October Horrors 2019 # 1: Mausoleum (Michael Dugan, 1983?)

 An independently-produced horror film shot in Los Angeles and Ventura County, ‘Mausoleum’ seems to have first surfaced on video in 1983, although evidence would seem to suggest that it was actually shot in the late ‘70s. IMDB meanwhile specifies Feb-Mar 1981 shooting dates, which seems like a happy compromise. Either way, the film’s widescreen 35mm photography and general technical proficiency suggest that its producers were initially gunning for a theatrical distribution deal which never materialised.

Be that as it may, ‘Mausoleum’ is a crudely commercial venture which strays into the realm of high weirdness solely as a result of its fevered determination to “deliver the goods” to a hypothetical target audience. Though the film exhibits a near total lack of talent, taste or originality, its makers nonetheless seem to have had a perfect understanding of the kind of stuff they needed to throw onto the screen in order to keep rubes like me watching, and for that I salute them.

Garish gel lighting, swathes of dry ice, gratuitous nudity, lashings of bright red gore, gruesome prosthetic wound make-up, ridiculous creature designs and a wafer thin grasp of narrative logic…. man, anyone would think this thing was secretly made by Italians, were it not for the complete absence of style or atmosphere. (It does have J&B product placement though, so anything’s possible.)

Whilst taking in the film’s genuinely bizarre prologue – in which disembodied voices lure a little girl in a fairy tale dress toward an artificial fog-shrouded, disco-lit gothic chapel which incongruously lurks in the middle of an otherwise drab suburban cemetery – it occurred to me that ‘Mausoleum’ may possibly have been inspired by the success of 1979’s Phantasm, with its similarly surreal, graveyard-based shenanigans and use of an evocative / antiquated word as a title. If Don Coscarelli’s film was indeed an influence though, the similarities are soon dropped once the main body of the movie gets underway.

The body in question is that of dead-eyed, platinum blonde actress Bobbie Bresee, appearing here in what I believe was her only leading role, though she went on to scale the giddy heights of minor b-movie renown through supporting parts in the likes of ‘Ghoulies’ and ‘Surf Nazis Must Die’. Bresee plays Susan, the grown up version of the girl we saw in the prologue, and her ‘department store model’ physique is ruthlessly and rather mechanically exploited by the filmmakers - so if you like looking at it, you’re already quids in with ‘Mausoleum’.

Susan, it transpires, is now the idle trophy wife of a successful businessman played by perpetually weird-looking former child evangelist Marjoe Gortner (‘Food of the Gods’, ‘Starcrash’, etc). The couple are apparently quite rich, as they live together in an extravagant white columned mansion-house with its own grounds, assorted grotesque-yet-expensive looking furniture, flashy cars etc, but despite these material comforts, all is not well.

I’m not sure I quite have all this straight, so please bear with me, but I think the general idea is that Susan is an unwitting descendent of – wait for it – the thrice-cursed NEMOD dynasty, erstwhile owners/occupants of that spooky chapel we saw in the prologue. As a result of her childhood visit to the mausoleum, Susan has become possessed by a demonic spirit which, now that she is all grown up, occasionally takes over her body, gifting her with luminous, glowing eyes, sharp teeth, sundry supernatural powers, and, in extreme cases, a hob-gobliny face like some creature from ‘The Dark Crystal’ or whatever.

Well, I think that’s basically the gist of it, anyway – my address is in the sidebar if credited screenwriters Robert Barich, Robert Madero or Katherine Rosenwink wish to set me straight on the finer details.

So yeah, from hereon in, what we’re essentially looking at is an OTT ‘80s trash version of an exorcism movie, structured around the idea of the demonically possessed Susan gradually murdering a procession of obnoxious and/or comedic secondary characters, whilst poor old Marjoe frets and wonders what’s wrong with her, and her psychiatrist (ubiquitous Hollywood character player Norman Burton, who must have had an especially big tax bill to deal with in 1981 or something) steps up in the all-important exorcist role.

Susan’s first victim is a boorish, inebriated slob who harasses her whilst she and her husband are ‘enjoying’ an evening at their local night club – a location which I confess I found more terrifying than any of the film’s supernatural horror scenes. I don’t know what benighted corner of Southern California they found this place in, but it’s a low-ceilinged, ‘hotel bar’ type room full of dark wood panelling and plush leather furnishings, in which tired-looking middle-aged couples in formal evening wear shuffle around distractedly to sounds of a white, ersatz disco ensemble (heavy on the Kenny G sax), after being served unappealing cocktails in grotesquely elaborate glassware.

Quite possibly the most comprehensively uncool night spot I have ever seen featured in a motion picture, the horrors of this unsavoury joint entirely overshadow the telekinetic car fire which does away with the drunken groper – an incident which is merely *awkward* for all concerned.

Awkwardness continues to be the film’s defining motif as Susan turns her attentions to here house’s stereotypically lecherous Hispanic gardener (actor Maurice Sherbanee’s performance reminded me of Dr Nick Riviera from ‘The Simpsons’). This whole business takes up what feels like a pretty long stretch of the movie’s middle half hour, with Susan alternately leading the horny devil on with peek-a-boo balcony appearances (whilst demonically possessed), and being repulsed by his attentions (whilst in ‘normal’ mode).

Although I realise I was probably supposed to be looking at Bobbie Bresee’s breasts whilst all this was going on, I instead found myself becoming increasingly infuriated by the way the gardener seemed to be spending ages and ages attempting to remove an unsightly tree stump by half-heartedly swinging an axe into the top of it. That won’t bloody work mate! What the hell are you even doing? You’ve at least got to get a pitchfork under there to pull the roots up, or maybe even use a small digger. What a useless gardener! (Actually, now that I think about it, Susan does eventually butcher him with a planting fork post-coitus, so maybe that’s poetic justice of a sort?)

