Exploito All’Italiana: The Weapon, The Hour, The Motive (Francesco Mazzei, 1972)

Although you wouldn’t necessarily know it from reading this weblog, I spend a lot of my time watching Italian gialli. Why I’ve so rarely written about them over the years, I’m not quite sure, as there is undoubtedly still a lot to be said about this feverishly creative and endlessly rewarding genre, even beyond the efforts made by the multitude of English language critics and commentators who’ve taken a crack at it over the years.

It feels fittingly perverse therefore that I should break the fast of giallo content in these pages, not by looking at any of the more celebrated or representative examples of the genre, but by instead turning my attention to what is, by anyone’s standards, an extremely marginal entry in the canon. Indeed, it’s probably fair to say that one-shot director Francesco Mazzei’s 1972 magnum opus ‘L’arma, L’ora, Il Movente’ languished in near total obscurity until Arrow saw fit to reissue it as part of a blu-ray box set last year. (1)

Suffice to say, even now that it’s easily obtainable, ‘L’arma..’ is unlikely to make it onto many giallo fanatics’ top ten lists. To be honest, I’m not even sure it would even make my top fifty at this point. But, it is at least incredibly strange, which counts for a lot around these parts - especially when it comes to inspiring me to hit the keyboard and begin trying to figure out what the bloody hell I just watched.

Of course, we all know there are a lot of very strange gialli out there, and seasoned fans of Italian genre cinema will have long since learned delight in these films’ refusal to abide by the dreary rules of narrative logic which American (and indeed British) culture have hammered into most of us from birth. But… ‘L’arma..’ is not really one of those films, if you know what I mean.

In fact, for much of its run time, it’s a perfectly linear murder mystery / police procedural kind of joint, doggedly moving from A to B…. except when it suddenly decides it would rather spend some time hanging around in Q or X instead, which is where the fascination begins. Returning to the jigsaw metaphor I was utilising just last month, it’s a film full of bulbous, misshapen pieces which stubbornly fail to coalesce into any kind of coherent whole, no matter how long you spend trying to force them into place.

So, let’s get down to cases. Basically our setting here seems to be a convent, located somewhere in rural southern Italy. Our characters are the strange gaggle of people who either live at the convent, work there, or just inexplicably hang around, enjoying the suspiciously boozy and indulgent meals which seem to be frequently served in the institution’s bucolic gardens.

Central to this social milieu is Don Giorgio (Maurizio Bonuglia), an attractive, blonde-haired young priest, who is soon revealed to be having affairs with not one, but two, married women. In fact, he is currently in the process of ditching teacher and wife-of-rich-businessman Orchidea (Bedy Moratti) in order to devote more of his time to tarot card reader and alleged ‘witch’ Giulia (Eva Czemerys). In addition, he has also attracted the steadfast devotion of almond-eyed nun Sister Tarquinia (played by the magnificently named Claudia Gravy), who insists with barely-concealed lust that Don Giorgio is “..a saint”. (1)

In a certain sense, perhaps Don Giorgio’s enthusiastic embrace of the ways of the flesh could be seen to reflect a devotion to the same kind of transcendent, non-denominational spirituality practiced by Oliver Reed’s character in Ken Russell’s ‘The Devils’, carrying with it the same implied critique of papal dogma and clerical celibacy… but, as with so many things, Mazzei’s film never really gets its ducks in line sufficiently well to express this idea very clearly.

Meanwhile, much screen time is also devoted to the travails of a small boy named Ferruccio (Arturo Trina), who appears to live at the convent. Late in the film, a throwaway line of dialogue belatedly informs us that he is an orphan whom the nuns have unofficially adopted, but I don’t think we’re ever offered an explanation as to why they keep him confined to his bedroom, or why the aforementioned Orchidea visits him each day to administer some kind of injection.

Anyway, before long, Don Giorgio is found dead - stabbed in the back whilst seated at the organ in the convent’s chapel - and down-at-heel, motorcycle-riding Commissario Bioto (veteran comedy actor Renzo Montagnani) is soon on the scene, determined to crack the case in his best bumbling Maigret / Columbo type manner.

Soon though, the Commissario also finds himself smitten by Orchidea, instigating a romantic relationship which takes him way beyond the realm of professionalism, given that she is both a prime suspect in the murder case, and, lest we forget, already married.

So far then, a pretty standard issue whodunit, seasoned with a heady mix of religion, rural Southern superstition, sexual intrigue and implied child abuse which will inevitably remind genre fans of Lucio Fulci’s classic ‘Don’t Torture a Duckling’, even as Mazzei immediately steers things in an entirely different direction.

Because, really, it is the extraordinary series of non-sequiturs which accumulate on the fringes of this central plotline which make ‘L’arma, L’ora, Il Movente’ stand out.

We’ve already mentioned the strangeness of poor Ferruccio’s situation, which in most films would surely be treated as an immediate red flag that something nefarious is going on at the convent. But here, everybody - the police included - just seems to take it for granted that the nuns keep a drugged orphan locked in his bedroom.

Meanwhile, we’re also treated to what I can only describe as several one-off outbursts of gratuitous nunsploitation (an addition which is certainly in keeping with director Mazzei’s history as the producer of several mondo and sexploitation titles during the ‘60s).

At one point, the nuns strip off and begin indulging in an extended bout of topless self-flagellation, working themselves up into a state of orgasmic frenzy as a gliding camera tracks them against a black background; a scene which, again, invites comparison to ‘The Devils’, but, beyond its value as pure exploitation, it has no wider significance to anything else which happens in the film in thematic/narrative terms.

Even stranger is a subsequent scene, in which the nuns all take a shower together (still wearing their bloomers and gym slips), and appear entirely unconcerned when the heretofore unmentioned leering, snaggle-toothed ex-con gardener character suddenly wanders in to invade their privacy. The “joke”, I suppose, is that they then all lose their shit in predictably comedic fashion when the Commissario’s bungling sidekick Moriconi (Salvatore Puntilo) inadvertently intrudes on them, but… so many unanswered questions here. Rather than the sexy comic interlude which was presumably intended, it basically all just seems - at the risk of repeating myself - really strange.

The incongruous antics of the nuns pale into insignificance though once we get deeper into the film and find ourselves assaulted with several full strength descents into - albeit potentially unintentional - surrealism.

One of these occurs when young Ferruccio, fleeing from Orchidea as she pursues him wielding a syringe, descends to the cellars beneath the convent, where, incredibly, he enters a chamber full of cobweb-covered skeletons, arranged in some kind of morbid diorama, clad in moth-eaten regal vestments and bearing bejewelled medieval goblets!

Up to this point, I should clarify, the film has featured no hint of overt gothic horror imagery whatsoever, and yet here we are suddenly in the midst of an extraordinary feat of production design, straight out of Mario Bava or Riccardo Freda’s darkest nightmares.

Of course, neither Ferruccio nor Orchidea seem at all perturbed by this. It’s never mentioned in dialogue, never explained, and the set is never returned to. The characters simply run straight through it all as if it weren’t there.

So, what in the absolute hell is going on here?! Has something crucial been lost in translation, perhaps? Do convents in southern Italy routinely keep ancient skeletons posed in elaborate tableaus in their basements? Would domestic audiences have recognised this as an accepted phenomenon and taken it in their stride? I have no idea. (A more likely explanation perhaps is that the film’s crew just stumbled upon the set for a gothic horror movie shooting on a adjacent sound stage and decided, “eh, why not”?)

Either way though, this merely amplifies the confusion for those of us earnestly trying to figure out where in the hell ‘L’Arma..’ is coming from. I mean - murdered horny priests, sexually frenzied nuns with very strange showering arrangements, imprisoned orphans, skeleton dioramas in the basement… not to mention the fact there’s a ‘witch’ hanging around the place, and boozy dinners for sleazy local benefactors regularly going on in the gardens. In any - ahem - ‘normal’ film, a picture would surely be being painted here of a corrupt/decadent institution in which something very, very bad indeed is going on - but, nope.

