Horror Express: Cinta Terlarang [‘Forbidden Love’] (Pitradjaya Burnama, 1995)

Though it dates from somewhat after the ‘70s-’80s glory days of Indonesian horror/fantasy cinema, the opening of Pitradjaya Burnama’s ‘Cinta Terlarang’ certainly makes good on his nation’s proud history of maniacal cinematic insanity, as two women wearing translucent white dress shirts over their sensible white pants descend the steps leading to a cobweb-shrouded, blue fog-drenched subterranean altar chamber.

It turns out that Ratih (Lela Anggraini) and Nita (Welda Hidayat) are here to exact black magickal vengeance upon the father of Ratih’s unborn child, who has refused to claim the child or even marry her (the swine!)

Conveniently, all the gear they need for this task is neatly stored in a box which they extract from inside a smoking, blue-light emitting coffin, including both an ancient grimoire and some rather fetching ceremonial leotards and matching cloaks, which they promptly change into, as the scene is inexplicably intercut with footage of dancers writhing in a neon-drenched night club.

Right on cue, the reverb-y voice of an apparent demonic entity chimes in, telling them, “your spite of love will be the foundation of our alliance”. A black rooster is duly slaughtered (in long shot, and I believe the effect is faked, thank god) and its blood dripped onto a photograph of the witches’ intended victim. (1)

Clearly, this kind of threat to the patriarchal order cannot be left unchecked, and so, outside the witches’ lair, a bunch of men armed with machetes and clubs have assembled, apparently taking orders from Ratih’s shady, white-haired boyfriend, and another fellow who seems to be acting as his occult advisor.

After gaining access to the altar chamber, shady boyfriend belatedly attempts to take the gentlemanly route, apologising to Ratih for his prior conduct and offering her his hand in marriage. Evidently though, it’s a bit late for that, and the girls are having none of it, responding to his overtures with suitably miffed “HMPH!”s, before - brilliantly - they strike martial arts poses and begin enthusiastically beating the living daylights out of loverboy and his henchmen, employing their new-found supernatural fighting prowess in the process.

In the course of the ensuing melee however, Ratih regrettably ends up getting decapitated by the falling lid of the blue-lit coffin. “You’re mean and cruel,” her still conscious severed head spits at the assembled males. “Await my revenge!”

“I will come back after 13 full moons,” Ratih’s now-disembodied voice continues as Nita grabs her bloody noggin and makes a flying, wire-assisted exit, “and I will bring the sacrificial blood of three male virgins! Remember that! Remember that!”

At which point, I sat back and offered praise to whatever unholy deities preside over the unruly world of Indo-horror, for once again allowing the genre’s efforts to hit that perfect sweet-spot of bloody, fantastical craziness I so crave in my cinema viewing.

Meanwhile, at Jakarta’s famed Cleopatra Executive Discotheque (the signage is fucking amazing) - which we have been randomly cutting to throughout the preceding sequence - another, rather confusing, storyline begins to unfold. 

This involves a chap named Andre (Sonny Dewantara, sporting a mighty ‘tache), who is arguing with his girlfriend over the paternity of their unborn child.

As Andre’s girlfriend storms off, never to return, Nita watches pensively from the bar, whilst a woman named Lola (top-billed Sally Marcellina, in a fetish-y combo of lace and leather) reacts to cut-away shots of a black cat, and contemplates a bloody tampon she lifts from a bin in the bathroom. (2)

At the end of the night, Andre (who later turns out to be the son of Ratih’s white-haired boyfriend) goes home with Lola (who may or may not be a prostitute - it’s a little unclear). Before they can get it on though, Lola falls asleep, and - apparently being a more chivalrous soul than his conduct thus far would tend to suggest - Andre gently tucks her into bed and calls it a night.

Back in the witches’ realm however, Nita is now poised over her scrying bowl, as Ratih’s spectral head looms from the shadows pleading for reincarnation. And so, a black cat is dispatched to Lola’s residence, and, we presume, a rather vague form of possession-based vengeance is about to be enacted!

The first fruits of this malediction are reaped the following night, during a truly uproarious scene in which Lola, at the behest of the sleazy, quasi-pimp type guy who seems to control her activities at the night club, goes home with a musclebound dude named Randy. 

At the height of their passion, after she has spent quite a long time sensually rubbing her face around Randy’s knees (which I suppose must be as far as local censorship at the time permitted these things to progress), Lola announces, “now it is time for me to suck your blood”! After transforming into a vision of Ratih, complete with her purple ceremonial garb, proceeds to send Randy reeling with a set of bloody gashes scratched across his face. 

Then, she goes one better by sucking his very life-force (represented by a kind of post-production laser beam) directly out of his brain, before plunging her fist into his chest and eviscerating him with her bare hands. Blimey! 

To western eyes and ears, ‘Cinta Terlarang’ will seem ‘80s to a fault, in spite of its mid-90s release date. Hazy, diffused lighting provided by blinding blue spotlights is filtered through smoke and translucent, billowing curtains, along with gleaming neon and the best chrome / glass / silk interiors the production could manage.

The bedroom sets within which much of the action takes place often look as if they’re under water, such is the quantity of blue light pulsing through their windows, and thumping electro-pop and wistful, Tangerine Dream-esque synth jams dominate the soundtrack.

Though there is no actual nudity (again, presumably due to diktats of local censorship), implied sexual content is fairly strong, and almost every frame of the movie features at least one woman wearing some form of impractical, kinky lingerie. (Seriously, the costume designer(s) must have had the time of their lives on this one, and the results are remarkable.)

In this regard however, it’s worth noting that the ill-fated Randy also strips down to his Y-fronts and does a sweaty erotic dance at one point, whilst a subsequent hunky victim of Lola/Ratih also gets stripped and tied to the bed, so - props are due to the filmmakers for making a rare attempt at equal opportunities titillation, I suppose.


