Recent Paperback Acquisitions # 2: Psychedelic Sci-Fi.

(Ballantine / collection originally published 1948, this edition undated.)


(Panther, 1970 / Cover by the great Enzo Ragazzini.)


(Sphere, 1970)




(Mayflower, 1970)


(Lancer, 1967)


(Quartet, 1973)

London Frightfest 2011, Part # 3.

Midnight Son
(Scott Leberecht, 2011)

The only flick I managed to catch this year on Frightfest’s smaller ‘discovery’ screen, the unsatisfactorily titled ‘Midnight Son’ wasn’t one I picked out specially or anything – it just happened to be on when I had a film-length hole in my schedule, and I’d already paid for a day pass, so hell, why not. I’m glad I made the effort, because it was pretty good.

Shot on HD Video on what was presumably a non-existent budget, the festival blurb for ‘Midnight Son’ describes it as following in the footsteps of Romero’s ‘Martin’, but really I think it’s closer to a West Coast equivalent of Abel Ferrara’s ‘The Addiction’. Guess that wouldn’t pull the punters in quite so well though.

Anyway, ‘Midnight Son’ invites us into the life of a poor young chap who works the night shift as a security guard in a corporate office building. Seems he has a bit of a skin condition that prevents him from going out in the sun much, and in his spare time he likes to sit in his dingy basement flat painting pictures of sunsets. Understandably feeling a bit washed out, he pursues the kind of remedy that macho doctors in the ‘50s probably used to prescribe to young men with mysterious ailments: vigorously eating a blood red steak and spending the evening chatting to a girl he met selling cigarettes and candy outside a nightclub. This dose of protein and human companionship seems to perk him up no end, but as the working week goes on, the familiar fug descends again, and his discovery that blood works better than coffee as a pick-me-up leads him inevitably toward some rather more unsavoury habits.

So far, so familiar, but the film’s tone of smart, low-key realism goes a long way toward side-stepping the clichés that usually accompany this kind of story, stringing us along effectively enough to make the character’s gradual realisation of his vampiric nature seems both interesting and surprising, as much as we knew it was coming. The awkward quasi-relationship he develops with the similarly troubled young woman is very well played – a combination of her matter-of-fact drug problems and his matter-of-fact vampire problems amusingly conspiring to prevent them ever managing to have a nice evening together.

Although not exactly big on jollity to begin with (thinking about it, this is actually the only film I saw at Frightfest that didn’t have a significant amount of humour running through it), the film takea a darker turn when our man finds himself hanging around by the contaminated waste bins behind a hospital, forging a dubious alliance with a wannabe-gangster porter that eventually leads the story into the realms of a full-blooded (sorry) vampire/crime epic. Here, the video shooting actually works in the film’s favour, allowing for the creation of a believably cold and threatening nocturnal Hollywood underworld, very much reminiscent of the street scenes in Lynch’s ‘Inland Empire’, and thankfully entirely devoid of the kind of dated goth/industrial hoo-hah that usually blights movies like this.

The mumbling indie relationship stuff manages to merge convincingly with the final-third shift into brutal noir crime story stuff, and if ‘Midnight Son’ does have a few of the drawbacks and unintentionally goofy moments that go hand in hand with such DIY, zero budget productions, they’re not worth bothering to go into here. By and large, I thought it was a very impressive piece of work, standing way, way, waaaay above the baseline for SOV horror. If you can stomach a heavy quotient of ‘grainy close-ups of pale, miserable people breathing heavily’ type stuff and aren’t sick to the back teeth of the kind of story that the DVD back cover blurb would probably describe as a ‘gritty urban vampire fable’, this one is well worth making time for.

Oh yeah, and another cool thing about this film – Tracey Walter, Miller from ‘Repo Man’, is in it! Yeah, y’know – “plate of shrimp”, “John Wayne was a fag”, “..you’ll see” – that guy. Always good to see him getting work, even if it is presumably unpaid in a micro-budget horror film. [Clarification: after checking IMDB, Mr. Walter is clearly not short of work – dude’s been in everything; wow, I had no idea.]

The Man Who Saw Frankenstein Cry
(Ángel Agudo, 2010)

Speaking of dudes who get a lot of work done for precious little recognition, it was depressing to see such a small turn-out for the screening of this documentary about the man Michael Weldon wryly described as ‘Spain’s most popular werewolf actor’, the one and only Paul Naschy.

Despite being presented as a tie-in with the Scala Forever season, only about half a dozen lonesome guys and a couple of couples made it into the auditorium to catch this one, perhaps reflecting the sketchy distribution and mangled presentation of Naschy’s films in the English speaking world. Although most of them are barely available at all in legitimate form, in the past year or so I’ve managed to scrape together a fair selection of the many, many horror films Naschy wrote and starred in during the ‘70s, and from what I’ve seen so far, you can count me a fan.

Whether at a career high watermark with 1971’s Leon Kilmovsky directed ‘La Noche de Walpurgis’ (aka ‘Werewolf Shadow’ aka ‘The Werewolf vs. The Vampire Woman’) or wallowing in a mass of straight to video shlock through the ‘80s and ‘90s, it seems like Naschy was one cat who was ALWAYS on form, his name guaranteeing a certain mixture of good-natured monster bashing, gleefully amateurish gore, brain-melting un-scripting and unhinged atmospheric weirdness that never gets old… assuming you’re the sort of misfit who enjoys it in the first place. Personally, I think it’s wonderful stuff – I’ll have to get around to doing some reviews at some point.

As a documentary, ‘The Man Who Saw Frankenstein Cry’ isn’t exactly up to much – basically an extended DVD extra, it doesn’t have a lot to offer beyond an uncritical synopsis of the man’s life and career, interspersed with clips from his movies and talking head interviewees talking about what a great guy he was. But Naschy (real name Jacinto Molina) makes for a fascinating subject, and I don’t see anyone else queuing up to make documentaries about him, so I guess this one wins by default.

Beginning on an interesting note, it tells us all about Molina’s traumatic upbringing during the Spanish Civil War, and his subsequent education in a Nazi-centric ‘German school’ (a clip from one of his ‘80s movies that shows his character violently tearing up pictures of Hitler, Franco etc, cursing their evil legacies, seeks to leave us with little doubt as to what young lad’s feelings on all this were), before we follow him through his initial career as a boxer and bodybuilder. Subsequently working as a gopher in the nascent Spanish film industry as domestic productions began to get off the ground in the ‘50s, Molina initially saw himself breaking into pictures as an art director, and wrote his first werewolf script just in order to have something fun and fantastical that he could hopefully persuade some international backers to let him work on. Legend has it that it was only at a last minute production meeting after their proposed star dropped out that Molina was reluctantly (it says here) persuaded to take on the role of the wolfman himself. Needless to say, the barrel-chested human dynamo took to this assignment with such gusto that his performance helped make 1968’s ‘Las Noches del Hombre Lobo’ (released in the US as ‘Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror’, despite a palpable lack of Frankenstein) into a big hit, and, well – the rest is history, of a sort.