Somehow, ‘L’arma..’s narrative never draws any connection between these isolated events. Outside of those directly suspected of Don Giorgio’s murder, no one at the convent is ever accused of conspiracy or foul play by the screenplay. Seemingly, day-to-day life in this whacko nunnery is going just fine so far as Mazzei and his co-writers are concerned, give or take perhaps some broad criticism of Catholic dogma and its attendant hypocrisies.

Weirder still though is the segment of the film which I will simply refer to as, “all that business with the restaurant”.

Long story short: in the throes of their new love, Orchidea and Commissario Bioto at one point go motoring off into the countryside, and stop on a whim at a restaurant located within an idyllic country villa. Therein, things take on an almost fantastical / fairy tale quality, as they are seated at a grand table in the centre of an otherwise empty palatial living room, and presented with a ridiculously extravagant bill of fare (bowls piled high with fruit, entire cakes, decanters of wine, etc.).

Suddenly though, it’s ‘David Lynch directs’, as Orchidea disappears, and the restaurant’s proprietors (an older lady and - we presume - her daughter) lurk around in the corners of the room, staring menacingly at their remaining guest.

“I have a son in Haiti,” the older lady announces. 

“Tahiti..?” ventures Bioto, confused. 

“No, Haiti.” 

The conversation ends there.

Bioto then rises, and POV camerawork takes us on a tour through the labyrinthine corridors of the building, until he eventually finds Orchidea reclining in a bedroom, ready to receive him in her arms for a bout of off-screen passion.

Again, I feel there may be a certain element of cross-cultural confusion playing out here. Would this whole set-up have been something contemporary Italian viewers would have recognised? Was this restaurant, say, the kind of place where rich folk in rural areas might have routinely gone to enjoy illicit liaisons of one kind or another? Was there some some element of the food or decor which may have explained the elderly lady’s strange conversation?

Anyway. Back at the convent, Commissario Bioto receives an anonymous note, advising him to investigate the restaurant he just visited in connection with Don Giorgio’s death. Returning, he finds a workman taking down the restaurant’s shingle. This man casually informs him that the joint has closed down because, “the proprietors have been murdered(!)”

Entering the building, Bioto engages in a brief chase and scuffle with an initially unseen intruder, who is soon revealed to be his own colleague Moriconi, who also saw the note and got there before him. After a bit of mutual backslapping and exasperation, the pair leave, and the whole business with the restaurant is never mentioned again.

So, let me get this straight. Our protagonist here is a homicide detective. When visiting a restaurant to follow up a lead on the case he’s investigating, he’s told that the people he wishes to question have been murdered, and, after mooching around for a few minutes, his reaction is basically, “eh, never mind then, none of my business”..?

And from a commercial filmmaking POV meanwhile…. wouldn’t a scene in which a pair of women are stalked and killed within a beautiful old villa have been just this ticket to boost this film’s (otherwise rather scant) giallo / horror credentials..? We know from events elsewhere in the film that Mazzei wasn’t averse to a bit of totally gratuitous exploitation, so why just report this potentially shocking and exciting occurrence second-hand via a throwaway line of dialogue?

I can’t claim any insight into what might have been going on behind the scenes on ‘L’arma, L’ora, Il Movente’, but - to repeat myself once again - some of the decisions taken here seem very strange.

Speaking of giallo / horror credentials meanwhile, based on what I’ve written so far, readers might be forgiven for questioning the extent to which ‘L’arma..’ even qualifies as a giallo at all, at least in the Argento/Bava-derived sense usually employed in the English-speaking world.

Indeed, I was wondering the same thing myself up until the exact halfway point of the film, when somebody seems to have suddenly woken up and remembered the conventions of the then-extremely popular genre the film’s financing and eventual marketing was clearly geared toward [see the poster at the top of this review]. So, without further ado, a female character is murdered by a scissor-wielding POV camera, in a startling and technically well-executed scene as shocking, fetishistic and borderline misogynistic as anything you’d find in a contemporary Sergio Martino or Umberto Lenzi picture.

This scene is brief, only loosely motivated by the plot, and - you will probably not be surprised to hear by this point - nothing remotely similar happens at any other point in the film. But, it earns it its “Hi! I’m a giallo” badge, which was presumably the point of the exercise.

Now, dedicated genre fans will be aware of course that there is a distinct sub-set of lower tier Italian movies (often by first-time / one-time directors) which are disjointed to the point of being almost entirely incoherent. (Angelo Pannacciò’s lamentable ‘Sex of the Witch’ (1973) immediately springs to mind as an example.)

The difference though is that those films tend to be cheap, obviously amateurish affairs, whereas ‘L’arma, L’ora, Il Movente’ is actually quite a lavish production by comparison. The staging and camerawork is generally very good, executed with a certain amount of stylistic flair. The locations and production design are excellent, and most of the performances are entirely credible. Somebody clearly spent some money on this thing, and put some thought into it.

And, as I outlined towards the start of this review, neither is this one of those Italian horror movies which seek to evoke a flat-out crazy or disorientating atmosphere, revelling in delirium and oneiric weirdness for its own sake. Outside of the assorted oddities I’ve outlined above, the setting of ‘L’arma..’ is broadly realistic, and the tone is measured, assured and, if not exactly ‘serious’, at least fairly sincere in its intent - a fact which makes all the head-scratching diversions feel even stranger.

In trying to make sense of the succession of non-sequiturs which comprises so much of ‘L’arma..’s run time therefore, I found myself turning to some of the ideas explored by the critic Mikel J. Koven in his 2006 book La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo Film.

Therein, amongst other things, Koven seeks to draw attention to the context in which these movies were consumed and experienced by domestic audiences at the time of their release, and how this may in turn have fed into the development of subsequent films within the genre - an aspect of their existence which is all too easy to overlook in an era when we are far more likely to view them in an isolated, epicurean manner in our own homes.

In a review of Koven’s book published by Senses of Cinema, Alexia Kannas concisely summarises his arguments on this point as follows:

“..Koven draws on Wagstaff’s analysis of prima, seconda and terza visione (first, second and third run) cinemas. Both writers liken the giallo’s terza visione audience to that of a televisual (rather than cinematic) audience who talk, drink, smoke and are mobile during the screening. This is certainly useful for both indicating to and reminding the reader that, with gialli, we are not necessarily looking at classical narratives of cohesion or linear construction, but to something else of cinematic value.”

It is probably worth noting at this point that, unlike many higher profile Italian exploitation films, ‘L’arma, L’ora, Il Movente’ was clearly not made with foreign distribution in mind. Aside from the cultural specificities discussed above, no English dub ever seems to have been created for the film, suggesting that Mazzei and his collaborators were not under pressure to consider the expectations of an overseas (for which read: American) audience when assembling their final cut.

Reframed through this lens, and via the context of the terza visione screening experience which Koven helpfully reminds us of, a film like ‘L’arma..’ suddenly, miraculous, starts to make sense.

What might our hypothetical terza visione patron - say, a working joe in some provincial town - have taken away from a movie like this, assuming he took it in which one eye on the screen, in between heading out to the lobby for a few smokes, buying a lollypop, chatting to a local shop owner about business, and yelling at so-and-so’s son for trying to feel up such-and-such’s daughter in the back row..?

Well, I reckon our man probably have broadly followed the drift of Commissario Bioto’s murder investigation and been satisfied with its mildly ingenious conclusion, much in the same way we might get the gist of an episode of a TV detective show whilst absent-mindedly flipping between channels.

He might have enjoyed Renzo Montagnani’s eminently likeable performance as the Commissario, and might even have been touched by his ill-fated romance with the leading lady, or his burgeoning paternal relationship with the young orphan.

Beyond that though, he would totally have remembered a few of the way-out images which might have forcibly drawn his attention back to the screen every now and then. Freaky nuns! Skeletons! A chick in a mini-skirt getting slashed across her tits!

