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Kate Hazelton (Marsha Hunt), her brother-in-law Dick (Arthur Franz) and Kate's pregnant sister Mandy (Peggie Castle) have come to a small coastal town where Dick once lived for a nice, relaxing holiday. Alas, doom hangs over the holiday. Mandy has been hearing voices where there should be none to hear, and soon enough not only loses her child thanks to that particular state of mind, but also loses her identity. Very suddenly, Mandy takes on the personality of Dick's first wife Felicia.

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Kate Hazelton (Marsha Hunt), her brother-in-law Dick (Arthur Franz) and Kate's pregnant sister Mandy (Peggie Castle) have come to a small coastal town where Dick once lived for a nice, relaxing holiday. Alas, doom hangs over the holiday. Mandy has been hearing voices where there should be none to hear, and soon enough not only loses her child thanks to that particular state of mind, but also loses her identity. Very suddenly, Mandy takes on the personality of Dick's first wife Felicia. Suddenly, she doesn't recognize Kate anymore, violently dislikes the family dog, acts like an unpleasantly manipulative monster and - most horrible of all - calls her husband by the nickname of "Dicken". Clearly, it's a mental problem caused by the shock of losing the baby, the local doctor diagnoses! Yet how come Mandy even knows about Felicia, whom Dick (for semi-understandable reasons, we'll later on learn) never mentioned to her at all?

Things become even stranger once Mandy/Felicia has gotten it into her head to visit Felicia's parents. There, she not only convinces her mother of her identity as Felicia, but Kate and Dick, too, for she knows things about Felicia Mandy has no way of knowing.

Dick is convinced that the whole possession problem is the fault of Felicia's mother for the whole family has been dabbling in the occult, and we all know how these people get when their loved ones die.

Kate and Dick decide they're going to do everything in their powers to get Mandy back, which in practice means they (mostly Kate) are going to do a bit of investigating and will be threatened by supernaturally induced pains, Felicia's unnecessarily murderous nature and a cult leader with a French name and a German accent (Otto Reichow).

Stories about dead women possessing the bodies of their former husbands' new wives aren't exactly typical of US horror movies from the 50s (though not completely unheard of), so Charles Marquis Warren's Back from the Dead already has something going for it with its basic plot. Adding some occultism and quite a few hints at nasty psychological complexity is an even better idea, so I think reading scriptwriter Catherine Turney's novel "The Other One" this is based on lies in my near future, seeing how cheap used paperback copies of the book are. The whole set-up reminds me of something Val Lewton's RKO unit could have done during the 40s.

Unfortunately, the Lewton comparison ends there, because Back from the Dead's execution is by far not as successful and interesting as its script - or at least its script's basic ideas - may promise. Director Charles Marquis Warren isn't doing a horrible job, but he doesn't really seem to know how to produce the creepy mood his material calls for, nor does he do anything to emphasize the psychological (and other) ambiguities the script hints at (the sister rivalry, the sexual tensions, questions of identity etc., etc.). Warren is doing a straight point and shoot job, which is no job at all when it comes to psychologically oriented horror.

And it's not as if the script were perfect. Despite all its innate interest, there are some curious problems and omissions. To just take the obvious example, the film spends next to no time with Mandy as Mandy, making her change into Felicia seem premature and not as dramatic as the film pretends it is, sabotaging any possibility for Peggie Castle to play the two women using one body differently from each other, which would surely have packed more of an emotional punch for the audience.

Nonetheless, if you are able to adjust your expectations accordingly, Back from the Dead is a decent little film that may not fulfil what a promises, but at least tries something without failing completely.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,horror,charles marquis warren,peggie castle,marsha hunt

Allan Kelley (Paul Birch), his wife Carol (Lorna Thayer) and their college-aged-yet-acting-like-twelve-for-most-of-the-time daughter Sandra (Dona Cole) are living in the desert, running a date ranch (interesting question for a non-American: why isn't it a date farm?) without much success. Helping them out is a mute, mentally ill, and more than slightly creepy man the family only calls "Him" (Leonard Tarver), for they can't be bothered to find out his actual name.

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Allan Kelley (Paul Birch), his wife Carol (Lorna Thayer) and their college-aged-yet-acting-like-twelve-for-most-of-the-time daughter Sandra (Dona Cole) are living in the desert, running a date ranch (interesting question for a non-American: why isn't it a date farm?) without much success. Helping them out is a mute, mentally ill, and more than slightly creepy man the family only calls "Him" (Leonard Tarver), for they can't be bothered to find out his actual name.

