A randomly comprehensive survey of extraordinary movie experiences from the art house to the grindhouse, featuring the good, the bad, the ugly, but not the boring or the banal.
The first thing that's hard to believe about William Friedkin's documentary is that more than forty years passed before the director of The Exorcist was invited to witness an actual exorcism. Once the opportunity arose, Friedkin made it the occasion for a meditation, at times searching and at times utterly credulous, on the potential real-world benefits of exorcism. He was invited to Italy to witness the pre-eminent exorcist of the age, the nonagenarian Fr. Gabriele Amorth, in his ninth session with a woman named Cristina. It looks nothing like Friedkin's visualizations of William Peter Blatty's novel. Cristina is surrounded by an extended family as Amorth, who died before the film was released, does his thing. Blatty is constrained by Amorth's forbidding of a film crew of cinematic lighting, but his digital video long-take approach seems appropriate to the material, though his cinema-verite presentation of the exorcism is marred by his obvious resort to enhanced sound effects whenever Cristina starts ranting. Of course, she's incapable of the contortions or levitations of pop legend, but it is unsettling to see her thrashing about and playing the devil at random moments during the session. She says nothing outrageous -- or nothing outrageous was translated -- unless you're still outraged by people claiming to be the devil, or "legion," or whatever. For all that, it seemed, especially with the family around, more like an exotic therapy session than a struggle with the forces of darkness.
Digressing, Friedkin interviews a number of reputed experts in various related fields, from the author of a scholarly history of the devil to medical specialists who debate whether Amorth's work can have a genuine therapeutic effect. The film is at its best here, steering away from sensationalism to suggest that there may be some worth to exorcism, perhaps on a placebo level, apart from its spiritual pretensions, though it was Amorth's own policy not to exorcise anyone who could be diagnosed with psychological issues. There are reasons, detailed in his Wikipedia listing, to question whether Amorth was the best judge of his own work, though Friedkin tends to take his claims on, well, faith. His film has ultimately limited value as a documentary, compared to an essay film, because it fails to appraise either Amorth or Cristina objectively. I especially missed the lack of background to Cristina or her family that might suggest more mundane reasons for her odd, attention-seeking behavior. Instead, Friedkin goes in an even more sensationalist direction, telling a yarn about an unfilmed encounter with Cristina and her boyfriend in a creepy church in which she went apeshit and the boyfriend threatened the director with physical violence. It's hard not to call bullshit on that bit of business, but Friedkin is probably betting that no one will care enough to try to corroborate the Cristina story. There's an "evil wins" implication here, underscored by the facts of Amorth's final illness, but The Devil and Father Amorth is really too slapdash to make any strong impression. Nevertheless, I found it entertaining on a barnstorming level, a bit of exploitation hucksterism that seems more like something from The Exorcist's own time than the work of the director's old age.
The latest film from the director of the acclaimed one-take stunt film Russian Ark has something in common with that perennial candidate for Worst Film of All Time, Manos: The Hands of Fate: an pathetically diabolical actor with grotesquely stuffed trousers. Happily, the resemblance ends there, unless you feel let down by Alexander Sokurov's refusal to show us a war in heaven or the more spectacular episodes of the Faust legend. He's freely adapted Goethe's famous verse play -- with my poor high-school German I still recognized some of the poet's original lines in the film -- but treats the legend as an epilogue (or prequel) to a trilogy of films about 20th century tyrants: Moloch (Hitler), Taurus (Lenin) and The Sun (Hirohito). We are invited to see in Heinrich Faust a precursor of their destructive will to power, and to make him a more immediate ancestor Sokurov has updated the legend to Goethe's own time, the early 19th century. Making a German Faust film he couldn't help but tread on F. W. Murnau's territory but Sokurov's Faust is more reminiscent of Murnau's Nosferatu, while the setting and the mania that drives both Faust and his deranged assistant Wagner are reminiscent as much of Werner Herzog as of Murnau. The film may be as much a riff on German cinema as a riff on German culture and history.
Faust contemplates man (above) and civilization (below)
Sokurov sticks to the first part of Goethe's play, which is fine since Goethe himself didn't get around to part two until almost the end of his life. This leaves us in a mundane setting in which Faust (Johannes Zeiler) and Wagner (Georg Friderich) go about their archetypal quest for knowledge by dissecting cadavers. Wagner is creepy from the start and gets creepier later. The ever-frustrated Faust falls in with Mauricius the moneylender (Anton Adasinsky), Sokurov's Mephistopholes. In a great performance, Adasinsky sets the tone for the film. Mauricius is a petty if not pathetic devil -- the bulges in his clothes suggest that his angelic and demonic physical attributes have been stuffed inside his own grotesquely gnarled flesh. As a moneylender, he's often busy collecting on debts in this world, and in that role he's more hated than feared. He makes the traditional promises to Faust, and Sokurov mystifies the proceedings enough with distorted lenses to indicate that Mauricius can back up his claims. Faust isn't sure what he wants from this strange man until he encounters Gretchen (Isolda Dychauk) in a public bath where Mauricius makes a ridiculous spectacle of himself by stripping and flirting with the other girls. As Faust's desire for Gretchen grows, Wagner grows madly jealous, while Gretchen takes interest in Faust, despite his apparent involvement in her brother's death in a pub brawl, as a form of rebellion against a controlling mother.
