GORE IN THE STORE - NEW DVD RELEASES FOR 10th MAY 2007.

“Jack’s Back”: Rowdy Herrington, one time gaffer to the cult stars on projects like “Humanoids From The Deep” and “Repo Man”, is justly famous for his homoerotic paean to throat-gouging, pain-not-hurtin’, nude-tai-chi-ing coolers from the deep south, 1988’s “Road House”. But the year before that magnificent redux of “Shane”, Herrington was having another of his mulleted stars ripping throats from all and sundry in creative curio “Jack’s Back”. Starring James Spader in a dual role as brothers who may or may not be possessed with/murdered by the spirit of Jack the Ripper, it’s the kind of project you might expect to spring from the mind of Spader’s “Storyville” director Mark Frost rather than the directorial brains behind the Bruce Willis wilderness project, “Striking Distance”.

An odd amalgam of character study and chiselled thriller -- as so many of those late 80s yuppie-baiting shockers were from “Criminal Law” to “Bad Influence”, also starring Spader -- “Jack’s Back” had a handicap/edge (depending on where you stand on celluloid oddities) in that its central conceit wasn’t the mores of the rich and filthy, it was a potentially hokey gimmick designed to give Spader an endearingly stupefied stab at playing opposite ends of the emotional spectrum – ‘hunted’ and ‘hunter’. Jeremy Irons needn’t have lost much sleep, as the result is less Cronenberg’s “Dead Ringers” than Avi Nesher’s “Doppelganger”. As a brother investigating his twin’s demise at the hands of the ripper before finding himself a suspect in the claret-spouting cavalcade, Spader is his usual dour, impersonal self, and perhaps the perfect foil for a picture whose mystery’s success rests on the questionable integrity of its hero.

Herrington ultimately betrays his intentions for a 100th Anniversary tribute to the East End’s serial slayer by -- understandably, I guess -- relocating the action to the US (thereby aligning it with one of the oft-held conspiracies about Jack the Ripper’s true identity, perhaps?). But he’s produced an intriguing novelty, one that was lost amid the influx of domesticity-bothering psycho-thrillers that followed in the wake of “Fatal Attraction” and lay waste to the reputations of nannies, babysitters, roommates and psychotic tenants. A step away from “Se7en”, then, or even “Time After Time” but a spring-heeled leap above the tawdry rubbish of “Ripper”.

“New York Ripper”: From Argent Films’ new label, Shameless, this is a nifty throwback to a time when a big, puffy box and scorched, screen-print artwork could only mean one thing: a gonzo cornucopia of random violence, nonsensical ADR work and frenzied directorial shenanigans. It was the era of the VHS invasion. None more vibrant a genre thrived than the Italian horror film in those wild and woozy times. The nastier the better and top of that hideous heap lay the pictures of Deodato, Lenzi and Fulci. The very zenith of his filthy zeal: “The New York Ripper”.

If it sounds like I’m affronted, you’re half right. “New York Ripper” is a tour de force of everything Italian horror pictures did with such verve and commitment -- from labyrinthine (read unnecessarily but hilariously convoluted) whodunit plot machinations, to expertly carved sequences of tense, simmering violence all the way to rather ugly scenes of cruelty and a wildly irresponsible attitude toward sexual politics. The cogent argument is, of course, that the picture is a product of its time, but then so was the rise of the Nazi Party. Not that I’m drawing facetious comparisons here -- the Nazi Party after all did allow us the controversial artistry of Leni Reifenstahl. What did the ‘New York Ripper’ provide? A psycho Donald Duck, that’s what.

What grates (and frustrates) so much about “The New York Ripper” is how much the simple mechanics of the picture demonstrate Fulci’s firm grasp of cinema’s possibilities. It’s not a flashy picture, sure, but it’s an extremely impactful one. And that’s not merely down to strident funk of Francesco De Masi’s score. Fulci, as his masterpiece the previous year “The Beyond” ably asserted, was an artist totally at ease with the way in which cinema could lure the viewer into whatever sordid and feverish world a picture of his could create. That he chose to use that adroit grasp of style and mood to tell such a blunt and incongruously “straight” tale of a murderous rampage is a disappointment indeed. Like his grubby “Cat In The Brian”, it seems Fulci just woke up in a foul mood and took it out on humanity with this one.

Fulci was a fine director, better than his brusque reputation for gory grandstanding and shouting at his players might indicate. From the beautifully barren landscapes of his gritty westerns “Four Of The Apocalypse” and “Massacre Time” to the fantastical Lovecraftisms of “City Of The Living Dead” and the propulsive fatalism of “Murder To Tune Of Seven Notes In Black”, Lucio Fulci could shoot. A shame then that he often proved himself less of a philanthropist than Stanley Kubrick at his most arch. Fulci was cleverer than many of his contemporaries, and each well-mounted and bloody set piece in “The New York Ripper” drives the incongruity of this shallow exercise in cruelty home with the subtlety of a razor studded prophylactic.

