Hayes of Thunder: THE DISEMBODIED, ZOMBIES OF MORA TAU, GUNSLINGER

Snaking her unhinged voluptuousness through the breezy soundstage jungles, medieval forests, old wests and voodoo graveyards of drive-in independence, Allison Hayes was a special breed of star (aggressively sexual) at a special time (the mid-to-late 50s) for a special place (the drive-in). And what she did for America and its boozy good-time pulse cannot be fully known or measured. At her best playing the direct, carnal sexually available wanton, the well-bodied broad with an unfulfilled need for sex and violence, she was as recognizable a face in the late-50s drive-in as Vincent Price or Boris Karloff. Classic genre fans rightly revere her like Christians do Mary Magdalene. She was the antidote to the Marilyn Monroe/Annette Funicello dichotomy, as ravenous as a wolf and smart as a pistol. Here are three of her films not as well known as her most iconic (Attack of the 50-Foot Woman), but all are worth hunting down, if you love well-built and slightly crazy but all-the-way women.   

ZOMBIES OF MORA TAU 

(1957) Dir. Edward L. Cahn

***

If you ever saw one of those cool plastic pirate skeleton or old-time diving suit aquarium ornaments--the kind that sit on the bottom of the tank, with the oxygen bubbles coming up from a small sunken treasure chest half buried in the gravel--and you really wanted one. But there was one problem: you didn't have an aquarium to put it in. Well, I have a movie for you. my friend: you should see this film from independent producer Sam Katzman. Old "Jungle" Sam doesn't have an aquarium either! But damned if that'll stop him from filling a film with a lot of underwater old time diving suited salvagers hunting out a gold chest in an old shipwreck, and tangling with its undead guardians. 

Many have tried over the years to recover the diamonds--guarded by the corpses of the ship's pirate crew--and all have died and joined the bubbly vigil. The undead captain's now-elderly wife (Marjorie Eaton) lives in the forlorn hope that one day the curse will be broken but the only way to break is "destroy" the diamonds. What? How can you destroy the hardest thing in the world? So she changes it to "get rid of them! Throw them into the sea!" They're in the sea already, lady, so what, just drop the chest back in the water? Why not just fish them out again once the curse is broken? Writers on these old yarns never seem to iron out curse logistics. At least Jungle Sam never does. He's a man who doesn't do rewrites, or monitor, it seems, his special effects crew (witness the dopey bird marionette of another of his 50s productions, The Giant Claw).

Jan (Autumn Hoskins) visits the coast to get the backstory after her incoming cab runs over a walking dead crewman and doesn't stop to check (proving the screenwriter saw White Zombie). She arrives to visit grandma at her coastal vigil, as does another doomed salvage team. There's the usual burly, long green-minded captain, Joel (George "Not the same Beatle" Harrison), his trophy mistress Mona (Alison Hayes) and the hunky-dopey 'hero,' first-mate diver Jeff (Gregg Palmer). Cue the flared tempers and aggressive come-ons, especially when jealous Mona gets a load Jan. Mona's so crazy over Jeff she practically stabs Jan just for giving him a drink of water after he's roughed up by a zombie. Joel hits her for that one, and she runs out in a huff. Guess how she comes back!

This movie gets a bad rap (called 'unimaginative' by one critic / "dull" by another) but in my inner TV guide it's got everything you want for a movie called Zombies of Mora Tau. Maybe it was badly panned and scanned for TV; maybe it was just too relaxing to keep viewers awake during late show TV airings back in the day. Unless you're expecting gut-munching, restored, HD-ified, and in its original aspect ratio, the Tau has near everything you want in a late-night drive-in relaxant, with nothing you don't. 

Then again, maybe I just love this movie the same reason I love Katzman's Giant Claw--for the dopey 'special' effects: the film's underwater treasure-recovering and old timey diving suit vs. zombie fights are all shot 'dry' (no aquarium), with the actors just moving really... slow. (with bubble overlays). The result evokes those WB cartoons where sleepy characters float into bed; or Cocteau through-the-mirror effects where characters fall up buildings. Mora Tau is a place that won't keep you awake, but it is a fine place to fall asleep. 

But probably the reason I like it is Alison Hayes. Wandering through the Tourneur-esque shadows in her cinched up nightgown--her knife, bra, and posture stiff as Frankenstein---treating everyone including their old lady host with uncouth scorn, openly suspecting their dinner is poisoned, goading Josh into insisting Jeff kiss her ("How dare you say no to a friendly kiss!"), Hayes' sexual energy makes a nice side dish to the leisurely zombie action. She's so mean they don't even realize she's become a zombie when she starts trying to stab everyone.

Scenes of sailor zombies coming at the living humans from bushes, and shadows, and the sea, and from all sides--never even flinching from point black gunshots--are dispersed well enough that there is nary a dull-- or exciting (the zombies are all rather slow)-- moment. When they're not guarding the treasure these (all-white male) undead are nosing around on the veranda, looking through open windows, skulking in bushes, ever ready for their cutaway. Their unstoppable slow momentum, and the moody black photography make Tau a key historical zombie link between 1932's White Zombie and 1968's Night of the Living Dead. If you can get around the weird nonsensical aspects--like that 'destroy the diamonds' curse, and the whole crew is buried in the same small mausoleum (like some sort of sailor's eternal rest home)--you'll find it a fine film to help you sail towards ye old catatonia.