Mercifully spared from Susan’s wrath meanwhile is the family’s comic relief maid Elsie, played by veteran comedienne LaWanda Page, who is instead called upon to enact a hand waving “fleeing from the haunted house” routine unseen since the days of Mantan Moreland.

I feel a bit torn about Elsie’s character to be honest. On the one hand, she clearly represents an appalling racial stereotype which should have been consigned to the dustbin of history long before 1981, but, on the other hand, she is also hands down the most entertaining character in this movie, raiding her employers’ liquor cabinet with gusto, and delivering lines like “good googly-moogly, I need a drink of the hard stuff” and “no more heaving’, I’m leavin’” with Dolemite-level sass.

Meanwhile, poor old Auntie Nemod (no, really) suffers one of the film’s more elaborately grisly deaths, as she is suspended in mid-air by Susan’s evil powers and has her torso graphically torn open. A delivery guy subsequently gets splatted by invisible evil whilst trying to make a phonecall, and, during a visit to the shopping mall, an art dealer gets impaled on a big, spiky abstract sculpture when Susan’s demonic alter-ego develops an obsessive attraction to a painting that… well, words can’t quite express it, so it’ll probably be easiest if I just give you a quick screen-grab:

Thereafter, the film’s exorcism plot-line picks up speed for the final act as the psychiatrist – who has recorded one of Susan’s demonic transformations on tape - calls in a former mentor of his who specialises in this sort of thing.

Refreshingly for a movie of this vintage and general boorishness, this professor turns out to be woman who is neither sexy n’ objectified nor a crazy old bag, and together, the two of them set about delivering masses of exorcism-related exposition and begin preparing for a showdown loaded with more ridiculous, rubbery demon effects and green n’ purple tinted lighting than even I can really tolerate, culminating in what some viewers may consider ‘Mausoleum’s most memorable moment, as Bresee’s demonic boobs stretch out and develop their own pus-drooling faces. Cor blimey.

Special effects here were handled by John Carl Buechler, who went on to direct stuff like ‘Troll’ and ‘Cellar Dweller’ for Charles Band, which… actually kind of makes sense, I suppose? I mean, I may not have quite as much of a detailed understanding of 80s b-horror chronology as fans more thoroughly steeped in this particular area, but I’ve always had the general impression that it was in the late ‘80s - when trolls, gnomes, killer dolls and god knows what were running amok and films like ‘House’ and assorted ‘..Elm Street’ sequels were ruling the video shelves – that medium budget horror films, perhaps wary of censorship or simply aware of the genre’s increasingly young fan-base, began to focus on fantastical, rubbery creature designs as a substitute for more quote-unquote “realistic” sex n’ violence.

To my mind therefore, 1981 feels very early for the kind of latex monstrosities which dominate the last few reels of ‘Mausoleum’; perhaps we could even see Buechler’s work here as somewhat pioneering in that respect, although the film as a whole could perhaps be better framed as a transitory work, mixing full on, creature-feature goofiness with lurid gore and a defiantly puerile, ‘70s drive-in approach to nudity and sexual exploitation?

Well, who knows. Overall, ‘Mausoleum’ is a strange beast, standing out largely for its EC Comics-on-crack tastelessness, and for the eye-watering ugliness of its production design. In this respect, the film is pitched roughly on the level you’d expect from the kind of teenage SOV movie celebrated by Bleeding Skull, which sits oddly alongside its technical proficiency, orchestral score and cast of industry professionals.

In an attempt to understand this disjuncture, I will close by simply drawing your attention to the background of a couple of the film’s principal architects.

Producer Michael Franzese was an heir to New York’s notorious Colombo crime family who earned himself the nickname “The Yuppie Don” during the ‘80s, reportedly raking in a vast fortune via a gasoline bootlegging operation he arranged with the Russian Mafia. A veteran of numerous Grand Jury appearances, racketeering trials and state indictments, he is widely assumed to have begun investing in the film industry for the purposes of money laundering and/or tax avoidance. After ‘Mausoleum’, he went on to produce the impossibly crass (yet hugely entertaining) Linda Blair exploitation classic ‘Savage Streets’ (1984), before eventually getting hit with a jail term and subsequently re-inventing himself as a born-again motivational speaker.

Meanwhile, the sum total of director Michael Dugan’s other film industry credits to date are, in order: a 1976 kids movie named ‘Super Seal’, a 1999 T&A comedy (‘Raging Hormones’), and a 2015 “TV mini-series” entitled ‘The Adventures of Turkey Dude’, which does not appear to have ever been publically screened.

Somewhere between the aesthetics embodied by these two gentlemen, the essence of ‘Mausoleum’ lies, waiting.

A Visit to Jean Rollin’s Grave.

Earlier this month, I visited Paris for the first time in many years, and naturally I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to visit the resting place of one of my favourite filmmakers, the great Jean Rollin.

Approaching Père-Lachaise Cemetery through the quiet lanes leading to the side entrance off the Rue de la Rèunion, the city’s muted roar of traffic gradually gives way to bird song from the trees overhead and the muffled clamour of morning break-time at the nearby primary school, and it is hard not to reflect that, as much as his fans might have envisaged his ashes being scattered into waves at Dieppe, there is really nowhere more appropriate for Rollin to be entombed than alongside the great and the good of his city, deep within this veritable cité des morts.

