October Horrors #3: Inquisition (Jacinto Molina, 1977)

 Believe it or not, I’ve never really been a big fan of the whole witch hunter/tortures of the Inquisition sub-genre, in spite of the fact that I seem to have spent half my life watching examples of it. As such, I have held off investigating Paul Naschy’s inevitable entry in the “religious hypocrisy is explored, meanwhile naked ladies get bits cut off them” sweepstakes for quite some time, feeling that it would most likely prove a somewhat unedifying experience.

Now, don’t get me wrong here - of course I’m a big fan of Naschy and I love many of the wild n’ wooly horror movies he starred in unreservedly. But, I found myself thinking, is there really anything worthwhile he could contribute to the kind of heavy, historical subject matter necessitated by a project like this, beyond just another dose of imitative, ‘Mark of the Devil’-style sadism..?

Well, let’s just say that I hang my head in shame for underestimating El Hombre Lobo, because it turns out Naschy actually had a great deal to bring to the table here, and, assuming one can overlook the fact that it is at least partially cobbled together from reheated bits of ‘Witchfinder General’ and ‘The Devils’, ‘Inquisition’ is a far better, and far more sincere, film than many might have anticipated.

In fact, when Naschy - using his birth name Jacinto Molina - took the plunge and began directing his own films in the late 1970s, he departed significantly from the kind of goofy monster rallies we might reasonably have expected of him. Instead, Naschy/Molina met the collapsing market for independent horror films in the second half of the decade head-on with a series of unexpectedly challenging projects, including the ’10 Rillington Place’-esque serial killer film ‘The Frenchman’s Garden’ (1978) and the bizarre medieval morality tale ‘El Caminante’(1979). First in line in this apparent attempt to reinvent himself as a more serious filmmaker though was perhaps the jewel in the crown of this strange, transitional period in his career – ‘Inquisition’.

Although he was stepping behind the camera for the first time, Molina’s direction here is extremely confident, arguably achieving more professional results than any of the men who had helmed his projects up to this point. Apparently inspired by such works as Polanski’s ‘Macbeth’ and (inevitably) Michael Reeves’ aforementioned ‘Witchfinder General’, Molina establishes a tone that is sombre, stately and doom-laden right from the outset, utilising well-choreographed crowd scenes and carefully composed long shots to establish a genuine feel for the lingering mediaeval barbarism of the rural 17th century setting.

The director is aided in this by some exceptional production design; Molina was apparently a stickler for historical detail, and his collaborators do him proud here with an impressive range of costumes and set dressings that, along with the oppressively dense, earthy tones of Miguel F. Milá’s cinematography, combine to create a brooding atmosphere of febrile menace and mud-splattered feudal poverty.*

Though the film is, shall we say, deliberately-paced, Molina’s tale of a trio of beleaguered witch-hunters trespassing upon the hospitality and inner secrets of an isolated French community threatened by the approach of The Black Death remains sufficiently compelling that boredom never comes knocking (which is certainly more than can be said for some of Naschy’s earlier movies) and, once the story gets underway, it heads off in some unexpectedly interesting directions.

Though character development remains minimal, and much of the acting here is as emblematic and old-fashioned as you’d expect of a pulpy historical yarn, Molina nonetheless does a good job of exploring the social and economic tensions boiling beneath the surface of the story’s myriad witch finder/church/landowner/peasant relationships, all explored in an admirably straight-faced manner that rarely boils over into melodrama.

We probably shouldn’t go too far in trying to play up ‘Inquisition’s “seriousness” however; there are of course still plentiful clichés and random bits of silliness here for euro-horror fans to enjoy. We might for instance ask how the witch hunters, whom we saw arriving in town on horseback with no luggage, nonetheless manage to outfit a local dungeon with a magnificent selection of massive wooden torture instruments within a few days of their arrival -- and indeed, the ensuing scenes of misogynistic torture are as gratuitously exploitative as you might imagine.

Early in the film, Molina proves he is not above letting his camera linger over the naked bodies of some surprisingly buxom plague victims, and, once the witch findin’ gets underway, the torments inflicted upon one young blonde victim in particular top anything in ‘Mark of the Devil’ for sheer, eye-watering excruciatingness. (Those who have seen the film won’t need reminding of the details; I’ll leave the rest of you to find out for yourselves.)

