The Owl Service (Peter Plummer, 1969/70)

Perfect viewing for chill British autumn (even though it’s set during the summer), I’ve recently found myself revisiting the 1969 Granada TV adaptation of Alan Garner’s ‘The Owl Service’, scripted by the author in collaboration with director and producer Peter Plummer.

Although memories of this series and its accompanying aesthetic have been extensively excavated by the Ghost Box/hauntology mob in recent years, to the point where it’s become a pretty obligatory signifier of ‘that sorta thing’, Garner’s story still holds a special place in my imagination. I’m far too young of course to have seen the series when it was first broadcast, or even when it was repeated in colour during the ‘80s.* At some point during my childhood though, my dad decided to read the book to me as a bedtime story – an endeavour he was forced to abandon about a third of the way through, because it was scaring the bejesus out of me.

I remember being completely engrossed by the tangled mystery of the whole thing – the magical dinner plates, book-destroying telekinetic outbursts, rediscovered medieval frescoes and creepy Celtic myths – but at the same time, it was clearly all a bit much for me. Used to dealing with far more straightforward narratives, I just didn’t know what to make of it all. You know that feeling - of being absolutely fascinated by the possibilities that these disparate elements seem to imply, yet terrified by the dark secrets that might be revealed in the process? For me it all started here.





Apparently my dad was under the impression that it was a children’s book – indeed, it was published as such. Many aspects of the story though - from the stifling atmosphere of familial conflict, to the deeply uncomfortable sexual undertones and the quite complex treatment of the class and ethnic identity – strike me as decidedly grown-up.

Raised in the Welsh countryside and sometimes subject to broadly similar concerns, ‘The Owl Service’ holds an obvious resonance for me, but it sticks with me above all because it provided me with perhaps my first real exposure to the kind of unresolved, emotionally resonant mystery that I’ve ended up prizing above all things in film and literature, and that has subsequently led me to Lovecraft, Machen (an unavoidable touchstone here), Nigel Kneale, David Lynch and any number of incomprehensible European horror films.

One of the things that most struck me when revisiting the TV series is how perfect the casting is. Each of the actors, simply in manner and appearance, is a perfect encapsulation of the kind of archetypal figure he or she is portraying… as I suppose befits a story in which modern, self-motivated individuals find themselves pushed into assuming inescapable roles within a reoccurring cycle of mythic fate; a kind of pre-gothic romantic tragedy imposing itself upon the contemporary world, even as its participants struggle not to succumb to their attendant stereotypes.

Every gothic of course needs a tempestuous female focal point, and I doubt Gillian Hills ever bettered her performance here as Alison, her character unmoored and never quite settled, shifting scene by scene between a manipulative brat, a childlike innocent and a naïve, natural mystic tapping into some undefined, destructive force. Although Gardner’s story remains rather coy about such things (the direction and costume choices in the TV series somewhat less so), it is clear that Alison, much like Mia Farrow’s character in ‘The Secret Ceremony’, is in the process of being simultaneously defined and strangled by her emerging sexuality, torn between the pull of childhood and adulthood, and unsure how to deal with either.

Hills herself had of course experienced what we can only assume was a pretty tempestuous teenhood, having allegedly been scouted out by Playboy at the age of 14(!), she appeared in Roger Vadim’s ‘Les Liaisons Dangereuses’ in 1959 before playing the lead in classic Brit-exploitation flick ‘Beat Girl’ a year later. It’s certainly pretty unnerving seeing her convincingly playing a seventeen year old in ‘The Owl Service’, a full decade after her first starring role and several years after her brief but memorable turn in ‘Blow Up’ helped open the floodgates for full frontal nudity in international cinema, and it’s probably not that much of a leap to assume that she incorporated some of the anxieties of her recent past into a fairly astonishing performance here.




It goes without saying I suppose that such a character should become ground zero for an old-fashioned ‘possession’ narrative – one of the many generic threads that makes up ‘The Owl Service’s distinctly odd fabric, and one that could (some would probably say should) have been merely implied by the series, rather than thrown straight at us. Garner and Prosser’s decision to literally depict Alison’s possession is still one of the most startling aspects of the series, and must have seemed outright astonishing in the context of British TV in 1969, when such supernatural grotesquery very much did NOT sit at the same table as the ‘serious’, Pinter-esque drama of the rest of the series.



