Halloween Special Edition: 10 Quintessential List + 13 More on Bright Lights

As a lifelong classic horror fan it gets my arse all in a tether when channels like IFC figure what we need are marathons of crappy HALLOWEEN sequels, or that horror means only three names: Freddy, Jason, Michael or god forbid, Jigsaw. To me that's like bringing a keg of green dyed Bud Lite to a highbrow Dublin wake. It's gouache (the watery paint, not the adjective). It's the one time of the year the punters might learn something about our rich horror heritage but instead they're allowed to indulge in feeling that 'classic' doesn't extend back farther than the mid-90s.

Well, rejoice brothers and one sister. I've made a grand list of 13 horrors fit for even Hiram Walker himself, found only on Acidemic's more coherent and lauded (laudanum-laminated) cousin, Bright Lights Film Journal:

Sh! The Horror! 
13 Suggestions for an Uncommon Halloween 
Viewing Experience

Also, make sure to visit my Netflix horror recommendations on:

Post-Giallo Nightmare Logic ala Netflix
and Netflix Deadpan Comic Horror Inititative
and Last year's 13 Obscure Horror Gems (via Slant)


Many lists... many masters. But this next list cuts through them all, for they are the lesser-known but relentlessly magnificent gems I watch every year around this time, as far back as whenever I first taped, bought, or saw them. Each is so laden with atmosphere you can smell the bonfires and first chill of night, feel the centuries of huddling around the harvest hearth in your collective ancestral ganglia. Rather than finish all these half-assed reviews I've been struggling with, here now, some short mentions of all the favorites I revisit every year.

CITY OF THE DEAD 

(AKA Horror Hotel)

(1960) Dir. John Moxey

There's so many strange similarities between this Amicus debut feature and Psycho that, were they not made in the exact same year on opposite sides of the Atlantic, you'd swear they were emulating each other. Both feature naive but courageous and very pretty blondes who wear their hair moddishly short and leave their comfort zones on big adventures, alone, against other people's advice or good common sense, and wind up staying at decrepit inns where they are killed, by a knife, in the middle of the night, and the middle of the picture. Then follows the boyfriend to investigate and eliminate the threat, but the damage has been done; our locus of identification is forever shattered. Welcome to the 60s. (from: CinemArchetype #5: The Human Sacrifice)

Even her name, Nan Barlow, evokes her sacrificial position (similarity to John Barleycorn) and her beauty and low-key acting style evoke Veronica Lake--who played a witch herself years earlier. But what's most important is the swirling black and white fog, sinister shadows, minimalist sets, and the feeling of pre-ordained noir-ish dread, Nan reading a history book about the burning death of Elisabeth Selwyn to (unwittingly) Selwyn herself in her ghostly materialization alias as the hotelkeeper, also reading about the human sacrifice, guileless about how the things she's reading about--the Candlemass sacrifice to Lucifer at the hour of 13--will be happening to her in a few hours -- just a sweet innocent college student unaware of the dangers around her, with no smirking boyfriend to protect her (he tried to talk her out of it but didn't come along). There are no outdoor shots: the town is just a fog-bound ever-dark soundstage, and all the better for it, especially in the moments of warmth like Nan's refuge in the cozy bookstore. Add Christopher Lee, Brit actors rocking "American" accents, a very-deep voiced ghost Satanist (Valentine Dyall), and a bunch of comeuppance heaped upon that smug boyfriend when he finally shows up (he sounds like he's doing a Ralph Meeker impression)--and you get a favorite of mine that makes a great triple bill with BURN WITCH BURN (an actual line in the film) and VOODOO MAN. In each our loyalty and sympathy is always in flux, the hatred for intolerance and denial and its long-term damage on the world vs. the actual bottomless malevolence and pagan human sacrifice at the core of pre-Christian religion, making Christianity seem, if you'll forgive the expression, the lesser of two evils. After all, we come to like cute little Nan - the unlucky Alice drawn to her Barlow-corn wicker girl wonderland waterloo and her death is genuinely upsetting --maybe even more so than Marion Crane's, because Nan has time to see it coming - to know what's in store having just read about it, and we feel her bottomless dread as she looks into the merciless eyes of her killers as they coldly chant the hour. It helps make the admittedly silly climax cathartic, and then there's one final PSYCHO-echo, a slow turn of a chair into the light to see the corpse of the presiding female spirit. 