THE DISEMBODIED

(1957) Dir. Walter Grauman

**1/2

Another of Allied Artist's drive-in back-end fucked-up, weird-ass bill-fillers comes a-calling. Hayes stars (in white 'native' bronzer) As "Tonda" a mix of slutty/sexually dissatisfied trophy wife of an old Germanic psychiatrist  (John Wengraf) doing research in the "jungle" and a homicidal voodoo priestess. Her appendage-squiggling, dagger-waving, hips and chest akimbo voodoo drum-spurred rhumba is perhaps the feature's sole attraction (the title likely refers to soul-transference, but it's hard to know for sure what part goes where). Her mixed blood implied by her name and a shellacking of bronzer, she does a lot of sultry veranda-stalking at their jungle compound. There's nothing to do otherwise but lust after her narc of a chiseled man servant Zuba (another white person in native bronzer) and try to kill her husband with voodoo dolls. But lo! The native drums are announcing a handsome jungle photographer Tom Maxwell (Paul Burke) and his lion-mauled buddy headed their way for the doctor's medical help. Tonda's eyes light up with lust at the size of Tom's zoom lens, but he's sure to leave immediately if the patient should die, and he's so weak with blood loss he won't last the night. What about the witch doctors of which Tonda speaks? And what about Zuba and her fixing to narc on Tonda's midnight liasons? Surely a voodoo shimmy will solve both problems at once. But then what of Zuba's vindictive mate (another white person in native bronzer) now that he's suddenly voodooed by mighty Tonda?

Look, I love Hayes to death, and maybe even beyond, but in general jungle movies don't grab me. They're too sweaty and stock footage-bogged. Even with Hayes in the cast. caged animals and stock footage narration alone could keep me away, but Disembodied is all shot on one big soundstage jungle set, free of  animals, bugs, compost, and realism of any kind. The only wild animal on display is Hayes' Tonda, stringing along her sweaty old doctor husband with the occasional kiss, strangling effigies of him and dancing at midnight dance rituals--"she's the voodoo queen!" observes Tom's (actual) black driver says Tom's guide as they spy on her secret ceremonies--she's divided even unto herself. We never can tell if her normal self knows there's a voodoo priestess side of her. Seeing a lot of movies like this may help fill in plot points the writers were too something or other to notice. 

Zuba's mate Mara (Eugenia Paul) may be the only one who understands his soul is in the healed buddy of Tom. She gets right away that his soul is inside a white dude who, as chance would have it, is now trying to kill everyone for some zombie reason. Maybe it was a case of rewrite-itis? One writer undoing the linear plot of the other? The gravelly German doctor husband is as surprised as anyone that his mauled-to-ribbons patient seems mostly healed the next day and only wants to stab people. As one of his buddies notes: "This whole thing is so freaky it gives me the shakes." Move over,  buster.

Competently acted all around ( Tom has that low register downtown New York-accented Actor's Studio-type of inflection; his precise but underneath TV cop show-style speaking voice lets you know he's not trying to be a ham), Disembodied is let down by two unforgivable elements: white actors playing natives by wearing bronzer to play natives, and Hayes' black fringe two-piece dance costume. What moron at AIP decided Hayes' skimpy tribal wear should be a formless black top with a long-hanging concealing black fringe? it's worse than a censor bar. Hard to believe this is the same girl who looked so young and alive in Corman's Gunslinger (below) and The Undead that same year. I do like her Asian-style cocktail dress and trim safari jumpsuit, and the fact that all three dresses include a front dagger sheathe, just big enough to get the job done without rousing the shame of low-hanging males. But that fringe? Oh boy. It cancels a lot of good feeling. 

Ah well, despite the heartbreak, The Disembodied is not a total failure: Hayes still has that weird air of bitchy carnal aggression that made her so transcendent in all these probably tailor-made roles (she would have been sublime as the treasure hunter-cum-monster in Voodoo Woman made the same year and I think on the same set (1)) She may stray from form when getting all gooey over Tom but she can wring maximum Stanwyickian mileage out of her hatred for her husband, hurling blunt force lines delivered low under breath like, "I could kill you...." in measured whispers like spears through cake. There's a lurching unevenness at work, but then again it's a short movie. Tom goes from falling for her sensual heat to hating her for her hamfisted attempts to get him to kill her husband. Her husband worships her with a kind of jungle-rot sub-Sternberg masochism, his mind refusing to see her voodoo queen truth even as he buries himself in mumbo research. 

whoever designed this outfit was no friend to straight men

And you can't blame her for being evil: she's horny and  bored, and as the doctor says, "the natives are like children." You can't figure why she'd marry this coded impotent German doctor in the first place, unless you imagine some kind of backstory on your own (or borrow from another film, such as White Woman, or Voodoo Woman or any D.H. Lawrence adaptation). But there's really no need for logical sense in in this potted soundstage jungle, just good steady drumming and the crisp photography that captures well the shadows of the black soundstage night. Maybe that's enough. Sometimes an eerie night in a "jungle" full of dangers all you need, at least for an hour's distraction. And preferably with that Hayes woman, figure-hiding fringe or no. All it takes to know it's a keeper is the turned-on look in her eyes as she watches Tom and his disembodied friend fight over a knife.

Note lack of fringe and light dress shade
allowing alluring under-shadow in this glamor shot, compared to next photo up

GUNSLINGER

(1956) Dir. Roger Corman

***1/2

Roger Corman is mainly known for his horror and science fiction films, but did ya know he started out with four westerns? Gunslinger--a gender-reversed Wyatt Earp variation--is easily the best, and it's also criminally unavailable on DVD, or Blu-ray (you can only currently find it on yonder YouTube). Beverly Garland plays Rose, whose marshal husband is gunned down in broad daylight. She vows to get the men, and woman, responsible; she even shoots one of her man's killers at his funeral, nice and quick, before stepping in as substitute marshall (after the mayor and rest of the men prove too chicken-hearted to accept it). Her daytime no-fuss funeral gunplay is a blast of fresh air after so many of the more liberal revisionist westerns of the era. People get shot right and left here in her muddy town of Oracle, with no fanfare or drawn-out showdowns. Rose has no problem--no tears or misgivings--about racking up an impressive body count. Damn straight! 