For better or for worse, these are the kind of things that tend to make an impression on an inattentive audience, then as now. And, whether our man was exhilarated or appalled by such spectacles, maybe, just perhaps, they might have inspired him to start telling his co-workers about the film the next day, prompting them to get down to the cinema in turn to check this shit out for themselves.

As to why all these things happen in the film, how they all fit together, the jarring shifts in tone they create, and all the other things which are liable to torment us 21st century cinephiles as we sit down in our darkened screening rooms paying close attention to ‘L’arma, L’ora, Il Movente’ from beginning to end…. well, that’s just so much water under the bridge, so long as it kind of feels like a proper movie from a distance, and so long as our man’s pals turned out the next night and coughed up a few lira for their tickets.

Francesco Mazzei’s brief filmography as a producer suggests he’d had a hard scrabble through the lower depths of the Italian film industry in the decade or so before he finally stepped up to make ‘L’arma, L’ora, Il Movente’. Contrary to what we self-styled giallo connoisseurs might think as we try to puzzle our way through his oblique intentions today, I’m sure he knew his business well enough to understand exactly what he doing back in 1972 - and there’s a fair chance it paid off for him too. 

 ----

(1) Also including Giuseppe Bennati’s excellent gothic giallo ‘The Killer Reserved Nine Seats’ and Silvio Amadio’s enjoyably frivolous, Rosalba Neri-starring trifle ‘Smile Before Death’, safe to say Giallo Essentials: Black gets a big thumbs up from these quarters, even though I’d question the deeply misleading “essentials” tag assigned to these sets.

(2) To save clogging up the main text with an extended round of who-was-in-what, let’s get it all out of the way here instead. Maurizio Bonuglia has prime giallo cred, having appeared as Mimsy Farmer’s arsehole boyfriend in ‘The Perfume of The Lady in Black’, and Franco Nero’s pal in ‘The Fifth Cord’. Eva Czemerys is probably best remembered for meeting with a memorably sadistic end as one half of the ill-fated lesbian couple in the aforementioned ‘The Killer Reserved Nine Seats’. Claudio Gravy became something of a minor sexploitation star during the ‘70s, with appearances in the likes of ‘Byleth: The Demon of Incest’, ‘The Nun and the Devil’ and ‘La Llamada de Sexo’, as well the expected avalanche of largely forgotten sex comedies; she continued to work prolifically in film and TV right through the ‘90s and ‘00s. Despite being effectively second billed, Bedy Moratti is probably the least recognisable face in the central cast here; though she played small roles in a handful of noteworthy films between 1968 and 1975, her career never seems to have really taken off.

October Horrors # 11: The Creeping Flesh (Freddie Francis, 1973)

Although I can’t 100% confirm that this is an accurate memory, I seem to recall that, long ago in the distant past, my initial viewing of a VHS copy of ‘The Creeping Flesh’ might well have marked the point at which my interest in old British horror films first surpassed the level of idle, time-killing curiosity, prompting me to think, “my god, these things are amazing – I think I should probably try to watch as many of them as possible”.

Revisiting the film all these years later, it’s easy to see why my response was so favourable – in a profound sense, it really does the business. Whereas contemporary productions such as Amicus’s And Now The Screaming Starts and Don Sharp’s ‘Dark Places’ appeared to show the British gothic horror tradition on its last legs, exhaustedly dragging itself toward its own grave, ‘The Creeping Flesh’ by contrast is an exuberant, imaginative and confidently realised production, seemingly inheriting a sense of joie de vivre (and, it must be said, a few plot details) from Cushing & Lee’s previous assignment, the equally wonderful ‘Horror Express’.

Although this co-production between Tigon and the utilitarian-sounding World Film Services may not have been planned as an epitaph for this particular strain of British cinema, it was certainly amongst the last batch of such titles to enjoy widespread distribution, and in retrospect, it can’t help but feel like an attempt to give the classical approach to the genre the all-guns-blazing send-off it deserved. (1)

Whilst the film makes a point of evoking as many of the tropes that had helped define the legacy of the preceding fifteen years as possible though, imbuing proceedings with a warm feeling of tried-and-tested familiarity in the process, it also engages intelligently with the more psychological / visceral approach which was already beginning to twist the genre into weird new shapes as budgets plummeted and declining audiences began to demand harder-edged exploitation content (perhaps taking a few notes from Hammer’s envelope-pushing ‘Hands of the Ripper’ (’71) and ‘Demons of the Mind’ (’72)) – a cake-having / cake-eating combo, which, against all the odds, works brilliantly.

An introductory framing narrative features an infirm and unhinged looking Peter Cushing in his lab, ranting about the nature of good and evil and the grave responsibility he holds for saving humanity from a plague of darkness, and so on. As he begins relating his sorry tale to a younger doctor who has apparently turned up to assist him, we move into ‘flashback’ mode as the story proper begins with a scenario akin to what might have happened had Cushing’s character from ‘Horror Express’ managed to return home without incident, and with his crated up specimen still intact.

Upon arrival at his isolated country home, Dr Emmanuel Hildern (for such is Cushing’s character name) is immediately reacquainted with his devoted daughter Penelope (Lorna Heilbron), whom he has left alone at the house during his costly and arduous expedition to the wilds of New Guinea. Naturally enough, Penelope declares her wish to catch up with her beloved father over tea and toast, but Dr Hildern has other priorities, immediately retreating to his laboratory to unpack his big crate.

Excitedly filling his assistant (George Benson) in on the results of his trip, Hildern reveals his prize discovery – a gnarly-looking, giant sized skeleton of some ancient, previously unknown species of hominid, whose very existence throws conventional theories of human evolution into disarray!

Consulting his surprisingly extensive library of work on “the spiritual beliefs of the New Guinea primitives”, Dr Hildern is subsequently inspired to make some even more earth-shattering claims concerning the veracity of his discovery, including the suggestion that it in fact belongs to an ancient race of “evil giants” who once went to war against the people of the islands – and his speculations become even more far-fetched after an attempt to clean the skeleton reveals that the dead bones are capable of actually regrowing their living flesh when exposed to water.

Soon thereafter, Hildern makes the astounding declaration that the blood samples he has taken from this freshly-grown flesh actually contain the essence of pure evil, determining that he and his assistant must get straight to work preparing a prototype vaccine from it, which I suppose in theory should function to rid mankind of all its negative impulses?! (Whoa, back up there Doc, one thing at a time please...)

Whilst begrudgingly taking a break to partake in that aforementioned familial breakfast meanwhile, Dr Hildern gets stuck into his years’ worth of unanswered correspondence, and swiftly learns that his wife, who had been committed to an asylum many years previously, has passed away during his absence. Significantly, it transpires that he had lied to Penelope about her mother’s fate, telling her that she had died whilst she was still a child – so now of course, he must stick to his story and hide his grief from his daughter.

Even more awkwardly for Dr Hildern, the proprietor of his friendly local asylum is none other than his half-brother James, played by Christopher Lee (I suppose the “half” has been appended to the script to account for their obvious lack of family resemblance). Another scientist of questionable propriety, this younger Dr Hildern is soon revealed to be an ice-cold authoritarian who manages his mental hospital with an approach to patient well-being seemingly inspired by Torquemada, whilst spending his spare time engaging in his own Frankensteinian experiments (you know, hand-crank generated electrical charges applied to severed arms in tanks of formaldehyde – all that kind of good stuff).

Clearly there is no love lost between the brothers. Apparently suffering from a severe case of sibling rivalry, James lords his superior wealth and public standing over the grief-stricken and destitute Emmanuel, announcing straight off the bat that he will refuse to subsidise any of his brother’s foolish expeditions, and furthermore declaring that he intends to go head-to-head against Emmanuel to win the much-coveted Richter Prize!

