GORE IN THE STORE - NEW DVD RELEASES FOR 9th AUGUST 2007.

David Fincher's lead-lined reputation rests upon his enviable status as a true visual stylist -- in the way Ridley Scott was in his heyday and is now mostly and thankfully reclaiming his rightful reputation as ("A Good Year" excepting). Fincher is an idiosyncratic seer of visions, eliciting images that only someone with that eye could extract and isolate from the million others pummelling their retina daily.

But finally catching (unlike his new picture's "heroes" Graysmith or SFPDs finest were able to do) the "Zodiac" recently, it struck me that Fincher is in possession of not only a painter's eye but a Mozart-like ear as well. The talented bastard.

I have to confess that, amid the audaciously, staged carnage and slathering of period minutiae about “Zodiac”’s scope frame, what jazzed me most about the picture was just a simple phone call. Or should I say a raft of simple phone calls. Or perhaps I should really specify half of a raft of simple phone calls. During the myriad, exasperatingly dense detail being exposited upon the eavesdropping viewer during countless scenes of urgent phone calling by Jake Gyllenhaal's Graysmith, Robert Downey's Avery and Mark Ruffalos' Toschi, the sound design of the person on the other end of the phone was what gave me the most pleasure for those two and half quite mesmerising hours. It represents Fincher's dedication to detail and his love of classic cinema perfectly. Sure, the wide angled, deep focus newsroom and gruff editorial meetings is a fine nod to "All The President's Men". But the more tacit (or should that be simply "more subtle"?) homage to Alan J. Pakula's incredible thriller was the timbre and breathy tension of those piecemeal 'deepthroat' conversations.

Call it one of those intensely personal cinephilic moments

www.girishshambu.com/blog/2006/06/cinephiliac-moment.html call it fastidious but I find myself with a need to call it. Amid the mood board Fincher constructs with his picture's soundtrack, the countless sounds of the technology obsessively & compulsively used by the characters in the investigation envelop us as much as the era's languid funk and soul, as realised by Donovan, Gordon Lightfoot, Isaac Hayes and the whole gang.

Sound designer Ren Klyce has been with Fincher as a sound effects editor since "Se7en" (yes, "7", it's how the credits spell it -- damn the stigma of such pedantry all to hell). Richard Hymns, also Fincher's regular sound editor since "Fight Club", has a career stretching back to Lucasfilm in the 1980s and across an impressive array of Spielberg productions, riding (no doubt thunderous) shotgun alongside Gary Rydstrom and Ben Burtt and winning 3 Academy Awards and nominated for a further 4 for his toil.

Here they work almost (and rightly) imperceptible magic.

One simple, clipped static effect on the end of a phone, an effect they no doubt spent arduous hours refining and perfecting, meant the difference, to me, between a good picture and a great one.

In our favourite genre here at Frightfest, it's quite often the sound that makes the difference between a bearable picture and an unbearable one. I know one message board poster -- whose love of film scores surpasses my own -- that has probably sat through many a bad-to-execrable picture all because Christopher Young's gorgeously anarchic music soothes the vapid images ("Urban Legend", "Bless The Child", stand up and take a bow). More than any genre (save the Hollywood Musical, I suppose), sound design is a vital ingredient of the horror and the thriller. It's the reason we all lay awake at night wondering what that antagonising creak from downstairs might really be. A mouse? A killer mouse? A mouse with a blade? A mouse that's really a demented, suburban-weary serial killer with a massive hacksaw? Pzazu? A C.H.U.D.? Gary Busey? (you think that last one's ridiculous, tell that to Mimi Rogers and Michael McKean!) Dumb as some of those may be (except Gary Busey), some of our favourite pictures have probably encouraged us to fear things much more risible, uncanny and downright weird. And all with the help of sound.

Think of Mercedes McCambridge wailing and screeching in "The Exorcist"; George C Scott becoming harangued by a malevolent bathtub in "The Changeling"; "Them"'s giant ants squealing through the desert like demented harpies; "Pyscho"'s shrieking string shower; "Cat People"'s bus stop moment. The list is probably endless.

