Film junkie Giles Edwards gives you the low down on DVD releases, hidden treasures and personal indulgences you simply can't get along without.
 

24th January 2008

“Boogeyman 2”: The early 21st century has been an uneven time for horror. While Eli Roth, Rob Zombie, Neil Marshall and a horde of non-English speaking directors were crushing taboos, bucking trends or embracing long-held beliefs about what constituted true horror with a zealous savagery uncharted since the glory days of the 1970s, studios were discovering once again that kids liked this stuff. Literally. And the parent-sanctioned, PG-13-pitched, heavily cosseted face of the genre unfurled across screens with a cliché-creating fervor, rendering even the more sanguinary R-rated product mere gormless recapitulations of once-fuzzily nostalgic folk-tales, legends and concepts.

The end result was, for want of a better scapegoat, “Boogeyman”: emblematic of the very nadir of good concept/shitty execution filmmaking. In a club that numbers Robert Harmon’s rather lacklustre “Them”, Jonathan Liebesman’s partially successful but ultimately clumsy “Darkness Falls” and most of the increasingly muddled Dark Castle pictures following William Malone spirited “House On Haunted Hill” amongst its ilk, it’s some feat to be the most awkward, most narratively retarded and dramatically dishonest of the bunch. That Sam Raimi & Robert Tapert’s production company, Ghosthouse, shepherded it to the screen was the final insult to many genre aficionados, to whom only those names (this was pre-full blown Spidermania) would mean anything in the first place.

True, there are far worse films in horror cinema’s dank basement than all of the above. But with the auspices of decent studio money and genuine genre maniacs in the producers’ chairs, to fail in conjuring up a motion picture that trumps something as modest as the great Larry Fessenden’s rather fine but ultra low-budget “Wendigo” in terms of spectacle, is frustrating indeed. But then, a filmmaker of Fessenden’s invention isn’t pandering to a demographic with flashy set-pieces, he’s just telling an intriguing story.

The genre is brimming with countless examples of how seasoned legends of age-old folk tales can be compellingly rendered, from “Suspiria” to “The Wicker Man” to Amicus’ boundlessly inventive anthologies. “Boogeyman”’s concept of a dreadful spectre from urban folk-lore rearing its head in the physical world is actually pretty sound, as deeply rooted in the great psychoanalytic tradition of uncanny horror of childhood as Hoffman’s ‘Der Sandmann’. But the story’s fertile ground was immediately watered with the weak swill of CGI-enhanced grandstanding, pounding toward an incomprehensible finale of false shocks, cheap scares and an odious example of the absurdly reductive ambiguous ending of which the modern genre is rife.

It’s rare that I get incensed enough about a picture to find little or nothing to appreciate within it, from score to lighting to a specific performance, so to demure to constructive positives: the great Joe Lo Duca phones in an adequate piece of strum und drang scoring, more Christopher Young/Daniel Licht than “Evil Dead II” and I guess the picture looks fine, if very, very dark (thanks “Se7en”!) But in terms of worst horror films of the decade, this was a shoe-in for the list, a muddled, ultimately wretched picture that appears to have undergone a raft of post-production tinkering in an attempt to inject some sort of memorable content, but only succeeds in further diluting what minimal atmosphere the first few concept-setting minutes possessed.

So, now, “Boogeyman 2” finds itself, if not floundering within a pall of preceding reputations, then certainly at a disadvantage. At least it starts of from a position of relative safety: how much worse could it be? The presence of Tobin Bell (the “Saw” series’ saving grace, with his wonderful demeanor seemingly beyond weary of this miserable world -- I can’t wait until someone finds a way to team him with Lance Henriksen) and a rather atmospheric trailer prove hopeful. As a Sony DTV product, it’s measuring up against Warner Brother’s Raw Feed imprint with titles like the middling “Rest Stop” as a benchmark. On the basis of this trailer, it comes off very well, its anxious camera-work revealing a less orgiastic approach to well-worn gothic cliché. But the obstacle in its path is that it’s still a selection of teens propelled into a scenario all too reminiscent of “A Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors” and Andrew Fleming’s “Bad Dreams”.

Director Jef Betancourt has worked his way up the ranks from editor on a slew of reputable indie titles like “The Good Girl” through Ghosthouse productions “The Grudge”, its sequel and now the much-anticipated “The Ruins”. Like Patrick Lussier before him, a one time editor-cum-production fixer is in a unique position to be able to enhance what was effective about a premise and perhaps steer it in a more experimental direction. (Not that it worked with John Ottman and “Urban Legends 2”, but lets gloss over that.) I’ll anticipate this over the umpteenth in the “Children Of The Corn” franchise. For now.

797 words on “Boogeyman 2”: my “be less cynical” New Year’s resolution holds fast, friends.

“Eaten Alive”: Last year I mused upon gadabout-cocksure craftsman Sergio Martino and his forays into giallo-dom, specifically the sublime “Torso”. In the same ballpark, if not on the same darts team (I’ll forgo all sporting analogy from here on out, it doesn’t make me look big or remotely clever) is Umberto Lenzi. Bedeviled and chided with the flippant label of “hack” as often and as unfairly as any of his contemporaries, in Lenzi’s case it’s, sadly, quite possible to see where he slipped up: there was one genre at which he far from excelled yet which he not only virtually invented, but kept making his name with for all the wrong reasons.