In spite of all the mad supernatural horror stuff I’ve described above in fact, the prime intention here was presumably to ape the style of the then-ubiquitous erotic thrillers emerging from the USA in the wake of ‘Basic Instinct’ - a conclusion supported by the (very sparse) promotional materials for the film which can be found online,  featuring images of clinching couples and nothing to suggest this is actually a horror movie. 

And indeed, this is largely the direction the film takes during its middle half hour, possibly with a side dish of TV soap opera thrown in for good measure. A garish approximation of high gloss eroticism takes precedence, whilst a love triangle plot line develops involving Andre, Lola and… Nita, who, in civilian life, it transpires, is actually Lola’s possessive lesbian lover!

Amidst the lengthy stretches of melodramatic relationship talk which result from all this however, director Burnama at least has the good sense to keep the witches’ cauldron boiling, as Ratih and Nita instigate further occult outrages, claiming that aforementioned pimp guy as Lola/Ratih’s second victim, and also undertaking an unsuccessful spectral assault upon Andre’s Dad’s house.

(The latter, incidentally, fails largely as a result their insistence on utilising billowing silk and flying vases as their sole weapons, leading to Ratih’s spirit being buried beneath a glowing flower pot on the lawn, trapped by an ‘antidote talisman’ which the occult advisor guy has told him Andre’s Dad to bury there!)

Just to further confuse the film’s genre identity meanwhile, there are also a number of decently choreographed martial arts fight scenes, suggesting that perhaps Burnama secretly wished he was helming a full scale action movie. (Perhaps the influence of sexed up Hong Kong action movies like ‘Naked Killer’ (1992) and ‘Robotrix’ (1991) can also be detected here?)

Naturally, this is all to the good in terms of the film’s overall entertainment value, and the scenes in which the thoroughly bad-ass Nita lays waste to gangs of machete-wielding goons in her slo-mo, silk-flowing splendour prove especially awesome, even incorporating some fairly elaborate HK/wuxia style wire-work in places. (3)

In a sense, I can see a similar methodology at work here to that guiding H. Tjut Djalil’s classic of Indo-horror/action insanity, ‘Lady Terminator’ from 1989. 

With that film, Djalil didn’t seem able to simply make a straight rip-off of ‘The Terminator’, instead switching out the sci-fi elements in favour of an insane, quasi-feminist black magickal possession story. By the same token, Burnama seems to have been unable (or unwilling) to make a standard erotic thriller here without spicing it up with… an insane, quasi-feminist black magickal possession/revenge story (and indeed, some kung fu). For this excellent decision making, we can all offer him our gratitude.

Having said that though, in visual terms, ‘Cinta Terlarang’s ultra-garish ‘80s bad trip splatter-horror aesthetic is actually probably more closely aligned with Djalil’s later ‘Dangerous Seductress’ (1992)… but yes, that one also goes pretty big on the insane, quasi-feminist black magickal shit as I recall, so the point still stands.

Though ‘Cinta Terlarang’ is evidently working on a lower budget than Djalil’s films - and is, comparatively speaking, less ambitious in its craziness as a result - all of this helps illustrate why I believe that pre-2000 horror films from Indonesia are always worth checking out, even when, like this one, they don’t quite manage to entirely achieve their potential.

Speaking of which, the pedant in me demands that I state that ‘Cinta Terlarang’ is fairly incoherent in logical, thematic, emotional, and even spatial, terms, but honestly - does it matter, when there is so much pure, wild, diabolical fun here to enjoy?

On a more depressing note meanwhile, the existence and rediscovery of wonderful films like this one also causes me to reflect sadly on the way in which a nation whose popular cinema was once overflowing with unashamed lesbian love, implied oral sex, vampiric flying heads, kung fu battling witches and leather-clad Lady Terminators laying waste to neon-drenched nightclubs, has, in more recent years, regressed to a state in which media portrayals of homosexuality are effectively outlawed, sex outside of marriage has recently been criminalised, and women are increasingly facing harassment for venturing outside without full face-covering.

Oh well. For now, let’s all close our eyes tight and/or cue up ‘Cinta Terlarang’ and return for 80-something minutes to wild and carefree days of… 1995? I know - who’d have thought it, right?

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(1)Curiously, the demonic entity in ‘Cinta Terlarang’ is addressed by the witches as “Eyang”, which the internet informs me means “grandparent” in Indonesian, perhaps suggesting some kind of diabolical ancestor worship is going on here?

(2)It is only after watching the film several times, and writing this review, that I’ve finally realised that, rather than just being totally inexplicable, that bit with the bloody tampon is perhaps meant to imply that Andre’s girlfriend is not actually pregnant, thus excusing him of being an arsehole when he refuses to believe her? If so, this plot point is… not very clearly explained, to put it mildly.

(3)Given that Nita possesses such impressive fighting prowess whilst in her witch-y incarnation, I’m curious why another scene finds her (in her day time / ‘jilted lesbian lover’ guise) hiring a bunch of male goons to beat up Andre whilst taking no part in the assault herself, but… NEVER MIND!

October Horrors 2019 # 6: The Black Cat (Harold Hoffman, 1966)

 It says something about the wild liberties cinema has taken with Edgar Allan Poe’s work over the years that Harold Hoffman’s 1966 independent production of ‘The Black Cat’ is actually one of the more faithful adaptations of Poe I can remember seeing, despite featuring a brawl at a rock n’ roll bar, an application of insulin shock treatment, a guest appearance by the Scotty McKay Quintet, a car chase and a man trying to feed champagne to his pet toucan.

Though the film-making here is pacey and technically proficient, one-shot director Hoffman made this one in Dallas, Texas in 1965, with funding partially provided by New York-based Hemisphere Pictures (yes, the Blood Island / Filipino co-production guys), and a sense of ineffable regional oddness shines through loud and clear in the finished product.

