Nippon Horrors / Horror Express 2020 #10: Kaidan Hebi-Onna /‘Snake Woman's Curse’ (Nobuo Nakagawa, 1968)

 A decade or so after he turned out a series of fairly wacky horror pictures like Ghost Cat Mansion and The Lady Vampire for Shintoho, Nobuo Nakagawa - who had largely retired from directing after directly contributing to the bankruptcy of the aforementioned studio with his 1960 epic ‘Jigoku’ [‘Hell’] - returned to the fray for this considerably more conventional kaidan effort, produced under the unlikely auspices of Toei.

I say ‘unlikely’, because, although they soon would soon go on to cut a bloody swathe across the early ‘70s with some of the most grotesquely violent and OTT genre movies ever made, supernatural horror was never really Toei’s ‘thing’, leaving Kaidan Hebi-Onna [‘Snake Woman’s Curse’] feeling like a bit of a curious one-off.

According to what little background info I can find on the film, the production seems to have originated with writer Fumio Kônami, who apparently told the producers that he would only allow the studio to film his script if Nakagawa (who had not worked in the industry for about five years at this point) was hired to direct. (1)Apparently keen to try to establish a viable kaidan/horror line at the time, Toei acquiesced to the writer’s request, and…. bob’s yr uncle, as we say over on this side of the globe. (2)

Plot-wise, ‘Kaidan Hebi-Onna’ is in most respects a pretty standard, run-of-the-mill kaidan picture - essentially a variation on the old bakeneko (ghost-cat) story, in which a wronged woman returns from the grave with the help of an animal spirit to take her vengeance on the hateful aristocrats who have destroyed her family, only with snakes used as the totem animal this time around instead of cats.

Set (and presumably filmed) somewhere in Japan’s remote far western region, the story opens with an elderly peasant farmer (the ubiquitous Ko Nishimura), practically throwing himself under the wheels of the local landlord’s coach, as he begs for leniency vis-à-vis the repayment of his debts. Needless to say, such mercy is not forthcoming from the venal plutocrat (Seizaburô Kawazu), but, on his death-bed, the farmer is still pleading deliriously for the chance to save his family’s small-holding, uttering the key phrase which will go on to become something of a catch-phrase for the film’s spectral avengers: “even if I have to eat dirt, I will pay you back”.

After the man’s death, the landlord decrees that his homestead will be demolished in order to clear space for the planting of mulberry trees (used in the production of silk), whilst his wife (Chiaki Tsukioka) and adult daughter (Asa, played by Yukiko Kuwahara) are cheerfully informed that they will be taken into service in the landlord’s household, there to ‘work off’ their late patriarch’s debts.

As you might imagine, this is far from an idyllic prospect for the two women. Set to work weaving silk in what basically amounts to a small scale Victorian sweatshop, Asa must work sixteen hour days under the supervision of the landlord’s thuggish, lecherous son (Toei yakuza/action regular and future Roman Porno director Shingo Yamashiro), whilst her mother meanwhile becomes a general domestic dogsbody, bullied and belittled at every turn by the landlord’s sadistic wife (Kurosawa regular and future ‘Female Prisoner: Scorpion’ / ‘Sex & Fury’ legend Akemi Negishi).

Although their fellow servants treat them with kindness, and although Asa still has steadfast fiancée Satematsu (Kunio Murai) waiting for her on the outside, the inhumane treatment doled out to the two women leads them, inevitably, to their sad and undignified deaths. Asa’s mother, significantly, has always made a habit of habit of helping unloved animals (she was nursing a pigeon back to health when the family lost their home), and she is struck down whilst attempting the prevent the killing of a snake which has intruded into the landlord’s house.

As anyone who knows the ‘rules’ of this genre will be well aware by this point, the Big Man and his horrid family had better watch the hell out, as Nakagawa and his crew prepare to get busy with the thunder crashes, gel lighting, stage blood, green-faced living corpses and double-exposed snake effects, for the riotous closing act of vengeance-from-beyond-the-grave.

To Western audiences, these films often play more like ritual re-enactments of familiar folk tales than exercises in contemporary story-telling, which perhaps to some extent accounts for their failure to gain much of an overseas following, as the lack of novelty within their narratives can soon become pretty dispiriting. Once you’ve seen a handful of ‘em, you’ll know exactly how things are going to play out, right from the outset. The only interest comes from seeing how efficiently the filmmakers will accomplish their task, in technical and dramatic terms.

For domestic audiences however, we must assume this would not have been so much of a problem. More accepting of the traditions behind the bakeneko form, and more able to appreciate the more subtle cultural resonances within it, one hopes they would have been able to view each addition to the cycle with fresh eyes. 

(By way of comparison, we can perhaps imagine how a viewer largely unfamiliar with American culture would feel after being sat down and told to watch 25 early ‘80s slasher films. We might love them all for their minor eccentricities and variation on the theme, but to the uninitiated, aren’t they all kind of the same, more or less?)

In some ways, ‘Snake Woman’s Curse’ feels like a case in point in this regard. As eye-rollingly over-familiar as the basic storyline may be, look deeper and some very specific points of departure from the norm begin to emerge. For a start, the film is set during the Meiji era (1868-1912), a time of dramatic change and modernisation for Japan, immediately differentiating it from the more historically static Edo or Tokugawa eras in which kaidan stories more traditionally take place.

Again, domestic audiences would likely have been keyed into this right from the start, as the landlord is seen roaring through his domain in a Western-style coach, whilst his son sports a bowler hat and other foreign accoutrements. The mechanised ‘sweat-shop’ in which Asa is put to work likewise represents a form of industry unknown in pre-Meiji Japan, but whilst the the adoption of these innovations by the film’s villainous aristocrats would seem to indicate an implicit support for the older, folk-based way of life favoured by the hard-done-by peasants, the approach taken by Kônami’s script is, as usual, a little more nuanced than that.

The ambiguous attitude to modernisation and/or Westernisation so frequently encountered in early ‘70s Japanese genre cinema is perfectly encapsulated here via a memorable one scene cameo from Tetsurô Tanba, playing a regional police chief dispatched to investigate the murderous goings on within the landlord’s domain.

Effectively acting as the very personification of modern, democratic state governance, Tanba reduces the landlord to a fit of spluttering disbelief as he calmly undercuts the local lord’s Shogunate-derived feudal authority, daring to suggest that the police may wish to investigate the death of one of his peasants, and that he might even dare to implicate members of the aristocrat’s own family in the process - an absolutely unthinkable prospect for a man born into the strict caste system of the Tokugawa era, and an amusing demonstration of that the way that, however keen the ruling classes may have been to enrich themselves using technological innovations offered by contact with Western capitalism, their understanding of the social and political implications of such development tended to lack somewhat behind.

As you will no doubt have gathered from the preceding paragraphs, ‘Kaidan Hebi-Onna’ is about as politically conscious a kaidan pictures as you could possibly hope to find, taking the age old fantasy of the rural peasantry exacting revenge against their cruel feudal overlords baked into all bakeneko stories, and hammering it home for strongly than ever, applying it to a more nuanced, more realistic and more historically recent setting in the process.

Some might be apt to suggest that the film’s success as a horror movie suffers as a result of this heavy emphasis on socio-economic angst, and indeed Nakagawa’s pacing here is glacially slow, whilst the atmosphere he builds is painstakingly sombre. The inevitable horror ‘effects’ which dominate the final act meanwhile, whilst inventive and fun, are strictly conventional within the genre.

So, we’re definitely not looking at a Friday night horror banger here I’m afraid, but, if you can approach the film in an appropriately sober, arthouse-y frame of mind, Nakagawa’s execution at least is absolutely top notch. Performances are excellent across the board (in addition to the aforementioned esteemed actors, there are also turns from such Toei notables as Yukie Kagawa and Hideo Murota), whilst Yoshikazu Yamazawa’s photography, highlighting the fertile-yet-foreboding topography of Japan’s mountainous Western coast, is beautiful, radiating an overpowering brown n’ green aura which seems to link the earth where the snakes crawl directly to the hallowed afterlife from whence the spectres emerge.

Shunsuke Kikuchi’s score meanwhile is richly evocative, and the carefully wrought production design includes a wealth of great “folky stuff” (songs, costumes, local festival customs) for Japanophiles to enjoy. Most importantly perhaps, Nakagawa manages to imbue the script’s off-the-peg structure with a handful of genuinely haunting, transcendental images which will live long in the viewer’s memory after viewing.

Born in 1905, the director was sixty-three years old as the time of this film’s production, and it would be all too easy to interpret the slower, more meditative direction Nakagawa takes here as the work of a filmmaker trying to establish himself as a more ‘serious’ voice in cinema during the twilight years of his career, after half a lifetime spent churning out rushed 60 minute programmers and battling the studios for budgets.

Unfortunately for us reviewers’ desperate need to try to impose a narrative onto everything however, Nakagawa rather kicked this idea in the nuts by immediately going on to make a brief but prolific comeback as a commercial director in 1969, directing five action/yakuza pictures for Toei in quick succession before, curiously, adopting the pseudonym “Ise Tsugio” in order to make what I presume to be a series of obscure, independently distributed pinku (erotic) titles (ubiquitous S&M / rope torture guru Oniroku Dan is credited as writer on at least one of them). All of these hit cinemas before the year was out, with the director’s anonymity surely somewhat undermined by the fact that they were all proudly produced by his own ‘Nakagawa Pro’.

So, once again, we return to the idea of ‘Kaidan Hebi-Onna’ seeming like a real one-off - an odd, inexplicable diversion in the paths followed by its director, writer and studio. It is what it is, I suppose - but thankfully for those with an interest in this particular overlooked corner of Japanese culture, what it is is very worthwhile indeed.

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(1) An absolutely pivotal figure in the golden age of Toei exploitation, Kônami (1933-2012) went on to contribute to a huge number of the studio’s best and/or most outrageous films from the early ‘70s, including the entire ‘Female Prisoner: Scorpion’ series, Sonny Chiba’s Yakuza Deka movies, the extraordinary Wolf Guy: Enraged Lycanthrope, the horrifying Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs and Kinji Fukasaku’s ‘Sympathy for the Underdog’ and ‘Graveyard of Honour’, to name but a few. 