I'm not sure if you realize how revolutionary this is! Corman is breaking from the 50s western fold--the sort of bland revisionism epitomized by patriarchal pacifists like Gary Cooper in High Noon--like a B-list gender fluid Hawksian, almost pre-Peckinpah-ian, calf outta hell. These ladies don't refuse to pack a gun or cry over all the violence they see and dish out. Death doesn't even get a close-up or a showdown --it's quick and the ladies are more ruthless than the men. Hayes rival is even more bloody. Erica (Allison Hayes), proprietor of a 24-hour saloon/brothel, has the bad but ingenious habit of buying land in the area (she thinks the train might come through), then sending her lovestruck little bartender Jake (Jathan Haze) out to bushwhack the men she just bought land from, reclaiming the $$ and using it to buy another piece of property, etc. Ingenious! But that's not why Rose is after her. The friction comes when Rose decides to finally implement the town's never-hitherto-enforced liquor and prostitution laws. She gives Erica's three dancing whores a week to get out of town, and she forces Erica to close her saloon every night at three AM. 

Of course you know, this means war!

Erica hires a professional gunslinger Cane (John Ireland) to take Rose out, in both senses of the phrase. Her little smitten barkeep assassin Jake (Jonatha Haze) is pretty miffed about not getting the job, but Erica realizes he's no match for a good woman. Cane is soon the only real man in town, dating both women on alternate nights, angering little Jake even further! And then, Rose and Cane of fall for each other! Who'd a thunk it? Erica is double mad now and if the railway doesn't come through, god knows what a bloodbath may be in store, especially when Cane starts a-gunning for the cowardly mayor, who led Cane's artillery regiment the Civil War and ran away when he got scared. Got to love the idea of Rose riding desperately to the rescue of a grown-ass man, and the way all the men in the story are either dead, short, cowards, or otherwise ineffectual. Even Cane proves inadequate when he's made wishy-washy by love when---in very cool and nicely underplayed and well-written scenes by future Corman regular screenwriters Charles B. Griffith and Mark Hanna--Rose and Cane fall for each other. She playfully but sincerely trying to change his outlaw ways, knowing full well she won't succeed, while remaining undeniably attracted to his bad boy sparkle at the same time. 

What a film! it doesn't even matter that--so rare for a western--the skies are overcast and rainy; and the ground is super muddy; the actors are pretending the wetness isn't soaking through their pants when they sit down for picnics or lay down after getting shot in the back. 

Corman is the first and for a long time the only schlock filmmaker who realized he could cast hot capable actresses roles usually reserved for men and not even change their actions. And Garland and Hayes are sublime examples of how a woman can be alluring and assertive at the same time. With her red hair, black velvet choker, tightly pulled corset and form fitting burgundy red dress, Hayes is an angry vision of loveliness and connivance in a western setting. Erica's mix of naked greed, amoral entrepreneurship, sexual jealousy, manipulativeness, aggression and combined with dark, worldly wit seems tailor-made. And casting her as the sexually-manipulative heavy going against a rival 'good' female sets the blueprint for another great Griffith/Hana script, my personal Roger Corman favorite, The Undead the following year. 

Executing a deft outflanking maneuver around all the liberal guilt-tripping, corny sentiment, and labored symbolism that usually dampens the mood in any 50-60s western, Corman keeps the tale lean, sexy and over fast. Perhaps the only reason Gunslinger isn't more widely celebrated today on a cult level (it rates a lowly 3.7 on imdb) is that western fans threatened by the gender revisionism? I usually roll my eyes at girl gunslinger movies as they're either campy, overwrought or saddled with tiresome moralists who don't approve of guns and murder so can't press the trigger on a disarmed opponent. This isn't like that at all, thank god. But Roger, if your film is about a battle between two strong, inflexible, beautiful, deadly women--they even have one of the best female-on-female bar fights in film history--why give it such a generic title? It is because boys are afraid of armed girls? I doubt it!

Though never released on DVD or Blu-ray (why, lord?), it's currently streaming on YouTube. Find it on my public YouTube playlist "4 AM Favorites") right next to another--never been on official DVD or Blu-ray--film, the Dino di Laurentiis-produced, Ennio Morricone-scored tale of a drug-addicted bisexual super spy, Fraulein Doktor. There are also two 70s TV series about cultures where women are in charge and men subservient--Star Maidens and All that Glitters. There are no streaming, VHS, DVD or Blu-ray releases of them, at all. Ever! 

Dear video labels, stop being threatened over strong women! Release Gunslinger, Fraulein Doktor, Star Maidens, and All that Glitters on DVD or streaming. Do it soon, or Allison Hayes' ghost just might get awful mad. 

click here for more where this came from! Awooo!

NOTES:

1.  Maybe she was busy making Zombies of Mora Tau? 1957 was her big year - she was in 4 films and made six TV shows. wth Voodoo Woman, which used to be on a double bill with The Undead (which co-starred Hayes) so maybe that's why they got Marla English instead (in her second go-round as a woman turning into an armor-plated She-Creature) in the villainess role. Two Hayes in one double feature, the same year may have confused half-watching audiences. But Hayes would have crushed it. (though English is clearly having a ball and is rather marvelous in a pint-sized sort of way. Keep your expectations even lower, and check it out).

2. their names and films shall be unmentioned as they constitute spoilers.) 

Recent Favorites: Ten Weird Cinema Discoveries

Don't panic, but picking out a movie to watch is becoming ever more impossible. No filmmaker, artist or writer can help but be dismayed by the internet's total everything all the time availability. With hundreds more movies coming out every month and none of older stuff ever disappearing, it's harder and harder to find choice nuggets since it's easy to close yourself off to new sensations. Content aggregators zero in on our specific tastes and so our tastes shrink instead of widen. Tubi chooses for me an array of 30s-80s horror and science fiction, some of which I haven't seen--for a reason. But I zero in like a good consumer,  drowned in options if he so much as wavers from his niche. Just the number of independent SOV outsider horror films alone could send even the most open-minded film critics running screaming into the night from despair, unless they had a paradigm, an ideal--a past pre-CI period rather than the cliche-drenched present. 