In between the endless personal tributes, generalised hagiography and overbearing music cues, the thing that comes across most strongly in this documentary is a sense of Naschy/Molina’s extraordinary work ethic and unwavering dedication to his own strange corner of cinema. From his initial breakthrough in the late ‘60s through to his death in 2009, it seems that barely a day went by when this man wasn’t busting his ass trying to make some weird movie or other a reality, ploughing on through financial collapse, personal tragedy, government censorship, health problems, disappearing distribution networks and public disinterest to keep his various projects rolling, taking in a long series of Japanese co-productions, an unexpected left turn into oddball thrillers and controversial ‘issue’ movies, and a late career revival aided by American trash-mongers like Brian Yuzna and Fred Olen Ray.

In the final analysis, Naschy has a neat 100 films to his name as an actor on IMDB, 43 of which he wrote, directed or otherwise co-produced. Such a body of work is quite an achievement in itself, and the consistency of vision he seems to have maintained across the decades is remarkable. Of course, a lot of people would argue that such consistency simply means his films were consistently crappy, but who cares what they think? Have they ever made a movie in which a werewolf fights a yeti, or one where the disembodied head of Torquemada freaks people out in nocturnal visions, or where a secretly devil worshipping Indian guru fights zombies with a broadsword in a London cemetery? I think not. The level of basic craftsmanship and goofy invention in Naschy films is always a delight, and say what you like about them, they’re great pieces of demented, gut-level entertainment that are rarely dull, even when they’re almost completely incoherent.

If such eccentric figures as Jose Marins and Jess Franco can become international cult movie heroes then I think Paul Naschy is long overdue his day in the sun, and it would be the greatest gift a horror fan could ask for if some DVD company or other could finally set about reconstructing some nicely transferred, uncut versions of his films before the financial viability of DVD releasing goes down the plughole, leaving us to make do forever with the fuzzed up public domain atrocities currently on the market. If you’re listening out there Anchor Bay or Arrow or whoever, I’ve got money in my pocket and a Paul Naschy Box Set sized gap on my shelves. Make it happen.

----

Following the Naschy documentary, my plan had been to hang on to catch the 11:30 screening of the fun sounding flick ‘Detention’, but to be honest, I was pretty worn out by this point – I had a splitting headache, and there was still an hour to go before that then, and I just couldn’t face the idea of killing yet more time hanging around the multiplex lobby drinking overpriced, metallic beer or aimlessly wondering the streets before fighting my way home on the nightbuses after the movie finished at 1am-ish, so… I’m sorry readers: I went home instead.

I know, what a wuss. As I sit here sneakily writing this on a rainy afternoon in work, I would absolutely love to be hanging out with a crowd of boozed up horror fans, watching some rip-roaring alien/zombie/high school movie, but on the night it just wasn’t gonna happen.

That aside though, another year of fine and varied programming from this festival, with even a lot of the films on the big screen serving to challenge the mainstream clichés of modern horror, and filling me with a lot more optimism for current genre cinema than I’ve felt for some time, I guess. Good stuff – looking forward to next year, etc.

London Frightfest 2011, Part # 2.

The Innkeepers
(Ti West, 2011)

Ti West’s ‘House of the Devil’ very much impressed me as a semi-abstract, post-modern horror movie, and if this follow-up is ultimately a less distinctive piece of work, one can hardly blame the director for striking out in a slightly more commercial direction, foregrounding characterisation, humour and reassuring ‘boo!’ moments over weird, minimal dread.

Strong ‘Shining’ vibes are in evidence from the outset here, as the credits roll over a series of faded photographs of a town centre hotel in its historical heyday, leading gradually up to the present day, where we join the establishment's last few minimum wage staff members, sitting out a marathon weekend shift before the place finally closes down for good.

Like ‘House..’, ‘Innkeepers’ goes for the looong slowburn before any horror stuff gets going, and your overall enjoyment of the picture will likely hinge on your tolerance for the bitchy, Clerks-esque chemistry between the two leads - directionless teen Claire (Sara Paxton) and slightly older college dropout Luke (Pat Healy). Personally I very much enjoyed their shenanigans – I thought both performances were very good, and that the script built them up nicely as strong and individually motivated characters whilst keeping things just on the right side of whiny. Individual tastes may vary however – if you don’t have much sympathy for these kinda flawed, slacker-ish characters and their assorted bellyaching, you could be in for a tough ride.

Anyway, Claire and Luke are rather half-heartedly trying to investigate paranormal phenomena in the hotel, running a Geocities-style website full of hilariously unconvincing videos of doors slamming and ‘unexplained bathroom incidents’, and stalking the corridors at night with a tape recorder, in search of ‘EVP recordings’.* As you might assume, this investigation provides the hook that leads us straight into a wholly traditional haunted house narrative.

Aside from the aforementioned nod to ‘The Shining’, the big reference point here is, inevitably, Robert Wise’s ‘The Haunting’, from which ‘The Innkeepers’ inherits its emphasis on strong characters, its pattern of slow-building set-piece scares and its atmosphere of gradually escalating hysteria. Indeed, the only other real character in the movie, a TV actress turned new age healer played by Kelly McGillis, seems very much like an older, more washed out version of Theo the psychic from Wise’s movie.

Such similarities can hardly be seen as derivative though, or even deliberate. Wise’s film casts such a definitive shadow over the haunted house sub-genre that all these elements are pretty much mandatory. In fact, ‘The Innkeepers’ is notable for the extent to which West seems to pull back from the haze of referential imagery and horror-fan nostalgia he perfected in ‘House of the Devil’, instead inviting us to see his film as a free-standing, wholly contemporary effort. And this, sadly, is where it falls short.

Like both ‘House of the Devil’ and ‘The Haunting’, ‘Innkeepers’ is extremely well-constructed, and will scare the pants off you exactly as it sets out to – seeing it in the cinema, I won’t deny that I was watching a lot of the later scenes through gaps in my fingers. Unlike ‘The Haunting’ though, the film crucially fails to really tie any psychological depth or emotional resonance into its scares – an absolute necessity for any decent ghost story. The scariness here, though undoubtedly effective, is of an entirely manipulative variety, utilising the kind of purely physical ‘shock’ effects that serve to turn a horror film into little more than a rollercoaster ride. And I don’t know about you, but I hate rollercoasters.

