Penguin Time/Psyched Out Sci-fi: The Squares of the City by John Brunner (1969)

Only marginally qualifying as science fiction, John Brunner’s 1965 novel is really more of a high concept socio-political thriller, taking place in Ciudad de Vados, the purpose-built capital city of the fictional South American nation of Aguazal.

Presumably modelled on President Juscelino Kubitschek’s construction of Brasilia in the early 1960s, the city is the crowning achievement of the charismatic President Vados, and we arrive in its environs in the company of one Boyd Hakluyt, an Australian expert in urban planning who has been engaged by the city’s municipal authorities in an initially rather vague consultancy role.

Upon arrival, Hakluyt soon discovers that  his expertise in the fields of traffic management, industrial rezoning on so on will primarily be put to use in solving the problem presented by the masses of impoverished, disenfranchised rural peasants who are now migrating to the new metropolis, settling in a series of sprawling shantytowns and slums beneath the gleaming overpasses, and rather undermining El Presidente’s vision of a shining beacon of civilised modernity in the process.

Less than enthralled by this task, and unnerved by the evidence of creeping authoritarianism and violent political disorder he sees broiling away beneath the city’s tranquil surface, Hakluyt becomes drawn into a complex web of subterfuge and treachery, crossing paths with bureaucrats and politicians, dissidents and revolutionaries, union leaders, industrialists, media personalities, generals, journalists, gangsters and so on, all engaged in an exhaustingly complicated wrangling for influence and power which seems to eerily mirror the Aguazalian nation’s all-consuming obsession with the game of chess.

And beyond that, I will keep quiet, as ‘The Squares of the City’ is a novel which is very easy to “spoil”. 

Suffice to say that, like much of Brunner’s work, it takes a bit of patience to get into - his prose initially seems quite dry, and his plotting needlessly convoluted - but it ultimately proves a very rewarding read. It is certainly a unique entry within its supposed genre, that’s for sure, and if the above synopsis has piqued your interest, I’d recommend giving it a go.

As to Franco Grignani’s cover illustration meanwhile - well, it’s not one of my favourite examples of his work for Penguin to be honest, but it certainly conveys the novel’s idea of an urban eco-system collapsing into entropic chaos fairly effectively.

Those little white dots on my scan of the cover, by the way, are not stars or any other part of the design - I’m afraid they’re just remnants of damp, of concrete dust, or something, which have become stuck to my copy of the book, suggesting it might have spent some time sitting atop a pile of paperbacks in an attic or similarly insalubrious environment.

As you may have gathered, these Grignani Penguins often ain’t cheap, and my insistence on picking them up for pennies does not lend itself to acquiring them in primo condition - but at least this one was readable.

Weird Tales: The Evil Eye by Boileau & Narcejac (Four Square, 1961)

Before being subsumed into our dearly beloved New English Library at some point in the 1960s, paperback imprint Four Square published a wide variety of interesting stuff, including a lot of obscure and/or sought after titles (often in translation) which have rarely been reprinted since.

Four Square books also often featured bold, attention-grabbing artwork, of which this fabulous, comic book style ink & watercolour number from acclaimed SF/fantasy illustrator Josh Kirby provides a perfect example [the signature in bottom right confirms this as Kirby’s work, although it looks drastically different from his later, better known style]. As such, obscurities from the company’s long-lost back-list have done much to liven up second-hand book shopping in the UK across the decades, although collecting them can also prove a frustrating experience.

Due to their especially cheap binding (or so I’m assuming), Four Square’s paperbacks have a tendency to look reasonably well preserved on the outside, but to crack and fall to pieces, scattering dried out pages to the four winds, as soon as some poor fool tries to read them. Thankfully I just about managed to make it through ‘The Evil Eye’ without destroying it in the process, but… I’m not sure that many future readers will get a chance to enjoy the charms of this particular copy, let’s put it that way.

In the English-speaking world, Pierre Boileau (1906–1989) and Thomas Narcejac (1908 –1998) will almost certainly get more name recognition from film fans than literary types. With their names appearing ominously on the writing credits of Clouzot’s ‘Les Diaboliques’ (1955), Franju’s ‘Les Yeux Sans Visage’ (1960) and Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’ (1958), its safe to say that the duo’s residual influence has sunk deep into the very bones of the horror and thriller genres, as well as those of auteur and arthouse cinema more generally.

Back in France of course, Boileau-Narcejac are equally remembered for their achievements in the field of putting words together on the page, but for whatever reason, translations of their work have remained extremely scarce over the years. So, naturally I was keen to take the opportunity to check out some of their prose, despite the risk of the book crumbling to dust in my hands.

It’s probably fair to assume that ‘The Evil Eye’ (‘Le Mauvais Oeil’, originally published in France in 1956) is a minor work within the duo’s oeuvre, weighing in at just over 120 pages, and sadly the horror spin that Four Square’s packaging puts on the material turns out to be almost entirely erroneous, with the protagonist’s suspicion that he is afflicted with the power of the “evil eye” merely numbering among a number of fantasies and delusions which flicker through his unsettled mind through the course of the novel.

In fact, ‘The Evil Eye’ barely even qualifies as a thriller in the conventional sense of the term. What we have here rather is kind of a downbeat, quasi-gothic character study, in the ever-popular “dysfunctional remnants of an aristocratic family bounce off each other in their decaying old house” vein which went on to become so beloved of filmmakers in the late ‘60s / early ‘70s, for whatever reason.

It's a testament however to the talents of Boileau-Narcejac (and indeed to their translator on this occasion, Geoffrey Sainsbury) that this rather morose and uneventful tale actually remains a thoroughly engrossing read, drawing me into the story far more deeply than I suspected it would once I’d got the basic gist.

Our protagonist here is Rémy, a young man who has been paralysed from the waist down since infancy, when his mother apparently died under traumatic yet mysterious circumstances. We join him on the morning when, aged eighteen, and following the ministrations of a questionable ‘healer’ hired by his emotionally distant father, he gets out of bed and walks.

Disappointingly for Rémy, this Lazarus-like recovery prompts surprisingly little jubilation from either his brash, business-minded uncle or the two female servants who have provided him with his only real human contact over the years, and so, largely left to his own devices, he sets out to undertake the long-delayed process of growing up, digging into the inevitable backlog of uncomfortable family secrets in the process.

Intelligent, self-possessed and callously confident, yet at the same time hopefully naïve and chronically lacking in the kind of practical experience which most of us have gained by the time we reach adulthood, Rémy makes for an interesting and complex viewpoint character. Though he is not necessarily an “unreliable narrator” in the usual sense of the term, a lifetime of near isolation has left him with an unhealthily introspective approach to life, and throughout the novel, we’re forced to bear witness as he twists the people and events around him into his own melodramatic, self-centred narrative, unable to understand the feelings of others or to comprehend the more prosaic motivations behind their actions.

Though ‘The Evil Eye’ offers few of the shattering narrative revelations or surprise handbrake turns that Boileau-Narcejac’s cinematic reputation may have led one to expect, its strengths lie elsewhere – in the deceptively complex exploration of character dynamics, and in the cultivation of a richly ominous yet finely tuned atmosphere.

In fact, the book is steeped in that very particular world of seedy, grey-skied decay which seems to persistently creep into French culture of this era, from the damp-stained walls, musty bedclothes and corked, half empty bottles to a persistent impression of poverty and bankruptcy dogging the heels of the purportedly wealthy characters, and of the grindingly tedious, antiquated duties still performed by their indentured servants, long after modernity should have rendered them irrelevant.

Inevitably, the duo’s writing reminded me somewhat of the precise, descriptive prose of Georges Simenon, even as they push things far further than he would have done, including a few extraordinary, opium-scented flights of poetic fancy which can't help but push the tale toward the eerie, indefinable realm of what we’re obliged in this context to call le fantastique.

For all that it’s essentially a naturalistic, psychological tale in fact, one could perhaps apply a supernatural explanation to the book’s final paragraph ‘shock’ ending. But, this is never directly implied, cleverly leaving readers to map their own beliefs and gut feelings over the plainly recounted events.

All in all then, a surprisingly rewarding few nights reading, well worth making time for if you can manage to track down a copy that’s still in one piece.

Noir Diary #1: Witness to Murder (Roy Rowland, 1954)

It’s funny how these things happen in Hollywood sometimes, isn’t it? ‘Witness to Murder’, in which Barbara Stanwyck looks out of her window one night and sees her neighbour in the opposite apartment block cheerily killing a woman, was released by United Artists four months before Hitchcock’s ‘Rear Window’ premiered in August 1954.

