by ·Comments Off on Suspiria (1977, Dario Argento)

An awful lot like Inferno, with the ludicrous plot, hysterical acting and silly deaths. But also like Inferno, the visuals are excellent enough that I can forgive all that. I think I actually prefer Inferno, even though this one has better music and funnier death scenes.

Eva Axén went from working with Visconti in classy period pieces to getting stabbed, thrown through windows and hung by Argento:
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Eva up there escapes from a prestigious dancing school, goes to stay with a friend, and is dramatically killed (along with the friend) by an unseen evil which cares little for logic or reasonable dialogue, only for the picturesque posed deaths of young women.

Our heroine in the middle is Jessica Harper (Phantom of the Paradise, Pennies From Heaven). At left is Stefania Casini, an older sister in Blood For Dracula.
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New student Suzy picks up the narrative from there, discovering right off the bat that her school is creepy but not figuring until the end that it’s a front for a coven of witches run by a hundreds-year-old evil mother.

The Mother Of… something:
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One thing the movie’s got going for it: casting Udo Kier. But it loses points for casting Udo Kier in a tiny, talky role, essentially letting everyone BUT Udo Kier overact. Bad call. Maybe Kier was busy in Fassbinder’s The Stationmaster’s Wife at the time.
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While Suzy has fainting spells, deals with a plague of maggots falling from the ceiling, and talks with Udo Kier and some professor (Rudolf Schündler, actor since the 30’s and director in the 50’s and 60’s, also in The Exorcist and Wenders’ Kings of the Road and The American Friend) about historical nonsense, more deaths occur. Her friend Stefania Casini is murdered by the unseen hand in a similar over-the-top manner to the first death (barbed wire, razor stabbing, nails through the eyes). And the blind pianist is kicked out of school and walks through the abandoned square at night. The music warms up, the lighting declares the buildings to be a threat, and suddenly a stone gargoyle comes alive and flies overhead… but in the end, he’s simply killed by his guide dog.

Blind Daniel (Flavio Bucci of Il Divo) getting kicked out of school by mistress Alida Valli (star of Eyes Without a Face, Senso, Il Grido, The Third Man, played a caretaker in Inferno)
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Joan Bennett (30+ years after Scarlet Street), in her final film role, has got some wicked wallpaper.
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Amazing cinematography by Luciano Tovoli (from Antonioni to Argento to Barbet Schroeder to Titus), who shines red and blue colored lights on simply everything. The dubbing is mostly good, and I liked the pumping Goblin music surprisingly well. I dig when Goblin sings along quietly with a sinister “la la la.”

Argento’s debut seven years prior was titled The Bird with the Crystal Plumage.
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OCT 2017: watched the new 4k restoration at the Alamo, wowie wow wow.

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“Count Dracula may not seem like the ideal husband. … Of course he’s deadly pale, but then he’s a vegetarian and they all seem to look like that.”

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The director admits the film is slow, even uses the word “boring,” but says they figured it’d be more poetic that way. He also claims little familiarity with the original Dracula story and vampire mythology, but says he’d try to respect it whenever a crew member would point it out (“hey Paul, Drac can’t walk out in sunlight like that”).

On the plus side, it has very nice piano music, decent well-lit cinematography by Luigi Kuveiller (who shot Avanti! and is as fond of zooms as Brian De Palma), Udo Kier acting off his nut, a humorous array of atrocious accents, and the longest blood-vomiting scene I’ve ever watched. Morrissey’s got the right idea about horror movies drawing in the viewer through slow buildup, but he misses the creepy horror atmosphere. Udo Kier’s Dracula is a pale weakling who gets ordered around by his enthusiastic German servant (Arno Juerging) and is eventually, humiliatingly killed by a loser rapist houseboy wielding an axe. Without the horror, or the over-the-top 3D humor of Flesh For Frankenstein, this one just sorta drags along.

Arno Juerging with Maxime McKendry:
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Dracula is sent from Romania to Italy to find virgins, since Romania is fresh out. Stays at a house run by the shabby, formerly wealthy couple of Maxime McKendry (seems like the best actress here, but never in another film) and the great Vittorio De Sica, below.

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Drac is interested in the family’s four girls and tries to figure which is a virgin so he can drink her bl… I mean marry her. Unfortunately, the oldest two are having kinky sex regularly with beefcake houseboy Joe Dallesandro (Rivette’s Merry-Go-Round, a hitman in The Limey), the middle one has been engaged before so Drac writes her off (turns out she’s still a virgin so Joe kindly rapes her to save her from becoming vampire food) and the youngest is 14 (so unmarryable, but Drac is chasing her at the end).