There is nothing genuinely disturbing in ‘The Innkeepers’, nothing that’s going to lurk in your mind in the dark hours of the night, nothing that instigates any particular catharsis, for either ourselves or the characters. Whilst it’s in progress, yes, you’ll jump outta your skin, and feel uncomfortable, and beg the characters not to go down to that bloody basement again, and so on. But when it’s over, it’s over.

Basically Ti West seems to have no interest at all in developing the narrative beyond the bare bones of a generic haunted house story, and in fact he fails to even comply with the basic expectations of the sub-genre by giving us a big reveal regarding the nature of the evil that lurks in the hotel. Some may defend that as a deliberate ambiguity, but given the lack of any particularly striking details to hook our imaginations to it just seems like a lack of interest to me, making the film a strangely hollow experience. Sure there are a few vague intimations of dark and twisted going on, but just as the Satanic cult in ‘House of the Devil’ seemed rather perfunctory when they finally turned up, the supernatural aspect of the storyline here never really extends beyond “there are some ghosts”.

It’s interesting that with both this film and ‘House..’, West seems to be building a reputation for making horror films in which all the best stuff happens before the horror starts. And in a way, I think that’s kinda applaudable – a nice reversal of the priorities of some of his more gore/shock-obsessed peers, anyway. Despite some significant drawbacks, ‘The Innkeepers’ is still well worth a watch for anyone who fancies a nice old fashioned spook movie with a bit of character to it. The humans in the film certainly pull their weight and will give you a few rewarding memories, even if the ghosts don’t.



*When that phrase was mentioned, the pedant in me immediately wanted to scream that, no, the term ‘EVP’ is traditionally used to describe mysterious voices turning up on dead radio frequencies and blank recording media – if you’re wondering around with a microphone capturing external noises then they’re just, y’know… regular recordings. Before I write an angry letter though, I’ll charitably assume this was a deliberate error thrown in demonstrate the general half-arsedness of our investigative duo, rather than a scripting mishap.

London Frightfest 2011, Part # 1.

Armed with a one day wristband and a couple of additional screening tickets, I made my second annual visit to the appropriately hellish environs of The Empire in Leicester Square last weekend to check out a few of the more exciting offerings at this year’s London Frightfest. Although I was only present for a fraction of the full four day programme, I still managed to clock up nearly twelve straight hours spent in and around a multiplex in the centre of London’s foremost tourist trap hellhole, and I’m telling you readers, it hurt. But along with my hard-earned status as a guy who wastes time writing about weird movies on the internet comes a certain responsibility, and if at least once a year I can make the effort to keep myself- and by extension, yourselves – up to date on developments in the field of movies about people running around in the dark being murdered in horrible ways… well the discomfort is all worthwhile.

Here is what I saw with my eyes.

Troll Hunter
(André Øvredal, 2010)

I know this is the same crack I made at the start of last year’s festival write-up, but the fact remains: when you find yourself setting your alarm on Friday night to ensure you get up in plenty of time to make the 11am showing of a movie called ‘Troll Hunter’, something is going very right in your life.

Most likely you’ve heard a thing or so about this singular Norwegian production by now, given the (justifiable) hype that has grown up around it in the past few months, but in case you haven’t, here’s a quick synopsis:

‘Troll Hunter’ takes the form of a Blair Witch-style ‘found footage’ effort, following a trio of youngsters who are attempting to make a documentary investigating illegal bear hunting in rural Norway. Latching onto an eccentric and unfriendly man they believe to be a poacher, they begin following him around, eventually trailing him on a nocturnal excursion deep into the woods where, well… let’s just say they get more than they bargained for. Pissed off with his working conditions and the attitude of his superiors, the man subsequently admits to the filmmakers that he is actually a government employee, working for a covert Troll Security Service within the Department of Wildlife, and invites them to film him as he goes about his business, keeping the country’s troll population under control.

Beyond that, there is little that can be said about ‘Troll Hunter’ that wouldn’t spoil the numerous surprises and delights that first time viewers have in store for them, but suffice to say: on every level, this is a really great film.

There is something so awesome about the way that, rather than reinventing the trolls as some kind of scary, fast-moving modern horror type beasties, the creatures here basically still look like old fashioned storybook trolls, complete with knobbly noses and hairy kneecaps and all the rest of it. The special effects through which the monsters are realised are pretty incredible too – I don’t know how they did them exactly, but, speaking as someone who probably watches more than his fair share of monster movies, I thought it was remarkable the way that instead of thinking ‘oh right, they’ve got a guy in a suit’, or, ‘oh yeah, that’s some CGI’ when a troll lumbers on screen, the audience basically shares the astonishment of the characters in thinking, ‘fuck me, that really IS a troll’.

The trolls are rendered frightening simply through their size and physical presence, and the scenes in which they attack our protagonists are pretty intense, especially with the booming THX-whatever sound mix in the cinema. Rather than a conventional scare-the-pants-off-ya horror film though, ‘Troll Hunter’ is really more… I dunno - a comedic study in absurdist wildlife management, maybe?

With a blend of dry wit, weird low-key satire and constant visual invention, and a small cast who manage to establish themselves slowly and naturally without compromising the ‘found footage’ conceit (which remains eerily convincing throughout), it’s basically just very, very funny. By turns, it is also exciting, thought-provoking, humane and strangely melancholy and somewhat awe-inspiring - a really unique movie and one that I’m sure will find a healthy audience well beyond the niche horror fraternity.

If you only see one new film at the cinema this year… etc.

The Wicker Tree
(Robin Hardy, 2011)

I wish the same could be said of Robin Hardy’s 40-years-later sequel to ‘The Wicker Man’, but let’s face it… this was always going to be a bit of a car crash, wasn’t it? Taking the view that a pessimist is never disappointed, I went in not expecting much beyond a bit of a chuckle and some incidental weirdness, but sadly the film failed to even deliver on that modest level. ‘Wicker Tree’ is a meandering mess of a production that never really manages to get an angle on its own ideas and ambitions, or even to provide much in the way of entertainment.

Trying to run down everything the film got wrong in the process of updating and rethinking the premise of the original would be both needlessly cruel and extremely tedious, so I’ll try to restrict myself to just discussing some of its most chronic missteps.

Most crucial to the film’s overall failure I think is the way it bungles the attempt to replicate the unsettling clash of ideologies that was so vital to its predecessor’s success. In ‘The Wicker Man’, the reactionary clichés of horror storytelling are challenged from the outset as the pagan islanders’ way of life is presented as being essentially healthy, joyous and rather enticing, as opposed to the repressive, self-denying angst of Sgt Howie’s Christianity. It is only with the gradual realisation that the islanders practice human sacrifice to appease their strange gods that we too become shocked at their amoral behaviour, forcing our sympathies back toward the safer boundaries of Howie’s more puritanical worldview. It is this basic ambiguity, this questioning of easy dualistic thinking, that gives the film much of its enduring power and beauty.

