THE CATACOMBS OF FILM

Rampo Noir (Japan 2005)
Directed by Suguru Takeuchi, Akio Jissoji, Hisayasu Sato, Atsushi Kaneko

If RAMPO NOIR is a good example of the marketing phenomenon known as ‘J-Horror’ then I think I might give the others in this genre a miss. An anthology movie by three different directors, with an impenetrable opening sequence involving a naked man and a lake, the film purports to ‘adapt’ (I use the term loosely but not as loosely as the people who made the film) three stories by the Japanese writer Edogawa Rampo, whose tales of cruelty and psychological horror haven’t been translated into English much, although there is a nice little paperback from Tuttle publishing that includes both ‘The Hell of Mirrors’ and ‘The Caterpillar’ which have both been filmed here.
The first story proper, then, is the mirror segment, which adds to its bare bones source a plot about women being discovered with their faces burned off. It turns out they all have hand mirrors made by one particular man, who ends up inside the mirrored sphere of the original tale, but not before engaging in some presumably ‘controversial’ bondage-and-hot-wax shenanigans with a lady who looks anything but pleased about the whole thing.

The second is ‘The Caterpillar’ – possibly the most outrageous story in the collection, and certainly the cruellest, most despairing, and something that could form the basis for a painful, tragic meditation on loss and desire. Instead what we get is something that tries to be film as modern art but comes across more like something from Garth Marenghi. The ending is laughable, although the loudest guffaws from the audience I saw it with were reserved for the final story.

I haven’t read ‘Crawling Bugs’ but I suspect it may be a psychological horror tale worthy of Ramsey Campbell. Unfortunately its execution is confusing rather than ambiguous, and the denouement utterly silly rather than overtly repulsive.

What makes me perhaps more vitriolic than I might otherwise have been is that having read some of Rampo’s stories they’re actually quite good, but they seem to have been hijacked by filmmakers determined to subject characters you can neither sympathise with nor relate to in situations where there is little or no attempt made to suspend disbelief during some of the dullest and most arty-farty bollocks I have ever seen in my life.

As I have said, my disbelief was not suspended one little bit, although perhaps whoever was responsible for this overly arty self-indulgent drivel should be, preferably from a great height.

30 Days of Night (US 2007)
Directed by David Slade

I’ve always found it a bit odd that, while the success of the Universal pictures of the 30s and the Hammer film of the 50s & 60s was very much based on their ability to make good vampire movies, and despite the persisting popularity of this fairly tired subgenre, modern Hollywood seems to be absolutely hopeless at it. UNDERWORLD? VAN HELSING? JOHN CARPENTER’S VAMPIRES? All rubbish. I saw this new one today, boasting a “radical new take” on the modern film & TV treatment of vampires (i.e. this time make them all complete and utter bastards) an intriguing plot idea (the town the vampires attack is dark for 30 days once each year) and some appropriately noughties modifications to vampire lore (no stakes, crucifixes or garlic, just axes to chop their heads off with and a bloody great grinding machine to drop them into). And guess what? It’s still rubbish. Actually it’s not the concept to blame here but the director, who sets up all the characters nicely in the first half hour and then blows it by generating little or no suspense and having people do the most idiotic things to create more incident. I won’t go into the plot, such as it is, any more in case anyone wants to see it. But it really really annoyed me. The setting and the production design is fabulous and should have been an opportunity for some breathtaking shots, but there are hardly any. In fact half the time I felt as if I was watching an early 80s Italian movie – the widescreen framing is occasionally impressive but frequently atrocious, with far too many close-ups of talking heads (or rather framing of eyes to lips). Whole segments of film seem to be missing, so that characters are suddenly somewhere else talking about events that should have been visual and dramatic highlights but just aren’t there, some scenes inexplicably cut jarringly just before their violent payoff, and actors spout silly dialogue that you would assume was dubbed but isn’t. The music score is one of the worst I have ever come across, sounding like someone dragging a piece of corrugated metal along the ground. I know many people are going to trash Saw IV for being utter nonsense but at least it felt like nonsense made with a little bit of integrity. This is something made by someone with no feel for the genre at all. There is not an ounce of dread or suspense in its overlong running time. In fact the kindest things I can bring myself to say about it is that it’s far more of a tribute to the Grindhouse aesthetic than Tarantino’s Death Proof. But for all the wrong reasons. And just to prove how much I hated it I don’t even feel better for writing this.