As you’d rather imagine, Emmanuel’s frantic and rather sloppy attempts to knock up a vaccine against Original Sin, Penelope’s calamitous discovery of the truth about her mother (it turns out she was a former Parisian night club performer who allegedly succumbed to a form of hereditary insanity!) and James’s attempts at scientific espionage add up to a whole heap of trouble for all concerned -- especially when you factor in an escaped lunatic rampaging around the place and a big, gnarly skeleton which threatens to turn into an atavistic remnant of a lost race of pre-human destroyers as soon as it’s left out in the rain.

And, as life in the Hildern house becomes ever more dysfunctional, the older Dr Hildern’s extremely bad decision to test out his vaccine on his beloved daughter (I mean, it’s only injecting a solution made from the blood of an ancient evil giant into the blood-stream of an emotionally unstable teenage girl…. what could possibly go wrong?) is basically the last straw that tips the whole thing into complete chaos.

With Cushing and Lee as rival mad scientists, a hot-house gothic house melodrama with overtones of sexual repression and parental abandonment, an ancient, atavistic supernatural menace and a lurid Victorian milieu of hellish asylums, riotous taverns and buxom wenches, ‘The Creeping Flesh’ delivers everything a gothic horror fan could possibly wish for, but, rather than merely coming across as a mega-mix of Brit horror clichés, Peter Spenceley & Jonathan Rumbold’s admirably ambitious screenplay actually succeeds in incorporating all this stuff into an example of that rarest and most valuable of horror movie virtues – a good story, well told.(2)

Critics of the film have tended to draw attention to the unlikelihood of Dr Hildern’s extraordinary leap of logic in determining that he has extracted ‘the essence of pure evil’ from his pet skeleton, and have taken a dim view of the film’s apparent endorsement of the grimly puritanical, Manichean worldview this implies – especially once the injection of the botched ‘evil’ vaccine into Penelope appears to provide the catalyst for her catastrophic sexual awakening. Rarely, it seems, has a horror movie’s “sex = evil = death” message been so explicitly spelled out, and even given scientific credence, no less.

What is easy to overlook on first viewing however is that what we are seeing here is the story as recounted in flashback by Dr Hildern himself – an unreliable narrator to say the least. Whilst the supernatural nature of the creature he has unearthed remains unquestioned, we are never actually given any verifiable proof that the Doctor’s babbling about ancient mythology and good and evil has any basis in fact. Indeed, Spenceley & Rumbold’s script subtly undermines the doctor’s reactionary assumptions at every turn, clearly implying a far more mundane, psychological explanation for the tragedies which plague his family life.

Although Dr Hildern is a genial, sympathetic figure when we first meet him, as the film goes on it becomes increasingly clear that his problems run far deeper than mere bumbling absent-mindedness and nutty-professor style eccentricity. Beyond all of the mad science and monster movie hi-jinks which result from his sloppy professional practice, the clear implication here is that the malady which sends Penelope out on the town in a scarlet dress is the exact same one which drove her mother to the asylum -- and that Emmanuel himself is chiefly responsible for it, irrespective of any botched vaccine injections and vague talk of hereditary insanity.

Through his insistence that his wife and daughter remain closeted from the outside world, and through his failure to understand their needs or to return their affection, Emmanuel has inadvertently destroyed the lives of the two women he loves, and his transition from a lovable bumbler to a tragic, ruined lost soul is, of course, brilliantly realised by Cushing, adding yet another variation to the gallery of morally tormented patriarchs he had previously essayed in films as varied as The Flesh & The Fiends, ‘Cash on Demand’ and The Gorgon. Working here just a few months after his return to active service following the devastating loss of his wife, it is spiriting to see him firing on all cylinders, bringing energy, commitment and emotional nuance to a demanding lead role.

Lee, for his part, falls back on his tried and tested ‘archly superior, cold-hearted cad’ routine, and I’m sure we all know how great he was at doing that. I’m not sure what his characteristically strident thoughts on this particular production may have been, but he certainly seems to be enjoying the opportunity to indulge in a slightly more refined form of full spectrum villainy than his horror roles usually allowed for.

Meanwhile, the supporting cast is excellent too, with Heilbron (who went on of course to work with Jose Larraz on ‘Symptoms’ the following year) on fine, hysterical form as Penelope, and some great one-scene-wonder bits from a few old favourites too; Michael Ripper as one of the porters who carries Cushing’s crate into the house, Harry Locke improvising wildly as the pub landlord, and Duncan Lamont as a drawling Scottish police inspector. There’s even an extended cameo from Jenny Runacre as Cushing’s late wife during some flashback-within-a-flashback scenes of Parisian debauchery.

(The only disappointment in fact is that the hulking, mute asylum escapee is inexplicably NOT played by Milton Reid. Perhaps he was on his holidays at the time? [Cue mental image of Milton relaxing on a sun-lounger drinking a cocktail with an umbrella in it, as Hawaiian music plays.] Oh well, you can’t have everything I suppose.)

Freddie Francis was always rather uneven in his work as a horror director, but he certainly had his moments, and ‘The Creeping Flesh’ is undoubtedly one of them. In particular, he was always a director who seemed to have a good feel for production design, and the staging, props and set dressing here are indeed all top notch. I don’t know where ‘The Creeping Flesh’ actually sat in budgetary terms, but it certainly looks like one of the more extravagantly realised British horrors of its era, with location shooting taking place both around Thorpe House in Surrey and the London Docklands, whilst the standing sets used for the urban exteriors (identified as such by the film’s entry on the Reel Streets website) are so elaborate that I actually mistook them for genuine streets given a period make-over.

Meanwhile, the special effects used to realise the monster – in both its skeletal and fleshy form - are satisfyingly icky and menacing, especially during the film’s climactic nocturnal coach crash – a genuinely thrilling, beautifully evocative sequence featuring great, blue-tinted nocturnal photography, lashing rain, thunder crash editing and a sense of all-consuming chaos as the newly reconstituted revenant makes its getaway in a sutiably menacing hooded cape.

And, as to the ending, well – oh my gosh, it’s so good. The hooded creature banging at the doctor’s door with its clammy paw is just so ‘Weird Tales’, and the vengeful, sanity-wrecking price it eventually exacts from him is so E.C. Comics – just absolute classic stuff (even if Francis does ill-advisedly revive his “camera inside the skull” gimmick from 1965’s ‘The Skull’ to considerably lessened effect).

As you will have gathered, I like ‘The Creeping Flesh’ rather a lot. For some reason, it seems to have remained a fairly under-rated and infrequently discussed entry in the British gothic cycle over the years, but it really is one of the very best, managing to embody all of the arcane joys which this form of filmmaking represents for its fans, whilst at the same time presenting a solid, serious and exciting tale, compelling enough in its own right to make a perfect ‘gateway drug’ for any British horror neophytes who stumble across it. If for some reason you’ve overlooked it until now, please do make the effort to track it down - you’ll be in for a treat.

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Check out this amazing poster artwork from Italy (title translation: “The Terror From The Rain”(?)), West Germany (“At Night, The Skeleton Awakens”), and Belgium (more or less direct translations of the English title in French and Dutch).

In the UK meanwhile, Tigon put this out on a double-bill with Mario Bava’s ‘A Hatchet For The Honeymoon’ – now THAT’S what I call a good night out!

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(1)An eclectic production outfit to say the least, World Film Services appear to have had a hand in everything from Peter Watkins’ ‘Privilege’ (1967) and Joseph Losey’s ‘Boom!’ and ‘Secret Ceremony’ (both ’68) to the sub-Amicus portmanteau effort ‘Tales That Witness Madness’ (1973), the inexplicable David Niven vampire comedy ‘Vampira’ (1974), and post-E.T. kid’s sci-fi movie ‘D.A.R.Y.L’ (1985).

(2)Given how accomplished their script for ‘The Creeping Flesh’ is, it is surprising to learn that neither Spenceley nor Rumbold had much of a background in the film industry, and nor did they go on to much recognisable success. Spencely worked intermittently as an assistant editor in the UK, whilst Rumbold next popped up in Greece in 1978, directing a film which no one ever seems to have seen, before occasionally contributing script work to a number of low key productions based out of Greece, Yugoslavia and Iceland.