When I was working as a film critic I rarely got to pick my assignments (what they call a 'second stringer); as a result, I had to see a lot of stuff I'd never watch in a million years if I had my choice. I covered everything from gay rustic romcoms like Big Eden  to weird but effective black family-aimed spiritual comedic-soaps like Medea's Family Reunion. (which turned out to be, with an old lady-rich mostly-all black audience, one of the most deeply moving cinemagoing experiences of my life--not that I'd ever watch it again.) As a result my horizons were expanded far beyond my comfort zone. I wouldn't watch any of those movies today on my own, not ever, especially not in a theater or screening room where I was compelled to actually pay attention. Nonetheless, with the exception of Alexander Sukorov's unconsciously closeted frustration fantasia Father and Son (2003) and the the Ned Flanders-friendly The Pirates who Don't do Anything: A Veggie Tales Movie (2008). Ugh.

But that job is long since done and so my comfort zone has gotten very narrow. Now if something doesn't grab me from the get-go, I stop watching. With a thousand channels, and hundreds of thousands of movies on each one why would I waste time with something aimed at a different demographic? Or something that has kids, animal abuse, pedantic Christian messaging, prison. life, torture scenes, depressing truths, fake breasts, snickering frat boys, or tacky 80s perms? Or anything other than atmospheric analog gems. Life's too damn short. And so it is I wade through the banality in search of those rare nuggets that I crush close to my bosom, like a locket from my violin teacher who once held my hand in a cab, if you know what I mean. 

1. WOMAN CHASING THE BUTTERFLY OF DEATH

(1978) Dir. Kim Ki-young

via Mondo Macabro (Korean - with subtitles)

Here at Acidemic we have a yen for legit weird films but they got to be weird for a purpose. Sometimes weirdness is a specific code used to get critiques of Catholic or Communist ideologies past their home country's censors (i.e. the films of Bunuel or Parajanov); sometimes weirdness is just arch intellectual posturing (some Godard, Robbe-Grillet, Resnais, Carax) or merely a callow showcase for macabre art direction and wild imagination with no real mythic heft behind it (Burton, Gilliam, Jeunet). But other times weirdness translates to shamanic archetypes straight from the unconscious, captured on film prior to any conscious structuring (Jodorowsky, Lynch, Zulawski Rollin), that's the kind I love - and then.... this one time, the only time, the mic drop of weirdness, there's Kim Ki-young's Woman Chasing the Butterfly of Death--a Korean surreal meditation on death and the eternal self. Quietly absurdist, terrifying, and droll, resisting with ease any attempt to categorize or predict the origin or direction of its next offense--that kind of cinematic experience I'll give my steel pot to any day, to quote Gene Evans as Sgt. Zack.  This movie alone is justification for his service and sacrifice as far as I'm concerned. 

So this young man kind of starts a long and strange odyssey by accidentally drinking poison with a girl he meets at a park while chasing an elusive and strange butterfly. Miraculously, he doesn't die, but she does, so now the cops think he killed her, or was hallucinating. A wandering bookseller senses our hero's near brush with death and appoints himself his guru, announcing defeating death can be done through will alone. Our hero isn't interested. But that's no deterrent to the bookseller who keeps hounding him even after death--to prove the power of the will! Then he steals an ancient skeleton from a huge cavern he visits as  tourist and it fleshes out in the form of the man's cannibal demon lover. It turns out the daughter of his soon-to-be archeologist mentor/employer was going to drink the poison with that dead girl from the park but was late, and now is jealous and pissed our hero took her place and that now she'll have to die alone. She too collects butterflies (transfiguration's ultimate symbol, as we well know from Buffalo Bill's basement.). They're pinned all over her room, and he's next. 

Yes, Virginia, this club has everything: disembodied heads blow out birthday candles, giant excavators become assassination weapons; vicious archeologists fight over a primitive man's skull, and there's even gangsters. It all doesn't add up to much cumulative effect but then again neither did Holy Mountain, or Twin Peaks. It's the ride not the destination, because there's only ever really one destination, isn't there? No point arriving at it any time soon, unless you're eager to join your friend, or to satisfy some vague metamorphic yearning.

The Mondo Macabro transfer has a kind of rough-around-the-gills look that doesn't do it much favors, but Jeffrey, let's not ask for the wound, we have the scars. 

2. YOKAI MONSTERS: SPOOK WARFARE

Aka (THE GREAT YOKAI WAR)

(1968) Dir. Yoshiyuki Kuroda

via Arrow streaming (in Japanese with English subtitles)

A wondrous Arrow release this year has been the 60s Yokai Monsters trilogy (plus a CGI-using Takeshi Miike remake). Of the three original films, this one is easily the best and the only one with a nonhuman villain. Like the similar but much less fun Giant Majin trilogy, the Yokai films are all set in small rural period piece Japanese villages where local peasants are subject to the cruel whims of human oppressors, until weird folk legend monsters finally show up and kick bad guy ass. The oppression parts can get pretty manipulative, especially with the Maijin series--how much more suffering can these peasants endure until that pokey statue finally lumbers into action for the unsatisfying pay-off (at a certain level of prolonged abuse, no mere stepping on by a big stone giant is sufficient catharsis). The Yokai are more child-friendly, to a point, and scatter monster vengeance bits throughout, but only Spook Warfare--the second in the Yokai series--stacks the deck more evenly, using an ancient Babylonian vampire monster who can assume any form--and even split himself into numerous different human forms via vampire bites--instead of a cruel human landlord, gangster, or tyrant for a villain. The resulting all out brawl between this powerful demon and 100 or so different folk monsters is like if the residents of the Star Wars cantina all went over to somebody's backyard pool after closing time to drink more beers and fight the monster from A Chinese Ghost Story. Like all the best spooky movies, it occurs mostly at single night, in beautifully-lit soundstage gardens and eerie graveyards, with moody low end ominousness pulsing in the score (courtesy Sai Ikeno). It would be fine choice for brave children, never talking down to them and directly threatening them at the same time (as the vampire villain especially loves to drink their virgin blood), and "adult" kaiju fans will find plenty to groove to. 

