October Horrors 2019 # 10: Humanoids From The Deep (Barbara Peeters, 1980)

He’s a tricky devil isn’t he, that Roger Corman? Though he has sometimes been praised over the years for promoting female talent within the none-more-male-dominated arena of ‘70s/’80s exploitation film-making, it is also notable that, whenever he offered the director’s chair on one of his New World Pictures productions to a woman, it was for a project that might otherwise have drawn fire for its misogynistic content - thus neatly defusing the critical backlash whilst still delivering the, uh, shall we say, ‘provocative’ content his less enlightened audience demanded.

Think Stephanie Rothman on ‘The Student Nurses’ (1970), Amy Holden Jones on ‘The Slumber Party Massacre’ (1982), or, in this case, Barbara Peeters on ‘Humanoids From The Deep’, aka ‘Monster’, a film whose poster artwork alone would likely have incited its fair share of feminist outrage, had there been a male name sitting in that all-important slot at the end of the credits.

In all of these cases, the directors in question were presumably sufficiently thrilled at the chance to get their name on a feature film that they were happy to take Corman up on his offer, accepting pre-packaged projects with script and marketing materials already more-or-less locked down… and of course, strict orders from the boss regarding the required level of nudity, violence and so forth.

And, in all of the above examples, I believe these women did very creditable work with the material they were handed -- but the terrible irony of the situation of course is that, whereas a roll-call of New World’s male alumni includes Jonathan Demme, Ron Howard, Joe Dante and Jack Hill, none of the female directors listed above managed to make the transition to mainstream industry success (or even cult recognition) off the back of their Corman pictures. (It is at this point that we pause to shake our fists and spit bitter invective at the ‘Hollywood’ sign.)

Anyway, back to the matter in hand, and in late 1979, Peeters basically found herself staring down the barrel of a script that amounts to a cross between ‘Jaws’ and ‘The Creature from The Black Lagoon’ with added rape, and a few weeks shooting time in an off-season fishing town near Fort Bragg to get it all in the can. (I’ve not read any background on the film’s production, but surely there must be some great material here for a behind-the-scenes docu-drama or Christopher Guest style mockumentary or something?)

What most struck me most about the first half hour of ‘Humanoids..’ is just how authentically grim life in the film’s fictional fishing community of Noyo seemed to be. I suppose I’d been expecting something pretty breezy and tongue-in-cheek, in the vein of Dante’s ‘Piranha’ (1978), but this is a whole other kettle of genetically-modified fish.

Not only does this place seem cold, grey and permanently overcast, but the people, when they’re not being actively horrible to each other, seem glum and withdrawn, whilst the town’s economic decline and cultural isolation are clear for all to see. Amity Island this ain’t. In fact, that isolated mining town from ‘My Bloody Valentine’ (1981) seems positively idyllic by comparison.

As the film opens, controversy surrounds the arrival of representatives from a Big Corporation, who are looking to open a “canning plant” up-stream from the town, securing the area’s economic survival, and, they claim, increasing fishing yields through the application of exciting (read: untested) new scientific techniques. (UH-OH.)

Naturally, the gang of beer-swilling racist goons headed up by Vic Morrow are pro-canning plant, but they face opposition from a rival fisherman, a young man named Johnny (Anthony Pena), whom they address as “The Indian” on the basis of his Native American heritage. Unhappily for all concerned, this beef is brought to the boil when something crawls out of the sea and slaughters the men’s dogs (some cheery shots of staged doggie carnage here for animal lovers in the audience). For reasons which do not seem entirely clear (but then, I’m not a stereotypical racist goon, so who knows), Vic and his boys blame “The Indian” for this massacre, and promptly kill his dog in retaliation.

This leads to a showdown, as Johnny interrupts the all-important town hall barn dance at which the townsfolk were due to be introduced to the representatives from the Big Corporation. Throwing down his dead hound in the middle of dancefloor and demanding an explanation, he earns himself a public beating from the goon squad, which soon spills over into a full scale parking lot brawl when some slightly less goon-ish citizens come to his defence, leaving the town’s entire male populace nursing bruises and black eyes, and the canning plant guys no doubt considering their options.

Frankly, unless you like dead dogs, salmon fishing, geriatric bands playing slow, old-timey dance music and simmering small town resentment, there is precious little to enjoy in Noyo, even before it becomes clear that any woman of child-bearing age who strays close to the waterline now also risks being assaulted by a raging, seaweed-covered gillman trying to forcibly copulate with her. Oh boy, just what we need.

In a development reminiscent of Ray Russell’s sleaze-horror opus ‘Incubus’ (published a few years earlier in ’76), it seems that the primary aim of these monsters – which we are later informed have evolved into humanoid form from at hyper-speed after some test-tube mould made a getaway from hard-headed lady scientist Ann Turkel’s lab, or somesuch – is reproduction. They attack (and sometimes abduct) women solely for the purpose of trying to impregnate them, but this tactic has a low success rate, as the majority of human females are simply torn apart by the creatures’ amorous assault. Delightful!

(As I write this, I’m conscious of the fact that rape and violence against animals seem to have inadvertently become recurring motifs in this October’s reviews. It’s entirely accidental, I swear! For the record, I didn’t even intend to watch this one, but ended up throwing it on in an emergency when  my DVD of ‘Mr Vampire III’ failed to play.)