MESSIAH OF EVIL
(1976) Dir. Willard Huyck 

This impressive debut feature from future Lucasfilm writers Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz stars Mariana Hill as Arletty, the emotionally vacant daughter of a disappeared artist (Royal Dano). There's a hushed quality to Messiah of Evil, all the better to hear the waves crashing in the distance. Nobody shouts until they're about to die, usually at the hands of cannibal mobs. A super-chill dandy, Thom (Michael Greer), and his two girlfriends, Laura (Anitra Ford) and Toni (Joy Bang), join Arletty in an attempt to unravel the mysteries afoot in this secluded, unfriendly location, and as Thom busts a move on Arletty, the girlfriends get bored and disappear into the ominous blackness. Among the film's more haunting elements: photorealist faces peering through windows and a wall weirdly painted with a full-size escalator. At any moment, this empty house seems as if it could warp into a nightmarish shopping mall—one of many bizarre evocations of a film that cannily mixes Lovecraftian dread with Antonioni-esque alienation. (Slant 10/30/14)

KILL BABY KILL

(1966) Dir. Mario Bava

It take a few viewings to really appreciate KILL BABY; it's not as highly regarded as some of Bava's other work, which is probably due to a history of bad prints and title changes. A Victorian Gothic Italian rural villa ghost story, KILL, BABY, KILL's Italian title was OPERAZIONE PAURA! (Operation: Terror!). We don't blame them for changing it, but why make it sound like a giallo spy thriller? The similar sounding film FASTER PUSSYCAT, KILL! KILL came out the previous year, and was a film that set the bar for outre grooviness, but grooviness hadn't even been invented in the BABY's Victorian Age setting. Instead there are beautiful 'old master lighted' bowls of fruit, great wind effects, sedatives ("give her 20 drops") and an array of strange and wonderful women, including a beautiful brunette bruja (Fabienne Dali), a terrified innkeeper's daughter (Micaela Esdra), a stylish and terrified med student named Monica (Erika Blanc), and Melissa Graps, a ghost girl with blonde hair (to tie the film even deeper into RIGHT ONE, she's played by a very spooky boy, Velerio Valeri). She's like Italy's Victorian era version of THE BAD SEED times the SHINING's murdered twins divided by Norman Bates in "wouldn't hurt a fly" drag. In fact, I've seen this movie ten times now and it gets better every time, even if it does occasionally put me to sleep.  Since BABY tells only one story, it's not as relentlessly scary and blackly comic as Bava's 1963 trilogy BLACK SABBATH, and can seem padded here and there with repeated shots of bells tolling and gloomy ghost-eye exteriors. Cool scenes of victims returned as undead servants of the evil spirit, foreshadowed all through the first 2/3 of the film never materialize. Did Bava run out of undead make-up? Is that the reason the film is so slow, and yet over so fast? Who cares, it's Halloween down to its core  (more)

THE UNDEAD

(1957) Dir. Roger Corman

I saw UNDEAD when very young on TV and the scene were Duncan seeks shelter at the witch's house is to me the eternally definitive Halloween moment, Dorothy Neumann the definitive good witch. Her crooked nose, clearly made by cheap putty that seems always about to dry and fall off (you can see the line between Neumann's real nose and the false one), bubbling cauldron, and other trappings, puts to rest the libelous claim of Glenda in OZ that "only bad witches are ugly" (the bad witch is sexy Alison Hayes) and I love the casual way she asks the stranger at her door "Are you from this era or from a time yet to be?" as if hypnotists from the future were not uncommon.

