October Horrors #5:‘The Dracula Business’(Anthony de Lotbiniere, 1974)

Originally broadcast as a Tuesday night documentary by the BBC in August 1974, ‘The Dracula Business’ is a thoroughly entertaining forty-five minutes, structured in the ever-popular “this thing happened, also this largely unconnected thing happened” manner beloved of mondo movies and parapsychology paperbacks.

After an (unattributed) playback of the ship scene from Murnau’s ‘Nosferatu’, proceedings begin, naturally enough, in Whitby. “I wonder if Count Dracula found this church yard as odd as I do?” muses presenter and Boris Johnson lookalike Dan Farson. Farson is the great nephew of Bram Stoker no less, and a “renowned Soho character” according to my (extremely limited) online research.

After treating some local children to a round of ‘Count Dracula’s Secret’ ice lollies, Farson quizzes them on their knowledge of vampire lore (chalk that up as “scene you definitely wouldn’t see in a documentary these days” # 1), before he attends a meeting of The Dracula Society at Purfleet (and these guys deemed 1972’s ‘Blacula’ “…the mosty horrifying film of the decade” according to my copy of the soundtrack LP, so they know what the hell they’re talking about). “Haven’t you got even ONE crank?” Farson asks the assemblage of mild-mannered eccentrics somewhat disappointedly.

In an attempt to demonstrate how much these programmes cost to make (gag © Eric Idle/Neil Innes), Farson next travels to Transylvania (“..there IS such a place..”) in present-day Romania, where the production captures some remarkably atmospheric footage, visiting a medieval convent decorated with appropriately infernal frescos, wherein nuns ward off evil by circling the grounds hammering planks of wood, whilst peasant-folk who look as if they could have stepped straight out of a Universal torch-wielding mob meanwhile queue up to kiss a carved icon above a well.

We are even presented with a picturesque rural funeral procession, featured in-between shots of mist raising from the forest, as Farson rambles on in pompous Wheatley/Lee type fashion about the depths of ancient superstition and an apparent “outbreak of Vampirism” that ravaged the area in the 18th century.

Remarkably, the filmmakers even manage to track down a woman – one of the singers at the funeral – who, interviewed against a backdrop of the local cemetery, tells Farson (via an interpreter) that her own father was suspected of being a vampire, and was disinterred and staked by village elders. Beat that for local colour.

Back in London meanwhile, things get a tad sillier, as Farson stalks about Highgate cemetery, musing on some recent cases of premature burial. Jarringly, we then jump straight from Farson recalling some spectacularly grim family tales about the ordeals faced by the Stoker family during a cholera outbreak in County Sligo during Bram’s youth, to the London offices of Lorimer Press, where some eager fanboys are sorting through a huge pile of Euro-Horror posters, preparing “..the latest work on vampire films”.

“Paul Naschy, the hunchback of the morgue!”, one of the guys exclaims happily, drawing our attention to a one-sheet for that very motion picture, which sits atop a fairly awesome French poster for (of all things) ‘Blacula’. I’m not sure who these fellows are (we’re not given their names at any point), but they seem like some cool dudes, with a lot of interesting things to say on their subject – perhaps the 1970s precursors to the Kim Newmans and Stephen Throwers of today?

Arguably somewhat less of a cool dude is good ol’ Michael Carreras, whom Farson corners at Hammer House, where he is checking out a test-pressing of Hammer’s cash-in Dracula LP. Carreras says something about the fantasy horror provided by Hammer being contrasted with “modern horror, more of a social realist document kind of thing..”. “Like Belfast?,” Farson jumps in. “Yes, very much so.”

Next up is Denholm Elliot, who gives us a great recitation of a passage from Stoker by way of demonstrating the “sexuality of vampirism”, following on from his 1968 TV version of ‘Dracula’ (which, on the basis of his hamming it up here, I should probably get around to watching). Elliot concludes his reading with perhaps the single greatest suggestive “HMMMMmmmmm…” ever captured on film. “Did you enjoy the devouring?” asks Farson. “Well, quite frankly, that isn’t really my scene…” responds Elliot.

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any better, we then move to an on-set report from the making of Jose Larraz’s ‘Vampyres’ at Oakley Court. “How stunned my poor old Great Uncle might have been by these scenes,” Farson opines as Anulka and Marrianne Morris lounge naked on the bed waiting for the camera to roll, “and of the hard professionalism that goes into the making of this latest style of vampire film”.

We actually get a great glimpse here of Larraz in action, directing his leading ladies in rather hands-on fashion (“now, you go like that, and then like that, now… that is the thing… you come again, alright, with your hands like this…”, etc), all of which proves absolutely fascinating given the complete lack of ‘making of..’ footage that exists for most Euro-horror films of this era.

Sadly though, the scene cuts quite soon, as we return to Romania for a segment exploring Dracula sight-seeing tours, and plans for the “Count Dracula Castle”, which is to be opened to tourists in the Borgo Pass “hopefully in around 1977”. This in turn leads into a bit exploring the history of Vlad Tepes (“he was cruel, but… he had a certain style”) and the theories that have sought to connect him to Stoker’s Dracula.

Apparently running low on purely Dracula-related material, Farson next moves on to “..the general resurgence in the idea of the occult, which is greater in Britain today than it has been in the past few hundred years”. To pursue this further, he heads to a London sci-fi/fantasy bookshop (“specialising entirely in the occult, science fiction, and the ramifications of the Dracula cult..”), which needless to say looks amazing.

Here, he meets a woman, who, put on the spot by the presenter’s blunt questioning, states that she is attracted the idea of reading vampire novels due the fact she is “feeling rather aggressive” because her has husband left her, prompting her to seek vengeance against him through the form of “fantasy violence”. It’s all pretty awkward, to be honest.

From there, we return to Highgate, where poor old Mr Laws, the cemetery caretaker, is dragged out once again to hold forth on the “Highgate vampire”, Alan Farrant and the unfortunate flap of related grave desecrations that generated so much press in the early ‘70s. (For more on this, see my post here from 2010, featuring a report on a BFI screening of a contemporary news report that covered much of the same ground.)