The monster effects in ‘Humanoids From The Deep’, are, I would say, rather uneven. The early scenes in which the beasties attack and molest women on the beach take a no-nonsense “man in a suit” type approach, but elsewhere we get some rather more interesting animatronic type creations. In some shots, they seem outright comical, but, especially towards the end of the film, there are also moments when they look totally awesome. In particular, I loved the way that they sometimes shamble around the place with big, toothy grins and their unnaturally long arms raised above their heads, looking like some kind of Satanic, fungoid Tickle-Me Elmo.

Going back to those early attack sequences, I’m pretty sure I remember reading somewhere that Peeters actually refused to shoot the more exploitative footage demanded by Corman, and that as a result he simply brought another director onto the set to film additional footage without her participation. (IMDB credits these sequences to Jimmy T. Murakami.)

As such, I’m not sure who should really take the blame for these “bikini beach attack” scenes, but either way, they’re pretty damned peculiar and unedifying, temporarily threatening to turn the movie into a humourless, sleazoid update of Del Tenney’s ‘60s drive-in classic ‘The Horror of Party Beach’ (only without the great rock n’ roll music or hipster wise-cracks). (1)

The biggest problem here I think is that the beach itself looks horrible. Clearly the filmmakers had to take what they could get in terms of the weather and location, but even so - with grey, gritty sand, perilous rocks, crashing waves and freezing, overcast skies, it’s safe to say that young people would need to be out of their minds to choose this particular spot for frolicking in bikinis or making out in the surf, immediately adding both a fabricated, surreal quality and an air of bleak, bloody-minded nastiness to proceedings. (Perhaps it could have been this, as much as her objection to the stronger sexual content, which led to Peeters refusing to film these scenes?)

Things get even weirder meanwhile when at one point we cut to a random couple of youngsters who are getting to know each other better in a tent they’ve erected on the sand, and, not only does the poor girl have a sea-monster to deal with, the boy she’s screwing turns out to be a goddamn ventriloquist. We’re really looking at a perfect storm of bad decision-making on her part here, as her partner whips out his dummy and starts running through his ‘gottle-a-geer’ act, but… as you’d imagine, she is given little time to reflect on the sequence of events which led her to this unenviable situation before a rampaging monster intervenes.

(Actually, I think the addition of the ventriloquist’s dummy must have been someone’s attempt to introduce some low-brow, frat-house humour – there is much strained, double entendre type dialogue (“you’ve got to let me see more than just the head”, etc) – but this feels quite out of keeping with the dour tone taken by much of the rest of the film. Frankly the whole thing is just really bizarre.)

Meanwhile, our first line of defence against the fungoid menace is headed up by the mighty Doug McClure, taking a well-earned break from punching cavemen in the face and harpooning dinosaurs in Kevin Connor’s wonderfully entertaining series of Edgar Rice Burroughs-inspired ‘70s adventure movies. After all that, you’d think a mere bunch of spongy ‘humanoids’ would be a walk in the park for this dude, but McClure is actually on pretty reserved, naturalistic form here, keeping his fists to himself and playing slightly ‘older’ than was usually the case.

Alongside Doug is the aforementioned Ann Turkel, who looks as if she’s been grown in a vat to be a leading lady in a ‘70s monster movie. I don’t mean that in a negative sense - in fact her performance here is a stand-out - but… can’t quite put my finger on why, but something about her face, her bearing, that hair – I was sure I’d previously seen her as the female lead in ‘Piranha’, or as somebody’s wife in ‘Grizzly’, or, y’know - something like that.

In fact, it turns out ‘Humanoids..’ is one of the only genre movies Turkel has ever appeared in, and I don’t think it was a very happy experience for her (rumours suggest that she actually petitioned the Screen Actors’ Guild to try to stop the film being released, after she learned of the additional footage Corman had added to it).

The sections of the film dealing with these folks and their response to the monster threat quickly fall into the familiar ‘Jaws’ mould, but the difference is that, whereas it’s become a truism that the success of ‘Jaws’ was down to its characters rather than the shark, ‘Humanoids from the Deep’ simply can’t cut it on the same level. Sure, McClure, Turkel and Prena are ‘good guys’ by vestige of the fact that they speak to each other civilly and don’t behave like dicks, but when they set out together in a motor-boat to seek out the monsters’ breeding-grounds, we couldn’t really say that we like them, or particularly care what happens to them.

In fairness however, the film quickly picks up steam in its second half, beginning with our heroes aforementioned monster-blasting excursion, during which they rescue an abducted girl who has been ickily encased in seaweed, which actually turns out to be a pretty fun and exciting action sequence.

Turkel’s character meanwhile does become increasingly forthright and likeable as we get to know her better, and anyone still looking for a gossamer thin thread of potential feminism running through this movie can take heart in the scene back at the lab, which finds her directing an absolutely fantastic tirade of invective at her weaselly male colleague, who wants to try to keep the monsters’ existence secret.

Speaking of ‘Jaws’ meanwhile, you will of course understand that the mayor of Noyo can’t POSSIBLY let the spree of sea-monster rape-murders get in the way of the town’s annual Salmon Festival! And, boy oh boy, it’s during the wonderful, wonderful outburst of absolute mayhem which follows as the monsters attack the town’s nocturnal water-front carnival en masse that this movie really redeems itself - and how! The film’s Japanese title, incidentally, translates simply as ‘MONSTER PANIC!’, and that’s a pretty good two-word summation of everything which follows after this point.