Despite the frequent intrusion of ill-mannered tourists wrestling with their google-map equipped devices in perpetual search of Jim Morrison’s regrettably placed monument, Père-Lachaise retains its unique atmosphere, with its sheer scale and prevalence of overhanging foliage giving the cemetery’s central portions a sense of complete isolation from the outside world – a feeling that Jean Rollin must surely have appreciated, even as he endeavored to embody a similarly rarefied atmosphere in many of his films. [Needless to say, Rollin actually used the cemetery as a location in both ‘Lèvres de Sang’ (1975) and ‘Les Deux Orphelines Vampires’ (1997).] When night falls, as the gates are locked and the tourists depart, is there anywhere he would feel quite as at home as here?

A small, wedge-shaped block in the central Eastern part of the cemetery, Division # 27 of Père-Lachaise can be easily reached by climbing the winding steps surrounding the colossal tomb of the Baroness Elizaveta Alexandrovna Stroganova (pictured above), just off the pathway known as the Chemin des Chèvres.

Though #27 is thankfully one of the smaller Divisions in the older part of the cemetery, it still took us a good fifteen minutes of off-the-path searching to locate the modest Morel / Le Gentil family tomb within which Jean Rollin is interred, commemorated by a simple stone plaque appended to the tomb’s frontage, next to that of his son Carel, who sadly passed away in 2001. Though he was born Jean Michel Rollin Roth Le Gentil, Jean’s plaque simply bears the name by which the world knew him best.

Raising the metal bar that secures the gate to the railings around the tomb, I took a brief step inside to leave my own small tribute. Perhaps not quite un rose de fer, but the closest I could come up with at short notice. Rest in peace Jean, and may your spirit run free among these mysterious stones, dreaming of stories and pictures, for as long as they stand.

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Appendix # 1: Whilst kneeling at the base of the tomb, I couldn’t help but notice a small red and black beetle with a striking ‘deaths head’ type design on its carapace making its way across the step. Not exactly being an expert on beetles, I have been unable to identify this species, and am uncertain of their commonality within the cemetery, or whether or not any significance is attached to them, but either way, it seemed an odd bit of synchronicity.

Appendix # 2: The location of the Le Gentil / Rollin tomb, it should be noted in closing, actually borders on the cemetery’s larger 28th Division, which is seemingly the chosen resting place of assorted military generals and 20th century descendants of the Morat / Bonaparte dynasty. The thought of Jean Rollin quietly sneaking in under the grandiose noses of these representatives of a very different French culture amused me greatly.

Appendix # 3: Some bonus cemetery photographs? Why not.

Nippon Horrors: The Great Yokai War / ‘Spook Warfare’ (Yoshiyuki Kuroda, 1968)

It would be interesting, I think, to know precisely when Japan’s legion of Yokai Monsters ceased to be a genuinely frightening presence in the nation’s mythology – boogeyman-esque nasties conjured up by parents to keep their children in line, or to put the wind up them on cold nights sitting around the kotatsu heater – and began to take on the slightly more… whimsical aspect generally assigned to them in post-war popular culture.

A definite turning point in this regard would seem to be emergence of legendary manga artist Shigeru Mizuki in the early 1960s, and in particular, the phenomenal popularity of his character Kitaro. A shaggy-haired, one-eyed ‘monster boy’ whose independently mobile second eye is, rather bizarrely, inhabited by the spirit of his late father, Kitaro represents an ambivalent but generally benevolent supernatural presence – a friend of the Yokai who often acts as a kind of intermediary between humanity and the monsters, using his powers either to punish human greed and egotism, or, more frequently, to combat more malevolent ‘outsider’ monsters who are feeding off the defenceless humans on his patch.

Earlier in his career, Mizuki had been advised by his editors that his interest in folkloric monsters was too ‘dark’ to be incorporated into a mainstream comic strip, and perhaps this is the reason why, with Kitaro, the artist took a more light-hearted approach to the material, tempering the macabre weirdness of his often extraordinary imaginings with a tone of gentle black humour, somewhat reminiscent of ‘The Addams Family’, presenting Kitaro’s Yokai pals as goofy, somewhat likeable creatures, and making sure that their adventures were always neatly wrapped up with minimal harm done to innocent human by-standers.

As such, there is always a certain conflict between humour and genuine nastiness running through Mizuki’s work, but regardless, he apparently worked this balance well enough to make ‘Kitaro’ a massive hit, pretty much single-handedly reigniting public interest in the culture surrounding the Yokai, and defining their subsequent presentation to such a degree that many Japanese still have trouble differentiating monsters with roots in folklore from those which Mizuki invented from scratch.

With the popularity of Mizuki’s Yokai tales increasing through the 1960s, happily coinciding with the post-Godzilla/Ultraman boom in Japanese monster action, it was perhaps only a matter of time before the spooks got their shot at live action, big screen glory, and thus we come to Daiei’s 1968 production ‘The Great Yokai War’ (released in the USA under the wonderful title ‘Spook Warfare’). Whilst the film is in no way a direct adaptation of Mizuki’s manga, the spirit of his work is very much in evidence in Yoshiyuki Kuroda’s extremely strange motion picture.

For foreign viewers coming to it cold, I can only imagine that ‘The Great Yokai War’ must seem like a colossal WTF from start to finish, and even to those familiar with the ways of the Yokai, it proves a pretty peculiar business. For one thing, you certainly know you’re in for something a bit different when a Japanese movie – a product of surely one of the most inward-looking and culturally specific film industries in the world - opens with a prologue set amid the ruins of ancient Babylon, where a pair of Islamic-looking treasure-hunters are busy defiling the sanctity of some sand-blasted tomb or other.

In doing so, a solemn voiceover informs us, they are about to unleash the spirit of the all-powerful demon who was single-handedly responsible for the downfall of Babylonian civilisation. And indeed, the voiceover doesn’t lie. Lightning blasts! Earthquake! Whirlwind! And as our unfortunate nomads are buried beneath falling debris, a singularly gnarly, winged reptilian man-in-suit monster takes flight! Good grief.