Nippon Horrors: The Living Skeleton (Hiroshi Matsuno, 1968)

All four of the films included in Criterion Eclipse’s recent When Horror Came To Shochiku collection are pretty interesting and enjoyable in their own right, but for me the pick of the litter was definitely Hiroshi Matsuno’s ‘The Living Skeleton’ – noteworthy not just as the sole black & white film in the set, but also as the only one that veers closer to a Western-style supernatural horror than to an Ishirô Honda-influenced sci-fi/monster flick.

Well… to a certain extent, anyway. A delirious mixture of ‘60s gothic, ghoulish mad science, psychic turbulence and macabre aquatic psychedelia, one of the things that helps make ‘The Living Skeleton’ so unique is its refusal to tie itself down to any easily definable set of genre conventions, or to really go where you’d expect it to; Weirdo Horror in excelsis, basically.

Case in point is the startlingly brutal opening sequence, which doesn’t exactly scream “gothic horror”, instead throwing us straight into a nightmare scenario of an entirely different order, as the occupants of a modern day passenger ferry – the ‘Dragon King’ - are imprisoned and coldly massacred by a gang of machine gun-wielding pirates.

The most memorable shot here (an optical FX job, presumably) features the screaming face of a doomed woman reflected in the lenses of the sun-glasses worn by the scarred, bald-headed leader of the attackers – an image whose central significance to the story that’s about to unfold will gradually become clear, but which for now merely serves to highlight the surprising level of stylistic ambition exhibited by Matsuno and his collaborators. Certainly, in comparison to the rather workmanlike fimmaking seen in Shochiku’s other horror/SF titles, the quality of the direction and cinematography here is excellent, and remains so throughout, with rich black & white photography and some beautiful, deep focus compositions really setting the film apart, leaving only some shaky nautical model shots and lovably dodgy special effects (bats on strings, rubber skeleton attacks, that sort of thing) to reveal it’s poverty row origins.

Once this out-of-leftfield prologue is taken care of, a dreamy, gothic atmosphere increasingly begins to take hold, as the story (such as it is) proceeds with a heavy, doom-laden feel that recalls nothing so much as Jess Franco’s ‘Nightmares Come At Night’ or ‘A Virgin Among The Living Dead’, presenting a vague and uncertain tale of interchangeable identical twins, ghostly manifestations and fantasy/reality disjuncture that proves is just as difficult to summarise in concrete terms as the aforementioned Franco films, however much sense it might make on an emotional level.

With her porcelain features, big, sad eyes and sombre, elegant movements, leading lady Kikko Matsuoka is certainly every bit the Japanese answer to Soledad Miranda or Diana Lorys, and makes a perfect casting choice for this rare example of a fully-fledged Nippon Gothic, here assuming the role of Saeko, identical twin sister of the girl we saw being killed on the ship, who now lives in a remote cliff top church, ward of a benevolent Christian priest.(1)

Out of sight of her benefactor, Saeko also enjoys a healthy romantic relationship with Mochizuki, a young fisherman, and generally seems to be enjoying a happy and relaxed existence. But when the wind blows in from the sea, she hears her sister’s voice calling her, and when she and Mochizuki go snorkelling, she experiences a vision of weird fake skeletons, looking look like something out of a Mexican day of the dead parade, dancing before her eyes. Soon, a thick fog rolls into the harbour, bringing with it the empty hulk of the ‘Dragon King’, and any hope we may have had of separating linear reality from Saeko’s subjective descent into vengeful, identity-shifting craziness goes entirely up the spout, in best Euro-horror tradition.

As things proceed, the bare bones of a good ol’ supernatural bride-wore-black vengeance narrative take shape, with Saeko and/or her ghostly sister tracking down and dispatching the venal pirates in short order. It’s all very much the kind of thing Franco might have come up with between courses at some local eatery, and is detourned in some equally interesting directions as well, taking in noir-ish segments, pulpy mad science and some shock reveals in the final half hour, building up to a hellzapoppin’ Laboratory-based climax that plays like something out of ‘40s Monogram b-picture amped up with ‘60s drive-in gore.

And in case you were worried things weren’t QUITE Jess Franco-like enough already, the 25 minute mark also brings forth a totally gratuitous nightclub striptease sequence, in which two stocking-clad dancers shake their stuff to languorous dinner club jazz! Heavens be praised.

(If anyone’s keeping track out there in Film Studies-land, it occurs to me that the opening shot of the dance routine, which features the two symmetrically posed dancers picked out by spot-lights, is a deliberate echo of the sunglasses reflection shot mentioned earlier, with both images serving to remind us of the film’s central tale of psychically conjoined twins. He was no slouch, this Matsuno-san.)

Even more so than Michio Yamamoto’s vampire films, ‘The Living Skeleton’ is full of explicit references to Western horror, many of them rendered inherently surreal by their placement in a Japanese setting. The dual role played by Matsuoka seems a direct nod to the traditions of ‘60s gothic horror, and, whilst steeples, crucifixes and Christian funeral services may go hand in hand with church setting, the endless swarms of bats, diaphanous night-gowns, stone dungeons and wrought-iron candelabras definitely seem a little too way out for any sense of realism to be maintained for long. (The priest’s study even boasts a medieval suit of armour amongst its accoutrements, ferchrissake!)

More specifically though, Matsuno seems to be most concerned here with plundering the same current of imagery that John Carpenter tapped into a decade or so later for The Fog. You know the score, I’m sure: isolated seaside locale, pirates, churches, priests, vengeful ghosts, staticy radio broadcasts, lighthouses, skeletons and fog – lots and lots of fog. The convenient discovery of a ship’s log divulging the dark secrets of the ghost-ship’s history is particularly synchronicitous in this regard, but I doubt there’s any direct influence going on here (the chances of Carpenter having seen this film back in the day are pretty slim, and even if he did, I’m sure he’s a solid enough guy to have acknowledged his debt). Instead, I feel this is once again just a parallel take on the same nexus of collective unconscious type imagery from filmmakers on opposite sides of the world, and another example of the same watery thread that runs through a whole swathe of my favourite horror films and stories, from Lovecraft’s ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’ to Messiah of Evil, Jean Rollin’s ‘The Demoniacs’, and beyond.

With no production back story or literary/cinematic forebears as such, and with a director and writers who seem to have come out of nowhere and swiftly returned there, (2)  ‘The Living Skeleton’ is a real one-off, difficult to place within any grand narrative of Japanese genre cinema, Asian horror tradition, or much else for that matter.(3) About the nearest I can get to linking it to any of its domestic peers is in vague, thematic terms – there’s the ubiquitous figure of the long-haired avenging female ghost of course, and the overwhelming concern with the ocean and ships as a source of fear – a motif that seems to occurs again and again in post-war Japanese horror (I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions) - plus the psychic vengeance angle, all of which remind me somewhat of Hideo Nakata’s ‘Ring’ (a film that increasingly seems like a sort of rosetta stone for the recurring thematic concerns of Japanese horror, in spite of its time-specific technological aspect).

Like the best under-the-radar Western horror films, there is a real “where the hell did THIS come from?” thrill to the discovery of a movie like ‘The Living Skeleton’; a feeling that any seasoned horror fan should relish. Though rather insubstantial and sluggish of pace here and there (there are a few of those ol’ run-time padding “journey between locations” bits that we could probably have done without), as a piece of film-making it displays a high level of style, visual imagination and atmosphere-building know-how; qualities which are only enhanced by its ‘grab-bag’ approach to genre conventions and plot ideas.