As in Jess Franco’s surprisingly-decent ‘The Bloody Judge’ (1968) though, this sort of thing is more of a gruesome sideshow than anything else – a sop to the more bloodthirsty horror fans in the audience, perhaps – and the imprisonment and torture of innocent victims thankfully never becomes the main focus of the narrative.

Speaking of Franco, ‘Inquisition’ has often been accused – most recently by Jonathan Rigby in his book ‘Euro-Gothic’ – of following the pattern established by 1972’s utterly daft The Demons in terms of taking a mixed up, “have yr cake and eat it” approach to the witch hunter sub-genre, inviting us to condemn (whilst also revelling in) the sadism and hypocrisy of the inquisitors, whilst simultaneously portraying witchcraft and black magick as a genuine supernatural threat.

Though developments in the second half of ‘Inquisition’ – wherein heroine Catherine (Daniela Giordano) falls under the sway of the local witch cult and embarks upon a campaign of vengeance against Naschy’s lead inquisitor – are certainly suggestive of such a conclusion, I nonetheless believe this is a misguided and superficial reading of the film, and one that Molina actually goes to great lengths to avoid, as attentive viewers will hopefully note.

Admittedly, Molina/Naschy is treading a delicate balance here, and some may feel that the character he plays, who is initially painted as a cruel religious fanatic, becomes a tad too sympathetic in the final act (an indulgence perhaps to the actor/director’s usual “tragic monster” persona), but, by and large, ‘Inquisition’ just about manages to hold fast to a consistent worldview throughout.

Crucially, effort is made to establish that the film’s Black Mass sequences – which are totally way-out and awesome, by the way, complete with Naschy pulling double duty as His Satanic Majesty – can be seen as hallucinations on Catherine’s part; more restrained, earth-bound festivities lent an extra kick by the sinister psychoactive brew administered to her by the cult’s intimidating head crone.

Catherine’s other ‘visions’ meanwhile, including the one in which she sees her lost lover murdered by assassins under Naschy’s command, are thus rendered equally suspect; more the result of ideas placed in the head of a desperate and suggestible woman than bona fide supernatural sign-posts. (Giordano, it should be noted, delivers an excellent performance here, powerfully conveying her character’s unravelling mental state without ever overdoing it.)

In order to further untangle the film’s intentions for the audience, ‘Inquisition’ also introduces a character – the wise, liberal minded local doctor, played by Eduardo Calvo - who essentially functions as a mouthpiece for the filmmakers, criticising the proto-fascist behaviour of the witch hunters, whilst also patiently explaining that they are a symptom of the very same atmosphere of religious fanaticism and social inequality that has  pushed women toward the far fringes of this society, leaving them with nowhere to go except into the arms of a newly re-vitalised witch cult.

Whilst the inclusion of such an obvious “mouthpiece” character sounds rather fatuous on paper, in practice the doctor’s presence as a moral barometer within a long, complex film full of compromised, unsympathetic characters is actually very welcome, and Calvo is a strong enough actor to sell the part convincingly.

The ideology he espouses meanwhile will be familiar to most students of the European witchcraft mythos as part of a compelling – if rather fanciful – line of thought that runs through such texts as Margaret Murray’s ‘The Witch Cult in Western Europe’ and Jules Michelet’s ‘La Sorcière’, and films stretching from Eiichi Yamamoto’s extraordinary ‘Belladonna of Sadness’ (1973) to Robert Eggers’ The Witch (2016), all of which seek to some extent to reframe the witchcraft phenomenon as a kind of quasi-feminist rebellion against a repressive Christian patriarchy.

(Quite how well these bold ideas can be squared with the misogynistic violence exploited elsewhere in the film is of course a matter for debate, but veteran Euro-horror viewers should be used to rolling with the punches when it comes to these kind of mixed messages.)

Viewed within this framework, ‘Inquisition’s conclusion, in which Naschy’s character - a befuddled puritan, his acts noble in his own mind but abominable to the world at large – finds himself burned to death next to the former object of his lust/love, now howling with derisive laughter as her kamikaze quest for vengeance reaches its conclusion, actually represents a uniquely twisted spin on the usual, over-familiar witch hunter narratives.

Despite the best efforts of Calvo’s doctor, we are left with the impression of a world gone mad, unsure how we should be feeling, or where our sympathies are supposed to lie – certainly a more unsettling mixture of emotions that those who think of Naschy purely as some cheap-jack werewolf guy would ever have thought him capable of evoking.