The Zombie Dead (Italy 1980)
Directed by Andrea Bianchi

Ah, the early eighties, when the Italian film industry decided that it had nothing better to do than churn out a series of rip-offs of George A Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, phenomenally successful on its release in Italy as ‘Zombi’. Lucio Fulci was quickest off the mark and so his film became Zombi 2 in his homeland and Zombie Flesheaters in the UK. There were several candidates for the title of ‘Zombi 3’ including another Fulci effort and the film under review here, which went out under the title of Burial Ground in the US and is now on UK DVD with an altered title but an uncut print for those two or three people who have been awaiting its arrival.

It’s directed (to use the term in its loosest context) by Andrea Bianchi and it wins hands down as the worst of this specific sub-sub-sub genre of film (except maybe for Jean Rollin’s ‘Zombie Lake’, but that’s a different story).

The plot involves the time-honoured simple set-up of a group of people trapped in a country house because flesh-eating warrior monks have been brought back to life by the Professor who lives there (if this encourages you to see this film then believe me, reading about it is a lot more fun, and quicker, than subjecting yourself to the 81 minute running time). This being a European horror film these characters behave like X-Rated soap opera rejects with various marital disharmonies, perversions and one very, very strange mother-son relationship (popular Italian actress Mariangela Giordano at a career low). Cue a series of boringly-directed close-encounters with the zombies accompanied by that strange wheezing and burping synthesiser soundtrack so popular in films of this type. “They move so slowly,” say a character at one point “we might as well let them in!” leading to the predictably inevitable disembowelments with an especially bizarre fate in store for Mariangela. The film rounds everything off with a final act of hilarious ineptitude. As the monster wave their rotting hands over the face of helpless (but really rather pretty) Karyn Weil we are treated to a caption which claims to be an excerpt from the ‘Profecy (sic) of the Black Spider’, which amongst other thing promises us ‘Nigths of Terror’ Presumably the budget couldn’t stretch to correcting typos.

Extras on the disc include what look like exhaustive filmographies for each and every cast member and also for director Bianchi. Otherwise you get the usual bunch of Vipco trailers and that’s about it. A hilarious bottom of the barrel zombie gut-muncher that you too could probably make on a few spare weekends in the country.

Le Rose de Fer (France 1973)
Directed by Jean Rollin

Is Jean Rollin any good? Therein lies a question, the answer to which is probably 'No', but his work, which often tends to consist of scantily clad young French ladies draped over rotting castle battlements has a peculiar appeal that I find hard to shake off. I also quite like his minimalist style if I'm in the right mood. For example, 'La Rose de Fer' is meant to be about a couple who get lost in a huge graveyard and then end up wandering around it. Quite a few of his films (Le Viol du Vampire, La Vampire Nue') leave you wondering quite why you're sitting watching such nonsense, but 'Fascination' is a little gem, and 'The Living Dead Girl' is both very bloodstained and very tragic. I think his heart is in the right place.

It's not a bad little film at all if you need a hit of slow, atmospheric Euro art-house horror. A lot better than most of Jean Rollin's other films, this is often criticised for being very slow and having little substance, both of which are true, but if you like this sort of thing (as I do), then you’ll probably agree with me that the first 10-15 minutes are wonderful. The post-credit sequence of shots of a rotting French town make you wonder what Rollin could do with some of Ramsey Campbell’s work, or even HP Lovecraft. Francoise Pascal plays the female lead and is gorgeous, being used to much better effect here than she ever was in British crap like Norman Warren's 'Loving Feeling' , Hazel Adair's atrocious sex 'comedies' or, God forbid, ITV's 'Mind Your Language' The graveyard is huge and Rollin almost manages to give it a personality all its own.