Lastly, the psychedelic warriors amongst you just need to know a wild umbrella monster with a very long tongue in appears the movie--you're not hallucinating. It's a real Japanese folktale spirit called a kasa-obake) and the way it bounces around with its wild eye and obscene tongue just may give you one one of those coveted acid flashbacks we're always hearing about but--for me at least--have never actually occurred. Either way, with so many other ghosts and goblins--even if they're more or less actors in suits-- Spook Warfare will make you rethink your lifestyle choices, in the best of ways.

3. EYES OF FIRE

(1983) Dir. Avery Crounse

Severin via Shutter  (English)

The awesome and otherworldly and long-unavailable (excepts as a chopped-up HBO cut or cropped old VHS) period piece is one of the real surprises of the year (coming in as part of Severin's unmissable folk horror collection All the Haunts be Ours). It's horror-adventure period piece magical realism along the same general plot and time frame as The Witch --i.e. late-1600s America, when the wilderness was still largely the domain only of Native Americans, trappers, a few British or French military-maintained outposts, wandering fur traders, and small, remote religiously uptight enclave, and--of course--wild witches and shamanic tree spirits roaming unchecked in the woods. As with The Witch, we have a an iconoclastic patriarch of the kind that essentially made the laws privileging white males so deservedly obsolete--in this case an itinerant preacher who takes up with the wife of a long-absent fur trader and her gaggle of kids. They end up needing to escape downriver when the town tries to hang a redheaded girl stepchild just because she knows herbology and how to speak with the trees. (Say what you will about this preacher, at least he's not a witch hammer). Sailing on a wooden raft, shot at by Native Americans, they end up finding a place of their own by setting up shop in a patch of woods the local tribes fear to tread, haunted by a malicious soul collecting tree spirit magus who is soon sucking them all down to his web of interlocked roots and shroom filaments. Gradually the survivors barricade themselves into their fort walls defending against the tribes and even an evil changeling shuttled into their midst that the preacher takes as his own.

  

These woods are personified in the power of this shamanistic force, a real earth elemental in the grandest form. The preacher himself gradually goes plum loco in an Aguirre thinking he's Col. Kurtz but actually being Royal Dano in There Will be Blood kind of way. The kids stand fast, under the protective wing of the barefoot wild-haired dirt-eating, herb-picking redhead in their midst. With great use made of the misty forest and a cockeyed Badlands-style child narration--as the story is told to the incredulous French officer (Mike Genovese)--highlights include all the spirts embedded in slimy grey tree bark; the running around ghost slaves of former visitors, now turned into mud wrestling pagan sort of dancers glowing red, the blowing leaves, the people trees, wild shamanic fights; the vanishing into the mist; and a bizarre and the sudden wink of an ending that left me, for once, feeling bullish about the natural world again, like it just might have this shit under control.

4. THE MURDER MANSION

(1972) Dir. Francisco Lara Polop

via Arrow (in Spanish with English subtitles)

Another all-in-a-single dark and foggy night wild ride movie, my favorite kind of spook show (ala The Old Dark House, The Black Raven, House on Haunted Hill, Cat and the Canary, and Something Creeping in the Dark.) In a rather ingeniously-edited overlapping open stretch along the late afternoon, we follow a pretty hitchhiker (Lisa Leonardi), a young motorcyclist, and an array of cars full of interlocked rich connivers--and the rich they marry and/or prey on--along a winding one country road through and along a moody Spanish tree-lined woods and countryside. They soon all get lost in the rural Spanish fog and thus seek shelter at the same gloomy mansion owned by creepy-sexy Evelyn Stewart (Persephone in Bava's unmissable Hercules in the Haunted World) in a town gone empty and uninhabited after a lot of rumors about vampires. Rural Spain is superstitious! Analía Gadé is the dissolute redhead heiress who is probably being driven mad by the ghost of a brutish glowing red eyed chauffeur and the old severed head in the closet gag (a shout out perhaps to House on Haunted Hill!), Figuring out the twist-upon-twist ending in advance needn't diminish the shivery pleasures to be found, especially now that it looks so damned good (thanks to an Arrow HD clean-up). Besides, after the expected twists come several more. They don't call it Murder Mansion for nothing. 

5. THE ZOMBIE WALKS

 ("Im Banne des Unheimlichen")

(1968) Alfred Vohrer

Youtube (in German with English subtitles)

This beautifully color-restored HD German film (once on YouTube since taken down, goddamn it) probably misses a lot of potential viewers because of its misleading American release title sounding too much like other films (and probably it was in a badly cropped print, with bad dubbing). But those days are about to change! Turns out, there are about three million Edgar Wallace adaptations from Germany from the 60s-70s, most from director Alfred Vohrer and featuring a sputtering Col. Klink-style Scotland Yard chief Sir Arthur (Hubert von Meyerinck) as comic relief, his capable little girlfriend assistant (this time Siw Mattson) and the handsome dashing lead detective Higgins (here Joachim Fuchsberger) dealing with, variously, supposedly dead people who may not be dead, masked killers, spooky fogbound estates, imperiled heiresses, mysterious criminal organizations and Bond-style escapes; the usually have an English language pop/rock theme song, color credits even if the film is in black-and-white, and a jazzy psychedelic look. Thanks to the folk hero Simon Bart bull they've been collected and subtitled into English on YouTube (see the list hier). 

