Some thoughts on… The Witch(Robert Eggers, 2016)

Arriving in my household this December on the back of a veritable avalanche of critical adulation (a major studio distributed horror film won “best director” at Sundance? Really?), Robert Eggers’ directorial debut proved… heavy going, to be honest.

Rendered in the dour, near-monochromatic style that so often seems to predominate in 21st century films that aspire toward “seriousness” (don’t get me wrong, I know life for the 17th century Pilgrim Fathers wasn’t exactly a riot of Technicolor extravagance, but I’d at least like to think they at least encountered the occasional dash of blue or green amid the grey, and managed to look at each other without frowning every now and again), ‘The Witch’ is nonetheless refreshingly unequivocal about its identify as a hackle-raising, scare-yr-pants-off horror film.

Indeed, in purely utilitarian terms, it succeeds extremely well in this area. Despite its overtures toward what I suppose we’re obliged to call in shorthand the “arthouse crowd”, I’ll readily admit that ‘The Witch’ was the most viscerally frightening film I’ve seen in years. Full-on sneaking-glimpses-of-the-screen-through-my-fingers terrifying in places in fact. So, yes - if you are the sort of person who is inclined to judge horror films based primarily on their capacity to be “scary”, you can anticipate a right doozy with this one, irrespective of its somber tone and subject matter.

Whilst I was busy being reduced to a quivering wreck by the film’s overpowering aura of dread and persistent threat of imminent, soul-wreaking violence however, I was also uncomfortably aware of the fact that the techniques Eggers was employing to generate these responses from me were just as cynically manipulative as those found in the most base of jump-scare filled slasher flicks.

From the slow, steady-cam crawls through unfamiliar locations to the nerve-shatteringly loud Penderecki-via-Hermann score, the rapid movements erupting from still life-esque quietude, semi-hidden tableaus of alarming Goya-esque beastliness and aggressive soundscapes of rumbling earthquake drone and chittering demonic feeding - every trick in the Hideo Nakata-via-David Lynch playbook for scaring the bejeezus out of your audience whilst still remaining artistically credible is exhaustively exploited here, whilst the more basic conceit of constantly imperiling children and other innocents simultaneously delivers the can’t-fail coup de grace to our ailing nerves.

Though it is confident in its execution and ruthlessly efficient in its effect, I couldn’t help but feel that this heavy-handed approach to the “scary stuff” was to some extent counter-productive, detracting our attention from the very elements that do actually make ‘The Witch’ a rewarding and genuinely disturbing piece of work – namely, those arising not from the heavy-handed direction but from the film’s writing and performances, which are both extremely good.

As the story initially got underway, I was surprised and rather impressed by the extent to which the script takes the strict puritan beliefs of its characters – a mind-set that is so alien to us in the 21st century West that it is almost impossible to approach it without implicit or explicit criticism – and presents them entirely at face value.

The “witch”, we initially feel, is an external force of parasitic evil whose wrath can be avoided only through a regime of prayer, obedience and enforced purity of thought. The soul of a child who dies prior to baptism meanwhile is headed straight to hell, and that is no laughing matter – especially as regards the burden of guilt which must subsequently be borne by the already grieving parents whose modest lapses in duty are seen as having allowed such a circumstance. Needless to say, it is in this invisible realm of Christian cosmology that the film’s real horror lies.(1)

As the story develops and we delve deeper into the internal lives of the film’s characters though, and as the situation facing them becomes increasingly desperate, ‘The Witch’s moral universe gradually shifts upon its axis in an extremely interesting fashion. Though the change is almost too subtle for us to even notice at first amid all the horror movie nerve-jangling, what eventually begins to emerge is a uniquely involving method of retelling an old, old story.

Though the notion that a seemingly external threat actually grows from within has been a given in haunted house and exorcism type narratives for decades (or indeed centuries, if we fall back on the gothic tradition), I have rarely seen this theme elucidated in quite such a compassionate and compelling manner as it is here, as, taking a page or two from the none-more-obvious reference point of Arthur Miller’s ‘The Crucible’, ‘The Witch’ essentially becomes a tale about the way in which the seemingly unbreakable bonds of love and trust within a close-knit family unit can be strained, twisted and eventually destroyed in the face of stressful and traumatic circumstances.

As hardship and anxiety increases, minor vanities and personal failings that could be indulged and forgiven under more comfortable circumstances widen into fatal flaws, allowing nagging seeds of doubt to flower into full blown paranoia, which in turn becomes entwined with the family’s rigidly inflexible belief system, legitimising increasingly unhinged and dangerous patterns of behavior that move the story toward a far more nuanced and thought-provoking condemnation of religious extremism and its social & psychological consequences than we horror fans are usually asked to process via one-sided diatribes of the ‘Witchfinder General’ variety.(2)

Played out by a gifted cast with all the weighty intensity they can muster (I’d normally single out some names at this point, but frankly it’s just easier if I just refer to the IMDB cast list, as each member of the film’s central family is equally outstanding, the child actors in particular), it is this theme which serves to elevate ‘The Witch’ to a level of dramatic legitimacy that I confess makes all the Luciferian goats and monster-clawed hags that Eggers throws at us seem rather silly in comparison.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that ‘The Witch’ might even have worked better as a naturalistic, real world drama rather than as a horror film. This may seem a stretch, but the more I think about it, the easier it is to imagine the essential structure of the script being transferred wholesale to, say, the travails of the family trying to survive in a contemporary Middle East combat zone, without altering the beats of the story in any significant fashion. Just exchange the “the witch” for “the war”, and everything pretty much falls straight into place, with a result that would likely remain just as emotionally coherent, and even more harrowing.

(Of course, THAT film could probably never make it to the screen in quite the way I imagine it, even via the neo-realist film traditions currently prevalent in countries like Iran, simply because it would be near unbearable to sit through. After all, the perverse webs of escapism and thematic metaphor that inform our enjoyment of fictional narratives here in the First World dictate that it is a lot easier to contemplate a baby spirited away by a witch’s familiar than a baby blown to pieces by a cluster bomb, even as the latter continues to be tolerated and enabled every day by the same global power structures that allow us the comfort in which to enjoy tales of the former…. but, I digress.)

One thing that would probably not work in the kind of substitution I have described above however is the ending of ‘The Witch’, which I hope I can briefly discuss without straying into the realm of out-right spoilers.

In essence, there is something fairly extraordinary about the way in which Eggers dovetails ninety minutes of relentless terror and misery with a few giddy, closing moments of what feels almost like a post-annihilation/ego-death liberation of sorts – a kind of ‘flip the script’ alchemical rebirth that leaves us feeling unmoored and light-headed, as the lingering fear we’ve become accustomed to falls away into acceptance. It’s a great ending.

As my wife insightfully observed, by the end of the movie, the mysterious witch cult that we have been living in mortal terror of thus far begins to seem very much like the coven of female convicts in Shunya Ito’s ‘Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41’ (1972) – a society of outcast women transformed into predatory savages because the authoritarian society that has rejected them allows them literally no other options for continued existence. And if I tell you that the ending of Eggers’ film succeeds in capturing even a fraction of the transformative spirit of Ito’s, readers familiar with the latter will know that they can take that as a pretty strong recommendation.