No such subtleties are at play in ‘The Wicker Tree’ however, as the cultists orchestrated by Scottish borders landowner Graham McTavish fail to really rise above the level of weird, misguided villains, no more convincingly motivated in their beliefs or practices than the aristocratic devil-worshippers in the cheesy gothic horrors that the original film’s script set out to transcend. Similarly, the young Texas evangelists who are lured across the Atlantic to provide the cult’s annual sacrifice are little more than brain-washed dimwits – a liberal British director’s cardboard cut-out idea of right wing American culture, with none of the heartfelt intensity that made Edward Woodward’s character such a convincing central presence.

In spite of Hardy’s warning in his pre-screening intro that we “shouldn’t expect a conventional horror movie”, the failures of his script sadly reduce the narrative here to the level of the most banal modern horror, in which pointlessly evil baddies menace obnoxiously shallow ‘goodies’, with the end result that we basically don’t give a shit what happens to any of them, let alone the finer points of their respective belief systems.

Things aren’t exactly helped by poor performances across the board, and some of the most excruciatingly clumsy dialogue I’ve heard in a real world-set film for some time. The more experienced actors in the cast do their best to soldier on and keep things low-key, but hearing the young leads make a meal out of their soap opera level proclamations is absolutely cringeworthy (if I remember correctly, the male lead at one point announces “I’m just a poor, dumb cowboy, a long way from home”).

Perhaps conscious of such drawbacks, the first two thirds of the movie are basically played for laughs, throwing in a bunch of dated nudge-wink humour and ill-advised slapstick silliness that seeks to pre-empt criticism by blurring the line between intentional and unintentional laughs, although frankly neither raises much more than frequent eye-rolling and the occasional snigger of disbelief.

In fact, the more I think about it, it’s definitely the writing that puts the kibosh on this whole venture. The technical aspects of Hardy’s direction are pretty decent for a man who’s only made two films in four decades, and the cinematography, which utilises a kinda high gloss contemporary sheen, is actually very good, providing some atmospheric moments that successfully capture the eerie incongruity of an ancient country estate living on into the 21st century.

Better writing might have inspired better acting, which in turn might have allowed the film to capitalise on at least some of its potential. But with Hardy’s screenplay essentially little more than a load of rambling nonsense devoid of drama or insight, so clearly lacking in the kind of vision that Anthony Shaffer’s script or David Pinner’s source novel brought to the original, it’s hard not to cry ‘abandon movie’ and head for the lifeboats long before the toothless conclusion hoves into view. The final straw for me was when it starts desperately throwing in supposedly audience-pleasing tropes from post-Chainsaw Massacre modern horror, but then fails to actually go the distance and give us any real gore or nastiness, and…

Aah, forget about it, who cares. I think this particular post-mortem has gone on long enough.

Hopefully in a couple of years memories of this one will have faded away, and we’ll be able to remember Robin Hardy as a man who at least made one really great film with the word ‘wicker’ in the title.

Recent Paperback Acquisitions # 1: Horror & Gothics

It’s been a while since I did any book cover posts, but in the past six months or so I’ve managed to build up a formidable backlog of material without taking the time to go to any particularly Herculean book-collecting efforts. Y’know how it goes I’m sure: just the odd psychedelic sci-fi paperback picked up here and there around London, a few trips further afield, a few donations from friends, all topped off with a mammoth haul from Baggins Bookshop in Rochester last weekend, and I’ve got pulp fiction coming outta my ears.

I’ve got some of the more interesting volumes earmarked for individual posts in the future, but in the meantime there’s more than enough left over for a few genre-themed gallery posts. First up: horror and suchlike.

As you might imagine, I find it eternally disappointing that the heyday of pulp paperback art (roughly early-‘50s to early-‘70s) never really coincided with the rise of horror as a saleable genre, and, as much as blogs like Too Much Horror Fiction might offer a convincing argument to the contrary, the slick graphic design of the post-Stephen King ‘black background / shiny text’ horror boom has never really appealed to me that much. There WERE plenty of odd horror-ish pulps from before that of course – New American Library big print gothics (see here and here for some great galleries of those), hippy era witchcraft shockers and post-Rosemary’s Baby cash-ins, even completely whacked out psychedelic Lovecraft/Weird Tales stuff (everybody’s favourite). But compared to the sheer volume of crime, sci-fi and romance novels that were hitting the shelves back then, they’re still relatively scarce items – hence finding a good one is always a treat.

(The first one here is borderline genre-wise, but it’s an awesome cover and clearly aligned toward the more overtly supernatural Ace/NAL gothic series, so let’s go with it.)

God, this getting a bit nerdy, isn’t it? Anyone’d think I actually did research on this stuff or something. On with the show!

(Ace Books, 1962)



(Ace Books, 1973)



(Fawcett World Library, 1965)



(New English Library, 1980)


(Corgi, 1963)



(Corgi, 1969)

(Thanks to my friend Kate for donating ‘Death Tour’.)

Deathblog:Jimmy Sangster (1927 - 2011)

Sad to hear this weekend of the passing of another Hammer big hitter, scriptwriter/sometime director Jimmy Sangster.

Although his few efforts as director aren’t exactly revered by Hammer fans – his attempts to take the gothic formula in a cheesier, more tongue in cheek direction in “Lust for a Vampire” and the near-forgotten “Horror of Frankenstein” (both 1970) being generally considered to have fallen rather flat – Sangster can still take credit for having pretty much defined that formula in the first place through his definitive scripts for “Curse of Frankenstein”, “Dracula” and “The Mummy”, as well as sharpening his preferred genre of the Les Diaboliques-inspired psychological thriller to perfection via a whole series of lesser known Hammers, including “Taste of Fear”, “The Nanny”, “Paranoiac”, and Joseph Losey’s 1955 short “A Man on the Beach”.

Also on his CV: “X – The Unknown”, “Terror of the Tongs”, “The Devil Ship Pirates” and such non-Hammer Brit-exploitation landmarks as “Jack The Ripper”(1959), “Blood of the Vampire” (1958) and “The Trollenberg Terror” (aka “The Crawling Eye”, also 1958).