Thrill, as the local pop DJ broadcasts live from the scene, sticking to the mic even as the monsters besiege his booth trying to get at his station’s roller-skating hype girls! Cheer, as loads and loads of ply-wood carnival booths are smashed to pieces by rampaging monsters! Shed a tear (possibly), as Vic Morrow gains last minute redemption by sacrificing himself to save a little girl from the jaws of doom! Laugh uneasily, as the people fight back, and a bunch of guys arms with spiked planks are seen encircling a stricken gillman, seeming slightly unsure of what to do next. Feel slightly confused, as McClure and Turkel enact a plan to spray gasoline across the bay and set the water on fire (because, apparently that will help?).

Even better, all of this fantastic, life-affirming craziness is intercut with the film’s strongest and most convincingly realised horror set-piece, which finds McClure’s wife and young son isolated in their remote beach house, trying to defend themselves from the stalking gillmen. There is some brilliantly tense stuff here, faintly reminiscent of the Timmy-and-Grandma-alone-in-the-house sequence from Carpenter’s ‘The Fog’, and I’d like to think (though I have no particular evidence to back up this claim) that this perhaps represents an example of the slightly more classical suspense filmmaking that Peeters was ideally aiming for, before Corman stepped in to enforce the “monsters tearing off bikinis on a rainy beach” approach.

The frantic cutting between this scene and the wacky carnival mayhem meanwhile struck me as pretty exhilarating, rather than jarring, and, perhaps feeling the benefit of a couple of glasses of wine by this point, I was overjoyed to realise that I was suddenly having a really great time with ‘Humanoids from the Deep’.

In conclusion then, let it be known that ‘Humanoids..’ opens with a dour, mean-spirited vibe that, combined with a surplus of clumsy, joyless sleaze, makes its opening hour pretty difficult to hang with. Adventurous viewers are advised to hang on in there however, because the last few reels make it all worthwhile, delivering exactly what I wanted from a movie like this – which is apparently ABSOLUTE CHAOS - and oh so much more besides.

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(1) A complete digression I realise, but why does ‘Horror of Party Beach’ only score 3.0 on IMDB?! It’s brilliant! I dunno… fuckin’ *people*, eh?

Some Thoughts on… Blood Beach (Jeffrey Bloom, 1980)

I don’t know, maybe I’ve just been looking in the wrong places, but this little movie seems to get a pretty bad rap within horror fandom. I mean, of course I understand that those coming to it expecting a routine slasher or a Tremors/Deadly Spawn style monster-bash or something might not get very far with it, but even such sources as Bleeding Skull, where you’d expect an off-beat mess of a film like this to find a natural home, don’t seem to think much of it.

Quoth Dan Budnik on page 14 of the otherwise admirable and highly recommended Bleeding Skull book: “Everyone does their best to be as much of a ‘character’ as they can, but it just doesn’t hold. The scenes between the attacks just aren’t very memorable. They’re clichéd and sometimes boring.”

What can I say - with all due respect to Dan, I felt differently. In fact, I had a wonderful time with ‘Blood Beach’, and particularly enjoyed its unhurried, lugubrious approach to staging a monster movie. Well, things are always subjective aren’t they, and fleeting impressions created by late night viewings of trash-horror films more so than most.

It is sometimes said of horror that a successful movie is one that would remain interesting even if the threatening/supernatural element were removed. I don’t know whether that’s a credo I’d always subscribe to, but in this case it seems apt. In contrast to Mr. Budnik, I found myself largely ambivalent to the antics of the carnivorous subterranean beast inexplicably feasting on sunbathers and joggers beneath the sands of Santa-Monica through the duration of ‘Blood Beach’. Instead, I was pleasantly captivated by the miscellaneous goings on that surrounded it. I mean, sure, it was nice to have the monster there. It gave the characters something to do, and gave us an insight into what they might react when stressed, confused or frightened. It catalyzed the events of the film, you might say. But, for me at least, it wasn’t really the central point of the piece.

Anyone who has read this blog for long enough will know that I have a soft spot for that particular kind of disconnected, quasi-bohemian sense of otherness that seems to characterise horror films set around Southern Californian beach communities. From Night Tide through Messiah of Evil to ‘The Witch Who Came From The Sea’, these locales seem to lend a very specific ‘vibe’ to horror films, and, despite being a considerably more linear proposition than the aforementioned examples, ‘Blood Beach’ has it in spades.

You wouldn’t exactly call this an ‘artistic’ or technically accomplished movie. Indeed, in objective terms you may even by justified in deeming it a ‘bad’ movie – one that is poorly paced and sloppily directed with wildly erratic performances, and certainly one that largely fails to deliver on promise of its somewhat legendary poster (see above). Nevertheless though, it has its moments. The photography is very nice (insofar as I can tell from the terribly degraded version I’m watching – see below), and the musical score sounds surprisingly slick and accomplished for this kind of film.

In between ‘Blood Beach’s more eventful moments, there are many shots of stuff like a guy standing by the sea-front playing a violin, lengthy close-ups of a grown woman doing a paint by numbers picture – you know, that sort of thing. All this eccentricity is a tad over-done perhaps, but director Jeffrey Bloom seems very much concerned with building a sense of place around his characters, and I can dig that. I always enjoy films set in locales that I feel I’d enjoy living in. Do I want to see this place torn apart by some big carnivorous worm? Hell no! I feel quite strongly about it in fact, just like the characters do.

Admittedly, there is a kind of self-conscious quirkiness to a lot of the lackadaisical goings-on here that some may find off-putting, but at the same kind there’s a peculiar earnestness about them too - a gentle, deliberate approach that conversely led to me finding this film is very charming.