Why, it’s almost enough to make us overlook the fact that, when his character is wheeled out to meet his fate with a shaved head, white smock and square-jawed, teary-eyed countenance, Naschy is “doing” Oliver Reed in ‘The Devils’ just as shamelessly as he had previously “done” Chaney, Lugosi, Karloff et al in his earlier films. Well, you can’t keep a good horror-man down I suppose, even when the weight of history, religious philosophy and high art comes knocking.

Whilst it clearly can’t hold a candle to Reeves or Russell, ‘Inquisition’ is still an extremely impressive achievement in its own right, despite its somewhat imitative agenda. In fact I think I would rate it as the single best entry in the “second division” of witch hunter movies I have seen to date. Needless to say, if you are at all interested in any of this stuff, it is well worth your time. (Mondo Macabro's recent blu-ray release is splendid, by the way.)

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* A mainstay of ‘60s spaghetti westerns who moved on to home-grown horror pictures in the ‘70s, the range of Milá’s credits as a cinematographer is such that he could probably claim a certain amount of credit for establishing the uniquely “earthy”/brown-heavy look that defined much Spanish horror – a look that perhaps reaches its apex in ‘Inquisition’.

October Shorts: A Pre-Halloween Horror Round-up.

Every year, when October rolls around, I survey the movie bloggers and film forums undertaking “31 films in 31 days” pre-Halloween countdowns and so forth, and feel a profound sense of envy as I consider those lucky enough to enjoy a lifestyle that allows them the time to view, let alone write about, a feature film every single day - that being a circumstance which usually feels beyond the reach of my wildest dreams at this time of year, sad to say.

Nonetheless though, this year I’ve been doing my best – aggressively ring-fencing movie-watching time, squeezing in double-bills wherever possible, prioritising horror above all other genres and trying to find a few minutes to scribble down some thoughts afterwards. Thus far I’ve only clocked up a mere six films in seventeen days, but believe me – under the circumstances, I count that a success.

Hopefully I’ll be able to rack up enough to compile a “Part # 2” to this post later in the month, but for now, let’s crack on. Needless to say, all the write-ups that follow are “first thought / best thought” type efforts banged out with a minimum of forethought or proof reading, so make of them what you will.

The Wasp Woman 
(Roger Corman, 1959)

Well, this was… quite alright I suppose. It’s snappily paced, smartly scripted (by b-Western ‘heavy’ actor Leo Gordon, no less), has an agreeably loopy premise and is full of likeable characters portrayed by a crew of familiar AIP/Corman faces. Unlike Corman’s best black & white era films however, ‘The Wasp Woman’ never really manages to transcend its status as a five-day-wonder double bill timewaster, failing to offer up anything that is liable to live long in our memories the way that ‘A Bucket of Blood’ or ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ did, or to challenge an audience’s pre-existing expectations of a movie named “The Wasp Woman”. There are any number of interesting directions that the Countess Bathory-esque ‘aging-woman-will-go-to-any-lengths-to-preserve-beauty’ storyline could have been taken in, but instead Corman and Gordon just serve it straight, avoiding of any social commentary/satirical twist despite the film’s self-aware, cosmopolitan atmosphere and Madison Avenue setting.

Still, it’s a thoroughly diverting seventy-something minutes that remains approximately 126 times as entertaining as what might have resulted had any other director active in 1959 made a film about a woman turning into a giant wasp with a budget roughly equivalent to Charlton Heston’s dry-cleaning bill.

Shock Waves 

(Ken Wiederhorn, 1977)

Similarly, this little number – in which Peter Cushing and John Carradine lead a cast of younger/lesser known performers pitting their wits against undead Nazi super-soldiers in the Florida keys – has all the necessary ingredients in place for an absolutely bad-ass under-the-radar ‘70s horror…. but somehow, it just never manages to get the engine running.

The main boons to the film’s intermittent effectiveness come from it’s incredibly atmospheric shooting locations, which convey a convincing sense of isolated deprivation, and it’s uniquely conceived antagonists, who rise from the water uniformed and be-goggled like some nightmare combination of Golan-Globus ninjas and Amando de Ossorio’s Blind Dead. The cast are all fairly good too (Brooke Adams, who went to better things in the ’78 ‘Invasion of The Body Snatchers’ particularly stands out), and much of the photography is superb, despite being shot on 16mm.