(2) CREDIT WHERE IT’S DUE DEPT: All background info on the production of this film is taken directly from Jonathan M. Hall’s well-researched commentary track on the 2007 Synapse DVD release.

Horror Express 2020 #9: The Night Eats The World (Dominique Rocher, 2018)

I was kind of in two minds about this one. On the one hand, it certainly starts off strong, as a well-directed and well-shot take on the ol’ zombie apocalypse formula (last-man-on-earth subdivision), with requisite nods to ‘I am Legend’, ‘Night of the Living Dead’ and ‘28 Days Later’ all present and correct, and that gut-wrenching “something dreadful is about to happen” feeling effectively established.

Protagonist Sam (Anders Danielsen Lie), sole survivor of a zombie-crashed house party at his ex-girlfriend’s Paris apartment, initially seems to have reassuringly good survival instincts too - scoping out his surroundings, stockpiling food and weapons and sizing up the abilities of his undead opponents, just as we’d all probably like to think we would in his situation. But, as the film transitions from the straight survival horror of its first act toward a more psychological study of long-term isolation and loneliness, it lost focus and began to annoy me.

Although on one level we’ve got to commend the filmmakers for having the foresight to essentially make a lockdown movie in 2018, their protagonist’s predicament never really rings true (see below), and, well… basically, as we spend more time with the man, and as his actions become more irrational and self-indulgent, we begin to realise that he's actually a bit of a dick. Not in a “the filmmakers are challenging us to accept an unsympathetic protagonist” sort of way either, I should specify, but more of a “this character is the fimmakers’ idea of a relatable, everyday guy, but frankly that guy is a tosser” situation. And when you’re watching a film with only one character, that’s kind of a problem.

Also, despite the film's painstakingly naturalistic, contemporary setting, the apocalyptic scenario it is asking us to accept begins to seem more ridiculous, the longer you stop to think about it.

By which I mean - a crucial element of this film is that its zombies are not capable of breaking through locked doors. Our protagonist survives the initial, nocturnal zombie attack because he is unconscious in a locked room. When subsequently reclaiming the apartment block, he simply secures the exterior doors and windows, and is safe for the duration.

So far so good, but, given that MOST people essentially spend their nights asleep behind a locked door or two, and probably tend to at least look out of the window in the morning before they step out for a stroll... surely there would be loads of survivors? The idea that everyone else in the city has been wiped out overnight by zombies with less agency than feral animals is patently absurd.

Likewise, despite the movie being set in the late 2010s present day, no one in this apartment building seems to have owned a computer, or a TV, or even a radio. Instead, like our painfully hip, DIY musician protagonist, the residents seem to have favoured cassette tapes (so retro and chic, y’know?). Conveniently, this allows him to bop around the empty rooms using up the batteries on a walkman he reclaimed from a ‘punk’ teenager’s bedroom (in 2018? really??), instead of, say, using his smartphone to try to contact the outside world. (You see what I mean about this whole ‘dick’ thing?)

In fact, he briefly checks his voice messages on his phone during the first morning, establishes that his nearest-and-dearest are dead, then abandons it. I get that “isolation” is the film’s watch-word, but the idea that he wouldn’t have at least tried to find out what was happening in the wider world whilst the electricity was still running is difficult to accept.

Of course, I don’t mind directors bending a film’s world to suit their own needs in a movie whose presentation is pulpier or more fantastical, but given this one’s absolute realist aesthetic, the failure to address these issues just seems like an insult to the viewer’s intelligence - a wilful refusal to provide us with the information we need to make this story work for us, on either an emotional level or a purely narrative one.

My wife, incidentally, has already christened ‘The Night Eats the World’ “that emo zombie movie”, and whilst I wouldn’t go that far in my criticism (I thought it had its moments), I get where she’s coming from.

Gothic Originals / Horror Express 2020 #8: The Ghoul (Freddie Francis, 1975)

 I make a point of trying to cover at least one previously unseen Peter Cushing film each October, and I've had this one lying around as a VHS-rip since god knows when, so here we go.

As anyone who has read up the history of British horror cinema will probably recall, Tyburn productions (named for the infamous site of London’s public gallows) was a short-lived outfit founded by Kevin Francis, son of Freddie, with the deliberate intention of reviving the more old-fashioned style of gothic horror filmmaking which had pretty much been driven to extinction in the UK by the mid-1970s.

(Precisely the kind of films the then 25-year-old Kevin had grown up watching his father work on in other words, although this is neither the time nor place to dwell upon the psychological motivations underpinning forty-five year old entrepreneurial ventures.)

Be that as it may, Tyburn was not a success. To put it bluntly, there were good reasons why production of traditional gothic horrors had flatlined in the preceding years, and the young Mr Francis had no ace up his sleeve to help overcome them. Greeted with almost total disdain by audiences and critics alike when they scraped into cinemas in ‘74-‘75, the three feature films Tyburn produced attracted little interest, and the company faded from existence shortly thereafter.

Released in June 1975, ‘The Ghoul’ was the last Tyburn film to see the inside of a projector, and, true to its producer’s intentions, it’s a sombre, slow-moving and ultimately pretty dispiriting attempt to revive the ‘stately’ (read: stuffy / Victorian) feel of classic-era Hammer.

Indeed, Hammer’s own Anthony Hinds (writing under his John Elder pseudonym) provided the script, a substantial portion of which is directly recycled from his work on 1966’s The Reptile - only, this time around, there’s no reptile, which gives you an immediate insight into what a bloody-mindedly uncommercial production we’re getting into here.

Dour as it may be though, ‘The Ghoul’ does have its charms - not least an excellent, late-era Cushing performance. As so often in this era, the actor seems to be drawing pretty heavily on his own well-publicised battle with grief, and I really hope that the scene in which his character cradles a photograph of his late wife, reflecting that they will “always be together” and so forth, was not added to the script simply to capitalise on the star’s personal circumstances. (1)

Either way though, Cushing handles it all with the grace and dignity we’d reasonably expect of him, whilst his character Dr Lawrence - a morally compromised former missionary, returned from India with a dark secret and henceforth dedicated to his solitary passion for building violins - incorporates enough psychological nooks and crannies for the actor to really get his teeth into (so to speak), irrespective of the relatively shoddy stuff which surrounds him.

It's a shame therefore that second-billed John Hurt pretty much phones it in as the simple-minded groundskeeper/hobo type character who skulks about Lawrence’s swampy, dilapidated country pile, luring young ladies back to the literal chicken-shack he calls home and falteringly attempting to abuse them. Despite being painfully uninteresting, this vacant numbskull is assigned an absolute ton of screen-time, and although he essentially representing the film’s only portrayal of a working class character, neither script nor actor bother to put in a very good showing.

Having already played leading roles in several higher profile films by this point, as well as being nominated for a BAFTA for his harrowing supporting performance in Richard Fleischer’s ‘10 Rillington Place’ (1971), it’s possible that Hurt simply felt this gig was beneath him - and indeed, with its Wurzel Gummidge costumery, moptop wig and clunking, remedial dialogue, it quite possibly was. But, he could still have taken a few tips from Cushing vis-à-vis counting one’s blessings and making the best of things, I would suggest.

Elsewhere, it's great to see Ian McCulloch (‘Zombie Flesh Eaters’, Zombi Holocaust) popping up a few years before his Italio-horror glory days (there’s some uneasy, class-based tension when, noticing that Hurt’s character is a former soldier, McCulloch’s young officer starts bossing him about in regimental fashion, igniting an awkward battle of wills), Whilst Veronica Carlson (‘Dracula Has Risen From The Grave’, ‘Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed’) makes for a far ballsier heroine than you normally encounter in this sort of thing, taking charge during the film’s opening car race, and generally lording it over her male co-stars in no uncertain terms.

Despite of ‘The Ghoul’s all-pervading atmosphere of nostalgic gloom in fact, some efforts have clearly been made here to bring a more contemporary feel into proceedings. The unusual 1920s setting for instance seems to have been introduced largely in order to facilitate some rambunctious, jazz-age merrymaking into the film’s opening scenes (retro ‘20s hi-jinks were, oddly, often a by-word for envelope-pushing modernism in ‘70s cinema, post-‘Bonnie & Clyde’), whilst the aforementioned nocturnal car race - in which the movie’s hateful young toffs recklessly roar around ill-lit country roads in their vintage motors - is both well-executed and quite exciting, surpassing the similar scenes featured in ‘The Devil Rides Out’ (1968).

Beyond ‘The Reptile’ meanwhile, Hinds’ script also seems to have borrowed at least some of its structure from ‘Psycho’, and the film’s scenes of violence, few and far between though they may be, are effectively gory and hard-hitting.

Indeed, given that it is inevitably being tagged as a boring, old fashioned throwback by British horror fans, it is ironic that ‘The Ghoul’s “bright young things find themselves at the mercy of doddering old weirdos” plotline entirely mirrors the far edgier films being made by directors like Pete Walker at around the same time, realigning the class-based conflicts underlying most of Hammer’s output to reflect the generational rifts more frequently explored by younger filmmakers during the ‘70s.

Conversely however, some viewers might be liable to find other elements of ‘The Ghoul’s script more retrogressive and objectionable - specifically, its apparent portrayal of Indian culture as an ‘exotic’, sinister sort of business which serves to undermine steadfast, Christian morality; a conduit for depraved, pagan beliefs which Cushing’s character has opened himself up to by “going native”, destroying his family in the process.

Embodied in the figure of Cushing’s taciturn housekeeper Ayah (a ‘browned up’ Gwen Watford), who rather unfairly emerges as the primary villain of the piece, this strain of pulp fiction-era racism was already present to some extent in ‘The Reptile’, but regrettably it becomes more emphatically pronounced here.