Looking for some further background on Sangster’s achievements and influence, I can highly commend this excellent forum post from Dave Hartley;


“Hammer's Frankenstein combined Anthony Hinds romantic and Sangster's anti-romantic sensibilities to produce an entirely distinctive approach to the story. From Hinds suggestion that Frankenstein should be a 'shit', it was Sangster's idea to invert the structure of the story and not simply make the Baron the focal character as in the book, but a villain who becomes a monster incapable of recognising his own monstrosity. Modulated through Fisher's direction and Cushing's performance, Curse of Frankenstein emerged as something more ambiguous and complex than that, with at it's heart Frankenstein not simply a villain but an anti-hero. Sangster swiftly recognised what had been achieved and given only a fortnight to produce a first draft he produced an even better script for Revenge fully exploring the ambiguities of Frankenstein's character and actions, and giving greater expression to the ironies of 'poetic injustice' - as Ray Durgnat put it, in which no good deed goes unpunished.
[…]
Sangster made no secret of the fact that, like his close friend Michael Carreras, he was no fan of gothic horror. That distance from the material was part of his contribution - not just in his unsentimental 'straightlining' or removal of overcomplicated and unnecessary story elements and characters, and the deliberate use of touches of humour to notch things down before building them up again, but in his essentially modern approach to them as stories. These were not respectful period adaptations of acknowledged literary classics (a status the original Frankenstein and Dracula were only awarded AFTER the success of the gothic cycle Hammer kick-started). It was a lesson lost on the makers of many subsequent gothic adaptations. His scripts took a post-war, cold eyed, ironical - at times even cheeky - approach to the material. Left to himself he might have produced a more tongue-in-cheek treatment and his scripts contain lines that could have been played that way. […]Hinds and Fisher stopped anything like that. Although the lines remained they were played entirely straight to produce films that were "rich looking, slow, deliberately paced, bursting with unstated sex but with nothing overt..." (Hinds in Fangoria 11). Built on the solid exoskeleton of Sangster's scripts.”

Full obit from Hammer here.

Rollinades: Tout le Monde il en a Deux / Bacchanales Sexuelles (1974)

WARNING: The following review contains nakedness!

Along with infamous work-for-hire atrocity ‘Zombie Lake’, 1974’s ‘Tout le Monde il en a Deux’, aka ‘Fly me the French Way’, aka ‘Bacchanales Sexuelles’ – never gifted with a remotely decent title or poster in any language - must be the least celebrated, most disreputable Jean Rollin production legitimately available on DVD (we have Synapse Films to thank for that pleasure).

The second ‘Michel Gentil’ sexploitation film directed by Rollin for producer Lionel Wallmann, ‘Tout le Monde..’ follows on from the strangely delightful ‘Jeunes Filles Impudiques’, and in many ways functions as a sequel to that film, with a bigger budget (relatively speaking), more characters, more locations, more zaniness, more sex, a more developed storyline (again, relatively speaking) and a far longer running time. That the results are more ‘Ghostbusters II’ than ‘Mad Max II’ is a bit of a shame, but… I’m getting ahead of myself.

Things get off to a good start, as the indefatigable Joëlle Coeur and her friend Michelle (Marie-France Morel) arrive at the groovy Paris apartment where they’re going to be spending some time house-sitting for Joëlle’s cousin, a journalist who’s off covering a big story. With framed Phillipe Druillet prints on the wall, gothic knick-knacks over the mantlepiece and shelves full of weird and rare French literature, it sure looks a lot like Jean Rollin’s apartment, but hey, who’s complaining? Certainly not the two girls, who waste no time in getting the party started.

Who could this elusive Michel Gentil possibly be..? Why, the mystery must have confounded the French film industry for years…

“Do you have anything to drink?”, asks Michelle, prompting Joëlle to head for the kitchen, returning with vodka and vermouth that they proceed to swig straight from the bottles. To complete the mood, Michelle heads to the record player and drops the needle on Art Ensemble of Chicago’s ‘Home’ LP!



My kinda Saturday night!

Those with a vague idea what kind of film they’re watching won’t exactly be surprised by the way Joëlle and Michelle’s quiet night in progresses, and here, sadly, is our first hint that a viewing of this movie isn’t going to be quite as fun-packed an experience as might be wished. Whereas the sex scenes in ‘Jeunes Filles..’ were so coy and gentle they were actually kinda charming, ‘Tout le Monde..’ seems to go for a different approach entirely, leading us straight into the darkest chambers of grotesque softcore groping.

Ever since spending a bored evening or two flicking through dire TV movie soft porn in my misspent youth, I’ve been consistently amazed at the ease with which a bad director can turn the sight of two attractive ladies pleasuring each other into a thoroughly repulsive spectacle, and whilst I don’t think Jean Rollin is a bad director, that is the impression his alter-ego M. Gentil seems determined to create here, as Coeur and Morel set to on the carpet, pretend-grinding their way through a variety of laughably unnatural positions with a distinct lack of enthusiasm.

(Sorry, I’m not giving you any screengrabs of that – gotta draw the line somewhere for chrissake.)

Anyway, things take a more curious turn after the girls finally call it a night and head to bed, as the apartment is infiltrated by two Fantomas-esque masked female cat-burglars (later revealed as none other than Catherine and Marie Castel), who wrap Michelle up in a carpet and kidnap her, all as Joëlle snoozes on oblivious! Good grief.


So begins the gradual unravelling of a convoluted yet excruciatingly simple-minded storyline concerning the villainous schemes of one Malvina (Brigitte Borghese), a decadent aristocrat who runs some sort of underground sex cult, using blackmail to coerce wouldbe libertines into becoming her unquestioning slaves. Or something.



With her theatrical manner and seemingly inexhaustable wardrobe of ludicrous outfits, Malvina - who looks a bit like a ‘60s Nico gone to seed - is clearly the most potentially interesting character in this movie. In one of the few scenes to evoke the delirious spirit of Rollin’s better work, we see her out on the front lawn, clad in some kind of bizarro black bodystocking based funeral attire, blasting away with a handgun at a collection of department store mannequins.




Eager weirdo-movie fans will doubtless be crying out for more of this sorta thing, but sadly it’s not to be. Back at the shack, Joëlle has hooked up with Michelle’s ‘friend’ Mark, a randy devil of a tousle-haired hippie whose chief interest in life seems to be forcing himself upon any woman within grabbing distance as often as is humanly possible. I’ll admit, I found it pretty hilarious in ‘Jeunes Filles..’ when the characters decide to find time for a good night’s sleep and a hearty breakfast before setting out to rescue their friend from the clutches of criminals hiding out in the garden shed, but here Joëlle and Mark’s complete disinterest in their kidnapped friend becomes both callous and excruciatingly boring, as we’re forced to endure them hanging around the flat fornicating every which way for what seems like hours, their simulated hetero sex so achingly drab it makes the earlier lesbian scene look like a masterpiece of eroticism by comparison.