As ever though, Mr Laws is good value for money. Choice quote: “one person said that he’d seen a horrible grey thing wrigglin’ down the road… all this bloody nonsense, y’know… I had to have the police clear them all off out of it..”.

And so it goes on: “Last year, in Stoke On Trent, a man was found dead in this house, in most extraordinary circumstances”. This leads us into the unfortunate tale of a paranoid individual who apparently died after swallowing an entire clove of garlic in an attempt to ward off vampires – a sad tale, somewhat leavened by the fact that the coroner Farson interviews on the subject has such a wonderful, Donald Pleasance-esque manner he could have fared pretty well in a horror movie himself.

The (rather questionable) Rev. Neil Smith subsequently rambles on a bit about his belief in vampirism and his attempts to exorcise people apparently suffering the attentions of vampires, before Farson states his belief that dabbling with the occult has “assumed the scale of an epidemic in modern day Britain”, travelling to “..the reassuring surroundings of a vicarage in Hull” to discuss the issue with a slightly more grounded clergyman, who again, manages somehow to turn his reflections on prevalence of mental illness encouraged by poking about with the powers of darkness into a highly entertaining turn.

Indeed, if there is anything to be said for the entirety of this confused, digressive and fatuous documentary, it is that it is hugely entertaining throughout - probably more so now than when it was first broadcast. The random insights it provides into pop culture and horror fandom circa 1974 are a delight, and it’s massively over-romantised, alien-coded visions of Northern Romania are likewise quite remarkable in their own right.

A perfect palette cleanser to throw on mid-way through your next Halloween movie marathon, ‘The Dracula Business’ can currently be viewed on the BBC iPlayer here, or via Youtube here.

October Horrors #4: And Now The Screaming Starts (Roy Ward Baker, 1973)

Word of mouth regarding this late period gothic throwback from Amicus (not to be confused with Scream and Scream Again, ‘The House That Screamed’ or ‘And Soon The Darkness’) has never been terribly good, but by jove - just zoom in on the poster and look at that cast; Cushing, Lom, Magee, Ogilvy, Beacham - together at last!

Add to that the new-found respect I’ve gained for Roy Ward Baker after finally watching ‘Quatermass & The Pit’ last year, and it was inevitable that I was going to have to sit down and give this one a try at some point.

And, well, I don’t think I’ll be watching it a second time at any point in my life, I can tell you that. Dear lord, the first half of this thing is a drag.

It’s not that there’s anything wrong with it as such – the age-old “new wife arrives at the home of family with a dark secret” yarn plays out in much the way that tradition deems it should (rendered slightly more contemporary via an additional dose of post-‘Rosemary’s Baby’ pregnancy paranoia) and Stephanie Beacham and Ian Ogilvy are engaging enough as the central couple, even if they’re not given a great deal to do.

The production design meanwhile is grand indeed (making excellent use of the familiar Oakley Court in Windsor, previously seen in these pages in Die Monster Die!, The Reptile and more besides), whilst Denys Coop’s cinematography hits some splendid gothic high notes and Baker’s direction is confident and fluid as ever.

But, at the same time the whole thing is just so… uninspired. Events plod along rather joylessly, everything staying well within the established remit of this particular sub-genre, and the intermittent horror/shock moments are particularly poorly handled. As is so often the case in Amicus’s movies, the “spooky stuff” here – involving mischievous severed hands, eyeless apparitions and sundry other spectral nonsense – is knowingly silly, yet refuses to take the full leap into comedy or surrealism, instead maintaining a dogged pretence of dramatic seriousness that simply makes these scenes seem cheap, opportunistic and – crucially - dull.

Geoffrey Whitehead is very good in his few dialogue scenes as the sinister, birthmark-scarred woodsman who carries much of the story’s menace, but, even if you’re willing to roll with ‘And Now..’ as a kind of dumbed down, Poundland version of Jack Clayton’s ‘The Innocents’, the film’s sub-William Castle “shocks”, which I suspect must have been foisted upon the production from above, generate little tension and make naff all impact.

At least Robert Hartford-Davies’ similarly themed ‘The Black Torment’ from a decade earlier had the decency to summon up an atmosphere of looming, malignant dread to disguise its uneventful storyline, but attempts to achieve an equivalent feel here are ruined by laughable, ‘will-this-do?’ touches like the inexplicable ball of day-time fog that appears to exist solely within the gates of the estate’s tiny family cemetery, whilst the sun shines outside.

As in his similar doctor role in Peter Sykes’ far superior ‘Demons of the Mind’ (’72), Patrick Magee lowballs it here with an uncharacteristically mellow, soft-spoken performance, but things do at least pick up considerably when Peter Cushing finally makes the scene, at about the fifty minutes mark.

Playing one of his fastidious, polite-yet-rude Holmesian investigator roles, and sporting a truly flamboyant hair-piece, Cushing is, as ever, magnificent. When he is on screen, the script’s rather hum-drum mystery plotting momentarily becomes quite interesting, and even Douglas Gamley’s ham-fisted score suddenly gets a hell of a lot better. It feels as if if the whole production team was deliberately holding back the good stuff to impress the Cush, and, following his appearance, there’s a stretch in which ‘And Now The Screaming Starts’ becomes pretty good fun.

For many viewers, one of the most memorable parts of ‘And Now The Screaming Starts’ will probably be the extended flashback that reveals the “primal scene” from which the film’s haunting/family curse has arisen. As with many Amicus productions, this sequence achieves a distinctly nasty, mean-spirited tone whilst holding back (insofar as is possible) on any actual on-screen violence or eroticism, and, though it is certainly more eventful than much of the hour or so that has preceded it, personally speaking I couldn’t really get on with it.

Herbert Lom appears here as Oglivy’s sadistic, decadent ancestor (there are definite shades here of the aristocratic debauchery that opened Hammer’s Hound of The Baskervilles way back in ’59), and, well… I dunno. Maybe it’s just me, but I can never buy Lom when he finds himself in a role that calls upon him to get sleazy. For some reason, people kept casting him in these lecherous, rapey roles in horror films (Franco’s ‘99 Women’ springs to mind), but the inherent dignity and formal manner of Lom’s on-screen persona just makes it feel all wrong, adding an unwholesome, icky sort of vibe to his turn here. Like I say, maybe it’s a personal thing, and I suppose ‘unwholesome and icky’ was very much what they were going for… but it just didn’t ring true for me.