Aside from the 1960s setting, Hoffman’s main deviation from the text of Poe’s most disturbing and personal story is the fact that our protagonist Lou (Robert Frost – not the poet, obviously) is no longer a struggling writer, but in fact a very wealthy one. Lou (no surname provided) resides comfortably in a grand mansion he has inherited from his late parents, and the rationale for his descent into alcoholic delirium is given a more contemporary, Freudian update, as he is haunted by his hatred for his over-bearing father, whilst simultaneously revering the memory of his sainted mother.

When we meet Lou, he has been married for one year to the pretty but rather vacant Diana (Robyn Baker), apparently winning her heart with his romantic sensibility, child-like kindness and grasp of poetic-type lingo, so that’s nice for them both. Slightly less encouraging however is the fact that Lou increasingly likes to stay up all night, getting blind drunk and hanging out with his menagerie of caged animals, whom he speaks to in a crazy, cackling voice whilst attempting to force feed them alcohol.

One gets the feeling that Robert Frost may have made more than a few return visits to his local picture palace to catch Anthony Perkins in ‘Psycho’ a few years earlier, and he does great work here, delivering an endearingly twitchy, hellzapoppin’ uncomfortable-in-his-own-skin type performance. Sadly, Baker is, shall we say, an actress of more limited range, and the film ultimately suffers from her failure to garner much sympathy from viewers once her husband goes off the deep end.

As per Poe, Lou’s delicate mental balance seems to be upset by the introduction of the titular black cat, Pluto, into his household, as the cat soon comes to replace Diana in his affections. Also as per Poe, Lou begins heading further afield to get hammered – in this case, to a swinging joint where the aforementioned Scotty McKay and his boys (best known for their memorably raucous recording of Train Kept A-Rollin’, issued in 1968 with ‘Theme from The Black Cat’ on the flip) are busy laying down polite, white bread versions of ‘Bo Diddley’ and ‘Brown Eyed Handsome Man’.

These scenes are a lot of fun, complete with go-go dancers, a small crowd of modishly attired extras ravin’ it up, and the inebriated Frost looking cool as a cucumber as he cuts some rug, lit cigarette hanging precariously between his lips. (‘60s garage aficionados will also no doubt appreciate the chance to get a good look at the band doing their thing too.)

It’s kind of wonderful to suddenly realise we’re watching an Edgar Allan Poe movie with a rock n’ roll soundtrack (there are some groovy instro cuts too, and McKay and the band return later to sing ‘Sinner Man’, complete with piratical eye patches for some reason), and things get even more enjoyable when Lou’s raging drunkenness gets out of hand and the whole scene degenerates into a full on bar-room brawl, flying stools, smashing mirrors and everything. Good times!

In fact, whilst the success of the Corman/AIP Poe films earlier ‘60s must surely have inspired this project, at least in terms of convincing people it was a financially viable prospect (you can almost hear the filmmakers exclaiming “hey, they haven’t done ‘The Black Cat’ yet – let’s go!”, having apparently missed the middle segment of 1962’s ‘Tales of Terror’), it’s interesting to note the extent to which Hoffman refuses to draw upon their example here, eschewing gothic cliché and instead keeping things resolutely contemporary in terms of both setting and style.

As a result, ‘The Black Cat’ ends up feeling more akin to one of Corman’s snappier, black & white ‘50s productions, or one of those oddball hipster flicks that Something Weird Video used to specialise in digging up (indeed, I first watched ‘The Black Cat’ many years ago on a SWV double feature with the demented beatnik serial killer movie ‘The Fat Black Pussycat’ (1963), which I must get around to reviewing at some point).

After all this rockin’ fun, things adhere fairly closely to the Poe blueprint, and, though the film thankfully steers clear of full-on animal cruelty, prospective viewers should be aware that animals were at least made to feel a bit uncomfortable during its production, with a cup of liquid thrown over a caged monkey and a cat on a make-shift leash getting dragged up a flight of stairs, as well as providing a convincingly gruesome (staged) depiction of the pussycat gore the subject matter demands. The close up of a severed eyeball amid a mass of matted blood and fur in Lou’s clawed hand in particular is a great horror moment, though animal lovers of a sensitive disposition may beg to differ.

Once Lou has managed to burn his goddamn house down whilst in the process of electrocuting poor old Pluto, our lad is understandably confined to a sanatorium, where a scene depicting the application of the aforementioned insulin therapy (a grim and discredited procedure, needless to say) is truly rather horrifying, with his screams going way behind the comfort zone.

After a routine “yes doc, modern psychiatry has left me completely cured, yep, I ‘m a changed man alright, no doubt about that whatsoever” type sequence, Lou is back on the street – or, more specifically, in the more modest suburban home he now shares with Diana – and naturally he’s soon back to his old tricks. Another fun scene finds him freaking out in a low-life drinking den, where he unleashes a stream of crazy-man invective in the direction of a prospective hooker who has latched onto him. Amazingly, she continues to court him as a potential customer, even after he has slurringly accused her of being “a witch”, “the devil’s wife”, “an agent sent by my father” and “a cat in human form”. She must have really needed the business.

If the film drags a bit after this point, that’s largely just due to the fact that it plainly follows the story – and of course, we all know the story. Could the resulting feeling of ho-hum over-familiarity perhaps offer us an insight into why most other Poe adaptations tended to go so wildly off-piste with their story-telling (particularly in the USA, where, I gather, students are even required study this stuff in High School)?

The one remaining highlight – and it’s a doozy – comes when Lou (as per the story, once again) suddenly brains his long-suffering wife with a wood axe – whammo! This is a startlingly full-on, ahead of its time gore effect which punk rock fans of a certain age will immediately recognise as the source of the still used on the cover of The Angry Samoans’ Inside My Brain album.

To put my ‘serious critic’ hat on for a moment, ‘The Black Cat’s main weakness as a Poe adaptation is its superficiality. Whilst Hoffman dramatises the story in an admirably straightforward fashion, in the process of updating the explanation for the protagonist’s condition to reflect a paradigm of mid-20th century pop-psychiatry, he entirely jettisons Poe’s doom-laden musings on the underlying evil of the human condition, and loses most of the bleakly disturbing atmosphere which accompanied it in the process.