As Alison’s opposite number, the ill-fated Michael Holden (who died under mysterious circumstances in a London bar in 1977) is also very good as Gwyn – his character something of a representative of a new amalgamated Welsh identity, smart and sensitive and looking to move beyond his roots in the inward-looking rural working class - a late-blooming Welsh counterpart to the Northern heroes of the late ‘50s kitchen sink new wave novels, perhaps? Whether by accident or design, Gwyn also ends up becoming the only fully welcoming, sympathetic presence in the story. Not that any of the other characters are outright dislikeable, but as in any well-composed character drama, there are no villains here. All of them embody a certain mixture of sympathy and threat - as in Pinter, we feel sorry for them in their assorted misfortunes even as we recoil from their assorted minor cruelties. But somewhat uniquely here, we also feel anxious about the damage they might wreak on the unfolding narrative itself. Will Clive’s well-meaning conniving or Roger’s frustrated bullying stir things up too quickly, forcing the dissolution of the status quo and derailing the ‘investigation’, before the secrets of the house and the land beneath it can be revealed…? Not that they’ll ever be revealed, we implicitly understand, but still, somehow, we must know, dammit.



Maybe I’ve just been watching too many cheap horrors recently, but it’s nice to encounter a story in which secondary and purely ‘functional’ characters gradually move beyond their allotted roles, attaining unexpected depth - one dimensional orges unfolding like a kaleidoscope as the psychic battles heat up. Gwynne’s mother Nancy, excellently played by TV actress Dorothy Edwards, is particularly noteworthy in this regard, as she gradually opens up about the personal history that led her back to the house, providing one of ‘The Owl Service’s several reminders that we should never be too quick to dismiss a character as a sour-faced fishwife or an empty-headed lunk - for even the most utilitarian fictional placeholder can hide revelations as vital as those of our fiery protagonists and instigators, if only the pen and camera dare grant them time.


Witness the exemplary presence of moron/sorcerer Huw Halfbacon, played by veteran Welsh actor Ray Llewellyn, through whom ‘The Owl Service’ attains a level of cracked, sinister poetry. Reminiscent of the italicized, uknowable jabber mouthed by Lovecraft’s characters in their last moments, the cadences of his outbursts still raise goose-flesh, and have clearly touched many legions of psyche-folky souls over the years, passing into the wider lexicon of those who’d seem to evoke the essence of this particular cultural backwater. “I am a stag of seven times, I am a fire upon a hill,” he exclaims at one point, stumbling backward against a gnarled treetrunk, possessed with a startling mixture of fear and exultation; “I am a hawk in the sun’s tears, I am the wolf in every mind!” Stirring stuff indeed.



Likewise, the decision to never show the character of Alison’s mother on-screen is unusual and strangely effective - emblematic of the numerous odd, seemingly random decisions made by the TV adaptation. There is no immediate practical reason why we shouldn’t see her, but as the other characters constantly discuss her and act upon her thoughts and wishes, she becomes an ever more imposing, almost fantastical presence in the narrative, always watching and commanding, always unseen.

On a more prosaic level, I really liked the strict colour coding of the story’s central trio – Alison = red, Gwyn = blue/black, Roger = green. You probably don’t need to spend too long consulting works on emotional symbolism to figure out what’s going on there, but apparently the colour scheme was devised to mirror the then-current conventions of electrical wiring (red=live, black=neutral, green=earth I believe, but best not put it to the test by asking me to rewire any old plugs), helping to explain Gwyn’s otherwise slightly perplexing comments about plug wiring in the early episodes, and also casting interesting light (so to speak) on the fact that the house in which the story is set still lacks mains electricity – a decision taken by Alison’s mother to preserve its historical ‘authenticity’ – a stance mocked by Roger when he complains of the ‘phoniness’ of rigging up an electrical doorbell for guests.