The most likely explanation of course is simply that producer Chester Erskine (who also takes credit for ‘Witness to Murder’s screenplay) got wind of the idea behind Hitch’s next big picture and decided to ‘leap-frog’ it, much as outfits like The Asylum and ScyFy do with blockbusters these days. Personally though, I always like to try to give the little guy a break, so it’s interesting to speculate about other possibilities.

Perhaps Erskine had been independently working up an idea based on the same Cornell Woolrich story that inspired ‘Rear Window’, rejigging it somewhat when (for obvious reasons) he couldn’t get the rights? Or, could both projects have just end up being developed in parallel, growing from a treatment that might have been swishing across studio big-wigs desks for years, or even from some loud-mouth who might have been making the rounds of Hollywood parties with a “hey, I got a great idea for a picture…” routine..?

Who knows. Perhaps Hitchcock scholars might be able to shed some light on the matter (I don’t think there are any Chester Erskine scholars), but in all likelihood the exact circumstances that led to ‘Witness To Murder’s fortuitous release date are now lost to time. Fortunately however, ‘Witness..’ is a more interesting movie than its reputation as a kind of low rent ‘Rear Window’ rip-off would tend to suggest, rambling off in a different direction entirely as soon as the strikingly similar initial premise is out of the way.

Whereas in ‘Rear Window’ for instance, Jimmy Stewart’s attempts to apprehend the killer are hindered by his literal lack of mobility, in ‘Witness to Murder’, Stanwyck finds herself having to contend with the more fundamental lack of societal mobility that results simply from being a woman in 1954. At least her character Cheryl Draper is one of those self-confident, single career–women who tend to pop up with great regularity in Hitchcock’s ‘50s films (funnily enough), so that probably helps, but even so, Stanwyck’s evident bad-assery cuts little ice with the assorted male authority figures whom she is required to convince of the truth of her tale.

So, yes, I’m afraid it looks like we’re dealing with one of those old “I know what I saw, but what can I do to make them believe me?” numbers here, but things certainly perk up a bit when the detectives who initially respond to Cheryl’s call on the night of the murder head over to the alleged scene of the crime, and find none other than George Sanders lounging around in his luxoriously padded dressing gown.

Sanders’ character here turns out to be one Albert Richter, a sort of controversial public intellectual whose work, we are told, celebrates humanity’s violent instincts in aggressively Nietzschean terms, arguing that murder can be morally justified in certain circumstances (such as when intellectually superior specimens like himself find themselves annoyed by their inferiors, for instance). So, uh… yeah.

Despite this however, Sanders manages to charm the cops with his trademark panache, just about maintaining his cool as he distracts their attention from the remaining evidence of his crime (kicking a stray lipstick under the desk, standing in front of the torn curtain, that sort of thing), until he eventually hustles them out of the door, wishing them a hearty good night and casually suggesting that his lady accuser across the hall may have just gotten a little over-excited, or something equally patronising; because we all know how daffy women can get now and again when they’re left on their own, don’t we chaps?

Thereafter, watching the unfolding battle of wits between Stanwyck and Sanders becomes this film’s main selling point, with both delivering far stronger performances than Erskine’s boilerplate scripting really deserves. Clearly, Sanders’ unconventional character provides the most intriguing element here, and thankfully we get to see plenty of him, as he ups his game against Stanwyck, indulging in an audacious bit of Gaslighting (stolen typewriter, false letters) in order to get her committed to an asylum.

Richter’s cause is helped considerably by the sheer level of dismissal that Cheryl receives from the powers-that-be, and, following her brief incarceration in the nuthouse, even she begins to doubt her recollection of events (maybe I did imagine it, maybe I was dreaming, etc). The film misses a trick here I think due to the fact that both the reality of the murder and Richter’s guilt have clearly been established from the outset, thus preventing this temporary weakening of our heroine’s resolve from creating any genuine ambiguity or memory / perception-based uncertainty. (No chance of this one turning into one of those new, fangled psychological thrillers, no sir!)

Never mind though, because there is still a lot of fun to be had with the final act revelation that – as anyone who has been appraised of his rather extreme views might reasonably have suspected – Richter is actually an escaped Nazi fugitive, passing himself off as an American under an assumed name!

This particular bit of post-war paranoia of course takes us straight back to Orson Welles’ similarly plotted ‘The Stranger’ from 1946 (a movie which also perhaps finds an echo in ‘Witness to Murder’s climactic, tall building-based denouement), whilst, for his part, Sanders certainly had good form playing suave Nazis. In particular here, he seems to be drawing upon superbly menacing characterisation he brought to Fritz Lang’s ‘Man Hunt’ (1941), reminding us just what a great villain he could be when he played it straight(ish).

One of the best moments in ‘Witness to Murder’ comes when, driven to the end of his tether by Cheryl’s continued badgering, Richter suddenly breaks his ‘cover’ and unleashes a mouthful of spluttering, German invective, before announcing that no one can prevent the inevitable triumph of the “4th Reich”! Oops.

Even better though is Stanwyck’s reaction to this. Although her character is already aware of Richter’s Nazi past by this point in the story, the withering look of bored non-surprise she gives him (as if to say, “yeah… figures”) is simply fantastic.

So, that’s all well and good, but, the eternal question - is it noir? Well…. long-term readers will be all too familiar with the issues I have with the tendency to arbitrarily categorise all pre-1960 Hollywood thrillers as Film Noir, but basically I think we’re looking at a borderline case here.

Though the film spends much of its time futzing around in more mundane b-movie mystery territory, delineating the space between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ with tedious clarity, the darkness of Richter’s background and the psychotic nature of his infiltration of American life nonetheless lend it a welcome tang of noir-ish societal corruption. (Did I mention that he is engaged to an influential widowed heiress, and has previously left a prostitute strangled in an L.A. park in order to protect his reputation?)

Likewise, the aforementioned asylum sequence recalls the ‘crooked doctor’ / ‘shady clinic’ motifs that proliferate in the work of Chandler and Hammett, and it is realised here with consummate skill. In terms of set design, it doesn’t look as if they had much more to work with than a couple of old bed frames, but the way the sequence is staged makes it truly memorable. In the foreground, a black inmate (future Oscar nominee Juanita Moore) croons a blues lament, her gently defused shadow standing out on the far wall, whilst a catty white woman yaks away behind her, repeatedly telling her to shut up, and an elderly lady sits forgotten in the corner, obsessively repeating the same phrase again and again.

Though hardly progressive in its portrayal of mental illness, this brief, throwaway scene presents a nightmarish extension of the film’s central theme of women’s concerns being side-lined by patriarchal authority; carrying both a raw, exploitation kick and an undertow of dream-like sadness, it attains a notable level of pulp artistry.

Which helps bring us neatly to the main justification for ‘Witness to Murder’s categorisation as noir – namely, the presence of the great John Alton, an inspired cinematographer whose talents helped define the look of many of the very best low budget noirs (‘Raw Deal’, ‘He Walked By Night’ and The Big Combo, to name but a few).

Though director Roy Rowland does competent enough work here, it is Alton’s touch that is most strongly felt in the film’s visuals, with his attention-grabbing compositions and trademark use of single source spot-lighting adding real atmospheric clout to otherwise rather flat stretches of script, turning simple set-ups such as the one in which the pair of detectives walk down the corridor to Richter’s apartment into ominous tableaus of high contrast silhouettes and jagged angles, with the looming threat of violence ever-present; absolute text book film noir, needless to say.

Beyond all this though, the surest indicator of ‘Witness to Murder’s noir cred is the fact that mild-mannered male lead Gary Merrill – playing the affable, pipe-smoking middle-aged cop who provides an unlikely romantic interest for Stanwyck – feels completely out of place amid the brooding shadows and rampaging Nazis. Get back to yer slippers and cocoa, pops, the world around him seems to be saying, cos the nice little murder mystery you thought you were in is going downtown.

FRANCO FILES: Los Blues de la Calle Pop (1983)

During my visit to Spain last year, prior to my pilgrimage to Calpe for the inaugural instalment in the (hopefully soon to be continued) Great Jess Franco Locations Tour, I was obliged to spend several days just down the coast in Benidorm – a town whose negative reputation couldn’t even begin to prepare me for the reality of its sheer, staggering awfulness.

A baking strip of wall-to-wall concrete and claustrophobic, decaying high rise hotels sucking the life out of a once idyllic beach front, Benidorm is populated largely by roving gangs of bloated, sun-burned British tourists, many of whom seem determined to live down to their nation’s very worst stereotypes by behaving in as thuggish and xenophobic a manner as they can get away with without attracting the attention of the town’s ever-present (and presumably long suffering) police patrols.