Here are five more scene stealing aurals that float this particular captain's boat:

1. "Blow Out": without a shadow of a doubt (Hitchcock allusion intended) De Palma's elegantly tragic thriller is one of my most favourite pictures. An exploitation heart pumps the chilled blood round its celluloid story of John Travolta’s skilled b-movie soundman, Jack Terry, who toils away his days, and more often his nights, creating sounds and screams to supplant the obtuse effect of derivative visuals and vapid starlets in a host of terrible slasher films with titles like "Co-ed Frenzy”. During a routine sound scout, he witnesses what appears to be a tragic car accident. But after rescuing the sole survivor of the crash, Sally (Nancy Allen), he’s drawn into the incidents aftermath and it appears much more is afoot than mere misfortune. His inquisitive (and, it’s revealed, somewhat self-destructive) sensibilities pull Jack and his new ward Sally further into the sinister and murderous affair involving corrupt senators, sleazy snitches and a maniacal killer played with admirable salaciousness by John Lithgow.

As I've written before on this very site, aside from being a rollickingly tense thriller, Blow Out is simply an unsung masterpiece of films about film. It’s a perfect distillation of every film nut's fear that eventually, as sure as day follows night, their obsession will consume their every waking thought, action and emotion. It's a portrait of the filmmaker's purgatory, deliciously grandiose, operatically tragic and hysterically funny all at the same time.

It's inconceivable that De Palma wouldn't have at least talked this idea over with Paul Schrader at some point, given he and Schrader’s collaboration on the similarly fraught tale, Obsession. It’s fortuitous then that Schrader didn't lend is scripting abilities to this project because his tautly puritanical, Protestant leanings would have stripped all the ripe hyperactive emotion with which De Palma's achingly Catholic guilt imbues his own screenplay. Horror is often emotional truth disguised as fantasy. Here, that truth, as played by Travolta, is laid bare with a raw honesty and genuine compassion quite unexpected in an essentially glossy skid row thriller. The dazzlingly controlled camera work and cutting by Vilmos Zsigmond and Paul Hirsch respectively parries with a score by Pino Donnagio that’s laced with romantic catastrophe the picture rolls, reels and eddies its way toward a punch line as mesmerising, audacious and devastating as Oldboy. In the picture's final seconds, a single, simple and grimly ironic sound gag encapsulates one man's spiritual destruction and despair at a modern world full of bastards and liars. You’ll never think of scream queens in quite the same way again.


2. "Inferno": halfway through Argento's kaleidoscopic fever-dream, Gabriel Lavia (something of a whipping boy for Argento in the late 70s -- though not quite to the extent John Morghan was for Lucio Fulci) is demonstrating his chivalrous nature, keeping neighbour Irene Miracle company as a storm ravages the electrify supply in their sumptuous and preposterously gothic New York apartment block. As Verdi churns merrily away on the funky retro turntable in an effort to calm the undulating atmosphere, the power flicks on and off at irregularly patterned intervals, the music and light dipping and ebbing away in stark unison. Through the unease of this disconcerting aural assault Lavia wanders away down a tenebrous (...sorry about that) corridor to investigate the fuse box, chirping reassuringly that Miracle has nothing to worry about while he's there. Until his voice disappears amid the staccato throng of Verdi's chorus and the apartment's faulty wiring. It's such a simple effect, but coupled with the almost impenetrable blue and red tinted gloom, it makes for one of Argento's most unsettling sequences of pure fright.
 