Whilst I certainly couldn’t argue with anyone who would wish to dismiss the film on this basis however, I personally found that the ambiguous atmosphere (Freddie) Francis and Cushing bring to the film help to steer the material in a more interesting direction than that of mere xenophobic scare-mongering.

Though the elder Francis’ talents as a horror director were often taken for granted, even his lesser efforts are usually characterised by their close attention to production design, lighting and camera-work, and the pungent atmospherics he summons up during the better passages of ‘The Ghoul’ are no exception. Thus, the idea of an “alien” Indian/Eastern culture subtly underlying the prosaic surface of a conventional English country house is given a great deal of play here, and actually becomes quite intriguing.

The house is kept sweltering by roaring fires in every room because “we’re used to the heat”, whilst the residents speak primarily in Ayah’s native tongue, awkwardly reverting to English for the benefit of their guests. Meanwhile, in a striking visual metaphor, the shrine of the black onyx Thuggee goddess worshipped by Ayah literally sits directly behind Dr Lawrence’s modestly adorned Anglican chapel, hidden from sight by a flimsy screen, as the compromised patriarch writhes in culturally conflicted mental agony before his impotent, gold-plated cross.

Imaginatively rendered through the film’s production design more-so than its writing, this all adds up, in its own way, to a curious sideways reflection on the ‘end of empire’ and the effects of the Indian experience upon upper-crust British identity, whilst Cushing, mindful no doubt of these sensitive themes, making a lingering sense of guilt and displacement the keynote of his performance.

In saying this, I realise I’m probably giving ‘The Ghoul’ more credit than it deserves. To the casual viewer, much of the movie will simply seem clumsy, boring and amateur-ish, in addition to its questionable racial political. This all comes home to roost when, after well over an hour’s painstaking build up, the climactic reveal of the titular ‘ghoul’ (played by prolific bit-part actor Don Henderson and a couple of buckets of blue paint) proves a crushing disappointment all round.

Filmed in perfunctory, one-take fashion amid a haze a Vaseline-lensed blurriness, it feels as if Francis was reluctant to even put this nonsense on camera (which is saying something, given that his recent directorial assignments had also included Herman Cohen’s ‘Craze’ and Ringo Starr & Harry Nilsson’s atrocious ‘Son of Dracula’). Just a hideous embarrassment for all concerned, the less said of this farrago of a finale, the better, to be honest.

Sad to say, these final scenes serve as an absurd and rather pathetic final pratfall for the traditional British gothic, of which this was, effectively, the final example. It feels especially fitting therefore that, with a thoughtfulness characteristic of the sub-genre’s most gifted and iconic performer, Cushing claws back some degree of dignity in the film’s last moments, furnishing it with an appropriately sombre grace note and a memorably doomed closing image. Nice work Pete - you earned your fee on this one, and then some.

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(1)As per IMDB trivia; “according to Veronica Carlson, director Freddie Francis made Peter Cushing do multiple takes during the scene where he talks about his love for his wife. This caused Cushing great distress, and reduced him, and some of the crew, to tears.” So that would seem to confirm my worst suspicions then.

Horror Express 2020 #7: Doctor Blood’s Coffin (Sidney J. Furie, 1961)

 Following a move to London at the dawn of the 1960s, the first project young Canadian director Sidney J. Furie got off the ground was the off-brand horror picture about the son of the local GP in a picturesque Cornish village performing Frankensteinian resurrection experiments in an abandoned tin mine.

Echoing the predicament faced by Furie himself to a certain extent, the film finds Dr Peter Blood (Keiron Moore) cheerily skipping back into the quiet life of his father Robert (Ian Hunter - not the Mott The Hoople guy, needless to say) after four years spent studying bio-chemistry in Vienna. 

Given that the re-appearance of Dr Blood Jr. neatly coincides with a rash of mysterious disappearances in the local area and repeated thefts of medical equipment from his father’s clinic, few viewers will be surprised to learn the it is the younger doctor’s ‘coffin’ we’ll soon be peering into, in spite Moore’s bland, leading man good looks.

There is a certain amount of promise here - not least the somewhat novel idea of wrapping up the romantic lead and the mad scientist within the same character. Unfortunately however, Nathan Juran’s script proves decidedly ropey throughout.

Full of excruciatingly poor dialogue (“Do you know that I had analysed the protein value of an acorn by the time I was six?”; “You want me to deny God and instead kneel down and worship a new God - science!”) and low level absurdities (why do a bunch of blokes who look as if they’ve never left the local area in their lives need to rely upon guy who’s just returned from four years overseas to lead them through the local caves?), Juran’s tale also, fatally, retains some long stretches of uneventful tedium in its first half, instantly consigning ‘Doctor Blood’s Coffin’ to the status of half-remembered ignominy within the Brit-horror canon.

Given that Juran was better known as the director of ‘The Deadly Mantis’ (1957) and ‘Attack of the 50 Foot Woman’ (1958), it makes sense that (according to Jonathan Rigby’s English Gothic, at least) his script originally took place on the other side of the Atlantic, in an Arizona mining town. Quite why Furie went to the trouble of importing and anglicising this unpromising potboiler though is another matter entirely.

The story’s American roots can perhaps be glimpsed through the actions of Kenneth J. Warren’s policeman character (it’s incongruous to see an English copper organising the occupants of the local pub into a posse on the slightest pretext, and yelling down the phone that he needs “twenty armed men” to form roadblocks), but for the most part it seems to have survived the Transatlantic crossing surprisingly well - which is a shame in a sense, as some out-of-place Americanisms might at least have livened things up a bit.

By the time he got around to directing ‘The Ipcress File’ a few years later, Furie had reinvented himself as a mod-ish, cinematic stylist, but unfortunately there’s little sign of that ambition here, as he approaches his craft with dogged, nailed-down-camera conventionality, seemingly imitating that static, old fashioned style which Hammer’s Terrence Fisher was often (rather unfairly) accused of perpetrating.

On the plus side however, the whole thing is at least handsomely realised despite its presumably low budget, utilising some absolutely splendid - very early '60s - colour photography to highlight the picture-postcard shooting locations. (I’m obliged to mention at this juncture that Nicholas Roeg served as camera operator under ‘Zulu’ DP Stephen Dade.) Meanwhile, the film also benefits from a propulsive, Hammer style orchestral score, courtesy of Buxton Orr and the ubiquitous Philip Martell, which helps considerably with the pacing issues.

Though the cast boasts no big names, a few of the supporting players will be familiar to more discerning British horror fans. You’ll recall the aforementioned Mr. Warren for instance for taking work which should rightly have gone to Milton Reid in the likes of ‘Demons of the Mind’ and The Creeping Flesh, whilst Fred Johnson - here playing a Hugh Griffiths-esque undertaker - also essayed “old geezer” roles in ‘The Curse of Frankenstein’, ‘City of the Dead’ and ‘Brides of Dracula’ amongst others.

Most significantly of course, our leading lady (indeed, the ONLY lady on the cast list) is Hazel Court. Playing widowed nurse / mad doctor love interest Linda, she brings a strong and radiant screen presence, but her noble efforts are probably best consigned to the “does her best with a thankless part” file.

The film’s horror content meanwhile is slow to make its presence felt, but, clearly inspired by Hammer’s success in the field of medical horror, there are a few bits of ‘Curse of Frankenstein’-inspired surgical grue, including some gruesome beating heart close-ups and so forth. This is all framed by Furie without a great deal of additional, atmospheric fuss, as if he believed that success within the genre was entirely predicated upon proximity to corpses and body parts.

This approach lends the film a rather morbid, unsavoury aura, despite its relative mildness, which reaches its apex during the conclusion, when, in a fit of spurned petulance, the younger Dr Blood digs up Hazel's dead husband, who's been mouldering in the grave for over a year, and actually sticks a new heart in what's left of him. Yuck!

As a horror film, I found ‘Doctor Blood’s Coffin’ to be entertaining enough in an undemanding sort of way, despite its myriad weaknesses - perfect for the Monday night on which I chose to watch it. What I enjoyed most of all about the film though was actually its extensive use of Cornish locations. 

[The evocatively named hamlet of Zennor, near St Ives, largely stood in for village, whilst the cliff-top ruins and abandoned mine workings were played by beauty spots near St Just and Botallack - a full breakdown and a wonderful set of ‘then and now’ photos can be enjoyed on the Reel Streets website.]

As well as looking absolutely beautiful in their own right under the nigh-on atomic glare of Dade and Roeg’s Eastman Colour lighting, the village exteriors provide a wealth of time capsule-worthy period detail, which I’m sure anyone who grew up in a similarly remote corner of the British Isles should be able to enjoy. (Athough this was of course considerably before my time, the Hillman touring cars, the curtain fabrics and Court’s costumes, even the occasional glimpses of the village shop, all provide a shudder of tribal recognition.)

Even during the film’s longueurs, there’s a certain pleasure to seeing familiar actors trudging about these out-of-the-way provincial locations, so rarely visited by British genre films, which is worth the entry price alone. (In this regard, I’m reminded of the even more mundane and uneventful ‘Night of the Big Heat’, filmed in Dorset and Buckinghamshire a few years later.)

In fact, I’m even go so far as to say that gazing upon the quiet cottages of Zennor circa 1961 gave me a real twinge of sadness, reminding me that I've not been able to make it out to the coast or the countryside at all this year. All the while, the memories of earlier days and older ways of life, fleeting captured on celluloid here as an incidental backdrop to the clumsy tale of Dr Blood gadding about with his chloroform and formaldehyde bothering Hazel Court, fade further out of sight with each turn of the season, buried deeper ‘neath the wheely-bins and people-carriers of the 21st century day-to-day.

Horror Express 2020 #6: Mas Alla Del Terror / ‘Further Than Fear’ (Tomás Aznar, 1980)

The more I learn about global genre cinema, the more I appreciate those increasingly rare opportunities to jump into something with absolutely no idea what to expect. As such, this remarkably obscure Spanish horror - available solely as an extremely smeary VHS-rip, insofar as I’m aware - proved a rare treat.