Along the front, bars seem to blast out Queen and Bryan Adams for about sixteen hours a day whilst serving microwaved pizzas and endless steins of watered down lager, whilst further back from the beach, the streets, distressingly, begin to resemble the dying centre of some economically deprived English town - full of familiar decaying chain stores, rubbish-strewn pavements and a vague sense of menace.

Deeper into what passes for Benidorm’s “pleasure quarter” meanwhile, in between Brit-owned faux-pubs proudly advertising the fact that no Spanish is spoken within, one can find beer-sodden strip joints, sex clubs and, I’m sure, vice-related enterprises of a less legal nature, all of an order so grimy and desperate that even Jess Franco himself might have thought twice before paying them a visit.

In view of these horrors, I have subsequently been delighted to discover ‘Los Blues de la Calle Pop’ (“The Blues of Pop Street”), an extremely strange little movie that Franco filmed in Benidorm in the midst of his early ‘80s Golden Films purple patch. (1) Herein, our hero rechristens the town “Shit City”, reimagining it in his own inimitable fashion as a kind of neo-noir dystopian wonderland of organised crime, rampaging punks and sweaty sexual violence.

Fitting roughly into the lineage of whimsical, ramshackle thrillers Franco had been occasionally banging out ever since La Muerte Silba un Blues in ’62, the inexplicably named ‘.. Calle Pop’ (wouldn’t “Shit City” have been a better title?) begins with a scene in which down at heel private eye Felipe Marlboro (Antonio Mayans) is hired by a sad-eyed young lady named “Mary Lucky” (played, with typical Franco weirdness, by a one-shot actress credited only as “Mary Sad”). She pleads poverty, but reluctantly agrees to pay Marlboro back with a bit of casual sex if he will travel to Shit City to locate her missing boyfriend, who goes by the name of “Macho Jim”.

Mary hands Mayans a picture of “Macho Jim”, and, in a rather bizarre visual gag, we see an insert shot of a Frank Frazetta-style barbarian illustration, prompting the observation that ol’ Jim certainly seems to live up to his name. Other shots of Frazetta artwork will proceed to pop up once or twice through the rest of the film, though whether they are intended as Godardian avant garde interjections or just weird attempts at humour, who knows.

Similarly, quite why the protagonist of this movie is named “Felipe Marlboro”, despite being essentially the same character as Franco’s frequently recurring private eye Al Periera, whom Mayans played on many occasions, is likely to remain a mystery for the ages.

In a further eccentric touch, stills of the Manhattan skyline are used to illustrate the opening credits sequence, over which the credits are scrawled in the form of blood-red children’s sprawl, accompanied by crude, stick-man illustrations, whilst a dusty old bossa-nova/fuzz-rock track blares in the background.

Arriving in ‘Shit City’, Marlboro of course has to stay at one of Benidorm’s very few actual cool-looking hotels (shot from high angle, its geometric outline briefly captures a touch of the sinister, futuristic vibe Franco brought to the ‘Grande-Motte’ complex in Lorna The Exorcist).

Whilst making himself at home, Felipe discovers that his neighbour in the hotel is some kind of loud-mouthed dominatrix type person who seems to have stepped straight out of Derek Jarman’s ‘Jubilee’, complete with hair like a poodle attacked with spray paint, studded leather jacket and a dog collar.

Though Marlboro declines her offer of casual sex, they still hang about together a bit, and as such, he subsequently finds himself in the hot seat when she is unceremoniously murdered by a gang of sadistic underworld heavies, catapulting our hero into a theoretically complex (but actually just boring and inconsequential) sub-‘Big Sleep’ style mystery with the elusive “Macho Jim” at its epicentre… or something.

(The movie’s primary antagonist, by the way, is an unhinged flamenco dancer who assaults his victims via aggressive dance moves, accompanied by snatches of canned music on the soundtrack and cries of “please, not the flamenco!”. Perhaps it’s a Spanish thing, I dunno, but speaking as a foreigner I must say I found this line of humour somewhat less than hysterical. Flamenco-guy’s main sidekick however is a moustached ‘70s long hair / aviator shades type dude, which I thought made for an amusing contrast.)

As I have stated in prior reviews, I feel that, to some extent, Jess Franco never really got the 1980s. Whilst he remained as prolific as ever through the first half of the decade, I just don’t think he was ever managed to exploit the aesthetic of the era as successfully as he had during the ‘60s and ‘70s - thus aligning himself with a long list of ‘60s veterans in all creative fields who hit the skids in a big way once 1980 rolled around.

But, this failure certainly wasn’t down to any lack of effort on Franco’s part, and, as my brief synopsis above implies, what we find ourselves looking at here is – brace yourselves – a Jess Franco movie full of punks.

Yes, the streets of Shit City are veritably overflowing with cockerel-haired, safety pin adorned, leather-clad miscreants, of whom the ill-fated dominatrix girl and “Macho Jim” (when he eventually makes an appearance) and but two, and indeed, Franco’s take on the punk sub-culture is just as off-beat as you might imagine.

Well, I say ‘off-beat’, but it’s really more just lazy, to be honest. The beliefs and tastes of the ‘punks’ are never addressed by the film, and basically it is easy to imagine that, when Franco found himself working on a story that featured a lot of ‘youth’ characters, he just asked “hey, uh, how are the kids dressing these days? It’s all this ‘punk’ thing, isn’t it?”, prompting whoever was responsible for the film’s make up and costumes gave him a big HELL YES and then go absolutely bananas with the idea.

Whoever was responsible, ‘Los Blues de la Calle Pop’s low rent urban warriors are certainly a sight to behold, verging on ‘Rollerblade’/‘Intrepidos Punks’ level ridiculousness at times. Much face paint is in evidence alongside the requisite overdose of hair-spray, whilst the female punks sport plastic-y looking chains and fragments of mismatched lingerie, whilst appearing to have taken a few lessons from the Betty Rubble school of DIY dress design.

My favourite male punk meanwhile is a guy who wears a black golf visor with “PUNK” written on it with correction fluid, combined with a homemade swastika patch, black leather driving gloves and a Phil Oakey-style face-covering forelock. I don’t know how much they paid him to walk around Benidorm dressed like this, but it wasn’t enough. (2)

Meanwhile however, there is not even the slightest hint of ‘new wave’ music to be found within ‘..Calle Pop’ – quite the contrary, in fact. Indeed, I’m sorry to report that most of the music used here is at best inappropriate, at worst singularly dreadful, consisting of a bunch of lumpen, cheesy big band jazz cues of the kind more traditionally used to enforce a ‘jaunty’ atmosphere in unspeakably Germanic sex comedies. (Hell, for all I know Franco might have picked up some tapes of this stuff whilst making an unspeakable German sex comedy.)

Wherever it originated from, this ‘wacky’ guff plays loudly and incessantly through much of the film, pretty much destroying any attempt to create a dystopian/neo-noir kind of ambience, and driving me to distraction in the process. (Seriously - it’s awful.)

We do at least get some brief respite from the trombone however when, in a delightful instance of only-in-a-Jess-Franco-film surrealism, it turns out that Shit City’s punk rockers like to congregate in a ‘piano bar’, where they listen intently as the director himself (playing a kind of loosely Film Noir inspired nightclub pianist/informer type character named “Jack Chesterfield”) lays down some gentle boogie-woogie and mellifluous lounge jazz for their delectation.

This being a Franco film of course, the ubiquitous punks are also dedicated strip club patrons, and it is here, needless to say, that we encounter Lina Romay – appearing in her ‘Candy Coster’ alter-ego – who essays the role of “Butterfly”, the latest in a long line of happy-go-lucky exotic dancers / sex workers portrayed by Romay in Franco’s films from the mid ‘70s through to the mid ‘80s.

Often, Lina’s nightclub scenes are highlights of the films in which they feature, with the couple’s unique voyeur/exhibitionist relationship firing on all cylinders (from my own reviews, Los Noche de los Sexos Abiertos, filmed the same year as this one, proves a pertinent example), but sadly, Franco’s mojo seems to have deserted him here, and the strip club routines are pretty dire.

Capturing Lina as she works her way through a listless, buttock-grinding routine that proves distinctly unflattering to her increasingly plump form, these typically lengthy digressions see her rolling around and gyrating rather clumsily on the grubby stage, basically resembling the kind of unedifying spectacle one might expect to see in an actual Benidorm strip club. Rendered even less enjoyable by the fact that she seems to be moving to a completely different beat from the mind-numbing easy listening cue heard in the finished film, I’m afraid this is definitely not a highlight of Ms Romay’s storied career in erotic cinema.