Next, we cut to a narratively pointless but absolutely delightful Ray Harryhausen-esque sequence in which the winged demon descends upon a sailing ship making its way across a storm-tossed sea – a mixture of nautical model shots, back-projected monster-suit action and screaming, piratical crew member close-ups that serves both to demonstrate the kind of ambition this film intends to throw into its special effects, and also to bring a tear of joy to the eye of anyone with even the slightest love of ‘60s monster movies.

We are never given any explanation as to why this being of pure evil should head straight for Japan after being awakened in the middle of the Mesopotamian desert, but nonetheless, that is what he does, hitting shore in a remote coastal district where a respected local magistrate and his daughter are enjoying a quiet fishing trip. (Oh, and this all takes place during the Edo period by the way, so it’s top-knots and kimonos all round - you’d have to wait for Takashi Miike’s 2005 remake of this film to see your favourite Yokai running amok in contemporary Tokyo.)

The demon’s primary MO is soon revealed to be a kind of vampiric body snatching / mind control type operation, as he corners the magistrate in a spooky, cobweb-enshrouded rural shack, disarming him using a mixture of smoke, lightning and magical laser blasts, and bloodily consumes his soul, taking on his likeness and setting out to further extend his hidden influence within the man’s household. Not that our Babylonian antagonist really does a great deal to hide his presence, as the previously mild-mannered patriarch returns home and immediately begins yelling unreasonable commands at his family and servants, slaying the pet dog and violently smashing and burning the assorted shrines and religious icons dotted around his homestead.

Watching the ensuing chaos from a pond in the house’s courtyard is a curious Kappa – one of Japan’s reptilian river monsters, here represented as a kind of lovable, proto-Howard the Duck sort of fellow. As a supernatural creature, the Kappa is able to see the demon in his ‘real’ form, and, suitably startled, bravely sets out to take this scary intruder down with some Kappa kung-fu, getting his ass kicked in short order.

 

Tail between his legs, the Kappa retreats to an eerie, abandoned cemetery - a wonderful set, looking like it could have been taken straight from one of Mizuki’s drawings, with cluttered, ruinous mise en scene, overgrown weeds and voluminous quantities of gel-lit, multi-coloured Yokai Smoke - and reports his experiences to the local assembly of Yokai.

Everybody’s favourites are represented here, from the stretchy-necked woman Rockuro-kubi to the weird, one-eyed bouncing umbrella creature Karakasa-kozō, and Futa-kuchi-onna, the self-explanatory ‘two-mouthed woman’. Their leader and spokesman is the big-headed, staff-wielding Abura-sumashi, his oversized cranium presumably acting as movie code for “big brains”.(1)

Whilst the Yokai are largely ambivalent about the fate of the local human populace, they are a pretty patriotic bunch it seems, and on hearing the Kappa’s tale, they express concern that the preeminent reputation of Japanese spooks will be tarnished if they let this foreign interloper rampage around unchecked, taking over people’s minds and tearing down the sacred symbols of national tradition. (Do you detect a metaphor in there somewhere, readers? If so, I’m just going to whistle and look the other way.)

So, reccy missions to the magistrate’s house are attempted and plans are hatched, whilst, inevitably, a parallel ‘human’ storyline also emerges, wherein the noble fiancée of the magistrate’s daughter figures out that there is some demonic business going on and sets out to consult his uncle, a venerable Buddhist monk of an evil-fighting persuasion, leading to a couple of rather intense sequences of Asian-style folk magic business that play out like a far less icky version of one of those ‘Black Magic’ type Shaw Bros horror movies.

As neither human nor supernatural counter-attacks appear to have much of an immediate impact on the growing power of the Babylonian interloper though, the Yokai start to put the word out to their brother and sister spooks around the country, gradually assembling a full scale spectral army, as preparations for the Great War of the title start to get underway, building up to one whopper of a mind-bending, monster-bashing climax.

Director Yoshiyuki Kuroda didn’t have a great deal of directorial experience when he went to work on this film, and prior to this assignment I think he was primarily known as an effects guy – a background which certainly makes sense when viewing ‘The Great Yokai War’, in which a rather uncertain tone and underdeveloped narrative is livened up through the application of great art direction and lashings and lashings of outlandish special effects.(2)

In writing about films like this one, I always feel the need to preemptively defend their visual effects against hordes of hypothetical naysayers, pointing out that, sure, ‘The Great Yokai War’s creature designs are neither high-tech nor very convincing… but if you’re watching a movie as crazy as this and expect it to be ‘convincing’, then god knows, I can’t help you. What the effects ARE here is simple, imaginative, a lot of fun to look at and basically just really weird-looking, which I think is basically all you can ask of a barmy ‘60s monster movie.

Although I casually mentioned Harryhausen earlier in this review, that comparison is of course highly misleading. In keeping with the majority of Japanese fantasy cinema from the ‘60s, stop-motion and other ‘in-camera’ means of realising monsters are almost entirely avoided here, with all of the creatures instead created ‘live-on-stage’ style, with full-head masks, life-size suits and the like predominating. As such, it’s clear that Yuroda’s budget and expertise in no way allowed him to replicate the kind of rubbery fantasias exploited by Toho and Tsuburaya in the same period, but watching this film’s crew strive to create extraordinary results from their obviously limited means certainly makes for an enjoyable and – there’s that word again - delightful experience.

Several of the most prominent characters for instance are lumbered with fixed-expression head masks that allow for little facial movement, which immediately gives a bit of a goofy, childish feel to proceedings, but if you honestly find yourself taking offence at the Kappa’s boggle-eyes or the Babylonian demon’s leery fixed-grin, you have a harder heart than I, especially given the kind of exuberant physical acting that both performers employ to make up for such shortcomings.