In my more pompous moments, I’ve been known to declare that the only kind of fictional narrative that can be considered in any way relevant to an understanding of the human condition is one that features no clearly delineated ‘villains’, but instead posits a variety of ultimately sympathetic characters who provoke conflict through their contradictory or misguided actions. As such, it could perhaps be said that Robert Eggers’ greatest achievement in ‘The Witch’ lies in his finding a way to combine this principle with a tale of shrieking, inhuman terror that leaves just about everyone dead and eternally damned, and to somehow make it work.

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(1) As a wanton digression that doesn’t easily fit anywhere else in this review, I should note that, purely in terms of supernatural horror, it was this earlier section of the film that I found to be by far the most frightening. Given that the family portrayed in the film (and indeed, the wider community from which they have separated themselves) seems to exist upon the edge of a wilderness largely untouched by humanity, I kept thinking, well, what the hell *is* this ‘witch’? Where did it come from? I mean, an old-fashioned witch cult existing as an off-shoot of an established Christian society – that’s something I can deal with. But the possibility of that *unknown other*…? Remember that quote (was it William Burroughs?) about how, before the white man came to America, and before the red man came, there was already something evil there, some lurking at its heart…? Now THAT’S a scary thought when you’re stuck in an isolated homestead surrounded by impenetrable forest. Though ‘The Witch’ doesn’t ultimately go in that direction, it hovers around it for long enough and convincingly enough in its first half to put the wind up me.

 (2) For wanton digression # 2, it behoves me to point out the similarities between ‘The Witch’ and what is quite possibly my all-time favourite horror film, Piers Haggard’s ‘Blood On Satan’s Claw’ (1972). Not only are they amongst the only horror films I’m aware of that create and sustain a believable 17th century setting, complete with period appropriate dialogue, they are also the only two films in my experience of the genre to operate on the basis of a period-appropriate puritan Christian belief system without foregrounding a contemporary critique of said belief system. 

Whilst that may sound like an odd thing to celebrate on one level, it is this straight-faced portrayal of the characters’ beliefs that I think gives both films some of their unique power. Add a number of more nebulous similarities – the association of nature and “the woods” with untamed, pagan nastiness, the corruption of children by an insidious evil, the quasi-political implications of a coven of young/female/sexually active outsiders attacking a repressive patriarchal society – and one wonders how closely Haggard’s film might have played into the development of ‘The Witch’, despite the vastly different tone of the two projects.

Nippon Horrors: Genocide / ‘War of the Insects’ (Kazui Nihonmatsu, 1968)

Even when writing a weblog that prides itself on plunging headfirst into discussion of some pretty crazy motion pictures, there are some films that just present so much of a WTF it’s difficult to know what to do with them, and here we have a case in point. Quite what was going through the minds of Shochiku studio’s short-lived sci-fi/horror division when they decided to follow up their fairly jaunty low budget kaiju picture ‘The X From Outer Space’ with the cheerily titled ‘Genocide’, I almost think I’m happier not knowing.(1)

So first off, two things I’m usually reluctant to do in the course of reviewing movies: (i) classifying these sort of sci-fi / ‘nature goes bad’ disaster movies as ‘horror’. (I know strictly speaking they kind of are, but y’know… in aesthetic terms, there’re way off from what constitutes ‘horror’ in my mind.) And, (ii), giving in to the school of thought that seeks to frame everything shocking or extreme in post-war Japanese culture as a response to the trauma created by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. (It seems some Western critics like to crow-bar that issue in wherever they possibly can, but much of the time I just don’t buy it, personally.)

Both of those rules, however, are going to be jettisoned whilst we look at ‘Genocide’, a frankly extraordinary venture that resembles a humble genre programmer that’s somehow lost its mind and gone completely insane, beginning in the detached, utilitarian mode common to ‘50s and ‘60s science-goes-bad disaster films, but gradually spiralling off into a kind of beserk, hysterical fatalism, conveying a sense of absurd, nihilistic cruelty that surpasses just about any contemporary horror film, and reflecting the unthinkable reality of an era in which pointless mass death seemed ever imminent.

So how the hell did that happen…? Well, let’s begin at the beginning, shall we.

The very first thing we see in ‘Genocide’ is stock footage of an atomic bomb explosion.“The moment mankind unleashed the power of the atom..”, reads a somewhat gnomic opening caption, “..he immediately began to fear it”. So that’s the second of my above-stated caveats out the window right from the outset, I guess. I also get the feeling that anyone who bought a ticket in the hope of seeing a fun movie about killer insects is already beginning to feel somewhat uneasy.

After a beautifully garish title sequence (rather reminiscent of the similarly insect-filled credits to Teruo Ishii’s equally unhinged Horrors of Malformed Men), we join an American bomber carrying a nuclear payload, flying over Kojima Island in the Anan Archipelago on a routine exercise. The pilot Charly, played by Japanese cinema’s go-to guy for black American roles, Chico Roland,(2)spots a wasp outside the window and inexplicably freaks the fuck out, suffering flashbacks to Vietnam as he thrashes around, assaulting his fellow crew members and trying to activate the release mechanism for the bomb. Temporarily distracted by their colleague’s outburst, the crew fail to notice that they’re flying headfirst into an inexplicably gigantic swarm of insects, whose combined mass burns out the plane’s engines, setting the vessel ablaze.

From a hideaway on the nearby cliffs, a blond Caucasian woman, Annabelle (Kathy Haran, who also did some first-class freaking out in ‘Genocide’s sister film, ‘Goke: Bodysnatcher From Hell’), and her Japanese lover Joji (Yûsuke Kawazu), watch as the plane and its cargo fall to earth.

This Joji, it quickly transpires, is a bit of a creep. We soon learn that he’s been frolicking with Annabelle on the pretext that he’s out hunting for rare insects, leaving his trusting Japanese wife, a hotel maid, at the mercy of her boss, a disagreeable oaf who seems to try to rape her every five minutes. The next time we see Joji furthermore, he’s sailing into harbour in his dinghy, trying to palm off a handful of suspiciously obtained US military watches on the local fishermen. Yes, he’s a bad ‘un alright.

When army personnel make it to the island to investigate the crash meanwhile, they find the plane’s crew dead, having apparently contracted some hideous, bubonic plague-like disease whilst sheltering in a cave. That’s with the exception of Charly, who is found unconscious on the beach, having apparently fallen off a cliff whilst fleeing from his comrades. The wreck of the plane itself, and the H-bomb onboard, remain unaccounted for. So until Charly wakes up, I think Uncle Sam might want to have a quick word with Joji...