Actually, it is interesting to note that, for the most part, ‘Los Blues de la Calle Pop’ is entirely lacking in the kind of sexual content one would expect of an ‘80s Franco film. Though the storyline itself is full of unseemly business (prostitution, strip clubs, sexualised murders), someone involved in the production seems perhaps to have taken a last minute decision to pitch the film at a slightly different audience, and as such, nudity and on-screen sex is kept to a minimum (by Franco standards, at least). Despite being staggeringly sleazy in most other respects, the aforementioned nightclub scenes for instance don’t even see Lina taking her g-string off (which perhaps to some extent explains why both she and Jess seem so bored with the whole affair).

But then, late in the movie, Franco goes and blows the whole deal with a lengthy Mayans/Romay love scene, filmed as was often his want in this era entirely via near-abstract close-ups, including the sight of Mayans spending a great length of time sticking his chops into what I’m *fairly sure* must be an artificial bush (though with Lina, I wouldn’t count on it). Maybe they thought the censors wouldn’t mind if it was a fake one, or something? Who knows.

In light of this confused approach, it is difficult to figure out quite who this film was supposed to be aimed at, or indeed how it secured a release at all, given its DIY level production values and lack of any easily exploitable content. (3) As with most of Franco’s straight ‘thrillers’, casual viewers are liable to find ‘..Calle Pop’ an off-putting, meandering and generally infuriating experience, whilst its intentional comedy elements alternate between the hopelessly clumsy and the simply incomprehensible. The “youth movie” aspects that the film’s domestic VHS release gamely tried to play up meanwhile never really materialise, with the generally sleazy vibe further mitigating against this idea, so, without any real erotic material to fall back on, what does that leave us, beyond a barely releasable load of lackadaisical, in-jokey Franco hoo-hah?

Well, for dyed-in-the-wool Franco freaks such as myself of course, such barely releasable hoo-hah is very much our bread and butter, and in spite of everything, ‘Los Blues de la Calle Pop’ is actually a surprisingly engaging film on a purely visual level. As I discovered when returning to it to take some screenshots for this review, if you play it through with no sound or subtitles, it actually starts to look like pretty great in places.

Some scenes utilise rich, deliberate colour schemes (red walls and stained glass), picked out with what looks like it might have been quite decent cinematography before the ravages of VHS took hold. At various points in the film, different varieties of red filters are even used – sometimes to create an atmospheric ‘evening’ effect, and sometimes just for the sake of random weirdness (such as making a drab hotel lobby look like a photographic dark room).

In another characteristic Franco touch, ‘accidental’ camera blunders (over-saturated sunlight, lens flare, botched focus etc) are actively encouraged, and indeed exaggerated in the name of added visual interest. In particular, rainbow-coloured light halos, created by strong light sources shone directly into the camera, can be seen exploding all over the place like cost-free psychedelic effects.

At the other end of the technical spectrum meanwhile, a brief scene in Lina’s dressing room casually pulls off a nifty ‘infinite mirror’ effect, and a red-tinted final confrontation between the two leads is constructed with great skill and no small amount of style, paying effective tribute to the jagged framing and editing patterns of classic Film Noir. The film’s editing (credited to David Raposo) is actually very good throughout, meaning that, mystifyingly awful though it may be in many ways, ‘..Calle Pop’ at least never drags. (4)

Franco’s usual ADHD tendencies also see him splicing in static close-ups all kinds of posters and decorations adorning the bars and apartments in which the film is shot, some of which – including the Frazetta illustrations referenced above and a Victorian print of a train accident assigned the English caption “Oh Shit!” - seem to provide oblique commentary on the on-screen action. Between shots of Bogart, Marilyn, Led Zeppelin and Adam & The Ants, the cultural iconography of Benidorm circa 1983 is certainly well-explored here.

Locations are used reasonably well (I was particularly delighted to see an early ambush/fight sequence staged within the monolithic shopping mall that I ventured into to pick up some breakfast supplies during my stay), and the idea of reimagining Benidorm as a kind of floating, pulp fictional dystopia is an absolutely brilliant one, although sadly Franco doesn’t seem to have put a huge amount of effort into realising it on screen.

As usual in these Al Periera-type movies, he seems to have been more concerned with goofing on a few half-remembered scenes from whatever classic Hollywood crime movies were on his mind at the time, and, as usual, one suspects this was a lot more fun for the director than it is for his audience.

For first time in fact, we get a definite sense in ‘..Calle Pop’ of Franco getting old. Up to the mid-70s at least, his films felt at least somewhat in tune with the zeitgeist, comfortable in their own skin you might say, but here he demonstrates little interest in the contemporary characters and settings, instead subjecting his viewers to the squarest music imaginable whilst giving every indication of wishing to return to the glory days of his youth, taking in some black & white studio masterpiece in a darkened Madrid picture house.

One gets the feeling here that by this stage in his career Franco really just wanted to make his own ‘Kiss of Death’ or ‘The Big Combo’ or something… but, when you find yourself in Benidorm in 1983 with a few Pesetas in yr pocket and a cast & crew consisting mainly of local kids, you’ve got to adjust to your circumstances, and ‘..Calle Pop’ is the somewhat confused result – a massively self-indulgent work, complete with an overriding tone of camp self-awareness that would go on to shape the majority of the director’s dreaded post-1990 Shot-On-Video output.

For its sheer strangeness, for the chance to see Franco’s take on Benidorm, and for all the random, piano bar-frequenting punks, I confess I actually quite enjoyed ‘Le Blues de Calle Pop’ on its own terms, but at the same time, it is not a viewing experience I would necessarily recommend to many other human being. As should be abundantly clear by this point, we’re well into a “For Madmen Only” corner of Franco’s filmography here, so if you’re anything less than a tenth level adept of the great man’s canon, I’d advise approaching with caution.

…

(1) Despite being shot during the period in which Franco was primarily working for Golden Films, ‘..Calle Pop’ seems to have been shot without their intervention, with the credits assigning the production solely to Franco’s own Manacoa Films. Combine this with the lack of any credited producer and ‘..Calle Pop’s bottomless eccentricity, lack of easily exploitable genre elements and general obscurity all come into sharper focus.

(2)In tracking down and watching ‘Los Blues de la Calle Pop’, I have actually found myself fulfilling my long-standing ambition of discovering a film crawling with punks which was NOT included in Zack Carlson & Bryan Connolly’s otherwise encyclopaedic Destroy All Movies: The Complete Guide to Punks on Film. I wish I could take the opportunity to become probably about the 78th person to point out this oversight to the authors, but the book’s promotional website is long-dead by this stage, and it was out of print the last time I checked, so what can ya do?

(3)According to IMDB’s always eerily hyper-specific box office data, ‘Los Blues de la Calle Pop’ did actually enjoy a brief theatrical run in Spain, selling exactly 5,401 tickets and earning 1,291,425 Spanish Pesetas.

(4) An editorial assistant on a number of mainstream/arthouse films in Spain during the ‘70s (as well as the 1975 Exorcism knock-off “The Devil’s Exorcist” with Jack Taylor), Raposo seems to have moved toward (s)exploitation fare when he took on full ‘editor’ status in the early’80s, although I believe this film is his only credit for Franco.

Exploito All’Italiana: Spasmo (Umberto Lenzi, 1974)

Well, my Exploito All’Italiana season earlier this year may have stalled after three measly reviews, but my concerted attempts to watch and write about as many horror movies as possible during October certainly helped get things back on track, with a few delirious evenings spent in the company of Cinecittà’s favourite sons, so – let’s get going with some more glorious, blood-soaked escapism...

Over the years, I’ve developed quite a soft spot for the work of Umberto Lenzi, and I tend to feel he gets somewhat of a raw deal from more – uh – ‘high-minded’ fans of Italian cult cinema. At his best, Lenzi was capable of delivering genuinely great movies (his ‘70s poliziotteschi entries chiefly spring to mind), and, even if circumstances rarely allowed him to deliver said ‘best’, his remaining filmography is nonetheless characterized by such a surfeit of high energy, non-fuck-giving, eager-to-please craziness that it would be churlish not to simply give in and be entertained by the majority of the pictures that bear his name, however shamelessly awful they may be in conventional terms (his much-loved ‘Nightmare City’ (1981) is a perfect case in point).*

Though it has rarely found favour with genre critics, I was thus delighted to discover that Lenzi’s late-to-the-party giallo ‘Spasmo’ (its title simply the Italian for “Spasm” you’ll note, rather than an insult to cerebral palsy sufferers) follows this latter formula to a tee, transforming a production that could easy have been a bit of an also-ran within the genre in the hands of another director into an uproariously enjoyable exercise in mild to moderate level celluloid delirium.