Lastly, the insidiously merry laugh of Satan himself, played brilliantly by Richard Devon, incorporating modern wit and ancient evil as a good-humored beatnik trickster who transcends time itself and recognizes the time-traveling hypnotist right away, by name! Awesome. Once the rubes leave, the site of the black mass becomes a point of contact between the by-now-insane hypnotist, Duncan, the devil, and both witches as they all argue for and against Duncan going back to the executioner in the morning. Ingeniously, Corman finaly moves his camera outside, making the sun and sky seem suddenly more unreal and dreamlike than the black fog supermarket-bound night that came before.

THE DEVIL RIDES OUT

1968 Dir. Terence Fisher

Here in Hammer's tight little adaptation of Dennis Wheatley's novel we have everything that makes British devil films great: Christopher Lee, some intelligent older women, Charles Gray as a sophisticated, witty villain, and upper crust Jet setters cult worshipping Satan through black magic, peppered with a few older eccentrics who look like any minute they're flying to Manhattan for Rosemary's baby shower. (CinemArchetype 17: THE DEVIL)

SPIDER BABY

1968 Dir. Jack Hill

As with GIRLY, described in my last post, SPIDER BABY seems to merge with my psyche as if it had been made just for me... zeroed in but not in a sort of overkill give the people what they want kind of way but a perfectly-realized, just gory and strange enough but never to the point of post-modern narrative disruption way. It lies on the historical time line between my love for those old Bela Lugosi Monogram and PRC poverty row horrors and the art film Corman-school mix of post-beat wit and Corman trained mastery of on-the-fly shock, schlock, and drive-in pacing. Nowhere are there the tedious elements that usually mar old dark house and murderous family films: no snarky reporters, imbecilic cops, doting old ladies or suspicious tire salesmen and yet there are all sorts of groovy meta links to the gonzo films of the past in the casting: Monogram mainstay Mantan Moreland opens the film as an unlucky telegram Sam; Carol Ohmart, the archetypal broad in Castle's House on Haunted Hill (1957) and Corman's The Creature from the Haunted Sea, is great at making greed and contempt super sexy; Sid Haig, the Jack Hill and later Rob Zombie perennial, brings weird savage naive pathos. Why, the whole thing just stinks with atmosphere! (that's a quote from the sun-dappled but roughly similar and underrated Boogeyman Will Get You (1943). (more)

PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE

(1959) Dir. Ed Wood

"...if you’re old enough to remember UHF TV then you remember seeing PLAN NINE or BRIDE OF THE MONSTER and having your mind blown. Wood understood children’s need for disruption of narrative and that need is the same as Godard’s. Nothing bores children like heavy plot-driven adult conversations and mature coded historically accurate subtlety. When green slime drops from a CARRIE bucket onto Kid’s Choice Awards presenters, how different is the laugh derived than the laugh when Tor Johnson bumps into the doorways and shakes the walls in BRIDE?"(see my MUBI List: Accidental Brecht)

THE RAVEN

(1963) Dir. Roger Corman

A personal favorite Halloween perennial, this loose comedic 'adaptation' of Poe has reluctant sorceress Vincent Price longing for his Lenore and Peter Lorre (old and bloated but still hilarious) as the raven, turned that way by Dr. Scarabus (Boris Karloff), who it just so happens killed Price's father and has, as it turns out, stolen Lenore (Hazel Court) - who's still alive (a bit like he stole Lugosi's wife in the 1934Black Cat, another Poe "adaptation"). Soon they're all packed away in a carriage, along with a super young Jack Nicholson as Lorre's son Rexford. It all culminates in a memorable sorcerer duel that's fun for all ages.

The Blu-ray remastering is jaw dropping --as different as beautiful soothing night from shitty gray-ass day; its vast and impressive sets (Corman kept all the sets from past Poe films and by the time of The Raven he'd assembled them all into a vast sprawling Gothic maze) always looked kind of brownish and washed out but now every flicker of the big fire pit is a poem; once the gang enter Scarabus's castle the HD transfer begins to shimmer and glow in a new hauntingly lovely greenish gold reflective light and inward depth. The Les Baxter score at times errs on the side of the smugness and helicopter overbearance; but this is pure uncut Halloween delight, so might as well bring the kids by which I mean depressed lovelorn sophomores reeling from too much bad acid too soon in life, catching this at the Student Union, aching in their tired raging bones for the velvet-lined purr of Price. (Mephisto from Missourri - 10/14)