Joji’s arrest on some slightly trumped up murder charges brings the whole mess to the attention of Dr. Nagumo of the the Tokyo Biological Research Centre (Keisuke Sonoi), who, with a sense of taste and restraint typical of this film, is introduced to us via a shot that sees him stabbing a large rodent with a syringe full of bright blue fluid, apparently for real. (What can I say, you’ve gotta learn to wince and shrug this stuff off in older movies sometimes..). According to the doc, Joji has recently sent him samples of a rare insect found of Kojima island, one whose poison “..attacks the nervous system, causing madness and death”. Things just keep looking up for our poor islanders, don’t they?

Meanwhile, a world news report on the radio in the hotel bar announces that food supplies in Egypt and India are under attack from unseasonable swarms of locusts, and by the time Charly finally awakens in a hospital bed, portents of both local and global doom are accumulating so thick and fast it’s not surprising folks are starting to get a bit twitchy.

Ah, poor Charly. Rarely have I seen a character who has such a persistently dreadful time in a film as he is subjected to here. From his very first appearance on screen, he’s practically losing his mind with fear, and the catalogue of torments he experiences through the rest of the film beggars belief. After suffering severe head injuries on the beach, he awakens in an insensible state, raving about his fear of insects. So naturally the doctors decide to try to revive his memory by sitting him in a dark room and playing reels of insect footage whilst he screams in abject terror, after which he immediately gets smacked around by the attending US Colonel, who accuses him of being a hallucinating drug addict.

On his way to a military prison, he narrowly avoids being torn apart by machine-gun fire as he is kidnapped by a gang of Communist agents temporarily in the employ of the film’s main villain (who will remain nameless here). Determined to use him to locate the missing h-bomb, they tie him up, beat him and torture him with a cigarette, before trying out a new technique, confining him in a descending tunnel of that kinda gauze-like fabric that bee-keeper’s hats are made of, and pumping in a swarm of those nervous system shattering wasps.

Completely unhinged by this point, Charly is dumped by his captors on the shore of the island; out of sheer malice, they throw him a pistol before they depart, hoping he’ll wreak some kind of carnage before the insects’ poison kills him. Next, we see him staggering toward the island’s hospital, letting off shots in the air and laughing like a loon as he prepares to menace the film’s two heroines, who are within. Suddenly transformed from a hapless victim to a psychopathic monster by the poison, he suffers a singularly inglorious death, shot down from behind as he sets about trying to rape the nurse.

So basically, the unfortunate fellow spends the entire duration of the film in a state of extreme pain, terror and confusion, culminating in a pointless death that leaves everyone assuming he was a violent maniac. And as his corpse leers up at us, we’re suddenly hit with one of the film’s most singularly unglued innovations, as a hideous, electronically filtered voice that we’re apparently supposed to interpret as the ‘chorus of the insects’ begins chanting (in English): “genocide…. genocide…”.

As with the aforementioned ‘Goke’, there is a kind of vicious misanthropy at work in ‘Genocide’. In spite of the massed threats the film lines up against humanity, most of the characters seem incapable of uniting with each other or acting rationally for even a few moments. Dr Nagumo and the Red Cross nurse (Reiko Hitomi) are presented as our standard issue trustworthy, heroic characters, but aside from their obligatory presence, the whole film seems to take place in some upside down moral universe in which people routinely say things like “thank you for the poisonous insects” and “thank heavens for that plane crash”.

Just about everyone in this film’s world, it seems, is motivated either by callous selfishness or horribly misguided ideological fervour… unless, that is, they’re one of the contingent who is actively welcoming and encouraging the forthcoming nuclear/insect/plague apocalypse. Amid layers of political, global, cultural distrust and despair, “kill ‘em all and let god sort it out” seems to ‘Genocide’s general message to the world, a sentiment that is only amplified by a truly jaw-dropping plot twist that occurs midway through the film. Totally crazy and utterly black-hearted, I won't spoil the surprise for you here, but… just you wait.

Strangely enough though, despite all this bleakness, ‘Genocide’ actually remains pretty fun to watch. As an example of formula genre picture that’s gone completely off the rails into uncharted territory, it is astoundingly entertaining, and the weird, sledgehammer ineptitude with which many of its more extreme situations are portrayed, together with the randomised hysterical energy of the whole thing, is a whole lot of “WTF is UP with this movie?!” style enjoyment.

Initially, the basic characterisation, impersonal medium-shots and functional, exposition-heavy dialogue of a more traditional sci-fi / disaster movie predominates, but when the film goes full-on ape-shit following Charly’s death, the situations that transpire swiftly become so twisted, it’s almost as if the two dimensional characters can barely comprehend what’s happening to their little world. Meanwhile, the dry cinematic syntax in turn becomes freakier and freakier, until it practically collapses into an orgy of solarised stock footage, shrieking close-ups, assaultive montages and utterly bizarre psychedelic visual effects (the latter an attempt to portray the ‘mindspace of the insects’, or somesuch, as experienced by victims of the poison before they die).

And so, what could, in a more orderly, less threatening world, have just remained a mildly diverting Japanese answer to ‘Them!’ instead becomes a celluloid equivalent of Colonel Kurtz, gazing deep into the abyss, cackling as flies buzz around the heads on spikes, reflecting on the mad, unending horror of it all. Christ almighty. But, you’ve gotta laugh, haven't you? Just ask Charly.

(1)The original Japanese title, 'Konchû Daisensô', translates roughly as ‘War of the Insects’, a title that was also used for at least one English language release (see the film’s IMDB page for a poster using that name). How in the hell it ended up being called ‘Genocide’ for it’s slightly more high profile US release, I can’t begin to imagine.

(2)Chico Roland is perhaps best known for his appearances in Seijun Suzuki’s ‘Gate of Flesh’ (1964) and Shigehiro Ozawa’s ‘The Streetfighter’ (1974), as well as for playing the rebellious black GI ‘Gill’ in Koreyoshi Kurahara’s pair of cinematic molotov cocktails, ‘The Warped Ones’ (1960) and ‘Black Sun’ (1964). He always seems to present a rather weird, gentle, child-like demeanour on screen, and his frequently bizarre line readings suggest that he wasn’t very fluent in either Japanese or English. Quite who this guy was, and how he ended up appearing in so many awesome Japanese movies, I would love to know.

FRANCO FILES: Barbed Wire Dolls (1975)

AKA:

‘Frauengefängnis’, ‘Jailhouse Wardress’, ‘Caged Women’, ‘El Reformatorio De Las Perdidas’, ‘Women's Penitentiary IV’.

Context:

Being a fan of a director like Jess Franco is all about learning to take the rough with the smooth, and at some point in this series we’ve got to acknowledge the fact that he made a whole pile of Women In Prison films over the course of his career, ranging from 1969’s surprisingly upmarket ‘99 Women’ to 1981’s unspeakably grimy ‘Sadomania’.

I know that the WIP genre has its fans, but, as you may have gathered from the tone of the preceding paragraph, I’m not really one of them. Probably best not dwell too much on my reasoning here, but let’s just say that more-so than their obvious legacy of cruelty and misogyny, I just find these films unspeakably dull – drab, joyless productions that offer few possibilities for visual or narrative excitement, like the slimy basement lurking beneath the grand ballrooms where all the more glamorous exploitation sub-genres go to party.