As usual for Wallace films, the 'zombie' is probably not real, just a mysterious assailant in a glowing skull mask with glowing skeleton hand gloves who runs around offing people with that ultimate in Edgar Wallace murder weapons, a spring lauded scorpion ring laden with an undetectable poison. A scene of him attacking someone pulled over in the fog on the road--the fog itself and the green mask all aglow--is especially spooooky and fun, evoking Bava and the Batman at the same time. The cast are all either suspects, dead, or heroes, including Claude Farell is the intrepid young female reporter regularly getting to the crime scene mere seconds before Higgins. Wolfgang Keitling is a haunted aristocrat who inherited the estate from his brother (who's recently maybe killed in a suspicious plane crash). 

 Vying for the estate are competing charities his brother supported, including  a shady clinic operated by cold-eyed doctors and nurses (a Wallace staple), and a religious organization that tries to stop Higgins from examining the body of the supposedly dead brother.  There are plenty of suspects to go around: an evil nurse, a green-faced alcoholic grave digger; a priest and his evil looking right hand woman; a female author of a books about rare poisons; and a doctor who can't attest to his own whereabouts the night before. It's got the perfect blend of comic touches, all-in-a-night spook show momentum, stunning HD night photography, endless easy-to-follow plot twists, swirling fog, comedy, gloomy crypts, nightclubs,  Bava-esque deep gel colors and a fun Scooby Doo-style denouement that makes it just the right film to watch between Blood and Black Lace (1964) and The Ghoul (1933).

6. THE INGLORIOUS BASTARDS

(1978) Dir. Enzo Castellari

Severin (in English and German)

Director Enzo Castellari sucks us in from the very beginning of this Dirty Dozen-inspired full bore over-the-top Italian WW2 action extravaganza. Like so many Italian imitations of American box office hits, it proves way more fun and faster moving than the original. Offering the same basic premise --a bunch of stockade-bound US soldiers vs. mostly anonymous Germans. Forgoing all the training montages, sneaking around, war games, brawls, lip service from arrogant generals, mission planning and carousing and anti-authoritarian posturing that ate up the first 2/3 of Aldrich's film, Castellari keeps his loose and in the moment. About five minutes in, a lucky shelling frees a group of prisoners on their way to the stockade. Boom! They decide wander through the war-torn landscape, hoping to find Switzerland and immunity. They end up teaming with an AWOL German Wermacht soldier (Raimund Harmstorf), accidentally wiping out a squad of Nazi-disguised Allied commandos, and then taking their place on a mission with the French or Belgian resistance to blow up a train carrying a Nazi rocket scientist and his new warhead aboard. So many explosions and guns! I started watching this more out of just searching around the web for a moment's distraction, and soon my childhood obsession with WW2 sparked right back up and I sucked down the whole thing like a desert wanderer sucks down a cold can of beer. How we would have loved this back in my tweenage war years if only we'd not been such snobs over post-sync sound and Italians in general. Well, it was worth waiting for (this would probably be much less effective on fullscreen VHS), all looking suave and majestic on HD widescreen. And man is it a bloody hilarious riot. All this, and Fred Williamson too! Count me in. 

7. THE LAST HUNTER

(1980) Dir. Antonio Margheriti

Code Red (in English)

I loved Bastards so much I found and followed up with this far different Margheriti war movie from just two years later. This time he's imitating Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter, i.e. a much less popular war than the one fought in Inglorious. A decidedly odd but engaging epic, The Last Hunter stars everyone's favorite Brit, David Warbeck (The Beyond) as a combo Martin Sheen from Apocalypse Now and Robert De Niro in The Deer Hunter, but way cooler. After his crazy friend kills himself over his AWOL girlfriend at a Saigon bar, Warbeck is sent on a mission behind the lines to find and destroy a hidden Tokyo Rose/Axis Sally-style propaganda radio station operating somewhere upriver. A big twist at the end harkens it all back to the beginning and seriously jades our hero out so that the final shot eerily anticipates the big key image of Platoon.  Scrawny maniac John Steiner is the Col. Kilgore to Warbeck's Willard, holding shit down in a remote river outpost that's has a a snack machine and bar. Showing he's loco, Steiner's favorite music is his reel-to-reel of gunfire and explosions ("dig that beat!"). Tessa (Zombie) Farrow lends feminine presence meanwhile as the usual endangered but fearless photojournalist who's almost raped (Steiner's sex-starved soldiers "haven't seen a woman in months.") Luckily the crazy colonel distracts them by sending one of them across enemy lines to get him a cocoanut. Ah, the genius of command! 

This being an Italian movie, they're all soon besieged by attacking VC and NVA--bullets flying and people falling back into crates and through mud walls, and the crazy action resumes anew: gunboat explosions, lone survivor rescues, heroics, imprisonment in bamboo cages submerged in the rat-infested river (to get those Deer Hunter tokens) and of course, endless explosions. The climactic confrontation at the radio transmitter station makes this a sublime winner of disillusionment and pro-violence anti-sentiment. 

A big surprise here is how Riccardo Pallottini's cinematography makes the Philippine jungles look airy and crisp and inviting. Usually in films shot there the sky seems always white with a haze of solid cloud; the humidity makes everyone and everything seem shellacked and hazy with perspiration and gnats. I get sweaty and find it hard to breathe just watching 90% of movies shot there. That's not the case with The Last Hunter. The water looks fine, and the air is crisp as a new dollar bill. 