Going in, all I knew about Tomás Aznar’s film was:

1. It features some pretty great electro-rock music, which was once featured on an episode of El Diabolik’s Psychotronic Soundtracks.
2. It was released in Spain under the auspices of ‘Cinevisión’, the same company responsible for Escalofrío / Satan’s Blood a few years earlier.
3. It was advertised using the fairly awe-inspiring, Frazetta-plagiarising poster you see reproduced above. (1)

All in all then, the omens looked good.

Perhaps one of the things which has led to ‘Mas Alla Del Terror’ receiving so little attention from horror fans is the misleadingly mild pre-credits sequence, which sees a young woman (Lola, played by Raquel Ramírez) being picked up from a roadside café by an older man, with the couple’s earnest dialogue suggesting that they are engaged in some kind of long-term adulterous relationship.

Lola insists on taking her partner to some out of the way, rural idyll, where, in a matter of seconds, things go from second-rate Truffaut to full-on Ruggero Deodato, as she attempts to steal the man’s wallet, prompting him begin savagely beating her, before she in turn pulls a knife and remorselessly carves him up.

“Dirty fucker - this ain’t shit buddy,” she exclaims as she contemptuously pockets the measly few pesetas which comprised his roll, wiping her blade on his tie and leaving him bleeding out from multiple chest wounds as she sets out to hitchhike back to town. Yikes!

Post-credits, we re-join Lola in what seems to be her more natural habitat, rocking regulation leathers as she trades sneering, scatological insults with the other members of her equally amoral, drug-huffing misfit biker gang (“Fuck, you smell like camel shit - find yourself a good dentist”, she greets a dealer dishing out wraps of hash outside a nightclub).

From here, the movie kicks into gear as a kind of ‘Mad Foxes’-via-‘Last House..’ type psychotic youth-gone-wild gang movie, as these punk kids indulge in all kinds of gratuitous cruelty, exchanging dialogue that (if the fab-subs to be believed) consists largely of increasingly obscene sexual insults, which I won’t recount here lest they offend the sensibilities of the very internet itself.

After an attempt to rob a greasy spoon cafe (dig that low level of ambition) escalates into an impromptu killing spree, the gang - who now essentially comprise Lola plus leader Chema (Francisco Sánchez Grajera) and wingnut Nico (Emilio Siegrist) - briefly go on the road ‘Rabid Dogs’-style with a pair of hostages. So fucked up are our anti-social anti-heroes though, they can’t even keep this relatively straight-forward scenario on the road for more than five minutes of screen time, before internecine bickering leads to a roadside altercation soon leaves them lost in the depths of the countryside with a totalled car.

Spying lights as they trudge across the featureless nocturnal landscape, the gang come upon a well-appointed house, and, as you might well expect, get stuck straight into a dispiritingly gruelling home invasion scenario. After taking a tyre iron to the family dog (mercifully, VHS murk obscures this footage, but I REALLY hope the whines of canine distress on the soundtrack aren’t genuine), they proceed to remorselessly brutalise the elderly lady they find within, whilst her youthful grandson (we presume) hides terrified upstairs.

Mindlessly destructive brutes that they are, the gang have soon set the house alight, leaving the helpless residents to perish. But wait! As it turns out, the poor grandmother they've just left for dead was actually a high-ranking Satanic priestess of some kind, and she proceeds to curse them with her dying breaths, promising supernatural vengeance in the name of Astaroth, Beelzebub and the whole merry gang!

Shortly thereafter, the gang and their hostages once more find themselves shit-out-of-luck transport-wise, holed up in a remote, ruined church with eerie, skeleton-filled catacombs beneath it - by which point, we can probably get a handle on where things are heading next, I should think.

It’s a shame however that the pacing of this horror-themed second half of the film pretty much grinds to a halt in comparison to the frantic, action-packed stuff which has preceded it. Much aimless waiting and wandering fills up the remaining minutes of run-time, whilst I also found the idea of having the evil-doers’ victims return in spectral form to wreak their ironic vengeance - much in the manner of a Japanese kaidan - to be pretty old hat. I mean, couldn’t they have rustled up a few demons or zombies or something, instead of just going with the old EC Comics “b-but I saw you, you were dead - arg!” route?

Well, no matter - on the plus side, they certainly picked a great location for it - an arid, rustic set of ruins which just reek of poverty-stricken misery and menace. There's a lot of great Armando de Ossorio / ‘..Blind Dead’ type atmosphere to enjoy here, not least when the acrid, cobweb-shrouded skeletons in the catacombs are briefly unleashed to take care of the Stockholm Syndromed female hostage, whilst things are livened up considerably by intermittent outbursts of the aforementioned killer, Goblin-esque disco-rock (courtesy of one J.P. Decerf and the ever-reliable CAM library). (2)

Even beyond their penchant for senseless murder meanwhile, there’s something singularly warped and repulsive about the gang members here, as they fill their remaining hours with low level blasphemy and icky sexual perversity (at one point one of the guys aimlessly masturbates into the fire whilst shrieking an improvised litany in praise of “fornication”), sneering and drooling in the face of death like true no-hope punks.

As the remaining characters gradually meet their predestined demise, new elements are added to the medieval ‘triumph of death’ mural which takes pride of place on the church’s walls - a common ‘body count movie’ motif, but nicely done - heralding the eventually reappearance of the avenging witch, and a rather fine, high five-worthy ending which I won’t spoil for you here.

Whilst I certainly wouldn’t go so far as to hail it as a lost classic, ‘Mas Alla Del Terror’ is, as you may have gathered, wild as all hell - an off-the-map rampage of low rent sleaze, grime and amoral hell-raisin’ which gradually finds itself enveloped by a cloak of old school, Iberian gothic doom.

Production values are minimal, performances are perfunctory (aside from Ramirez, who is brilliant, and should clearly have wielded her flick knife in more movies) and Azner directs with no great amount of flair, but there is nonetheless a ton of fun to be had here for a certain, special audience. Indeed, I’m amazed that this film’s potential has remained largely untapped by all the late-era Euro-horror / video nasty fans out there.

It would certainly be lovely to see a restored version popping up at some point in the future, but for now, let’s just say that this one is well worth a trip down to the VHS/torrent catacombs if it sounds like your particular cup of rancid, spiked tea.

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(1) Apparently originating on the cover of ‘Vampirella’ # 11 in 1971, this iconic Frank Frazetta witch illustration seems to have had a big impact on horror movie poster artists - it was also recycled just a blatantly for the remarkably misleading advertising which accompanied Matt Cimber’s perennially underappreciated The Witch Who Came From The Sea in 1976.

(2)Once again, thanks are due to the aforementioned El Diabolik podcast for filling me in on the soundtrack info and name of the composer. Check out Episode 46 of their fine programme to hear some of the music from this wild out in the wild.

Horror Express 2020 #5: The She-Creature (Edward L. Cahn, 1956)

Though it was likely little more than another day, another dollar for ‘50s b-movie workhorse Edward L. Cahn (whom we last encountered on the way back from Mars with It! The Terror From Beyond Space earlier this year), this curious yarn is notable for running with a set of mismatched plot ideas so sketchy and ill-thought-out that they actually go full circle, resulting in a tale whose steadfast refusal to make any damn sense whatsoever leaves it feeling dream-like, inscrutable and obscurely haunting, emerging as one of the more bizarre monster movies mid-century America had to offer.

Seemingly in some kind of southern Californian beach community (although this is never explicitly made clear), ‘The She-Creature’ is able to exploit a range of settings which will to doubt remind modern viewers of such later, brine-soaked classics as Herk Harvey’s ‘Carnival of Souls’ (1962), Willard Huyck & Gloria Katz’ ‘Messiah of Evil’ (1973) and most of all, Curtis Harrington’s ‘Night Tide’ (1960).

First of all, there are the lonely, rocky beaches, where we initially find the mysterious Dr Carlo Lombardi (didn’t he build E.T.?) stalking through the sea-mist, making esoteric pronouncements to himself (“now, on this very night, I have called her from the unknown depths of time itself, she is here”) as he observes a set of sinister, triangular footprints leading up from the surf.

(Chester Morris, who plays Lombardi, had been Hollywood royalty in the era of the early talkies, but was clearly pretty down on his luck by this point - ‘The She Creature’ marks his last feature film appearance until 1970, the year of his death.)

Then, there are the isolated, wood-panelled beach houses in which most of the characters live, which seem to extend in a horizontal line along the beach-front, although we never see more than one of them at a time.

And, of course, there’s the carnival, wherein Lombardi conducts his strange shows, attempting to win converts to his quack transcendental doctrines whilst thrilling punters with live-on-stage past life regression sessions, featuring his psychically indentured hypnotic subject Andrea (Cahn regular Marla English), who seems to spend her non-performing hours reclining in a diaphanous gown upon the stage-set’s altar-like backdrop.

Whereas the films I referenced above though were all shot on real locations, carrying an authentic sense of place as a result, the imagined geography of ‘The She-Creature’s world by contrast feels entirely disconnected from any kind of reality. We see no cars or roads, no streets or infrastructure. The people live in the beach houses. The shore is a realm of mist and monsters. The crashing of the waves never ceases. If the people want to go anywhere, they go to the carnival.

When necessary, cops and detectives appear from somewhere to frown and crack wise, haul off the bodies and (eventually) take ineffectual pot-shots at the monster. But though the wider world is frequently referred to in dialogue, we never see it. To all intents and purposes, the film’s budgetary constraints trap us within a closed, goldfish bowl-like realm - a Malibu gothic ‘Truman Show’, or a Pacific analogue to ‘The Prisoner’s village.

Our hero within this disembodied realm - Ted, played by Lance Fuller - is that rarest of things, a serious, scientifically-minded parapsychologist who frowns upon quacks like Lombardi for bringing his profession into disrepute. I won’t trouble you with the ins and outs of Ted’s relationship with the beach-house dwelling Chappell family, but essentially he’s courting eligible daughter Dorothy (Cathy Downs).