The Kelleys are as troubled a family as you'll encounter in 50s SF horror. Allan feels emasculated over the lack of success of his business and tends to put his work before his family, Carol has been turned quite nasty thanks to being confined to the family ranch with no human contact at all (unlike Allan, she doesn't even get to see the neighbours), and Sandy clearly has her reasons to want to leave for College as soon as she can.

Fortunately, the titular creature (spoiler: that thing with the million eyes is a metaphor, as the alien explains before the plot starts) has landed in the desert close to the family's farm, destroying Carol's much-loved glass and porcelain wares in the process via a nasty high-pitched noise, and there's nothing better to get a family back together than an alien invasion.

At first, the alien turns the local wildlife aggressive, leading to an unconvincing bird attack, the most polite attack by family dog ever put to film, and one of the neighbours being nearly killed by his cow (ending his "comical" antics, so well done, cow). Eventually, the alien does turn its mental powers on the "weaker minded" humans around, putting the mind whammy on "Him" and trying its luck with Sandra, but Allan and Carol find a very hippie-esque way to deal with the problem.

The Beast With A Million Eyes is a very early Roger Corman production, with a belaboured and painful production history featuring unconvinced ("Where is the monster?" - "Why, it's invisible!" - "No way!" - "Oh, alright, have a hand puppet!") distributors and pissed off unions (turns out unions don't like it when you try to get around paying union rates - who knew!?). It's probable that the film's official director David Kramarsky didn't do any directing at all, and that Corman did the rush-job himself, making this the great man's second stint on the director's chair.

This early in his career, Corman wasn't quite as good at working around the problems of a miniscule budget as he would soon become, and so The Beast is plagued by a number of expected problems, like too many scenes of desperately unexciting filler scenes of people walking through the desert, acting that is all over the place (though sometimes - especially from Thayer and Birch - pretty good for a change), an inappropriate but free soundtrack of classical music, entirely unconvincing to ridiculous (cow attacks are never ever frightening) animal attacks, and a climax that is only exciting if you really like to watch people talk to a kettle-like contraption in the desert. Let's not even talk about the monster, except to mention that this is the first bit of work Paul Blaisdell did for Corman.

On the positive side, the film's script has more than just one good idea. The first twenty minutes, which are predominantly spent on the family's troubles, are excellent, showing a group of people whose love has faded thanks to the horrors of day to day life, and even allowing Thayer's Carol more complexity than just making her a bitch. In this context, I can't even fault the film for the woozy idea of people loving each other again being the solution to their alien problems. It might work out too pat, but putting the emphasis on the love instead of the duty in familial relations seems like a very un-50s and un-conservative thing to do. It's also pretty neat that one of the plot points setting up the film's happy end for the family is that Allan finally bothers to find out "Him"'s real name, giving him back the full humanity the family had denied the man until then (not that it helps the poor guy survive, but it's not as if modern movies would treat the mentally ill much better; after all, there's nobody shouting at producers and writers for the slightest transgression real or imagined or supposed towards them for them).

The film's ropy execution may generally overwhelm the script's intelligence and humanity, however, I do prefer a film that tries something and fails to one that doesn't try anything and still fails, so I can't help but like The Beast With A Million Eyes more than its actual quality deserves.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,roger corman,paul birch,lorna thayer,sf,horror

I hardly need to tell anyone that Robert Siodmak's thriller comes close to early perfection of the form (and is stylistically closer to my heart than Hitchcock's comparable films, but let's not go there), nor that the biggest hurdles it has overcome for a modern viewer are its alcoholism-based comic relief, its jerky romantic lead (who fortunately isn't important to the narrative at all and disappears from it early on - it's a film most interested in its female characters), and what can be read as its ableist tendencies.

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I hardly need to tell anyone that Robert Siodmak's thriller comes close to early perfection of the form (and is stylistically closer to my heart than Hitchcock's comparable films, but let's not go there), nor that the biggest hurdles it has overcome for a modern viewer are its alcoholism-based comic relief, its jerky romantic lead (who fortunately isn't important to the narrative at all and disappears from it early on - it's a film most interested in its female characters), and what can be read as its ableist tendencies. Siodmak overcomes most of these problems through the sheer beauty of his filmmaking, an eye for mood-building detail and a sense for filmic rhythm that just stops this viewer from thinking about possible flaws in the narrative. It's the sort of film that establishes its position as a period piece and the character of its lead by having her visit a silent movie.