Veering somewhat toward the more excessive/ridiculous end-point of the genre already explored by Emilio P. Miraglia in ‘The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave’ (’71) and ‘The Red Queen Kills Seven Times’ (’72), ‘Spasmo’ dials down the sexual content and gothic decadence of those films, but otherwise adopts very much the same game plan vis-à-vis submerging us headfirst in a swirling, irrational nightmare of nonsense that seems purpose-built to break the brains of anyone actually approaching this thing as an ostensibly solvable whodunit.

Beginning from a relatively linear (if extremely sketchy) starting point that sees an idle Tuscan playboy (Robert Hoffman) ditching his wife(?) at a yacht party in order to embark on a tryst with mystery girl Suzy Kendall, ‘Spasmo’ proceeds to bombard our poor, free-lovin’ hero with such a relentless profusion of inexplicable events and breakneck changes of plan that I spent the first hour or so convinced that there was *no way on earth* Lenzi could actually tie all this stuff up into a single, coherent plotline – especially given that Hoffman consistently responds to these challenges with some of the worst decision-making I’ve ever witnessed from a horror/thriller protagonist. (Yes, the “no, don’t do that – you idiot!” guy at your hypothetical viewing party will likely need some extra blood pressure pills to get through this one.)

Nonetheless though, ‘Spasmo’ pulls off a series of shock revelations in its final act (including a fine example of the ever popular Ivan Rassimov-ex-machina) that kind of, sort of, just about leaves things making a flimsy sort of sense… assuming you don’t start factoring issues of believable human behavior or psychology into your calculations.

What I liked most of all about ‘Spasmo’ though is that it is completely, unmistakably a giallo, flyin’ its flag without shame. Where other directors opted to downplay the more clichéd aspects of the genre or to turn them on their head as things drifted toward self-parody once Argento and Martino had nailed down the template for all time in the early ‘70s, Lenzi instead seems happy to fully embrace the genre’s trademark aesthetic, to the extent that, were someone to come out of the blue and ask me “so, these giallo movies, what are they all about then?”, I’d be tempted to screen ‘Spasmo’ for them in preference to the work of any of the genre’s more celebrated proponents.

Though Lenzi may lack the technical flair and strength of vision possessed by said proponents, as an unpretentious, base level example of everything that made the emergence of this genre in this particular time and place such wonderful fun, ‘Spasmo’ does the business just perfectly.

Along with the aforementioned plot convulsions, the film’s exquisite atmosphere of shabby-genteel ‘70s Mediterranean languor remains unmatched this side of a contemporary Jess Franco flick, at least in my movie library. Fashions, accoutrements and interior décor are as beautifully garish as could be hoped for (at one point, a fugitive Hoffman returns to the scene of a crime because he left his medallion behind), and Lenzi & co make use of some absolutely fantastic shooting locations too -- most notably, a refurbished cliff-top watchtower whose atmospheric environs add a welcome frisson of gothic horror-ish isolation to the movie’s middle half hour, helping stave off any hint of boredom as the plotting loops the loop like an out of control bi-plane.

Though one imagines he probably didn’t exactly bring his A-game to the studio for this one, Ennio Morricone’s score nonetheless adds greatly to proceedings too, as the maestro comes through with some choice moments of slithering funk and atonal electronic freakery, in the rare breaks between incessant repetitions of his obligatory harpsichord-blasting main theme – all adding up to a kind of giddily familiar “mega-mix” package of the sort of material he provided to more celebrated gialli in the past.

One reason for ‘Spasmo’s low critical standing amongst fans may be its perplexing lack of any particularly memorable or blood-thirsty murder set-pieces, but, much as you’d expect with good ol’ Umberto at the helm, violent incident is nonetheless both frequent and jolting – particularly when he begins to whip things up into a more frenzied pace in the film’s final act, instigating bouts of aggressive jump cut montages and ‘am-I-the-one-going-crazy?’ unreliable narrator flashback stuff that recalls the excesses of Renato Polselli’s aptly named ‘Delirium’ (1972).

Factor in the somewhat surrealistic sub-plot that sees somebody lurking about in the dark leaving grotesquely mutilated latex sex dolls in Hoffman’s wake, and a sinister hired killer who seems to have been made up to look almost exactly like Dario Argento (one of several bits of wacky, intentional humour I think you can identify ‘Spasmo’, should you have a mind to), and I would invite readers to pause and ask themselves: really,  what more could one ask of a rip-roaring second tier giallo…?

Basically, the whole thing feels rather like staggering about on some treacherous Tuscan cliffs late at night in the company of strangers whilst ripped on several bottles of bootleg Chianti - and that, needless to say, is a feeling that this blog can wholeheartedly recommend. Aside from the fact that the film’s producers seem to have struck a product placement deal with Johnny Walker instead of J&B (heresy!), this is ninety minutes of pure giallo nirvana so far as I’m concerned.

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* Without wishing to interrupt the main text with such concerns, I would like to make clear that this positive assessment of Umberto Lenzi’s work does not extend to his early ‘80s cannibal films, and the deeply regrettable animal cruelty featured within them. Just for the record.

Exploito All’Italiana: Blastfighter (Lamberto Bava, 1984)

At some point in this review thread, we had to turn our gaze toward that prodigal son of the Italian exploitation business, Lamberto Bava, and what better place to start than here, as a Commandoed up moustache warrior stares us down through the barrel of a magnificently rendered shooter in what must surely count as one of the most definitive action movie posters of the 1980s (maestro Enzo Sciotti in full effect, of course).

On the basis of its title and poster artwork alone, I had always assumed that ‘Blastfighter’ must be one of those Filipino-shot gonzo war movies that so wantonly proliferated through the final decade of the cold war – you know, exploding huts, chopper stunts, bloody dog-tags, the whole nine yards. So strong in fact was my belief that ‘Blastfighter’ was one of those movies that I somehow managed to read some stuff about it on the internet, buy a copy of it (from a SHOP no less), and put the disc in my player on one of those increasingly rare post-midnight moments when I still have the energy to consider plugging in the headphones and tackling a movie before bed…. all before realising that it is in fact a different kind of movie altogether. Such is the power of Sciotti’s airbrush.

Once I discovered that what “John M. Old Jr” actually had in mind back in ’84 was a comparatively restrained backwoods Americana survival thriller, I felt a tad uneasy, but I ploughed on regardless, and ultimately I’m glad that I did. Maybe it was the woozy early hours time-slot, the accompanying glass of whisky or the complete lack of any particular expectations, but, for reasons I can neither explain nor fully justify, myself and ‘Blastfighter’ had a pretty good time together on that lonesome Saturday night.

Dardano Sacchetti’s script comprises a neatly polished Frankenstein’s monster of parts repurposed from ‘First Blood’, ‘Deliverance’ and ‘Death Wish’, and as such ‘Blastfighter’ begins as disgraced hero-cop Jake ‘Tiger’ Sharp walks out of prison, having served an eight year stretch for blowing away the politically connected scumbag who killed his wife.* (‘Tiger’ is played by Michael Sopkiw, whom you may recall from Sergio Martino’s ‘2019: After The Fall of New York’ (1983), here efficiently embodying a 2nd gen photocopy of ‘70s Franco Nero.)

As inevitably happens in such situations, ‘Tiger’ is reluctantly picked up by a limo containing his former boss in whatever elite, special operations-type police unit he belonged to, who tries to convince him to come back on-board, offering him a prototype of an experimental new super-shotgun that fires every form of projectile under the sun as a token of goodwill. (Whoever this big-wig answers to, he apparently anticipates no “COP GIVES FREE GUN TO CONVICTED MURDERER” headlines looming in his future.)

Much to our disappointment as well as the boss-man’s however, ‘Tiger’ shakes his head and declines the offer of returning to an exciting career of legally-shaky, villain-blasting mayhem, opting instead to make a lonesome new life for himself ruing his past mistakes, nursing his broken heart and espousing the cause of peace and human dignity from the comforts of his cabin in the mountains of rural Georgia. He takes the super-gun with him nonetheless though and stashes it under the floorboards on his porch, because hey – this is America, so who knows when a steadfast, law-abiding citizen will need the help of a laser-guided, pump-action grenade launcher to uphold what is good and right.

To no one’s surprise, the build-up to that day begins almost immediately, as Tiger encounters a posse of perpetually whoopin’ and hollerin’ young rednecks who are in the process of decimating the local deer population, cruelly keeping their wounded prey alive as they sling them in the back of a truck to take home. Naturally, our hero must step up to confront such barbarity, and, as you might expect given his past history, he is far from diplomatic in his approach.

As it transpires, the rednecks are making a living selling the live animals to a Chinese butcher who is hacking them up for medicinal ingredients (the racist language thrown in this guy’s direction by both sides in the film’s drama goes unchallenged, incidentally), and matters are further complicated by the fact the leader of the posse is the younger brother of Tiger’s former hunting buddy and small town rival George Eastman – now a local logging company foreman who grants tacit paternal approval to their unsavoury shenanigans on a “well it give the boys something to do” type basis.