Anton Adasinksy as Mauricius, clothed (above) and sort of unclothed (below)
The story follows the barest bones of Goethe's outline, though Sokurov doesn't follow Gretchen's storyline to its melodramatic climax. Indeed, the way he ends the film is a stunning statement of, if not his own than Faust's indifference to the moral stakes involved in his dealing with the devil. Like just about everyone else in the picture, the doctor has treated Mauricius with scorn during their walks through town and countryside. After the moneylender finally entices him to sign the infamous pact with blood, and Faust has his night with Gretchen, Mauricius seeks to recruit Faust into some infernal army, giving him armor to put on while donning some himself for a trek into a wild landscape that might be Hell. The armor soon grows uncomfortable and ridiculous for both travelers. More unexpectedly, Mauricius is increasingly uncomfortable with the environment itself, while Faust is increasingly fascinated. For the devil this is, presumably, both his domain and his punishment, while for the man it's just a new world to conquer by gaining knowledge of it. A geyser terrifies Mauricius while Faust adores it until it bores him with its repetition. Impatient and uncomfortable, Mauricius demands Faust's soul, but the doctor tells the devil to wait until he's dead -- and if he won't wait Faust is happy to stone the helpless, wailing moneylender until he's buried under rocks, leaving our antihero free to explore this wonderful, terrible new world.
Repulsive as Mauricius is, you may find yourself feeling sympathy for the devil, for rarely has his work been shown to be more thankless, even when he seems to be winning. If Mauricius is a rebel angel of myth his punishment seems to be an inability to enjoy whatever power he gains over men. In town, he's plagued by a woman who claims to be his wife, while Faust, as a contemptuous ingrate, may be typical of what our mediocre Mephistopheles has to deal with in his real work. It's an interesting take on the devil, but where does that leave Faust in Sokurov's scheme of things? If he wants us to link Faust with his historical subjects from the next century, the thing in common must be a certain arrogant fearlessness or an indifference to consequences -- or a failure to take his own soul seriously.
Faust may leave you wondering what the ultimate point is, but it's a beautiful thing to ponder. Bruno Delbonnel's cinematography -- he's since worked with the Coen brothers brilliantly on Inside Llewyn Davis -- will put you in mind not just of Murnau and Herzog but of the paintings, contemporary with Goethe, of Caspar David Friedrich. Visually the picture is as much a masterful accomplishment for Sokurov as Russian Ark was, and the acting lives up to the images. Zeiler is great in the title role, but Georg Friedrich as Wagner nearly steals the film with a Kinskian tirade in which he demands to be called "the great Wagner," tries to convince Gretchen that he's really Faust, and shows her a homunculus -- a disembodied face, really -- he made all by himself to impress her. I must admit that I don't entirely get Sokurov's philosophical or spiritual points, but on a mere movie level Faust is a feast of elegant madness that can be enjoyed on that level -- depending on your taste, or your morals.
New to YouTube this week, as I learned while randomly browsing for videos, is the one and only film written and directed by Bart LaRue, a voice actor for most of his career and most recognizable in that capacity as the voice of the Guardian of Forever in the "City on the Edge of Forever" episode of Star Trek. LaRue's two lead actors made their only screen appearances in Satanwar, and that kind of singularity often means something special. In fact, "Bart LaRue's Satanwar" is a sublimely inept attempt at an Amityville Horror rip-off, a 76 minute movie with approximately an hour of plot, followed by a 15-minute Mondo-style presentation on the satanic elements of voodoo. The film proper is introduced with narration explaining that Satan's demons target not just the general population, but Christians as well. This is demonstrated through the sad "true" tale of Bill and Louise Foster, whose new home is so ghastly -- I leave the kitchen wallpaper to your imagination -- that haunting seems redundant. But when did that ever stop the Evil One. No sooner have the Fosters hung their wedding cross on the wall that the powers of darkness struggle to turn it upside down. So impressed is Director LaRue with the special effect that makes this possible that he repeats the cross stunt several times during the picture.
Jimmy Drankovitch and Sally Schermerhorn gasp at the military might of Satan.
Other demonic manifestations include smelly brown gunk that boils over on the stove, smelly white gunk that seeps out of the refrigerator and cabinets, and invisible hands that grope Louise in the kitchen one morning. She's terrified at first, but later she and Bill can joke about it. It might not be bad having another man around the house, hubby suggests, if he shares in the housework.
Louise:I'm not going to be molested day and night just so you don't have to take out the garbage. Bill:Just tell him that rape, sex and molestation are my department. Louise:...He did have nice hands.