The Cannibal film, a Jonathan Hensleigh is currently discovering, is a cruel mistress, at once ripe with investigations into the white man’s abject fear of johnny foreigner’s “otherness”, ethnic fetishism, wanton rural sleaze and, dollops of gore-spattered gut/genital/brain munching. Yet for all their garish excesses, most of the genre is faintly ridiculous and hilariously dated. Don’t get me wrong, I think the genre is a fascinating one, find many of the pictures within it positively brimming with endlessly diverting hysteria, and, to divulge more of me than many would care to know, my undergraduate thesis was actually an examination on the whole excessive charabanc titled “Spectating The Violent: A Vindication Of The Italian Cannibal Film”. But in the last decade, with all that we know about the modern world and the West’s proclivity for its own peculiar brand of sadism, the much-maligned “torture-porn” cycle is a far more resonant comment on the horrific primal desires far closer to us than any remote, unexplored rainforest tribe.

Ruggero Deodato, whether through cunning or sheer fate, deftly sidestepped the frenzied obviousness of those flesh-fetish encounters by filming 1980’s “Cannibal Holocaust” as a self-reflexive, post-modern thesis-disguised-as-exploitation film. Astride Massaccesi (Joe D’Amato) unapologetically squeezed his soft/hard-porn seductress Laura Gemser into the tight uniform of a slutty explorer and toned down (relatively!) the violent rumpuses to one memorable encounter with an enormous cheese wire, choosing the more voyeuristic route in “Emanuelle & The Last Cannibals” in 1977. Both were rather more successful in their branding of the cannibal film than misguided, though trail-blazing, Lenzi.

In 1972, five years before D’Amato’s “Emanuelle…”, Lenzi managed, in the midst of a string of rather (artistically) successful and thoroughly appealing crime thrillers, both polizia and giallo -- “Orgamso”, “Seven Blood Stained Orchids” and “So Sweet…So Perverse” before, “Almost Human” afterward -- to ride the wave of now decade-old Mondo popularity with “Deep River Savages”. A kind of “A Man Called Horse”-ethni-sploitation thriller, it sees western photographer Ivan Rassimov’s body and soul ravaged by his indoctrination into the culture of the eponymous “savages” and their delightfully named star attraction, Me Me Lai. Of course the eerie weirdness and outright perversion of the tribal folk is what takes center stage before too long (with a cynical get-out clause detailing how we’re really the savages what with all our modern angst and rage and all…which by the time Deodato’s masterwork rolled around, was, helpfully, very gravely recapped in voiceover at the climax).

In 1981, Lenzi perpetrated one of the most ill-advised incarnations of the video nasty era, the grotesquely absurd “Cannibal Ferox,” or “Make Them Die Slowly”. Despite its lurid, tabloid-baiting tagline it wasn’t as groundbreakingly pernicious as it would have liked you to believe. It was nonetheless sleazy and mean-spirited enough to become the nail in the coffin of a genre not known for its subtlety. This notorious epic featured more “Man Called Horse”-style torture, this time on Lorraine De Selle’s breasts, Giovanni Lombardo Radice being quite literally topped and tailed and more importantly a rather unappetizing parade of real animal cruelty, the single component that would make Lenzi’s name, alongside Deodato (though both are apologetic for it now), one of the most reviled in the annals of mondo-centered exploitation.

And between these two marginally better offerings; we were given “Eaten Alive”. Even in its uncut version, there’s not all that much to recommend beyond the exploitation thrill of yet another fix of ghoulish eccentricity. Which is plenty recommendation enough, if like me you’re addicted to these things. It’s a sleight and limited pleasure, though.

Whereas “…Holocaust” has its technical prowess, “…Ferox” has its quaintly gratuitous gore and “…Savages” was the first of its kind, “Eaten Alive” exists in a kind of limbo. Capitalizing on the then-recent Jonestown Massacre headlines, this 1980 ‘gutmuncher’ (whose Italian title “Mangiati vivi!” sounds far more sinister than the AIP-like English title) is more Nancy Drew than Alferd Packer. Though some eventual flesh eating unfolds, the bulk of the story follows a woman whose sister is accosted in New York by a ridiculous looking blow-dart wielding assassin from New Guinea. The man is eventually killed and found to have a roll of film on him that may or may not be a deeply obvious clue as to the whereabouts of her sister and so the adventure begins.

Cobbled together from a variety of sources -- those far more informed than I have suggested that it’s a mélange of “Deep River Savages”, “Jungle Holocaust” and Sergio Martino’s “Mountain Of The Cannibal God” mixed in with a smattering of new footage and I’m not about to doubt them -- it’s plainly a rat-tag example of exploitation filmmaking at its most resourcefully brazen.

The most astonishing part is that Lenzi would have cranked out this and one more in the cascade of cannibalistic cacophony post-“Deep River Savages” even though he’s plainly quite bored with it all (though given the popularity of Italian gore epics, it’s perhaps not all that surprising). Devoid of the suspenseful set-pieces or outrageously choreographed urban action of his far more laudable and successful forays into giallo and polizia filmmaking, Lenzi doesn’t really seem to invest any energy or verve into the film. Were it not for the limited amount of gore on show toward the end, it might have been made 40 years earlier, and better, by RKO.

But such is the life of a venerable Italian hack (and I use that word benevolently – as the great John Martin has been at pains to points out everytime a critic uses that word derogatorily, all the great Italian genre filmmakers ‘hacked’ out a considerable living in a staggering variety of genres with no shame, nor need for any). Lenzi, an otherwise demonstrably talented filmmaker would simply move from this clumsy cash-in and onto the next project. As he had done with the well-regarded “From Hell To Victory” and “The Sicilian Boss” before “Eaten Alive”, he dived into cult-sensation “Nightmare City” and then “…Ferox” probably not pausing for breath, probably not pausing to reflect that the Italian film industry’s -- and by extension he and his peer’s -- most unbound years were behind them.

To sum up: a fascinating failure and one for more than mere completists. After all, the relatively dire of the Italian 80s is no doubt far more involving than the mediocre of the English speaking 21st century.

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