Aside from anything else, this colour-coding provides a great example of the lengths the production team went to get the most the most out of the new colour TV technology, cramming just about every shot with bright primary colours and rich natural textures, to the extent that some of the costuming in particular has an almost absurd, hyper-real quality to it, hammering home the red/blue/green dynamic until it becomes unmistakable even to a casual viewer.

Shot on 16mm film rather than the video that swiftly became the norm for colour TV productions, ‘The Owl Service’ easily overcomes such over-indulgences, and the series overall has a beautifully grainy, kinda timeless look to it that easily matches up to most late ‘60s feature films. Although very much OF its time, the aesthetic of the series seems to OWN its time rather than being owned by it, if you see what I mean.



Above all though, rewatching The Owl Service got me thinking about WHY these kind of open-ended spiritual mysteries – confusing, esoteric stories with no crowd-pleasing gimmicks and no satisfactory conclusions - were so popular on British TV during the ‘70s. Penda’s Fen, The Stone Tape, Children of the Stones etc. – it is genuinely extraordinary to think that there was a time when these troubling works were broadcast to the nation on ITV and BBC1 – the shadows of Arthur Machen and William Morris writ large across prime-time entertainment. Why, of all things, would the nationally broadcast TV series – that most conservative and closely scrutinised of media – become such a willing conduit for this kind of deliberately inexplicable product..? Was there something in the air during these years? Something in the water at Television Central?




I suppose that, much like ‘Twin Peaks’ in the USA all those years later, the success of ‘The Owl Service’ (and ‘Quatermass’ and ‘The Prisoner’ before it) proved to TV programmers that this kind of demanding, elusive drama can serve to grab the public’s imagination far more powerfully than the usual dumbed-down logic would tend to assume – a lesson that we could well do with relearning, if the past few decades’ utter collapse of creativity or expertise in British TV is anything to go by.**

And speaking of ‘Twin Peaks’ (gratuitously comparing stuff to ‘Twin Peaks’ being a bit of a preoccupation of mine it seems), the similarities – conscious or otherwise – between ‘The Owl Service’ and Lynch & Frost’s series are surely worth a mention. The nexuses of fairytale-like imagery that feature heavily in both series, repeated and expanded upon with almost ritualistic regularity as the story progresses; the sublimination of unspeakable sexual and familial troubles into supernatural form; the carefully-guarded secrets passed between members of a small rural community, understanding that they must ‘protect’ themselves from some force they sense but can’t really define; the forest-dwelling idiot-savant…. could ‘Twin Peaks’ owe more of a debt to vintage British folk-creep than is generally appreciated?

After all, the unsettling conclusion to ‘The Owl Service’ only serves to remind us of what ‘Twin Peaks’ states aloud: the owls are not what they seem.


*Shot in colour on 16mm film to show off the possibilities of incoming colour TV technology – and looking absolutely beautiful for it on the DVD - ‘The Owl Service’ was initially broadcast in black & white due to some kind of union dispute with technical staff.

**I know, I know – I’m sure those more forgiving of modernity can point me toward X, Y and Z that’s really, really good, but after so long without watching TV just turning the damn thing on gets my back up. I mean, do they not even have editors any more? Every programme looks like they’ve just fed the raw footage into some sort of application that turns it into generic cheesy montages and reaction shots fitted to canned music and… I’m sorry, I could go on for days…

The Mirror of Dionysos by Ralph Comer(Tandem books, 1969)

Unusually for one of the forgotten paperbacks I feature here, I’m actually halfway through reading ‘The Mirror of Dionysos’. When I glanced at the first page and saw that the book opens with the protagonist getting into a sticky situation over Dunstable in his state-of-the-art glider, I couldn’t resist taking the plunge.

Reading on, it soon becomes clear that Ralph Comer is an enthusiastic proponent of what you might call the ‘info dump’ style of writing - bulking up the word count by merrily throwing in incidental digressions on a wide variety of subjects as the mood takes him. In the opening chapters alone, Comer holds forth on the ancient history of the Aylesbury and St Albans, the lifestyles of contemporary Fleet Street journalists, recent developments in vertical take-off rocket technology, Roman history, Chinese philosophy and the author’s distaste for family-orientated chain restaurants. Rather than making things meandering and dull as you might expect though, this technique actually works quite well in maintaining a level of constant, ambient interest – rather like flicking through old Sunday supplements in a doctor’s waiting room.