That said, another potential highlight - for sleaze/trash fiends at least, although frankly who else would bother watching this in this day and age? – emerges after Malvina’s cult sends a counterfeit maid (sans panties) to ‘spy’ on Joëlle and Mark. Unsurprisingly, this ‘spying’ seems to consist primarily of instigating an interminable threesome, but sparks really start to fly when a genuine maid turns up. Joëlle moves to intervene in the ensuing melee, but no says Mark, looking on with a smirk - “let the best woman win”.





Fly me the French way indeed!

I realise I’m probably making this sound like a pretty fun movie thus far, but seriously, I’m all out of stuff worth talking about now. That’s yer lot. Barrel’s empty.

What is so frustrating about ‘Tout le Monde il en a Deux’ isn’t so much that Jean Rollin should make a bad movie – after all, received wisdom suggests that all of his subsequent sex films are pretty anonymous, dispiriting affairs. Rather it is the fact that ‘Tour le Monde..’ is so packed with HIS FAVOURITE STUFF, and yet the directorial engagement necessary to make something worthwhile out of it all is so shockingly absent.

Feuillade style cat burglars dancing across the roofs of Paris? Occult sex rituals, masked libertines and fighting French maids? Joëlle Coeur and the Castel twins all running around ready to bare all? A whole stately home to run riot in, and production circumstances that presumably allowed a certain degree of financial and creative freedom? By rights this movie should have been the most joyous explosion of Rollinesque pulp delirium on record… but like a grumpy kid on Christmas day crying in the corner whilst his shiny new toys lie untouched, the director’s heart clearly just wasn’t in it.


Admittedly, the film also suffers from a few additional drawbacks compared to its predecessor. Unless he was working under a pseudonym (I suspect not), Jean-Jacques Renon’s reliably lively photography is notable by its absence, and the cold, drained colour palette that takes its place seems a weird and unwise choice for a sex film.

Also lacking is a proper soundtrack, or even decent sound editing. Proceedings could have been livened up no end by letting a regular Rollin collaborator like Pierre Raph or Philippe d'Aram have a bash at the score, but instead audio accompaniment (Art Ensemble aside) is confined to a handful of horrifically insipid library cues that splutter into life seemingly at random between long, awkward silences. Total mood-killer.

That the storyline (credited to Rollin and regular collaborator Natalie Perrey) is nonsensical and the acting atrocious is practically a given for a film like this, but in this case there is little charm for the flimsy scenarios to fall back on, and the dialogue in particular is forehead-slappingly dire – so many opportunities for outrageous pronouncements or ribald witticisms missed as characters instead just blunderingly state the obvious, staring straight to camera, looking bored out of their skulls.


For all this though, the lion’s share of the blame still has to fall on Rollin’s direction. Somewhat lugubrious at the best of times (oh, those long walks), his preferred style of filmmaking is never really one which is liable to liven up dreary, impersonal subject matter, but even so I have rarely seen a film directed with such a palpable sense of despondency as this one; there ya go, I’ve set up the camera, I’m off for a smoke… should we move it now? Oh, might as well give it another few minutes, who fucking cares anyway. Quick zoom into the bare wall before we cut, and… sorted! Next scene! That seems to be the general approach here, and it’s difficult not to picture Rollin yawning between takes, reading the paper as his ‘performers’ grudgingly go through the motions.


Occasionally things seem to grab his attention – framing and lighting in the aforementioned mannequin scene is notably more imaginative than most of the rest of the film, and there are a handful of great, weird shots in the closing ritual/orgy – but for the most part this is soft-porn filmmaking by numbers, and pretty sorry looking numbers they are too – an inexplicable failure, given the potential zaniness of many of the events actually being enacted on screen.

So that’s that really: you’ve got the mannequin shooting stuff, the Castel cat-burglers and the maid fight to tick off your list of ‘stuff I’ve seen’, and Joelle Coëur’s mischievous grin could add an erotic frisson to a documentary about alzheimers sufferers (to say nothing for the rest of her), but beyond that I’m afraid I find little here to recommend to even the hardiest Jean Rollin completist. C’est la vie.

Short Reviews # 3: Other Stuff

Smithereens
(Susan Seidelman, 1982)

Back when I started this blog you probably wouldn’t have put good odds on my praising a movie by one of the creators of the ‘Sex & The City’ franchise, but here we all are to witness me reporting that Susan Seidelman’s independently financed debut ‘Smithereens’ is an absolute blast.

Of the various movies that have leapfrogged their way to ‘cult favourite’ status by capturing the spirit of New York in its magical and volatile late 70s/early 80s prime, ‘Smithereens’, which was shot over a two year period in the East Village, strikes me as one of the most vivid, its low budget and vérité intent giving the film ‘time capsule appeal’ to die for, as Seidelman’s camera tears freely through the streets, apartments, junkyards and nightclubs, largely free of permits or fabrication. It would have been really funny if she’d bumped into Abel Ferrara making ‘Driller Killer’, and they’d ended up in the background of each other’s movies. I’d like to think it was a near miss.

Anyway, first-time screen actress Susan Berman is bottled dynamite here, doing very little acting one suspects as Wren, a perpetually wired proto-Ghost World girl / New Wave refugee in mini-dress and oversized shades, plastering xeroxes of her face onto every available surface as she tries to find a place for herself in the life of the city – both literally and figuratively – and desperately clinging on to any hint of cool or fame.

Richard Hell presumably didn’t need to search too far for his motivation either, portraying a fading, manipulative sleazeball rock singer in what is easily a career-best performance, and our vague love triangle is completed by Brad Rjin, blank as a slate as an itinerant kid from the Mid-West, sleeping in his VW van in a junkyard en route to wherever life happens to takes him.

If ‘Smithereens’ has one drawback, it’s the rather wishy-washy proto-indie melodrama at the heart of the storyline. Seidelman may have had ‘The 400 Blows’ or ‘Bande A Part’ in mind (fresh from film school, the movie’s style and pacing hits those nouvelle vague buttons dead on), but in truth her aimless, drifting characters and their subdued semi-relationships seem more like a blueprint for the kind of sub-Slackerish solipsism that Hollywood started injecting into it’s rom coms and youth dramas in the mid-‘90s tot try to nab a mythical Gen X audience. I dunno why, but I kept thinking ‘Reality Bites’, and then feeling a bit ill.

But that’s small fry really – the strength of the lead performances, and the more genuine desperation that overtakes Berman’s character as the film progresses, keeps us on-message, and what really matters here is that, like its ‘60s inspirations, ‘Smithereens’ is a movie practically exploding with life, every scene dragging us through strange places full of singular people, bright colours and unexpected outbursts of energy and human connection, the camera rushing to keep up with the antics of a charismatic heroine who never hits the ‘OFF’ switch.