Dorothy’s proto-new age, society wife mother Mrs Chappell (Frieda Inescort) has meanwhile become a devotee of Lombardi’s hypnotic revelations, whilst comically single-minded, amoral capitalist Mr Chappell (Tom Conway, brother of George Sanders, who was playing horror movie cads as far back as ‘Cat People’ and ‘I Walked with a Zombie’) reckons he can make big bucks exploiting Lombardi’s uncanny gift for predicting local murders. So, like it or not, the pencil-moustached man of mystery is a pretty inescapable topic of conversation at the family’s nightly soirees.

Like Roger Corman’s even weirder The Undead from the following year, ‘The She-Creature’ seems to tap into the mania for past life regression therapy which seemed to be sweeping the U.S.A. in the late 1950s (if the plots of b-movies are to be believed, at any rate). In attempting to graft this concept onto the bones of a common-or-garden monster movie, scriptwriter Lou Rusoff apparently gave little thought to even the most elementary notions of scientific understanding, resulting in leaps of theoretical logic which are truly dizzying.

Even leaving aside the notion of a hypnotic subject’s past selves being able to manifest as invisible spirts who can roam around the waking world causing mischief at the hypnotist’s command, by seeking a way to crow-bar a monster into proceedings, Rusoff’s script implicitly invites us to contemplate an entirely new theory of evolution (“..based on the authentic FACTS you've been reading about,” claimed the poster).

Rather than accepting the conventional assumption that primitive, amphibious life-forms moved from the sea to the land at a fairly early stage in their development, gradually developing over the millennia into reptiles, birds and mammals as we know them today, ‘The She-Creature’ instead casually confronts us with the possibility that humanity’s distant ancestors stayed in the water far longer, apparently evolving directly from some monstrous and heretofore unknown species of carnivorous, anthropoid lobster.

The ontological implications of this Nigel Kneale-like revelation are staggering, but naturally no one in ‘The She Creature’ seems to bat an eyelid as Lombardi babbles on to all and sundry about how he’s been able to summon a living, breathing example of this primordial monstrosity from deep within Andrea’s ancient, pre-human subconscious.

Perhaps understandably, most of our characters are more concerned with the more immediate matter of the people Lombardi’s creature keeps bumping off each time it hauls its atavistic, weed-encrusted carcass from the depths of the Pacific. After all, this is a goddamn Edward L. Cahn movie, not some navel-gazing, pinko beatnik speculative science seminar! This thing is eight feet tall, immune to conventional weaponry and can crush a man’s head like a walnut, forgoddsake! What are gonna do again it?!

Built (and indeed occupied) by Paul Blaisdell, the creature suit here may not quite be up to the standard of the one he built for ‘It!’, but ridiculous though it is, it sure makes an impression - those big, choppy claws are convincingly huge, and the insect-like compound eyes and segmented antenna are a nicely horrible touch, ready to give kiddie matinee audiences are serious case of the heebie-jeebies, even as the gnomic vagaries of the film’s script potentially played havoc with hard work their teachers had gone to providing them with a solid grounding in the whys-and-wherefores of life on earth.

Released by AIP, double-billed with Corman’s ‘It Conquered the World’ (also scripted by Rusoff), ‘The She-Creature’ subsequently drifted off into the late-night UHF ether from which one supposes it periodically emerged to pollute the impressionable minds of subsequent generations American youth, accidentally propagating the veneration of weird, primordial lobster gods which we see practiced so frequently on our cities’ streets today.

So, heed the word of Lombardi, and check out ‘The She-Creature’ today - it’s a mist-shrouded subliminal mind-bender for the ages, its wave-crashing, theremin-blasting echoes ringing out through time and space long after its director picked up his lunchbox and headed off to make ‘Runaway Daughters’ and ‘Shake, Rattle and Rock’ back-to-back.

 

Horror Express 2020 #4: The Exorcist III (William Peter Blatty, 1990)

Within the realm of sequel-driven horror franchises, it’s fair to say that the Exorcist series has always been a bit of an outlier. Admittedly, it got off to an earlier start than most of them, and began from a far higher level of critical acclaim and self-serious artistic intent - but still.

In stark contrast to the “iconic/ground-breaking original followed by reams of (at best) entertaining crap” furrow ploughed by ‘Halloween’, ‘..Elm Street’, ‘Hellraiser’ et al, ‘The Exorcist’ seems to have attracted highly strung, artistically-minded filmmakers like moths to a flame, each determined to fight tooth and nail with the studios to bring their own unique visions to the screen. A strategy which, unfeasibly, multiple generations of studio execs actually seem to have encouraged, even after the ridicule unfairly heaped upon John Boorman’s commercially disastrous ‘Exorcist II: The Heretic’ back in ’77.

Boorman, William Peter Blatty and Paul Schrader may all in turn have lost their battles with the suits, ultimately delivering compromised, imperfect movies which they were never truly happy with, but, viewed with a few decades of hindsight, I believe that these sequels can be viewed as a disparate trilogy of wildly ambitious, unconventional films, each of which I personally find more rewarding than Friedkin’s original (which I’ve never really cared for, truth be told).

All of which is a long-winded way of getting around to the fact that I watched the theatrical release cut of Blatty’s ‘The Exorcist III’ [pedants will wish to note that it had not yet gained the ‘Legion’ sub-title applied to the later reconstruction of the writer/director’s preferred cut at this point] for the first time last month, and, though it can’t hold a candle to the weird majesty of ‘The Heretic’, I nonetheless enjoyed it a hell of a lot more than I was expecting to.

Although Blatty’s high-minded thematic concerns to some extent fall by the way-side here, that’s fine by me, as again, his particular brand of existential Catholic dualism has never really floated my boat. But, when it comes to the more down to earth matter of making a Bloody Good Horror Movie, it’s difficult to watch ‘Exorcist III’ and not conclude that this gentleman had the chops.

In purely audio-visual terms, the writer/director’s approach to this task basically seems to have consisted of throwing in way too much of everything. Every single thing in this movie is creepy and foreboding and upsetting and scary, and every time there's a chance to throw in a jump scare or a disembodied demon growl, you're damn well gonna get one.

Outside of some suitably evocative Washington DC location work, settings here run to lofty, shadow-haunted churches, forced perspective hospital corridors and sombre, steel-shuttered asylums - all photographed by DP Gerry Fisher in a drained, colourless palette which may be tediously familiar to us these days, but must have seemed a pretty fresh approach back in 1990.

(It’s interesting to note that Adrian Lyne’s ‘Jacob’s Ladder’, the other film which immediately springs to mind as a precursor to this now ubiquitous grim-dark, institutional aesthetic was also released in 1990.)

Barry De Vorzon’s score of course also deserves a big shout-out in this regard. Presumably asserting a huge influence upon post-2000 horror movie (and indeed video game) music, the composer’s relentless soundscape of treated, disembodied vocal textures, rusty gate shrieks and bowel-shaking rumbles pretty much defines the kind of thing which would become de rigour for straight-faced horror in the wake of Kenji Kawai’s soundtracks to Hideo Nakata’s ‘Ring’ films a decade later.

THAT hospital hallway scene (if you’ve looked up anything horror movie-related on Youtube in the past decade or so, you’ll know it) is of course the film’s unquestioned cinematic highlight, but viewed in context, it forms part of a steady succession of exquisitely nerve-jangling sequences spread across the opening two thirds of this picture, each executed with a seemingly impossible mixture of Lewton-esque restraint and utter, baroque excess.

In terms of plotting meanwhile, I’m happy that Blatty chose to entirely dispense with the old “possessed little girl” routine here, as the “occult crime story” angle extrapolated from his source novel is a lot more fun all round.

The movie-obsessed Lieutenant Kinderman (previously played by the late Lee J. Cobb) is my favourite character in Freidkin’s ‘Exorcist’, so it’s great to see him return as the protagonist here, and even greater that he seems in the interim to have transmuted into the gargantuan figure of George C. Scott.

As a life-long devotee of the ‘Go Big’ school of acting, Scott has always been a favourite of mine, and he here delivers what must surely count as one of his absolute best late-era performances, taking his usual ‘simmering human pressure cooker’ thing to a whole new level, playing it taut and low key during his character’s most emotionally trying moments, before boiling over and completely losing his shit when we least expect it. As a showcase of repressed rage, hardboiled, craggy compassion and a dogged determination to resist the rigours of age, it’s pretty awe-inspiring stuff.

Opposite Scott meanwhile, our resident demonically-inhabited, body-jumping psychopath The Gemini Killer (Brad Dourif, with a little bit of help from the first movie’s Jason Miller) boasts the most ridiculous collection of show-boating serial killer trademarks I've ever encountered pre-‘Silence of the Lambs’.

Not only does he only kill people whose names begins with ‘K’, but he uses an extremely obscure, specialist drug to paralyse his victims, cuts off a certain finger from each hand, draws astrological symbols on their backs, and replaces pieces of their bodies with vandalised religious paraphernalia! Man is certainly not short of ideas.

In fairness to Blatty though, I suppose this convoluted MO does indeed represent the kind of symbolic cluster-fuck which I suppose might occur should an already thoroughly coo coo killer end up bouncing around the same bonce with a host of demons and the restless spirit of a tormented priest.

As heavy-handed as some of these story elements may seem though - and as ‘on the nose’ as the director’s favoured imagery of mutilated statuary, demonic crucifixions and angelic visitations may be - this is all balanced out to some extent by Blatty’s deeply eccentric approach to screenwriting.

Drawing on his oft-forgotten background as a scripter of screwball comedies, he seems determined to leaven the metaphysical hand-wringing we’d expect of an Exorcist movie with frequent excursions into high stakes, oddball humour and touches of quasi-Lynchian surrealism which I’m surely the studio must have considered totally ‘off-brand’, as well as seeding the movie with a dense tapestry of synchronicitous inter-textural referencing, touching on everything from Conrad’s ‘Lord Jim’ to the Rider Waite Tarot deck to Powell & Pressburger’s ‘The Red Shoes’ and (believe it or not) Mel Brooks’ ‘Space Balls’.