Redemption's budget-priced DVD is quite a nice print, although this being a Nigel Wingrove release there has to be something about nuns somewhere & I'll leave that for you to find in the extras if you're keen.

Severance (UK 2006)
Directed by Christopher Smith

Some say the world exists in a state of balance. For every Yin there is a Yang, for every Heaven a Hell, for every episode of Funland a hundred episodes of Big Brother and so on. Having watched one of the very worst horror films I am ever likely to see just before this (Neil LaBute’s terrible remake of The Wicker Man) it filled me with joy to see the balance redressed with a film that restored my faith in modern horror movie making, and the fact that it was British just made it all the sweeter.

Severance is directed by Bristolian Christopher Smith, whose previous feature, ‘Creep’, I found wasted a good setting and had an underdeveloped storyline and dislikeable characters, which just makes his second effort all the more of a surprise. A group of office workers are off on a teambuilding weekend in Hungary. They get lost in a forest and end up having to deal with areas filled with landmines, huge mantraps, and psychotic guerrillas armed with flamethrowers, machine guns, and very big knives. So far, so we’ve-seen-it-all-before, but Severance has several things going for it that many of its predecessors in the being-chased-around-the-woods subgenre have sadly lacked. Firstly the acting is very good right across the board – the characters are fleshed out well and quickly endear themselves to the audience. Tim McInnerney does a great job as the unpleasant, ineffectual leader of the group whose exit scène nevertheless elicits genuine sympathy, pretty Laura Harris (from ‘Dead Like Me’) shows she can do more than be the brittle blonde, and Danny Dyer is very good as well as the dope head with a constant supply of spliffs and ecstasy who’s never quite sure if what is happening to him is real or not. The direction is right on the button, which is all the more of an achievement when you take into account that the script veers between hilarity and out and out horror, yet Smith never makes a mistake – this is one of the few films where I have literally been chortling merrily one minute and then genuinely horrified the next. And by the time the characters meet their demise you’re truly sorry (and in at least one case really upset) to see them go.

The film has been plugged as being another Shaun of the Dead. It isn’t. Whereas Simon Pegg & Edgar Wright’s film was essentially a comedy with gory bits, Severance is a genuine horror film that manages to seamlessly include bits that make you really laugh. In fact my spine tingled quite a few times with the sheer deliciousness of the whole endeavour.. My God this is good. Unreservedly recommended.

Paradise Lost (US 2006)
Directed by John Stockwell

Or 'Turistas' as it was known in the US - the film was retitled over here to avoid confusing the masses who apparently might have presumed that indicated a subtitled movie.

Here's the plot - bright young attractive things backpack to Brazil and end up having their organs taken out by a psychopathic South American surgeon for transplantation into his local patients as 'payback' for what the US has done to his country.

This story could have been loads of fun. In fact as I watched I could feel the political allegory and pithy dialogue writing itself. Sadly that's where it stayed -in my head. In terms of quality Paradise Lost is down there with Zombie Holocaust, although at least when Donald O'Brien trepanned Sherry Buchanan he used the right incision. You'll never get a kidney out through that my friend was my only thought as the villain somehow manage to disembowel a naked young lady without the aid of a general anaesthetic. Don't bother with this one unless you're writing your thesis on the 'let's go somewhere foreign and get killed' subgenre. Bet you someone's doing it, and it’s doubtless going to provide lots of academic beard stroking in years to come, whether it deserves it or not (I don't think it does). The 'gross out' has been a part of horror right back to the 'Men Fighting With Sledgehammers' short films of silent days and as always with this sort of thing, nastiness on its own doesn't work - it's the equivalent of watching an autopsy or going to the butchers. It's what's behind it that matters (oh God I almost said the word subtext). The problem with Hollywood is that it doesn't really lend itself to this doing of genre with any integrity. The ending of Paradise Lost, for example, is such a damp squib because of Hollywood dictats about how these pictures should end.