The soundtrack is killer too, much of it provided by Glenn Mercer and Bill Million, who formed perennial indie faves The Feelies off the back of the music they initially recorded for this film, and early versions of tracks that went on to form the bulk of their debut album ‘Crazy Rhythms’ sound brilliant here, more fierce and anxious than they ever did on the LP – the perfect accompaniment for watching our frazzled heroine tearing round the chaotic New York streets. Meanwhile, whatever was left of Hell’s Voidoids by the dawn of the ‘80s provide ‘Kid With the Replaceable Head’, one of his best post-Blank Generation tunes, and there’s some great use of ESG’s timeless ‘Moody’ to enjoy too.

There’s so much great incidental stuff in this movie that lives on in the mind after viewing: Rjin sharing a sandwich with a hooker on a cold night, and her king-of-the-junkyard pimp popping up at regular intervals, making increasingly menacing offers to buy his van. Berman desperately trying to muscle into her weak-willed friend’s already woefully over-crowded shared apartment. Hell’s sleazoid punk flatmate trying to put the moves on said weak-willed friend. Just nice little scenes, y’know? Slice of life stuff, but from a way of life that seems strange and special to us now.

Despite its sometimes hokey relationship dramas, there is a raw spirit to ‘Smithreens’ that easily puts it in the top tier of independent American filmmaking from this era. I don’t usually go much on film festival accolades, but it’s no accident that every release of this movie can proudly claim it as “the first American independent film to be selected for Cannes”, and it’s easy to see why Seidelman was on board soon afterwards for Madonna’s ‘Desperately Seeking Susan’, in many ways a bigger budget reiteration of the style and themes of this film.

The Jokers
(Michael Winner, 1967)

I don’t know if anyone can help me out here, but: what IS the deal with Michael Winner? I mean, just the way he managed to crank out dozens of films through the ‘60s and ‘70s, working with some of the era’s most renowned actors on expensive studio films that explored a range of potentially interesting subject matter, and yet… they’re pretty much all crap. And I mean, prior to ‘Deathwish’, he never even had a commercial hit, insofar as I can tell. How did he keep on getting the budgets? Why did people want to work with him? Who knows.

I don’t say this because I hold some personal grudge against the man – after all, some of the greatest directors in history were similarly insufferable blowhards - but simply because I’ve yet to see a film by him that hasn’t been a cack-handed disappointment of one kind or another. Case in point: ‘The Jokers’, in which Oliver Reed and Michael Crawford play a pair of indolent aristocratic brothers who devise a fool-proof plan to steal the Crown Jewels and subsequently return them, thus making a mockery of the English establishment and cementing themselves as heroes of the counter-culture and popular press. Zany hi-jinks and tense, Italian Job-style heist capers ensure, set against a backdrop of authentic Swinging London decadence, with screenplay assistance from future sit-com savants Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais.

What could possibly go wrong? I mean from a start like that my dog could probably make a good movie, and I don’t even have a dog. And yet, Winner somehow manages to turn in a picture that is singularly unlovable. It’s not *awful* as such – Reed and Crawford are reliably brilliant, as are many of the familiar faces in the supporting cast, and there’s enough going on to make for pleasantly diverting viewing if you happened to catch it on TV on a rainy afternoon, but each opportunity to turn the film into the madcap pop art masterpiece it truly should be is shamefully bungled.

Winner’s directorial style here is ugly and rather lumpen, favouring awkwardly framed close-ups and jerky jump cuts over wider, more visually inviting compositions, whilst the kind of local colour and random magnificence that usually livens up even second rate films shot in ‘60s London is singularly lacking amid a succession of drab interiors and party scenes that look like suburban wedding receptions. The city location shooting is pretty good, with chaotic crowd scenes are quite convincingly orchestrated, but even here… London just looks like London, y’know?

Simple though the film’s story is, the plot ends up tripping over itself, slowing down the final act as characters rehash the same details and arguments again and again to no very satisfactory conclusion. There are a few good lines and capers reminiscent of Clement & La Frenais’ better TV work, but if the best thing you can say about a feature film is that bits of it might pass muster in an episode of ‘The Likely Lads’, well… I’ve leave you to finish that sentence.

Worst of all though is that rather than offering any critique of his privileged, self-satisfied and generally dislikeable protagonists, Winner seems to invite us to identify with them as loveable rogues – a disjuncture that can’t help but invite comparison to the director’s own boorish public persona. In fact, the whole film seems to have a particularly nasty strain of low key misogyny running through it, as most obviously expressed in the character of Reed’s Swedish girlfriend, whose lack of English vocabulary is seen to render her a childish simpleton, as the brothers forcibly exclude her from their conversations whilst we in the audience are invited to roll our eyes at her ‘idiotic’ pronouncements. Englishmen in ‘60s movies – and in ‘60s real life I daresay - could get away with a lot of bad behaviour if they had a bit of charm and charisma, but Winner and co seem to have forgotten that latter half of the equation here, giving us a pair of heroes who just seem like conceited oafs waiting for a fall that never comes.

I’m probably exaggerating the negative aspects of the film somewhat – it’s honestly not that bad – it has some good set-piece scenes and is passably entertaining on a basic lizard-brain level. If it’s ever on TV during that aforementioned rainy afternoon it’s probably worth a shot, but like most of Winner’s films, it could have been so much more.

The Hired Hand
(Peter Fonda, 1971)

It’s been over six months since I saw this Peter Fonda directed western at a BFI Flipside screening, and whilst it’s not exactly a ‘drop everything’ life-changer, I still regularly find myself reflecting on how much I liked it.

Beginning as an archetypal ‘hippie western’, it doesn’t take much effort to project a post-Easy Rider resonance onto the tale of Fonda, his best buddy Warren Oates, and a more impetuous younger companion slowly cruising around the American wilderness, idly dreaming of one day making it to California. From the outset, Fonda proves a far more accomplished director than anyone might have expected, exhibiting an almost Terrence Malick-like sense of scope and meditative detail, greatly aided by Vilmos Zsigmond.’s photography, which is so beautiful here it almost brings tears to the eyes, particularly in a stunning psychedelic sequence of swirling, superimposed, sun-drenched landscape shots. Pretty far-out, but striking and unexpected enough to avoid seeming like a goofy period cliché, whilst Bruce Langhorne’s extraordinary soundtrack of droning, Sandy Bull-esque guitar provides a perfect an accompaniment to the visuals, prefiguring both Neil Young’s ‘Dead Man’ score and the expansive rural minimalism of the late Jack Rose’s playing in his group Pelt. Too much, man!