That said, it’s certainly worth picking up in the objective guise of being a lynchpin of cinematic violence and the raging debate it helped inform during the 1980s. For that alone, it’s practically indispensable.

Shameless is also a new label that deserves your undying support. Stepping out of the gate with an admittedly obvious gambit like “NYR” (which incidentally has more violence but less sex than the previous Vipco version(s)), they’re intent on fostering a ravishingly nostalgic bent with their wonderfully gaudy packaging and cute attitude to the affectionate absurdities and hyperbole of the video era. If rumour is to be believed, they’re also in possession of a wondrous barrage of nefarious nasties (the real kind, not that shitty DPP list…) with which to indulge us in the months to come.

GITS: From The Vault:

Subjective? Well-seasoned? Sure. But for GITS these pictures are all essential viewing. I surely hope you find something to take from each of these retro-recommendations (“retrommendations”, if you will) that we pull from the vault (almost) each week to thrust unceremoniously in your eager and willing faces. Send any feedback noise to the usual place. This week.

‘Squirm’: 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 slathered over our collective platters. Regardless of the fact 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 rainswept 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 undulates over the verdant tumult onscreen -- the effect is so simple, chaos vs. calm, but it’s incredibly eerie and something that truly surprises as the opening strains of a picture about….well, cheap looking killer worms. Though he 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 resolutely shoe-string production yet, time and again, Lieberman is able to pull the most incongruous of directorial touches out of the bag. He’s able to deftly sketch the small absurdities of life, 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 more ingenious wizardry of a young Rick Baker. His innovatively rendered, if sparsely used, f/x work for a smattering of skin burrowing crawlers is all the more surprising amid the rough hewn nature of the production as a whole. With creaky acting 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 the director’s eye.

Lieberman is 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 a casual 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 off. That lingering impression is a rare commodity in today’s horror cinema. I’m thankful at being able to back and discover it anew amid unsung gems such as this.

GITS’ Multiple Maniacs

Part of being a cinephile is the almost obsessive-compulsive glee one takes connecting the dots in the filmic firmament. ‘Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon’ is of course for amateurs. No, the real thrill is in the ‘Six Degrees of Tim Tomerson’. Or Greg Nicotero. Or pictures involving a very moist death via telekinesis. Everyone has a fantasy film festival idea buzzing round their head like some errant chainsaw. Creating contextualised double, or even triple, bills for such whimsical assaults on taste and decency is a diverting pastime. Please indulge us as we flick the residual gore of suggestion from GITS’ exposed brainpan in your general direction. Apologies for the mess.

“It’s Grim Up North”: “28 Days Later” & “The Liiving Dead At The Manchester Morgue”

You all know the story by now.

Marked by a slavish attention to not getting bogged down in stock cliché and Hollywood-lite plotting, Danny Boyle, screenwriter Alex Garland and team fashioned a brilliantly subtle twist on the tale that plays not so much “what if…?”: more rhetorical “what happens when…”

“28 Days Later” is the thinking horror fan’s dream. Plot points drip with Pittsburgh-specific detail: the black protagonist (here, lobbing an intelligent, forthright female into the fray -- the white man relegated to a gibbering Barbara); the shopping trip to a deserted, muzak-filled consumer graveyard; one character’s unwillingness to kill a child at a deserted fuel-stop, willing simply to believe in a shred of humanity left in its pale body until it’s almost too late and the creature’s wild eyes are upon them. This is before you take into account the militarily-run stronghold with added bunker, the captured zombie…sorry, infectee tied up for study in the compound’s backyard or the climactic assault pitting rabid hordes vs soldiers that’s only lacking a “choke on it!!!” from cut-glass accented Christopher Eccleston to complete its gooey package.

It’s “The Stand” for the less New Agey amongst us. Religious iconography abounds but is more often than not glanced over with as much nostalgic disdain as the child-drawn picture showing mummy and daddy shooting the shit out of each other pasted to a board of Missing Persons posters. The soundtrack is a collision of the anarchic and the angelic, ferocious industrial ambience parrying with a requiem of mournful religious anthems mimicking the dead and crying.