Satan also hits Louise in the leg with a stop-motion animated chair, sets Bill's newspaper on fire, and, in his ultimate stratagem, sends a hooded guy into the house with a knife. A timely combination of cross and revolver repel the intruder, but he's enough to convince them finally to quit the place so LaRue can cut to the voodoo. "Thus the oldest war in the universe carries on to its eternal conclusion," the narrator narrates to close this riveting empty film. It has a badness on every level that lends it a kind of inimitable authenticity. Too many people make self-consciously bad movies, but this kind of bad can't be faked. Satanwar doesn't seem to be very well known, but the GialloGrindhouse channel on YouTube is out to correct that, and you can watch Bart LaRue's definitive cinematic statement right here -- if you dare.
Hammer followed the success of Roy Ward Baker's The Vampire Lovers with Jimmy Sangster's Lust For a Vampire, a film my friend Wendigo has seen but once. Once was enough: the lead actress, though quite a looker, was no Ingrid Pitt when it came to talent or personality. Nothing about Lust impressed him, and to have the vampire woman lusting for a man violated the Carmilla concept. Whatever its original audience thought, Hammer persevered and put John Hough to work directing a third "Karnstein" film. This time, though, the British studio brought some extra exploitation inspiration to the project, merging their signature vampire product with the then-hot topic of witch-hunting. The result is a conceptually dynamic film that I prefer to Vampire Lovers, while Wendigo himself has some justified reservations.
The Collinson twins differentiate themselves gradually over the course of the film.
For most of the picture, the titular twins (played by pioneer twin Playmates Mary and Madelaine Collinson) take a back seat to a war of wills waged by witch-hunter Gustave Weil (Peter Cushing), the head of a torchbearing Brotherhood, and the decadent Count Karnstein (Damien Thomas). The Count routinely has his way with local women, doing who knows what in his castle, but the bourgeois Brotherhood can't touch him because, as an aristocrat, Karnstein enjoys the protection of the Holy Roman Emperor. The war of wills is a class war fueled by Weil's resentment of Karnstein's privileges -- and his sexual prowess, we can assume -- and Karnstein's libertine contempt for Weil's intolerant moralizing. In their first encounter, Karnstein looks more like a hero, since we've already grown suspicious that the Brotherhood is burning innocent women. We're inclined to think that Karnstein has Weil well pegged as the real villain of the piece. However, amid the witch-burning there's this nagging business of a vampire. Someone's in the woods biting necks. Who could that be?
Both Gustave Veil (Peter Cushing, above) and Count Karnstein (Damien Thomas, seated below) have sins to answer for, but is that poor schmuck with the bite on his neck (bottom) one of them?
Count Karnstein, perhaps? The answer seems to be no, at least at first. We see the Count become a vampire by performing a blood sacrifice to summon the spirit of his ancestress Mircalla/Carmilla for a round of necro-incest prior to the necessary bite, but that begs the question of who was biting folks before. Wendigo thinks it a major weakness of the picture that this question is never really answered. We may be meant to assume that Karnsteins are running around all over the place, but since we see no other vampires before the Count summons Mircalla, we can't draw any conclusions about the early vampire attacks with any certainty.
The Ghost of Vampires Past approaches Count Karnstein. Below, director John Hough makes the most of mirrors and mirror-related effects, including the Count's loss of his reflection as he becomes a vampire.
In any event, the battle between bourgeois morality and aristocratic depravity is played out in miniature between the newly-arrived Gellhorn twins. Maria (Mary) is the good girl, while Frieda (Madeline) is the wild child. Only Anton (David Warbeck), the choral instructor of the local Hammer Academy for Highly-Developed Young Ladies, senses the moral difference between the twins, and can thus tell them apart reliably when no one else can. Frieda resents the discipline imposed by Uncle Gustave and is attracted by the Count's decadent reputation. Maria isn't exactly happy with her uncle, but doesn't feel the same temptation to transgress out of spite that Frieda feels. Maria's too good for her own good. When Frieda runs off to spend a night with Karnstein and is turned into a vampire, Maria covers for her, convincing Gustave that she's Frieda and that Maria had run off for the night. For her trouble, Gustave beats "Frieda" with a belt and is sure to beat Maria in the morning to punish her. The real Frieda doesn't care.
Anton has been studying vampire lore, and tries to explain to Gustave that the local problem is vampires rather than witches, and that burning suspects will do no good. You get a sense that, on some level, Anton is simply trying to discourage Gustave from burning women. But when his sister turns up dead by neckbite (and not necessarily by Karnstein or Frieda) he makes vampire fighting a serious vocation. Gustave gets wise when he catches Frieda in the act, but convinces the Brotherhood to behave themselves and hold the vampiress in prison for a time. That gives Karnstein time to kidnap Maria and do the switcheroo, so that Maria is brought to the brink of burning before Anton convinces Gustave to give her the crucifix test again. A now quite repentant Gustave rallies the Brotherhood to join Anton in an assault on Karnstein castle to destroy the aristocrat and his evil acolytes once and for all. Normally Peter Cushing vs. vampires has a foregone conclusion, but this time around he may have too much to answer for....