No surprise here is how cool, calm, and always with a sideways disbelieving smirk is our Warbeck. There's a reason he's so beloved of Italian genre film fans. A kind of a Cary Grant without the dandy feyness nixed with Pierce Brosnan without the Esquire vanity, all smothered in a "who the fuck are you kidding?" kind of a cock-eyed look that makes me wish he could be in every Italian action and horror film ever made. Of the ones he did, this is probably the best. It's certainly the best looking (I found it in HD floating around YouTube, but plan on getting the Blu-ray soon, cuz Code Red rawks.  

8. THE PEACOCK KING 

1988) Dir Ngai Choi Lam 

(DVD) in Chinese with English subtitles

Ngai Choi Lam doesn't waste any time or include any filler. We're plunged into the heady melange of a devil, his young daughter (Narumi Yasuda), and ancient curses destined to be fulfilled and the sky being blotted out by inky clouds of evil when she comes to her 16th (I think) birthday and opens the gates of Hell as foretold in the prophecy. There's no time to think twice or wonder why an animatronic dinosaurs exhibit is being set up in the midst of a grand opening department store--we know it's so the monsters can come alive and battle a pair of odd couple Buddhist disciples, separated at birth by their respective Zen masters, one from Japan (Hiroshi Mikami) and one from HK (Biao Yen), now there to save the soul of the devil girl. No need to wonder why they take her to an amusement park--it's so weird little touches like stop-motion animated little creatures hiding in the trash on the Hong Kong street are like shots of joy to the heart. So we have two separately trained young monks helping to turn Satan's little girl to the side of good before her key turning moment comes--at an amusement park! We're still reeling from how cool the dinosaur department store fight was and here we are climbing up a rollercoaster (for real) to rescue a person stuck up on the track.  

The only (minor) flaw I could find is perhaps that Lam is a bit too enamored of the special effects shots of a giant reptilian mouth emerging from a villain's bendable back, and the massive gates to Hell shooting up from the ground and slowly opening. Lam is so psyched for these two moments that they stretch on way too long and kill the momentum. The whole film seems to stand still while these effects slowly unfurl. But otherwise, from the get-go, it's a solid blast. HK's ultra sex symbol Gloria Yip is even along for the ride. Look out! In a lot of ways, Lam does what Tsui Hark does but better --less slapsticky and speed-addled/confusing, more fun and easy to follow, grabbing you from the get-go and never letting go. The only comparison I can think of how I felt watching this was the first time I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark, the perfect flow from grand set piece to grand set piece, never exhausting or confusing or boring,  is hard to do but Lam does it here, and also in the equally great THE SEVENTH CURSE!

9. TWO ORPHAN VAMPIRES

(1997) Dir. Jean Rollin

Severin / Kino-Cult - in French with English subtitles

No one who loves Jean Rollin will argue that in many ways he's not the greatest horror director -- but only he brings that dark, moody sense of kinky and uniquely French decadenceHe absorbed a great wealth of decadence and poetry as a child ("Story of the Eye"-author Georges Batailles was a family friend) and it meshes with the memory of his first kiss on the beach into a miasma of work that seems like the beautiful but macabre dreams of an absinthe-poisoned aesthete--classic vampire motifs, weird twin-Alice surreal imagery violent, sudden sex and death, and--of course--that same beach. Rollin fans know that beach very well. Expect a gory and fast-paced good time and expect in vain! But if you let the slow pace lull your mind into a receptive alpha state, his macabre Baudelaire / Corbière-esque poetic monologues--often waxed direct to camera by a deep-eyed beauty holding a skull--might just beam right into your subconscious-- and there's nowhere you'd rather it beam. This is especially true if he keeps his focus on his favorite archetypal image: two mysterious young vampire girls walking around old castles or graveyards in search of blood and adventure. And he has in just this in Two Orphan Vampires a pair of amazing actresses (Alexandra Pic et Isabelle Teboul) who have a great, wondrous rapport and a line of patter that perfectly encapsulates Rollin's oeuvre in a fun, almost playful way. Soaring on each other's wings of madness across numerous times and identities, they're more in the vein of Kate Winslet and. Melanie Lynskey in Heavenly Creatures than the usual, often mute, somewhat vacant Rollin heroines.  Scenes of them with their eyes glazed and Rollin's requisite big dopey hanging out of the mouth fangs are kind of dumb, but the rest is sublime. 

Rollin has never been comfortable with just wholeheartedly embracing the familiar vampire tropes, and here--instead of needing to sleep in their coffin to avoid sunlight-- these girls are totally blind by day, replete with canes and dark glasses but at night they come alive with delirious evil. It's an ingenious idea and I love that there are barely any men at all. Men are often either rapist crooks or effete dreamers in Rollin films, so when the two orphan girls are adopted by a widowed (?) businessman, we cringe--will he be abusive and/or unbearable? No, he's dutiful and often absent. His only crime is he shoots one of them by mistake after they're late coming home from one of their bloody wanderings. The closest thing to a villain in the film is a guy chasing the girls after catching them in the act at a nearby graveyard.

Filmed in 1997 (we even see Pete Tombs' indispensable Immoral Tales--which includes a large chapter devoted to Rollin--proudly displayed on an altar at the ruined church) and looking very crisp and HD, it's clear this is kind of a Rollin capstone. After decades of terrible reviews and bad box office, he's now a legend, his films recognized as fine art as well as terrible trash.  Older, wiser, aware of what works and what doesn't, freed from the need to deliver rote sex and violence (and maybe too old to want to anyway), he changes to a macabre sense of playfulness . These girls spin flights of fancy, remembering their past incarnations via books from the nunnery library on Aztec history and French circus magicians (but not in the irritatingly twee way of some French films), as well as the expected graveyard hauntings. On their travels, they encounter various solo-flying versions of themselves--lonely loner monster women (a bat girl who flies over cemeteries at night; a werewolf girl who hides from packs of wild dogs in misty rail yards), each hidden but radiating a strong independent presence via proud explanatory monologues, explaining why they avoid all human contact, speaks to the deadening effect of masculine energy on creative female energy more elegantly than an ocean of rapey backstories.