HORROR EXPRESS

(1972)

This Spanish-British horror union of Horror Express (1972) was long a favorite of my father's back in the day, with a bad guy as an alien that passes from body to body that's been thawed out from inside the frozen ape man brought onto the Orient Express by Himalayan explorer Christopher Lee. The thing inside --which drinks your brain through your eyes rendering your brain creaseless--crashed here before life began; its glowing red eyes carry imprints of things it has seen such as the Earth from far away, and dinosaurs. They look like drawings from a book but that's not the reason superstitious Rasputin-style monk (giallo regular Alberto De Mendoza ["thy will be done as it is in Hell!"]) steals it off the tray. There's also Silvia Tortosa as a foxy countess, Alice Reinheart as a foxy spy and Telly Savalas as a Cossack who comes barging onto the train at the worst possible time rocking his usual awesome ridiculous hamminess ("Who are da killas!? WHO!??" he shouts to the assembled first class dining car. "Who are da trubblemakers!"). Christopher Lee Peter Cushing make an engaging Holmes-and-other-Holmes style duo (aided well by Totosa) and the Orient Express makes a perfect backdrop for a tale of existential steam-powered escape, where through the ever-increasing momentum of man's scientific reasoning --the lone guiding red lights hurtling through the Ice Age Siberian tundra; the train whistle Morricone-ish score, the alien red eyes sucking up information the way we wish we could with books and professors and maybe will be able to one day with brain boosting chip memory implants, we get a tragic and profound sense of science still having a long way to go before we can escape the gravity of these archaic bone machines with any kind of permanent return to our true friends and family... out there, in a way that's infinitely more profound than The Man who Fell to Earth. 

(see also: The Creeping Flesh - 1973)

PHENOMENA 

(1985) Dir. Dario Argento

I've seen fire and I've seen rain, and I've seen SUSPIRIA enough times to not even mention it here - but PHENOMENA is a perennial because it's got Jennifer Connelly in the dark mirror twin role to her LABYRINTH wanderer (made the following year). With her raven-black hair blowing in the wind roaring down from the Alps, as the echo and flanger-pedal-drenched electric guitar and throbbing synth moments of ex-Goblin Claudio Simmonetti's evokes some echoing electric alpenhorn trying to signal anyone who can hear it to an unseen spectral menace. If you can move into the frame of mind of being at a near-deserted drive in in the middle of nowhere or even if you can't, you will dig the spook show surrealism and great wind noises.

It takes all the hot topics of the early 1980s/late 1970s and mashes em up with Argento's bizaarro touches: there's a chimp named Tanga (played by a very cool chimp named Inga) avenging his slain master ; SWARM-style bug attacks; CARRIE-esque telekinetic revenge against bratty schoolmates (replete with wind blowing the hair back ala FIRESTARTER); a deformed Jason-like child, flaming lakes, a razor left in a trash can, beheadings, maggots, POV killers shots with a knife on a pole ala PEEPING TOM, and all of it scenically filmed around the base of the Alps, where it's nice and stark and windy, in what wheelchair-bound Donald Pleasance dryly refers to as "the Transylvania of Switzerland."

People have written bad things about Connelly's acting here, i.e. her blank expressions when she should be scared, but hey--I think she's letter-perfect. She's a sleepwalker! And good lord did she have to suffer bouncing around in that decomposing offal pit, so give her a break. PHENOMENA works best, as its fans note, as a fairy tale, with Connelly's power to attract bugs perhaps the key to her fearlessness. She's like a superhero, hence the killer's question, my favorite line in the film, "Well? Why don't you call your insects!?"(more)