Twins may not have as much nudity as one might hope for, but the final reel has plenty of gore to keep up Hammer's street cred.
Wendigo acknowledges that Twins has a lot going for it. It has a strong male cast, Cushing, Damien Thomas and Peter Warbeck all giving good performances grounded in the film's social and cultural context. The film is admirably ambiguous in making Cushing a virtual villain motivated by obvious jealousies and resentments who only gradually evolves into an antihero. Count Karnstein also evolves, or devolves, from a mere libertine skeptic who initially scoffs at a purported sacrifice to Satan into someone who embraces absolute evil as almost an aristocratic imperative. He looks like he'll be the antihero at first in that early confrontation with Gustave, but his aristocratic prejudices seem to doom him to wickedness. Amid the confusion, Anton emerges as the least ambiguous hero -- though I initially suspected him of being the original vampire. Wendigo also likes the way the conflict between the twins echoes that of Weil and Karnstein, with the sisters taking opposite extremes of fatal selfishness and almost-fatal selflessness. After stumbling with the first sequel, scripter Tudor Gates, who worked on all three Karnsteins, was really back on his game this time. Technically, Twins is a knockout, richly envisioned by Hough and usually realized evocatively by cinematographer Dick Bush and art director Roy Stannard. Interiors and exteriors are often quite striking, and Twins overall looks richer and more striking (whatever the difference in budget) than Vampire Lovers.
Wendigo wants to stress again how irritated he was by the film's failure to identify the original vampire. For him it's a major, almost crippling flaw of the story. If anything, the whole vampire angle is a weakness of this ostensible vampire movie. That's because he feels that both Frieda and Count Karnstein became less interesting once they became conventional vampire villains. He also feels that Hough bungles one major scene, the bedroom tussle between Anton and Frieda disguised as Maria. Shot with a handheld camera and a fisheye lens, it was probably meant to express immediacy, but in Wendigo's opinion it only looked amateurish and made Madelaine Collinson -- in her one nude scene -- look silly. Meanwhile, the business with Joachim, Karnstein's mute black servant, having to pantomime that the Brotherhood is advancing on the castle, looks goofy to say the least if not a little racist. Joachim gets his own back later with an impressive cleaver-to-the-head attack on a Brother. Finally, Harry Robinson's music is probably inappropriate in its own right, sounding more like a swashbuckler soundtrack, but his main theme now sounds alarming like the opening music for the Justice League cartoon series of a few years back. That's not Robinson's fault, but anyone who "recognizes" the music may have a hard time taking the film as seriously as it deserves.
While I've stated my preference for Twins over Lovers, Wendigo is reluctant to name a favorite of the two. The original film retains the overwhelming asset of Ingrid Pitt, while the stunt-cast Collinsons don't impress him as actors. Also, like Lust, Twins is almost lesbian-free, which is simply wrong, in Wendigo's opinion, for material derived from Carmilla. It also has less nudity in general, a fact that surprised and disappointed Wendigo somewhat. While this makes it look like he leans toward Lovers, he feels that the comparison is like apples vs. oranges. I'll accept that because Twins really took the Karnstein concept in a new direction and practically into a new genre. What keeps them together in a trilogy, beside the Karnstein name, is a concern with vampirism as an analog for sexual deviance, whether Lovers' obvious lesbianism or Twins' implicit libertinage. In the end, Wendigo likes both films for different reasons, flaws and all. Throw out the middle film and you have an admirable diptych of late Hammer nearly at its best.
Here's a British trailer uploaded to YouTube by flotzcore.
Paul Naschy, the thespian alter ego of writer-director Jacinto Molina, is often called "the Lon Chaney of Spain." There's an appropriate ambiguity to that label. In his most popular character, the tormented werewolf Waldemar Daninsky, Naschy clearly walks in the thorny footsteps of Lon Chaney Jr. In other films, like The Hunchback of the Morgue, his pathetic grotesques are more in the tradition of Chaney Sr. The more Molina took Naschy beyond the conceptual realm of the Universal classic monster mythos, the more his complete body of work came to resemble the broader range of roles of the elder Chaney. Molina wrote the script for director Leon Klimovsky's medieval adventure, crafting for himself the sort of role Chaney Sr. might have played in silent days, albeit with a more modern emphasis on Satanic sleaze, and for extra measure throws in a subtle homage to the great man's most famous role at the end.
An American distributor retitled El Mariscal del infierno to cash in on Seventies Satan fever in the aftermath of The Exorcist, and to pre-empt any assumption that "The Marshall of Hell" was a Spaghetti Western. In medieval Europe, a marshall/mariscal was a high ranking military official and part of the royal household. Such a man was Gilles de Lancre (Naschy), a fictional amalgam of Macbeth and Gilles de Rais, who opens the film by retiring to private life as the lord of his castle and the nearby countryside. He's somewhat disgruntled over failing to get the recognition he feels he deserved, or failing to achieve the greatness he considers his destiny. In retirement, he hopes to win fame as a man of science.