Once it gets going, the story itself has a reassuringly crazy sort of feel to it, beginning with the case of a man who appears to have been placed under a curse by some sort of coven of neo-Nazi, ancient Rome-obsessed witches (look forward to the big reveal about what makes them tick). Basically, every time this unfortunate fellow falls asleep, he finds himself inhabiting the body of a disgraced Roman gladiator who is about to enter the arena to be torn apart by wild animals – the resulting wounds manifesting on the man’s ‘real’ body when he awakes. Discovering that any items placed in contact with the victim’s body will also be ‘transported’ back in time, our heroes come up with a brilliant plan to send him back armed with several smoke bombs and an experimental jetpack to aid him in his escape!

Although published in ’69, Comer’s book has an exquisitely ‘70s feel to it, painting a world populated by selfish career-men who refer to each other by their surnames as they zoom around in Triumph Spitfires, engaging in hanky panky (“..and before I knew it I was giving her a right going over..”) and ordering large brandies in Charing Cross pubs. (“Cullender had a lager and lime.”, notes one short but perfectly formed sentence.) So far, there’s been one scene set in a subterranean hippie club where attendees lay around in a stupor staring at flashing lights 24 hours a day, and another at a swanky fashion industry party, featuring a ‘pop group’ floating in a perspex box and ‘dollybirds’ dishing out champagne.

Far from a great work of literature, ‘The Mirror of Dionysos’ would nonetheless have made for an absolutely cracking, action-packed horror movie along the lines of ‘Scream and Scream Again’ or ‘Dracula AD 1972’. Dashing photojournalist Robert Lawson could have played by somebody like Jon Finch or Ray Lovelock, and Christopher Lee would have been an absolute shoe-in for the obsequious and overbearing occult expert Harry Cullender. Maybe they could have got Valerie Leon or Caroline Munro as interfering, witchy next door neighbour Isadora Martin? Not that I’ve got to the bit where she’s revealed to be a witch yet, but OF COURSE SHE’S A WITCH.

It looks as if this is the last of three Lawson & Cullender novels Comer wrote between ’68 and ’69 (the other two are ‘The Witchfinders’ and ‘To Dream of Evil’), and it’s a shame he didn’t get around to doing some more really – regardless of leaden prose, rampant chauvinism and Reader’s Digest-level research, ‘The Mirror of Dionysos’ is a hoot.

SKULL TIME: Thee Fourth Annual Stereo Sanctity / Breakfast in the Ruins Halloween Mix Tape.

(Cross-posted with the other place.)

Well I could hardly yet this much loved (by me at least) blogging tradition slip, could I? No further explanation needed, I hope.

Accidental themes that emerged whilst compiling this year’s Samhain offering: (i) a general preoccupation with zombies, voodoo and the like; (ii) a slight shift away from fun pop tunes toward more genuinely creepy atmospherics and hair-raising metal nastiness (although there’s still some great examples of the former too); (iii) the first volume in this series with no Ramones.

So without further ado…

SKULL TIME!

1.“welcome to the castle”
2.The Misfits - Skulls
3.Cheater Slicks – Night of the Sadist
4.The Recedents – Zombie Bloodbath on the Isle of Dogs
5.Drunks With Guns - Zombie
6.Destroy All Monsters – You’re Gonna Die
7.Claudio Simonetti – Demons
8.German Measles – Olivia’s Eyes
9.Nile – The Nameless City of the Accursed
10.Jeffrey Lewis & Peter Stampfel – I Spent the Night in the Wax Museum
11.The Ventures – The Bat
12.Curse – Killer Bees
13.Bruno Nicolai – Funeral Striptease
14.“exorcising a curse”
15.Swamp Witch – Emerald Serpent
16.Anaal Nathrakh – Carnage
17.The Girls At Dawn – Evil One
18.Mater Suspiria Vision – The Ring
19.“god at the crossroads”
20.LA Vampires & Zola Jesus – No No No
21.The Wee Four – Weird
22.Black Time – I’m Gonna Haunt You When You’re Gone
23.Exuma – Dambala
24.“home for tea”
25.Roky Erickson & The Explosives – I Walked With a Zombie


(N.B. – In case anyone wants to turn this into an actual, physical CD, I’ve enclosed some printable artwork in the .zip file – just send the enclosed .jpg to print as a landscape A4, and bob’s yr uncle.)

