© London FrightFest Ltd. 2000-2007

GORE IN THE STORE - NEW DVD RELEASES FOR 31st JANUARY 2007.

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 each week to thrust unceremoniously in your eager and willing faces. Send any feedback noise to the usual place. This week.

 

“The Spiral Staircase”: many a column inch has been expended in the name of rectifying a great ‘slasher’ wrong: namely that “Halloween” kick-started the whole kit ‘n’ caboodle in 1978. Bob Clark has done rather well out of such discussion, and rightly so. His classic 1974 picture “Black Christmas” -- especially in the UK where its reputation is as luke-warm as that of Clark’s other perennial jollity, “A Christmas Story” – has relatively recently been fully embraced into the pantheon as a superb psycho-drama, more skulk than slash but all the more affecting for it. Realigned lineage or not, the fact still remains that it was far from the first picture to see vulnerable types fall foul of crazed killers in such a salacious and manipulative fashion as the ‘slasher’ genre would present for our voyeuristic pleasure.

 

Most notably, Clark’s seasonal shocker arrived shortly after the central influx of giallo from Europe, and most pertinently one that Mario Bava had unleashed upon an unsuspecting exploitation audience three years earlier, the wickedly satirical “Twitch Of The Death Nerve”. With it, Bava had, in the eyes of some genre aficionados, truly set in motion the slasher craze. Intended to be as much a subversive and horrific answer to bourgoise Italian comedies as it was a gory giallo thriller, with its underlying class struggles mirroring that of the multiple killers’ to bump off whomever they could, it’s a picture that’s as famous for possessing a few delicious slices of highly influential horror cliche. An ace card in film quiz trivia, it’s well documented that the picture is quite vital in the evolution of the Friday 13th series and a sure influence in Steve Miner’s Jason Vorhees-introducing first and second sequels, right down to the bloody modes of dispatch used for horny teens.

 

Bava, of course, exhibited an even more prototypical whodunit formula with his seminal black gloved “Blood & Black Lace” in 1964 an even earlier benchmark for the start of the slasher. However, the same brand of visual fetishism, and particularly that one stark motif, found its way back further still – most likely via Edgar Wallace’s krimi novels – into the mainstream(ish) cinema with Robert Siodmak’s terrifying and elegant 1946 picture, “The Spiral Staricase”.

 

In a New England town in the early 1900s, a young woman, traumatised in her youth so that she is no longer able to speak, lives with and cares for a grand old rich maid in a cavernous mansion. Also living there is a small assemblage of close and not so close family, associates and employees. One dark and stormy night, after the brutal murders of a series crippled and infirmed damsels have rocked the small community, the isolated house is invaded by the assailant. A mute girl, dark house, crazed killer: it’s a paradigm of delightful proportions.

 

Siodmak, best known for the sharp crime/noirs “The Killers” (also 1946) and “Criss Cross” (1949) delivers a picture that’s as atmospheric as it is astutely honed. A deeply Hitchcockian dilemma – most recently the character of the taciturn heroine was plundered by Anthony Waller for his terrific debut “Mute Witness” in 1994 – it bares the embryonic hallmarks of the best psycho-sexual shockers with which the 1980s would later bloody cinema screens in droves. The mystery is less labyrinthine than, say, a standard Poirot potboiler -- there are, after all, barely ten main characters, two of whom are asleep for half the picture’s running time (bare with it, it’s integral to the plot). There are only a couple of murders shown on screen. Yet it’s the way in which they are presented which intrigues. It has an eerie and thoroughly unnerving reveal when the time to unmask the killer finally arrives. More interestingly, though, the picture introduces us to that kinky, black-gloved villain driven by his own furiously perverse devises and desires to wring a pretty neck. In this case, those necks of the imperfect yet nubile.

 

From the outset, in a stark, shocking opening to the kind of graceful US chiller that the time and place would seem to indicate is going for something in the Gainsborough mould, Siodmak certainly keeps things wry and spry. The inaugural killing is an absolute archetype of things to come in the genre and takes place in a hotel room directly above a makeshift silent cinema, one that happens to be showing a wittily sexualised picture entitled “The Kiss”. Upstairs, a crippled beauty is seen grabbing a gown from her closet, revealing the piercing eye of the assailant staring out from behind the swath of hung and rumpled clothes. In a moment so resonant of “Tenebre” decades later, she struggles to get the gown over her head as the killer strikes. It’s as good a metaphor as any that while this despicable deed is being enacted for us above, it’s subverting the ‘proper cinema’ going on below – “The Kiss” is the kind of coy picture with which temperant types at the turn of the century would just about deign gather and engage in such well-heeled establishments.