Further increasing our enjoyment, and cutting through the Euro-horror somnambulance somewhat, there are some great turns from a supporting cast packed with capable character actors - Asao Uchida as a crafty, drunken gambler, Nobuo Kaneko as a nefarious club owner and Ko Nishimura as the cadaverous ship’s doctor all provide great value for money. And even the soundtrack is excellent for that matter, with a main theme that mixes up spy movie strings with thin fuzz guitar buzzing like a wasp on the periphery (lest we forget which decade we’re in), with heavily-treated tremolo guitar and eerie, reverbed harmonica reveries elsewhere suggesting that the lessons of Morricone and Nicolai were not lost on composer Noboru Nishiyama.(4)

You’ve probably gathered as much already, but I’ll freely admit that I loved just about everything about ‘The Living Skeleton’, and would highly commend it to anyone who enjoys the kind of stuff I write about on this blog. Sharing some aesthetic choices with the very wooziest end of ‘60s/’70s Euro-horror, it is a thoroughly irrational, oneiric venture that sails closer than any other Japanese film I’ve seen to the kind of territory mapped out by filmmakers like Jean Rollin and Jess Franco at around the same time. Which perhaps isn’t everyone’s idea of a good time, but my own cry of delight at having discovered not just a Japanese Jess Franco film, but a Japanese Jess Franco film that is arguably more accomplished than any actual Jess Franco film, must have been audible from space.


(1) A prolific actress in the late ‘60s, Matsuoka’s more notable credits include roles in Kinji Fukasaku’s two Rampo/Mishima adaptations, ‘Black Lizard’ and ‘Black Rose Mansion’, and an uncredited appearance in ‘You Only Live Twice’.

(2) Well, co-writer Kyûzô Kobayashi also gets a script credit on the same year’s ‘Goke: The Bodysnatcher From Hell’, but aside from that I’m gettin’ nothing.

(3) As previously mentioned, Western-style Japanese gothic horrors are rare as hens teeth; investigations are ongoing, but the only one I’m aware of prior to ‘The Living Skeleton’ is Ghost of the Hunchback aka ‘House of Terrors’, a terminally obscure 1965 Toei film from ‘Goke’ director Hajime Sato. Unsubtitled DVD-R of an Italian TV broadcast anyone..?

(4) Another obscure figure, Nishiyama’s four credits on IMDB are rounded out by two little known Daiei films, and Koji Wakamatsu’s ‘Affairs Within Walls’ (1965).

GOTHIC ORIGINALS: The Embalmer (Dino Tavella, 1965)

Of the relatively few places on earth I’ve been lucky enough to visit over the years, Venice is one of my favourites, and as such, I’ve always found films set there to be a dead cert in terms of watchability. Such is the city’s unique presence, some half-decent location shooting can help invest any old rubbish with a palpable sense of grand, shadowy antiquity. And such proves to be the case with ‘The Embalmer’, a barrel-scraping low budget programmer that would likely have proved a total snooze were it not for the inspired decision to shoot most of it within spitting distance of St Marks Square, seemingly off-season, and at the dead of night.

Initially, Tavella’s film doesn’t really seem to fit the bill as a gothic horror. It’s more one of those “a bit from column A, a bit from column B” type ‘60s b-horrors (think Werewolf in a Girls’ Dormitory or The Awful Dr Orlof) that seems to mix up a few elements from the gothics, a bit of an Edgar Wallace Krimi type mystery, some cynical proto-giallo / bodycount business and just a pinch of post-‘Eyes Without A Face’ mad science, all to make…. well, a right bloody mess in this case. For a film that touches on so many potentially exciting generic tropes, it must take some effort to come up with a picture quite as flat and uninvolving as this one.

Basically it’s that age old story: some guy with a set of scuba gear in lurking in the canals, snatching beautiful girls and dragging them back to his subterranean lair, where he moons about in a monk’s cowl, subjecting his victims to some (off screen) taxidermy before adding them to his gallery of waxy, incorruptible beauties.

Anyone hoping for some further clarification regarding the motivation and elaborate methodology behind this character’s depredations will be waiting in vain, but fear not – whilst the cops flounder impotently, Venice’s resident hotshot investigative reporter is on the case, in the shape of singularly named actor Gin Mart, portraying a perfect example of the kind of smug, dislikeable jerk that producers of ‘60s genre movies for some reason seemed to think audiences would relate to as a hero. Within minutes on-screen, Gin has established himself a nice little sideline as unofficial tour guide to a party of rather grown-up looking school girls, and proceeds to spend much of the next hour shepherding them around like a gaggle of mindless, giggling animals, his face perpetually fixed on a kind of Connery-esque smirk/eyebrow arch as he tediously romances their teacher (nominal leading lady Maureen Brown).

As you might assume from such a set up, the girls gradually begin falling victim to our nefarious frogman, and it’s up to our intrepid reporter to blah blah blah, etc. Thus far, I’m sad to report that pacing is lumpen, with writing, performances and direction all lacklustre at best, but thankfully there are a few sundry eccentricities on hand to keep our attention simmering through the interminable yammering and faffing. I for one particularly enjoyed the scene in which a man who looks like DH Lawrence engages in a bit of unbelievably awkward jive dancing with his elderly maiden aunt, and there are a few surprisingly sleazy bits of business going on too, including a sub-plot about a creepy hotel clerk who installs two-way mirrors in the rooms so as to furtively watch ladies taking off their stockings – a pursuit he indulges at length in one sordid, borderline sexploitation type interlude.

In fact, everything about the hotel is kinda weird, including the floor show, in which the lights go down and an Elvis-alike guitar-strumming rock n’ roller emerges from a coffin – another relative highlight, especially when of course on the next evening the coffin turns out to contain one of the killer’s victims, impaled with a knife through his heart. Good pulpy fun.

Mostly though, it’s Venice itself that saves the day. Locations are well chosen and -insofar as we can judge from the beat-up public domain print under review - well used, the thick, inky blacks of the chiaroscuro photography bringing an appropriately threatening, night-haunted aspect to the city’s streets and squares, contributing greatly to the success of the film’s intermittent ‘good bits’.

And, after an hour or so of mildly diverting time-wasting, we do finally get a satisfying pay-off as the movie really revs things up for the final reel, cementing its status as a worthy addition to the Italian Gothic canon with a tremendously atmospheric conclusion that sees Maureen venturing into the soggy crypt beneath the hotel, concealed behind a secret passage, for a climatic showdown with our embalming fluid-happy villain.

Sometimes, all it takes to win me over is a good candelabra walk, and whilst Brown certainly isn’t up there with Barbara Steele in her mastery of the art, the one in ‘The Embalmer’ is still a winner. Filmed in what I can only assume were genuine Venetian catacombs of some description, the shots are tightly framed, with rough, handheld camerawork that works very well, as she descends the seemingly endless stone steps toward pitch black doom.

The inky, slimy, lightless feel of the subterranean world she find herself in is conveyed with an eerie realism borne from the use of real locations, and only intensified by the distancing of the fuzzy, VHS-derived print. And when the villain makes his entrance, striding through the echoing chambers in a hooded cowl and an honest-to-goodness leering skull mask(!), he is suddenly a genuinely terrifying presence, making up for all the drab lack of menace in the film’s earlier horror scenes – literally the last thing you’d ever want to encounter in a dark alley, never mind a blackened medieval crypt full of ossified skeletal monks(?!). Unexpectedly violent, visceral and shockingly morbid, this finale is almost good enough to completely outweigh the preceding hour of faff. It’s a shame things have to wrap up so quickly once they’ve finally got going, but with the 75 minute mark approaching, wrap up they must, and…. shall I spoil the ending for you? Oh go on then. [Skip the next paragraph if you actually care.]

Turns out the villain is none other than…. some guy who for turned up for one scene earlier in the film and neither said nor did anything of particular note! Can you believe it? And there we all were thinking it was the creepy guy from the hotel! *palm-face* Nice one Dino, next time maybe let someone else have a go at the script, huh?

Well as it turns out, there wasn’t a next time, because ‘The Embalmer’ seems to have marked the end of Mr. Tavella’s brief career as a film director. In fact with the exception of one other obscure film released the same year (‘Una Sporca Guerra’, which I think translates as ‘A Dirty War’?), he has no other film credits whatsoever. Trying to research ‘The Embalmer’ a bit via IMDB, it’s interesting to note that almost everyone who worked on it proves a similar dead end, with many of the cast making their only screen appearance. Production company ‘Gondola Films’ followed Tavella into the great unknown after overseeing his two directorial efforts, so reading between the lines, I’m guessing this out-of-nowhere horror effort wasn’t quite the money-spinner they’d hoped.