Argh.

I was planning to get this blog back on track this week with a series of exciting paperback posts.

Unfortunately though, my printer/scanner has undergone some pretty severe trauma this evening, and is now sitting by the front door in several pieces whilst I try to figure out the best way to dispose of it.

As usual, there's at least a thousand different things I'd love to write long and erudite posts about, but lack of time means that's not gonna happen.

At a loss for any other kind of content, why not enjoy this trailer for the 1980 Roger Corman/Barbara Peeters joint 'Humanoids from the Deep', as released in the UK under the title 'Monster'? Saw this at the start of an old VHS last weekend, and thought it was pretty funny... (particularly the conspicuous lack of any monsters)...

Jesus on the Mainline: Learning to Love Jess Franco.

Back in the early days of this blog, when I was still pottering about on the outskirts of the big, humid jungle that is weird European cinema, I made a few derogatory remarks about the work of Jesus ‘Jess’ Franco - remarks that I now largely regret, and would like to withdraw.

Sorting out my DVDs and VHSs prior to moving house last month, I discovered that I have no less than twenty two movies directed by Franco on my shelves – more than I own by any other filmmaker by a considerable margin. (Jean Rollin probably comes second, with about 17 titles not includes duplicates – I know, I’m a walking cliché.) Given that I probably acquired around half of these films whilst I was still under the impression that Franco was about the shoddiest, most consistently disappointing director in the business, an examination of the strange phenomenon of Franco Fandom is surely called for.

I still probably wouldn’t list Franco in the top rank of my favourites directors – the number of his movies I own is more a reflection of the vast number of movies he MADE than anything else. I’m sure if Orson Welles or Fellini or whoever had banged out ten features a year through their careers, they’d probably be giving Jess a run for his money re: distribution of my disposable income. But all the same, I have grown very fond of his films.

I’m sure at least some of you will be able to relate to way that Franco exerts an influence upon cult film fans similar to that exercised by the irresistible supernatural seductresses who populate so many of his movies, leading on hesitant victims against their better judgement, luring them ever deeper into his strange and fascinating realm – an island principality cut off from all the norms of conventional cinema, functioning according to its own set of primitive laws. Beyond the barriers of kitsch, beyond the limits of boredom…

Unlike the on-screen seductresses, he hopefully doesn’t end this initiation into exotic new pleasures by KILLING US, but what can ya say, it gets pretty close at times.


Back in 2009, I began my review of Rino Silvestro’s ‘Werewolf Woman’ (a review I’d pretty much wholly like to disown, btw) by foolishly vowing that I would give up watching Jess Franco films. The existence of this post tells you how well that particular resolution went. In that review, I singled out the 1969 flick Kiss Me Monster for particular scorn, recalling how my first viewing, on comfortingly crappy Redemption VHS, annoyed the hell out of me, prompting the kneejerk “well fuck THIS guy!” reaction that Franco neophytes are sure to experience at least on their first, ooh, six or seven times out the gate.

Nowadays, I can tell you in a flash that ‘Kiss Me Monster’ is one of the so-called ‘Red Lips’ films, two light-weight efforts Franco knocked out in collaboration with producer Adrian Hoven to capitalise on the notoriety that lead actress Janine Reynaud had gained in 1967’s far more elaborate Necronomicon (aka ‘Succubus’) - perhaps the closest Franco ever came to critical/arthouse recognition (which probably wasn’t THAT close, but hey, it caused a bit of a rumpus on the festival circuit and presumably made a ton of cash). Even by Franco standards, the ‘Red Lips’ films (the other is Sadisterotica) are slipshod, opportunistic affairs that must have served to completely undermine whatever cineaste cred he’d temporarily acquired from ‘Necronomicon’. Beginning as broad spoofs of the then fading Euro-spy genre, the movies introduce Reynaud and co-star Rosanna Yanni as a pair of ditzy secret agents involved in comic book-style espionage capers, but swiftly degenerate into a typically Franco-esque mass of blathering, inexplicable nonsense, essentially functioning as extended injokes/laff-fests for Franco, Hoven and their pals.