Anyway, moving on, there’s some enjoyably melodramatic dementia to enjoy in the closing stretch of ‘And Now The Screaming Starts’. It’s all very thunderous and Old Testament, and I’ll admit to being genuinely quite taken aback by the scene in which Ogilvy (harking back to his freak-out at the end of ‘Witchfinder General’) actually wrenches his grandfather’s mouldering bones from their coffin and begins smashing them to pieces against the side of his tomb.

I recall that, when covering this film in ‘English Gothic’, Jonathan Rigby runs down an extensive litany of the Freudian imagery underpinning this story, so, presumably this scene represents the point at which Sigmund right have buzzed security and prepared a straight jacket.

Generally speaking though, it’s a real shame that, despite a handful of startling moments like this one, ‘And Now..’ never quite comes together the way it should. After all, we’ve got a great Peter Cushing performance, a fantastic supporting cast, a solid director, relatively lavish production values, a workable old warhorse of a story full of all kinds of potent themes and images… what went wrong?

I’ll bite my tongue and refrain from saying “bloody Amicus went wrong”, but… basically this has the feel of a horror film made by a lot of very talented people who didn’t really have any interest in making a horror film. The half-hearted manner in which tired “shock horror” tropes are exploited feels condescending – token gestures that, though Baker and his collaborators may have initially factored them in to appease the producers, nonetheless leave those of us in the cheap seats feel like we’re being played for fools, which is always a drag.

If – like many early ‘70s British horrors – the film had opened up and included a bit of humour, campiness or outright craziness, we perhaps could have shrugged this off and enjoyed a laugh alongside the filmmakers, but, given the prevailing tone of dour seriousness, we simply end up feeling as if we’re having our time wasted – and what feels like a hell of a lot of it too, given that the film’s most compelling performer doesn’t even turn up until over halfway through the run time.

Though ‘And Now..’ is not an objectively terrible film by any means, it is one that clearly has no particular enthusiasm for the genre tropes it is exploiting, and little reason to exist beyond wringing a bit more cash out of British horror’s swiftly fading box office popularity. As a result, it’s almost up there with ‘Curse of the Crimson Altar’ in terms of its wasted potential, and probably best filed under “worth watching once, but don’t get yr hopes up”. Ho hum.

October Horrors #3: Inquisition (Jacinto Molina, 1977)

 Believe it or not, I’ve never really been a big fan of the whole witch hunter/tortures of the Inquisition sub-genre, in spite of the fact that I seem to have spent half my life watching examples of it. As such, I have held off investigating Paul Naschy’s inevitable entry in the “religious hypocrisy is explored, meanwhile naked ladies get bits cut off them” sweepstakes for quite some time, feeling that it would most likely prove a somewhat unedifying experience.

Now, don’t get me wrong here - of course I’m a big fan of Naschy and I love many of the wild n’ wooly horror movies he starred in unreservedly. But, I found myself thinking, is there really anything worthwhile he could contribute to the kind of heavy, historical subject matter necessitated by a project like this, beyond just another dose of imitative, ‘Mark of the Devil’-style sadism..?

Well, let’s just say that I hang my head in shame for underestimating El Hombre Lobo, because it turns out Naschy actually had a great deal to bring to the table here, and, assuming one can overlook the fact that it is at least partially cobbled together from reheated bits of ‘Witchfinder General’ and ‘The Devils’, ‘Inquisition’ is a far better, and far more sincere, film than many might have anticipated.

In fact, when Naschy - using his birth name Jacinto Molina - took the plunge and began directing his own films in the late 1970s, he departed significantly from the kind of goofy monster rallies we might reasonably have expected of him. Instead, Naschy/Molina met the collapsing market for independent horror films in the second half of the decade head-on with a series of unexpectedly challenging projects, including the ’10 Rillington Place’-esque serial killer film ‘The Frenchman’s Garden’ (1978) and the bizarre medieval morality tale ‘El Caminante’(1979). First in line in this apparent attempt to reinvent himself as a more serious filmmaker though was perhaps the jewel in the crown of this strange, transitional period in his career – ‘Inquisition’.

Although he was stepping behind the camera for the first time, Molina’s direction here is extremely confident, arguably achieving more professional results than any of the men who had helmed his projects up to this point. Apparently inspired by such works as Polanski’s ‘Macbeth’ and (inevitably) Michael Reeves’ aforementioned ‘Witchfinder General’, Molina establishes a tone that is sombre, stately and doom-laden right from the outset, utilising well-choreographed crowd scenes and carefully composed long shots to establish a genuine feel for the lingering mediaeval barbarism of the rural 17th century setting.

The director is aided in this by some exceptional production design; Molina was apparently a stickler for historical detail, and his collaborators do him proud here with an impressive range of costumes and set dressings that, along with the oppressively dense, earthy tones of Miguel F. Milá’s cinematography, combine to create a brooding atmosphere of febrile menace and mud-splattered feudal poverty.*

Though the film is, shall we say, deliberately-paced, Molina’s tale of a trio of beleaguered witch-hunters trespassing upon the hospitality and inner secrets of an isolated French community threatened by the approach of The Black Death remains sufficiently compelling that boredom never comes knocking (which is certainly more than can be said for some of Naschy’s earlier movies) and, once the story gets underway, it heads off in some unexpectedly interesting directions.

Though character development remains minimal, and much of the acting here is as emblematic and old-fashioned as you’d expect of a pulpy historical yarn, Molina nonetheless does a good job of exploring the social and economic tensions boiling beneath the surface of the story’s myriad witch finder/church/landowner/peasant relationships, all explored in an admirably straight-faced manner that rarely boils over into melodrama.