Milena Vukotic:
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Stefania Casini (Suspiria, a hitwoman in Bad, 1900, Belly of an Architect):
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Not pictured: Fellini/Bunuel/Tarkovsky actress Milena Vukotic, and youngest Silvia Dionisio. It was a bitch to figure out the above screenshots since all four sisters look the same. See comment below for some clarification/corrections (thanks Jenna).

“What about your sister? What does she do all night? I’d like to rape the hell out of her.” “She’s only 14!”

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The reason I watched this in the first place, kicking off an early start to SHOCKtober on the 29th, is Roman Polanski. During all the controversy while he sits in a Swiss jail I thought I’d watch myself a RoPol movie, but I can’t find my copy of Knife in the Water so I went for this instead. Apparently Udo Kier needed to take a day off for reshoots on another film, so they hurriedly wrote a scene in which Arno Juerging gets scammed by Roman (on left with the mustache) in a tavern.

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Udo is as fun to watch as always (well, maybe less fun than always), but he’s surrounded by the usual sordid 70’s misogyny of a Morrissey/Warhol production. Dracula comes to a sad end, limbs all chopped off like the Black Knight and then staked by the gross houseboy. Better luck next time…

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by ·Comments Off on Dead Set (2008, Charlie Brooker & Yann Demange)

SHOCKtober gets off to a rocky start with this five-part British miniseries. The premise is that there’s an apocalyptic zombie attack which we see through the eyes of reality show Big Brother participants. I think maybe if I’d ever cared about the show (or even seen it) this might’ve made a bigger impact… movie seems geared towards fans.

Who loves Dawn of the Dead?
“Why do they keep coming towards the house?”
“This place used to be like a chuch to them.”

I hope to see no more work from director Demange and cinematographer Tat Radcliffe who provide garbage visuals for Brooker’s cliche but sometimes exciting story. Every time there’s a bit of action the cameraman goes spastic. Since the bits of action are what make zombie movies fun, this one kinda blows. Fun to see zombies unleashed on a reality TV set though, ripping up the only character I liked, a girl whose only line seems to be a dismayed “I don’t like it!” We’re supposed to be thrilled instead at the prolonged, gory death of mega-asshole producer Andy Nyman, but he was too cartoonish to hate – I just appreciated his death scene because it was the only zombie-attack bit where the camera stood still.

MPEG noise over gloomy clouds makes the sky appear to be full of tiny birds.

by ·Comments Off on Thirst (2009, Chan-wook Park)

Not a vampire thriller with comic parts, but an all-out comedy. I used to think Park was someone to take seriously with his vengeance trilogy, but after this and I’m a Cyborg But That’s Okay, I’m not sure he was ever serious. Maybe it has always been dark humor, and he never had anything to say about revenge – there’s nothing I can remember, anyway, and surely nothing to match K. Kurosawa’s Eyes of the Spider. Complaints aside, this was entertaining as hell and the sparse crowd was laughing and yelling in horror and delight.

Great to see the star of The Host again on the big screen, and just as good (if not better) was his 20-year-old costar Ok-vin Kim. Anyway, a priest volunteers to be injected with a painfully fatal disease in the name of science, but during a blood transfusion on his deathbed, accidentally gets turned into a vampire. Still a priest, he’s trying to be the most humane vampire he can be, killing nobody and drinking blood from coma patients through their feed tubes. But then he falls for wild young Tae-joo and leaves the priesthood to have an affair with her behind the back of her husband (Ha-kyun Shin, father of the dead girl in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance). She’s messed up and amoral from the start, and our man begins to fall – killing his blind friend and the girl’s husband so they can be together. But then she becomes a vampire and starts killing everyone in sight, so he drives them out to the middle of nowhere and waits for the sun to come up…

No messing around with stakes through the heart, garlic or other vampire business – we never even see the original vampires who infected these two. Their super strength adds to the comic-book atmosphere, jumping across rooftops, denting lampposts, tearing apart a car with his bare hands.

This died at the theater with hardly anyone hearing about it. Weird that foreign action/horror movies don’t seem to stand a chance in theaters here, while talky family dramas do fine. I’d think The Good, The Bad & The Weird, Sukiyaki Western Django and this could pull a bigger crowd than Summer Hours and Revanche, but I guess that’s why I’m not paid to book theaters.

Steve McQueen’s Hunger was playing last week, and I meant to catch it so I could watch Hunger and Thirst back-to-back, but sadly reality prevailed over gimmickry and I missed it.

by ·Comments Off on Nightmare Detective (2006, Shinya Tsukamoto)

The two stars of Big Bang Love: Juvenile A are back – Ryuhei Matsuda (the weak hero) as the titular Nightmare Detective and Masanobu Ando (tattooed superdude) as a curly-haired regular detective. It would seem like an inversion of their roles in the other film, except amazingly it’s not – the title character is weaker than everyone else in this movie. He has the power (at great personal risk) to enter the nightmares of others, but not to do anything else, so once inside he’s just bitter and afraid. It’d be kind of hilarious but there were always too many terrifying blurs of action to laugh.

your (very upset) nightmare detective:
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I suppose our main character is Keiko (played by singularly-named Hitomi). That’s her at the bottom warming her hands on a giant plastic brain-looking creature. Keiko works with rookie Wakamiya (Masanobu Ando) under chief Sekiya (Ren Osugi of MPD Psycho and Achilles and the Tortoise). Initially Keiko has a strained relationship with the others, since she formerly worked a desk job and doesn’t handle crime scenes well but all that’s forgotten when the shit goes down.