After a US release alongside Michael Reeves’ The She-Beast (I wonder what audiences made of a double bill in which BOTH features were cranky, zero budget 75 minute oddities?), ‘The Embalmer’ tumbled into what I can only assume to be unremitting obscurity, although apparently it at least made a sufficient impression on Dutch exploitation director Dick Maas for him to effectively remake it in 1988, relocating things to his own canal-centric home town for the self-explanatory ‘Amsterdamned’.

So there ya go. ‘The Embalmer’, everybody. Worth a watch? Probably not, but what can I say, I had fun with it. The good bits were good, Venice played itself beautifully, and even the bad bits (which, I should remind you again, comprise most of the run time) sort of lulled me into submission in comforting bad movie fashion. You could do worse.

The Restless Bones & Other True Mysteries by Peter Haining (Armada, year unknown)

Cover illustration: Alun Hood

Interior illustrations: Ellis Nadler

Assorted tales of strange and unlikely goings-on, written in simple words and big type, guaranteed to put a rocket under the imagination of any young mind. Do kids these days still read books like this? I hope so.

I suppose parents & teachers might frown upon Haining’s insistence that the tall tales herein are all 100% factual, but his introduction, in which he thanks readers of his previous books for alerting him to new ‘mysteries’ worthy of investigation, is certainly pretty charming.

My favourite story is the none-more-hauntological yarn about an RAF pilot stationed at Mildenhal in Norfolk, who apparently discovers whistling East Anglian ghost ‘Old Roger’ doing his bit to help repel the Luftwaffe. Top stuff!

A Woman After A Killer Butterfly (Kim Ki-Young, 1978)

Watching Kim Ki-Young’s 1978 film ‘Woman After A Killer Butterfly’* for the first time is likely to be a fairly strange experience for any viewer. But for those of us watching it ‘blind’, as it were – with no prior knowledge of the director’s work, or of his place within Korean cinema – it’s gonna be a real a real doozy. An 8.5 on the weirdo richter scale, call-the-WTF-police, high level freakiness jamboree. You know the deal, I’m sure.

You also know, presumably, that nine times out of ten when the shadier end of international horror/fantasy cinema throws up what appears to audiences in the English-speaking world to be an A grade piece of mind-blowing bafflement, such impressions can be primarily attributed to cultural differences, general ignorance on our part and a failure to appreciate the limitations and conventions within which these marginal filmmakers were working. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, I hasten to add – it’s just the way things are, all part of the fun as we stumble our way through uncharted cinematic territory.

What is far more interesting however is that one time out of ten when things get strange in a way that is genuinely unaccountable, and what we’ve got here is a case in point. Because rather than the unhinged, culture clash style weirdness one tends to associate with Asian movies, ‘Killer Butterfly’ is an intelligent, self-aware, extremely well made and internationally informed film that just happens to be… completely inexplicable.



My reason for bringing all this up is simply that what with the film (and several other of Kim Ki-Young’s key works) suddenly being available to view on Youtube courtesy of the Korean Film Archive, it seems likely that ‘Killer Butterfly’ will sooner or later be turning up alongside ‘Mystics in Bali’ and ‘Housu’ on somebody’s list of ‘Top Ten Crazy-Ass Loony Asian Horror Films That You Gotta See’ or somesuch - an inclusion that even the slimmest amount of research (and that’s all I’ve done, needless to say) would reveal as both undeserved and deeply inappropriate.

First off, ‘Killer Butterfly’ isn’t really a horror film. With its wealth of grotesque gothic imagery and supernatural happenings, it could easily be mistaken for one, but no... it's true intentions lie somewhere else entirely. At a push, you could maybe claim it as a ‘fantasy’ film, but again, none of the elements we’d associate with such a tag are really catered for. Although Kim Ki-Young certainly delights in playing with genre elements, at the end of the day ‘UNCLASSIFIABLE’ is the only drawer you’re really gonna be able to file a film like this in. But more on that later.


Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, Kim Ki-Young’s background and career is about as far removed from that of yr average regional lo-fi horror maniac as it’s possible to get.

Spending time in Japan after WWII, he became a devotee of American and European cinema, and gained his first experience of film-making producing newsreels for the US army during the Korean War, after which he was in on the ground-floor of South Korea’s own national cinema, shooting his first features (including the country’s first film with synchronised sound) on equipment he’d requisitioned from the Americans. Working solidly through the late ‘50s on neo-realist style films and social melodramas, he could very much claim to be one of the founding fathers of his country’s film industry, and proceeded to follow the path of an independent minded auteur/arthouse filmmaker as closely as circumstances allowed. Critical plaudits and relative financial success in South Korea ensued, and it was only after his international ‘breakthrough’ film – 1960’s ‘The Housemaid’ – that controversy began enter the picture.

Apparently, ‘The Housemaid’s outbursts of expressionism and Bunuel-esque subversive turmoil marked a shocking departure from the strain of optimistic realism that had until then predominated in Korean cinema, and, following the film’s success, the director pushed further toward what is described as his ‘mature style’ during the ‘60s – a style that his reassuringly informative Wikipedia page describes as being characterised by “..gothic excess, surrealism, horror, perversions and sexuality”. Our kinda guy, in other words!


When the Korean film industry (along with most other national film industries) hit the ropes during the ‘70s, Kim began to produce his films independently, with the financial assistance of his wife (a successful dentist) allowing him more freedom than ever before to indulge his eccentric tastes, resulting in a series of ambitious films that, despite a sizeable cult following and a surprising level of box office success, seem to have been met with what I can only assume was a sense of bafflement and indignation from the rest of the Korean film industry – at least if the near complete absence of this venerable and prolific director from the country’s annual ‘Blue Dragon’ and ‘PaekSang’ awards ceremonies, and the corresponding low profile of his films overseas, is anything to go by.

Returning to ‘Killer Butterfly’ with this background in mind, it all begins to make a bit more… well, not sense exactly, but its existence becomes more understandable, let’s put it that way.

As Todd of Die, Danger, Die, Die, Kill! observed when he reviewed the film a few months back, the only way to successfully convey the alien logic of ;Killer Butterfly' is via straight plot description. Normally I’d prefer to avoid such synopsis-heavy reviewing, but sometimes (as with Alabama’s Ghost, for example) I’m afraid it’s the only way to go. So, if you’re sitting comfortably, let’s begin.


Young-gul (Kim Chung-chul) is a nervous young medical student, who is enjoying a day out in the countryside pursuing his favourite hobby, catching butterflies. As he spikes one of his specimens with a syringe, a well-dressed woman approaches him and begins haranguing him for his cruel treatment of the creatures. “When it comes to death, people are no different, it’s just as trivial” she argues, rejecting Young-gul’s assertion that the death of a human is “much more noble” than that of an insect. The two apparently agree to disagree, and the woman offers Young-gul a cup of juice, which he accepts. Only when it is too late does she reveal that the juice is in fact poisoned, explaining that she had come to this remote place to die, but didn’t want to enter the afterlife alone.

Freaking out as he collapses into a coma, Young-gul subsequently awakes in hospital, where a rather slack police inspector informs him that the woman did indeed die, throws him her butterfly pendant as a memento, and lets him go free. Arriving home (he seems to live in a squalid mountainside shack, somewhat reminiscent of the one where all that crazy shit goes down in the second ‘Female Prisoner: Scorpion’ film), Young-gul finds himself plunged into a deep depression by the incident, and, feeling there is a now “poison in his soul”, decides to kill himself.