We probably shouldn’t go too far in trying to play up ‘Inquisition’s “seriousness” however; there are of course still plentiful clichés and random bits of silliness here for euro-horror fans to enjoy. We might for instance ask how the witch hunters, whom we saw arriving in town on horseback with no luggage, nonetheless manage to outfit a local dungeon with a magnificent selection of massive wooden torture instruments within a few days of their arrival -- and indeed, the ensuing scenes of misogynistic torture are as gratuitously exploitative as you might imagine.

Early in the film, Molina proves he is not above letting his camera linger over the naked bodies of some surprisingly buxom plague victims, and, once the witch findin’ gets underway, the torments inflicted upon one young blonde victim in particular top anything in ‘Mark of the Devil’ for sheer, eye-watering excruciatingness. (Those who have seen the film won’t need reminding of the details; I’ll leave the rest of you to find out for yourselves.)

As in Jess Franco’s surprisingly-decent ‘The Bloody Judge’ (1968) though, this sort of thing is more of a gruesome sideshow than anything else – a sop to the more bloodthirsty horror fans in the audience, perhaps – and the imprisonment and torture of innocent victims thankfully never becomes the main focus of the narrative.

Speaking of Franco, ‘Inquisition’ has often been accused – most recently by Jonathan Rigby in his book ‘Euro-Gothic’ – of following the pattern established by 1972’s utterly daft The Demons in terms of taking a mixed up, “have yr cake and eat it” approach to the witch hunter sub-genre, inviting us to condemn (whilst also revelling in) the sadism and hypocrisy of the inquisitors, whilst simultaneously portraying witchcraft and black magick as a genuine supernatural threat.

Though developments in the second half of ‘Inquisition’ – wherein heroine Catherine (Daniela Giordano) falls under the sway of the local witch cult and embarks upon a campaign of vengeance against Naschy’s lead inquisitor – are certainly suggestive of such a conclusion, I nonetheless believe this is a misguided and superficial reading of the film, and one that Molina actually goes to great lengths to avoid, as attentive viewers will hopefully note.

Admittedly, Molina/Naschy is treading a delicate balance here, and some may feel that the character he plays, who is initially painted as a cruel religious fanatic, becomes a tad too sympathetic in the final act (an indulgence perhaps to the actor/director’s usual “tragic monster” persona), but, by and large, ‘Inquisition’ just about manages to hold fast to a consistent worldview throughout.

Crucially, effort is made to establish that the film’s Black Mass sequences – which are totally way-out and awesome, by the way, complete with Naschy pulling double duty as His Satanic Majesty – can be seen as hallucinations on Catherine’s part; more restrained, earth-bound festivities lent an extra kick by the sinister psychoactive brew administered to her by the cult’s intimidating head crone.

Catherine’s other ‘visions’ meanwhile, including the one in which she sees her lost lover murdered by assassins under Naschy’s command, are thus rendered equally suspect; more the result of ideas placed in the head of a desperate and suggestible woman than bona fide supernatural sign-posts. (Giordano, it should be noted, delivers an excellent performance here, powerfully conveying her character’s unravelling mental state without ever overdoing it.)

In order to further untangle the film’s intentions for the audience, ‘Inquisition’ also introduces a character – the wise, liberal minded local doctor, played by Eduardo Calvo - who essentially functions as a mouthpiece for the filmmakers, criticising the proto-fascist behaviour of the witch hunters, whilst also patiently explaining that they are a symptom of the very same atmosphere of religious fanaticism and social inequality that has  pushed women toward the far fringes of this society, leaving them with nowhere to go except into the arms of a newly re-vitalised witch cult.

Whilst the inclusion of such an obvious “mouthpiece” character sounds rather fatuous on paper, in practice the doctor’s presence as a moral barometer within a long, complex film full of compromised, unsympathetic characters is actually very welcome, and Calvo is a strong enough actor to sell the part convincingly.

The ideology he espouses meanwhile will be familiar to most students of the European witchcraft mythos as part of a compelling – if rather fanciful – line of thought that runs through such texts as Margaret Murray’s ‘The Witch Cult in Western Europe’ and Jules Michelet’s ‘La Sorcière’, and films stretching from Eiichi Yamamoto’s extraordinary ‘Belladonna of Sadness’ (1973) to Robert Eggers’ The Witch (2016), all of which seek to some extent to reframe the witchcraft phenomenon as a kind of quasi-feminist rebellion against a repressive Christian patriarchy.

(Quite how well these bold ideas can be squared with the misogynistic violence exploited elsewhere in the film is of course a matter for debate, but veteran Euro-horror viewers should be used to rolling with the punches when it comes to these kind of mixed messages.)

Viewed within this framework, ‘Inquisition’s conclusion, in which Naschy’s character - a befuddled puritan, his acts noble in his own mind but abominable to the world at large – finds himself burned to death next to the former object of his lust/love, now howling with derisive laughter as her kamikaze quest for vengeance reaches its conclusion, actually represents a uniquely twisted spin on the usual, over-familiar witch hunter narratives.

Despite the best efforts of Calvo’s doctor, we are left with the impression of a world gone mad, unsure how we should be feeling, or where our sympathies are supposed to lie – certainly a more unsettling mixture of emotions that those who think of Naschy purely as some cheap-jack werewolf guy would ever have thought him capable of evoking.

Why, it’s almost enough to make us overlook the fact that, when his character is wheeled out to meet his fate with a shaved head, white smock and square-jawed, teary-eyed countenance, Naschy is “doing” Oliver Reed in ‘The Devils’ just as shamelessly as he had previously “done” Chaney, Lugosi, Karloff et al in his earlier films. Well, you can’t keep a good horror-man down I suppose, even when the weight of history, religious philosophy and high art comes knocking.

Whilst it clearly can’t hold a candle to Reeves or Russell, ‘Inquisition’ is still an extremely impressive achievement in its own right, despite its somewhat imitative agenda. In fact I think I would rate it as the single best entry in the “second division” of witch hunter movies I have seen to date. Needless to say, if you are at all interested in any of this stuff, it is well worth your time. (Mondo Macabro's recent blu-ray release is splendid, by the way.)