Ando and Osugi:
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Movie has a very video look, a la Haze or MPD Psycho. The horror action is never seen – pieces of blades or the color red may be glimpsed, but mostly you know that a fast, screaming blur is approaching the character, something unstoppable and terrifying (Tetsuo-like).

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The screaming blur is actually nightmare terrorist/suicide-assistance provider Zero (played by our director), who takes phone calls from depressed people then comes to slaughter them in their dreams, causing them to kill themselves (all with stabbing implements, I believe) in reality while still sleeping. He’s sort of a Freddy Krueger for hire. After a couple of people die, Wakamiya dials Zero (ha) as part of the investigation and ends up suffering the same fate, telling Keiko as he awakens “I didn’t even realize that I wanted to die.”

Zero/Shinya Tsukamoto:
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So Kagenuma, the nightmare detective, is drawn quite unwillingly into the investigation, more than halfway through the movie. He turns out to be juuust enough of a hero to get the job done, actually rushing the villain in a fit of bravery. Keiko, having dialed up Zero herself leading to a three-way battle inside her head, decides to live after all.

Tsukamoto: “The killer appears to be revealing the true terror of death to the willing.”

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Much of the online writing on this movie mentions the crappy performance of Hitomi in the lead role. I guess I just figured she was your typical buttoned-up brainiac movie detective and wasn’t supposed to emote. Or I was spending all my energy thinking “where is the nightmare detective? why is he barely in the movie?” From the look of the trailer, the upcoming sequel looks quieter, more contemplative, with less violent stabbing. This was great – Tsukamoto’s movies seem to get better and better – so I’m looking forward to it.

by ·Comments Off on Baghead (2008, Duplass bros.)

These Duplass fellas made The Puffy Chair and are somehow involved with Ryan “Half Nelson” Fleck, Joe “LOL” Swanberg and Andrew “Mutual Appreciation” Bujalski.

Four movie extras go to a cabin in the woods to script their own indie movie to kickstart their careers. The girls want to make a relationship drama and the guys want to make a horror about a killer with a bag on his head. Meanwhile, they themselves are having relationship drama and being stalked by a dangerous bagheaded dude. So sorta like Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, except the movie tries to bring its own humor instead of deriving all fun from geeky references to horror movie tropes. Naw, it’s still pretty geeky, and instead of playing with two filmmaking styles (handheld doc / slick studio horror) like in Behind The Mask, this one goes all the way shaky-cam. I am glad I watched it in a window on my computer or it would’ve driven me batshit… when the cam isn’t shaking enough, the cameraman (a Duplass himself) plays with the zoom lens to keep us from getting comfortable. Jerk.

L-R: dude who is appearing in new Amy Poehler show, Baghead, Hannah from Hannah Takes the Stairs
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L-R: appeared in the Prom Night remake, appeared in Vampire Lesbian Kickboxers
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Okay I totally liked it but I’m not sorry I didn’t watch it fullscreen.

by ·Comments Off on Frontier(s) (2007, Xavier Gens)

Christ almighty is it ever dangerous out in the countryside. Jeez. Frenchman Alexandre Aja pointed out that it can be damned dangerous in the countryside with Haute tension (and similarly, in the American desert with The Hills Have Eyes) and now everyone wants to join in. So I’ve just watched French horrors Them (it’s damned dangerous in the countryside because of murderous children), Calvaire (it’s extremely dangerous in the countryside because of insane rural folks) and now Frontier(s) (it’s sure-as-shit dangerous in the countryside because of crazed, torture-happy, inbred, cannibalistic nazis). I am leaving 2007 French horror Inside on the shelf this year, because I get the point already.

An actress conveys trauma:
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A Paris heist goes wrong, four thieves split for the country after dropping one off at the hospital to die. Yasmine, the dead guy’s sister, is traumatized. Two guys arrive at a country inn and are seduced by the hotties who work there then turned upon, captured by some sadistic dudes. The others arrive, are fed then turned upon, captured by sadistic dudes. Movie goes all Hostel on us now, with chains and power tools and horrific deaths. Yasmine’s boyfriend is killed and fed to her – she is traumatized. She’s discovered to be pregnant so they keep her around to breed new nazis – she’s cared for by a girl who seems too young to already have four deformed monster children but somehow does. Traumatized! Then comes the bloody revenge part of the show, where Yasmine goes allll ultraviolent on the nazis, fighting and chopping and sawing and chewing and shooting her way out of the compound, driving away extreeeemely traumatized and getting picked up by cops, haha.

