olen Ray. That’s not an underhand piece of snark either: DeCoteau really is the prolific go-to guy for DTV gay horror. His “The Brotherhood” series has shifted units aplenty for fans of lithe young things getting all hot and bothered and vampirised/warlockised and now he’s prepping a series of gay-themed Poe adaptations for cable TV. He’s nothing if not industrious and its rather endearing to think that while filmmakers like Clive Barker and Bill Condon are commendably pushing gay-associated horror into the kind-of-mainstream arena, the scene has it’s own DTV exploitation realm as well. It’s a strange (or is it, really?) leap indeed for a man most notorious for tit-tasic sci-fi/sex comedy “Dr Alien” and a brace of Linnea Quigley sexploitation horror pictures in the breathlessly lurid late 80s.

(DeCoteau also made the rather wonderful “Puppet Master III: Toulon’s Revenge” -- maybe the Olen Ray tag is harsh on reflection. But it’s doubtful he’ll ever truly equal the wonderfully inept psychomania of “Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers” let alone the rich atmospherics of Corman’s “Frankenstein Unbound” and the winning cranial abuse of Wynorski’s “Chopping Mall”)

But I digress, at some length, as usual. Simply put, “Creepazoids” is one of DeCoteau’s earlier, sprightlier yet still rather pedestrian pictures. Coming hot on the heels of the better and certainly more brilliantly titled “Sorority Babes In The Slime Ball Bowl-A-Rama” -- a picture which opens rather memorably with Michelle’s Bauer beating Brinke Stevens’ ass hell-for-leather with a paddle in a kinky sorority ritual -- it has the distinction of featuring one of Linnea Quigley’s most gratuitous shower scenes (and if you’ve ever seen a picture with Linnea Quigly, or indeed her self-penned “Madonna’s Sex”-homage “Skin”, featuring some truly eye-opening exploits involving Gunnar Hanson and Tony Todd and a lot of humps, humps and lovely lady bumps, that’s saying something.)

In the end, “Creepozoids” is mostly the usual “Xtro II”/”The Terror Within” schlock with abandoned, derelict warehouses just outside of L.A. standing in for future, post-apocalypse earth. It’s a diverting, quaint time-waster and Linnea Quigley is always a curiously watchable spunk (be warned, she’s far less overt and histrionic than in Kevin S. Tenney’s late-80s highlights “Night Of The Demons” or “Witchtrap”). Not “Rollerblade Seven” awful then, but it does fail in matching up to the eclectic barrage of violent, post-apocalyptic exploitation triumphs that Italian directors such as Enzo G. Castellari pulled off to riotous effect just a few years earlier.

“Deliverence”: an age old bugbear of genre fans worldwide is that musty reposte “it’s not really a horror film” uttered, usually, by frantically perspiring executives or marketeers absolutely desperate to not limit their picture’s demographic appeal in any way shape or form. Which is often an odd stance to take on pictures involving sadistic dwarves, gore-drenched psychic criminals or lugubrious demonic shenanigans invariably climaxing with a central character having expired quite obviously in minute one of the story. “Psychological thriller?” –“chinny reckon”, as the hiply nostalgic used to say.

One such genre that never seemed to court its genre origins yet seems content residing in the skeezy, blood-red bayous alongside bedfellows like “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” is the rural survival genre. Updated these days with an extra slathering of sleaze and sadism with the likes of “Wolf Creek” and “The Devil’s Rejects” -- via less known late-80s entities like “Hunter’s Blood” and, I guess, “Cut and Run” -- the genre really prides itself on two or three hugely accomplished and incomparable titles: Walter Hill’s action-packed “Southern Comfort” and this, John Boorman’s masterful adaptation of James Dickey’s bleak dissection of modern masculinity.

Duelling banjos, inbred hillbillies, ruptured extremities and violated orifices -- it’s easy to forget that in 1972, these appalling incidents were terrifying and brilliantly dramatic new outrages being foisted upon the movie going public and not the damnable cliché 35 years has sadly made them out to be. Regardless of the gag being run into the ground, the sight of poor Ned Beatty being assaulted by a couple of toothless simpletons is as chilling for serious cinephiles now as it must have been then. Equally, the sight of four robust, able-bodied men reduced to snivelling wrecks by nothing so much as a weekend away from the urbanised, automated safety net of “civilisation” where they surely reigned as high-flying kings of the coop, is devastating stuff indeed.