Meanwhile, we’re never really given a chance to engage with or share in Lou’s internal torments, despite Frost’s highly enjoyable performance, meaning that the movie’s eventual message never really delves much deeper than: hey girls, keep away from rich guys with parent issues who go a bit wacky when they drink – they ain’t no good, so do the right thing and you’ll keep your cranium intact.

Whilst these deficiencies prevent it from really being hailed as a lost classic of the horror genre however, Hoffman’s film is still a fun, divertingly weird watch, complete with a handful of startlingly memorable moments, a few laughs and some cool tunes, and its near total obscurity strikes me as slightly unfair. I certainly found it to be well worth the investment of 70-something minutes, and those with an interest in Poe adaptations and / or off-beat American regional horror in general are strongly encouraged to track it down.

Exploito All’Italiana / October Horrors 2019 # 2: Death Smiles on a Murderer (Aristide Massaccesi, 1973)

 ‘Death Smiles on a Murderer’ [a direct translation of the domestic release title, ‘La Morte Ha Sorriso All'Assassino’] is a 1973 Italian horror film so narcotic in its effect that I have now watched it three times – and read the booklet, and listened to the audio commentary – and I still have no idea what happens in it.

I don’t mean that in the sense of, “I don’t understand the plot” (that’s only to be expected), I mean - I actually remember very little about the nature and order of the events which are portrayed on screen.

Quite an achievement for gifted cinematographer Aristide Massaccesi, here making the first and only proper feature film he would direct under his birth name before taking on the better known (nay notorious) alias of Joe D’Amato.

An unstable melange of gothic horror and giallo tropes with some additional envelope-pushing gore, ‘Death Smiles..’ lingers in my mind rather like a frustrating, three-quarters forgotten dream – a formless haze of pink cheeks and red lips, huge, dewy eyes, creased silk sheets and hyper-real green grass photographed in crisp, bright sun-light; of spatially disorientating extreme close-ups, looming low angle shots, languorous palacio exteriors, psyched out fish-eye madness, occasional bursts of garish blood-letting and an overriding feeling of claustrophobic immobility and confusion.

Further suffocating my rational senses meanwhile is Berto Pisano’s exquisitely languorous, melancholic main theme, which plays more or less constantly throughout, and which sounds like the accompaniment to a ballerina suffering from tuberculosis expiring during her final dance and witnessing the dust of her bones reforming itself into the shape of a gliding, celestial swan.

Though occasionally interspersed with the obligatory searing fuzz guitar stings and hideously jaunty ballroom dancing music, this remarkable melody tunnels its way into the viewer’s brain across the course of the film like a flower-bearing, funereally-garbed earwig, and indeed, the double LP soundtrack release which was recently issued alongside Arrow’s blu-ray upgrade of the film contains about 156 variations on it, all equally wonderful.

Trying to piece anything together beyond that feels like dipping into some deep and unsavoury region of the unconscious mind, but if I recall correctly, things might get underway with ubiquitous blond-mopped wild man Luciano Rossi, who is even more wild than usual here, playing a character who I think is the unhinged brother of a woman who may or may not have been murdered by the residents of the palacio, so he is running around like a madman and suchlike.

Then I think we switch to a flashback, or flashforward, or something, bringing us to a bit of business cribbed from LeFanu’s ‘Carmilla’ (or perhaps indirectly from Hammer’s ‘The Vampire Lovers’), in which a young blond girl in a black and red cloak (Ewa Aulin) is rescued from a coach accident, and invited into the nearby palace to recover.

Disconcertingly, Klaus Kinski plays the doctor overseeing her recovery, and, when no one is looking, he pulls out a big needle and sticks it directly into her eyeball (I certainly remember that bit). Kinski, it soon transpires, is actually a Frankensteinian mad scientist, and before long he’s down in the basement, mixin’ up the medicine, in the finest tradition of such characters.

There is some kind of sub-plot about an ancient Inca medallion(!?), which Ewa seems to have brought with her, and which Kinski declares contains the secrets of life and death within it, or something. So, he goes to work trying to reanimate a subject on his operating table, but sadly he doesn’t get very far with this, as he is promptly killed – possibly by Rossi, or possibly by his creature… or perhaps Rossi IS his creature, I really don’t remember – but either way, this regrettably spells the end of both the mad science plotline and the thing with the medallion, which I don’t think is ever mentioned again. Au revoir Klaus!

Meanwhile, we spend loads of time with the rich occupants of the palace, characters who feel so ephemeral that I’m still not really sure who they are. Are the man and woman husband and wife, or brother and sister? And, does it even MATTER in a movie like this? Inevitably, the man (Segio Doria) gradually falls in love with Aulin’s character, who, vaguely following the ‘Carmilla’ blueprint, also seduces the woman (Angela Bo) too. I mean, you’d think I’d remember THAT scene at least, but no dice.

I think Aulin is probably a ghost who is seducing these folks in order to take revenge upon them after they murdered her in an earlier time period, but I’m not entirely sure about that. There is also some stuff with a maid, who is being haunted and/or menaced by Rossi, who is possibly also a ghost, or just a bad memory?

At one point, Giacomo Rossi Stuart (whom you’ll recall as the male lead in ‘Kill Baby Kill!’, alongside a wealth of other Italian genre credits) turns up, playing Doria’s brother or father or something, but as their characters look fairly similar and neither of them have any actual personality traits, it kind of just seems as if the ‘man’ character has split in two.

At another point, the maid character flees the palace in terror, and gets her face blasted off with a shotgun, in full on blood-drenched papier-mâché Eastman colour glory. Again, I remember that bit!

Then there’s some stuff with Ewa getting bricked up behind a wall, Poe-style, a lot of torch-lit running around in the catacombs, and, towards the end, Rossi gets his eyeballs torn out by an enraged cat (a scene memorably depicted on the film’s visceral Italian poster design).