True, it isn’t the treatise on humanity that Romero’s gut-muncher so wonderfully turned out to be. It’s conspicuously devoid of the rash intellectualising that one might expect from Boyle and Garland, who certainly redressed that balance with the elegiacally verbose theoreticals in “Sunshine” Whereas most successful sci-fi is arguably moralistic -- even didactic -- in tone, most good horror, maybe through some primal simplicity, is allegorical. “28 Days Later…” certainly owes less to the “The Andromeda Strain” and “The Omega Man” and more to Cronenberg’s early Body Horror trilogy. “Shivers” (who’s tower block is echoed in the chillingly absurd temporary stronghold that Jim and Selina hole up in with Brendan Gleason and his daughter) “Rabid” (with its hellish viral outbreak) and “The Brood” (who’s emotionally engineered fiends the infected in “28 Days Later…” most resemble) are taken to their logical extremes here. If this is science fiction, then Cronenberg has never made a horror film in his life.

Boyle’s picture doesn’t seek to wag fingers or sermonise over man’s evils, his excesses or his foibles. All of those become clear through the drama. And it is a far finer film because of it.

Early on, as the activists who set the plot in motion are suddenly overcome by some startling chimp-violence, one monkey, trapped in his Perspex cage, watches the real savagery in front of him (in stark contrast to the very first scene where the same primate was seen strapped to a chair forcedly staring “Clockwork Orange”-like at screens unspooling horrific newscasts and stock shock footage.) The look on his face breathes a thousand words that no amount of moralising could come up with. When we witness the match-cut-in-all-but-execution to Jim, lying prone and naked on the hospital gurney, a bunch medical wires mirroring the monkey’s plight 28 days and a dozen shots earlier, it’s a subtle directorial touch, as keen and cunning as a zombie-consumer eyeing the materialism of his previous life in a mall store window.

There’s a pleasantly unforced gallows humour running like a vein through the picture. When they stop off at the gas station and Jim goes scouring for something more than the tinned peaches they’re forced to eat in lieu of anything in need of preserving by regular, electrical means, he’s scolded by Selina.

“Jesus,” says Jim, “it’s like going holiday with your fucking Aunt!”

With little grandstanding or excessive set-piecing (although there are a few of those) Boyle effectively taps into the audience’s psyche, laying down pertinent questions. The most obvious of these being: how long does it take before the rules that constrain normal society become useless and the only way to survive in this new society is to refute them unreservedly? It’s carte blanche for society to run riot in what’s left of its ashes until you can’t tell the scared from the raging.

28 days later, and the world through which Jim and Selina travel is now an unreal and artificial place. Their suddenly archaic reality is, in a whimsical and brilliant directorial flourish, represented by a fleeting shot of a car cruising through a field of flowers -- processed digitally to look like a painting. Reality as these characters know it is gone: a relic, a painted memory. Reality now is stark brutality. Grotesquely and unexpectedly beautiful though parts of this world are -- like the glorious golden sunset aching to break through the thick grime of the tower block’s half-shattered window -- what’s really there, like the film itself, is undiluted horror.

In contrast, Jorge Grau’s “Living Dead At The Manchester Morgue” is almost blunt relic. Bereft of contemporary pizzazz, it is, however, on its own terms, a prophetic, bravely sincere and chillingly realistic portrayal of undead dispersion in the 70s Lancashire. Like “28 Days Later”, Grau takes a more immediate anf manmade rationale for the outbreak of resurrection razing this rural idyll. Its eco-conscious opening montage clues us into how grounded in reality he wishes to make his picture. Contrast this with the insensitive ‘booga-booga’ spiritualism reasoning with which many a 70s zombie picture laced their undead epidemic, it seems pretty forward thinking.

The sonic assault that accompanies our introduction to the agricultural machinery that violates the landscape – helped no end by the astonishingly avant-garde score/sound design by Grau and composer Giuliano Sorgini further proves that it’s more than base shocks we’re dealing with. As antique-loving hippie hero Ray Lovelock stomps petulantly across the grassy pastures, he encounters the sound of a thousand distressed souls, divined through some technological abomination that will soon provoke a mass uprising of the undead from their graves. The two scientists manning the contraption are as useless as the men of science in Romero’s world, earnestly attempting to substantiate the unquantifiable and most probably screwing us all into the bargain.

Of course it’s not all worthy treatise on how we’ve fucked the environment into a cocked hat (and this was 30 years ago, imagine what polluted hell we hath wrought by now?!) “…Morgue” includes its fair share of gruesome carnage: throat gouging, tit-ripping, face burning mayhem of the most censor-baiting kind. It’s short, sharp and shockingly rendered, all the more impactful for seeping insidiously from out of the potent, measured atmosphere realise so meticulously by Grau and his technical team. It’s a picture that aims to disturb rather than shock and 30 years on it succeeds surprisingly well. It’s a genuinely unnerving experience, assisted no end by attention to its aural innvation especially.

Despite the facetious title I’ve given this double bill, it’s an unobtrusively devastating few hours, full of moments of genuine anxiety and dread. A change of pace from the usual zombie butchery, it’s an evening of hushed horror that lingers long after the last blood has splattered the screen.