Obviously there are some noteworthy exceptions (Shunya Ito’s endlessly incredible ‘Female Prisoner: Scorpion’ trilogy springs to mind), but by and large, I find these cheaply rendered tales of confinement and degradation to be a stone drag. So the $100,000 question is: can Jess Franco bring anything to the WIP party to make us sit up and take notice?

By way of an answer, let us turn to one of the earliest fruits of Franco’s long association with ubiquitous Swiss sleaze-baron Erwin C. Deitrich, and the third highest grossing film in Germany in 1975 according to Tombs & Tohill in ‘Immoral Tales’, ‘Frauengefängnis’ aka ‘Barbed Wire Dolls’.

Content:

Communal shower scenes are inexplicably absent, and there’s not a cat-fight to be seen, but aside from that this is WIP 101 really: beautiful Lina, sentenced to a lifetime behind bars for defending herself from a paternal rape attempt, finds herself condemned to a totally context-less island penitentiary ruled over by sadistic lesbian wardess Monica Swinn. Sharing a cell with a duo of underwear-shunning, mentally-damaged nymphomaniacs (Beni Cardoso and Peggy Markhoff), our heroine proceeds to run the inevitable gamut of electro-shock torment, rape, starvation, aphrodisiac injections, cowardly, lecherous doctors (euro-horror stalwart Paul Muller) and more rape, before an ill-conceived escape attempt leads to a desperate jungle pursuit, climaxing in… well you don’t think I’m going to spoil the ending of a grand drama like this, do you?

Kink:

Given that the many of the scenes in this film present the director with a visual palette of bare concrete walls, unmade beds and largely unclothed women, no prizes will be awarded for guessing where Jess’s zoom lens tends to linger. Although things remain softcore, restraint was entirely off the menu by the time Franco was working with Dietrich, meaning that viewers will be able to draw the leading ladies’ private parts from memory by the time they get to the end of this one.

Initially, most of the naked writhing is handled by Markhoff, but inevitably Lina soon gets in on the act too (I mean she’s got a reputation for this sorta thing to keep up, and hell with the fact her character’s supposed to be a naive innocent), and sitting through the film’s more dreary passages becomes easier with the knowledge that we’ll soon once more be able to enjoy the strangely soothing feeling of being smothered to death by ‘70s pussy. The assorted inter-personal sex scenes by contrast are somewhat less soothing, showcasing a teeth-grinding awkwardness more in keeping with the WIP genre as a whole, and personally I was never quite won over by the nazi-kitsch antics of Commandant Swinn and her decidedly improper hot-pants, but each to their own. 3/5

Creepitude:

With its sunny surroundings, sexy machine gun toting guards and improbable softcore seductions around every corner, I don’t think anyone will be surprised to learn that Jess Franco’s idea of a fascistic high security prison is less a relentless hell on earth and more like some strange holiday camp for habitual masochists.

In fact, the total unreality of the film’s world immediately undercuts any attempt to convincingly convey the brutality and horror of prison life, and if the obligatory scenes of squalid, high level nastiness (Lina wetting herself as electric shocks are administered on an iron bedspread, a naked Cardoso being starved and forced to beg for food) are indeed extremely distasteful, the disgust the viewer feels is less a gut reaction to the events depicted on-screen, and more a kind of soul-sapping, second-hand revulsion at the idea that we have somehow chosen to watch these listless, poorly staged atrocities in the name of entertainment. Grim.

It should probably be noted that the UK 18 rated version of the film I’m watching runs to 77 minutes of what IMDB claims is a potential 93, but given the strength and duration of what’s been left in, I can’t honestly imagine much of the missing footage was cut for reasons of explicitness (unless there’s a hardcore version out there somewhere, in which case god help us all). 1/5

Pulp Thrills:

I suppose if you were to consider the ‘70s WIP film as a valid pulp aesthetic in its own right, ‘Barbed Wire Dolls’ would be an absolute hoot, ticking pretty much all of the relevant boxes for full scale camp enjoyment. As outlined above though, that’s not really my preferred bowl of gruel, and I found precious little escapist fun here, in spite of the complete detachment from reality. 1/5

Altered States:

Well quite a lot of the film is out of focus, so there’s that.

A brief rape scene in the prison governor’s office has some strikingly good disorientating, baroque compositions, but this stands out as an exception, and on the whole the technique here is unashamedly slap-dash, with erratic focus errors, wobbly, improvised zooming and awkwardly cropped framing all suggestive of a film whose makers spent more time looking at the clock than the viewfinder.

In the extras included on this Anchor Bay DVD, the supremely weasel-like Mr Dietrich expresses his belief that the film’s technical shortcomings were not merely the result of laziness and directorial apathy, but a deliberate statement of cinematic primitivism that directly prefigured the innovations of the Dogme 95 movement. And, indulgent though I am toward Jess Franco’s erratic artistic whims, even I feel I must pause here to suggest that this mind-bogglingly self-important claim is, how you say? A load of bollocks.

Probably the weirdest moment in ‘Barbed Wire Dolls’ is a creepy, vaseline-fogged incest flashback in which Franco makes an appearance as Lina’s father, both parties seemingly carrying out their movements at half speed in a baffling and rather laughable attempt to mimic the effect of slow motion. Well, you win some and you lose some I suppose – at least they were *trying* for something a bit different. 2/5

Sight-seeing:

Filmed entirely in Honduras, ‘Barbed Wire Dolls’ fits in nicely with the whole swathe of jungle-set films Franco made through the Dietrich era and into the early ‘80s (‘Doriana Gray’, ‘Sexy Sisters’, ‘Voodoo Passion’, ‘Diamonds of Kilimanjaro’, to name but a few), all of which feel like they could have been shot next door to each other, despite utilising a wide variety of ‘exotic’ (and no doubt affordable) locales.

Anyway, we get some jungle, a fairly impressive coastal fort, a few colonial looking houses. It’s ok I suppose, but not really much more eye-opening than the kind of terrain you’d see in one of those Filipino Vietnam movies. 2/5

Conclusion:

Y’know, in truth, ‘Barbed Wire Dolls’ isn’t really that bad. It isn’t that good either… in fact, who am I kidding, by any reasonable standard it’s bloody awful. But if nothing else, the performances given by Lina Romay and Beni Cardosso feel genuine, managing to connect on a vague, emotional level that helps us empathise with their characters’ hopeless plight to an extent that is rarely encountered in the ultra-cynical realm of the WIP film.

And maybe I’m just saying this because I’m a fan, but despite its numerous crimes against social and cinematic decency, ‘Barbed Wire Dolls’ doesn't leave one with the impression that Jess Franco is a bad man or a misogynist – more just a down-at-heel technician going through the contractually obligated motions, throwing in some personal touches as and when he can; a feeling that would sadly predominate through the majority of his subsequent collaborations with the Dietrich empire.