Back when I picked up the VHS though, I didn’t know any of this. All I knew was that it was called ‘Kiss Me Monster’, and had a picture of a woman in a tuxedo and fishnets playing a saxophone on the front. Maybe I’d heard the name Jess Franco bandied around, but I didn’t really know anything about him – so let’s throw this on and see what he can do, eh? Next thing I remember is sitting there 70 minutes later, thinking, what the hell just happened?

‘Kiss Me Monster’ indeed! Not only was there no monster, I don’t think there was even any kissing. In fact there wasn’t much of anything. It wasn’t a horror film, it wasn’t a sexploitation film, it wasn’t a spy film, it certainly wasn’t an ‘art’ film in even the vaguest sense of the term, it seemed to be aiming for comedy but wasn’t very funny - it was just… nothing. The whole thing fell out of my mind, like a dream too dull to bother remembering. A day later, I probably couldn’t tell you a single thing about it, other than that it made me feel like I’d been clubbed on the head and knocked out cold for an hour or so. What a bunch of crap. Who does this guy think he is, throwing together this random pile of leftover footage, calling it a movie and expecting us to pay to see it?


Fast forward to late 2010, when I decided to revisit ‘Kiss Me Monster’ to see if it was really as bad as I remembered – a key moment in my indoctrination into the cult of Franco. Essentially my reaction was very similar to the first time round – I still sat there dumbfounded when ‘FIN’ abruptly popped up, barely able to remember, let alone understand, what had just transpired. The difference is: this time I loved every minute of it. The random, improvisatory drift of the film, the wacky laziness and sly, garish humour – sitting there on the sofa with a whisky cocktail, I had an absolute blast. The wonky, cut & paste jazz soundtrack? The scene where the characters drive to some sort of shack on the edge of a cliff, discover a dead body, laugh uproariously, and indulge in terribly choreographed kung-fu with some kind of villain? The bit where one of the leads gets gassed and wakes in up in cage, slave to some sort of lesbian crime boss who seems to live in a greenhouse, but actually she doesn’t really mind cos she’s kinda into that? Suddenly it all made sense. I had entered a Jess Franco State of Mind, as the name of a weblog dedicated to the man’s work would have it. Like any higher state of consciousness, entry took some effort, but I’d cracked it.

In trying to explain the singular appeal of Franco films, I will inevitably find myself falling back on the same handful of arguments that his supporters have been using for years. Foremost amongst these is the idea that there is no *definitive* Franco film. Although his work maintains a stylistic & thematic consistency that marks him out (for better or worse) as an ‘auteur’ in the classic sense, he is a director who has never made a masterpiece. Even his very best films are flawed and erratic, usually giving the impression of being frustratingly incomplete. There is no one Franco flick I could pull off the shelf to try to turn someone into a fan – to the neophyte, watching pretty much any of his films will prove a confusing, disappointing experience. Watch enough of them however, and you’ll start to realise that these films are less stand-alone artefacts, more like additions to the vast river of imagery that comprises Franco’s artistic legacy – theme, genre, tone and quality ebbing and flowing across the decades like the tide.


Through generations of Film Studies text books and critical consensus, we’ve been taught to accept the idea the ‘auteur’ whose films are carefully constructed, deliberate statements, reflecting his/her artistic intentions. An appreciation of Franco’s oeuvre, however, involves throwing that notion outta the window from the outset, and preparing instead to enter the headspace of a director who basically doesn’t seem to give a damn about the final product of his labours, never mind the form in which they’re eventually placed before an audience.

Of course, Franco is far from alone in the ranks of directors who seem to make films for their own personal gratification, indulging their passions to the n-th degree and hoping an audience will share them. But whilst most classically ‘indulgent’ directors (from Fellini to Tarantino to whoever) presumably extract the most pleasure from assembling and evaluating their work in the editing room, or from witnessing the initial reactions of an audience in the screening room, Franco instead seems solely concerned with the act of filming itself. Like some weird voyeur or instigator of practical jokes, his satisfaction lies wholly in capturing what’s unfolding before his camera… when that’s over, he’s done with it. All he wants to do is film the next thing, and he wants to do it NOW.