Beyond his high-school-art-class level mask, the Kappa is basically just a guy in green body-paint and what looks like a few bits of an old ‘jungle lad’/barbarian outfit, but it is the actor’s spirited and strangely elegant capering that really sells the character. A similar approach is taken with Abura-Sumashi, who is presumably just played by a child wearing a giant papier-mâché head, but again, the results are so pleasing that you’d be hard-pressed to find fault with such an arrangement.

Daimon – as the Babylonian demon is referred to in the subtitles and cast list – also has a *very* cool costume, immobile head aside, looking not dissimilar to the kind of creature that might have turned up in one of Daiei’s ‘Diamajin’ films (see footnote 2). Scaly and bony with a thick carapace, curly back-spikes, a belt of skulls and, strangely, feathered wings, he certainly makes for a formidable and scary bad guy.

The Karakasa-kozō meanwhile is represented by a life-size puppet bouncing around on strings – an utterly bizarre addition to any film – whilst Rockru-kubi’s stretchy necked attack is realised by means of a wild assemblage of flailing, flesh-coloured hosepipe, and the use of a lot of conveniently placed foreground objects for the actress to poke her head around. Nonetheless, she is a wonderfully sinister presence, and her one-on-one fight with Daimon is definitely one the film’s highlights, perhaps the overall peak of its “I can’t believe what I’m seeing here” awesomeness.

Well, prior to the conclusion, anyway. Here, as Daimon splits himself into a number of clones then grows to full scale kaiju proportions, the Yokai army close in to attack him, and the filmmakers decide to make best possible use of their twenty or so functional monster suits through extensive application of super-imposition, building up layer upon layer of shiny, transparent Yokai legions by the simple means of slapping loads of different shots on top of each other, to sublimely freakish, psychedelic effect. This ‘March of the Yokai’, shot in slow motion, with the spectral hordes traversing rivers, clouds and mountains, and their ensuing epic battle with Daimon, is one of the most extensive spectacles of mindbending fantastic cinema I’ve seen for many a month. (And as an aside, I like how many of the Yokai seem to tie handkerchiefs around their heads when they go to ‘war’, making them look a bit like desperate, battled-scarred fighters from a Kurosawa movie or something.)

As you may have gathered from some of the descriptions above, ‘The Great Yokai War’ features comical character designs and gentle slapstick humour that could have come straight from kid’s adventure movie, but frequently mixes them up with moments of unnervingly gruesome horror, leading to a tonal discrepancy that is never quite resolved. In addition to the demon’s gory neck-chomping antics and a few other bloody, gaping wounds, the atmosphere of the film is persistently ominous, and Shigeru Ikeno’s dissonant, Ifukube-esque music is often terrifying.

One sequence in particular, in which a pair of young children are forced to flee their home and take refuge in the ghost-infested cemetery as their parents are slaughtered by demon-possessed samurai, seems purpose-built to send unsuspecting little ones straight into a screaming vortex of no-sleep-for-a-month trauma, but apparently none of this stopped ‘The Great Yokai War’ from finding a home as a frequent holiday TV fixture in Japan, so who knows, maybe kids in the Far East are just made of sterner stuff?

With this mixture of kiddie-friendly creatures and genuine threat, ‘The Great Yokai War’ could perhaps be seen as a precursor to something like Joe Dante’s ‘Gremlins’. But whereas that film managed to merge the two impulses very smoothly, Kuroda is less successful, with the resulting stylistic confusion perhaps serving to make things a bit too weird and alienating for casual viewers. Whilst the appearance of the Yokai is clearly quite cutesy, with the exception of the Kappa they are never really anthromorphised very much, nor allowed to develop their own personalities. And whilst their refusal to really give much of a fuck about the fate of the humans in the film is pretty refreshing for those of us with an ingrained hatred of Disney/Hollywood schmaltz, the spooks’ failure to become “relatable” also leads to something of a character-vacuum at the centre of the movie, especially given the rather dry and unengaging nature of the accompanying human drama.

Really though, such confusion is probably to be expected when you realise that Kuroda and his collaborators were basically going way off the map here, with no established set of genre conventions to guide them: in addition to horror and kid’s fantasy, there’s a hefty dose of kaiju eiga DNA in the mix, to say nothing of some distant hints at kaidan ghost stories, and even a fair amount of chambara-style period drama. With all these generic tropes flying around but never quite coalescing into a coherent whole, it is probably best to view ‘The Great Yokai War’ as a complete one-off, and one whose drawbacks are very much the result of its untested and somewhat unique style.

And, more importantly of course, those drawbacks never even come close to outweighing the sheer pleasure that the film’s wildly ambitious visuals, macabre atmosphere and unhinged creature designs have to offer to anyone with a fondness for unusual international fantasy cinema. In fact, if your tastes veer more toward the exceptionally weird, lower budget and culturally specific end of the scale, you can peg this one up as a ‘must see’ for sure... but then if you've read this far, you probably don't need me to tell you that.

As with just about every character or concept that emerged from Japanese popular cinema during the ‘60s, it seems that one film just wasn’t enough for Daiei’s Yokai, and they soon returned for ‘One Hundred Yokai Stories’ (1968) and ‘Journey with Ghosts Along Tokaido Road’ (1969). I’d imagine my quest to find both of those in watchable, sub-titled form might be worthy of a series of films in its own right, but nonetheless, I hope I’ll be able to share my thoughts on them with you sooner or later.