We could perhaps glimpse this trait to a certain extent in the first film via Kinderman’s cinephile banter, and it was given free reign in his directorial debut ‘The Ninth Configuration’, but it’s really turned up to eleven in ‘Exorcist III’. 

The sheer density of Blatty’s dialogue can take a while to get used to, and I’ll freely admit that I was more or less instantly lost by the early scene in which Kinderman obliquely criticises his fellow officers for their racism and lethargy by angrily throwing passages from ‘Macbeth’ in their general direction. Once you get into the swing of it though, it brings a really unique feel to proceedings, adding spice and flavour to what might otherwise have become a pretty po-faced exercise in over-cooked, airport blockbuster bombast.

Speaking of which -- we probably need at this point to address the film’s final act. Shot under duress by Blatty and the principal cast after studio Morgan Creek rejected the anti-climactic conclusion of the director’s initial cut, instead demanding a bit more action and an actual, gosh-darned exorcism, it’s… a bit of a mess, to say the least.

I mean, of all the actors you could have hustled in to play a new character needed for a bunch of pick-up shots for a major studio film with the clock ticking down to release… the legendarily temperamental Nicol Williamson (google up yr own anecdotes) is probably not the man I would have chosen. But, his casting here as hastily parachuted-in bell, book & candle guy Father Morning seems reflective of the sheer level of graft, blundering and back office vanity involved in these reshoots.

Actually, Williamson does perfectly fine work here, adding a certain amount of gravitas to a part that basically amounts to cipher created to satisfy box office expectations, and Blatty directs his scenes with a conviction comparable to the main bulk of the film. Sadly though, neither of them are a match for the risible hullaballoo of snakes, flame-pits, elderly, levitating Oscar winners, glowing gateways to hell, spectral crucifixes, indoor hurricanes and general shrieking hysteria which the producers apparently deemed necessary to provide the punters with the requisite bang for their buck.

Kinderman, had he been able to peel himself off the special effects-drenched cell walls at some point during these proceedings, might well have returned to The Scottish Play and muttered something about “sound and fury” - and indeed, this whole ridiculous finale only serves to confirm my suspicion that, despite Blatty’s noble efforts, ‘Exorcist III’ doesn’t really succeed in saying anything terribly profound about anything (in this cut, at least).

Viewed purely as a horror movie though, for the most part it is absolutely cracking stuff. Imaginative, unconventional, viscerally effective and often brilliantly executed, it now also has the added advantage of feeling extremely prescient, vis-a-vis the ways in which the genre has developed in subsequent decades.

To not put too fine a point on it, prior to 1990 very few horror films looked or sounded like this one. After 2000, they pretty much all did. Coincidence? Just ask all those kids currently at film school who probably spent their formative years watching SCARIEST EVER MOVIE SCENE eight thousand times on Youtube, then consult with Blatty’s restless spirit re: thoughts on Playing The Long Game.

Horror Express 2020 #3: Escalofrío / ‘Satan’s Blood’ (Carlos Puerto, 1978)

Seemingly one of the first Spanish horror films to take advantage of the “S” (for ‘sex’) certificate introduced to the country’s ratings system as part of the easing of censorship which accompanied the collapse of the Franco regime in the late 1970s, this out-of-nowhere devil worship shocker (Juan Piquer Simón of ‘Slugs’ and ‘Pieces’ infamy takes a production credit, director Puerto had previously helmed Paul Naschy’s little-known political thriller ‘El Francotirador’ [‘The Sniper’]) charmingly opens with a few minutes of run-time padding mondo type business.

First up, a purported professor of parapsychological matters delivers some generic blather vis-à-vis the dangers that dabbling with the forces of darkness continues to pose in our contemporary world. His brief lecture is interspersed with close-ups of illustrations from the same coffee table witchcraft book which will later turn up as a prop in the main body of the film, which amusingly results in an inadvertent guest appearance from the ubiquitous Alex and Maxine Sanders (last glimpsed around these parts when we looked at ‘Legend of the Witches’ (1970) and ‘Secret Rites’ (1971) last year).

This leads into a decidedly sleazy studio recreation of a generic black mass / virgin sacrifice type scenario, which succeeds admirably in demonstrating what I think we can probably all agree is the true function of The Black Arts within modern society – namely, giving creepy bearded men an opportunity to publically molest impressionable young women, often to the accompaniment of dissonant synthesizer music.

After that’s all over and done with, we finally open the movie proper and are introduced to our protagonists, Andrés and Ana (José María Guillén and Mariana Karr), a glumly average young couple who live happily in a pokey Madrid flat with their German Shepard, Blackie (no racial connotation intended there, let’s hope).

Although a night of dancing and drinking is out of the question for the couple (Ana is four months pregnant), they nonetheless decide to cheer themselves up with a night on the town, and so, after taking in a first run screening of ‘Star Wars’ (check out that marquee!), find themselves aimlessly driving around the city, with Blackie ensconced in the back seat.

Little do they realise however that this leaves them in a perfect state of receptive boredom to be hailed down by Bruno (Ángel Aranda, a one-time peplum regular who horror fans might recognise from ‘Planet of the Vampires’ (1965) or ‘A Dragonfly for Each Corpse’(1975)), a well-dressed playboy type who claims he was Andrés’ friend back in his school days, even though he looks considerably older than Andrés, who doesn’t remember him at all.

Exuberantly friendly, as is the want of OBVIOUS SATANIST SWINGERS, Bruno and his wife Berta (Sandra Alberti) invite Andrés and Ana back to their place to celebrate their ‘reunion’, and, having nothing better to do, our protagonists acquiesce – only to reconsider when, an hour’s drive into the countryside later, they find themselves traversing the kind of foreboding, overcast rural hellhole in which José Ramón Larraz would probably have chosen to shoot a movie.

Many of us no doubt have taken the decision to get the hell out of dodge as soon as we saw Luis Barboo – a towering actor who played muscleman/heavy roles in a number of early ‘70s Jess Franco films – clad in a full length cloak, opening the gates to the Bruno & Berta’s modest country estate. But, unfortunately, Andrés and Ana are as feckless and easily-led as they come – doe-eyed rabbits in the murky headlights of their hosts’ nefarious intentions.

The scenes which follow discomfort us less through means of outright horror, and more just through a sense of acute social awkwardness, as we are forced to contemplate our own likely responses, should be find ourselves guests in the home of a pair of over-friendly strangers who keep blatantly lying to us, in between fingering occult paraphernalia and asking questions of the “do you believe, in the power of the mind?” variety.

Things get even more uncomfortable once the hosts declare that it’s time to get the ouija board out (actually, they have a swanky, specially engraved ouija table for the occasion), prompting a series of unsettling declarations from the spirit world which prompt Bruno and Berta to start sniping at each other about their shared history of suicide attempts.

It’s certainly hellish alright, but more in a Chris Morris/Alan Partridge vein than a Bava/Fulci one for the most part - although, did I mention the bit where Ana walks in on Berta in the kitchen and funds her chowing down on a dog’s bowl full of gory, unidentified offal? Not a good sign.

Again, I’m sure even the most timid amongst us would be WELL ON OUR WAY HOME by this point, flimsy “you’ll never manage to find the roads in this bad weather” excuses or no. But, Andrés and Ana are not like you and I, so we soon find them sitting expressionless in the guest bedroom, awaiting whatever other atrocities the night has in store. (Well, actually they take a bath together – presumably just because there’s not been any nudity on screen for quite a while at this point. There’s not much water in the tub, and it looks freezing.)

The closest thing ‘Satan’s Blood’ offers to a shit-just-got-real moment follows, as Ana’s attempt to enjoy some classic, gothic horror style nocturnal nightgown peregrinations is rudely interrupted by the creepy, hobo-type guy who has been hanging around the house’s kitchens for reasons which are never adequately explained. A jarring attempted rape scene ensues, which seemingly proves enough to rouse even Andrés from his complacency. Setting off together to confront their hosts vis-à-vis the perennial issue of just-what-the-heck-is-going-on-around-here, the couple find Bruno and Berta sitting naked within the pentagram etched into the floor of their living room, backed by a roaring fire!

Apparently entranced by a potent combination of low key lighting and ragin’ psychedelic library cues, Andrés and Ana promptly forget their grievances, doff their dressing gowns, and move forward to partake in ‘Satan’s Blood’s most elaborate, set-piece sequence – a languorous, four-way softcore Satanic orgy.

Heavy on the super-imposed cross-fades and overdubbed moanin’ and groanin’, this scene achieves a fairly epic duration, but sadly misses the ‘erotic’ bullseye by quite some distance, instead prefiguring the “this is merely somewhat distasteful” hard-body simulated sex approach later taken to unsavoury extremes by Larraz’s similarly themed ‘Black Candles’ (‘Los Ritos Sexuales del Diablo’, 1982).

In moments like this, ‘Satan’s Blood’ (or ‘Escalofrío’ [roughly: ‘Shudder’ or ‘Shiver’], as it was originally billed for Spanish audiences) seems to be aspiring to the kind of decadent, libidinous delirium which characterised Euro-horror’s “Erotic Castle Movie” wave of the early 1970s. Even just a few short years down the line though, that kind of oneiric eroticism already seems to belong to another world - a half-remembered dream, impossible to recapture.

It’s as if, in the second half of the decade, somebody turned the overhead lights on, doused the fire and poured the the last few trickles of J&B down the sink. By this point, horror films across globe had (for better or for worse) become nasty, squalid and mean, and this film’s intermittent attempts to swim against the tide prove woefully ineffectual.

As the remnants of gothic cliché fade into obsolescence, the Satanists’ glitzy accoutrements merely seem tacky and gauche, whilst the ever-more-feral demands of the horror audience instead demand that we’re confronted with dead dogs, steaming bowls of offal and hobo rapists, all arrayed across grimy linoleum floors. Instead of being deliciously disorientating meanwhile, the fact that nobody at any point does anything that makes sense merely seems annoying.