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* A mainstay of ‘60s spaghetti westerns who moved on to home-grown horror pictures in the ‘70s, the range of Milá’s credits as a cinematographer is such that he could probably claim a certain amount of credit for establishing the uniquely “earthy”/brown-heavy look that defined much Spanish horror – a look that perhaps reaches its apex in ‘Inquisition’.

October Horrors #2: Creature From The Haunted Sea (Roger Corman, 1961)

 Though Roger Corman is often celebrated for the prolific output and gift for last minute improvisation he demonstrated through his early years as a director, the further one digs into his catalogue, the clearer it becomes that the results of his working methods were, to put it kindly, a bit of a mixed bag.

True, he made ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ in two days, and the result is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. On another occasion however, he had some time left over after shooting ‘Battle of Blood Island’ and ‘The Last Woman On Earth’ back-to-back in Puerto Rico, so he persuaded some of his cast and crew to hang around for a few days and made… this.

Set during the aftermath of the Cuban revolution – pretty damn topical for 1961, then - ‘Creature From The Haunted Sea’ begins with Corman regular Anthony Carbone doing his best Bogart impression in the role of an unscrupulous American pleasure boat captain who finds his vessel commandeered by a bunch of loyalist officers and soldiers who, on the run from Castro’s rebels and with a substantial percentage of the nation’s treasury under their “protection”, are keen to hightail it to South America ASAP.

Hip to the fact that his new passengers are in carrying a substantial stash of loot, Carbone and his crew of comedic layabouts decide instead to lead the Cubans on a wild goose chase of the islands whilst they pick them off one by one with the aim of taking possession of it. But, how do they pick them off one by one without the survivors getting suspicious? Well, naturally they contrive to make the ‘accidents’ look like the work of a Gillman-esque sea monster, using fake teeth marks, foot-prints, monstrous roars and so forth… which is all just dandy until a *real* sea monster shows up!

Now, I’m well aware that the movie I’ve outlined in the last two paragraphs sounds like an absolute hoot (hell, it’s certainly original, if nothing else). But, sadly, that just makes it all the more dispiriting to gradually realise that ‘Creature From The Haunted Sea’ is categorically lacking in anything even remotely hoot-worthy. I mean, seriously, seeing the guy who played the doctor in ‘The Pit & The Pendulum’ doing Bogie is honestly about as close as it gets to a highlight.

Scriptwriter Charles B. Griffith does his best to inject some rib-tickling wise-guy humour into proceedings, and the voiceover that fills us in on the action early on contains a few good zingers (“the Cuban treasury was now in the gentle hands of Renzo Capetto, the most trustworthy man ever to be deported from Sicily..”). The fact that this moderately amusing spiel is limited to voiceover, and presumably added in post-production, however speaks volumes.

When it comes to the stuff that was actually unfolding in front of Corman’s camera in Puerto Rico, evidence suggests that Griffith – assuming he was even involved at this stage – had no more idea of what the fuck was actually supposed to be going on than anyone else present. Most of the cast seem confused and disinterested in the material, with at least some of them giving the impression of only vaguely being aware of the fact they’re appearing in a movie at all, reciting dialogue that was presumably being fed to them from behind the camera with a bare minimum of enthusiasm.

Needless to say, the monster-suit featured here is a real “all time worst” contender even in terms of zero budget ‘50s matinee flicks, an immobile, boggle-eyed effort that looks hilarious in publicity stills, but proves a dead loss in the movie itself… which presumably accounts for the fact that in the end it is barely used, with the whole ‘monster’ angle just kind of fizzling out for most of the run-time.

To be honest, I was never really sure whether we were supposed to be looking at the story’s ‘actual’ sea monster, or the ‘fake’ sea monster that Carbone and crew made to scare the Cubans… although I will at least cop that the finale in which it addresses that question by making a triumphant return and pretty much *killing everybody* was agreeably demented (if not quite up to the high standards set for such things by Del Tenney’s ‘Horror of Party Beach’ a few years later).

Meanwhile, future ‘Chinatown’ screenwriter and New Hollywood legend Robert Towne also stars here as “Sparks Moran”, an undercover U.S. government agent who keeps his radio set hidden inside a can of frankfurters. Once again, it is my sad duty to report that, even when this kind of weird business is afoot, hilarity stubbornly refuses to ensue.

By the time our crew hits shore and the comic relief guys get themselves ‘native wives’, one of whom is named “Mango”, it was all over for me, I’m afraid. I just about made it to the end credits before the wall of sleep crashed down, but with the best will in the world, ‘Creature..’s sixty seven gruelling minutes of nothing-in-particular made me feel as if I’d been confined to the sofa for days.

Well, whatever - I’m sure everyone had a good time hanging out on that yacht in the Caribbean for an extra weekend before schlepping it back to Hollywood. If this movie were to have a saving grace, it would probably be the sheer chutzpah it must have taken for the usually conscientious Corman and his collaborators to offer the end results up to the viewing public - like a lazy schoolboy handing a torn, scribbled scrap of paper to the teacher as homework.

For those who were in on the joke, it must have been beyond hilarious to actually see this thing ending up in cinemas. Personally though, I wish they could have dropped the pretence and just released a home movie of their holiday instead – I honestly think I would have found it more enjoyable than this sorry excuse for a fictionalised entertainment.

October Horrors # 1: Werewolf of London (Stuart Walker, 1935)

During the Second World War, American studio horror films (and Universal’s efforts in particular) managed to boil themselves down into a set of formulaic clichés that have come to broadly define the idea of “cheesy horror films” in the popular imagination ever since.

That much we know, but the shadow cast by eight subsequent decades of monster movie branding makes it easy to forget that, a full decade before Glenn Strange was stomping about in the Frankenstein get-up and some mad scientist was trying to decide which brains to put where whilst the torch-wielding mob knocked on his door, many of the first wave of American horrors from the early/mid 1930s were far more unpredictable and just-plain-weird than this reductive set of clichés would suggest - and not just the designated classics helmed by Whale, Browning, Freund and Ulmer either.