THE HOWLING 

(1981) Dir: Joe Dante

For my money this is the best lycanthrope study since WEREWOLF OF LONDON (1934), the one with Henry Hull and Warner Oland fighting over a Tibetan flower, not the one with David Naughton arguing with a decomposing Griffin Dunne in a Piccadilly cinema. Maybe I just don't care much for werewolves that get hung up on the letter of the law, like Landis' AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, which came out the same year as HOWLING and there was much to-do in the press at the time about which make-up artist did the better transformation. Rick Baker won, and he's a genius, sure, but he and Landis makes Naughton's transformation unbearably agonizing, the moon inescapable, the beast itself a real wolf puppet on all fours. He takes it all way too literally. Joe Dante and Rob Bottin, on the other hand, know it's a goddamn metaphor, so they don't get hung up on the 'real' parameters. Thanks to witty script by John Sayles and Terry Winkless, their werewolves move way beyond such hang ups as urban realism, looming tall, standing upright like monster gargoyles, they're effective reactions to a world gone wrong. There might be too many indulgent close-ups of air bladders but so what!? It still rules. Following in the shoes of Dante patron, Roger Corman, HOWLING taps into the lupine side of 1970s sexual swinger and EST-ish encounter groups and woodland retreats. It's funny and scary and trashy and witty all at once, full of strong liberated professional female characters, De Palma meta-refraction, audio mimesis procedural delirium, Carpenter ominousness, Cronenbergian clinical immediacy, and a plethora of great bit roles by folks like Dick Miller, John Sayles, Kenneth Tobey, Slim Pickens, Kevin McCarthy, Forry Ackerman, and Corman himself..
--
Even FURTHER LISTS:
Great Women of Horror - Acidemic Top Ten. 

Netflix 24-hour Horror Marathon 
(though only about half the films listed are still streaming over there. Netflix what happened to you, man?)

CinemArchetype 17: THE DEVIL

Sever me Member! EX MACHINA, THE CREEPING FLESH

Is western scientific dogma really just man's elaborate defense mechanism against the arcane force of his own feminine unconscious? Has keeping a sweet young innocent locked away from the world ever preserved her innocence, or protected her keeper's sanity... for long? If she wasn't insane before she was locked in the attic, how long until she is? 

The eventual mauling the imprisoning male authority figure gets (or the burning down of his ancestral towers), when his wild-eyed captive is finally freed (and finds a match or a knife) is always relative to the length and virulence of her oppression. Buried alive for a few days, she might just strangle her brother and let the house burn itself down on its own; locked in an attic for years while her man played around with children's tutor, she'd have to burn Thornfield Hall to embers. Similarly, though never spoken of in the 'happily ever after' part of Cinderella, the abused heroine's first act after the royal marriage is to inflict brutal imprisonment and/or torture upon her wicked stepmother and stepsisters.  The 'cinder' part of her name really comes to the fore during this forgotten coda of the text. She must use her newly-acquired power to order the beheading, selling into bondage, or burning at the stake of her oppressors. This newly-minted princess--made into a sociopath by her years of systemic abuse--must be treated with ginger gloves by everyone at court. The female thirst for vengeance can burn whole countries down to ashy residue. 



The male of the species is, after all, ultimately an appendage. Woman's ovaries are the wellspring, connected directly to the divine. Man's member is  merely the postman at the gates, dropping off a package and then racing back into irrelevance, He must high-five his buddies and pass out cigars to convince himself he's a key part in the birth process, like a guy who hits a slot machine jackpot trying to convince himself it took skill in how he pulled the handle. Perhaps it's only through such wool-pulled-over fictions that man can convince himself he 'took' something from woman (innocence, chastity), rather than vice versa (i.e. life essence).

There is only one way he can collaborate with woman and be the birth mother - via art. His feminine unconscious is the one who impregnates his fertile conscious imagination. He must figuratively unlock the foreboding attic and let Mrs. Rochester prowl the halls at night; he must unlock his sister from her coffin; his pen and ink left out on the coffee table, and his guitar tuned, like flowers luring bees with sweet perfumes. Keep her locked up, deny her the tools of expression, and you'll get mighty stung when her colony finally explodes from the floorboards.

This is basic Jungian 'anima' theory and applies equally well to film and ancient alien theory, whether in science fiction revamps of the Pygmalion myth about the creation (and then restriction) of artificial intelligence, or our own creation by a fussy dissatisfied (possible mechanized) God who still isn't pleased with us, his latest draft, so keeps us locked in a drawer while click-clacking out the DNA re-write of his next edition.