If horror is about thrusting the unsuspecting into an unknowable void and dealing with the awful consequences, then the fact “Deliverance” does it so powerfully and all within the bright, bucolic woodland of modern America, with not a true monster or wrong turn in sight, is enough to make it endure as one of the greats.

“Night Of The Demon”: Finally ! I think I wrote last week about Jacques Tourneur’s sensational chiller being the zenith of horror, as far as I’m concerned, and that the currency in which it trades is that of countless other TV shows and pictures during the 90 or more years since the short story on which it was based was written. Philosophically astute tales of dread and the macabre such as those written by “Runes” author M.R. James (upon who’s short story “Night Of The Demon” is based) have unwittingly inspired a groundswell of popular fictions from “The X Files” to the all pervasive modern J-Horror trend (though there’s a huge crossover between Asia’s own classic breed of folk tales which James and his ilk were imagining for western readers). Yes, I certainly wrote and meant every word of that supposition, even the part about Japanese horror. I’ve considered whether or not this is hyperbole since committing the words to screen and I think I’d like to re-evaluate my position: “Night Of The Demon” is even better than that.

Hoax busting Dr John Holden (a wonderfully stony-faced Dana Andrews), traveling to the UK to attend a paranormal psychology symposium, becomes embroiled in a perilous quest to disprove some unnerving rumours regarding cult-courting aristocrat Juston Kerswell (a unsettlingly pleasant looking Niall MacGinnis). It appears Kerswell is in possession of as an inscribed parchment capable of unleashing madness and perhaps far more tangible horrors upon anyone whom he deems impertinent enough to try and discredit him and his beliefs. For professional sceptic Holden this is, of course, too much of a tantalisingly dangled carrot to possibly ignore. Something deeply wicked that way lies…

I wrote last week about “Night…”’s tale being as much about man’s proclivity for unbelief and incredulity in the face of overt evil -- such as this story’s quietly maniacal shaman Julian Kerswell -- as his fragility in the face of the mere suspicion. It’s this last notion that drives the short story “…Runes” and this liberal adaptation. It’s a exquisitely intelligent and cynical exploration of a very human condition.

Auspicious monster appearance aside, the picture combines palm-dampening dread, fiendish plotting and a raft of superb character acting to produce a British picture every bit as chilling as “The Wicker Man”, “The Shining”, “Don’t Look Now” or any other touchstone of 20th century terror film. All delivered with the same gothic panache Tourneur effortlessly elicited for his Val Lewton pictures at RKO a decade earlier. One of the unsung heroes of genre film, a name often lost amid the often obstreperous clamour produced around names such as James Whale, Alfred Hitchcock, Mario Bava and George Romero, Tourneur was, by his own modest admission, like “a carpenter using tools to construct what he was hired to build”. And Michelangelo was simply handy with a paintbrush.

No horror fan should be without this in their library. It’s everything a great horror film-- scratch that, a “great film” -- should be. Endlessly rewarding, it should be a required rebuttal to those who mistakenly think that old black and white pictures can’t be as thrilling as those new ones made in colour.

”Puritan”: let me say up front that Hadi Hajaig’s picture does not blaze a trail of jaw-dropping cinematic reinvention. Let me also say it doesn’t really need to. The tale of Nick Moran’s failed writer/charlatan psychic, Simon Puritan, embroiled in an affair with the wife of a shady svengali, and the disturbing visits he receives from a scar-faced man who seems to know more about Puritan’s life than he does himself is pure pulp noir. However, the fact that the zealous auteur amassed a roll call of talent both behind and in front of the camera who consistently deliver over and above such modest expectation is praiseworthy in and of itself. These are the type of filmmakers of which Britain needs more.

It’s an innovative, invigorating ride, despite not, in all probability, aiming for any great weight or magnitude beyond some hugely enjoyable existential chills. With lustrous photography, an evocative symphonic score and a restrained, sensitive performance from the normally truculent Moran, the ever-resourceful Hajaig rarely let’s his highly atmospheric picture betray its humble origins as it freewheels jubilantly through a host cinematic allusions; from Hitchcock to John Alton to 'Citizen Kane'. Hopefully propelled onto bigger budgets now this labour of love is set free into the world, Hajaig has the sharp, confident eye and canny, narrative dexterity of any of the UK’s most recent directorial successes. We should expect good things from his future.