Collaborators speak of Franco directing with an almost AAD-afflicted sense of constant forward momentum – a style that no doubt allowed him to thrive within the world of marginal, DIY productions, where such flippancies as retakes, coverage and continuity are laughed off as pointless luxuries. It also presumably helped him to maintain his prodigious work rate, which seemed to reach critical mass during the early-mid ‘70s, when he was churning out something like a dozen feature films per year, each of them splattered across the grimier end of the international film circuit in with so many alternate titles, in so many alternate versions, that a team of archivists could keep themselves busy for all eternity trying to assemble a comprehensive Franco filmography.

Accounts of how much input Franco had into post-production work on his films seems to vary depending on who you ask, but simply from watching them, it’s easy to get the impression that he just flung the raw footage at whoever was footing the bill and tore off to some other far-flung Mediterranean holiday resort to start filming his next onslaught of languorous, irrational lechery, leaving sleazebag producers and their aides to sellotape the results into a viable 80 minute programmer.

It is this ‘film and be damned’ approach that I think leads to the schizophrenic inconsistency that afflicts all Franco product. Even within the same film, a clear distinction can often be drawn between the scenes Franco was interested in (the sex, the violence, the decadent nightclub scenes and the strange, atmospheric location shots), and the tiresome stretches necessitated by the token adherence to script and continuity, about which he clearly couldn’t give a shit (character introductions, plot exposition, that sort of thing). The former can often explode with stylistic invention and emotional intensity, even as the latter showcase some of the most soul-witheringly dull filmmaking you’ve seen in your life.

Multiply this through the possibility that many of these films have been pieced together by people with little understanding of, or sympathy for, the director’s intentions, and then most likely censored, uncensored, porno-ised, unporno-ised, recut and generally buggered around with by hands unknown for years to come, and the result is a bumpy ride for all concerned.


But isn’t that, in effect, what remains so fascinating about Franco films? Every one of them is like a safari into the unknown. The general shape of his strange world will remain familiar, but the combination of elements within it could literally go anywhere, turning on a dime to leave you by turns baffled, exhilarated, horrified, angry, aroused, bored to tears, actually asleep, disgusted, awestruck, strangely moved or just insensible with laughter. Whatever happens, you’ll be insensible with *something* by the end, that’s for sure.

As such, writing a review of a single Franco film, assessing its relative worth as a discreet viewing experience, seems a pretty futile exercise. Far better I think that I should ramble on much as the maestro himself tends to do, drifting from film to film as the mood takes me, throwing in more general observations on his work wherever they occur to me.

I started writing this post with the intention of making it kind of ‘Franco overview’ precisely along those lines. But seeing as I’ve written over 2000 words already and barely even got started, I don’t think that’s gonna happen in ONE post. So… I guess maybe I’ll start doing a series of posts following particular aspects of his films in some form or other, and we can continue our voyage of discovery in part 2, part 3 etc? How does that sound to you? Good? No? Well ok, I’ll do it anyway. Maybe not immediately (there are plenty of other films I want to find time to write up first), but soon.

So get ready for jazz, machine guns, holiday resorts, Howard Vernon, generalised sexual delirium and lots of naked ladies, soon as I can be bothered to hit the typewriter. And in the meantime, at least I can relax in the knowledge that no one’s gonna stumble over this site’s archives and get the impression I hate the guy.

Recent Paperback Acquisitions # 3: Crime.

(Dell, 1961)

Robert McGinnis cover, first printing, good condition = £2. Eat my dust! (Or fail to give a damn and live a healthy & rewarding life… your choice.)



(Penguin Crime, 1958)



(Corgi, 1960)

Bertha Cool = best detective name ever.



(Gold Medal, 1960)

Why did I not know there was an early ‘60s TV show in which John Cassavetes played a hep-cat Greenwich Village Private Eye…?