But mostly, the male-as-mother creation myth comes through as man trying to tame woman, to keep her docile and silent, resorting to the pulpy-but-true horrors of shock therapy, iron maidens, aerodynamic brassieres and other repressive devices to keep her hobbled if he fails.

If his repressive conscious projection scheme works, we don't hear about it; our illuminati masters smash the prince's found glass slipper in an 'accident' and then brainwash him into marrying into the 'right' family ("This is the girl"). For some of us, it's maybe just as well. Woman as a complete entity is hard for men to swallow in 'real life.' Only the Perseus mirror shield of fiction allows man to behold her true chthonic devouring gorgon nature, to confront his prehistoric-alien-insemination roots in ways he can't if he has to spend his time arguing with closed-minded skeptics. It's only through Jung's archetypal lexicon that we can grasp the truth that myth is "truer" than reality, that no amount of Jekyll tea-totaling denial can suppress the Hyde alcoholic; the glass slipper will automatically reset itself as sure as the carriage becomes a pumpkin at midnight. Either let the Hyde/madwoman out once in awhile or wind up in the lunatic asylum yourself, buried alive in a sterile post-modern tomb, furiously painting the same demonic face, with hungry ghost mouth agape, over and over. Ad rabidus infinitum. 

And it will still be all her fault.

THE CREEPING FLESH

(1973) Dir. Freddie Francis

***1/2

actual photo (w/child)

Seeing this for the first time, the same week as a fifth revisit to Horror Express (1972), has me wondering if perhaps the zeitgeist of ancient alien theory--which had just broke big a couple of years earlier with Erich von Däniken's book Chariots of the Gods (released in 1969)-- had an effect on their story lines. Nigel Kneale beat them all to it with Quatermass and the Pit (1967) so maybe that does the honors. Either way - Express and Flesh each have such similar stories you can sense a conspiracy right there (neither are Hammer films, nor from the same studio, but both emulate and maybe even surpass Hammer): both revolve around an ancient alien fossil brought back to life by heedless archeologists in the Victorian era (when science was much more open-minded about the ancient alien theory, apparently). Both films star Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing as rival scientists battling the creature and its archaic skills in telepathy, telekinesis, and other assorted precambrian maneuverings. In Horror Express, the alien is a free-floating intelligence freed from the fossil of a frozen caveman (a kind of ancient yeti) when a guard looks to long into its red eyes. In Creeping Flesh the word nephilim or 'titan' is never bandied, but with its huge saurian skull and skeleton, its marrow blood ripe with undiluted evil of the kind gods might make floods (and Ice Ages) to erase from their chalkboard Earth, what else could it be? Both beings have 'ancient alien' written all over them and, perhaps because of the Jules Verne-style liberation of the depicted era, their existence is never subjected to the dismissive hampering of closed-minded skeptics (such as the demolitions colonel in Five Million Years to Earth) or witch-burning Christians. Yet in Flesh, there are those whom crazy Cushing would sandbag mighty low, and they are Cushing's nympho-schizophrenic wife, their lovely daughter, and his lab monkey.

Cushing w/ Red Angel wife Emily (Catherine Finn)

Flesh starts with Cushing  returning to his lovely mansion with a gigantic prehistoric humanoid skeleton in tow and the need to win a big grant to keep exploring weighing on his mind. His virginal, locked-away daughter Penelope (Lorna Helibron) is excited to see him but of course Cushing's more excited to play with his big skeleton. For no real reason, he forbids her from looking in his laboratory or upstairs in her presumably-dead mommy's room or leaving the grounds, or doing frickin' anything. Turns out the mom recently died, in his half-brother Christopher Lee's asylum, but Cushing told Penelope she died when she was a baby, so as to not touch off her inherited madness, as if a whiff of scandal would awaken an Irina Dubrovna or Madeline Usher-style frenzy of murder and nymphomania. But his overprotective yet absentee fathering strategy merely brings it about all the more violently when it finally comes!