My theory, y’see, goes that, during the pre-war years, studio directors and writers who found themselves assigned to a horror picture were obliged to strike out in all kinds of tentative new directions, faced as they were with a new, commercially popular genre for which no easily replicable template had yet been established. For a few years at least after the runaway success of ‘Frankenstein’ and ‘Dracula’, the thinking seemed to be that a big part of what pulled the punters in to see these movies was the sheer novelty of their subject matter – that oh-so-bankable “nothing-like-this-seen-before-on-the-screen” factor.

Rather than merely seeking to imitate those earlier hits therefore, Universal and the other studios seemed to want their boys to crank out some genuine ‘Shock of the New’… and mad-as-a-barrel-of-bats pictures like ‘Werewolf of London’ were the inevitable result.

As everybody knows, it was Curt Siodmak’s script for 1941’s ‘The Wolf Man’ that basically laid down the law for all future cinematic werewolves, pretty much inventing the werewolf mythology we now take for granted, and, as such, it feels all the more surprising to go back a further six years and discover that Universal’s first – commercially unsuccessful - stab at a werewolf movie completely ignored the monster’s origins in European folklore, instead pulling together elements of “exotic” orientalist adventure fiction, newly minted Frankensteinian mad science, slight echoes of ‘abominable snowman’ mythos and a hefty dose of Jekyll & Hyde to tell a very different tale of lycanthropy.

Written from scratch by John Colton and producer Robert Harris (was this the first Universal horror that didn’t even pretend to follow any literary antecedent?), we’re essentially talking here about a werewolf story that involves excursions to remote Himalayan valleys, rare night-blooming flowers, sinister underground networks of lycanthropy sufferers, electronically-generated artificial moonlight, hints of faux-Buddhist mysticism, octopus-tentacled man-eating plants, Jack The Ripper-style Victorian London skulduggery, and… well, you get the idea.

It’s all great stuff, and, watching for the first time, I went through most of the film with absolutely no idea where it was all going next -- which is a lovely feeling when it comes to a genre movie made over eighty years ago.

On a more prosaic level meanwhile, another thing ‘Werewolf of London’ has going for it in the weirdness stakes is the casting in the lead role of Henry Hull – a prolific character actor who here delivers a very convincing impression of a granite-jawed, hammer-headed lummox entirely devoid of human feeling.

Seriously, Hull’s character – a pioneering botanist and plant-hunting adventurer - is so rude to everyone he encounters during the film, it’s a miracle he has any friends or supporters at all, let alone a beautiful wife (Valerie Hobson from ‘Bride of Frankenstein’ and ‘Kind Hearts & Coronets’) to ignore and belittle, a whole garden party full of wealthy associates to offend, and a luxuriously appointed mansion house/botanical gardens/laboratory set-up in which to receive them.

Though Hull never becomes an out-right villainous character (in the vein of Peter Cushing’s Frankenstein, or the roles Michael Gough played for Herman Cohen in the ‘60s), he nonetheless comes across as a conceited, self-centred asshole, and much of ‘Werewolf of London’s failure to engage with audiences over the years has retrospectively been blamed on the film’s decision to present them with such an entirely unsympathetic protagonist.

Personally however, I’ve never much cared for this “central character must be sympathetic” jive that critics sometimes fall into, and I very much enjoyed the way that Hull’s perpetually enraged presence makes every conversation in the film feel spectacularly awkward. This allows ‘Werewolf of London’s idle chatter-filled dialogue scenes to side-step the usual blandness and expositional drag, instead filling the movie with pregnant non-sequiturs, uncomfortable silences and “well… I suppose I’d better be going then…” type moments, all of which I found most amusing.

(To be honest, Hull seems like such a goddamned weirdo, it’s easy to believe that few of these emphases were actually present in the script – it’s as if the other actors just had no idea how to react to him.)

Speaking of weirdoes meanwhile, the somewhat more likeable Warner Oland is also on hand as the inscrutable Dr Yogami, essentially offering a slight variation on the Charlie Chan character he played in dozens of sixty minute programmers through the 1930s. Though supposedly a more villainous figure than Hull’s character in terms of the storyline – not to mention racially offensive on more levels than can be calculated without the help of a spreadsheet – Oland’s faux-Asian quack doctor is a veritable teddy bear compared to our leading man, which leads once again to some very strange cognitive dissonance in terms of the way business is conducted on-screen.

Though ‘Werewolf of London’ is nothing special in terms of artistry or atmosphere, Stuart Walker’s direction is breezy and fast-moving, most of the film’s performances are lively and Hull’s transformation into an inadvertently rockabilly-styled wolfman is a hoot (sacrilege though it may be to say so, I think I actually prefer the make-up job here to Jack Pierce’s work on the ’41 Wolf Man). It’s all just such a wonderfully imaginative load of cracked, b-movie fun, it is impossible not to enjoy it on some level – so if you’ve previously overlooked it, I’d definitely recommend giving it a shot at the nearest opportunity.

For a perfect case study in what went wrong with horror movies between the mid ‘30s and mid ‘40s meanwhile, just try contrasting ‘Werewolf of London’ with its quasi-sequel, ‘She Wolf of London’ from 1946 - a sixty minute programmer so utterly lacking in interest that I can honestly believe it was concocted as part of some studio in-joke to try to drive audiences home to bed before the main feature came on.

I was going to do a separate review of ‘She Wolf..’, but… there really is nothing to say. I might just as well review the carpet in my living room. If, like me, you’ve got both of these movies on a double feature disc, please do yourself a favour and just skip the second one entirely. Hell, watch ‘Werewolf of London’ again instead – you’ll be happier that way, trust me.

October Horror Marathon:Intro.

 As I have opined in these pages in past years, whenever October rolls around, as the nights draw in and we feel the chill in the air, I tend to find myself looking at other blogs and websites undertaking pre-Halloween marathons and “30 horror films in 30 days” challenges and suchlike, and feel a tinge of jealousy as a result of the fact that October is also a time of year in when I am usually really f-ing busy with a lot of tedious and draining, non-horror/Halloween-related things.