As the antagonism between Tiger and the good ol’ boys swiftly intensifies, the stakes are raised further when his teenaged daughter (Valentina Forte) tracks him down and turns up demanding some fatherly affection. (He had previously abandoned her to an orphanage after her mother was murdered on the self-fulfilling basis that “I was a lousy cop and I’d make a lousy father too” – our hero, ladies & gentlemen.)

Inevitably, the lecherous overtures the rednecks cast in Valentina’s direction add a slight pinch of ‘Straw Dogs’ to the brew, and of course we know it’s only a matter of time before Tiger is going to be pulling up the floorboards to retrieve his mighty gat, his tache bristling with a renewed thirst for vengeance…

Driven on by the kind of inflexible moral certainty that only a truly cynical production can muster, ‘Blastfighter’ happily jettisons the relatively complex issues that weighed upon its aforementioned source texts, instead choosing present its story as an almost pre-modern popular morality tale, in which a character’s courage and martial prowess is entirely dependent upon the righteousness of their cause (as solely determined by the film’s scriptwriters), and in which real world consequences matter not a damn, so long as the cruel baddies are vanquished and the deer can gambol freely across the wooded hillsides as nature intended. (Except of course on rare occasions when some fine, upstanding sandy-haired hunter needs to shoot one of them for food, or to humanely manage the population or whatever, which is wholly acceptable – look, Tiger agrees, and you’re not going to argue with him, are you?)

Legend has it that this movie only exists at all because the budget Lamberto had lined up for a proposed post-nuke science fiction project fell through, and, having already pre-sold it to distributors under the name ‘Blastfighter’, he and his producers had to cobble something cheaper together to fill the gap. Under such  circumstances, I think everyone concerned did extremely well, but, inevitably, quality still comes on something of a sliding scale here, with ‘Blastfighter’s strongest moments (the action and outdoors stuff, chiefly) sitting right at the top end of what you’d expect of mid-‘80s Italian genre product, whilst the weakest sink to an almost Troll 2 level of face-slapping stupefaction.

The latter, it must be said, is almost entirely a result of the appalling English-as-second-language dialogue, and of the especially shoddy post-sync dubbing with which it is delivered. [English is the only language option on my DVD of the film, so I am unable to comment on how the Italian track fares in comparison.]

Regrettably, this serves to reduce many of ‘Blastfighter’s character interactions and tender “back story” conversations to a state of borderline nonsense, as actors’ on-set lip movements are inexpertly matched up with entirely inexplicable pronouncements (“there’s only one way to get pleasure in this life, but one hundred ways to get pain – don’t seem fair does it?”) that one suspects existed only as “LINE NEEDED HERE – ASK ENGLISH DIALOGUE GUY” gaps until long after principal photography was completed. Thus, we must persevere through dozens of instances of semi-meaningless, generic action movie blather whose zen-like opacity will boggle the mind of any viewers actually paying attention.

(That said, I did at least enjoy Sopkiw’s spirited “You want to know who I am? I’M A SON OF A BITCH… who wants to be left alone!” – a minor delight which more traditional line delivery would probably not have provided us with.)

That this state of affairs renders it impossible to connect with any of the film’s events on anything but the very bluntest level is hardly a surprise, but it is a particular shame in this case, given that the film-making here could under other circumstances have easily scaled the dizzy heights of actually-making-us-care.

Indeed, ‘Blastfighter’s technical acumen is actually far greater than its era and background might have led one to expect. Editing, cinematography and action choreography are all slick to a fault, whilst Sacchetti’s script (dialogue aside) is surprisingly coherent and well-paced (quite an achievement in itself from the man who gave us the dog’s dinner un-storytelling of Lucio Fulci’s early ‘80s horrors). In purely visual terms in fact, this could easily pass for a slightly rough-around-the-edges Hollywood studio film - making it all the more unfortunate that the game is up as soon as anyone opens their mouth.

Sadly, such unwarranted professionalism also elevates ‘Blastfighter’ to that particular grey area in which a film proves too well made and po-faced for viewers to simply laugh it off and enjoy it as a brainless thrill ride, whilst at the same time it is nowhere near “good” enough to generate any real emotional involvement or thematic engagement, meaning that, at the end of the day, what remains is just kind of… there.

Less the yummy cinematic junk food promised by its poster and personnel, ‘Blastfighter’ is instead more like a plate of tasteless steak and potatoes served at a quaint rural diner; despite occasional moments of uncouth wildness and genetically ingrained sleaze (could the brief flashback to Sopkiw’s wife’s death be leftover footage from one of Lamberto’s earlier gialli..?) and an absolutely bangin’ synth-rock theme from Fabio Frizzi, those who thrill to the madness and degeneracy of more typical Italian exploito product will be in for a letdown here.

If on the other hand though, you suddenly find yourself with a hankering for a reassuringly one dimensional tale of men with moustaches doing the right thing, attractively shot forest locations, badly dubbed teenage daughters, string-bending lead guitar stings and cars that explode in the slightest breeze – well, dive right into these cool Georgia waters my friend, and you won’t be disappointed.

Watchable, predictable, kind of likeable in a distant, undemanding fashion, ‘Blastfighter’ is, in a profound sense, a MOVIE. It also features a lovely country n’ western song written (though not performed) by The Bee-Gees, which plays three times in its entirety, so that's nice.

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In closing, check out this interesting alternative promotional artwork (also by Sciotti), which I *bet* must have originated back when the film was still being envisioned as an SF-tinged ‘Mad Max’ rip-off:

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* Whilst watching ‘Blastfighter’, I was convinced that Schwarzenegger’s ‘Commando’ also must have been a key influence, but subsequent research informs me that that film actually came out a year later, in ’85. I must have just been picking up on the shared Rambo inheritance common to both projects, I suppose.

FRANCO FILES: The Devil Came From Akasava (1970)

AKA:

According to IMDB, original shooting title for this one was ‘Hüter des Steines’ (“Guardian of the Stones”). Upon release, most territories went with a variation on the English ‘..Akasava’ title, although Greece opted for ‘Aorati apeili’ (“Phantom Menace”?), and Italian viewers were offered the chance to enjoy ‘Una Venere Senza Nome per l'ispettore Forrester’ (“Inspector Forrester and the Nameless Venus”..!?).


Context:

Just speculation on my part really, but at several points in his career, Jess Franco seems to have used a quick spy or detective film as a kind of ‘chill out zone’ during particularly heavy periods of filmmaking. I'm not sure why these genres were singled out for such treatment, but perhaps their pulpy and predictable architecture proved a bit more relaxing for Franco than the risqué sex and horror themes of his better-known work – the equivalent of a quiet week by the pool for this relentlessly prolific director, perhaps?

1975’s ‘Downtown’ and 1966’s ‘Residencia Para Espías’ both fit this pattern, but ‘The Devil Came From Akasava’ is perhaps the most definitive example of the phenomenon, emerging mid-way through the brief but extremely busy period that Franco spent working for German producer Arthur Brauner’s company CCC Films. (According to the chronology presented in ‘Immoral Tales’, Franco began work for CCC in late 1969, and in addition to '..Akasava', had completed ‘Vampyros Lesbos’, ‘She Killed in Ecstasy’, ‘Jungfrauen Report’, ‘La Venganza del Doctor Mabuse’ and ‘X312: Flight To Hell’ for them by the end of 1970).

Quite why the decision was taken to make a spy film at this particular juncture - long after the Euro-spy cycle had faded away, and during a rather troubled/transitional phase in the James Bond franchise – is something of a mystery, but at a guess, maybe it was Brauner himself who had a preference for these bland, slightly outmoded genre thrillers? (After all, ‘X312’ and the Dr. Mabuse film are hardly your usual Franco fare, and his final film for CCC the following year was a very-late-period krimi, ‘Der Todesrächer von Soho’ (aka ‘Death Packs His Bags’), with Brauner himself co-writing.)


Content:

Hang on, the devil came from WHERE..? No, me neither. Well apparently, Akasava is fictional African nation, and it there that our “adventure” begins, as we see some kind of super-precious stone being dug out of the wall of a mine-shaft by a bloke in a radiation suit. The stone is subsequently sealed in a lead-lined briefcase and, despite the radiation suit bloke being able to casually take his helmet off as he cradles it in the opening scene, it now gives off a prodigious radioactive glow, sufficiently powerful to vaporise anyone in the immediate vicinity when the case is opened, just like in ‘Kiss Me Deadly’ (or ‘Repo Man’, or ‘Pulp Fiction’, depending on your age and level of hip-ness).