Horrors of Malformed Men (Japan 1969)
Directed by Teruo Ishii

Oh my goodness me. Rather than try and review this I think it would be more useful to provide the following list of what it contains so you will know if you absolutely have to see it or desperately avoid it at all costs (and you will either be one or the other). So here goes. Amongst its many insane moments, Horrors of Malformed Men contains:

A web-fingered mad surgeon who looks like Jesus and wears a dress

A Buddhist priest in an ill-fitting bald cap who can’t lift anything on account of his appalling diarrhoea

A naked girl painted gold lying on a boat with her legs in the air

Three naked girls painted silver and doing a funny dance with sparklers in their hair

The line ‘I tore off his backside’

A cross-dressing sadist

A woman eating the crabs that are at the same time devouring her husband’s corpse

An unbelievable finale involving fireworks and exploding body parts

Some malformed men

Yes – it’s Japan’s answer to ‘El Topo’! All based on Edogawa Rampo apparently. There’s a scene based on his ‘The Chair’ but I think a lot of it is pretty tenuous as an adaptation. All I can say is it’s a long time since I’ve felt genuinely freaked out by a film. Weird, depraved, nonsensical, screwed up, utterly bonkers. I can't wait to watch it with the commentary track.

Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein (France / Spain 1972)
“Directed” by Jess Franco

I have just watched the ‘film’ DRACULA – PRISONER OF FRANKENSTEIN by Jess Franco. I say ‘film’ because it actually felt more like some sort of avant-garde experiment in non-verbal communication. Has anyone else seen it? For those who haven’t the following goes a little way towards describing the experience:

Not a word of dialogue is spoken for the first fifteen minutes. The titles open over a shot of a castle so wreathed in fog it quickly becomes invisible. The first five minutes consist of a series of repetitive crash zooms of a dog, a town square, a pub sign, a lady without her bra on, and a cat. Pissed up Dennis Price creates a piss-poor Frankenstein monster that abducts ladies and grunts as if heavily constipated. The most crap werewolf I have ever seen turns up in the last eight minutes & does little to help resolve what has gone before. One imagines that any of the ‘actors’ asking of their director what their motivation was would have been met with a shrug of the shoulders and an urgent gesture to ‘get on with it’, or in poor old Dennis Price’s case another glass of gin.

Never has the term ‘a load of old rubbish’ been more apt, never have bats been so rubber, and never has 79 minutes flown by so quickly when it should have dragged interminably, mainly because I couldn’t wait to see what unbelievably daft thing was going to happen next. Jess Franco is insane. I would say more power to him but that might actually be quite dangerous.

And I am sure hardly anyone will be interested to know that the sequel to Franco's Frankenstein piece above 'La Maledicion de Frankenstein' makes slightly more sense while at the same time managing to be even more insane, with a blind psychic birdwoman helping the mad Dr Cagliostro (Howard Vernon) kidnap Frankenstein's daughter Vera who can control the monster which is now painted silver. Or something.

Wolf Creek (Australia 2005)
Directed by Greg McClean

How do you like your horror films? Safe? Entertaining? The odd knowing wink? Suspenseful and with some impressive effects that you can marvel at? Or just unremittingly, unapologetically horrifying. So bleak and upsetting that if you think about it too much you realise you’re having your nose rubbed in one of the nastiest aspects of human existence? I’ve only just got back from watching ‘Wolf Creek’ and I suspect that my immediate impressions of this picture may mellow with time but it’s a long time since I have wobbled out of an auditorium. And even though I feel really quite uncomfortable at the moment I can also appreciate that any film-maker who can make me feel this way deserves praise. I know some reviews have been fairly disparaging about it. What I find interesting is that I agree with most of their comments. The beginning is indeed exceptionally banal, dull, and tedious. It had me looking at my watch. But I’m also sure that this is deliberate, not so much as to catch the viewer unawares later on but rather to set a bench mark of the everyday ‘kids on holiday’ lifestyle from which we can begin the gradual descent into uneasiness and eventually into outright horror. And this descent is gradual, aided by some beautiful visual compositions, each one ever so slightly more bleak than the last, - the odd beautiful shot of raindrops on a spider’s web or a bleak mist-wreathed landscape, interposed at points in the narrative just to emphasise how absolutely fucking horrible the events going on in the second half of this film actually are. There is even one scene towards the end where one girl is about to be shot in the back that is composed so beautifully that I sat there with the film aficionado in me thinking how well the shot had been put together while the viewer in me was cringing at the utter hopelessness of the situation she was in. Yes it is intelligent, yes it is vicious, yes it is well acted, yes it is depressing - relentlessly so, in fact. Add in the fact that it is beautifully filmed and that many of the torture scenes are filmed from another character’s POV, thus heightening the horror no end, and consider that all these elements have been brought together on what is probably a nothing budget and you have something really special. There have been a lot of low budget horror films over the last few years that have had praise heaped on them by critics and fans alike. All I can say is that most of them have nothing on this.