In all likelihood, this year will be no exception – indeed, obligations and flagged emails are already starting to pile up. But – this time, I’ve planned ahead. Despite the annoyances of sunshine and low-level frivolity, August and September actually proved pretty good months for mainlining horror movies, and thus I’ve managed to stockpile a stack of draft reviews to give myself a head start. So, whilst I’m not realistically going to be able to manage a post-per-day leading up to Halloween, I hope I will at least be able to average one horror movie review every two days through the coming month.

Given the time pressure under which they are being written, I can’t necessarily guarantee carefully polished prose, insightful observations and so on, but I will do my best. Expect about 75% first time viewings, leavened with reflections on a few old favourites, and perhaps even some documentaries, TV episodes, shorts and stuff thrown in for good measure. Mostly old/classic era stuff, but perhaps some newer bits and pieces too – we’ll see.

Well, whatever happens, I hope it will all help to get you in the mood for whatever depraved bacchanal festivities you have planned for All Hallows, and for an enjoyable winter of guttering candles, macabre tales and walks in the leaf-strewn cemetery more generally.  

Posts beginning tomorrow, so stay tuned!

Nunhead Cemetery photograph credited to 'Martin Brewer', respectfully stolen from here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

Deathblog: Harry Dean Stanton (1926-2017)

 Well, so long Harry Dean.

What can we say about the man that hasn’t exhaustively been said elsewhere, or that isn’t immediately made obvious through watching him on screen?

The cult bit-part actor who was so great at being a cult bit-part actor that he blew the whole deal and hit the mainstream, becoming a universally beloved icon of.. whatever it is the mainstream ain’t got; the taciturn barometer of realness in the black heart of Hollywood fakery; the inscrutable zen cowboy sensei; the living embodiment of that old chestnut about there being “no small parts, only small actors”; the kind of guy who could fill you with a dozen different mixed up feelings just by walking on-screen, looking straight to camera and saying a few words; the face of a man who could stare down to collective weight of all the world’s bullshit and tell it where to get off, before returning to whatever he was doing before it interrupted him… and probably did so on a regular basis for all we know.

At some time, to some people, he was all those things, but around here we’ll remember him above all for his immortal performance in ‘Repo Man’, providing the perfect ersatz father figure for the punk generation.

The last time I checked, there were something in the region of about 11,000 different things I like about ‘Repo Man’, but high on the list following my most recent viewings is the unspoken realisation that seems to overcome Otto when he falls under Bud’s tutelage: man, there’s nothing new about any of my shit AT ALL.

I could do all the quotes, but… you know ‘em, I’m sure. If you don’t, learn ‘em. For that role alone, he was one of the greats, but beyond that, I for one am sad that the potential total number of those “fuck yeah, it’s Harry Dean Stanton” moments discerning viewers of American films live for has now been capped forever.

R.I.P. H.D.S.

Old New Worlds: September 1965.

To further mark the recent passing of Brian Aldiss, I thought it might be a good idea to revive my long-neglected ‘Old New Worlds’ thread [click on the ‘New Worlds’ tag below to view earlier posts] to cover the issue that was once, long ago, lined up as the next instalment – an issue that, as luck would have it, is almost entirely dedicated to Aldiss and his work.

At this point in time, New Worlds had largely dispensed with interior illustrations, meaning that this issue contains relatively little scan-worthy material, but we do at least have the wonderfully bizarre, unaccredited cover illustration (is it a photo, some kind of collage..?), whose distorted, sensuous landscape seems a clear reflection of editor Michael Moorcock’s campaign to gradually move the magazine’s aesthetic reach beyond the confines of the stylised spaceships and meteorites that were gracing its covers just a few months earlier.

This seems to lead neatly into a short ‘appreciation’ of Aldiss by Edmund Crispin, which kicks off issue # 154.* Crispin here crowns Aldiss “The Image Maker”, drawing an interesting distinction between science-fiction (which “..can be good even when its visualisation – of a Martian, a metropolis, a mutant – is relatively sketchy and commonplace”) and science-fantasy (in which “..the quality of the visualisation is the all-important thing”), and crediting Aldiss as one the most gifted proponents of the latter strain, despite his embrace of the surface trappings of the former. “Aldiss has a painter’s eye”, Crispin concludes. “Compared with him, almost all other sf writers (take the ‘f’ whichever way you like) work in black and white.”

In his editorial meanwhile, Moorcock gets a little more personal in his praise;

“Apart from being admired for his talent, Brian Aldiss is also amongst the most well-liked of sf writers; charming, ebullient, fluent, not unhandsome, a gourmet and man of good taste and humour, he is as interesting to meet as he is to read. His criticism, in The Oxford Mail and SF Horizons, is intelligent and pithy, matched only by a few.”

If that weren’t enough, we even get a third, quite lengthy, appreciation of Aldiss’s work, from Peter White, who muses;

“However much he may attack the priggish inhumanity of bureaucrats, moralists, and politicians, and suggest that we should take life as it comes, he always deals with sadness more vividly than joy, and his very choice of subjects is mournful. Many of his heroes […] are intelligent plebeians; too repressed to be earthy, and without the well-bred grace to be aristocratic. Filled with a vague sense of loss, they search for a better life. Nearly every one of his major novels takes the form of a quest without any real conclusion. Perhaps it is this that makes his writing seem so valid to the world now, where the bright lights, dark and crowded dance halls, high-speed along the bypass, casual sex and beat music, all seem like drugs to keep us going until we can get hold of something real.”

White also sees fit to note that Aldiss was born in Norfolk “within a stones throw of F.L. Fanthrope” (no prizes for guessing in which direction he might have preferred the stones to be thrown).

For all these fine words though, perhaps the most pertinent summation of Aldiss’s approach to life in this issue comes from the man himself, who is quoted by White as follows;

“I wish to continue to write as I want, and to be published, and to earn a reasonable income, and perhaps in this way to make a contribution to the rich and wonderful culture into which I was born and which, despite all its horrors, never ceases to delight me day by day.”

Gifted as we now are with the knowledge that that is indeed what he continued to do for over fifty further years, I feel this is as good an epitaph as any for what I am certain was a life well spent. R.I.P. Brian.