Things take a rather different turn though after Fonda and Oates’ young friend is murdered during a bad night in an unfriendly frontier outpost, prompting Fonda to decide he should face up to his responsibilities and return to the homestead he abandoned seven years ago to go a-wonderin’. The look of anger and resignation in the eyes of his wife (Verna Bloom), contrasted with sight of free-spirited Oates saddling up his horse to head off into the sunset, tells us everything we need to know about the bind this swiftly aging young man finds himself in.

Given that Fonda made this film at the same time that he and his New Hollywood contemporaries were living lives of unparalleled freedom and alpha-male excess, stroking their egos with monstrous works of creative craziness, I was surprised and rather impressed by ‘The Hired Hand’s formal restraint and concentration on simple human drama, and even more so by the way that it sees Fonda offering a persuasive critique of his lifestyle as a Hollywood-hippie playboy, consciously exploring the issues of personal responsibility often faced by men of his age and, generally, coming up with the right answers.

One of the things that is most remarkable about ‘The Hired Hand’ is its frankness in addressing the relationship between Fonda and Oates. Considering that Bloom is the female lead in what is still ostensibly a Hollywood film, her character is portrayed as a surprisingly unattractive figure, whilst the camera’s ‘gaze’ lingers a lot more persuasively on the male leads. As Fonda and Oates swagger around in their fashionably threadbare jeans n’ spurs looking like they’re out for a night picking up chicks at the Whisky-a-Go-Go, Bloom wears the drab, shapeless garments of a genuine agricultural homesteader, her face drawn and prematurely aged, looking like she actually has spent seven years performing back-breaking labours as a single parent in the unforgiving Texas sun. Far from a caricature of a needy/victimised wife though, her character is gifted with a sharp emotional intelligence, and wastes no time in clocking the relationship between the two men, asking her ‘husband’ (if indeed he is able to regain that title after so long in the wilderness) in no uncertain terms whether he wouldn’t be happier sharing a sleeping bag with Warren under the stars than spending the night in her bed.

With the elephant in the room thus revealed, a violent revenge plot emerges from outside to force a conclusion to the three characters’ emotional stand-off, and the film essentially becomes a platonic love story between the two men, with Bloom playing Jules to Oates’ Jim, so to speak. In fact, the shadow of Truffaut’s masterpiece hangs heavy over ‘The Hired Hand’, sharing its deeply rooted humanism and unconventionally honest approach to human relationships, as well as its slow-building sense of tragedy.

Oh, and there’s also some cool stuff with people getting shot and guys riding horses and such, in case you were wondering.

A very good film indeed in my estimation, I think wider recognition and a new audience for ‘The Hired Hand’ would be richly deserved. (Tartan did a big 2-disc DVD release a few years back that you can now get dirt cheap, incidentally.) I certainly won’t be thinking of Peter Fonda as just a pretty face from now on, that’s for sure.

Scala Forever Season.

I don’t know whether I have many (any?) London-based readers, but regardless, thought I’d drop in another quick note before I get back to proper posting later this month, relating to the forthcoming Scala Forever season, which is taking place across numerous venues in the capital through August and September.

Before it was transformed into an extortionately priced and perplexingly cramped mid-level music venue catering to people who REALLY LIKE the sound of the kick drum, the Scala in Kings Cross existed for many years as London’s best-known repertory cinema, famed for its decrepit atmosphere, all night screenings and schizophrenic mixture of arthouse, exploitation and classic Hollywood fare. In a particularly heroic touch, the cinema was apparently forced into bankruptcy in 1993 as a result of a court case brought against it by Stanley Kubrick following an ‘illegal’ screening of ‘A Clockwork Orange’ in defiance of the director’s self-imposed ban.

Although I’m too young to have experienced it firsthand, I’ve heard the Scala hymned far and wide, not least by the unrepentant cinephiles in one of my favourite groups Comet Gain, whose rallying cry of “three Polanskis tonight / you bring the speed and I’ll bring the popcorn” in their song ‘Movies’ would seem to encapsulate the particular charm of this much missed venue.

Perhaps reacting to the current stagnant state of movie-going in the capital, in which the remaining independent cinemas either have to stack up kiddie blockbusters to stay in business or rely on pulling in the ‘80s babies with predictable ‘quote along’ showings of movies every fucker’s seen twenty times already, the great and the good of the city’s film clubs and DVD labels (including BFI Flipside, Cigarette Burns, Arrow/Shameless video, Filmbar ’70 and many more) have put together a sprawling season of one off screenings to keep the Scala name alive.

As you will immediately note when you hit the link in the first paragraph above, the result is a veritable cornucopia of awesome shit, ticking pretty much every box a ‘cult film fan’ (for want of a better term) could wish for. From the chance to watch ‘Phantasm’ or the second ‘..Blind Dead’ movie in a public space at 3am through to a ‘Female Prisoner: Scorpion’ triple bill, rare public exposure for Corbucci’s ‘Il Grande Silenzio’ and Fulci’s ‘Don’t Torture a Duckling’, an inexplicable double bill of ‘Theatre of Blood’ and Bunuel’s ‘Viridiana’, welcome outings for bloodcurdling perennials like ‘Black Sunday’, ‘Santa Sangre’, ‘Beyond the Valley of the Dolls’, ‘Liquid Sky’, ‘Aguirre’ and ‘Valerie..’, a flawed weirdo sci-fi double-bill of ‘The Final Programme’ and ‘Zardoz’, and, well.. I could go on. They’re even showing bloody ‘Thundercrack’ for christ’s sake (good luck with that one).

Needless to say, I’m pretty stoked to see all this going on, and to realise that there are still enough people who share my cinematic proclivities in this town to get an event like this off the ground, and I’ll try to make it to as many of these as my diary will allow. I’ll definitely be stepping out for some of the stuff I’ve never seen before, and will do my best to drag friends along to some of the obvious classics, perchance to enjoy some beers and synapse-damaging good times.

A bit of a pointless post for the vast majority of you who live elsewhere in the world I guess, but just thought I’d flag it up in order to raise awareness, register my enthusiasm and invite anyone else who’s going along to drop me a line if they’re feeling sociable.

Quick Question.

Well you can hopefully see the poll question I've posted above. I picked up a few tickets today for films that are showing as part of London Frightfest over the August bank holiday weekend, and found myself poised over the button that would allow me to drop eleven clams on a chance to see 'The Wicker Tree'.

I've managed to miss all the pre-release publicity, and didn't realise it had even been filmed yet to be honest, so what's the word knowledgeable readers? Forty years later, same director at least? Could it possibly work?

I'll keep the poll open for a few days for a laugh, but I'll probably have to make my decision fairly pronto if I want to get a seat (assuming it's not long sold out already).

The trailer streaming off the website looks nuts, but whether that's good-nuts or bad-nuts remains to be seen.

Sorry for recent lack of updates by the way. Blame summer, in short.