For now though, let's all wave goodbye to these spectral defenders of Japan's supernatural sovereignty, as they dance eerily back across the misty mountains. They may be apt to scare the shit out of us in nocturnal graveyards from time to time, but they're a good bunch really... well, provided you've got your visa papers in order and aren't planning to eat anyone or make with the mind control, at least.

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(1)Many thanks to the indispensable Yokai.com for helping me get all those names straight – a wonderful resource, and a great way to waste a few idle hours at work.

(2) Kuroda’s main claim to fame prior to this film was as effects supervisor on Daiei’s series of ‘Daimajin’ movies, of which three were made in 1966. A similarly off-beat kind of period kaiju / Shinto mythological(?) type creation that perhaps represents the nearest relative to what we see in ‘The Great Yokai War’ and its sequels, you can learn more about ‘Daimajin’ via this informative post at Cool Ass Cinema.

An Andy Milligan Double-bill from the BFI, Part # 2: The Body Beneath (1969)

Compelling in an entirely different fashion is the film Andy Milligan made immediately after ‘Nightbirds’, his first UK made horror effort ‘The Body Beneath’. “Filmed in the Graveyards of England!” announced the posters when the film eventually saw release in New York a few years later, and as selling points go, that’s certainly one that works for me. And indeed, a few memorable sorties into Highgate Cemetery do turn up here, adding further atmosphere to a film Milligan primarily shot in and around the Serum Chase estate on Hampstead Heath – a frequent British film location, perhaps most strikingly utilised in Joseph Losey’s ‘Secret Ceremony’.

Although there is absolutely no evidence to support such a notion, it’s fun to speculate that perhaps the sight of Milligan’s bizarrely-attired cast traipsing through Highgate on their no doubt un-permitted excursions might have been witnessed by would-be vampire-hunter Alan Farrant, who claimed he had seen black masses and similar shenanigans taking place in the cemetery in the lead-up to the infamous ‘Highgate Vampire’ flap of 1970. Apparently I’m not the first to have made this (no doubt entirely spurious) connection, and it was nice to see the wonderful ITN News feature on the ‘Highgate Vampire’ (previously exhumed at BFI/Flipside’s Mysterious Britain night in 2010) getting another airing alongside ‘The Body Beneath’ at a Flipside screening in January this year.


Although I’d been fascinated by Milligan and the world he inhabited ever since I read Jimmy McDonough’s book, I’ll admit that up until this point I’d been pretty reluctant to actually watch any of his films. For all that I might sympathise with his underdog status and marvel at the sordid circumstance under which his films were made, I do actually prefer to enjoy the movies I watch wherever possible, and sitting down with a few flicks made by a guy best known for his sadism, misogyny and near unwatchable technical ineptitude doesn’t exactly sound like my idea of a fun Friday night, y’know? At the same time though, there’s often a lot be said for simply taking a deep breath and diving in where good taste fears to tread, and when I saw the announcement of the BFI screening, I knew it was time to take the plunge.

Even without firsthand knowledge of his films, I implicitly understand that Andy Milligan is part of MY cinematic world, and that if Flipside want to go out on a limb and get stuff like his proudly listed in the programme of the National Film Theatre, it’s my duty to turn up and support them in that endeavour. I mean, I’ll bet this was the first time any of the films Milligan made in the UK have actually even been screened in public in the UK! In a weird sorta way, it’s quite a landmark event in his gradual rehabilitation as a recognised filmmaker, and hey, even if the movie itself turned out to be unbearable, just observing the kind of people who show up for it is sure to provide a certain amount of interest.

Well as it turns out, I needn’t have worried. I shouldn’t have brushed off Andy for so long, and I should have trusted the Flipside folks. ‘The Body Beneath’ is… well, it’s just beautiful really. I find it hard to put into words the extent to which the very existence of a film like this warms my heart. Maybe viewers who do not share my particular tastes will think otherwise, but to see such a wonderful, cracked vision of the world, preserved for all these years in faded, damaged, blown-up-to-35mm form, projected flickering and fuzzed up onto the screen for a dedicated few who still cherish and appreciate it, was genuinely moving. An odd claim to make perhaps, given the scorn and cynicism that usually greets discussion of Milligan’s work, but I hope that some of you who read this blog will get what I mean.


Although I’d never seen the film before (never seen any Milligan film in its entirety in fact), I felt instantly at home in the strange world of ‘The Body Beneath’. It was as if some much-loved friends and family members had made a backyard camcorder horror movie, say, ten years ago, and we were all sitting together watching it and chuckling, whilst at the same time marveling at how surprisingly good in actually is, and at how impressive the costumes Uncle Bert made were, and so forth.

There was indeed much chuckling in NFT1 on Andy Milligan night, and rightly so – ‘The Body Beneath’ is hilarious, in that impossible-to-fake way that can only arise from a genuine, unself-conscious descent into the absurd. As long-term readers will hopefully be aware, I am very much opposed to the idea of laughing AT films like this (what kind of heartless swine could do that?). But, like ‘Glen or Glenda’, or ‘Troll 2’, or ‘The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant’, there is a unique kind of linear-yet-impossible logic on display here that simply cannot be rationalised. We do not laugh in order to mock or dismiss, we laugh simply through astonishment, through a mixture of joy and disbelief in what we are seeing; we laugh because there is now other possible response. Again, it’s a difficult feeling to explain, but I hope readers will get where I’m coming from.