Quite why such a promising outlay eventually fails to deliver the expected thrills therefore, I’m unsure, but let’s reluctantly grit our teeth and think it through. Firstly, continuity is all over the place (at several points early in the film, the characters seem to be discussing and acting upon terrible events that we have not been privy to), and, cool though it is, the whole Nazi zombie concept is rather undeveloped, as early suggestions that we’re dealing with an occult/supernatural menace are dropped in favour a presumably scientific rationale for their existence, which likewise remains unexplored, as does their obvious thematic status as a potent return-of-the-repressed atavistic terror, ala those aforementioned Blind Dead.

Furthermore, once they’re wandering about on land, the zombies gradually shed their initial menace, moving like ordinary human beings (presumably whilst being shouted at by an Assistant Director) and failing to demonstrate any abilities that would render them significantly more threatening than any other bunch of semi-mindless, unarmed men.

Perhaps most damaging of all though is the production’s decision to avoid any gore or explicit violence, which, though in some sense admirable, also wreaks havoc with the essential build up and release of tension necessary to the success of any chase/stalk/kill-orientated horror movie. When the expected crescendo of bloodshed that would traditionally accompany the demise of each of the zombies’ victims is watered down to an “oh, well… I guess he’s supposed to be dead now?” damp squib, the theoretically remorseless survival horror showdown of the film’s final act is stripped of any real urgency, leaving us instead to simply admire the view and reflect that the poor extras in the nazi/zombie get-up must have had a really rough time shooting this thing.

Carradine and Cushing are both under-used – presumably bacause the production cut corners by only hiring them for a few days each, which I’m cool with – but, whilst the former is as boisterous as ever, this is sadly one those mid-‘70s movies in which poor Peter seems to be at his lowest ebb, looking more cadaverous than ever before. Though professional to a tee, his lack of engagement with the material is clear, as he fails to really put any meat on the bones of his potentially fascinating character, the way he would almost certainly have done a decade earlier.

But, I should step back at this point and stop knocking this movie. I’ve made my point. If nothing else, it’s a fairly unique entry in the canon of ’70s American horror, and if you come to it with your expectations primed for ‘interesting failure’ rather than ‘lost classic’, you’ll likely find it a somewhat worthwhile experience.

Count Dracula’s Great Love 

(Javier Aguirre, 1972)

Ah, now we’re talkin’! Despite a plodding and rather campy opening half much concerned with hunts for lost coach wheels and inconsequential romantic trysts, Paul Naschy’s sole outing as the Count eventually warms up into not only one of his best films, but one of the most exultantly delirious slices of euro-horror nirvana ever to emerge from the sainted ‘70s. The set up that gets us there may be clumsy, but as soon as “Dracula”s voice-over starts delivering ultra-reverbed metaphysical pronouncements and his be-fanged ladies begin their slow motion peregrinations through the cobwebbed corridors, we’re on a different plain entirely, supping an intoxicating brew that leaves our heads spinning happily as love and death commingle, footsteps clang through a brace of effects pedals and Kensington (Madrid?) Gore dribbles ‘pon cleavage.

Infused (in its stronger ‘export’ cut, at least) with a degree of sexual content that pushes it firmly into the realm of the Erotic Castle Movie, the genius of ‘Count Dracula’s Great Love’ is that, whilst it is undoubtedly delirious, it nonetheless remains emotionally coherent throughout, as the trivial faffing about of the film’s poorly drawn human characters is gradually replaced by that of a love story from another world, played out with aching seriousness, as Naschy – ever the tragic romantic – essays one of strangest and most conflicted Draculas in screen history, anticipating a conclusion that is startling to say the least for devotees of vampire lore.

Over the past few years, I’ve watched this film several times in various stages of degradation, and each time the closing card rears up and the music plays out over blackness, it never fails to hit me with that feeling of having just awakened from some extraordinary dream, the usual whys and wherefores of cinema long forgotten – an instant hit of exactly the phenomena that keeps me coming back to these mind-warping euro-horrors again and again in other words, and to finally see it returned to its full glory via Vinegar Syndrome’s recent blu-ray edition feels like a minor miracle. Really, just an absolute pleasure to experience this one again in such fine form.

Dracula AD 1972 

(Alan Gibson, 1972)

As you will no doubt be aware, this film has attracted its fair share of mockery and critical brick-bats over the years, so now I think is as good as time as any to come out and say it loud and proud: I really like ‘Dracula AD 1972’.