Godmonster of Indian Flats (Fredric Hobbs, 1973)

When we last encountered cracked conceptual genius Fredric Hobbs on this blog, he was busy trying to squeeze our brains through the sieve of the unforgettable Alabama’s Ghost. Needless to say, after a few months spent recovering from that experience, I was primed for more, and thankfully, so was Hobbs. In the brief window between wrapping up work on his magnum opus and witnessing its presumably disastrous unveiling on the grindhouse circuit, some damn fool gave Fred the green light once again, and production began almost immediately on 1973’s ‘Godmonster of Indian Flats’.

Perhaps they figured, well, how far off the rails can he go with a straightforward monster movie anyway? I fear you and I both know the answer to that question.

Having said that though, it’s clear from the outset that ‘Godmonster..’ is a far more low-key affair than ‘Alabama’, rarely seeking to replicate the overdriven freakery and psychedelic excess of its predecessor. More of a slow-burner in the weirdness stakes than an OMFG mindblower, close attention and contemplation nonetheless reveal it to be an equally inexplicable proposition; a bilious and indigestible film, by turns frustrating, whimsical, beautiful and genuinely upsetting, ‘Godmonster..’ is unmistakably the work of a creative mind running on a completely different set of rails from the rest of mankind, and for that alone it should be celebrated.


As Hobbs relates in an interview (more of a vast, disjointed monologue really) conducted by Stephen Thrower for his indispensable book Nightmare USA, the seeds of ‘Godmonster..’ were sewn largely from the director’s connections with the community of Virginia City in Nevada, a former goldrush city built on the profits of gold extracted from the legendary ‘Comstock Lode’, and subsequently preserved for the ages as a kind of period-authentic tourist town.

Hobbs created much of his best-known artwork during sojourns in Virginia City, as well as assisting in the restoration of town’s historic buildings and co-authoring the book ‘The Richest Place on Earth: The Story of Virginia City and the Heyday of the Comstock Lode’ (1978). So setting his film there, taking advantage of unusual architecture, awe-inspiring scenery and the goodwill of the local community, must have been a no-brainer really, and indeed ‘Godmonster..’ is in many ways a tribute to the strange atmosphere of Virginia City – full of local tales, local people and local peculiarities, even if it is not, I should imagine, the kind of homage many residents might have anticipated.

In classic ‘50s monster movie style, the film posits an isolated laboratory in the hills outside the town, where Dr Clemens (“head of Anthropology at the University of Reno”) and his perpetually dazed flower-child assistant Mariposa are working on unspecified matters requiring a great deal of secrecy and isolation. (In another great example of Hobbs’ knack for enhancing his movies through use of ‘found’ locations and props, Dr Clemens laboratory is housed in an incredibly sinister looking concrete pile that is apparently an abandoned US government cyanide factory.)


One night, Doc Clemens encounters Eddie, a simple-minded local sheep-farmer who has ended up penniless after a night of drinking following a fruit machine jackpot in Reno resulted in his being fleeced and run out of town by the Virginia City locals. Drunkenly collapsing amid his beloved sheep after the Doc drives him home (“how’s God’s children tonight?” he asks them), Eddie witnesses something that the film seems to invite us to interpret as a divine/miraculous happenstance.

First he sees a blinding light in the sky, and glimpses strange, swirling creatures in the darkness above him. Churning, super-imposed sheep imagery fills the screen and loud bahhing mixes with religious choral music on the soundtrack as a flash of lightning descends from the heavens, and Eddie awakes to find himself cradling a mewling, misshapen mass of newly-birthed sheep-flesh.




When he checks in on Eddie the next morning, the Doc apparently recognises the birth of this misbegotten creature as “an amazing event, almost incredible from a scientific standpoint… possibly the result of chromosomic breakdown and cross-fertilisation”, and immediately rushes it back to his lab, installing it in an incubator for further study. And, just when we’re wondering why the head of an anthropology department would need a fully-functioning medical lab equipped with a high-tech incubator and an all-purpose assortment of other mad scientist equipment, Clemens helpfully fills us in at length regarding the reasons he really came to the Comstock – namely, the investigation of “..a certain theory of cellular realignment..” inspired by unusual fossil imprints found in the abandoned mines, and goldrush-era legends concerning a supposed ‘mine monster’. Pity the poor clerk at the University of Reno who had to process the invoices for that one.

Meanwhile, back in town, other business is afoot, and Hobbs wants to make sure we know all about it. Mayor Silverdale – patriarchal head of the Virginia City Historical Society and also, allegedly, of a secret society known as the 601s who ‘protect’ the city’s interests – is having breakfast with one Mr Barnstable (played by Alabama himself, the one and only Christopher Brooks). Barnstable has come to the town on behalf of a Howard Hughes-esque billionaire named Rupert Reich with the intention of persuading the townsfolk to sell their mining concessions, allowing the Reich Corporation to commence a programme of economically-devastating industrial stripmining.



Understandably, Silverdale – whose desire to preserve the status quo upon which his power rests verges on fascistic paranoia – is less than sympathetic to Reich’s overtures. When the charismatic Barnstable refuses to take no for an answer and leave town though, Silverdale and his cronies decide to take more drastic action.

Somewhat uniquely, this action consists of seeking to ruin Barnstable’s reputation in the eyes of the townspeople by encouraging him to take part in a shooting contest during the town’s ‘Bonanza Day’ celebrations, then framing him with the death of a beloved local dog (whose owner, the local sheriff, instructs the beast to play dead).


Several long scenes are spent elaborating the details of this unfeasible ruse, as we hear about how the dog has been deposited with the sheriff’s nephew in Albuquerque for safe keeping, and witness the tearful funeral that is held for the purportedly slain mutt in the town’s central church. (“He was only a dog, but he filled out lives with joy and gaiety.. until a bullet struck him down” opines Silverdale’s lackey Maldove in the midst of the most solemn and overblown dog funeral oration in cinema history.)

In spite of his new status as a pariah and dog murderer though, Barnstable continues his quest to try to win over the townsfolk, experiencing much toing and froing and double-crossing that we won’t bother going into here, until he eventually finds himself on the verge of being lynched by the black-shirted 601s, after discovering that Silverdale has already gone over his head and sold out the town directly to Reich.

Escaping the lynch mob with the help of brothel proprietor/clairvoyant Madame Alta, Barnstable seeks sanctuary with Doc Clemens at Indian Flats, and it is during the subsequent tear gas assault by Silverdale’s men that the now fully-grown ‘Godmonster’ makes its inevitable escape.


It must be said at this point that, in purely technical terms, ‘Godmonster of Indian Flats’ is not really a great work of cinema. In keeping with what you might expect from a largely unheralded regional genre film, the pacing is pretty sluggish and the direction perfunctory (give or take the occasional moment of oddball inspiration). In spite of the remarkable shooting locations and the often astounding imagery presented on-screen, Hobbs works predominantly in bland medium and long shot, with camera movement clearly at a premium. Unconvincing post-production audio inserts are sometimes used to enhance or replace dialogue from original shoot, whilst the music track is largely comprised of stock ‘suspense’ cues and outdated theremin jams seemingly pulled straight from a ‘50s sci-fi/monster flick.