With the high quality of filmmaking (Nicholas Musuraca's photography being another special point of beauty) a given, what I found most remarkable rewatching The Spiral Staircase was, how much of the film visually pre-shadows the giallo. There are shots and scenes that will later be quoted (by Bava and Argento, for example) and re-quoted (by directors unconsciously quoting Bava's quotes) in just about every Italian film of the genre you'd care to mention. No genre is, of course, without its predecessors, but I've seldom seen a whole genre (except for the sleaze and the colour) so close to coming into existence twenty years before the fact.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,thoughts,robert siodmak,dorothy mcguire,thriller

aka Fashion Hell

Original title: Fasshon heru

Little do the friends of freshly eloped - and virginal! - Nakatsu (Yuya Ishikawa) expect that dragging their unwilling (eloped plus virgin plus thinking paying women for sex is morally problematic does make a guy awkward in this kind of situation, it seems - who knew!?) buddy into a "massage" parlour to celebrate his leaving their amateur baseball team will lead to lost primary sexual organs, fountains of blood, and death.

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aka Fashion Hell

Original title: Fasshon heru

Little do the friends of freshly eloped - and virginal! - Nakatsu (Yuya Ishikawa) expect that dragging their unwilling (eloped plus virgin plus thinking paying women for sex is morally problematic does make a guy awkward in this kind of situation, it seems - who knew!?) buddy into a "massage" parlour to celebrate his leaving their amateur baseball team will lead to lost primary sexual organs, fountains of blood, and death.

For this very special parlour is owned by an unseen man who likes to watch everything going on there via hidden cameras and pays the three prostitutes working there - Nonoko (Asami), Kaori (Mint Suzuki), and Nagisa (Saori Hara) - not to have sex with men for money (we call that the traditional option), but to cut off their clients' penises and kill them (yup, in that order), so that he can then do whatever with those darling sexual organs.

Two out of three amateur baseball players are soon enough emasculated, but Nakatsu is lucky. His hesitation in betraying his fiancée and the fact that Nagisa isn't quite as happy with the penis-cutting business as her colleagues save his manhood. But will his semi-innocence be enough to save him, his friends and Nagisa?

If you're even only slightly acquainted with the ways of exploitation cinema, you will be not at all surprised that the bubble of Japanese film-makers surrounding saintly Noboru Iguchi not only have one foot in the regular pinku business, but also dabble in movies that fuse that genre's softcore sex with the merry gore and slight to outright craziness of their other films. Horny House (which actually is a better English title for the movie at hand than Fashion Hell, because the latter title is based on an untranslatable pun) was directed by Jun Tsugita, whose first real movie as a director (after a lot of writing work) it seems to be.

Despite my status as a self-declared admirer of this particular part of what's left of Japan's exploitation movie industry, I did not go into Horny House expecting much of it; there is after all a sad but long tradition of sex comedies being completely unfunny and of attempts to mix pinku (or any kind of softcore sex, really) and horror movies being generally without success in the sexiness or horror parts of the equation. Colour me confused when I frequently laughed about the (admittedly low-brow) humour, did not mind the (not actually made to be titillating) sex scenes and found myself looking forward to the next mutilation.

Most of the film's success for me lies in its more than decent script. While Tsugita doesn't seem to be anything special as a director (though he does nothing problematic in this role), he sure does know how to write a low budget movie taking place in about four rooms without having to bloat it up with half an hour of filler. For my tastes, Tsugita's sense of timing and escalation make much of the film, and turn what could be a drab experience into a pleasant seventy minutes. Pleasant, that is, if you like blood fountains, random Sonny Chiba karate movie jokes, and bitten off penises, and do agree with me that having a black censorship circle only on the tips of hacked off sexual organs is hilarious. Well, and the actors seem to have fun, too.

Plus, nekkid people.

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese movies,in short,jun tsugita,asami,saori hara,yuya ishikawa,comedy,horror,pinku

Warning: here be rather large, yet unavoidable spoilers.

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Warning: here be rather large, yet unavoidable spoilers.

After having spent time in a mental institution (or loony bin, as he and everyone else how ever was in one calls it) to help him get over his suicidal depression, Ken Boyd (Kevin Corrigan) walks through his life with the shell-shocked expression of somebody neither able nor willing to take the risk of actually beginning to live again. Ken has moved back in with his - deadpanning and sarcastic - mother (Karen Black, truly delightfully deadpan) and works in the local ice cream parlour, where he frequently has to take on the undignified job of dressing up as an ice cream cone. His life is pretty horrible, but at least nothing is happening in it.

That is, until Ken's eleven years old daughter Amy (Ariel Gade, who actually manages to be as charming as the script wants her to be, no mean feat in the nightmare world of child actors) steps into his life. Amy's the product of a one-week-relationship, and until now, her mother was able to pretend her father just disappeared. However, once happenstance leads Amy to the truth, the girl decides to get to know her father, if he thinks he's too much of a fuck-up to be one or not. Amy decides to move in with Ken for a week, and she sure isn't going to take no for an answer.