Toward that end, his wife Georgelle (Norma Sebre) has brought "the greatest alchemist ever" into the Lancre household. Playing the Lady Macbeth role, the apparently bamboozled Georgelle encourages Gilles to indulge the alchemist's every demand toward the great project of synthesizing the ars magnus, aka the Philosopher's Stone -- the Sorcerer's Stone to you American muggles. Achieving that will make Gilles, whose greatness is heralded by his falling sickness, worthy to rule all of France. Such a project demands immense and costly resources, including the blood of human sacrifices to Satan. Gilles balks at that idea for about thirty seconds before wifey cajoles him into ordaining murder. From that point, de Lancre becomes the Marshall of Hell and the terror of his land.
Enter the hero, Gaston de Malebrache (Guillermo Bredeston), one part Banquo (Gilles's old comrade-in-arms) and one part Robin Hood (the noble-turned-rebel version), retiring in his turn from the wars. He rebuffs an attack by rustics, only to learn that they aren't bandits hunting the rich but rebels who mistook him for the tyrant de Lancre. That doesn't sound like his old pal Gilles, so Gaston sets out to investigate after fending off a gang of Gilles's goons in a tavern that seems to have a trampoline hidden somewhere for our hero to bounce on, Fairbanks style. Gilles himself welcomes his old buddy as a dinner guest, but Georgelle urges him to assassinate the "peril" in their midst. Gaston escapes the attempt and flees, joining the rebels who happen now to be lead, following the death of their original head, by Gaston's attractive cousin Graciela (Graciela Nilson), who helps him overcome the rustics' natural suspicion of another noble.
The sides properly formed, the de Lancres and Malebraches go to war, Gaston scoring first blood by entering the lists in disguise against Gilles in a joust and lancing an eye out. Things go downhill mentally from there for de Lancre. He hears the wailing of his victims in a delirium, resolves to repent his evil, only to order the massacre a party of monks when one of them dares call him out for his crimes. Frustrated at the alchemist's repeated failures, and perhaps finally realizing that the old man's a fraud, he kills the crank but carries on the regimen of torture and sacrifice, convinced that he can attain the ars magnus without wizardly expertise. By the time he faces Gaston for the final showdown, he's convinced that the prize is his, making him immortal and invincible.
Molina's script and Klimovsky's direction suffer from an imbalance that's inevitable when the star elects to play the villain. Their blend of Macbeth and Robin Hood is awkward, since one or the other must be the dominant character. In the end, the film's Robin Hood, Gaston, is a dull if energetic goody-two-shoes, the rebellious appeal of the archetype undercut by the villain's transgressive charisma. The creators probably recognized this by the end and were determined that Gaston should not defeat Gilles in single combat.
Instead, Gilles strikes a decisive blow and is poised to finish his foe when the rest of the rebels appear. As soon as he was surrounded I knew to expect a Throne of Blood homage with Naschy as a Mifunian human pincushion. But the fun thing about Naschy is that his homages are often multilayered, riffing on more than one influence. Molina was a meta-auteur, and spotting the homages adds to the entertainment value of his films. Here he did not disappoint. Gilles defies his enemies, warning them that he has the ars magnus in his clenched fist, with which he can destroy them all and conquer the world. He unclenches his fist -- and there's nothing there. That's Phantom of the Opera all over the place, when Erik is trapped on the bridge and threatens his pursuers with a mini-bomb, only to open his empty hand and laugh, as if his last word will be, "Psyche!" Unlike Erik, Gilles in his final madness actually thinks he has a super-weapon, but the moment and the gesture are Naschy's bow to Lon Chaney Sr. and Rupert Julian across the decades. At least I saw them that way.
Like Dr. Jekyll and the Werewolf, my copy of The Devil's Possessed comes from Mill Creek Entertainment's Pure Terror box set. This time Mill Creek comes closer to the actual thing. IMDB lists the running time of El Mariscal as 95 minutes, while Devil's Possessed comes in at a respectable 89 minutes. Whether that's the difference between a "clothed" and "unclothed" version I can't say, but there is a notable lack of nudity in my copy of a film full of sacrifices to Satan and attractive Euro actresses. Overall, the film has an appropriately grungy look typical of the more realistic, unromanticized portrayal of medieval Europe dating back at least to The Lion in Winter, enhanced by actual ruined locations. I wouldn't be surprised if more money was spent on costumes than on extras, but everybody looks good, and the eyepatch-sporting Gilles of the final section deserves a place in the Naschy Hall of Fame. Even the cinematography comes off respectably in an admittedly compromised presentation; you can see where they were aiming for something like a Caravaggio look in some of the scenes in the bandits' lair.