3. "Cat People": From the list up top, "Cat People" remains simultaneously the starkest, most effective, yet cheapest shock I can think of. Ever creative with their limited resources, producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur used a single street, perhaps a single street light and almost pure silence punctuated by one killer sound cue to illustrate the unease and terrifying spectre of Simone Signoret's descent into....whatever curse it is that seems to afflict her lineage. As Signoret's love rival Alice (Jane Randolph) hurries along what seems an unending street constructed out of incessant looming, shadowy bridges and imposing, prison-like brick walls, she's being pursued. By whom or by what we're never given a definitive answer to. And nor would we want one. Because Lewton and Tournuer's strengths lay in understanding that what we don't see (in the shadows, under the bed, outside the door or downstairs, making "that noise") is far more unnerving than anything that could really be captured on film. I won’t even hint at the noise that’s used, but it’s simple justly celebrated.

Vincent Minnelli's "The Bad & The Beautiful" pays explicit and wonderful homage to this particular instance of low-budget ingenuity. When Kirk Douglas’ first picture as producer is about to role before the camera: "Doom Of The Cat Men", we see that backstage the spectacle is far from fearsome -- a cluster of overweight extras being sewn into a series of hilariously moth-eaten furry animal costumes more panto than panic-striking. It's at that point that Douglas, in a small darkened screening booth and desperate to pull something from this catastrophic-looking situation in which their limited budget has placed them, turns to his director Fred and realises that people are afraid of the dark more than they are anything else. It’s a brilliant moment and a terrific summation of even a cheap horror picture's ability to haunt and affect us with the right, lithe and agile creative mind behind it.

4. "Audition": perhaps the most visible choice here, or at least the most seen (I'm guessing -- Tartan did a wonderful unleashing Takeshi Miike-proper on the country in 1999 despite a tiny amount of prints released nationwide, though of course many had initially caught up with this crazed creative through "Fudoh", much praised by Mitch Davis in Harvey Fenton’s terrific "Flesh & Blood" magazine). Of course everyone remembers the sack, the bowl of..."something" and the infamous needles from their first encounter with “Audition”. Miike, whether because of his perceived artistic profligacy based upon a love of anarchic splatter or because his pictures are chock-a-block with the kind of raucous heavy metal only Dario Argento circa 1986 could fall in love with, has never been heralded for his immaculate sound design. At least not in the way fellow Japanese filmmakers Hideo Nakata and Kiyoshi Kurosawa have been. Which isn't to say he's not well rounded technically. It just that this part of his palette often becomes lost amid the riotous sturm und drang of his restlessly perverse camera. For the most part.

In "Audition", there was one element that is always threatened by the overarching impact of needles in flesh and piano wire through tibia. It almost disappears beneath this grotesque body shock, yet it's also the one thing from most viewers were unable to escape. Hiding you precious eyes behind your fingers in the theatre and you'd still here that sound: 'kiri kiri kiri' -- 'deeper deeper deeper'. And how deep it goes, probing the viewer's mind more effectively than any dissonant music track or orchestral sting. All the sheered bone fragments in the world can't match that perfectly ghastly vocalisation of the torturous femme fatale at the centre of Miike's doomed romance.

5. "The Woman In Black": I haven't read Susan Hill's novel nor the stage adaptation of the same but Nigel Kneale's small screen adaptation of this most classically British of ghost stories remains an utterly nerve jangling experience. More exquisitely tense than it is outright terrifying (save the mighty payoff), it is its cumulative raising of heckles that truly delivers the fright in this nightmare of isolation, ghostly discovery and shattering of pragmatic beliefs.

In turn of the century East Coast of the UK, in the wonderfully named Eel Marsh House, Arthur Kidd a solicitor from London is attending to the artefacts of the late Mrs Drablow. In the house and the surrounding village, he discovers many murky goings on, superstitions and wild, folksy legends. I won't spoil the particulars of the titular woman; suffice it to say this is a slow, deliberate and methodical exercise in calculated atmosphere. And for the patient, it's terrifying. Not only do we get ghoulish noises emanating from the sea-mist-shrouded marshes but Kidd also discovers, amongst Mrs Drablow's belongings, a series of wax recordings detailing her fears, confessions and theories about all the mysterious occurrences in and around Eel March House. Director Herbert Wise -- an unassuming helmer of middling UK TV series, mini-series and soaps -- utilizes a remarkable array of aural tricks with which to entrap the viewer in a shroud of unease and discomfort. It's proper old-fashioned theatrics, something the stage play does with a single set, lights and -- of course -- sound.