Though it is certainly not one of Hammer’s best, and the damaging effect it’s oft-lamented drawbacks (the five-years-out-of-date Swinging London goofery, the almost total absence of Dracula, the rushed and inconclusive final confrontation, the antics of “Johnny Alucard”) remains substantial, I nonetheless maintain that this one is a lot of fun, and actually has quite a lot going for it beside the potential for ironic sniggering. Though not in the same league as the genuinely great ‘Taste the Blood of..’ (which the script here to some extent reworks), I’d probably place it above most of the other ‘Dracula’ sequels.

For one thing, I love the way that it – as is only appropriate, I suppose - oozes pure essence of “Britain in the early ‘70s”, in spite of the uproariously off-message ‘youth culture’ stuff. From the young Mr Alucard’s straight-from-a-NEL-paperback occult proclamations at his black mass, to the heavy-handed allusions to the Manson murders, to the Scotland Yard detective with a desk covered in ‘executive toys’ who dresses and behaves like a slightly younger and posher dry run for Jack Regan in ‘The Sweeney’ (I particularly love the bit where his partner begs some time off to get “a cup of coffee and a cheese roll” before they head off to bust the kids’ drug party)…. you could just bottle this stuff and I’d buy it by the crate.

It helps too that Alan Gibson largely directs the picture more like a crime drama than a traditional horror, rendering it one of the snappiest films Hammer ever made, with Van Helsing Jr and the cops’ pursuit of the vampire menace taking on a frantic feel akin to an episode of ‘Kolchak: The Night Stalker’ – an approach I very much appreciate.

The ‘deconsecrated church’ set upon which much of the action takes place is genuinely impressive too, and the aforementioned black mass, with reversed tape recorder freakouts and Johnny slitting his wrists all over Caroline Munro, is a real showstopper, probably one of the coolest scenes of its kind in early ‘70s horror.

Meanwhile, Peter Cushing – in stark contrast to his subdued turn in ‘Shock Waves’ - just radiates gravitas here, playing it straight enough to add weight to any amount of patently ridiculous plotting, and momentarily imbuing his final confrontation with Lee with a fateful intensity that successfully recalls their hair-raising showdown in Hammer’s first Dracula all those years ago (until the filmmakers bugger it all up a few moments later, but the less said about that the better).

I even quite like weird, ‘alternate world’ aspect of the script, wherein we’re presented with a 1970s wherein Count Dracula isn’t a pop culture household name, but a dread figure of obscure esoteric lore, mentioned alongside Belphegor and Belial in Johnny Alucard’s run-down of demonic top trumps, whom “legend has it” was buried somewhere in Hyde Park one hundred years prior.

Oh yeah, and if that wasn’t enough to win you over, I’ll put it to you that Stoneground’s ‘Alligator Man’ absolutely rules – a monster jam that sounds like it could have come straight off Lou Reed’s ‘Transformer’, perhaps lending credence to the argument that those upright cats at Hammer weren’t as far off the pulse of AD 1972 as is generally supposed.

The Brood 

(David Cronenberg, 1980)

Almost four decades later, and this remains Cronenberg’s most thoroughly disturbing film to date [persuasive counter-arguments welcomed at the usual address]. Almost entirely devoid of the “don’t worry kids, it’s just a horror movie” retreats into genre convention that softened the unsavoury subject matter of his earlier (and indeed, later) efforts, his heavy-handed use of a SF/horror metaphor to unpack the cyclical nature of familial abuse, together with a side order of disdain for the machinations of the psychiatric profession, grinds toward its conclusion with a sense of doom-laden inevitability, leavened only by the creepy feeling of ‘scientific distance’ from human behavior that characterizes so much of the director’s work.

With the exception of a startlingly effective horror movie ‘kill scene’ early on, no diversions, escape routes or sign-posts toward more conventional “entertainment” are offered to the viewer at any point, as Cronenberg’s determination to rub our faces in the nasty, serious business of his troubled characters’ case histories, and to generally go there each time we kinda wish he’d hold back, make this both, a) a remarkable and shocking film, and b) an extremely poor choice to open a Saturday night horror movie marathon. Cue uneasy silence and sombre discussion as the credits roll.