At right: girl with four mutant children
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Awfully bloody, and just short of being bloody awful, movie is full of flash action-editing and overwrought music. Bunch of actors I don’t know (the bulky simple guy was Samuel Le Bihan from Red, also star of Brotherhood of the Wolf). Director Gens was already working on his first Hollywood action movie Hitman (IMDB reviewer says “Guns, Blood, Boobies”) when this came out. Seems like a good match for him. New York Times gave this a passing grade because of references to France’s recent political strife – nazis vs. muslims! But as far as I could tell, only one of the thieves was muslim (and he got killed), and the nazis had German names/accents, not French, so I’m not seeing a cutting indictment of French society here, just more rural paranoia.

by ·Comments Off on Calvaire (2004, Fabrice Du Welz)

AKA The Ordeal. A single young dude, Marc Stevens, is a traveling, singing showman for old folks’ homes. His van breaks down somewhere (movie was shot in Belgium, France and/or Luxembourg) and he stays with Bartel, the Paul Giamatti-looking innkeeper. But Bart is way crazy, destroys Marc’s van, dresses Marc up as his ex-wife Gloria and threatens bloody revenge if “she” ever runs off again. Marc runs off, gets caught by villagers (sharing the delusion that Marc is Gloria) who rape him, gets re-caught by Marc who crucifies him, escapes again and gets his leg caught in an animal trap, and so on. It’s tough going for Marc until the townsfolk attack Bartel’s place and Bart is killed by a just-as-crazy Malcolm McDowell-looking guy. Marc runs off, pursued by Malcolm who sinks into the swamp. The end, although Marc is far from safe and sound, all hurt and hungry in a swamp with villagers possibly still looking for him. Also, as a side-suspense, a man named Boris is looking for his dog.

Marc watches Malcolm drown
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This one goes less for sustained tension/suspense than Them did, more for bizarre WTF-horror. It’s an ugly, somewhat effective little film… good enough that I could give his next movie, another rural-horror starring Emmanuelle Béart and Rufus Sewell, a shot. No music except for a piano tune played during a Bartel’s visit to a Bela Tarr tavern. I guess the message here is “don’t stray outside the city and get lost in rural areas”, a message that has been well hammered home by previous horror movies.

Bartel seems like a nice guy deep down
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Laurent Lucas, who did a fine job as terrorized Marc (except that when he’s most afraid, he kinda looks like he’s drunkenly grinning) was in mysterious films Pola X and In My Skin. Boris, who finally finds his dog, was in Luc Besson’s Taxi 4 last year. The dangerously deluded innkeeper appeared in Olivier Assayas’s Cold Water. And the cinematographer shot suspense films Joshua, Day Night Day Night and Irreversible.

Interviewer: “How do you think female viewers will react to Calvaire?”
Director: “Well, I realise my film could go over badly, even very badly. Though personally, I really think the film is feminist. It is a brutal work, like Deliverance or Straw Dogs, for example.”

WTF
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The “stars” are Ashley Judd (Frida, Heat) as a hopeless burnout and Harry Connick Jr. (Excess Baggage, Mad About The Mouse) as her abusive ex just out of jail, but the star performance here is by Michael Shannon as a single dude who shows up one day wanting to be Ashley’s friend and ending up in bed with her.

right: H.C. Jr.
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That’s when the part I knew from the trailer kicks in… new dude (Peter) sees bugs. They are in the hotel room, in the air and under their skin. He watches ’em with a kids’ microscope, sprays the place constantly and talks about the secret government project that unleashed the bugs upon him, while Ashley confides about her missing son and bad husband, and clings more and more to Peter.

Turns out there are (probably) no bugs – Peter is a bug-crazy paranoid lunatic, and Ashley is so love-desperate she starts to see what he sees. At the end after Peter knifes his doctor who comes to talk sense into him, he easily convinces Ashley they should set themselves on fire.

Doctor threatened with knife! Peter all bloody! Walls covered in tinfoil!
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Movie looks real good. Not particularly tense or scary, but the crazy, oh there is so much good crazy. Camera stays on our heroes, gets shaky and blue when Peter hallucinates helicopter-spies. Based on a play – no surprise there, given the movie’s single location (not counting a few flashbacks). As for Friedkin, he made French Connection, Exorcist, then ten+ movies that everyone’s either forgotten or wish they had forgotten. This is a good adaptation, an exciting movie, but nobody oughtta claim the Second Coming of Freidkin unless he pulls it off again.

Ashley’s head hurts from looking at imaginary bugs
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