Unavailable for an age on any home format, though "grey" copies are probably easy enough to find -- not that we condone any of that brand of activity at GITS -- it's one of the great unreleased pieces of UK television. With Kneale's other grand ghost story "The Stone Tapes" so celebrated and given a decent DVD treatment from the BFI recently, it's a shame that this superb slice of shock remains elusive and unappreciated by a generation of horror lovers now pumped up by such quietly exquisite tales as "Ringu" and "The Others".

Anymore? Take it to the boards.

In a limp line-up for new releases this week, we have

"Hills Have Eyes 2" - Alexander Aja's remake of Wes Craven's grimy fan favourite was as, in truth, no better or worse than that often loudly praised but still low key 70s shocker. Lacking the raw sense of place and terror that Craven effortlessly exerted throughout much of his pre-"Shocker" career (and I'm including the underrated "Deadly Blessing" in that number), Aja's picture certainly made up for it in visceral style and perverse thrills and set pieces. The short sequence involving first the gas station attendant and then Ted Levine's ghastly demise was one of the finest and fiercest pieces of horror for some time.

GITS missed Martin Weisz’s "Hill Have Eyes 2" during its cinema run earlier this year but this quickly, professionally packaged sequel seems to follow “Dog Soldiers”’ route of pitting thrill-seeking grunts against the radioactive foe to bloody, bleak effect. Lacking the personalities of a real family unit, no matter how thinly sketched, is presumably missed in favour of all manner of gung-ho antics. It also means that any semblance of the "innate primal instinct of the everyman" subtext from the original film is done away with. Trained warriors battling monstrous villains just doesn't seem as identifiably horrific, no matter how ballsy the action sequences. Which is a shame since the hysterical, vicious finale of Aja's picture with its crimson-soaked hero, howling like a beast as he dispatched (what he thought was) the last of the mutant family was an efficiently harrowing climax.

In keeping with Fox Atomic's more action-led approach horror sequels (see, also, the terrific "28 Weeks Later") it's good to see the studio production values being used more effectively than Platinum Dunes, and scoring some decent profits in return. Wouldn't it be wonderful if someone used those bountiful resources to really scare us again -- as this picture's extremely effective and far more subdued teaser trailer did with deft and witty style.

"Evil Bong" - this is legendary 80s horror mogul Charles Band's new slice of nonsense-looking comedy horror under his Wizard Entertainment banner. It's a film about weed so, of course, by international law, it has to feature one of Cheech and Chong. Since Cheech Marin is too busy doing bigger budget stuff, it must fall to stand-up comedian and liberal campaigner/fallguy Tommy Chong to step into this possessed “smoke-a-bowl” quickie and no doubt pick up a paycheck for humbly exploiting the reputation of his own good-natured Lou Alder-produced romps from the 1970s.

Band's recent hour-long long "Decadent Evil" was the worst kind of "make-do", digitally-shot, horror with no real flesh, gore, thrills or scares to be seen in its scant running time. That “Evil Bong” is shot on film and longer than 65 minutes signals hope for a return to Full Moon Entertainment’s late-80s/early-90s form as the king of diverting horror trash -- all of which bore the reassuring legend “From an idea by Charles Band” (yes, even “Dollman” and “Demonic Toys” and that one with the Blue Oyster Cult soundtrack were fast paced, frequently goofy and enjoyable.) The possibilities for gory, hallucinogenic fun are numerous (and the potential for excruciatingly sophomoric dope skits endless). Let's hope they're at least diverting enough to attract more than nightshift workers or students looking for a late night laugh. The online buzz from the fickle and demanding fan world seems good so we can hope it’s at least half as good as “Puppet Master”.