A couple of observations that occurred to me on this particular repeat viewing:

1. There are some striking (if entirely incidental) crossovers with the narrative of Andrzej Zulawski’s ‘Possession’ going on here. Given that that film was made roughly a year later, could we consider the possibility that a few scenes and ideas might have sunk into Zulawski’s consciousness during a screening of ‘The Brood’ and popped up again during the writing process for his own film..? Somehow I’d imagine no one ever dared put the question to him, but… just a thought.

2. Oliver Reed’s performance in ‘The Brood’ is really good. The character he plays is extremely ambiguous, as scripted –  a cruel arch-manipulator whose Frankensteinian disregard for professional ethics was solely responsible for letting the film’s supernatural menace get out of hand, but who also backs up his ‘tough love’ attitude with a genuine streak of well-meaning heroism - yet Reed embodies these contradictory impulses brilliantly. At this stage in his career, you’d have very much expected him to phone in his turn in a cheap Canadian horror flick from the nearest hotel bar, so it's surprising - and great - to instead find him putting in one of his best ever turns as a ‘serious actor’.

Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers 

(Fred Olen Ray, 1988)

And meanwhile, at completely the other end of the horror spectrum... let’s just say that if you knowingly sit down to watch a film named “Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers”, you’ll get exactly what you expect and/or deserve from this godawful piece of weirdly charming crap.

Camp as a row of tents and artlessly shot on what seems to be the same grubby, rescued-from-a-bin film stock utilised by John Waters on his early features, this basically seems to chronicle what happens when some people who theoretically work in ‘the film industry’ lower their expectations and instead begin competing with backyard SOV gore flicks made by horny teenagers – and if we think they should know better at their age, well, we’re the ones who paid money to watch the bloody thing, so who’s laughing now?

Telling the tale of a generic hardboiled private eye (yes, there are “private dick” jokes aplenty) who ends up on the trail of a cabal of prostitutes who belong to a quasi-Egyptian “chainsaw cult”(?!) overseen by TCM’s Gunnar Hansen (who, it turns out, has the least appropriate speaking voice imaginable for playing a cult leader), what we’re left with is essentially a non-stop pep rally for the delights of good ol’ LA sleaze, nothing more, nothing less, but if you’re in the right mood, then hey - dive right in.

The ostensible “gore scenes” – in which topless women wave chainsaws at off-screen victims whilst stage-hands throw blood and rubber limbs at them – are a disgrace to all concerned, whilst the relentless one-liners and tongue in cheek misogyny runs the gamut from knee-slapping to groan-inducing depending on your state of mind. Happily on this occasion, I found myself veering more toward the former. (“What do ya do, pray to Black & Decker?” was my favourite).

By the closing act, the whole thing has built up enough of a head of steam to become pleasantly deranged, and when we get to Linnea Quigley’s body painted double chainsaw dance, well… what need I do except repeat the phrase “Linnea Quigley’s body painted double chainsaw dance” and remind you that this film is commercially available on various formats? Actually, she doesn’t appear to be dancing all that effectively with those saws (they must have been quite heavy), but what the hell, it's still great, and Fred Olen Ray wins again!

Seriously though, for all my nose-holding, I had a pretty good time with this one – it’s a heck of a lot more likeable and good-natured than the Troma-type films it was presumably in competition with upon its initial release, and it’s really short too, so as long as you don’t make the rookie error of watching it sober, you’ll be home safe.

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To be continued (I hope)....

London Frightfest 2011, Part # 3.

Midnight Son
(Scott Leberecht, 2011)

The only flick I managed to catch this year on Frightfest’s smaller ‘discovery’ screen, the unsatisfactorily titled ‘Midnight Son’ wasn’t one I picked out specially or anything – it just happened to be on when I had a film-length hole in my schedule, and I’d already paid for a day pass, so hell, why not. I’m glad I made the effort, because it was pretty good.

Shot on HD Video on what was presumably a non-existent budget, the festival blurb for ‘Midnight Son’ describes it as following in the footsteps of Romero’s ‘Martin’, but really I think it’s closer to a West Coast equivalent of Abel Ferrara’s ‘The Addiction’. Guess that wouldn’t pull the punters in quite so well though.