For instance, you’ve got this one guy, a minor character who works with the main male lead as a lifeguard, or harbour patrol officer, or something. Said guy has a pretty wild mop of curly hair, and he can’t stick around for the night shift, because, quote, “I’m planning to BOOGIE tomorrow night, and I haven’t slept in a week!”. Say no more, brother – male hero guy understands. In a lesser film, such a conversation would probably provide lead-up for some ho-hum monster/killer set piece. Here, it initially leads nowhere, but eventually sets us up for a delightful scene later in the film where we see curly-hair guy getting his boogie on in a cramped and beer-sodden local bar.

Turns out he is the shirt & tie wearing, Joe Cocker-esque vocalist in a sweaty pub rock band. This is a short scene, no fanfare and it just sort of comes out of nowhere, but it’s great. It has a very authentic feel, and it looks like everyone present is having a really good time. An anonymous female singer gets up from the audience, takes a mic, and her and Curly do a few verses of this really haggard, sub-Gram & Emmy-Lou style wind-swept ballad together. Everyone in the crowd cheers them on (or at least they do in my head). It is awesome. I wish I was there.

Similarly, well, actually quite dissimilarly but you take my point, the soap opera-esque plot line about the main harbour patrol guy getting back together with his old flame after her Dad and his fiancée were both eaten by the beach-monster was quite diverting – strangely touching in its earnest, am-dram sorta fashion.

Meanwhile, Burt Young is in this movie too, which is always a treat. He is hanging around playing a fish-out-of-water sidekick to the main police detective, transferred in from Chicago. His character is very ‘one joke’, but boy can Burt Young ever do ‘one joke’ well. He dresses like a 1920s gangster and he keeps saying stuff like “I tells ya, dis wouldn’t happen in Chicago, hyuk hyuk”. He seems to be drunk much of the time, and a lot of his dialogue is slightly incomprehensible. It’s nice to have him around.

Then, after a while, no less a personage than John Saxon himself turns up, playing a hard-headed police captain who is charged with delivering some of the most ridiculous dialogue I’ve heard in a motion picture in recent memory (“you snot-nosed, scissor-billed crow-bait”, he calls an elderly woman at one point).

Saxon has a great two hander scene with this incredibly untogether, wigged out scientist guy they dug up from somewhere, who speaks in the most unbearably disjointed, monotonous sort of manner for ages and ages about what he conjectures that this beach monster may or may not be. (“What I’m trying to do is… try to define… some kind of living THING… perhaps a creature currently, uh, in a state of a evolution… that CRAWLS, subterraneanly… in, uh… MOIST, probably dark… places…?”.) Saxon, getting increasingly irate, tells him, “You gotta lot of scientific mumbo-jumbo that’s about as much use as whiskers on a sausage!”. Frankly I think someone was putting lines like that in the script for a dare, just to see whether John Saxon could get through them without breaking his straight-faced composure. Needless to say, he bats every one straight back like a pro. It’s a joy to behold.

Now that we’ve got all that straight, let’s sit back and reflect. The Joe Cocker bar band guy, the earnest lifeguard guy and his old flame, Burt Young, John Saxon, the rambling old scientist and their pals – they’re all going to get together to combat a carnivorous subterranean beast inexplicably feasting on sunbathers and joggers beneath the sands of Santa-Monica. How are they going to do it? What ideas will they come up with, and what challenges will they face? I bet you want to find out too, to share this strange journey with them.

Well, don’t worry, you have plenty of time. ‘Blood Beach’ only just got going. If you came for gore and boobs and the not-so-special effects, what can I tell you – the exit is that way. But if you’ve got time for Burt and John and the gang, and you like the thought of hanging out with them and maybe sharing a coffee in a paper cup from the refreshments shack in between searching the sand for body parts (Quoth Burt: “say, what colour eyes did ya stewardess have, I mean, uh, had..?”) and ruminating over what might have happened to that nice old lady who used to go jogging along the sea-front – welcome aboard. I don’t care what anybody says, ‘Blood Beach’ is awesome.

(As a final note, it’s possible I might have enjoyed this film even more if the bootleg copy of it I was watching didn’t appear to be a 3rd gen, cropped VHS rip downloaded from the internet in 1996. I have subsequently tried by best to obtain a proper copy, and am even willing to pay money for the privilege, but no dice apparently. Surely a watchable version of this charming motion picture must have hit the streets at some point! Can anybody help? ‘Blood Beach’ fans, stand up and be counted! If I’m not watching this on blu-ray by the end of 2015, can we really say that the great journey of the human race has truly been worthwhile? You tell me.)

Rollinades: La Rose de Fer / The Iron Rose (1973)

Having already reviewed a few of Jean Rollin’s more marginal and uncharacteristic films this year, I thought it was only fair that I should make time to cover at least one of his bone fide masterpieces before moving on to a few more oddities… not that Rollin’s masterpieces aren’t complete oddities by anyone else’s standards, but y’know what I mean. So where better to start than with perhaps the purest and most concise distillation of his particular approach to cinema ever realised – 1973’s ‘La Rose de Fer’.

Perhaps the most ambitious and personal work to emerge from Rollin’s creative peak in the early/mid ‘70s, ‘La Rose..’ also marks one of his only attempts to make a film outside of the constraints of the horror/exploitation industry. Entirely lacking in any of the usual genre signifiers whilst still staying true to the director’s established visual language, ‘La Rose..’ sees Rollin plunging headfirst into the kind of freely associative, imagery/poetry driven art film that his horror work had always hinted at - a move that sadly proved so commercially disastrous that he didn’t dare attempt another fully loaded avant/abstract film until 1989’s self-financed ‘Lost In New York’.