And there my friends, my recollection ends.

Describing a film as a “mood piece” usually implies that it will slow and stately, but ‘Death Smiles..’ is quite the opposite – indeed, Massaccesi’s directorial approach here is fairly deranged, cutting relentlessly between exhausting close-ups of over-wrought, rose-cheeked faces expressing mad emotions we’ve either forgotten the significance of or never understood in the first place, and throwing in every kind of disorientating photographic effect he can think of along the way, as if convinced that he was still essentially a cameraman, treating the film as a head-spinning show-reel to try to impress potential employers.

Perhaps ‘Death Smiles..’ does actually anticipate later Joe D’Amato horror films to a certain extent, in the sense that it intersperses long, languid passages of nothing-in-particular with startling moments of grotesque, rub-yr-nose-in-it gore, and also in the way in which the whole feels imbued with an inexplicable aura of diseased wrong-ness, but from my own POV, I certainly found this one much livelier and more watchable than the likes of ‘Anthropophagous’ (1980) and ‘Absurd’ (1981).

Though much of what transpires within it may be pretty mystifying, it’s too loud and visually restless for even its most meandering moments to be written off as “filler”, unlike D’Amato’s later films, in which he often seemed to be killing time waiting for the next outrageous incident to occur. By contrast, it feels as if he is always trying to put SOMETHING worthwhile on the screen here, even if the question of what exactly that ‘something’ was supposed to be often hovers unanswered like a bluebottle above a sugar bowl.

Despite having apparently been driven to watch it three times, I’m not even really sure whether or not a would consider this a good film. I can’t really think of a conventional measure by which it may be certified as such, and, even when assessed using the less rigorous criteria of a ‘70s Erotic Castle Movie, the film’s anxious, volcanic instability, bright, weirdly hyper-real photography and distracting sado-gore moments all mitigate against the kind of languorous, psychotropic sensuality I favour in such ventures.

But nonetheless, I seem to keep watching it, so I suppose I must enjoy it? I’m sure I’ll find cause to watch it again too, trying again to penetrate its secrets. And each time, I know I’ll feel more and more like William Hurt in ‘Altered States’, descending into his isolation tank to plumb the primordial depths of consciousness… who knows, maybe I’ll eventually turn into Luciano Rossi and go on a rampage in the zoo or something? Watch this space.

Gothic Horror Round-Up II: L'orribile Segreto del Dr. Hichcock (Riccardo Freda, 1962)

An unusual figure within the pantheon of Italian genre directors, I remember reading somewhere that Riccardo Freda had become ‘independently wealthy’ by the time he took up making horror films in the late ‘50s, with a fifteen year track record of success in the field of peplums (pepla? I dunno..) and historical epics serving to free him from the commercial considerations that defined the work of other Italo-horror directors, leaving him time to carefully consider the relatively few films he made in the genre, with the studios perhaps seeing them as ‘pet projects’ or indulgences from a guy who’d already proved himself a reliable money-maker.

I don’t know how much truth there is in that view of things, but a rare degree of creative forethought and aesthetic conviction can certainly be felt in ‘L’orrible Segreto del Dr. Hichcock’, which stands as one of the real A+ masterpieces of ‘60s gothic cinema. Released in Italian cinemas 50 years ago this month (funnily enough), it is ‘..Dr Hichcock’, more-so even than ‘Black Sunday’ or Corman’s Poe films, that I think subsequent filmmakers came to regard as ‘the template’ as they mined the gothic style into oblivion over the coming decade.

Packed with overbearing baroque imagery and masterfully orchestrated moments of creepitude, the film can certainly boast a full set of genre clichés. Anyone keeping track on a tick sheet can happily strike off the following in the first forty minutes alone:

Opening grave robbery scene
Eerie, disembodied piano playing
Conflict & confusion between two wives: one blonde, one brunette / one living, one dead
Giant, foreboding portraits of dead wife
Black cat
Randomly appearing skulls
Sinister spinster housekeeper
Disordered family crypt, connected to house via underground tunnels
Constant thunderstorms
Rooms full of furniture covered by ghostly dust-coverings
A mysterious figure creeping around outside bedroom doors at night, trying the locks
A forbidden room that must never be opened
Candelabras all over the joint

And so on.

Rarely though have such familiar elements been as effectively used as they are here. Shooting in technicolor with a wide aspect ratio (I’m not gonna venture into the technical AR talk, but y’know what I mean), Freda creates an incredibly detailed mise en scene within the film’s set-bound interiors, full of dense, dark colours, high ceilings and lavish furnishings that evoke a real sense of shadowed grandeur – a feeling of things lurking in the distance, perpetually unseen beyond the sharp spot-lighting.

Mario Bava had of course worked closely with Freda during the ‘50s (most notably on ‘I Vampiri’ (’56) and ‘Caltiki: the Immortal Monster’ (’59)), and it’s hard to believe that the colour gothic aesthetic perfected by Bava in 1963's Whip & The Body wasn’t veeeery heavily influenced by Freda’s film, utilising many of the same techniques (hell, maybe even some of the same sets – that wrought-iron gate in the crypt looks pretty familiar) to create a similar atmosphere of slow-building tension, borderline supernatural mystery and familial decay.*

Looking further ahead down the influence trail, Freda’s distinctive use here of a POV tracking shot that place us behind the eyes of a mysterious aggressor creeping slowly down glassy, unnaturally lit corridors, followed by close ups of ornate bedroom doorknobs being tested, will have Euro-horror aficionados immediately chorusing “ARGENTO”, and indeed, whether a conscious influence or not, after watching ‘..Dr. Hichcock’ it’s easy to interpret certain shots in ‘Deep Red’ and ‘Suspiria’ as direct nods to Freda.