The performances – though less blunt than those in ‘Alabama’ – are still of the declamatory, am-dram variety common to many off-the-map independent films, meaning that if characters don’t QUITE enter a scene with the fingers looped in their belt buckles and say “WELL, I DO DECLARE..”, they constantly seem to be on the verge of doing so.

Not every story needs nuanced, method style intensity to get where it’s going though, and likewise, ‘Godmonster..’ doesn’t really *need* to be a great technical achievement to make its point, when the wayward imagination and unguessable sideways logic that Hobbs packs into his screenplay instantly serves to separate him from the Don Dohlers and William Grefes of this world.

By necessity, ‘Godmonster..’ is a slower, more realistic venture than ‘Alabama’, but even in his most earth-bound moments, Hobbs can’t help but get a bit weird. In the film’s opening few minutes depicting Eddie’s night out in Reno, rows of slot machines wheeze and drone like part of an alien landscape, as salty characters ramble their way through sprawling mouthfuls of quintessential Hobbsian dialogue. (“It’s getting’ up into drinking time… it’s the golden hours, boy… full of banjo-dust and starry-eyed broads, lookin’ for a good time…”, announces one Elbow Johnson, apropos of nothing, as he props up the bar.)

Elsewhere, Hobbs’ obvious love of street parades and Western culture is in full effect as he comes on like some cranky, cowboy Fellini during the scenes depicting Virginia City’s ‘Bonanza Day’, filling the screen with leering, drunken faces, blaring oom-pah bands, cheering prostitutes, pie-eating contests, railroad spike-driving demonstrations, sixgun-blasting yahoos and you name it.



As the film progresses, it starts to accumulate some heavy psychedelic and spiritual undertones too, regardless of Hobbs’ apparent efforts to try to ground his tale in scientific/economic reality.

Making their way through Virginia City’s hilltop graveyard, Eddie and Mariposa witness Madame Alta pushing her face against the branches of a tree, apparently in some kind of supernatural trance. Sitting beneath an impressive obelisk (‘Captain Storie’s Monument’), Eddie gives his own impressionistic account of the ‘Godmonster’s birth (“when I had this.. vision.. it seemed like the whole sky opened up.. filling the barn with gold-dust..”) whilst Mariposa chimes in with some trippy local folklore (“the Indians say they owe their origins to the marriage of a white wolf and a princess.. the wolf turned into a rock at the summit of Sugarloaf Mountain”).

Occult vibes continue to predominate when Alta gives Mariposa a particularly eerie fortune reading, warning her against “..a great machine, a machine of science, a machine of death..” as bead curtains swing in the breeze and the theremin goes into overdrive. “I’m clairvoyant remember… I see in the dark” Alta announces, before the scene cuts to a POV shot of railway tracks rumbling through the darkness in an abandoned mine tunnel.




This strange thread of mystical / emotional logic, which seems to be embodied by both of the film’s noteworthy female characters - in stark contrast to the boorish materialism exhibited by most of the males - is further explored in one of the film’s most peculiar and memorable scenes, when Mariposa corners the escaped monster and tries to communicate with it and soothe its anger. Engaging it in a kind of strange, cosmic dance, she attempts to lead it down the mountain…until Eddie stumbles onto the scene and thoughtlessly hurls a rock at the frightened creature.


And at the emotional heart of the film of course lies the ‘Godmonster’ itself. Designed and created by Hobbs in his trademark ‘eco-art’ style, it is one of the most hilarious, pitiful, godforsaken beasts imaginable - a shambling bag of fur and bone that looks like the contents of a KFC bucket wrapped up in a moth-eaten carpet, topped with a head that could have been stolen from a mummified camel. With opaque, black eye sockets, the creature appears to be blind, swinging a grotesque, overgrown limb ahead of itself like a kind of primitive feeler as it endeavours to keep its unstable frame upright.

Probably the most achingly sad creature ever created for a movie, just seeing the poor thing (which looks to be about the size of a large cow) painstakingly drag itself up the hillside on underdeveloped legs, shuffling about confusedly as Silverdale’s rough-riders surround it with lassos, is absolutely heartbreaking.

Only the cruel idiots who make up most of this film’s cast of characters could possibly deem this unfortunate animal a ‘monster’, and even its obligatory ‘rampage’ is lovably pathetic (it inadvertently destroys a Chevron gas station when it knocks over a petrol pump, then frightens some children by stealing their picnic food).



After the creature is captured, Silverdale calls an impromptu gathering at the town dump, and, absurdly, announces the poor beast – now confined in a giant parrot cage strapped to the back of a pick-up truck - as ‘the eighth wonder of the world’, outlining his plans to make a fortune charging tourists to see it.

The assembled townsfolk recoil in horror when the repugnant sight of the wounded, hog-tied beast is revealed (“kill it, kill it!”, someone shouts in disgust), and the crowd, who by this point have caught wind of the fact that Silverdale has sold them out to The Reich Corporation, attempt to charge the creature, pelting it with rubbish as the gathering collapses into chaos.

Coming totally out of the blue, the sheer, directionless frenzy that follows is really quite unsettling. “Kill them, kill them, run them down!”, Silverdale yells to his outriders as they lay into the crowd. A frightening and tragic scene of destruction ensues, as cars burn, citizens scream in each other’s faces and fight in the dirt, and horses trample screaming innocent bystanders. It’s not exactly the Odessa Steps I guess, but something about the modest staging of the scene, the way Hobbs is able to suddenly create a kind of apocalyptic fervour with about forty extras and a few cars and horses scattered around a bit of Nevada wasteground, is truly horrific.



In the end, the selfish, squabbling humans barely even notice as the long-suffering ‘Godmonster’ is pushed down the slope to its fiery death; a failed messiah whose brief and pointless tenure on earth has yielded nothing but pain, confusion and fear. As it suffocates beneath a mountain of burning trash, perhaps it remembers those few fleeting seconds of inter-species communication, when Mariposa led it in that strange dance on the mountainside, before a well-aimed rock ended even that glimmer of mutual recognition.

“People have said, ‘Why does everyone go crazy at the end?’,” recalls Hobbs in the Thrower interview. “Well it’s in the dialogue – they’ve been had! Even the distributor, who’s a smart guy, said, ‘Everybody goes nuts at the end! Is that what you always do, Hobbs? In every movie you make everybody always goes nuts at the end!’ I said, ‘No, for chrissakes listen to the dialogue!’ It’s in there – people in the crowd shouting ‘Silverdale’s got our money!’ But you know what? The images were so strong that nobody listened. That’s why some of my movies fail, in some things. People say, ‘Oh, the story’s weak, Hobbs doesn’t know how to do stories.’ That’s bullshit! My imagery is so powerful that they can’t listen.”