It sometimes seems as if Naschy was obliged to drool some substance in every picture. Below: Whatever you say to Gilles, don't mention the eyepatch!
The Devil's Possessed is ultimately a little less than the sum of its parts because of the imbalance of power between Naschy and his co-stars. If you have him as a villain but want audiences to root for the hero, you need one made of stronger stuff than Guillermo Bredeston, I'm afraid, and you should probably change the script to introduce the hero first. The emphasis on Naschy, not to mention on sacrifice and torture, marks El Mariscal as a horror film rather than a swashbuckler in the final analysis; it's closest analogue might well be Rowland V. Lee's Tower of London in its volatile genre mix. In any event, this film is admirable for its ambition, even if that ambition isn't fully achieved.
This is my second and final contribution to the Naschy memorial blogathon organized by Mad Mad Mad Mad Movies to mark the anniversary this week of Jacinto Molina's death. I'm just the tip of an iceberg of terrific tributes and reviews all over the blogosphere. To learn more about the man and his work, just follow the links listed at viceducal headquarters. Happy browsing!
As a vampire-movie fan, my friend Wendigo is also a horror-film fan, but he doesn't necessarily judge vampire films by horror movie criteria. I asked him recently whether any vampire movie had ever actually scared him. He said that he couldn't recall one doing so, and then he recounted three films that did scare him. The first that came to his mind was the original version of The Blob; the mere concept of the creature and the fact that it could kill you while you were sitting in your chair simply by brushing against your foot spooked him as a kid. A more surprising film was Gore Verbinski's The Ring, as opposed to the Japanese original, which he has also seen. The American version didn't shock him as he watched, but the memory of the dead, wet girl's awkward, unnatural movements haunted him for nights afterward in troubled dreams. The other film was Mario Bava's landmark gothic horror from 1960, that annus mirabilis (or terribilis) of global horror cinema. But Wendigo had only the dimmest memories of what frightened him, though he remembered the spiked masks the condemned Satanists were forced to wear and the holes in Barbara Steele's face when her mask was removed -- not to mention her big, creepy eyes. It just so happened that I have Black Sunday in an Anchor Bay box set of Bava films, so I played it to jog his memory -- and it was then that we realized that it is, in fact, a vampire film -- or at least a film with vampires in it.
Wendigo remembered two characters, Asa and Javutich, being condemned as witches and cursing their Moldavian persecutors before the masks of Satan were hammered onto their faces. The shot of the mask being driven into Steele's face, and the mask bleeding blood (in black and white) brought back uneasy memories for him. It's about the most gruesome form of execution that he can imagine. The visceral though not gory quality of this scene set the tone for everything to come.
Two hundred years later, Steele plays Katia, a lookalike descendant imperiled when a visiting professor breaks the glass window of Asa's coffin while beating a bat to death, lifts the mask of satan from her eyeless and spike-pocked face, and cuts his hand on the broken glass. The blood revitalizes Asa (who wasn't burnt as she should have been in the first place because rain put out the bonfire), starting with her once maggot-infested eye sockets, but she expends her reviving power to resurrect Javutich, who still has to dig his own way out of his grave and pull his own mask off.
He eventually lures the professor back to Asa's crypt to watch her blow up her coffin. She mesmerizes the professor with a promise of power and pleasure and takes more of his blood. The professor becomes her instrument to avenge herself on the descendants of her persecutors, killing Katia's father before the professor's innocent assistant and a knowledgeable priest destroy him in his daytime resting place. By now Asa and Javutich don't need him any more as they aim to destroy the rest of Katia's family and have Asa herself take Katia's place. It's up to the assistant, the priest, and a helpful mob to save the day....
Asa's dependence upon blood, and blood's capacity to resurrect her, make Black Sunday quite like a vampire film, and by the time a victim is described as having puncture marks on his neck there was no more room for doubt. This film taps into Eastern European folklore and literature (namely Nikolai Gogol's "Viy") including the unusual detail of destroying a vampire by staking it through the literally evil eye. Wendigo may have been thrown off the scent way back when, however, by the emphasis on Satan in Bava's film. While western folklore often traces vampirism to demonic possession of corpses (hence the vulnerability to crosses and other holy symbols) the idea that vampires are primarily servants of Satan is downplayed in the Anglo-American post-Dracula tradition. There's a hint of Satanism is Hammer's vampire films, but when you hear about a "vampire cult" you usually assume that the cultists are worshipping Dracula himself or some other master vampire. Black Sunday is almost unique among movies in stressing the vampires' Satanism (though The Satanic Rites of Dracula is another obvious case), and Wendigo would even concede the point if someone would still rather see Asa as a witch or Satanist rather than a vampire. It might not be deemed a vampire film if your sine qua non is the money shot of someone biting a neck, since that never happens here. But for his purposes it's a vampire film because vampiric powers allow the villains to come back from the dead and attempt to fulfill their curse. In any event, Wendigo doesn't consider categories mutually exclusive, so define Black Sunday as you please.
