In his weekly column, Giles Edwards, a long time genre fan, gives you the juice on what you should be or not be spending your hard earned cash on in your local DVD shop.
 

29th November 2007

Thanks to the fine folk at MGM (or more specifically DVD Pacific -- I’m still lowly, unimportant and indebted enough to purchase my fix of genre product from a regular etailer -- anything to keep the industry mill sails turning) this month, I procured my copy of ‘From Beyond’ (and ‘Scarecrows’ -- you may remember this latter title from your local video store, where it resided, untouched alongside dust-gathering copies of ‘Neon-Maniacs’, ‘The Vineyard’, ‘Rush Week’, ‘Retribution’ and the achingly slow ‘The Attic’ written by an ailing Joseph Stefano. I rented them all. But then, that was my bag, and it seemed that it always would be, were times not to change so very much.)

If I could bottle the feeling of creativity and unabashed fulfillment such 80s horror pictures gave me, I'd sell it to everyone and stop wars and pestilence and quite possibly famine. Not death though, for that’s what this stuff gave us in emphatic, unequivocally imaginative drollops.

The 1970s gave us impact and viscera, the 1980s, perhaps in its purposeful departure from the verisimilitude of the gritty preceding decade, gave us (alongside a not quite as laudable pre-irony goofiness) real, imaginative audience engagement. It's that golden nugget which is missing from many posturing, self-aware horror pictures of today: simple engagement. I wrote last time about ‘Society’, ‘Brain Damage’ and ‘Bride Of Reanimator’ and even the blunt aesthetic differences you can immediately feel between them and, say, the latest sequel to ‘Children Of The Corn’ or some HD-shot pabulum with Tiffany Sheppis is vast a chasm (no doubt filled with Lovecraftian beasts). Without today’s hip irony on which to sail through a limp narrative, those pictures had to rely on something precious today: ideas. Imagine that. ‘From Beyond’, though slight compared with ‘Reanimator’ is still head and shoulders above what passes for independent horror today.

Looking at video shelves today, one can’t help but hark back to a time when Charles Band was doing his practically patented brand of shameless exploitation. Those productions at least had a pulse. A credit block baring the legend “Based On An Idea By Charles Band” was perennial joke among my peer group of die hard weirdoes and malcontents. Even the very worst of these ideas -- ‘Bad Seeds’, anyone? -- might find itself a marked, imaginative, advance above this decade’s ‘Halloween Camp 2 – Scream If You Wanna Die Faster’ if it were released today.

There was a time, not so long ago that producers and directors would take their inspiration, not from the last already-10th-generation knock off (‘Bloody Murder’, ‘Scream Bloody Murder’), but from books. Literature. At the very least folk tales (and by that, I mean those involving mythical beings/supernatural idiosyncrasies not what happens when you ingest popping candy followed by a swig of Pepsi). Which is what makes the cinema of the brand Stuart Gordon and his ilk created in the 1980s (and into the 1990s for the most part) such a rare, and lamentably untapped vein.

A remarkable run of genuinely -- if not always successfully -- imaginative titles began 20 years ago seeing ‘Reanimator’, ‘From Beyond’, ‘Dolls’, ‘Pit & The Pendulum’ and ‘Castle Freak’ assail audiences sensibilities with nothing if not audacious narratives and provocative thematic developments. Gordon made horror cinema that was designed to horrify. Not mildly excite or quite safely titillate or vaguely thrill: horrify, unease and disturb. Many of these ideas and inspirations were from the long-tried and tested proving grounds of Poe and Lovecraft. They were tales that inspired dread because they were based around dreadful things -- ironical, hip youngsters in cosy rural isolation, they were not. Even a tale that seemed like it could easily devolve into an adventure with meddling teen misfits, like ‘Dolls’, is a charmingly eerie gothic chiller not afraid of shadows and nothing so much as the threatening pall of an old, old, very dark house.

Even Gordon’s recent ‘Masters Of Horror’ episode dared to feature multiple planes of dimensional existence, harking back to the distressing quantum-physical foul-ups of ‘From Beyond’. True, there was a conspicuous dose of eyeball ingestion alongside mutant pineal abuse but there was also the resonant (literally) idea of bodily transference and psychological control far removed from any Vincent Price-style mumbo jumbo. Even ‘Reanimator’, with it’s deeply suspect science and archly black comedy, emerged as extremely impactful with its philosophical ideas of man-vs-mortality, much in line with its Frankenstein origins.