In short, everything in ‘Satan’s Blood’ looks cold, uninviting and shabby. Rather than abandoning themselves to a life of amoral sensory indulgence when they awaken the next morning, our characters proceed about their glum business as if the previous evening’s gruelling shag-fest had never happened - which I’ll choose to read as a presumably realistic portrayal of the embarrassing aftermath of unplanned group sex, rather than just the result of the producers shoehorning the sex scene into the film late in production to up the exploitation factor.

Ana is back in her frumpy jumper, complaining that Berta (confined to bed as a result of the night’s ceremonial exertions) needs to see a doctor, and the familiar, anxious ballet of we-need-to-get-going / oh-no-our-car-won’t-start / why-don't you-stay-for-lunch proceeds apace, until the flagging narrative eventually tries to retool itself as a kind of cracked murder mystery / walking corpses “but-we-saw-you-you-were-dead” type effort.

Viewed from the other side of the mirror however, there are a few aspects of ‘Satan’s Blood’ which stand out as noteworthy within the Pete-Walker-triumphant canon of grim, post ‘75 European horror. In particular, I appreciated the way that, in stark contrast to the hoary old tradition of pulp devil worship yarns, the Satanist couple here are gradually revealed to be disturbed, ineffectual and rather pathetic individuals, locked into some kind of self-destructive, co-dependant mania.

A far cry from the high-handed, baronial masterminds of a Dennis Wheatley novel, they are basically just desperately unhappy neurotics in search of some kind of power and fulfilment – a malign flipside of the emotionally neutered boredom evinced by our ‘innocent’, mainstream protagonists.

Though underexplored here, this attempt to deflate the pomposity of evil takes us all the way back to Val Lewton’s ‘The Seventh Victim’ (1943), even though it is entirely undermined by the film’s rather desperate decision to try to transform itself into a ten-years-late ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ rip-off in its final act, introducing an omniscient societal conspiracy angle, which… makes about as much sense as any of the other slackly scripted rubbish our unfortunate hero and heroine have to contend with over the course of this motion picture, I suppose. Poor bunnies.

Striking an uneasy balance between the transcendental and mundane strands of ‘70s occult horror, ‘Satan’s Blood’ ultimately succeeds at neither, but if you find yourself in the mood for a prime slice of chilly and mean-spirited late ‘70s witch-smut (and don’t we all, once in a while), it should nonetheless hit the spot pretty satisfactorily, sitting comfortably next to such grubby items as Killer’s Moon or Mario Mercier’s ‘La Papesse’ / ‘A Woman Possessed’ (which I briefly wrote about in this post), more-so than the earlier, more ethereal takes on the sub-genre suggested by its storyline.

Horror Express 2020 #2: The Amazing Transparent Man (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1960)

Over a quarter of a century after ‘The Black Cat’ (1934), and the best part of a decade since The Man From Planet X, Edgar G. Ulmer found himself in even more reduced circumstances than usual, shooting this late doors atom age ‘invisible man’ programmer back-to-back with the same year’s ‘Beyond the Time Barrier’.

Despite working under the contraints of a punishing two week shooting schedule (for both films) however, the indefatigable Ulmer still managed to transform ‘The Amazing Transparent Man’ into a haunting rumination on state power, the trauma of war and the malign consequences of scientific brinkmanship, with a touch of sombre, American gothic pictorialism thrown in for good measure – all neatly wrapped up in 57 minutes.

In a scenario highly reminiscent of the Bogart/Bacall vehicle Dark Passage, the movie opens with an incarcerated safecracker, the pointedly named Joey Faust (Douglas Kennedy), escaping from the pen (ten bucks says the brief prison break footage must have been stolen from another movie), only to find himself aided in his getaway by an attractive blonde (Laura, played by Marguerite Chapman) whom he’s never seen before in his life.

(Whilst researching this post on IMDB, I was astonished to discover that Douglas Kennedy was actually in ‘Dark Passage’, playing a detective; which seems like a fairly remarkable coincidence, but… if there’s a behind-the-scenes story here, I don’t know it, so let’s move on.)

The imitation of Delmer Davies’ 1947 film continues for at least a little bit longer as Faust and Laura negotiate a police check-point, but things subsequently takes a hard left – both literal and metaphorical – as she proceeds to drive him down a series of ominous, rather bleak looking country lanes, emerging in front of an austere, wood-panelled farmhouse, standing starkly against the landscape like something out of an Andrew Wyeth painting.

Approaching the house, the couple are met by a surly, gun-toting man named Julian (Red Morgan), who ushers them inside, where Faust is granted an audience with Major Krenner (ubiquitous TV villain actor James Griffith), the sinister cat who seems to have been responsible for orchestrating his prison break.

(There’s a great, hard-boiled bit here as Krenner disarms Faust whilst Julian covers him with a rifle; “Y’know what one of these bullets will do from behind? It’ll rip out yr spine and roll it up like a ball of string,” Morgan croaks venomously, channelling a thousand western villains.)

Politely declining to identify the country in whose armed forces he has attained the rank of Major (any guesses?), Krenner informs Faust that if he wishes to remain alive, he will henceforth he required to assist him in his as-yet-unspecified plans, after which he is ushered upstairs to take a look at – you guessed it – the laboratory.

In a cramped, lead-lined attic set jam-packed with outdated mad science clobber, we meet Dr. Ulof (Ivan Triesault), an elderly scientist of apparent Eastern European extraction, and learn that he has been working under Krenner’s command to perfect a form of time-limited invisibility, enabled through exposure to highly unstable radioactive isotopes.

The humans retreat to a lead-lined observation chamber whilst the super-charged atomic x-rays do their work, reducing a cute little guinea-pig to a state of complete invisibility (quite a decent effect actually) - and of course it don’t exactly take a disgraced experimental physicist to figure out that Faust himself is going to find himself strapped to the same gurney PDQ.

As Faust finds himself rendered invisible and forced to break into a series of government research labs to steal a load of even more dangerous nuclear material, it gradually becomes clear that no one in this ill-fated farmhouse is there of their own will; all are being coerced by Krenner through a mixture of blackmail, threats and lies.

Ulof, we learn, is a concentration camp survivor assumed dead by the U.S. authorities. In a horribly surreal touch, Krenner is forcing him to conduct work he feels is dangerous and immoral by keeping his young granddaughter – Ulof’s only other surviving blood relative – imprisoned in a locked room right next to the lab.

The thread drawn between the atrocities of WWII and their continuation in the movie’s present feels horribly palpable in Triesault’s convincingly haunted, emotionally desolate performance, whilst the image of him subsisting on a shabby camp bed, screened off in the corner of the lab right next to the steel door of his granddaughter’s cell, is queasily heart-breaking.

An unusual protagonist, Kennedy plays Faust as essentially a big lug, his actions self-serving and fool-hardy, but he says “yeah” in that same clipped way Warren Oates does, so we know he’s got a bit more than that going on upstairs - or enough base cunning to upset Major Krenner’s unstable house of cards at the very least.

This uncertain struggle for power lends the film a weird noir grit, as characters are repeatedly whacked with bottles, threatened with guns and locked in dark rooms as the interplay between the residents of the house becomes increasingly frantic - whilst all the while, the threat posed by the heaps of lethal fissionable material casually stashed in the attic throbs gently in the background.

Offering up a bleak dose of atomic existentialism, the film’s pessimistic conclusion seems to mirror the blasted, lifeless rural location in which the film appears to have been shot – itself an echo of an imagined, post-nuclear hinterland.

Once Krenner has been overpowered and his mis-matched prisoners have made their escape, Dr Ulof hits Faust with the bad news that many viewers will no doubt have already guessed – namely, that the vast doses of radiation he has been exposed to in the course of the invisibility process has left him with barely days to live. Possessed by a sudden sense of fatalistic moral certainty, he leaves the other surviving characters to drive off toward a decidedly uncertain future, making his way back into the farmhouse for one final conflagration…

Though ‘The Amazing Transparent Man’ is not really a horror movie in terms of its plotting, the characteristically doom-laden atmosphere Ulmer brings to proceedings sways it pretty heavily in that direction. Even the swampy terrain Faust stumbles through during his opening prison-break is shadowy and foreboding, whilst the relentless, sawing cello of Darrell Calker’s appropriately minimal score does an efficient job of putting us on edge right from the outset.

Whilst the impoverished circumstances under which the film was produced prevent it from even approaching the same level as Ulmer’s best work, for anyone seeking further evidence to cement his status as classical Hollywood’s favourite underdog auteur, this one is absolute gold dust.

Not only does it find the director throwing in some striking, expressionistic visuals which seem distinctly out of place in the realm of low budget ‘50s sci-fi, but he also twists writer Jack Lewis’s admittedly potent premise toward the same themes which had dominated his work ever since ‘The Black Cat’ and Detour, exploring ideas of imprisonment and inter-personal control, of the trauma of the past contaminating the present, and of inescapable, predestined doom.

Viewed in wider genre terms meanwhile, the film stands as a noteworthy, albeit minor, entry in the lineage of stark, atomic paranoia which runs from Aldrich’s ‘Kiss Me Deadly’ a few years earlier to Joseph Losey’s ‘The Damned’ a few years later, and even, eventually, to Troy Kennedy Martin’s extraordinary BBC drama Edge of Darkness in 1985.

So far as I’m aware, ‘The Amazing Transparent Man’ remains largely unacknowledged by surveyors of this particular sub-genre / sensibility, but I would strongly urge them to track it down. Though a ‘small film’ in every respect, the intrinsic merits of its strange scenario, and of its director’s cracked vision, lend it a rather haunting, morally ambiguous quality which easily surpasses its budgetary shortcomings.

Horror Express 2020 #1: Sugar Hill (Paul Maslansky, 1974)

Well, who on god’s earth could resist a poster like that if it popped up outside their local cinema?

Say what you like about American International Pictures, they sure knew their marketing, and the decision to mix up a blaxploitation female revenge story in the ‘Coffy’/ ‘Foxy Brown’ mould with a voodoo / zombie movie was not just a great idea, but an inevitable one, in view of the company’s place in the market circa 1974.