As the film ends, the camera pans upward to frame Silverdale, still ranting like a maniac, as a charred, apocalyptic landscape stretches before him. A few sheep graze contentedly as noxious sulphuric gas seeps up from earth around them, and the theremin wheezes on tunelessly.

Thus ends the cinematic career of Fredric Hobbs, wrapping up the strange tale he’s been stringing us along with for 85 minutes in about the bleakest, most misanthropic manner imaginable.

Some may question the proposition that independent American cinema has been significantly poorer for his absence in subsequent decades, but it’s certainly been a hell of a lot less strange, and that, I think, is a shame.

Rollinades:La Nuit des Traquees /The Night of the Hunted (1980)

The first piece of advice for anyone setting out to watch ‘La Nuit des Traquees’: forget any expectations you may have about ‘a Jean Rollin film’.

A unique and deeply upsetting piece of cinema practically clawing its way into existence from the most marginal circumstances imaginable, ‘La Nuit..’ is a real shock to the senses for Rollin fans – a film so far removed from the otherworldly atmosphere and hazy, fairytale logic of his previous work that it seems as if the director is deliberately plunging himself toward the opposite extreme, in a desperate attempt to confront head-on the kind of dismal, post-industrial ‘reality’ that his films had always sought so poignantly to escape from.

Rollin’s earlier films were moving and sad, of course, but their sadness was always of a slightly wistful, mythical variety. In ‘La Nuit..’, he takes the same kind of themes that have always resonated with him (memory, mystery, childhood friendship etc.) and drags them kicking and screaming from the realm of shadowed ruins and diaphanous gowns into a space of clinical, late 20th century misery, where basic dignity is impossible, where bright strip-lighting forbids any hope of escape. It’s a pretty brutal transition.

The film begins when Robert (Vincent Gardère), driving alone late at night, encounters Elisabeth (Brigitte Lahaie), who flees from the woods in her nightgown. Véronique (Dominique Journet) follows some way behind, stark naked. So far, so Rollin, but there is no psychedelic kinkiness afoot here – these women’s distress seems very real.

It quickly becomes clear that Elisabeth is suffering from a form of extremely severe amnesia, and that her short term memory is disintegrating at a frightening rate. By the time Robert picks her up, she can’t remember who she is fleeing from, or where she lives. She remembers the name Véronique, but soon forgets her friend’s existence, telling Robert that she thinks she is probably alone. By the time they arrive back at Robert’s flat at dawn (he having apparently deciding that alerting the authorities is not the best course of action at this point), Elisabeth has already forgotten who he is and where he is taking her.


A pretty intriguing opening for any movie, no doubt. But if there has been a whole glut of movies in the past ten or fifteen years that have explored similar variations on the theme of memory loss, all the ones I remember seeing (Christopher Nolan’s “Momento” and that godawful Tom Cruise “Vanilla Sky” movie spring to mind) have essentially treated the subject as a jumping off point for convoluted thriller plotlines and logic puzzles. None have really set out to achieve what Rollin’s humble film does in emphasizing the emotional impact of amnesia, or in communicating the notion of how completely crippling this condition would be to a sufferer’s ability to function as a human being.




Elisabeth, and her fellow sufferers in the secure unit from which she has escaped, live in a constant state of anxiety and confusion, unable to anchor themselves to even the most basic certainties or personal identities. Seeing the damage wrought on these characters, who drift like catatonics in-between occasional flashes of intelligence and defiance, unable to tell whether a child they distantly recall is their own or a fake memory made up by a friend to comfort them, is extremely harrowing. The scene in which Elizabeth’s roommate Catherine (Catherine Greiner) attempts to feed herself, her motor skills malfunctioning as her condition becomes more severe, is incredibly uncomfortable to watch – an expression of pain and futility more like something you’d expect to see in a gruelling docu-drama about living with disability than in a supposed ‘exploitation’ film. And if the opening scenes between Lahaie and Gardère are somewhat stilted, the performances Rollin later manages to coax out of his cast (largely comprised of non-professionals and performers recruited from the porno industry) in portraying this condition is often little short of extraordinary – an instant refutation of anyone who has ever laughed at the exaggerated, gestural acting in his vampire movies.

Which brings us neatly to my second piece of advice for anyone setting out to watch ‘Le Nuit des Traquees’: please try to understand the circumstances under which it was made.

As a film, ‘La Nuit..’ is compromised from the outset – an ‘almost masterpiece’, as broken and defiled as it’s characters. It is a film whose emotional power and originality deserves to be taken seriously. But the damage wrought by both the production’s miniscule budget and cruelly tight schedule, and the jarring mixture of footage Rollin was forced to include to secure a release, mean that it never will be.



By all accounts, ‘La Nuit des Traquees’ was a film that almost didn’t exist at all. The dawn of the ‘80s found Jean Rollin’s career (and presumably his spirits) at an all-time low. Despite receiving a boost from the modest success of ‘Grapes of Death’ in ’78, the fact remained that the three films Rollin had really put his heart and soul into over the preceding decade – ‘Le Rose de Fer’, ‘Levres de Sang’ and ‘Fascination’ – had all been crushing commercial failures. Given Rollin’s regular practice of ploughing all the money he had after one film straight into the production of the next one, his opportunities to work on his own material were naturally moving in ever-decreasing circles after such a series of perceived ‘disasters’, and when ‘Fascination’ – one of the first films of his career to actually gain some positive critical notices – was unaccountably withdrawn from distribution with all of his future production cash still tied up in it, his last chance to direct anything other than cheapo fuck movies seemed to have disappeared for good.

As Jeremy Richey notes in his review of ‘La Nuit..’ for the Fascination blog:

‘The quite stunning Fascination should have served as a major turning point for Jean Rollin, but the film’s botched release sent him back into the adult film industry he was trying so hard to escape from. He shot three additional Robert Xavier films between Fascination and The Night of the Hunted, and indeed the latter was supposed to have been just another cheap adult feature for Rollin. Rollin recalls on the [Encore DVD] commentary track, “I was tired of X-Films”, and he told his producer, “If you want a horror film for the same cost”, then, “I can make it in 9 days.”’

Et voila. Shot on a porno budget, on a schedule that works out at about a quarter of the shooting time usually allowed for even the lowest budget feature film in the ‘70s, and further compromised by copious quantities of producer-enforced sex and gore footage, to call ‘Le Nuit des Traquees’ ‘threadbare’ would be something of an understatement. I don’t want to labour the point, but the net result is the kind of movie where when a scene calls for two cars, you’re kind of surprised that the production team still had access to two cars.

Most of the film’s interiors were shot on one floor of a recently constructed office block outside Paris, with shooting restricted to the hours between when the workers left in the evening and when the cleaners turned up the next morning – a circumstance that Tohill & Tombs, in their rather dismissive overview of ‘La Nuit..’ in ‘Immoral Tales’, credit with inspiring the film’s “somnambulant” quality.