Various haggard-looking gentlemen and a few ladies are of course after this stone, and in pursuit of their goal, they walk back and forth between places a lot. Sometimes they drive jeeps between the places, and sometimes they even take aeroplanes. Whilst they are in the places, they natter on incessantly about nothing of particular import, and occasionally die, in a not terribly exciting fashion.

So yes, basically what we’ve got here is a singularly dull reworking of ‘60s Euro-spy cliché, in which everyone seems pretty laidback and nothing particularly interesting happens, and that both opens and closes with footage of some salty characters shooting at each other with pop-guns whilst running around a complex of off-season holiday chalets.

Some familiar faces are amongst their number: Franco himself, Howard Vernon, Alberto Dalbés, Ewa Strömberg (a blonde actress who appeared in most of Franco’s CCC productions) and the ubiquitous Paul Muller. Krimi regulars Walter Rilla and Horst Tappert are also on hand, adding to the feeling that ‘..Akasava’ was in some sense intended as a vague tribute to the Edgar Wallace cycle.

Most notably though, the legendary Soledad Miranda is here too, portraying a glamorous British secret service agent (or glamorous Interpol person, or something - it’s kind of unclear), in one of only three lead performances she supplied to Franco films prior to her untimely passing.

Kink:

So, look, I’ll level with you. There is only one reason for anyone to bother watching this film: Soledad Miranda. Admittedly, she’s not given a great deal to do here (nobody in this film really gets much to do), but, as has been widely acknowledged, the sight of Soledad Miranda lounging around looking bored is roughly equivalent to that of most screen performers unicycling across a tightrope over an active volcano. So fair enough.

Given that the time Franco was able to spend working with this extraordinary actress was cut so tragically short, it seems an dreadful shame that he stuck her in pictures as gloomy as this one and ‘She Killed in Ecstasy’, but whatcha gonna do? No one knew what the future held, so there is little blame to be placed.

Anyway, it goes without saying that she looks spectacular here. As with any great ‘sex symbol’ type movie actress, Miranda has charisma and energy to match her beauty, usually standing out as by far the most exciting thing on screen, regardless of one’s sexual preferences. And, this being a Jess Franco film, she does at least get to strut her nigh-on elemental stuff here in several obligatory night-club striptease scenes.

Obviously close cousins of the iconic night-club scenes in ‘Vampyros Lesbos’, with the same black backdrop and the same ‘Sexadelic’ library music going into overdrive, these performances are a little more conventional perhaps, with no candelabras or mannequins anywhere in sight, but still, those enchanted by the equivalent scenes in the earlier film will definitely want to check them out. Certainly, there are few actresses who could look as beguiling whilst straddling a red-upholstered bar chair, clad head to foot what looks like long strips of used cine-film, as Miranda does here.

3/5


Creepitude:

Few horror elements, or any atmospheric touches suggesting such, are to be found here, although there are a couple of decidedly un-thrilling violent slayings to enjoy(?).

1/5


Pulp Thrills:

Allegedly based on an Edgar Wallace story (though no one seems sure which one), you’d expect to get a fair old dose of pulpy shenanigans from this tale of triple-crossing secret agents, dodgy African doctors, gun-toting strippers and psychotic butler-assassins. But once again, ‘Akasava’ comes up short. Too poverty-stricken for any of the glitz or visual stimulation found in the earlier euro-spy cycle (or even in Franco’s earlier ‘Red Lips’ movies, for that matter), and with a pitifully small allowance of action and intrigue, things play out in a workaday TV movie sort of fashion that largely fails to capitalise on the potentially fun ideas presented by the story.

Though rambling and childishly illogical as you please, the plot-line is also extremely dry, almost entirely lacking in the kind of wit and invention that might have made it work. I’m perfectly happy to watch a thriller in which we don’t really know what’s going on, but when we simply don’t CARE what’s going on, that presents a bit more of a problem, y’know?

2/5

Altered States:

‘Akasava’ largely finds Franco in a“bored / get it done”, point-and-shoot sort of mood. It was movies like this one that helped make his abuse of the zoom lens a running joke, and indeed he takes this time-saving ‘technique’ to unhappy extremes here, never once pausing to set up a new shot when circumstances instead allowed him to get away with wobbling left or right, hitting the zoom and refocusing a few times instead.

When it is used to deliberately disorientating or psychedelic effect (as in Dracula: Prisoner of Frankenstein for instance), I like this style a great deal, but when applied to the hum-drum material found here it is simply irritating – precisely the kind of abuse of cinematic space that the anti-zoom lobby complain about.

Also much in evidence here is the other bug-bear of Franco detractors, his lugubrious pacing. We’ve spoken a lot about this in earlier reviews, and I think the crux of the matter is that, when a Franco film creates a world that’s fun to get lost in, I’m more than happy to indulge him and take my time. But in an ostensibly ‘plot-driven’ film such as this one, when things meander on endlessly whilst we’re watching, say, some people hiring a car at an airport, or discussing the whereabouts of their cousin in a hotel breakfast room, the boredom that results is simply excruciating.

Thankfully, things are at least propelled along by some GREAT music. Unfortunately for those of us who have already seen ‘Vampyros Lesbos’ and ‘She Killed in Ecstasy’ though, it is mostly the same music, all pulled off Manfred Hübler and Siegfried Schwab’s legendary ‘Vampire Sound Incorporated’ library LPs, ‘Sexadelic’ and ‘Psychedelic Dance Party’. (Much of the music used in these three films was re-issued on CD in the ‘90s as Vampyros Lesbos: Sexadelic Dance Party, and I’d guess that if you’re reading this, there’s about a 75% chance that you already own it and listen to it with obsessive regularity. As well you should.).

Usage of the Vampire Sound material in ‘..Akasava’ concentrates mainly on just one or two primary cues, which are looped in teeth-grindingly repetitious fashion, but in the film’s favour is the fact that this pre-existing soundtrack allowed at least some scenes to be cut to the music, upping the pace somewhat and allowing some sequences to manifest a (largely accidental) sense of style and purpose, particularly during the slightly more eventful final half hour.

There are occasional nice shots, particularly in Soledad’s scenes, with mirrors, reflections, objects d’art etc. used to good effect, and a couple of instances of surprisingly good lighting. Mildly sexy bits featuring Ms Miranda seem to be scattered at roughly 15 minutes intervals through the finished film, and these bits, as per usual when Franco’s eye is in the viewfinder, tend to be the best bits, cinematically speaking. But nonetheless, it is a bland, ‘down-time’ feel that largely predominates.

2/5


Sight-seeing:

If there’s one thing even a sub-standard Jess Franco spy movie should be able to deliver, it’s some groovy locations, but disappointingly, most of Akasava seems to resemble an off-season Iberian holiday camp.

“Beautiful country, isn’t it?”, Franco’s character proclaims as we’re shown some non-descript mud-flats during a boat ride to… somewhere. Not sure where this bit was filmed, but it looks like some kind of appropriately impoverished third world harbour. Brief shots of Moorish architecture rather suggest Turkey, leading me to think that perhaps this footage was shot whilst Franco & co were over there for ‘Vampyros Lesbos’?

In keeping with the generally lacklustre nature of this production though, it’s hard to really get a sense of place, with cast & crew rarely bothering to venture much beyond their hotel rooms. In fact, if non-descript, early ’70s budget hotel interiors and airport corridors are your thing, you will see sights in this movie that will carry your soul to new heights of reverie. And for the rest of us - well, it could be worse I suppose, but I’m not about to book my ticket to Akasava just yet.

Requisite attempts at some spy movie ‘globe-trotting’ also take us to London. You could probably write a book about German commercial cinema’s obsession with setting films in unconvincing versions of ‘London’, but, surprisingly, I get the feeling parts of this film may actually have been shot there. The inevitable faded establishing shots of Tower Bridge may not bode well, but the location of a secret rendezvous between Soledad and a middle-aged police inspector – supposedly a London brothel, with a sign outside reading ‘Chez Jackie’ – DOES have a convincingly shabby British look to it.

Just a hunch, but could this be the same down-market Paddington hotel where Pete Tombs met Franco in the early ‘90s..? (See this blog post for details.) According to Tombs, Franco said that he discovered the hotel whilst working for Harry Alan Towers in the late ‘60s, and that he subsequently stayed there whenever he visited the city. Though he was no anglophile and rarely shot in the UK, JF clearly liked the feel of this “run-down Edwardian flophouse”, and it doesn’t seem beyond the realms of possibility that he might have done it over as an unconvincing “brothel” for one of his films.