Not only were AIP the originators of the aforementioned Jack Hill/Pam Grier classics, but the success of the Count Yorga pictures had also put them in the forefront of the brief trend for contemporary, U.S. set reinventions of classic gothic horror tropes. Indeed, their blaxsploitation/horror crossover line was already thriving in its own modest fashion thanks to ‘Blacula’ (1972) and ‘Scream, Blacula, Scream’ (1973).

As it transpires, ‘Sugar Hill’ arrived right at the tail end of these trends’ parallel box office ascendency, just before Arkoff and Nicholson started trying to realign the AIP’s output from 1975 onwards. As such, it should really have been the crowning glory of the company’s achievements in this fertile era; the icing on an already fiendishly overstuffed grindhouse cake.

Trying to assign blame for the fact that it isn’t makes for a less than edifying assignment, but…. let’s just say that, whilst watching ‘Sugar Hill’, the only thing running through my mind from start to finish was: I wish Jack Hill had made this with Pam Grier.

I mean, clearly those guys would have knocked it outta the park. Can you even imagine? Pam in full effect as the voodoo queen, commanding her zombies, as Jack got the chance to mix up the visceral pulp mayhem of his black action films with the gleeful monster kid craziness of ‘Spider Baby’. Wonderful. The late Sid Haig would no doubt have been ragin’ around as some spike-toothed mob enforcer, and no doubt they’d find someone totally far-out - like Exuma, maybe? - to play the Baron Samedi / Vodou Loa character. Allen Toussaint and Dr John might be thrown into a studio together to cook up the soundtrack, and… oh man. It would have been incredible.

Unfortunately though, that’s not the film we got. I believe Hill was still finishing up ‘Foxy Brown’ around the time this was shot, and he subsequently cut his ties with AIP following disagreements with management on the set. Grier meanwhile stayed with the company, but after ‘Foxy Brown’ she (or perhaps, her management) seemed intent on trying to make a dent in the mainstream via watered down, PG-rated re-hashes of her earlier hits like ‘Sheba Baby’ and ‘Friday Foster’ (both 1975).

In lieu of the A-team, Arkoff instead placed a call with his buddy Paul Maslansky, erstwhile producer of such AIP-distributed European horror titles as ‘Castle of the Living Dead’ (1964), Michael Reeves’ ‘She Beast’ (1965) and Gary Sherman’s classic ‘Deathline’/’Raw Meat’ (1972). Having recently returned to America after fifteen years abroad, Maslansky apparently had a yen to direct. So, Sam gave him a brief run-down on what black exploitation films were all about, suggested that combining one with voodoo would be a dead cert, then he basically just handed him the keys and told him not to dent the bumper.

In order to keep costs down and avoid hassle with the unions, production took place in the less than atmospheric environs of Houston, Texas, subbing imperfectly for New Orleans, on a punishing tight three week schedule. A script was cobbled together from somewhere or other, and actress Marki Bey - top-billed for the first and last time after playing supporting roles in a couple of pictures for AIP director/producer Arthur Marks - was recruited to play the title character. She’s not bad, but… she’s no Pam Grier, that’s for sure. (1)

Likewise, ‘Sugar Hill’ is not a terrible film by any stretch of the imagination, but… it’s certainly not an exceptional one either. The very definition of ‘adequate’, it’s one of those movies that’s just kind of…. there, for the most part. It delivers exactly what you’d expect of a 1974 AIP-produced blaxploitation voodoo movie, nothing more, nothing less. Glimpses of innovation or inspiration are few and far between.

Predictably, the story begins with Diana ‘Sugar’ Hill propping up the bar in her upstanding boyfriend’s kitsch, voodoo-themed nightclub, where we get to see a bit of the floorshow, and hear Motown group The Originals’ laboured and rather heavy-handed theme song, ‘Supernatural Voodoo Woman’. (‘Theme from Shaft’ it ain’t.)

The club is proving a runaway success, so naturally the local, multi-ethnic mob (led by Count Yorga himself, Robert Quarry) want in on the action. Upstanding BF of course is having none of it, so before you can reach for the fast forward button, he comes a cropper in the car park, and Sugar is out for sweet revenge.

Naturally, her first stop is Mama Maitresse (Zara Cully), who lives a ghostly existence in a decaying colonial mansion amid a swampy estate swathed in prop department Spanish moss and gallons of dry ice. After the requisite sacrifices and incantations, Baron Samedi (a wild-eyed, permanently grinning Don Pedro Colley) arrives resplendent, as his ping-pong ball-eyed zombie slaves rise from the mulch of the forest floor to take care of business.

Before you can find any more synonyms for ‘predictably’/’naturally’/’of course’ etc, Quarry and his assorted despicable cohorts begin to meet their supernatural doom in a neatly episodic fashion, and….. that’s about as far as a plot synopsis needs to go, really.

On the plus side here then; even if the swampy, Louisiana atmos isn’t quite what it should be, the blind, silver-eyed zombies are an effective, distinctively creepy creation, and must have made quite an impression on audiences back in the pre-Fulci/Raimi era, when such soil-covered, filth-encrusted revenants were a rare sight indeed on the big screen.

Colley is full of fun too as Baron Samedi, going waa-ay off the deep end performance-wise, even if his top-hatted Loa character never really manages to move beyond the more obvious clichés of his part, and the ‘gags’ he dishes out as he drops in on his assorted victims are uniformly woeful.

Also providing excellent value for money is Quarry, who, despite reportedly being cast in this film simply because AIP were legally obligated to provide him with one more job before nixing his contract, nonetheless does sterling work. Giving every indication of having thoroughly enjoyed himself, he transforms his underwritten mob boss character into a hip, razor sharp figure who actually becomes strangely likeable, especially when sparring with his dim-witted, racist blonde girlfriend Celeste (Betty Ann Rees).

Those minor highlights aside however, there’s not really a lot to shout about here. Though there’s some nice lighting and camerawork here and there, in stark contrast to Hill, Maslansky’s direction is depressingly inert. It’s bad sign that he fails to invest even the calamitous early death of the boyfriend character with much dramatic weight, and for the most part proceedings remain equally flat thereafter.

Although he went on to enjoy a highly successful production career through the 70s and 80s (masterminding the ‘Police Academy’ franchise, of all things), it is notable I think that ‘Sugar Hill’ represents Maslansky’s only directorial credit. The drably utilitarian, “will this do?” vibe of most of the footage he captured here answers the question of why he never gave it another shot pretty concisely.

I probably can’t entirely blame Maslansky (who seems like a perfectly nice guy in interviews incidentally) for my next complaint – it sits more with a combo of him, Arkoff and Nicholson, writer Tim Kelly, the whole outfit really I suppose, but…. well, how can I best put this?

Whilst employing white writers and directors to make majority black cast films in the U.S.A. was never going to be an ideal scenario, my belief is that, when AIP hired hip white filmmakers like Hill, Larry Cohen and Jonathan Kaplan to make black action films for them in the early 1970s, those directors at least gave the impression that they were trying to engage with black audiences.

They positioned themselves on the same level as their hypothetical viewers and took an honest stab at reflecting their concerns back to them, sometimes pushing back against the more objectionable content demanded by the studio, and often allowing their actors to bend the material to their own creative/personal needs. To not put too fine a point on it, good movies resulted.

‘Sugar Hill’ by contrast merely feels like it’s patronising its target audience. Though the “revenge against whitey” plotline essentially isn’t much different to that of ‘Coffy’ or ‘Black Caesar’, there’s no real depth here, no impact or involvement. As each of the bad guys in turn prove themselves racist, corrupt or despicable before getting iced by Sugar Hill’s zombies as the guffawing Baron Samedi looks on, the payback is so predictable, so simplistic, that viewers – be they black, white, blue or green – simply feel as if they’re being played for fools, more than anything else.

It’s as if Arkoff told Maslansky, look, you’ve gotta knock off whitey (and some corrupt, black criminal types too, just for the sake of balance) – that’s what sells the tickets. Lesson learned, he’s just ticking the boxes for his boss here. Social relevance? Implicit understanding of the economic inequalities underpinning racial strife? Reflections on the blighted legacy of slavery lurking behind all that voodoo/colonial mansion shtick? Sadly there is precious little of any of that here.

And that’s before we even get to the “only in the 70s” ending, which sees the aforementioned Celeste (the real villain of the piece, to all intents and purposes) being ritually offered up to Baron Samedi as the ‘offering’ to repay him for his hard work icing all the bad guys, leading to us being implicitly invited to cheer in approval as Colley, grinning ear-to-ear, closes in for what he must assume to be a post-credits supernatural rape scene. HAPPY ENDING, everybody!

Boy oh boy. Let’s just skip over unpacking the questionable implications of that one, shall we? It might take a while.

In a sense, ‘Sugar Hill’ reminds me more than anything of the British horror directed by Vernon Sewell for Tigon in the late 1960s, ‘The Blood Beast Terror’ and ‘Curse of the Crimson Altar’ (both 1968). It carries the same terrible stench of wasted potential, of the lightning-in-a-bottle potential of a unique confluence of time, talent and ideas being squandered, just because the guys in the back office were more concerned with delivering exploitable pictures as quickly and cheaply as possible than they were with actually making a movie anyone in their right mind would wish to see more than once.

When undertaking creative work, I’ve always tried to remember the old axiom that, if you aim for ‘good’, hopefully you’ll get something average - but if you aim for ‘average’, you’ll inevitably end up with shit. I wouldn’t go so far as to say ‘Sugar Hill’ is shit – it’s a perfectly serviceable movie, and certainly worth a look for fans of this particular aesthetic terrain. But, if the film’s makers had borne the above wisdom in mind, it could easily have been worth two looks, or even eight or nine, if you get my drift. And the restless spirit of Mr. Arkoff may wish to note that we’d still be paying for it every time too.

Now if only they’d got Jack Hill to make this, and persuaded Pam Grier to star, and….

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(1)In fairness to Bey, this is a criticism which can just as easily be levelled at literally anyone else in the film industry. (Werner Herzog? I mean, he’s ok, but he’s no Pam Grier.)