Setting and landscape has always of course been extremely important to low budget filmmakers deprived of the luxuries of studio time and set construction, and Rollin in particular has always proved himself a master of moulding the atmosphere of his films to fit the spirit of the locations available to him. His technique worked splendidly with desolate chateaus, clifftops and cemeteries, but, perhaps surprisingly, he adapts himself equally well here to the obvious limitations of a bare, pre-fabricated office block.

The strip lighting, the uniform grey carpet and utilitarian plastic fixtures, the windows looking out onto a desolate hinterland of overpasses, industrial estates and weird, doomed new-build skyscrapers - the kind of landscape from which shopping malls and warehouse stores would no doubt begin to sprout only a few years after ‘La Nuit..’ was made – all of this makes for a more authentically spirit-crushing location for the film’s dubious ‘containment ward’ than a more typical slopbucket-gothic ‘prison hell’ set ever could have provided.



For exterior shots, Rollin frames the fragmentary, brutalist architecture of the surroundings in the most menacing way possible, making the concrete and steel edifices around the tower-block seem almost futuristic – the same methodology patented for all time by Godard in ‘Alphaville’ nearly twenty years beforehand. Whilst Godard arguably saw a futurist beauty in these buildings though, Rollin seems to treat them as symptomatic of utter dread, accompanying almost all his exterior shots with dissonant synth stabs and never missing a chance to utilise haunted, oppressive angles. Admittedly this is supposed to be a ‘horror movie’, so this is broadly in line with what might be expected, but it’s probably still not too much of a leap to suggest the dread Rollin feels emanating from these surroundings, and the challenge they present to the more romantic culture he represents, is very genuine. It is this fearful, Ballardian atmosphere above all which has probably led to the frequent comparisons between ‘La Nuit des Traquees’ and David Cronenberg’s early films.



As an intelligent, genuinely disturbing horror movie set against a clinical modernist aesthetic in the entropic malaise of the late 1970s, ‘La Nuit..’ would certainly seem to invite comparison to ‘Shivers’ or ‘Rabid’… if only Rollin had been able here to utilise violence and sexuality even remotely as effectively as his Canadian counterpart.

The biggest stumbling block to an appreciation of ‘La Nuit des Traquess’ – especially for viewers unsympathetic to the strange ways of lower tier Euro exploitation films – is the jarring inclusion of a lot of utterly gratuitous sex/violence footage. The finished film is full of sequences that seem so bizarrely out of place when placed next to unbearably fragile tone of the inter-character scenes that I think Hans of the Quiet Cool blog is spot-on when in his review of the film he talks about the ‘tender scenes’ and ‘exploitative scenes’ “standing together like bullies and victims, forced uncomfortably together for a school photo”.

It doesn’t help that much of the exploitative material is poor staged, weirdly paced and sometimes astoundingly stupid. About eight minutes of the film’s opening half hour are taken up with a seemingly never-ending softcore sex scene between Lahaie and Gardère, a sequence that, whilst it is relevant to the narrative insofar as it establishes the characters’ strong bond with each other, nonetheless goes on for so long that curious viewers drawn in by the film’s opening scenes might be forgiven for thinking they’ve been fooled into watching an extremely tedious soft porn flick, and turn their attention elsewhere.

Even more misguided is the fate allotted to the aforementioned Catherine, whom we are supposed to believe commits suicide by stabbing herself in the eyes with a pair of scissors(!). If the resulting mess is by far the film’s most enduring image for gore fans, the physical circumstances of the act itself are completely absurd, and the lingering shots of her naked corpse seem like an unforgivably cheap and sleazy way to end the life of a character who in her few short scenes had established herself deeply in our affections. It’s like the bully of the film’s dark side just punched us in the gut and stood over us laughing.

(Actually, lingering shots of corpses seem to be a pretty consistent motif in ‘La Nuit des Traquees’… I dunno why, but god knows, it certainly doesn’t help make the film any more cheery.)



As several more ugly scenes of sexualised violence grind by, the film, at it’s worst moments, starts to slip slightly toward the familiar rut of one of the innumerable Women In Prison movies that were such an inescapable feature of late 70s/early 80s exploitation, with the ward’s amoral doctor/overlord and his female second in command inflicting sundry indignities on the remaining cast of dazed, near-naked women, and so forth.

As this dispiriting middle section continues, we can maybe start to detect a certain meta-commentary from Rollin on the tiredness and waste of exploitation industry in which he was enmeshed. Pretty much all the women in the film dutifully get naked, and all the men get enraged and commit acts of violence; but all of it is staged with such dead-eyed, confused incomprehension, all of it carefully calculated not to titillate or excite anybody in the slightest, that the gruelling crap-ness of these scenes almost begins to seem like a rebellious gesture from Rollin – “you want this stuff ? Well here it fucking is – can I get on with my movie now?”


The film’s casting is both key to its overall power and, I would like to think, another facet of Rollin’s quiet rebellion against the exploitation industry. Many of the players are familiar faces from exploitation and porno movies, but the leading actresses - Lahaie, Journet and Greiner – are all women who I can’t imagine ever having been fully comfortable in those roles, regardless of their bodily ‘assets’. All of them have strong, distinctive faces, and are possessed of a certain haunted, deeply troubled look too unmistakable to ever really let a hetero-male audience feel fully comfortable as they get down to the nitty-gritty (or, uh, so I would imagine). Rollin’s masterstroke in casting ‘La Nuit..’ was to recognise this unsettling quality, and to allow these actresses the space and framework they needed to express some of their true feelings on screen, allowing them to deliver intense and upsetting performances that live on in the memory long after the gore and nastiness has faded away.



If we imagine taking some stereotypical snotty cineaste to see ‘La Nuit des Traquees’ then, yes - they would have every right to be repulsed, confused, bored and offended by what they see. Clearly I’m hugely sympathetic to Jean Rollin, and I’m always liable to try to view his work in the best possible light. I’ve taken the time to read up on the background of this film and to see how it fits into his career, and so on. But even I would cop that 'La Nuit..'s failings are pretty substantial, and that it is really not what the vast majority of viewers would consider a ‘good film’. Really it is more of a broken shell, with the essence of a great film dying somewhere inside it… and I understand that that’s not the kind of thing everyone’s gonna want to make time for in their lives.

When our hypothetical cineaste gets to the ending though, when s/he sees the long, excruciating walk along the trainlines, as Elisabeth and Robert pull themselves along, step by step, as the life drains out of them and they slowly become dead to the world… well I’d hope that by that point there is no way anyone could deny that, whatever the cruel shortcomings fate imposed on this film, we are still looking at the work of a filmmaker with a soul and a vision, and an unshakable faith in human dignity.

Sorry to end on such a pompous note, but it’s just gotta be said.

As Hans concludes his review; “La nuit des traquées is an obscure film in an obscure film maker’s filmography. There are no castles, no Castel twins, and no beach scenes. It’s a beautiful and sad film full of fragments, where perhaps, all its beauty and sadness reside.”

Amen to that.