 

So we witness this imperfect woman mutilated by a fellow outcast in the room just upstairs. So far, so original. But this was 1946. The leap from there to “Black Christmas“ and “Halloween” is thirty years. Yet so little has changed (which is not a qualitative assessment: both the latter picture are remarkable horror offerings). The opening of “The Spiral Staircase” also puts me in mind of scene revisited (surely coincidentally since I’m fairly positive Joseph Zito isn’t as well-versed in homage as all that, nor would want to be) in “Friday 13th: The Final Chapter”. The amorous prankster Teddy is left alone, trounced in the quest for getting laid by his square pal Crispin Glover, only to find himself splattered by Jason against his own silent movie screen, one showing something more salacious than a mere kiss. The point of this observation is not the presence of any clever referentiality (which as I say, is presumably not the case –- though it would be awesome if it were). It’s that these ideas, these concepts and these stock situations have been in the lexicon of the genre for a long time - longer than modern genre lore might have led us to think. It’s such fun to encounter the same tropes and tricks being used as effectively in pictures over four decades apart.

 

Naturally there’s a more dispiriting flipside: for a picture as rewarding and packed with sheer intrigue and delightful menace as “The Spiral Staircase” to remain so unsung, while any of the entertaining but flighty Vorhees sequels remain evergreen fan favourites, is both a relative shame and a distinct puzzle.

 

Not for want of pedigree though, clearly. “The Spiral Staircase” is beautifully shot in austere black and white (and the odd frenetic burst of gothic tempest) by Nicholas Musuraca and exquisitely scored by Roy Webb. This pair were of course part of the team responsible for a slew of RKO productions under Val Lewton including “The Seventh Victim”, “Ghost Ship” and “Cat People”, a picture which has taken on far more of a legendary status, perhaps due in part to its singular set pieces than for it similar brand of sub-textual character study.

 

The first giallo, then? Perhaps not. There were, after all, Hitchcock’s “The Lodger” and myriad krimi adaptations, creaky murder mysteries from Edgar Wallace in the half-decade preceding Siodmak’s grand triumph. The first great slasher picture in American cinema? You could very well say it. There are few as dripping with shadowy peril and impeccable dread. Track it down.

 

“Children Of Men”: Although one Mexican behemoth tore the fantasy world asunder last year with “Pan’s Labyrinth”, del Toro’s producer and brother-in-arms Alfonso Cuaron also managed to deliver his own caustic lament to the end of all things, London style. A touch austere narratively – there are few things within the simply woven tale of an dystopian Britain that haven’t been the basis of myriad catastrophe-ridden epics from “1984” to Tony Maylem’s “Split Second” to TV’s “The Last Train” -- but it’s an undeniably stunning cinematic experience, regardless. Most of that is down to the supreme confidence of vision exhibited by its helmer. More exciting than the entirety of “Mission Impossible III”, amid the sincere, committed performance and drama, two set-pieces manage to trump both “War Of The Worlds”' freeway sequence and “Hard Boiled”'s hospital assault with a devastating assurance. Capping it all, the mid-section has one of the finest suspense sequences featuring a stalled car you'll ever see. And we know they are legion. It’s this kind of skilful coup that will see Cuaron shoot further on up the roster of enviable filmmakers to watch blossom. It’s worth noting that such is its sure dexterity, the picture would make a terrific double feature with “The Handmaid's Tale”, “28 Days Later” or either incarnation of “Dawn Of the Dead”. With a song by Jarvis Cocker that sums up the deliciously absurd tone of all the madness, it’s as fine a picture that’s been made in Britain this decade, and perhaps the previous one as well.

 

“The Black Dahlia”: Love and hate are twin emotions that define De Palma both with the material he puts on the screen and within those who experience his arousing and elegiac images. He’s a filmmaker of wilful extremes and unabashed emotion. It’s what makes “Blow Out” so powerful and “Mission To Mars” so perplexing (though I have to admit, I find that tongue-in-cheek paean to those extraordinarily earnest 1950s sci-fi epics about the naive yearnings of a generation for exotic interstellar exploration to be a delectable treat, all the way down to Gary Sinise’s doe-like eyes and flagrantly applied mascara!) Here De Palma grapples with another grand master – one of literary intensity. Almost untranslatable literally – unless the world were privy to some unholy melding of the rat-a-tat-tat stylings of Howard Hawks with the lascivious, almost hellish extremes of Paul Schrader -- James Ellroy’s labyrinthine prose is nonetheless as organically adhered to human foibles and perversions as De Palma at his most wicked. It’s a marvellous match, one this adaptation almost achieves in living up to.

 

Falling foul of necessary compression, the tale’s dark heart still beats full pelt in Josh Friedman’s screenplay as a series of grim and dramatic coincidences in mid-century Los Angeles collide messily at the point where aspiring starlet Elizabeth Short’s gut meets her gullet. Partnered with an underused but thoroughly compelling Aaron Eckhart, Josh Hartnett’s cop is a role that really seems a natural extension of Guy Pearce’s Ed Exley. He flounders a little as the voice of (initial) sanity under the sprawling narration and opposite a Scarlet Johansen who seems just far too young to be prancing around such a parade of covetable get ups (courtesy of ace costumer Jenny Beavan). Only Hilary Swank as a rich girl slumming it as a gaudy vamp truly fits her role, though she’s sadly laden herself with an odd upper-crust accent that does not. Yet despite these fitfully problematic elements, under De Palma’s bravura direction and via the gleam Vilmos Zsigmond’s lustrous photography, the sheer hyperbolic scope of the fractured and elliptical narrative proves to be an engrossing, disarming plummet beneath the surface of a seemingly routine murder investigation.