(Lancer, 1973)

And a little bit of smut to finish off with:


(Kozy, 1961)

Youtube Film Club: Shaitani Dracula

A couple of years back, Keith Allison of Teleport City posted a review of an absolutely astounding discovery: ‘Shaitani Dracula’, directed by one Harinam Singh.

It’s a great review and a good example of why Keith is one of my favourite film writers - you should read it. Maybe you shouldn’t read it quite yet though – I guess I can’t help but feel that the justifiable hyperbole the review layers upon this singular cultural artefact might spoil the surprise that lies in store for the innocent viewer.

For yes, viewers we shall be. After a conversation with my brother last week in which the subject of insane third world horror movies was broached, we exchanged a bunch of youtube links that led me toward the discovery that, somewhat inevitably, some maniac has uploaded ‘Shaitani Dracula’.

What can I say – everything the Teleport City review claimed of it is true. I could drivel on at length about my picks for the most crazed/note-worthy/hilarious aspects of this… well, I hesitate to call it a ‘movie’ as such… but I’d basically just be treading ground already covered in Keith’s review.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the process whereby weird/’bad’ films can reach a certain critical mass of disjointed abnormality, a point at which they cease to be subject to kind of expectations and judgements we usually apply to narrative cinema, and in fact cease to really function as ‘films’ at all, instead taking on a new life as… something else - some nameless and fascinating form of outsider art that happens when strange people and movie cameras collide?

We may laugh when we see these ‘films’ – often we will laugh uproariously, laugh until we’re blue in the face – but it would be wrong to assume that we are laughing AT them. As someone (Nietzsche I believe, although I’m damned if I can find the quote online, so maybe it was someone else) once observed, laughter exists to fill the space left by an emotion that has died. Thus we laugh simply because we don’t know how else to react to the impossible reality of these things, the fact that not only did human beings create them, they actually placed them before us as prospective entertainments.

‘Troll 2’ is a good example of one of these un-films, ‘Manos: The Hands of Fate’ is another. ‘Roller Blade’ and its sequels, for sure. ‘Awakening of the Beast’. ‘Zombie Lake’ is borderline. I’d make the case for ‘Astro-Zombies’, though some might argue it’s a bit too self-conscious. ‘Future Hunters’ (another Teleport City discovery)! ‘Tales from the Quadead Zone’ anyone..?

Well you get the idea. So let’s just say that ‘Shaitani Dracula’, if not necessarily the most rewarding, is certainly the most extreme example of this kind of un-cinema I’ve ever seen. Either the absolute bottom of the barrel, or the shining peak of the mountain, depending on which way you look at it.

On a more prosaic level, it blows my mind that apparently ‘Shaitani Dracula’ was made in 2006. I dunno – 1986 or 1996 I could have handled, but 2006!? It just seems astounding that this level of naivety could still exist. Not that I’m suggesting that some quantum leap in cultural sophistication has taken place in the past fifteen year or anything, far from it, but, y’know…. we had the internet in 2006. Ok, so maybe people in rural India didn’t ‘have the internet’ as such, but Harinam Singh is evidently the owner of a few shiny 4x4 vehicles, and a movie camera, and whatever kind of resources it takes to get a seemingly endless number of attractive girls to hang out in the woods with him in revealing outfits – I’m sure he could have sorted himself out with a net connection. I’m sure he could have, I dunno… watched some films? Maybe read some Wiki pages on the basics of cinema? Perhaps he could have found a guidebook explaining how to set up his camera properly? But no – apparently he’s a busy man. Instead he just went for it. ‘Shaitani Dracula’ is the result.

So, the time has come. Let’s meet up on the other side, and we can talk about it.

Oh, and look out for the bit with the ducks.

Good luck!



(Purely by coincidence, whilst I was preparing this post earlier this week, I discovered that Todd Stadtman of the Die, Danger, Die, Die, Kill! blog posted a podcast in which he and an esteemed colleague discuss ‘Shaitani Dracula’ at length, alongside the similarly brain-breaking Thai film ‘King-ka Kayasit’ aka ‘Magic Lizard’. It’s a really entertaining and informative listen, throwing in a lot of background info on Harinam Singh, and the kind of culture that led to the creation of this extraordinary film, along with many additional chuckles.)

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.