Anyway, ‘Midnight Son’ invites us into the life of a poor young chap who works the night shift as a security guard in a corporate office building. Seems he has a bit of a skin condition that prevents him from going out in the sun much, and in his spare time he likes to sit in his dingy basement flat painting pictures of sunsets. Understandably feeling a bit washed out, he pursues the kind of remedy that macho doctors in the ‘50s probably used to prescribe to young men with mysterious ailments: vigorously eating a blood red steak and spending the evening chatting to a girl he met selling cigarettes and candy outside a nightclub. This dose of protein and human companionship seems to perk him up no end, but as the working week goes on, the familiar fug descends again, and his discovery that blood works better than coffee as a pick-me-up leads him inevitably toward some rather more unsavoury habits.

So far, so familiar, but the film’s tone of smart, low-key realism goes a long way toward side-stepping the clichés that usually accompany this kind of story, stringing us along effectively enough to make the character’s gradual realisation of his vampiric nature seems both interesting and surprising, as much as we knew it was coming. The awkward quasi-relationship he develops with the similarly troubled young woman is very well played – a combination of her matter-of-fact drug problems and his matter-of-fact vampire problems amusingly conspiring to prevent them ever managing to have a nice evening together.

Although not exactly big on jollity to begin with (thinking about it, this is actually the only film I saw at Frightfest that didn’t have a significant amount of humour running through it), the film takea a darker turn when our man finds himself hanging around by the contaminated waste bins behind a hospital, forging a dubious alliance with a wannabe-gangster porter that eventually leads the story into the realms of a full-blooded (sorry) vampire/crime epic. Here, the video shooting actually works in the film’s favour, allowing for the creation of a believably cold and threatening nocturnal Hollywood underworld, very much reminiscent of the street scenes in Lynch’s ‘Inland Empire’, and thankfully entirely devoid of the kind of dated goth/industrial hoo-hah that usually blights movies like this.

The mumbling indie relationship stuff manages to merge convincingly with the final-third shift into brutal noir crime story stuff, and if ‘Midnight Son’ does have a few of the drawbacks and unintentionally goofy moments that go hand in hand with such DIY, zero budget productions, they’re not worth bothering to go into here. By and large, I thought it was a very impressive piece of work, standing way, way, waaaay above the baseline for SOV horror. If you can stomach a heavy quotient of ‘grainy close-ups of pale, miserable people breathing heavily’ type stuff and aren’t sick to the back teeth of the kind of story that the DVD back cover blurb would probably describe as a ‘gritty urban vampire fable’, this one is well worth making time for.

Oh yeah, and another cool thing about this film – Tracey Walter, Miller from ‘Repo Man’, is in it! Yeah, y’know – “plate of shrimp”, “John Wayne was a fag”, “..you’ll see” – that guy. Always good to see him getting work, even if it is presumably unpaid in a micro-budget horror film. [Clarification: after checking IMDB, Mr. Walter is clearly not short of work – dude’s been in everything; wow, I had no idea.]

The Man Who Saw Frankenstein Cry
(Ángel Agudo, 2010)

Speaking of dudes who get a lot of work done for precious little recognition, it was depressing to see such a small turn-out for the screening of this documentary about the man Michael Weldon wryly described as ‘Spain’s most popular werewolf actor’, the one and only Paul Naschy.

Despite being presented as a tie-in with the Scala Forever season, only about half a dozen lonesome guys and a couple of couples made it into the auditorium to catch this one, perhaps reflecting the sketchy distribution and mangled presentation of Naschy’s films in the English speaking world. Although most of them are barely available at all in legitimate form, in the past year or so I’ve managed to scrape together a fair selection of the many, many horror films Naschy wrote and starred in during the ‘70s, and from what I’ve seen so far, you can count me a fan.

Whether at a career high watermark with 1971’s Leon Kilmovsky directed ‘La Noche de Walpurgis’ (aka ‘Werewolf Shadow’ aka ‘The Werewolf vs. The Vampire Woman’) or wallowing in a mass of straight to video shlock through the ‘80s and ‘90s, it seems like Naschy was one cat who was ALWAYS on form, his name guaranteeing a certain mixture of good-natured monster bashing, gleefully amateurish gore, brain-melting un-scripting and unhinged atmospheric weirdness that never gets old… assuming you’re the sort of misfit who enjoys it in the first place. Personally, I think it’s wonderful stuff – I’ll have to get around to doing some reviews at some point.

As a documentary, ‘The Man Who Saw Frankenstein Cry’ isn’t exactly up to much – basically an extended DVD extra, it doesn’t have a lot to offer beyond an uncritical synopsis of the man’s life and career, interspersed with clips from his movies and talking head interviewees talking about what a great guy he was. But Naschy (real name Jacinto Molina) makes for a fascinating subject, and I don’t see anyone else queuing up to make documentaries about him, so I guess this one wins by default.