Pivotal in holding ‘The Body Beneath’ together is an unforgettable performance from Gavin Reed, in the role of the Reverend Algernon Ford, the smug and officious vampire overlord who presides over assorted diabolical goings on in London’s ‘Carfax Abbey’. The kind of inherently comical looking British actor one could easily imagine trudging through a whole career of bit-parts as camp waiters and toadying butlers (indeed, his only other film credits are walk-ons in ‘Carry On Loving’ and the Dustin Hoffman vehicle ‘Tootsie’), Reed takes to the opportunity to play a lead role (if admittedly a very strange one) with rare gusto, instantly earning Reverend Ford a place in my pantheon of favourite oddball horror movie characters. (It would be nice to think that he’s out there somewhere, running free with Luther The Beserk, Simon: King of the Witches, The Crimson Executioner and the rest of the gang.)

It’s just as well Reed goes at it with such enthusiasm too, because a lesser actor in the role could have torpedoed this whole movie, at least 50% of which seems to consist of Reverend Ford going on, and on, and on about his bloodline, his family history and his nefarious plans. (There’s a great moment where he exclaims “forgive me, I talk too much, it’s a bad habit!” and sits down in silent ‘brooding posture’, leaving the other actors in the scene staring at him in baffled silence until someone nudges him and he gets up to continue his incessant monologue.)


Somewhat unfeasibly, the Reverend claims that ‘the Ford clan’ have been buried in Highgate for over two thousand years, their unbroken lineage dating back far enough to incorporate an unspecified Roman Caesar. This will come as something of a surprise to the historians who claim the first burials in the area took place after the cemetery was first consecrated in 1839, but no matter.

As far as the outside world is concerned, Reverend Ford and his mute, knitting needle wielding wife Alicia have only recently relocated to London from County Cork, but in fact the ‘Ford clan’ are nothing less than a dynasty of vampires, who for centuries have lurked in the tombs beneath the (relatively recently established) cemetery, feeding off the unwary. As their elected leader (they’re a democratic bunch, it seems), the Reverend has decided to go ‘overground’ in an effort to strengthen the family’s bloodline by gathering together assorted distant Ford relatives and imprisoning them in some sort of unholy breeding programme.

(We could probably spend quite some time speculating on quite how a vampire ‘lineage’ functions, and by what circumstances they ended up with an apparent network of healthy, non-vampiric human relatives, but…. let’s just not, ok?)



To help him in this task, Reverend Ford has command over a trio of silent ‘vampire brides’, whom he dispatches to kidnap his unfortunate victims. A visual masterstroke, these ‘brides’ are incredibly striking, appearing out of nowhere as fairie-like apparitions, their bright blonde hair, green skin, scarlet lipstick and primary-coloured diaphanous gowns (no doubt knocked up by Milligan’s costumier alter-ego ‘Raffine’) all blazing from the screen in hyper-real fashion, making full use of the remarkable faux-technicolor palette Milligan manages to wring from his cheap 16mm camera.

I particularly liked the way that whilst two of the ‘brides’ are conventionally attractive gothic maiden types, the third looks like a right bruiser. And when the trio’s shocking appearance and eerie, occult movements don’t succeed in subduing their prey, it’s no surprise that she’s the one ready with plan B – a good ol’ fashioned bottle of chloroform.



Another interesting addition to the Reverend’s household is his faithful hunchback servant Spool (Berwick Kaler, in a rather crushing demotion from the male lead status he enjoyed in Milligan’s previous film). Always the daftest and most questionable of horror movie archetypes, the wretched, drooling hunchback seems to have held a particular fascination for Milligan, who features them in almost all of his horror films, often taking the time to provide them with detailed back-stories and personal motivations – a direct expression of the kind of cracked compassion that can be detected beneath the grubby surface of his films. Here for instance, poor old Spool is allowed a lengthy monologue about the traumas that led him to his sorry station in life (naturally it’s all the fault of his evil step-mother and step-brother, who pushed him in front of a bus at a young age, then beat him and had him thrown out of his family and committed to a home).


Adopting a woollen cap over greasy blonde locks for this challenging role, with some pillows stuff under a torn anorak by way of a hump, Kaler capers about in the strange hopping fashion Milligan seems to have demanded of his hunchbacks, emoting like crazy as Spool finds himself torn between his loyalty to Reverend and his desire to help the female prisoners, who are ever-so-friendly to him as they try to enlist his help in escaping. Of course, we know either path leads to nothing but betrayal and disappointment for Spool, and, having established him as by far the film’s most sympathetic character, it is with a kind of mad glee that Milligan unfolds his terrible fate - crucified by Rev Ford and set alight by ghouls after his duplicity is discovered. Poor Spool!


Although far more ambitious than ‘Nightbirds’ in terms of cast, locations, narrative, production design etc., Milligan’s actual direction on ‘Body Beneath’ is notably rougher, with a lot of awkward, cropped framing, chopped off heads, excess ceiling room and the like in the close-ups, whilst dull, stagey long shots predominate elsewhere. Andy still enjoys his woozy dutch angles and swirling transitions when the mood takes him though, and I actually found a lot of charm in the movie’s sundry examples of technical ineptitude.

For instance, you’ve probably watched scenes in other films in which tied up victims use broken glass to cut their bonds and free themselves, but I’ll bet you’ve never seen anything quite as awkward and drawn out as the one here, in which our notional hero Paul (Richmond Ross) crawls around the floor of a locked room for a good two or three minutes, pushing over a conveniently placed glass vase with his nose, pulling a coat off a shelf with his teeth and wrapping it around the vase so that he doesn’t cut himself when he proceeds to break it with his feet, and so on. Milligan’s insistence on actually showing us this entire operation in real-time, where other directors would simply have used a few quick cuts to give us the general idea, demonstrates an amateurish bloody-mindedness that is actually strangely endearing. (Of course, knowing Milligan, it could just have been a welcome opportunity to linger for a few minutes on the sight of an attractive young actor in a kind of weird bondage situation, but a viewer unaware of the director’s proclivities would be unlikely to make such a connection.)