Young-gul’s suicide is interrupted however by an elderly travelling bookseller, who repeatedly barges his way into the shack, proffering copies of a book extolling the virtue of ‘strength of will’, a creed which the man insists can inspire one to immortality. Enraged by this cackling weirdo upsetting his solemn date with death, Young-gul eventually stabs the man with a kitchen knife, but, mortally wounded, he continues to jabber on, even as his blood drains away and his heart stops beating. Tiring of the now undead man’s continuous diatribe and the smell of his decomposing body, Young-gul sets out to bury him, and, when he returns from his shallow grave still preaching the virtues of willpower, to burn him. Following his cremation, the old man returns yet again as a walking, talking skeleton, who beats Young-gul with his bony arms, laughing at him and mocking his desire to die. A gust of wind enters the shack and reduces the skeleton to ash, but the old man’s disembodied voice raves on, proclaiming that his spirit will live on forever, as his essence drifts off on the winds.


Apparently impressed enough to take the old man’s advice for the moment, Young-gul puts his suicide on hold and returns to college, where a buddy of his convinces him to help out with a unique money-making scheme. Visiting a complex of caves, they break off from the guided tour and sneak out with the bones of an ancient skeleton, that Young-gul’s friend has arranged to sell to Dr. Lee, a prominent archaeologist, for a healthy profit. Left alone to assemble to skeleton in his shack, Young-gul is… well I was going to say astounded, but actually he seems to take it in his stride… when the skeleton regrows its flesh, assuming the shape of a beautiful, pale-skinned woman, who explains that she had fled into the caves 2,000 years ago, using Shamanic magic to keep her spirit in limbo until ‘the right man’ – that presumably being Young-gul – stumbled across her bones and resurrected her.


Unfortunately, if Young-gul’s ancient bride is to retain her corporeal form, the Shaman’s spell decrees that she must eat a raw human liver within ten days, or else return to a sack of inanimate bones. Refusing to hunt down a liver for her, Young-gul tells her she’ll have to find one herself, leaving her complaining of her unquenchable hunger as she eyes up the liver of her prospective husband…

How will this unsettling drama play out? Well we won’t find out quite yet, because some men have arrived at the shack, carrying a large piece of industrial machinery. “What’s that?”, the 2000 year old woman asks. “It’s a pastry machine!”, Young-Gul replies. “I thought we could use it to make some money on the side”.

Aaand, that’s where we’re going to have to leave our extended plot synopsis for the moment. So far, I’ve only covered about the opening forty minutes of ‘Killer Butterfly’s two hour run time, but… the pastry machine. It’s too much. You’ll just have to watch it for yourself and find out.

Actually, in a certain sense, this kind of high weirdness, that makes the film so noteworthy for jerks like me, kind of works against its overall artistic success in some ways. I mean, in essence, ‘Killer Butterfly’ is sort of a classical tragedy that tries to tackle weighty cosmic issues of life and death and rebirth etc. But after watching it, all I could think was, jesus christ… the pastry machine.



Anyway, after this apex of grand strangeness is over and done with, the film finally breaks away from the random, episodic anti-narrative that has prevailed thus far, and settles down (in a manner of speaking) into merely an intense gothic melodrama with a sub-plot about a secret society who dress up as butterflies to desecrate graves and send severed heads to a renowned archaeologist (or something).

In brief, Young-gul shrugs off the 2,000 year old woman caper, and takes up a job as assistant to the aforementioned Dr. Lee, moving into his richly appointed home and becoming involved with his equally death and butterfly obsessed daughter Kyungmi (Kim Ja-ok), with the pair’s chaste and tempestuous non-relationship proceeding to dominate the remainder of the film.



Whilst the preceding scenes have been characterised by an unmistakable strain of knockabout black humour, from hereon in things become more tricky to interpret, as the film strikes an uneven balance between metaphysical earnestness and grotesque genre parody that often becomes quite offputting.

Is Kim Ki-Young genuinely trying to make some grand, Jodorowsky-style Point about life and death, being and nothingness here? The intensity with which he treats these scenes in which characters yammer on and on about the solace of death and when and why they intend to put an end to their bleak existence, and the commitment of Ka-ok and Chung-chul’s startling performances as the doomed un-couple, certainly suggests as much, recalling the uncompromising emo-turmoil of heavy hitters like Zulawski’s ‘The Devil’ (1973) and Sion Sono’s ‘Love Exposure’ (2008).

But at the same time, this stuff is just ploughed through over and over, raised to such an absurdly heightened pitch of melodramatic silliness, it simply CANNOT be taken seriously, often verging onto some epic pastiche of the brand of melodrama that holds a central place in Korean film & TV. As noted, Kim Ja-ok’s performance is astonishing, but her character’s hand-wringing, self-obsessed Young Werther style angst soon becomes absolutely interminable, as does Young-gul’s impotent terror of the world around him, and Dr. Lee’s laughably overblown macho dedication to his daughter. And meanwhile, the whole far more interesting (to me at least) business of the butterfly-masked graverobbing cult remains sadly unexplored.

There IS undoubtedly a strong element of absurdist comedy running through the film - in contrast to the later reels, the whole 2000 year old woman section is both hilarious and strangely touching, and the film’s ‘horror’ bits have a great Evil Dead/Sammo Hung slapstick feel to them. But as things get more overwrought, the script’s uneasy blend of parody and pathos makes it very difficult to really get an angle on where Kim Ki-Young is coming from with all this stuff, emotionally speaking.



Where he’s coming from visually speaking is at least a lot clearer, as ‘Killer Butterfly’ gleefully draws on recognisible horror imagery throughout, with skulls and skeletons and candelabras and gothic hoo-hah infesting just about every frame, as the film rambles back and forth across the boundaries of life and death. It’s difficult to ascertain whether or not the influence of European horror is deliberate, but as fans of such things will no doubt have already noticed from the screengrabs accompanying this review, ‘Killer Butterfly’s dense, hyper-real colour scheme certainly has a lot in common with the more imaginative gialli, and the brooding fantasias and unnatural light sources of Mario Bava’s early/mid ‘60s work in particular.

Very much unlike a horror film however is ‘Killer Butterfly’s unhurried, leisurely pace, as the film strays freely from any kind of narrative tension with the freedom that becomes a filmmaker unchained from commercial necessity, as wholly tangential scenes – a beach party, a visit to the hospital – are transformed by Kim Ki-Young into outlandish tone poems of sumptuous colour and texture that are a joy to behold, even when the action on-screen becomes repetitive or incomprehensible. In fact, as the film progresses, this uniquely expressive approach to cinematography (which doesn’t exactly make for easy viewing on youtube, it must be said) seems to reflect the story’s obsessive concern with the battle between life and death, as bright patches of vivid, burning colour are consumed amid an ocean of impenetrable, inky blackness – an idea that is arguably conveyed far more powerfully through the visuals than it is through much of the script.



A horribly glib comparison perhaps, but after looking over Kim Ki-Young’s CV and watching a few of his films, I can’t help but think that discovering his work is a bit like stumbling across the Korean David Lynch. Clearly both are hugely talented and ambitious filmmakers who can command a strong popular following (Kim was apparently awarded the nick-name ‘Mr. Monster’ by his fans) and could easily sit at the forefront of their respective national industries, were it not for their insistence on producing films that many critics deem maddeningly eccentric and excessive – bulbous, overbearing, upsetting and impossible works, but never less than wholly original, with a strong streak of untamed genius always running wild.

With this in mind, perhaps the best way for us Westerners to explain the singularity of something like ‘Killer Butterfly’ is to say that watching it is a bit like taking someone who’s largely ignorant of American cinema and beginning their education by showing them ‘Lost Highway’ or ‘Mulholland Drive’ – an overwhelming and disorienting experience to say the least, but, given the chance, who amongst us wouldn’t want to dive straight in and savour the madness?


*Some sources go for the simpler English title of ‘Killer Butterfly’, whilst the film’s own subtitles identify it as ‘Chasing the Butterfly of Death’, and English text on the Korean poster states ‘Woman With Butterfly Tattoo’. So make of that what you will.