The set-up for ‘La Rose..’ is pretty minimal: a girl (Francoise Pascal) catches the eye of a boy (Hugues Quester) when he stands up to recite a poem at a boring wedding reception. Making each other’s acquaintance outside the event, they agree to go for a bicycle ride together next Sunday. Thus they meet amid abandoned locomotives at the fog-shrouded ‘old station’, and proceed to get cycling. They are full of beans and enjoying themselves, and everything is going swell. In fact it all seems far too affectionate for a first date, but hey - they’re French, I’m British, what the fuck do I know. Controversially, the boy suggests they enjoy their picnic amid the picturesque surroundings of a large, dilapidated cemetery they happen to be passing, and the girl, though initially reluctant, agrees. They decide to explore the cemetery, and spend so long mucking about that they fail to notice that it’s getting dark, and the caretaker has locked the gates for the night. Condemned to spend the night alone amid the graves, they go through some changes.

And that’s about it really.

Not much to work with perhaps, but ironically ‘La Rose..’ actually sees Rollin pushing his preferred themes of sex and death more relentlessly than in any of his sex or horror films, as the emblematic plotline quickly gives way to what is essentially an extended visual poem, exploring … uh, well… y’know - the fresh air and energy of young love contrasted with the constant erotic pull of the tomb, the shivery fascination of funereal imagery, life and sex and death and all that heavy shit.



As you can perhaps appreciate, ‘La Rose de Fer’ is an extremely difficult film to write about. It is capable of provoking a powerful reaction in receptive viewers, but that reaction can be a very fleeting and complicated one, almost impossible to describe or quantify without drifting inescapably into the realm of witless purple prose.

So, let’s try a different approach. ‘La Rose..’ is an unusually personal film, and as such, it seems only fair to respond with an unusually personal review.

Going back a few years, to when I was (cough) a younger man than the one you see before you today, for a short while I was really into those Richard Linklater movies, ‘Before Sunrise’ and ‘Before Sunset’. Y’know, the ones with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy traipsing around picturesque European cities exchanging a load of quasi-meaningful blather and so on. Nowadays, I’d probably be inclined to dismiss them in a heartbeat as a bunch of sanctimonious, masturbatory, half-assed indie-schmindie lamo wish fulfilment bullshit and get on with my life. Because, y’know, I’ve got better shit now, and more important, not at all lame or masturbatory things to do. Like watching ‘A Virgin Among the Living Dead’ again. But back then, when I was a bit dumber, a bit more earnest, a bit less cynical and judgemental, they… uh, well, like, y’know – they meant something, man.

If questioned at the time, I’d probably have come out with some claptrap about how these films presented the pure connection between two human souls, the act of falling in love as it should be, unfettered by ego or social constraints and yadda yadda yadda. But what I’d really have meant was: WOW, how much would I love to stride elegantly around some romantic old world city, exchanging deep n’ meaningful platitudes with some beautiful, intellectual French chick? That would be the BEST. And frankly, I’d be tempted to suggest that anyone who claims their enjoyment of those movies stems from anything other than similar base-level wish fulfilment is probably lying.

But the point I’m trying to make is: at one point in my life, those flicks seemed unique, and spine-tingling, and such. Then stuff happened, and I changed, and they don’t anymore. Now I watch ‘La Rose de Fer’ instead. Thanks Jean!



Similar logic of course applies though. It would be foolish to try to claim otherwise. How can I try to quantify the appeal of ‘La Rose de Fer’? Well…

Item # 1: if it is possible to say as much without immediately sounding like some teenage goth, I really like cemeteries. I liked them when I was a kid, visiting deceased relatives I was too young to even remember. Carrying the flowers and helping clean off the headstones, and running around picking up shiny stones from the paths between the graves, wondering whether they had some special power or something, but being very careful not to tread ON the graves, because that was bad luck, and just seemed, y’know… an inherently wrong thing to go around doing.

I still liked cemeteries many years later when I was moping around watching those Richard Linklater movies, and I still like them now. Whenever I’ve got some spare time and fancy a bit of a walk, I’ll often head out to one of London’s beautifully decrepit garden cemeteries. I like looking at them, I like being in them. I like the atmosphere, and I like the quietude. I like the sense of the past, the feeling of reverence. I like the strange architecture of the graves, and the overbearing imagery and… I don’t have to go on do I? You get the fucking point. I just really like graveyards alright, get off my case.

So when I watch ‘La Rose de Fer’, with Jean-Jacque Renon’s rich night-time photography (the way the couple’s red and yellow shirts stand out amid the dark green and brown hues of the graveyard is just lovely), and Pierre Raph’s almost subliminally low-key score (simple a cappella vocal melodies and ecstatic choral drones), I would be perfectly happily just watching a plotless documentary about the cemetery in Amiens for ninety minutes really.




I would say that the fact there’s a story of some kind going on often just seems like some added bonus, but that’s not really fair. In fact, one of the weird ironies of ‘La Rose..’ is that, for all that Rollin films tend to be labelled as nonsensical or surreal, the almost total lack of a story here actually inspires him to construct quite a gripping narrative from the elements at hand. The film’s thematic consistency creates a strong sense of internal logic, and the screen is full of action and movement at all times, the soundtrack given over to near continuous dialogue, helping the couple’s journey toward their strange fate avoid the kind of exquisite boredom one might have reasonably expected of a film like this. There are even some pretty funny bits, if you can believe that.