European horror films are still a tough sell for Wendigo despite his admiration for some of the movies I've shown him for our series. Black Sunday goes back before Euro horror got arguably too "European," however, and his recollections made him willing to rewatch the film. He's very impressed by Bava's direction, set design and cinematography, though even this master of making the most out of limited resources couldn't do a decent bat effect. The film has a strong gothic atmosphere throughout, a visual quality Bava enhances with remarkable events like the swirling sky as Javutich whips his carriage down a dark road. It probably represents the summit of black-&-white horror, from a director who would prove only more masterly in color. It also has a human special effect in the form of Barbara Steele in her star-making performance, ably assisted by Arturo Dominici as Javutich, equally creepy masked or unmasked. Wendigo finds Steele both stunningly beautiful and frightening, thanks to those powerful eyes. Her meteoric rise to horror stardom, not to mention Bava's rise to global fame, are perfectly understandable to him based on this film.
Barbara Steele: The good (top), the bad (middle), and even with the makeup there's no ugly here.
Wendigo didn't find the film very "European" because Bava didn't sacrifice narrative substance for the sake of style or sensation. Black Sunday doesn't deal in "dream logic," but tells a good old-fashioned yarn. It's more than the sum of its set pieces, while Wendigo finds many Euro horrors to be less. More to the point, it was just about as creepy as Wendigo remembers from his childhood. It's a film anyone will remember, even if disturbingly dimly, long after they've seen it. It isn't a landmark of the vampire subgenre, but it's certainly a classic of horror in general.
The American trailer was uploaded to YouTube by ennemme.
Ti West's retro horror film seems to me like a more successful attempt at what Quentin Tarantino was trying to do in Death Proof, his half of the Grindhouse double-bill. Each film has a two-act structure with a slow, talky first half designed to get you interested in characters who'll end up in extreme jeopardy. But while Tarantino depended pretty much on his dialogue alone to build and maintain your interest, West does a better job building up sympathy or empathy for Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) and Megan (Greta Gerwig). He nicely establishes Samantha's isolation on the college campus and her need to get away from an obnoxious roommate, as well as the quirkiness that leaves Samantha and Megan, two otherwise attractive if not hot young women, as each other's best if not only friends. West's deliberate pacing also works to establish the distance Samantha has to travel to reach the house where she expects to do a night of babysitting. He set his film in the 1980s not only as a homage to that decade's horror films, but because it was nearly the last time when a person could be cut off from friends, without recourse to cell phones, Twitter, etc. Once Megan drops her off and drives away, Samantha is on her own in an already dubious situation that seems certain to get worse.
You could argue that West's approach is too low-key to be a true Eighties homage if you identify the decade and the genre with cartoonish killers. This film's head menace is Tom Noonan, who's menacing because of his age, his height, and his history as an actor, but also, paradoxically, of how soft-spoken he is and how fragile he seems. He's professorial in manner and the type of person you could believe is at least some sort of obsessive character. Again, West takes time filming Noonan's scenes with Donahue, letting his creepiness sink in gradually after an already creepy first impression. He has you feeling pretty certain that Samantha is making a terrible mistake staying over, no matter how much money Mr. Ulman offers her, but since he's also established why Samantha needs the money so badly, you don't automatically condemn her as stupid, even if Megan does. If you're watching the film in the first place you have an idea of what's in store for Samantha, but West and Donahue have made her enough of a sympathetic character that you want her to survive the night.
For me The House of the Devil is a big improvement on West's last auteur effort, the sniper thriller Trigger Man. That film struck me as pretty pointless, while the new film is more focused and more effective. To the extent that Trigger Man was a gore showcase, House matches it pretty well with one especially nasty gun-damage scene and plenty of bloodshed during Samantha's showdown with the devil's housemates. Some of the action wasn't as convincing as it could have been (Samantha gets loose from her bonds too easily at one point), and the climax has to stretch to reach the desired evil-wins ending, but overall it's an effective little film with enough heart to make it genuinely horrific. Despite the period music, it struck me as more like a Seventies horror than an Eighties effort -- but that's a good thing as far as I'm concerned.
It didn't take long for me to recognize what Lionsgate was peddling in their recent DVD of a Kirk Douglas film the title of which I had never heard of before. All I had to see was Simon Ward's name and I realized they were repackaging Alberto De Martino's Omen-ripoff Holocaust 2000, perhaps to be rid of the obsolete dating, perhaps also to hide a bad reputation for the movie. I'd never seen the film before, so when the Albany Public Library made it one of their more improbable recent acquisitions, I decided to give it a shot, and I'm glad I did.