Best of all, there are no sudden distractions from the front-and-center female friendship--no boys come between them. In the past, Rollin often brings in a Yoko-style pretty boy to come between them, and soon one is killing the other just for trying to kill him for coming between them. We get this little outcome in Requiem for a Vampire, Fascination, Grapes of Death and, in variations in Poland's The Lure (2015) and the Canadian Ginger Snaps (2000). This intrustion fits the fairy tale archetypal motifs at work (you gotta grow up sometime!) but can have a disillusionment aftertaste (that's not why we come to le cine). Instead, well, no spoilers, but f you took the marvelous Baudelaire but shocking but strangely moving climax of another French film with a similar thrust, Don't Deliver Us from Evil and spread it to a whole film, monsieur! No growing up needed.

This incarnation of Rollin seems calmer, happier, less inclined to either moribund emptiness, callow anima pining, or slow burn destruction of innocence. The girls declarations and past life imagination borders on whimsical but stays on the dark side of fairy tales ( Grimm rather than HC Anderson) so it's OK by me. Reality is more or less forgotten--for example, though they're clearly not carrying any baggage, the girls easily produce oversize volumes of magic and Aztec history they stole from the nunnery library wherever they happen to roam, and their experiences with the other magical girls are like mythic encounters in Greek or Brechtian dramedies or Cocteau's Testament of Orpheus. In my favorite scene, one of them has shot and is dying in bed, but the other brings her back to health by vividly describing memories of ancient blood ceremonies (which they claim to have witnessed firsthand) atop an old Aztec pyramid: thousands of hearts ripped out of sacrificial bodies, enough blood dripping down the upon the pyramid steps to color the entire edifice a deep red. The actresses nail the love and transfigurative power of blood with such pure hearted bliss our whole notion of good and evil are thrown in the dustbin. Viva la mort!

PS - Make sure you watch the subtitled version in the original French. I hear the English dub is atrocious.  

10. VIRGIN AMONG THE LIVING DEAD

(1972) Dir. Jess Franco

Arrow, Kino, etc. - in French with English subtitles

Special Note: There are various versions of this film, some with hardcore inserts, some with dream-like slow-mo zombie attacks demanded by the distributor (zombies were very 'in' at the time) shot by Rollin shot them as Franco was busy and didn't want them added anyway. I don't think they detract, though the hardcore sex certainly does. Either way, you can always scroll past.

My admiration for both Rollin's and Jess Franco's works depends largely on whether a film of his breaks through to me in just the right place/mood/time. Often I find them insufferable but late at night when I'm half-asleep or delirious, alone in my chambers, bust of Pallas above the door and all that--magic. Now and then though, the doors between unconscious' dream and dream cinema open, Franco knocks one home and a kind of full scale magic overwhelms me - a timelessness envelops me like molasses and I'm suffused with an enjoyable melancholic delirium, a Rimbaud/Baudelaire kind of drug-like spell where the film and I merge.

I had been sober for a year before discovering his work and was far from an instant fan. This was back when seeing his work involved renting a lot of VHS tapes from the Kim's Video--unattractive pan and scanned unrestored images or worse, terribly faded and widescreen (vs. anamorphic) DVD or VHS. The first DVDs of SUCCUBUS and KISS ME MONSTER were terrible. Half the screen was missing, colors gone. Rather than pan and scan, they transferred by just cropping off the right half of the image so we saw a lot of people in profile talking to the tip of someone's nose. 

Even then, the magic could shine through in the right mood. 

Ah but NOW, now it's all different. 

Before I fall into hazy reverie, let me sum up by saying the films I like/love from Franco are few and far between. The man made hundreds of films and maybe ten are worthwhile: Succubus, Venus in Furs, and Diabiolocal Z  get me excitedly combing my Pete Tombs and Stephen Thrower volumes for a lead on my next big fix. But even they pale in comparison to the haunting elegiac beauty--with a little sex in it--of Virgin Among the Living Dead. It's everything great about Franco and is probably the one best to show doubters who 'don't get it' . A  truly nightmarish vision of an orphan innocence too bereft of parental guidance and starved for family to realize the danger she's in when she comes to her father's remote ancestral estate to hear the reading of his will. She comes to find the chateau occupied by a quintet of strange relatives. Her uncle (Howard Vernon, of course), a deranged bombshell (Carmen Yazalde) who is "one of the family" on some level Christina never quite gleans, a mute dopey but sinister servant (Franco),  and the beady-eyed aunt Abigail (Rosa Palomar).

Clues arise when neighbor boy tells her the chateau has been uninhabited for years; and other locals try to warn her away.  It turns out the Queen of the Night (Ann Libert--the blind bird girl from Franco's Erotic Rites of Frankenstein) is involved, holding them all - including the spirit of her father (Paul Muller) in her sway. Her father's ghost tries to warn her to leave before it's too late--but she's so starved for familial connection she can't. Anyway, she has nowhere to go. Even if they might drink her blood or attack her, she's too starved for familial connection to want to leave. 

Franco's cinematography never misses a natural light uncanny effect (particularly magic hour deep shadows over faces) hinting at the unknowable uncanny nature of even von Blanc's innocent beauty. There are shots and scenes so powerful they rank among the best poetic surrealism in 70s cinema. I avoided this film a long time mixing it up in my head with Erotic Nights of the Living Dead, which I heard horrible things about. It worked out anyway. Seeing it now is 'the right time' in my decades-long international genre cinema journey. 

Maybe that's why films have so much magic and why--in the end--all this paralyzing availability, this endless access to bottomless archives of films, is such a good thing. Fate is able to sometimes able to save just the right movie for just the right moment in one's life, so that art and self intertwine and annihilate each other. In a good way. For 90 minutes or so, we're truly liberated from the bondage of self. 

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