Anyway, Item # 2: I also like going camping in remote places and walking around after dark, breathing in the night air, and stuff. Yeah, that’s the best. And as for Item # 3, it should be noted that I’m still far from adverse to the company of dreamy, poetically-inclined young French girls.

So basically, when about halfway through the film the boy starts getting all angry and agitated and kicks up a fuss, I just feel like shouting, ferchrisake, what are you doing man? This is about the best way to spend an evening that could possibly be imagined! Give in and enjoy yourself, you idiot! You’re the guy I’m supposed to be identifying with here as I take vicarious pleasure in this exquisitely lyrical situation your character has got himself into – stop screwing it up!



If most of the action in the film is, as it seems, at least semi-improvised, then perhaps Hugues Quester’s irritating refusal to get with the programme is fitting. None of the backstage stuff I’ve read about 'La Rose..' has anything very kind to say about the actor. Pascal says she hated acting opposite him (see Jeremy Richey’s interview here), whilst Tombs & Cathal note in ‘Immoral Tales’ that “..Rollin also had a lot of trouble with the male lead” (p.152). Some kind of disagreement led to Quester insisting his name be removed from the posters, and he is credited as ‘Pierre Dupont’.

But no matter, Quester’s apparent belligerence never becomes a major problem, as Pascal holds the fort with an incredible performance, variously ignoring or tormenting her wouldbe lover as the film progresses, as her character finds herself moving inexorably from the reluctant innocent who initially wants to leave the cemetery into a wild and ecstatic participant in the world of the dead that surrounds her, as, in some sort of atavistic revelation, a concept of a wholly different relationship between life and death seems to explode in her mind fully formed, an absurdly romantic, anti-materialistic celebration of the mystery that lies beyond that strange horizon…

Sheesh, what was that I said about purple prose..?



The majority of the world’s populace would be forgiven for considering ‘La Rose..’ an insufferably pretentious, confounding exercise in god knows what. Sure, fine, whatever. It goes without saying that I love every second of it.

The film’s standout sequence comes when Pascal’s character experiences a vision of herself, naked in the surf on – where else? - the beach at Dieppe, the instant transition from funereal darkness to bright (ok, actually it looks a bit overcast) daylight creating a striking visual reflection of the girl's instinctive and weirdly compelling 'death = life' revelations. Wielding the wrought-iron funeral cross of Gallic tradition as the waves crash against her, she recites the Tristan Corbière poem that helped inspire the film. It’s really breathtaking. It is the heart of all of Jean Rollin’s body of work, the perfect distillation of his vision, from which all of the symbols and ideas that compose his cinema flow. It is near insanely beautiful, enough to stop the breath in your throat, to make you want to sign of the dotted line and join the girl in death’s loving embrace.






As you might imagine, people in 1973 didn’t quite see it that way.

To quote ‘Immoral Tales’ again;

“Rollin decided to present the film in person at the 2nd Convention of Cinema Fantastique that April in Paris. […] Patiently, he explained to them the genesis of the film and how he had tried to do something different, which he hoped they would receive in the right spirit.

The film had hardly begun before the walk-outs commenced. Pretty soon it was obvious that he had a disaster on his hands […] Cinematographe recounted how both he and his film had been roundly booed by the audience, in a way that the writer had never seen a director booed before. So much so, in fact, that for the next few days whenever Rolin was spotted he was given a wide berth and the comments and catcalls repeated. Ecran Fantastique […] in particular noted how the dialogue had given much cause for general hilarity.

Rollin was devastated. The film was now unlikely to find a distributor willing to take a chance on it. All the money he had made on his earlier films was invested in ‘Le Rose De Fer’. Now he had probably lost that too. Eventually the film was picked up by an arthouse distributor, but failed to find an audience amongst the devotees of the ‘cinema d’auteurs’, while its status as a film permissible to anyone over 13 made it anathema to the horror crowd.”

Those goddamn small-minded snobs. Fuck ‘em. They wouldn’t know great art is it punched them in the face. Henry Miller and Anais Nin and Baudelaire would have fucking LOVED this movie. For the moment, I love it too.

Maybe I’ll look back in a few years and cringe. Maybe I won’t. But for the moment, I can throw this in the DVD player and go exactly where I want to be. That is all.

Night Tide(Curtis Harrington, 1961)

As an unusually subtle and low-key independent b film emerging from an era in which sensationalism was all, Curtis Harrington’s first commercial feature ‘Night Tide’ seems born to be UNDERRATED - an epithet used in probably every capsule review of the movie ever penned, raising the question of precisely how far an underrated film can go before it becomes officially ‘rated’, and perhaps eventually overrated - witness the fate of the two films to which ‘Night Tide’ probably bears closest comparison, Herk Harvey’s ‘Carnival of Souls’ and Jacques Tourneur’s ‘Cat People’.

In fact, maybe one of the factors that has helped keep ‘Night Tide’ under the radar for so long is the sheer weight of the debt it owes to the aforementioned Lewton/Tourneur film. To lay it down straight for ya before we get all mystical later in this review, it must be noted that ‘Night Tide’s storyline is an almost an exact rewrite of ‘Cat People’, with the action moved to the Santa Monica sea-front, and Simone Simon’s potential cat-woman replaced by Linda Lawson’s potential mermaid, Mora.