Because of his current standing as a living legend of the screen, it may be hard to recognize that Kirk Douglas's career was on the skids in the 1970s. When you compare his output from the great decade with his peers (Lancaster, Mitchum, Holden, Peck) it's not that impressive. Even Peck was skidding a bit, but Kirk had to notice what The Omen did for Greg. But to get similar results, at the time, Douglas had to go to Europe (where he'd done The Master Toucha few years earlier) for this Anglo-Italo production was set up for the director of Blazing Magnum. I've watched that recently without reviewing it here, but its two great highlights -- the stunt-happy car chase scene and Stuart Whitman's bruising brawl with a gang of transvestites -- further encouraged me to try Holo--I mean Rain of Fire.
It's not such an Omen ripoff after all. Look: Douglas's character Robert Caine is a businessman, not a diplomat, and the Antichrist is practically grown up, not a toddler. Oh, all right, people have a funny way of dying when they could mess up the infernal plan, but wouldn't the Devil do that anyway even if there had never been an Omen? Anyway, the plan is different, too, though the makers of Holocaust 2000 didn't know going in what the long range plan was for the Omen franchise -- and they didn't know their film would be renamed Rain of Fire, either. But Omenologists will recall that Damien's plan is to pretty much make everyone miserable so that they'd renounce God, while Angel Caine (Simon Ward) simply wants to kill everyone in a nuclear holo--(sigh) --rain of fire.
I'm an atheist, but I'd still have this guy pegged as an Antichrist just on appearances. Simon Ward in the film formerly known as Holocaust 2000.
How does Robert Caine happen to raise an Antichrist? I cannot tell you, but it seems to have something to do with little Angel strangling a twin to death in Mommy's womb. Also, carrying the genes of an avatar of Kirk will give you a certain degree of cussedness even before other powers intervene. But it all does seem to be part of a plan, as our hero begins to discover strange numerological coincidences linking his big Middle Eastern nuclear power project with some of the symbolism of the Apocalypse. Some people don't like this idea simply because of the pollution it might cause. Protesters dog Caine's every step, chanting: What do our children want to be when they grow up? Alive! Them he won't believe, but all those coincidences get him having very strange dreams.
I don't think Kirk Douglas would know how to merely go slumming in exploitation cinema. He earned stardom in a series of apoplectic performances (Champion, Detective Story, Ace in the Hole) in which his characters drove themselves into early graves by force of pure will, it seemed, and at moments here he taps into that early fury. He throws himself into the show with Bela-like commitment, putting himself through more than Lugosi ever had to endure in a picture. Two scenes stand out: a feverish dream sequence that requires him to run naked through a desert and martyr himself (sort of) in a crowd of demonstrators; and a furious insane asylum visit that comes off less like Douglas's dream project of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and more like Shock Corridor, albeit with more color and violence.
Above, the dream; below, the nightmare.
Since I left out the bit where Douglas smashes an assailant's skull with that plank, I may as well show you the other gore highlight. A change in government in the Middle East has jeopardized Caine's power-plant project, so it's up to Satan to do something about it, helicopter style.
I don't mean to suggest that it was all hard knocks for poor Kirk in Europe. After all, he gets to go shoulders-&-sheets with the charming Agostina Belli, so charming a female that the innocent fawns of the forest are drawn to her.
Everybody loves Agostina Belli in (with apologies to Lionsgate) Holocaust 2000.
She becomes the object of some anxiety when Kirk confuses his prophecies and begins to believe that the child she's carrying by him will be the Antichrist rather than his grown boy. His suspicions are furthered in a manipulative scene in which Belli's character claims she's too tired to visit a church, leading Kirk to think she can't enter such a sanctuary. These suspicions lead our hero to force her into having an abortion -- with the endorsement of a Roman Catholic priest! I'll leave that particular plot point in suspense, as the whole film rather leaves you hanging. As if they, too, were planning a sequel, the filmmakers leave most of the major characters alive, though the balance of power has shifted a bit. What might Holocaust 2001 (or Rain of Fire 2, if you insist) have been like? The world will never know.
Whatever you choose to call the picture (your choices also include The Chosen and Hex Massacre), it wasn't your everyday Italo exploitation project. Getting Douglas and Anthony Quayle, among others, was just part of a budget that included some nice art direction and location work. Morricone did the music, by the way. Especially now on a widescreen DVD, this is a treat to look at, even if the plot doesn't endure much thought. For instance, the devil's style is to kill those who might interfere with his scheme. But at a certain point, the main obstacle becomes Robert Caine, yet at that point the best the evil one can do is to get him very temporarily confined to the nervous hospital. Why aren't buildings falling on him, for Satan's sake? On the other hand, there is no way you want Kirk Douglas taken off the screen prematurely on this occasion. He more than earns respect from genre buffs and exploitation fans with his all-out work here, though he may not necessarily have respected himself for a while afterward. It's his shamelessness on screen that makes the movie worthwhile.
* * *
Now dig this: an alternate ending to the movie that has been copied from a Greek tape and posted to YouTube. I'm guessing this was for countries that wanted a less ambivalent ending or where censorship boards required evil to lose. You can also find the whole film in installments, as well as clips of the helicopter death scene and Kirk's dream, if you look for them.
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