Spending time with Amy slowly opens up something in Ken, and with the girl's encouragement, he even begins dating British ex-pat Stephanie (Lucy Davis, still orange).

However, while all this has been going on, the small town Ken lives in has been hit by a series of murders. The victims are all major pricks, and, though the Sheriff (Barry Bostwick, just as deadpan as Black) - who just happens to be the boyfriend of Ken's Mum - doesn't realize it for quite some time, were once involved in a flashback-inducing traumatic event for Ken. In fact, there's a lot the Sheriff doesn't know that implicates Ken to the audience as a serial killer, and soon enough, Amy will have to share our point of view.

Colour me confused, for Some Guy Who Kills People was made by Jack Perez, the director and writer of Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus and other crap, yet it is actually pretty darn good. It's a clear demonstration of the fact that putting one's heart into a movie leads to much better results than putting in self-serving irony.

Not that Some Guy is free of irony or humour, it being a comedy and all, but this is not the sort of film that points at itself and shouts "Look how crap I am! Now laugh at me!". Most of the film's humour is of a rather more deadpan type that is in my mind part of the US indie movie tradition. It's the sort of humour that points out the absurdity of the situation the characters are in, and finds the funny in the quiet horribleness of Ken's life, but never stoops to making fun of people's pain. And there's a lot of pain to go around, for Some Guy's greatest strength is the quiet and honest way it shows its characters' unhappiness. There are no big dramatic break-downs, instead, Corrigan's stooped shoulders, and Gade's often a bit too ready smile are all the Perez needs to demonstrate how his characters are feeling for most of the running time.

However, Some Guy isn't only a film out to explain how much life sucks, but also one willing to suggest that yes, it might get better. I'm nearly tempted to use the word "heart-warming" like some of my more courageous movie-loving peers do when talking about the film, if that particular word didn't suggest a kitschiness neither Perez' quiet and unassuming film nor the nuanced performances of the cast have anything to do with.

Ironically, given my general tastes and unflinching pretend-cynicism (surely, I've never cried while watching Doctor Who), it's the film's horror part I find the least convincing. For one, I'm not sure if Ken's and Amy's story actually needs the serial killer plot at all, and while it certainly isn't anathema to the rest of the film, that aspect of the movie also feels a bit superfluous. It sure doesn't help that the film's indictment of Ken for the murders does not really play fair with the audience, showing things to make us think Ken really is the killer that don't seem believable anymore once we know he isn't.

On the other hand, the serial killer plot is so minor in its impact compared with the interplay between the main characters that its lack of success doesn't pull down the film too far. It may be keeping Some Guy Who Kills People from being a perfect film, yet it still is highly recommended one.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,comedy,horror,drama,jack perez,kevin corrigan,barry bostwick,karen black,ariel gade,lucy davis

Horror has been with the human race pretty  much since our origin as a species. Fear lives deep in the reptilian brain and we’ve always used storytelling to help us deal with the shit that freaks us out.

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Horror has been with the human race pretty  much since our origin as a species. Fear lives deep in the reptilian brain and we’ve always used storytelling to help us deal with the shit that freaks us out. As our means of telling stories progressed, horror travelled with us and it was a natural progression [...]

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Technorati-Markierungen: music,music monday,tomasz stanko

After an unpleasant divorce, writer John James (Kevin Costner) moves with his teenage daughter Louisa (Ivana Baquero) and younger son Sam (Gattlin Griffith) to Mercy, South Dakota, or rather, a lonely house in the woods near Mercy, South Dakota.

Not surprisingly, the children aren't exactly happy about the move. Sam's a bit too young to actually understand what's going on, and seems mostly afraid and confused, while Louisa - in the throes of puberty and now half a country away from all her friends - blames herself, her father and her mother in turn.

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After an unpleasant divorce, writer John James (Kevin Costner) moves with his teenage daughter Louisa (Ivana Baquero) and younger son Sam (Gattlin Griffith) to Mercy, South Dakota, or rather, a lonely house in the woods near Mercy, South Dakota.

Not surprisingly, the children aren't exactly happy about the move. Sam's a bit too young to actually understand what's going on, and seems mostly afraid and confused, while Louisa - in the throes of puberty and now half a country away from all her friends - blames herself, her father and her mother in turn.