Drawn into Mora’s orbit when he clumsily tries to pick her up in a beachside jazz bar is Johnny, an impetuous young navy recruit played by none other than Dennis Hopper. Already well-known by this point for his bohemian lifestyle and tough guy/troublemaker screen persona, it is to Hopper’s credit that he manages to make himself so believable here as a fresh-faced innocent, away from home for the first time and awkwardly trying to engage with the world around him. Fusing the character’s eager-to-please naivety with his trademark nervous energy and disconnected stare, Hopper makes for a goofily endearing protagonist, just as Lawson, looking like she’s just stepped off the front of a Les Baxter ‘exotica’ LP, plays the doomed, ethereal, forever unknowable heroine to perfection.




Even the most strident movie-tech snob (is there a movie equivalent of the term ‘muso’? suggestions on a postcard) would have to cop that Harrington’s direction here is excellent too – beautiful, bright photography and eerie, graceful camera movements a speciality – and his scripting’s none too shabby either, aforementioned ‘Cat People’ debt notwithstanding. From the outset, ‘Night Tide’ is clearly the work of a guy trying to position himself a good few notches above yr standard drive-in fare.

Best of all from my point of view though, ‘Night Tide’ excels in that particular kind of careful, hypnotic pacing that that so often seems to accompany films shot in sea-front locations, as events seem to ebb and flow with the tide, imbuing the film with that unique feel of disconnected seaside weirdness that I’m always going on about here.




Were that the sum total of ‘Night Tide’s charms, we could file it as a well made / well acted variation on ‘Cat People’ and get on with our lives, but what really gives the film such an uncanny resonance is it’s setting and unique cultural background. Although it is never directly addressed in the film as such, the rich occult/bohemian/art scene and strange atmosphere of the L.A. beach communities in the late 50s/early ‘60s seems to breath through every pore of Harrington’s film, every detail throwing up a new, unexpected connection that makes ‘Night Tide’ fascinating viewing for any student of mid-century American underground type bru-ha-ha.

If the film’s artier moments seem to recall the languid Cali-mysticism of Maya Deren’s ‘Meshes of the Afternoon’, well perhaps that’s no accident - prior to moving into the commercial film industry, Curtis Harrington was a big name on the West Coast avant garde scene. He assisted Deren and Alexander Hamid on ‘Meshes..’, and worked with Kenneth Anger on ‘Puce Moment’ and ‘Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome’, appearing in the latter as Cesare the Sleepwalker, as well as producing his own portfolio of experimental shorts, notably ‘Fragment of Seeking’ (1946) and the heavily Anger-influenced ‘Wormwood Star’ (1956), a portrait of his fellow ‘..Pleasure Dome’ star Marjorie Cameron.

Bridging the gap between this avant/occult scene and the (relatively) mainstream world Harrington was trying to find his way into at the start of the ‘60s, Cameron reappears in ‘Night Tide’ as the mysterious woman who haunts Mora, calling her back toward the ocean, and it is her unmistakable presence that will immediately have any occult bozos in the audience sitting up and paying attention.



A figure of almost mythical hip/esoteric fascination, Cameron’s legend dates back to her days as the wife and muse of Jet Propulsion Laboratory founder and Crowleyite magus Jack Parsons. An active participant in Parsons’ American branch of Aleister Crowley’s OTO dring the ‘40s, Cameron became the central focus of Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard’s infamous ‘Babalon Working’ in the Mojave Desert – a doomed(?) attempt to realise one of Crowley’s more apocalyptic notions by conceiving a supernatural ‘moonchild’ whose existence would help hasten the end of all creation, or somesuch.

Understandably perhaps, Cameron seems to have dropped out of sight for a while after that. But a few years later, following the various magical and financial battles that resulted from the rivalry between Parsons and Hubbard, culminating in her husand’s much-publicised fiery demise, it is little wonder that Cameron went on to build a reputation for herself as the flame-haired Scarlet Woman of West Coast occultism, a reputation that was immortalised forever by Kenneth Anger – whom she apparently schooled in Thelemic practice – when he cast her as Kali, the claw-handed destroyer in ‘..Pleasuredome’ – an image that I *guarantee* you would recognise from somewhere, even if you have no interest in this stuff whatsoever.

Perhaps it is the resonance of this backstory, or perhaps just her naturally striking visage, but each of the brief appearances Cameron makes in ‘Night Tide’ is pretty thunderous. In some ways, Harrington seems a bit like a reformed alcoholic in the making of this film, trying to stick rigidly to the straight n’ narrow of a linear, narrative film, whilst Cameron seems like some demon on his shoulder, pulling the film back toward the otherness of abstraction and magick, just as her unnamed character seems to want to drag Johnny and Mora back into the subconscious depths of the ocean.







Watching ‘Night Tide’ with knowledge of Harrington’s background, you can almost picture him desperately trying to convince distributors that he’s a regular guy plugging a regular movie, but all in vain. Despite his best efforts, there is something here that is just off; not just the dreamy atmospherics or the suspicion that he’s taking all this psychological ocean-ambiguity shtick a bit more seriously than is really becoming for a shlock movie guy, but just in telling details like the fact that this is probably the first horror(ish) movie I’ve ever seen that actually features a believable tarot reading. Sure, the seaside carnival’s resident Countess Romanov type gives it some theatrical hoo-hah, but she’s essentially laying down the cards for Johnny in exactly the way your old how-to book on the Tarot told you to, with typically perplexing and long-winded results for the, er, ‘uninitiated’ (read: BORED) viewer.