As usual, Milligan’s dialogue is extraordinarily overwritten. He seems to like commas even more than I do, and it’s easy to imagine actors’ hearts sinking as they were confronted with a script that seems to drag out even the simplest bits of exposition to excruciating length:

“You have brought me here against my will, and in less you release me shortly, my maid, who has no doubt by this point discovered my absence, will notify the police… now do I make myself clear?”

“But without any trace of a clue, how could the London police find such a charming young lady as yourself, in all of London.. and of course its suburbs?”

Milligan’s use of music here is also characteristically unhinged, his technique seemingly consisting of dropping the needle at random on archaic-sounding library records that sound like they’ve been ripped straight from some 1920s melodrama, using the soupy racket that results not so much to accompany the on-screen action as to drown out the camera whir, background noise and muttering that dominate the film’s recorded-straight-to-camera audio track.


In other respects though (the ones that really matter, arguably), ‘The Body Beneath’ is a surprisingly impressive piece of work. Visually, it’s an absolute feast of weirdo gothic imagery, looking unexpectedly splendid in the BFI’s remastered version - still grainy as you’d expect from a 16 mil blow-up, but blessed with deep focus and incredibly vivid primary colours. (Who knows, maybe Milligan’s other films might lose some of their reputation for ugliness if similarly scrubbed up?) With sodden, misty graveyards, extraordinary costumes, garish make up and languid, Rollin-esque walks, the film’s exterior scenes are actually incredibly atmospheric, with the fuzzed out graininess and random, warped music cues only increasingly their dream-like, haunted resonance.

In particular, the closing scene, in which the already pretty vampiric looking Jackie Skarvellis awakes from death and embraces her newly undead fiancée against the backdrop of a chill, blue dawn, is genuinely pretty beautiful – a superb low budget horror moment by anyone’s estimation.


‘The Body Beneath’ reaches its true zenith of visual / conceptual lunacy before this however, as we visit the annual ‘conference’ of the Highgate ghouls, where the Reverend Ford proposes a controversial plan to relocate the ‘family’ to America.

Following the vampiric host through a blue-tinted, day-for-night march across the graveyard, we join them in the family crypt, distinguished from the film’s other interiors through the use of jaw-dropping fogged fish-eye lens effects and swirling, Anger-like psychedelic madness, as the garishly-clad underworld creatures feast lasciviously upon fruit, hunks of meat and… flowers?

With visuals distantly reminiscent of both Anger’s ‘Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome’ and Jack Smith’s ‘Flaming Creatures’ (either of which Milligan may conceivably have encountered via his connections with the New York avant/gay arts scene?), the sense of dementia in this sequence is only heightened when Reverend Ford begins his address, debating with the green skinned, feather-clad Elizabeth Ford (Judith Heard, presumably sister of Milligan regular Susan, in her only screen role) as to the pros and cons whether or not this gang of millennia old British ghouls should relocate to sunny California.


Elizabeth: “I know our bloodline is deteriorating… I know we’re having problems with the police*.. I know we’re on the verge of discovery by the entire world… I realise we must pro-create a stronger breed of Ford… I agree that for us to continue to survive and exist we must make some sort of move. But to go to America?! Never! What is America? What is it made of? Pimps, prostitutes and religious fanatics, thrown out of England but a few small centuries ago! They’re the scum of the earth!”

Rev Ford: “I don’t want to leave my native soil… I don’t want to leave these grounds which are second nature for me… these familiar surroundings, these glorious environs which Alicia and I have enjoyed for so many centuries […] Look around you… all this may come to an end if we do not move to this new continent. Our relatives living in Canada and the United States are fabulously healthy specimens… we cannot exist another hundred years unless we bring them into our family… we must vote in my favour out of necessity […] we know only too well how close we have come to being discovered by the police for what we are… you all know how difficult it is to move around London after 11:30pm! London is a police state after midnight! Anyone can be stopped and asked where they are going at any time of the morning! We can no longer exist under these limitations! So, I have decided that we must move to America […] I have arranged for a chartered boat to take us to the States, it leaves at exactly 2am. […] There shall be some room on-board for personal belongings, it will be a long journey. We shall go round North America through the canal and land at California… we shall entomb ourselves at Forest Lawns, which is very lovely, I have heard…”

And so it goes on. Readers should note that I have excerpted the above quotation from a full speech that it easily twice as long. Surely, no other director in history would have thought to give us this bizarre debate in full.


And so, in conclusion: regardless of Andy Milligan’s dubious reputation and myriad eccentricities, I find it hard to believe that anyone with a love of outsider cinema and gothic horror could fail to utterly charmed by ‘The Body Beneath’.

More visually adventurous and thematically upbeat than yr average Milligan effort (in spite of its knitting needle eye-gouging and flaming hunchbacks),** the film’s mixture of Rollin-esque gothic surrealism, utter goofball craziness and otherly inspired filmmaking technique in fact makes it hard for me to conceive how I could possibly love it more. Maybe a little less yakking and fewer awkwardly framed interior shots might have helped, but let’s not split hairs: to all intents and purposes, this is a real classic of the kind of thing we like to celebrate on this weblog, and, needless to say, I’d urge you to seek out BFI/Flipside’s superb release with all possible haste, in the hope that more of this sort of thing may follow.

Criterion double bill of ‘Torture Dungeon’ and ‘The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves are Here!’ anyone..? After this disc, anything’s possible.



*I love the notion that a brood of outlandishly clad vampire ghouls who’ve been living in a public cemetery for two thousand years should suddenly be having “problems with the police”.

** I’ve subjected myself to quite a few Milligan movies in the past few months, just FYI re: my ability to draw such comparisons having earlier claimed never to have seen any of his movies before January this year…