For all that ‘..Dr. Hichcock’ plays on, and helps create, horror cliché though, there is far more going on here than a mere parade of gothic hi-jinks. To a greater extent than any of his contemporaries, Freda seems determined to explore the deeper psychological aspects of the gothic formula. Drawing (somewhat inevitably) on Franju’s Les Yeux Sans Visage, and pre-empting such psychoanalytical headfucks as Hammer’s ‘Demons of the Mind’, ‘..Dr. Hichcock’s web of sex, surgery and psychiatric dysfunction invests the film with a disturbing, modernist feel that sits oddly with its antiquated visual aesthetic. Sigmund Freud is even mentioned by name at one point, and the whole film is suffused with a sense of neurotic unease that almost bears comparison to a David Cronenberg film.

Whereas most gothic horrors by necessity employ a razor-sharp demarcation of good vs evil, protagonist vs antagonist, for a significant portion of ‘..Dr. Hichcock’ we’re left in uncertainty as to what we should be more worried about: the doctor’s coldness, strange behaviour and apparent duplicity, or his wife’s raging paranoia, unfounded jealousy and unstable grip on reality. In most movies furnished with thunder-claps, decaying gothic piles and sinister scientists, our sympathy with the frightened, loveless bride would be a foregone conclusion. But here, as Freda’s careful manipulation of the film’s emotional drift emphasises the tension between Robert Flemyng’s formal impassivity and Barbara Steele’s harrowing, near-hysterical performance, we’re often genuinely unsure whose point of view we can trust. No one’s, presumably. As in a Cronenberg or Franju film, chances are there’s something pretty off-balance going on with everyone here. Rather than a victim / aggressor scenario, what we’re witnessing could merely be a car crash between incompatible dysfunctions, and we’d be well-advised to keep a close eye on the whole lot of ‘em.

The droning strings and staccato piano of Roman Vlad’s accomplished, Hermann-esque score further heightens the atmosphere of unease, whilst Freda’s compositions constantly exploit the distortions and framing effects of gratings, bars, mirrors and - his personal favourite – having his characters stare through grimy, rain-soaked windows, emphasising a sense of enclosure that reaches its natural conclusion in the genuinely horrifying sequence in which Steele awakes to find herself scratching against the picture window of a sealed coffin.

In one of her few colour appearances and probably her best ever leading role, Barbara Steele is, needless to say, stunning, and it was hard work not to fill all six of my allotted spaces for screengrabs at the top of this review with some of the many, many beautifully realised shots of her looking frightened. Her actual performance here makes just as much of an impression as her unmistakable visual presence though – speaking her own lines in Italian rather than relying on dubbing, she’s as convincing a nerve-shattered gothic heroine as you could possibly wish for. Harriot Medin meanwhile does what she does best as the sinister housekeeper (see footnore below), and if a casual viewer could read Robert Flemyng’s performance as the eponymous doctor as simply being wooden, what he is actually putting across is a very deliberate, emotionless exterior that plays directly into his character’s troubled persona, allowing him to accumulate menace as the movie progresses.

And as the the good doctor’s ’orrible segreto itself, well, let’s just say that, just like Cronenberg’s best works, this is a film that revels in going *just a bit further than is comfortable* with its unsettling ideas in a way that, whilst never remotely graphic, must have been truly scandalous in ’62 and remains pretty iffy territory for a general audience today. If you’ve encountered any other writing about this film you’ll know what’s what, and once you begin watching it you’ll get the drift pretty quickly, but hey - it still says ‘secret’ in the title, so for the moment my lips are sealed.

More often written about over the years than actually seen, ‘..Dr. Hichcock’ has suffered from a pretty spotty release history in the DVD era (allegedly due to the influence of a less than co-operative rights holder), and remains effectively unavailable in officially sanctioned, English-friendly form. This is extremely regrettable, as it’s a really extraordinary film that every discerning horror fan deserves to see at some point. Thankfully though, the bootleggers at least have come through for us here, and a pretty decent looking print of the original theatrical version (sourced from an Italian TV broadcast) is currently doing the rounds, with workable English subs attached. So until such a point as an official release emerges… you know which doors to knock upon, I’m sure.

*There are a number of more concrete connections between the two films as well of course: both are based on screenplays by the ubiquitous Ernesto Gastaldi, and ‘Whip..’ even re-casts Harriet Medin as pretty much the same character she plays in ‘..Dr. Hichcock’. Factor in her unforgettable appearance in the ‘Drop of Water’ segment of ‘Black Sabbath’ and her appearance as ANOTHER sinister housekeeper in ‘..Dr. Hichcock’s follow-up ‘The Ghost’ and Medin definitely seems to have been the Italian gothic horror director’s creepy old lady of choice, although apparently she didn’t have much trouble overcoming such typecasting, going on to a long and varied transatlantic career that saw her appearing in everything from ‘La Dolce Vita’ to ‘Deathrace 2000’ to ‘The Terminator’(!).

#12 The Black Cat (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934)

“Strange about the cat… Joan seemed so curiously affected when you killed it..”

Recently, I’ve been conteplating the notion that cats, black ones in particular, are good omens for a horror film. From Lucio Fulci’s astoundingly peculiar “Il Gatto Nero” to the Peter Lorre/Vincent Price segment of Corman’s “Tales of Terror”, to zany beatnik murder caper “The Fat Black Pussycat”, and even that nutso low budget ‘60s version of “The Black Cat” put out by Something Weird where that guy force-feeds his parrots champagne and whacks his wife in the face with an axe, the presence of a black cat seems to be a pretty reliable indicator of a great time. Whether or not my theory would stand up to a viewing of 1972’s Night of 1000 Cats remains to be seen, but for the moment I’m sticking to it. And where better to mark the genesis of this noble cinematic lineage than with Edgar Ulmer’s 1934 Black Cat – surely one of the strangest and most extraordinary horror films ever made, and the one I’m going to try my best to hold forth about here today.

Ahem.