Is this the conte cruel as horror picture? Certainly it’s an example of that – and from such an unexpected source. To be honest at points this film reminded me of some of the most unpleasant entries in the ‘Pan Book of Horror Stories’ - take that how you will. ‘Wolf Creek’ is definitely worth watching, but as I said above, whether you’ll enjoy it or not all depends on how you like your horror.

Die Monster Die (UK 1965)
Directed by Daniel Haller

Whether or not you like the style of the films AIP made in the UK in the mid-sixties will determine what you think of this. Nick Adams arrives in the cosy little English village of Arkham and discovers peculiar goings-on up at a big old house where Boris Karloff is creating strange mutated things in his greenhouse with the aid of a glowing green meteorite. Boris's wife is starting to mutate as well and she manages to go on the rampage and get her face melted before the whole thing ends predictably in flames. Daniel Haller's exercise in adapting Lovecraft was presumably filmed around Bray studios as the house used for the exterior shots is none other than Oakley Court, the location used for many a classic British horror film including The Reptile, Vampyres and The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

As a piece of filmic Lovecraft the picture doesn't really work. If, however, you want a well-preserved widescreen slice of mid-sixties Brit horror then look no further. MGM's print has a few scratches but the colour photography in the opening scenes of the railway station and the village must look as good as (if not better than) when the film was first released. The special effects are what you would expect from this time period - psychedelic colour filters and rubber puppets twisted into funny shapes to simulate the greenhouse mutations. Good value for money, even if the only extras are a trailer and chapter selections.

Blood – The Last Vampire (Hong Kong / Japan 2009)
Directed by Chris Nahon

I’m trying very hard to work out whether I liked this film or not. As an example of a well-made adaptation of a famous anime, with beautifully choreographed fight sequences, a plot that combines both a revenge motif and the melancholy of an endless quest, and stunningly balletic scenes of violence it is an unmitigated bloody disaster, and yet as I watched it I had the strangest feeling that possibly that wasn’t what the film-makers were aiming for at all.

With far more in common with Psychomania than super-hero movies, this is the best example I’ve seen in at least a decade of ‘What on earth were they thinking when they made this?’ cinema. Even the opening ‘explanatory’ caption crawl doesn’t really seem to know what the film is about. Set in 1970 for no reason, with an opening sequence that is as pointless as it is erratically shot, the central character, who is some sort of immortal vampire girl (the film’s not big on explanation & I know nothing of anime I’m afraid), gets sent to a US army base in Tokyo disguised as a schoolgirl. In an absolutely inspired piece of ‘why did they do that?’ casting the US generals, teachers and other staff are all played by British TV soap opera actors. Liam Cunningham is the girl’s boss and is also meant to be American before he gets shot, allowing him to look surprised but relieved that he’s off the picture way before the end. Some potentially thrilling scenes are all ruined by jumpy camerawork, and all the blood is CGI blobs, which means it looks as if characters are talking to some rather blushing amoebas in some children’s programme rather than having their throats cut. The climax is nothing of the sort and left me open-mouthed and confused. In fact this felt a lot like the kind of rubbish certain Italian directors were making in the early 80s, but being compared with Yor, Hunter from the Future! is hardly something to be admired.