The family's situation doesn't improve when Louisa discovers the burial mound in the woods behind the house. The male members of the family seem somewhat repelled by the place, but for Louisa, it fastly becomes a retreat from everything that ails her. However, contact with the place begins to change her: she starts sleepwalking, gets a curious rash on her neck and upper back, and all of a sudden acts much rougher than the rather timid girl she was before. She's not just getting more assertive against bullies than is generally considered correct, but also begins to experiment with (slightly) shorter skirts and make-up. And that really is just the beginning.

At first, John thinks Louisa's changed behaviour is another consequence of the divorce and the move, but the longer things go on, and the more like a stranger his daughter becomes, the more his conviction grows that there's some outside force changing Louisa. Being a writer and therefore knowledgeable in the ways of the search engine, he begins to research and stumbles upon the sad story of the former owners of his home that includes a changed teenage girl, a run-away mother and a death. Below that, though, lies something more ancient.

In theory, Luiso Berdejo's (whom you may know as the co-writer of the [Rec] movies) The New Daughter should be a film right up my alley: an Americanization of a short story by John Connolly from the author's excellent collection Nocturnes with clear nods in the direction of Arthur Machen, shot atmospherically and with obvious love for detail, well-acted (even Kevin Costner is perfectly alright when he for once doesn't salute flags or explain the sanctity of baseball or said flags), and all-around solidly made.

Alas, in practice, the film turns out to be rather limp and ineffectual. It is one of those films that clearly prides itself on following modern Hollywood's beloved three act structure as closely as if scriptwriter John Travis had written the handbook on it, leaving us with a film that might as well have ended after thirty minutes, for everything that's going to happen after the set-up is going to happen exactly by the book. It's the sort of film where you can be sure that a gun that was buried early on in the proceedings will be dug out again and used later on, for what is good writing if not following rules Anton Chekhov set up once that never were meant to be strict rules every writer has to follow in the future? As it turns out, slavishly following the rules and regulations of the craft isn't good writing, but riskless writing.

As if that weren't bland enough, the film also spends too much of its running time spelling out its metaphors and themes (adolescent female sexuality is so frightening for dads, don't you know? also, it's icky) so clearly that even the idea of ambiguity or (oh noes!) openness to diverging interpretations of what's going on seems preposterous. The audience, after all, should never have to think for itself. We are dumb and need to be told.

Having said that, I also have to make it clear that The New Daughter isn't a bad movie at all, it's just a movie so aggressively lacking in life and actual imagination that it made me wish for an actual bad movie. Those films do at least know how to surprise.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,luiso berdejo,horror,kevin costner,reviews

If there's a more peculiar and specific way to make a guy feel old than Tomas Alfredson's rather brilliant John le Carré adaptation just found for me, I don't really want to know what it is. What got me was the (in fact pretty obvious, but I've never pretended to be able to see the obvious before it bites me in the ass) realization that you can adapt the good novels of John le Carré today only by turning them into period pieces, which feels slightly off to someone who does remember the Cold War as more than just a more or less exciting background for movies.

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If there's a more peculiar and specific way to make a guy feel old than Tomas Alfredson's rather brilliant John le Carré adaptation just found for me, I don't really want to know what it is. What got me was the (in fact pretty obvious, but I've never pretended to be able to see the obvious before it bites me in the ass) realization that you can adapt the good novels of John le Carré today only by turning them into period pieces, which feels slightly off to someone who does remember the Cold War as more than just a more or less exciting background for movies.

Anyhow, Alfredson not only makes his film a period piece, but also a film heavily reminiscent in spirit of the sort of film major Hollywood studios in the 70s - before the arrival of the blockbuster and long before a whole industry seemingly turned to prefer whining about piracy while making huge profits instead of actually trying to make movies worth paying for - still dared to produce: slow, based on grown-up characters having grown-up character feelings, talky, and sure not only of their own intelligence, but also of their audience's intelligence. Alfredson's film displays a subtlety and a trust in the ability of his actors to emphasise the complexity of their characters without becoming showy that is extraordinary, and that is - not surprisingly - repaid by those actors in form of brilliant, subtle and nuanced performances worthy of a script and direction just as subtle and nuanced.

Thematically, Tinker, Tailor is a movie not only about the paranoia that comes with the spy territory, but also one asking questions about loyalty, trust, the necessity of the little betrayals that get people through the day, it's also a movie especially centring around the question if there actually is something like a little betrayal; are the little betrayals perhaps more destructive in the long run?

Tinker, Tailor's biggest strength is that it doesn't answer these questions cleanly, even though it ties up its complex narrative of double-crosses and small and large cruelties clearly enough. A mystery like the one of the Russian double agent in the British intelligence services, can, after all, be solved with finality; it's just it's emotional costs and emotional reasons that truly can't.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,in short,spies,tomas alfredson,gary oldman,benedict cumberbatch,john hurt