If you think I’m being harsh on limited budget productions featuring Tiffany Sheppis (though I don’t mean to single her out, she’s actually the least grievous of many a c-movie’s sins these days -- she’ll do as a new Linnea Quigley, sure) it’s as well to remember ‘From Beyond’ wasn’t an A-league picture back in 1986. ‘The Lost Boys’ was. Or ‘Back To The Future’. Or ‘Freddy’s Revenge’. These were the competion and the audience-tauting big hitters that were released within a year or so either side of Stuart Gordon’s picture. ‘From Beyond’ was, for want of a term that wasn’t really relevant then (though it was certainly in existence), DTV, except it also happened to be released at cinemas. It was pure exploitation to turn a buck and make money -- only it would do so mainly on video, the new incarnation of the drive-ins and 2nd run theatres of old. But, as did the creators of their literary inspirations, these ingenious filmmakers dared to dream, to think, to at least pose questions.

All it took was a director willing to engage with his ideas. And those kind of ideas, complex and highbrow as their basis might be, for them to simply engage at a very base, visceral level with an audience is something that, today, is the provenance, in many people’s minds, of an “arthouse” film like ‘Primer’ or the documentary ‘What The Bleep Do We Know’. Larry Fessenden makes some remarkable genre films but is rarely known outside of niche circles because his films fail to fold neat narratives inside an “accessible” box.

Those adapting Lovecraft, or Philip K. Dick, rather than deliver a finite treatise on a scientific principle, are content to use their ideas as simply a far more intriguing jumping off point than ‘teenagers get stuck in the woods’ or ‘aliens invade a small town’.

Such simple ambition is so rarely exploited today -- or at least that ambition is stifled by demographically skewed moneymen. This is what they may really mean about the dumbing-down of audiences. Why think when a pair of tits and a post-modern pun will suffice? The answer is sad indictment of the state of much 21st century genre cinema.

killernun“Killer Nun”: Europe’s ‘nunsploitation’ genre comes in for a lot of stick. On the one extreme are Walerian Borowczyk’s elegant forays into sapphic softcore and on the other are more straight (pun not intended, nor indeed at all applicable) darkly baroque pictures like Bruno Mattei’s ‘The Other Hell’ and Mariano Baino’s ‘Dark Waters’. Removed from the more “respectable” (in very relative terms!) Ken Russell’s ‘The Devils’, the most visible conflagration of these two extremes are ‘Flavia The Heretic’ and this insane piece of trash, ‘Killer Nun’.

From Giulio Berruti, collaborator on cult favourite “Baba Yaga”, come a truly audacious tale of incessant sleaze and cynical degradation, made all the more bizarre because of a central turn by previously exquisitely classy 50s Euro pin-up Anita Ekberg. As far from her voluptuous gliding about the Trevi Fountain for Fellini, here, the former ‘dolce bella’ cuts a rather less bodacious figure spiralling effortlessly into morphine-addicted drudgery as Sister Gertrude, the eponymous troubled nun sliding into criminal mania, prostitution and finally insanity.

The presence of co-star Joe Dallesandro lets you in on the tone of this downbeat, yet still highly entertaining exploitation romp. Great art it ain’t. While never as audacious as it title would lead you to believe, if nothing else, it certainly adds a commendably committed performance to the roster of 70s oddities unleashed upon audiences by hereforto “legitimate’ stars of classical cinema (cf: Joan Crawford in ‘Trogg’ and Ernest Borgnine in ‘The Devil’s Rain’).

torso“Torso”: Sergio Martino, as many Italian exploitation aficionados might tell you, is kind of like the Tony Scott of giallo cinema: consistently inventive, assiduous and ultimately passed over [read: mainstream critics aren’t aware of, and therefore negate, them] in favour of the more high profile, “legitimate” thrills of Bava or Argento. But he’s arguably done as much for the language of exquisite terror in which the Italian-style thriller revels as Scott Jnr has for the visceral energy of the modern action film.

‘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 perhaps his crowning achievement. A streamlined and brutally efficient plot sees student Mimsy Farmer’s university peer group being bumped off by a sadistic, libidinous killer. What sets it apart from most giallo is its willingness to po-facedly delve deep to the heart of those aesthetics so often noted and dissected by cinematic psychoanalysts in discussions of horror in general: carnal cruelty. Indeed, the original Italian title translates as the wonderfully robust ‘The Corpse Displays Traces Of Carnal Violence’. Martino’s intense agenda is simply to objectify his human victim’s form 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 etc…) we discover a scene set for a final 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 wakes up and is subjected to an excruciatingly tense 20-minute ordeal of fear that is simply breathtaking. No doubt high on the list of inspirations for Alexandre Aja and ‘High Tension’, Martino manages to delivers a stunning, yet extremely atypical giallo sequence in that it doesn’t seek to ratchet up 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 Farmer’s vulnerable hiding place.

Perhaps the most overtly Hitchcockian sequence, alongside Argento’s opening of ‘Bird With The Crystal Plumage’, in a genre usually known for it stylistically baroque flourishes, it’s one of many reasons to pick up this exemplary Italian thriller.

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