(In a disorientating shot / reverse shot arrangement during this sequence, the inspector, standing in a spacious hotel lobby with a grubby carpet, appears to be conducting a conversation with a dressing gown-clad madam ensconced in what looks like an upstairs bed-sit with a wood-panelled kitchenette in one corner and the rest of the room masquerading as a café, with several small tables and a jukebox. A bizarre moment of low budget cognitive dissonance that I very much enjoyed.)

2/5


Conclusion:

The number of these kinda pulpy thrillers and spy films Jess Franco made during the ‘60s, you’d think he’d be able to knock one out in his sleep by this point. Unfortunately, ‘The Devil Came From Akasava’ very much gives the impression that he called our bluff and did actually direct it in his sleep.

Aside from Soledad Miranda, and the awesome music (which most fans have probably already heard in several other films, and own on CD), I honestly can’t think of any reason to bother watching this film. But having said that, I can’t really say that I disliked it either. In fact I found it’s sheer, inoffensive aimlessness quite soothing. If I were a fugitive criminal who’d been instructed by his boss to go and hide out in the cinema all day until the heat was off, I think I’d be very satisfied if a film like this was playing on a loop.

I could mull over my predicament, plan and scheme and lament my sorry state, without ever being overly distracted by the brightly coloured people walking around, talking about whatever and occasionally dying up there on the screen. It’s like an ambient movie - a vaguely pleasing, background kinda thing. The vintage genre cinema equivalent of one of those Brian Eno albums, perhaps. Could that be a first? Maybe. Let’s assume it was deliberate and chalk it up as another great idea from Jess Franco Ltd!

Venom(Piers Haggard, 1981)

It’s difficult to know where to start with a movie like ‘Venom’. Let’s just say that if you’ve had a quick look at the poster reproduced above and you’re still reading this, rather than running straight to your preferred movie provider to locate a copy, you might be reading the wrong weblog.

I’m unfamiliar with the novel, by Alan Scholefield, from which this film was adapted, but I can only imagine it to be the absolute epitome of hilariously contrived, late ‘70s, post-Jaws airport potboilers. Did it have a black cover with the title outlined in giant, shiny silver letters and an airbrushed illustration of a rampant snake-head? Was it about 400 pages longer than it really needed to be? I have no idea, but by god, I would like to think so.

I don’t want to get bogged down in plot summarising, so let’s keep it simple and just state that this is indeed a film in which a trio of crooks played by Klaus Kinski, Oliver Reed and Susan George find themselves under siege by the police in a luxurious West London townhouse, with aged big game hunter Sterling Hayden and his chronically asthmatic, heir-to-a-colossal-fortune grandson as their hostages. By complete coincidence, the grandson has just come into possession of a new pet which, due to an innocent pet shop mix-up, turns out to be not the docile house snake he was promised, but – oh no! – a full size Black Mamba, most deadly poisonous snake in the entire world!

So yes, it’s Kinski and Reed vs the snake, vs the cops, and vs each other, with kid and grandpa (plus a late entrant in the form of Sarah Miles’ mild-mannered snake expert) stuck in the middle. Anything could happen, but it’s a fair bet it’s not gonna be pretty.


Initially entering production with Tobe Hooper as director, ‘Venom’ suffered a set-back when Hooper was either a)thrown off the project for being unmanageable and incompetent, or b)walked voluntarily after having his creativity intolerably compromised by the big-head producers and disobedient stars, depending on who you choose to believe. Either way, ‘Blood on Satan’s Claw’ director Piers Haggard took the reins mid-stream and, whilst he clearly doesn’t display much of the personal vision he brought to that film, he nonetheless delivers exactly what was required of him under the circumstances, streamlining the frankly ludicrous source material into an efficient, fast-moving thriller, whilst also coping with the unenviable task of having to put Kinski and Reed in a small room together and then tell them what to do all day long.

The essential who/what/wheres thus established (never mind the ‘why’s or we’ll be here all night), I think perhaps the best way to convey the many unique qualities of ‘Venom’ is via a quick list of bullet pointed items.

There will be spoilers, in case you’re bothered about that sort of thing.


* Sterling Hayden IS Action-Grandpa! Hopping around in a moth-eaten cardigan and the most unflattering beard foisted upon a fading Hollywood star by the cruel British since Robert Mitchum in ‘The Secret Ceremony’, he’s far too “golly gee” to really convince as a retired colonial adventurer, coming across more like some twinkly-eyed old codger who’s accidentally wandered in from a live action Disney movie. But the set-piece scene where he’s forced to hunt the snake across a darkened living room armed only with table-lamp and a cushion is a lot of fun, the tension only slightly diminished by fact that continuity has clearly established that the snake has buggered off into the heating ducts by this point.


* Susan George is brilliantly duplicitous as the cockney maid who initiates the kidnapping plan, clearly planning to set her two lovers/accomplices at each other’s throats as soon as the opportunity presents itself. Unfortunately, one of the film’s major drawbacks comes from having her die far too soon, causing the vicious little Jim Thompson-esque love triangle that's been brewing to fizzle out before it’s ever really got going. I guess somebody needed to get whacked to demonstrate the gruesome effect of the snake’s venom, and she was just deemed the least essential character vis-a-vis the story’s plot dynamics. I wish they woulda killed that annoying kid instead, but then the crooks would have lost their hostage angle… or they coulda killed Grandpa, but then there’d be no sensible ‘good guy’ presence to lead the snake hunt. Stupid plot dynamics! Stupid good taste! What they should have done of course is written in some additional pointless flunky characters and killed them off. But they didn’t, so… no more Susan George. Curses!


* It’s great watching Oliver Reed’s character making a b-line for the liqueur cabinet whenever things get tough – “I… I think I need a drink… yes, a DRINK.. a drink would help us all relax!” Whether this was part of the original story or just written in for Olly, who knows. This isn’t really the place for a cheap dig at Reed's alcoholism though, partly because that would be unnecessary and cruel, but also because he’s actually on pretty top form in 'Venom', delivering a characteristically barn-storming turn as a petty thug way out of his depth, desperately trying to keep his shit together. A stock character, but in Reed’s meaty hands his gradual collapse into panic and random violence is a pleasure to behold.


* Conversely, it’s safe to say Kinski probably didn’t invest a great deal of commitment in his work here, but at least he stays awake and delivers the lines, which is more than can be said for a lot of the exploitation pictures he made through the ‘70s. Basically he contents himself with just ‘doing the villain’, but as ever, he’s pretty great at it - seeing him curl his lip in disgust as he delivers his monotone ransom demands to the “poliiizeman” brings joy to my soul.


* The poliiizeman in question by the way is Nicol Williamson, toiling away just below the bigger names on the cast list as a character who seems like a genetically engineered prototype of every dour, no nonsense working class ‘70s British police detective ever. By turns he reminds me a bit of Robert Hardy in ‘Psychomania’, Alfred Marks in ‘Scream and Scream Again’, and the entire brood of stoney-faced functionaries who propped up Carter & Regan on ‘The Sweeney’. A perfect specimen, he’s armed with a full set of Scottish tough guy mannerisms, a dirty raincoat, a really ugly school tie, and he even enjoys the attentions of a weaselly aristocratic superior who pops up at inopportune moments to make disparaging remarks and ‘keep an eye’ on him.


* There’s a great bit where Kinski throws a cigarbox from the window of the house, announcing it to be “..a geeft from doctor Shtowe”. Nicolson opens the box, hands it over to the others with a look of disgust. The other cops open it – close up of a severed finger wrapped in tissue paper, followed by reaction shots of their horror and surprise – you know the drill. Long, shocked silence as they try to form a response. Young policeman ventures; “they’ve cut her bloody finger off!” Laugh? Why, I nearly…


* A cameo from Michael Gough, playing real life London Zoo snake-handler David Ball, anyone..? Well, why not.


* This one guy!




* Above all else though, ‘Venom’s sudden/violent finale is perhaps one of the most astounding sixty seconds of cinema I’ve seen in my entire life. I mean, for the love of god, we’re talking about Klaus Kinski, locked in deadly combat with a Black Mamba, plummeting to his death through a shattering balcony window, being riddled with police sniper bullets, as he succeeds in shooting the snake’s fucking head off a mere split-second before he hits the ground, narrowingly missing a set of cast iron railings.

Damn, if only they could have gone all the way and ended with the impalement, it would have perfect. Even so, watching this alone in my living room on a Sunday afternoon, I stood up and applauded. And to think, they gave Oscars to other films in 1981.

Smothered in Michael Kamen’s absurdly bombastic score, which makes the whole movie sound like Indiana Jones exploring a lost Babylonian tomb, ‘Venom’ is as spectacular a load of beserk, high-powered nonsense as could possibly be wished for. If you’ve read all the above and you’re still not rushing out to get a copy, well.. I fear there is no hope for you.