Elsewhere in this issue’s non-fiction pages, ‘James Colvin’ (previously unmasked in these posts as a beard for editor Moorcock himself [note the initials]) waxes lyrical on the qualities of J.G. Ballard’s recently published ‘The Drought’:

“It is an intellectual and visionary novel of marvelously sustained power and conviction, […] reminding one constantly of the burning landscapes of the best surrealist painters. Its approach to Time and Space produces a sense of the ultimate merging of physics and metaphysics in that intensely individual way of Ballard’s, where grotesque, tormented characters inhabit and reflect a bright nightmare world that is at once unreal and yet real in the sense that it totally convinces on the level of the unconscious, cutting past the defenses of the outer mind and reaching the core of the inner mind, evoking responses that the reader did not know he had and, perhaps, does not understand even as he experiences them.”

Significantly, the talented Mr. Colvin pops up again elsewhere in #154 with what perhaps could be interpreted as one of his own humble attempts to evoke similar responses in his readers - a sixteen page story named ‘The Pleasure Garden of Felipe Sagittarius’.

Described in Moorcock’s editorial as “an experimental story of a kind [Colvin] believes hasn’t been tried before and which, he says, is ‘meant to be enjoyed, not studied’”, this story actually turned out to be an extremely important turning point in Moorcock’s writing.

Beginning with the image of ‘Minos Aquilinas’, “the top Metatemporal Investigator in Europe” clambering through the war-torn ruins of an alternate-world Berlin, the story posits that murder has been committed in the unnaturally verdant garden of the city’s police chief, Otto Van Bismarck, and that Bismarck’s personal assistant, one Adolf Hitler, is up to his neck in suspicion.

Also factoring in appearances by Kurt Weill, Albert Einstein and Eva Braun, and presenting the titular Felipe Sagittarius as a cultivator of lethally hallucinogenic, erotically scented greenery, this extremely strange first person detective story may be sketchy in the extreme, but it nonetheless introduces us – possibly for the first time – to the kind of temporally/spacially unmoored dystopian vignettes that would go on to define the style of the Jerry Cornelius mythos that Moorcock unleashed a few years later, as well as prefiguring the pungent aesthetic decadence that would characterise his experimental fiction as a whole, and even hinting at the kind of perverse alternative history scenarios that would increasingly predominate in his work through the ‘80s and ‘90s.

Clearly recognising the story as a bit of a ‘skeleton key’ work in this respect, Moorcock later revised it (under his own name, natch) when he came to compile his series of “Eternal Champion” compendiums in the early 1990s, re-christening the protagonist as a member of his Von Bek dynasty and placing it in the very first volume of the series, alongside several much later novels.

Confusingly, there was also a third iteration of the story at some point, this time with the narrator identified as “Simon Begg”, but, leaving such delving into the labyrinths of Moorcock’s literary revisionism aside for now, it is certainly a thrill to see ‘The Pleasure Garden..’ appearing for the first time here, hot off the presses and straight from the young editor’s fevered brain.

*A gentleman of of widely varied talents, Edmund Crispin is probably best-known for his series of ribald comedy-mystery novels, including ‘The Moving Toyshop’ and ‘Unholy Orders’, which I can highly recommend. Wikipedia also informs me that he wrote the score for The Brides of Fu Manchu, of all things, as part of an extensive composing career under his birth name Bruce Montgomery.

Deathblog: Brian Aldiss (1925 – 2017)

This is a somewhat belated Deathblog I’m afraid, but I actually recently learned of the death of Brian Aldiss, who passed away last month, one day after his 92nd birthday.

Although I don’t currently know enough about Aldiss’s personality, private life or beliefs to discuss him on that level, or to really miss his presence on earth in an emotional sense, I have nonetheless been in the process of familiarising myself with his core science fiction novels over the past couple of years, and have been enjoying them immensely.

Of course, ‘Frankenstein Unbound’ (1973) was always one of my favourite time/reality-bending ‘headfuck’ novels from back in my teenage years, and I’ve always enjoyed Aldiss’s short stories here and there, but, more recently, I’ve caught up with ‘Non-Stop’ (1958), ‘Hothouse’ (1962) and ‘Greybeard’ (1964), and can recommend all three in the highest possible terms; in fact I think you’d be hard-pressed to find as excellent a trio of SF books completed by any author within a five year period. Needless to say, I have a small pile of other Aldiss’s lined up to read in the near future, beginning with 1969’s presumably somewhat psychedelically-inclined ‘Barefoot in the Head’.

Though Aldiss never really crossed over into mainstream success or cult legend in the manner of Dick, Ballard, Kneale or Moorcock, his combination of wildly unhinged imagination, rich aesthetic vision and genuine literary chops increasingly make me feel that he really deserved to.

Frankly, I can only assume it was only the highly varied and profligate nature of his output – combined perhaps with the square/low key nature of his public persona – that keeps him confined to the dusty hearts of the hardcore SF crowd, rather than filtering through to Penguin Classics lists, student bookshelves and conferences about what it means to be “Aldiss-esque”.

Seemingly a veritable writing machine throughout his life, Aldiss’s work also encompasses vast quantities of literary fiction, criticism, essays, auto-biography and miscellaneous non-fiction, not to mention his successful trilogy of saucy, quasi-autobiographical ‘Horatio Biggs’ novels – all of which I am, again, not currently well placed to comment upon, but I can at least point you in the direction of Christopher Priest’s excellent obituary for The Guardian to fill in the gaps.

For the lack of anything else to add, I’ll simply treat you to a quick gallery of various Aldiss paperbacks that I currently have scattered around my shelves. They’re not necessarily always the most attractive designs that graced his books (although I love the Four-Square ‘Earthworks’ cover), and they’re definitely not in the best condition for the most part, but I hope they might at least give newcomers a feel for the breadth of his SF writing and the challenges it posed to cover designers.

(Dates given below are for the edition pictured, not the dates of original publication. Cover artists are all unknown/unaccredited, sadly.)

(1967)

(1974)

(1976)

(1965)

(1968)

(1982)