 

What emerges come the climax is a quintessentially modern, sometimes disturbing extension of film noir – a welcome alternative to “L.A. Confidential”’s superb but simple revitalisation of that classic cinematic style. It’s the kind of picture Abel Ferrara might make had he technical dexterity of Max Ophuls. It’s not pure Ellroy, but love the end result or hate it, the picture’s boldness and its willingness to mine the mad and the profane with such unrestrained finesse is utterly De Palma.

 

“A Scanner Darkly”: watching “A Scanner Darkly”, the giddy Philip K. Dick adaptation about an undercover narcotics agent and clandestine user who is effectively asked to spy on himself in a effort to bust a ring of Substance D users in a distressingly austere near future L.A., I couldn't help but ponder if Richard Linklater, so obviously a smart, literate filmmaker, might the most visually uninspired director since Kevin Smith. Going genre didn't work for “Dogma” and it doesn't help for the emphatically experimental “Scanner…” a picture that, frankly, might have been less enervating had it been simply read for 90 minutes. Any grouchy thesis on Linklater’s talents as a painterly artist, however, comes rather unstuck when considering the performances of the picture. Robert Downy Jnr is annoying as all hell as a bespectacled dealer, but in the way that any yabbering e-freak at 7am on a Sunday morning is wont to be. Likewise Woody Harrelson and Keanu Reeves are by turns grotesque and deeply morose respectively. None is a very empathisable hero. Which is of course part of the point of the picture, a thinly veiled elegy to the tragic circumstance of Dick’s contemporary circle, many of who were lost to fateful addiction in the 1970s. In representing these weirdly tinged caricatures in an otherworldly city, Linklater proves himself a consumate actor's director. Right back through “School Of Rock” “Before Sunrise”, “Suburbia” and his masterful “Dazed & Confused” this has always been his real strength. Maybe he'd be a legendary stage director. Probably.

 

So to find the picture as a whole so turgid is pretty dislocating, since besides the ‘lively’ performances there’s also an awful lot going on visually with the picture. It’s a purposefully dogmatic piece, almost slavishly beholden to Dick’s thought processes, his worldview and his “difficult” characters. It’s an existential piece, but it’s surely a genre picture as much as Darren Aronofsky’s work is. Filtered through the faddish visual style Linklater tried originally in “Waking Life” –- a kind of organic rotoscoped animation process that’s half artistry, half disconcerting acid flashback – it’s a presentation of difficult material with an equally difficult vision. Like Aronofsky, like Ken Russell and like David Lynch, both the story and telling of it are so enmeshed together you’re obliged to make a substantial leap of faith into the directors nimble hands. Either you’ll immerse yourself, liberally balming your fevered reaction to the paranoid tale or exit the darkness of the end credits quite ready for “Singin’ In The Rain”. For me, it’s a strategy that simply falls flat, one note and after a while, rather irritating. Whichever camp you fall into, though you’ll doubtless leave the experience glad for all of real life’s small mercies. At the very least, this proves Linklater’s not-so-dystopian science fiction to be coursing with genuine humanity.

 

 

“The Wicker Man: Director’s Cut” (2006) – Several apocryphal yarns relating to LaBute’s reservations about Robin Hardy’s original cult classic have emerged since this rejig’s release last year. One very telling anecdote, revealed in last month’s Dark Side by our own Dr Jones, finds LaBute complimenting Summerisle’s intensely disquieting atmosphere but casting scorn upon a bunch of songs he found deeply confusing and, in his words, “very trying….setting a mood but not one that I found to be particularly useful in creating a sense of dread or foreboding”. Which would seem to indicate an oversight of extraordinary proportions about an original story whose very power comes from its utter submersion in pagan ritual, rite and song. It would be like re-making “Suspiria” in black and white. Odder still when you think that LaBute’s widely publicised Mormon background is presumably an as insular religious enclave as both Lord Summerisle’s and indeed Sergeant Howie’s.

 

Now, for the picture’s fans, detractor and plain curious, the question of what further extraneous lunacy could be inserted into Neil LaBute’s ill-received pagan caper has been answered with this slightly extended Director’s Cut foray to Wild Cage Country. Avoiding its limited run in theatres, GITS has had to contend with the ever-dutiful youtube.com’s breezy summation of the picture’s “highlights” to bone up on the tale of pill-popping cop Nicholas Cage’s doomed excursion to an offshore matriarchal community. Drop kicking a teenage girl. A bear punching a woman in the face. “The BEEEEES are in my EYYYYYYES!!!!”. The calamitous events involving honey go on and on. Frankly it’s pretty mortifying sitting through these snippets as a casual viewer, so one imagines how it feels to have unleashed such a weird concoction into cinemas. It’s also hard to believe that the complete saga, no matter how unhinged and/or visionary, could be any more entertaining than this gag reel of absurd non-sequiturs. “Step away from the bike”, indeed.