A common interpretation of German Expressionist cinema of the 1920s sees it as a therapeutic/interpretive reaction to the mechanized horrors of World War I, and the same logic is of course applied to the whole of the wider explosion in Modernism that took place in the arts after the war. And if the Universal/Hollywood horror film of the 1930s can be seem as the bastard child of Expressionism, then “The Black Cat” is the mutant beast that squares the circle, as Austrian director Ulmer combines the familiar gothic trappings of Universal horror with a strange variation on stark, European Modernism, drawing us back explicitly to the traumas wrought upon European consciousness by the Great War.

As soon as the opening credits have rolled, our straight/normal honeymooning couple have the singularly bad luck of seeing their train carriage canoodling disturbed by an anxious Bela Lugosi, who tells them in agonising detail of the fifteen years of soul-destroying hell he has spent in a POW camp. Try that one out for ‘things you’d least like to happen on your wedding night’. When they all leave the train and continue their journey by coach, the driver regales them with tales of how the land they are traversing was the scene of some of the worst slaughter of the war, cheerily recalling the sight of bodies piled upon bodies, before the poor fellow promptly joins them when the coach takes a tumble off the rain-soaked mountain road, a circumstance that sees our characters changing their travel plans and paying a visit to Bela’s ‘old buddy’ - Boris Karloff as the almost impossibly sinister visionary architect Hjalmar Poelzig, whose terrifying modernist edifice of a house is literally built atop the mass graves of the men who died during the war under his treacherous command. Worst honeymoon ever, I think it’s fair to say.

A top-heavy wreck of conflicting aesthetic and cultural ideas, in which traditional horror movie notions of good and evil are left vague at best, “The Black Cat” is a challenging film to really write about or analyse. More-so than just about any other ‘golden age’ horror movie, it is an uncomfortable, disturbing viewing experience, reconstructing distant echoes of Poe’s original scenario into a modernist nightmare in which characters seem to exist in a constant state of nervous desperation and nothing ever quite seems to make sense.

As their characters renew their long-standing blood rivalry, Lugosi and Karloff seem to be competing to see who can appear the most utterly cracked, maxing out their respective allowances of morbid weirdness almost straight away as they start indulging in marathon staring contests, twitching like lunatics and undertaking lengthy, unprovoked digressions about such matters as ‘the dark of the moon’ and ‘the nature of evil’, as the appropriately named Peter Manners as Mr. Straight Guy looks on incredulous. Even their servants are fucking mental – Karloff’s major-domo played by craggy-face horror regular Egon Brecher, and Lugosi’s servant some kind of mute oriental strong man. In a scene that has to be seen to be believed, Bela spears Karloff’s cat with a thrown fork, before Boris quietly explains that his friend ‘suffers from a nervous affliction’ that renders him utterly terrified of cats – the only point at which cats, or Bela’s inexplicable fear thereof, are referred to in the whole damn movie!

Dull as they are, it’s hard not to sympathise with our ‘normal’ couple, plunged unexpectedly into this realm of world class boggle-eyed lunacy, trying to relax and recuperate in a complex of bare, Travelodge-esque bedrooms, under constant threat of Bela Lugosi or Boris Karloff barging in unannounced through the communicating doors to subject them to strange tirades of obsequious politeness. Bela is supposed to be a ‘good guy’, relatively speaking, and indeed he does his damnedest to take on a Van Helsing style gravitas when telling young Joan of the dangers she faces from evil old Karloff, but he’s not fooling anyone – it’s clear that he’s just as much of a vengeance-crazed loon as his opposite number, and understandably she just wants the whole lot of them to fuck off and leave her alone with her husband.

Then, just when you feel things have gotten about as freaky as was possible for a 1934 movie without its makers being incarcerated in the name of general public well-being, Ulmer drops the bomb that Karloff’s character is a Satanist. I mean, an actual, honest to god Satanic cult leader who summons his robe-clad coven to celebrate the rites of Lucifer around a terrifying Cubist/Expressionist altar in the catacombs beneath his house!

I realise that doesn’t exactly sound like much of an eye-opener by modern horror standards, but how many Satanic cults do you reckon had been seen in American cinema prior to 1934..? Now I’ve not done any actual research into the matter, but I’m gonna take a wild guess and say NONE. And furthermore, I don’t really think devil worshippers and black magic cults began to become an accepted part of horror movie procedure until probably the late fifties/early sixties, with the emergence of films like Jacque Tourneur’s “Night of the Demon” and Hammer’s “The Witches”. Why on earth did Ulmer feel the need to make Polzig a Satanist? Like, as if this film wasn’t berserk enough already! The Satan angle comes completely out of nowhere in the film’s final act, serves little actual narrative purpose, and rendered “The Black Cat” so controversial that Universal allegedly cut down Ulmer’s director’s cut down to a lean sixty minutes prior to release, whilst the British censor objected so strongly to the Satanism that he excised it completely, presenting UK film-goers with a version that ran less than fifty minutes.

Thank god for obscurely-inspired maniacs like Ulmer though, because “The Black Cat”s black mass is absolutely breathtaking – the first scene of its kind seen in popular cinema anywhere in the world, and the last too for many years, it brings a dream-like, ritualistic intensity to the film that prefigures all my favourite bits of modern horror.

Everything about “The Black Cat” is completely inexplicable – it is a work of near protean high weirdness, a haunted, desperate, genuinely unstable film in which nothing is easy, nothing is certain, no one is happy, nothing is the way it should be. I know I’m often inclined on this site to talk about my conception of ‘the weirdo horror film’ - well, “The Black Cat” (perhaps in a fifty/fifty split with the next item on our list) can be considered the daddy of them all.