Beginning on an interesting note, it tells us all about Molina’s traumatic upbringing during the Spanish Civil War, and his subsequent education in a Nazi-centric ‘German school’ (a clip from one of his ‘80s movies that shows his character violently tearing up pictures of Hitler, Franco etc, cursing their evil legacies, seeks to leave us with little doubt as to what young lad’s feelings on all this were), before we follow him through his initial career as a boxer and bodybuilder. Subsequently working as a gopher in the nascent Spanish film industry as domestic productions began to get off the ground in the ‘50s, Molina initially saw himself breaking into pictures as an art director, and wrote his first werewolf script just in order to have something fun and fantastical that he could hopefully persuade some international backers to let him work on. Legend has it that it was only at a last minute production meeting after their proposed star dropped out that Molina was reluctantly (it says here) persuaded to take on the role of the wolfman himself. Needless to say, the barrel-chested human dynamo took to this assignment with such gusto that his performance helped make 1968’s ‘Las Noches del Hombre Lobo’ (released in the US as ‘Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror’, despite a palpable lack of Frankenstein) into a big hit, and, well – the rest is history, of a sort.

In between the endless personal tributes, generalised hagiography and overbearing music cues, the thing that comes across most strongly in this documentary is a sense of Naschy/Molina’s extraordinary work ethic and unwavering dedication to his own strange corner of cinema. From his initial breakthrough in the late ‘60s through to his death in 2009, it seems that barely a day went by when this man wasn’t busting his ass trying to make some weird movie or other a reality, ploughing on through financial collapse, personal tragedy, government censorship, health problems, disappearing distribution networks and public disinterest to keep his various projects rolling, taking in a long series of Japanese co-productions, an unexpected left turn into oddball thrillers and controversial ‘issue’ movies, and a late career revival aided by American trash-mongers like Brian Yuzna and Fred Olen Ray.

In the final analysis, Naschy has a neat 100 films to his name as an actor on IMDB, 43 of which he wrote, directed or otherwise co-produced. Such a body of work is quite an achievement in itself, and the consistency of vision he seems to have maintained across the decades is remarkable. Of course, a lot of people would argue that such consistency simply means his films were consistently crappy, but who cares what they think? Have they ever made a movie in which a werewolf fights a yeti, or one where the disembodied head of Torquemada freaks people out in nocturnal visions, or where a secretly devil worshipping Indian guru fights zombies with a broadsword in a London cemetery? I think not. The level of basic craftsmanship and goofy invention in Naschy films is always a delight, and say what you like about them, they’re great pieces of demented, gut-level entertainment that are rarely dull, even when they’re almost completely incoherent.

If such eccentric figures as Jose Marins and Jess Franco can become international cult movie heroes then I think Paul Naschy is long overdue his day in the sun, and it would be the greatest gift a horror fan could ask for if some DVD company or other could finally set about reconstructing some nicely transferred, uncut versions of his films before the financial viability of DVD releasing goes down the plughole, leaving us to make do forever with the fuzzed up public domain atrocities currently on the market. If you’re listening out there Anchor Bay or Arrow or whoever, I’ve got money in my pocket and a Paul Naschy Box Set sized gap on my shelves. Make it happen.

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Following the Naschy documentary, my plan had been to hang on to catch the 11:30 screening of the fun sounding flick ‘Detention’, but to be honest, I was pretty worn out by this point – I had a splitting headache, and there was still an hour to go before that then, and I just couldn’t face the idea of killing yet more time hanging around the multiplex lobby drinking overpriced, metallic beer or aimlessly wondering the streets before fighting my way home on the nightbuses after the movie finished at 1am-ish, so… I’m sorry readers: I went home instead.

I know, what a wuss. As I sit here sneakily writing this on a rainy afternoon in work, I would absolutely love to be hanging out with a crowd of boozed up horror fans, watching some rip-roaring alien/zombie/high school movie, but on the night it just wasn’t gonna happen.

That aside though, another year of fine and varied programming from this festival, with even a lot of the films on the big screen serving to challenge the mainstream clichés of modern horror, and filling me with a lot more optimism for current genre cinema than I’ve felt for some time, I guess. Good stuff – looking forward to next year, etc.