(I thought it was pretty cool that Hopper’s ‘fate’ card is The Hanged Man – a result that oddly doesn’t fit his character in the movie very well, but suits the weird path of his later life and character pretty perfectly.)



The scene is which ‘Night Tide’ relapses most severely into the realm-of-the-weird comes when Johnny tails Cameron’s mysterious woman, apparently following her all the way to boho-haunted Venice Beach – a locale that the film presents as being some kind of treacherous, spectral zone that physically resembles a deserted Turkish fishing village or something – where he traces his quarry back to – where else? – 777 Baabek Lane.




Knocking on the door, Johnny is surprised to find himself greeted by Mora’s business partner/adopted father Captain Sam, who denies all knowledge of any mysterious woman, but is nonetheless happy to fill Johnny’s head with all kinds of wonderfully creepy blather about the ‘sea people’ and Mora’s true place among them – a great, forboding scene and a great performance from Gavin Muir.


Captain Sam himself is another bohemian beach community archetype of course – a kind of avuncular Henry Miller figure, drinking away his twilight years with anyone who’ll hang around long enough to listen to his bullish reminiscences. Even aside from all the magickal stuff, ‘Night Tide’ has a nocturnal boho charm that’s hard to define, but impossible to ignore.

The modal jazz being played in the cellar bar (‘The Blue Grotto’) in the opening sequence is fucking good, and characters seem to drift randomly through the day, staring out to sea, drinkin’ coffee, drinking in the silence before the crowds arrive for the funfair. Another perfeact example of those strange, self-contained horror-movie worlds that I just want to go and live in.


If one thing denies ‘Night Tide’ it’s richly deserved ‘cult classic’ status though, it is probably the ending. After the slow-burning dream-feel of the rest of the picture, the conclusion seems perfunctory and stupid on first viewing, giving every indication of a crass, producer-enforced happy ending that fails to even honour the basic Weird Tales convention that demands a naive protagonist be darkly changed by his or her uncanny experience.

Initially it’s a real disappointment - but thankfully, the crucial ambiguity remains. Johnny might have decided to bail on the story for good, cutting his losses and exiting stage-left with a nice new gal to pal around with, and Captain Sam might have delivered his stock confession to the fuzz and resigned himself to a life behind bars, but no moderately imaginative viewer is gonna take that shit at face value. Marjorie Cameron is still a no show – who WAS that strange woman, and what was the alien language we heard her speak in the opening sequence…? Mora herself may be conveniently ‘dead’, but the circumstances strike me as pretty vague. We are not privy to the results of the inquest, or to the details of her burial. Given her obvious love of the ocean, could she have been buried at sea, by any chance…? Harrington and his producers might have called time when things hit the last reel, but somewhere off screen, Mora’s tale continues.


Although it’s a solid movie in almost every respect, for me the fascination of ‘Night Tide’ stems from it’s role as a kind of prism, reflecting the psycho-cultural landscape of the L.A. beach towns, and foreshadowing the immense changes that were about to be wrought upon their hermetic cultural development in the following decade.

Somewhere just down the way, The Beach Boys were probably getting warmed up, and Sandra Dee was probably busy shooting ‘Gidget Goes Hawaiian’, without the faintest idea that she’d be reduced to orgasmic altar-writhing in ‘The Dunwich Horror’ before the decade was out. Bob Markley, future tragic avatar of ‘60s L.A. weird, was probably down there somewhere, hustling chicks and playing bongos on the beach in his faux-beatnik, pre-Law School get-up (and probably with markedly less success than the beach-bongo dudes who appear in another one of ‘Night Tide’s great moments of super/natural peril).


Dennis Hopper himself would of course go on to become emblematic of the shape of things to come, as the man on the scene when the ‘weird’ culture that seems so marginal, so exotic in the world of ‘Night Tide’ crashed headfirst into Hollywood and every other damn place, reaching it’s grizzly end a few short years later as the bloated carcass of what became ‘the counter-culture’ collapsed under combined weight of chemicals, ego and miscellaneous abuse. And if seeing Hopper here as a holy innocent is perhaps not entirely out of keeping with the quixotic travails that would take him on the strange path from ‘Easy Rider’ through ‘The Last Movie’ and ‘Apocalypse Now’, it nonetheless seems especially eerie to see him young, clean and sober, wetting his toes in the waters of the weird for the first time (or at least pretending to).

One thing’s for sure: it would have been a hell of a lot easier for a young goof like Hopper’s character to get mixed up with salty characters and mystical hoodoo in the Santa Monica of 1971. But it just wouldn’t have been half as much fun, would it? That wide-open feeling would have been long gone, the truly weird creatures having long ago returned to the shadows.




’Night Tide’ is public domain, and my screengrabs are taken from a surprisingly nice looking print you get find on archive.org. Frustratingly though, the audio track on this file doesn’t sync right, rendering it pretty useless. If you want to turn the sound down and just enjoy the visuals, I found that Grouper’s ‘AIA: Alien Observer’ album and side two of Miles Davis’s ‘E.S.P’ make for an excellent alternative soundtrack. If you’d prefer to actually hear the dialogue coming out of people’s mouths and follow the story though, you’ll have to resort to roughing it on Youtube I’m afraid. Or you could always be swish cat and find it on DVD I guess, but jeez, do I look like I’m madea money..?