Old Movie Reviews, Part # 2:Originally Posted October 31st 2005

The Black Cat (Lucio Fulci, Italy/UK, 1981)

Not under any circumstances to be confused with the Edgar Ulmer’s classic 1934 Lugosi / Karloff loon-fest, this is an Italian / English co-production that would have looked pretty crappy even at the height of Euro-horror mass production, and which must have been an embarrassment to all concerned in 1981. Fulci has made some films which are almost good, but this certainly isn’t one of them. Expanding on the Edgar Allen Poe story with all the subtlety you’d expect from the director of Zombie Flesh Eaters, this is – and I wish I was making this crap up – a film about an evil, serial killing cat. Yes, that’s right; picture dimly lit shots of the hapless moggie wandering around, overlaid with menacing Psycho-esque music, interspersed with extreme close-ups of his victims going “nooooo!”, and you’ve got some idea of the level of hilarity we’re dealing with here. Patrick “Would you like some WINE?!?!?” Magee reprises the same OTT acting style he used in A Clockwork Orange to play the cat’s mad scientist owner, who hangs around the graveyard at night recording the voices of the dead on tape recorders. Mimsy Farmer delivers her lines and waits for the pay cheque as the sassy reporter who has a dreadful suspicion she knows who might have crawled through the ventilation grille to kill that honeymooning couple in the locked boathouse. In short, Magee and the cat are brilliant. Everything else is rubbish. Best line: “If he were human, he’d be HANGED!”

[2010 UPDATE: Once again, I would just like to make clear that I love this film dearly, and don’t know what I was thinking re: declaring it to be ‘crappy’ and ‘rubbish’. What a clueless arse I was back then.]


Horror Hospital (Antony Balch, UK, 1973)

By god, this film is horrible. Not horrible in the way horror movies are supposed to be horrible, but just stupid, distasteful, baffling and wrong. It’s a British effort staring Robin Asquith from the ‘Confessions of..’ movies, and given the goofiness of the acting and the astonishing crapness of the story, I think it was intended to be a comedy, except that they seem to have forgotten to include anything even remotely amusing. The plot, such as it is, involves a wheelchair-bound evil doctor (Michael Gough) who uses his detox centre / country retreat as a front for his hobby of turning young people into zombies and making them morbidly dance around in their pants while he goes “look at them, they are under my power, ha ha ha” and so on and so forth. So naturally Robin and has lady-friend check in and are subjected to an hour or so of sub-Scooby Doo running around type bollocks. More worrying than the inherent rubbishness of the whole venture though is the extent to which an atmosphere of inexplicable and nasty sadism seems to work its way into every scene. Long sections of this film seem to dwell with leering and repetitive glee on scantily clad teenagers being restrained, beaten, drugged and generally mistreated by faceless men in leather and motorcycle helmets. There’s a LOT of syringes, leather gloves, punching, screaming and cold, dead-looking flesh – all of this creeping latently through the cracks of a lame, cringe-worthy ‘70s British comedy. The aura of general NOT RIGHTness surrounding this film is massive, and, combined with its utter z-rate banality, I feel somewhat ashamed to have been born and raised in a country whose national consciousness decreed this film should be made and people should pay money to see it. On the plus side though, there’s quite a fun gory beheading, the evil doctor turns into some kind of slime monster at the end and – I can’t help but be touched by the tragedy of this – the midget butler totally steals the show, putting his heart and soul into a fantastic, dignified and charming performance that outclasses everybody else present by a factor of ten. Were he of regular height he’d no doubt have been concerned with far better things, but, being a ‘comedy dwarf’, he finds himself relegated to supporting roles in god-awful films like this. A damn shame.

[2010 UPDATE: I’ve not subsequently had the chance to watch ‘Horror Hospital’ again, but needless to say, I remember it a lot more fondly than the above review suggests, and these days I think I’d really enjoy it. Michael Gough doing his creepiest Lugosi impersonation, motorcycle-based beheading, suit of armour enhanced sex scene, inexplicable slime-beasts and an ocsar-worthy turn from the diminutive butler (Skip Martin, whose credits also include The Masque of the Red Death, Vampire Circus and Otto Preminger’s Saint Joan)? What more could one want from an oddball horror/sleaze quickie for christsake! Dreary snob that I was/am, I’d probably have seen the film in whole new light had I known at the time that Antony Balch was a venerable Beat Hotel-affiliated boho who co-directed the “Towers Open Fire” and “Cut Ups” films with William Burroughs & Brion Gysin, and who became a big player in film distribution and exhibition in ‘70s soho, taking pleasure in blurring the boundaries between porn, exploitation and the avant garde at every opportunity; his applaudably detailed wikipedia page has more info.]


Mesa of Lost Women (Herbert Tevos / Ron Ormond, USA, 1953)

My god, where to start... A mad scientist who lives on a haunted mesa in the ‘Muerto Desert’ is creating an army of invincible super-women with the minds of insects! And giant spiders too! And he’s played by Jackie Coogan - Uncle Fester from the Addams Family! There’s a thunderous voiceover delivering dire warnings! A vampiric Mexican femme fatale performs a fantastic erotic dance in a cantina, gets shot at the climax, and then comes back to life as astonished patrons look on! The same piece of crazy mariachi music plays THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE FILM! A plane journey is represented using a model on a string, some cotton wool and a mocked up cockpit! There’s an escaped lunatic who talks like Kenneth Williams! There’s the laziest attempt to apprehend an escaped lunatic in cinematic history! For some reason the invincible monster-women hang around with a bunch of dwarves who look like Lon Chaney Jr! There’s a stereotypical Chinese man-servant who dispenses cryptic ancient wisdom and is secretly in league with Uncle Fester! There’s an even more embarrassing stereotypical Mexican who dresses like Speedy Gonzales and introduces himself as “Pepe”! There’s an alpha-male lead whose response to insane terror and imminent death is “let’s hit the hay and we’ll deal with it in the morning”! There’s a thoroughly lame-brained romantic sub-plot! There’s even a weirdly plausible pseudo-scientific explanation! And it’s all neatly wrapped up in under 70 minutes! Basically, this is B-movie heaven.

[2010 UPDATE: Well at least I got this one right. ‘Mesa of Lost Women’ ROCKS!]