In his tearful flashback we see that, for all his patriarchal smothering, Cushing might have been right. His wife's descent into the nympho/schizo maelstrom is brilliantly rendered by director Freddie Francis as a splotch of Vaseline blurring a stack of teddy bears in the background in an otherwise clear bedroom shot. The blurry patch seems to grow larger and larger as the camera slowly zooms in on her, and there's grim echoes of Argento's Deep Red in her madness and coloring. Finally working up the nerve to invade mom's scarlet boudoir, Penelope's soon wandering the streets in mom's red dress, her hair wild, eyes alight and jaw clenched like she's on her first big coke high or really good acid. Her drug? Ancient Alien blood injected into her by Cushing to try and cure her of the madness which hasn't even yet manifested, like giving your kid electroshock therapy on the off chance they have mental problems later in life. Horrifying!

But this time, man is it worth it: as with most of the chaste wives and maidens of Hammer's vampire films, once she's 'turned', Penelope lets her hair down, tarts up her frock, and turns drop-dead gorgeous in her wild freedom from inhibitions. Seeing her crazy eyes as she goes running down the street after gashing a sailor with a broken bottle, her red dress like a gorgeous shimmering hallucination in the cobblestone puddles, may well be the highlight of my cinematic year!

Penelope (Lorna Helibron) after shooting up Nephilim blood

Speaking of the 70s, I'd just caught Deep Red (1975) on El Rey earlier that evening, and was reeling from the idea that Argento's film was made just two years after Francis' film. One is like the post-Freud psychosexual shattered mirror reflection of the other's pre-hysteria. Each involves a paranoid schizophrenic mother's sins outing in the singing knife of the progeny, and the ultimate trauma of seeing your father killed on your birthday (in a truly bizarre flashback where the son is deliberately made to seem like an automaton of the sort one sees coming out of cuckoo clocks or Macy's Xmas windows). The epiphany of both is of course that 'we are the gods' own robots", thus subject to short-circuiting when presented with the unfathomable horror of our true ancestry. Is this not perhaps the root of our government's own fear of letting us know the full truth of our alien origins? All of human history would suddenly seem so naive, so outdated. We'd know the feeling of all those remote Polynesian islands where isolated natives are suddenly playing host to the American navy, dropping out of the sky in giant silver birds, landing on giant boats, and introducing them to canned peaches, radio dance music, and hard alcohol, then disappearing as suddenly as they came, never to return. The empty peach cans take on the totemic significance of the holy grail. or martyred saint's knucklebones kept under glass in a church rectory alcove. We would be forced to realize all our religious belief is just a more organized version of a uncharted Pacific island sky cult. Perhaps, in the end, it's better for our growth to not know these things - they tend to short circuit analog human development, the way it's hard to go back to the normal sober meditation after leaping ahead via mushrooms taken in conjunction with a light-sound machine and isolation tank.

But--to be fair-- Cushing's desire to protect his daughter from the truth is more than just his own projection, and it's also more than just a scientific awareness of the triggers that can activate latent paranoid schizophrenia-- it goes deep enough to connect them both, as if mental illness in women is indeed all men's faults. In Polanski's films of the same period, like Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby, people are genuinely paranoid and everyone really is out to get them - the line between the two is so blurred it's nonexistent. 

For a contrast: If Weimar-era Germany was as repressed as England and Emil Jannings ran an insane asylum instead of working as an English professor, the ending of Blue Angel might have been very, very different. Dietrich's naughty Lola would be the one crowing then, after ze nice lobotomy!

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EX-MACHINA

(2015) Dir. Alex Garland

**

Fussy, sterile, terminally hipster, and wearyingly inert, this story of a prototype AI named (what else?) Eva has been told better elsewhere, and I mean recently. There's the West-German Eva in Eva; there's Ava in The Machine from 2013 (which like Garland's film also has an earlier Asian model prototype--with the same punk haircut even); and the "Be Right Back" episode of Black Mirror features the same annoying ginger actor--Domhnall Gleeson---but as the robot instead of the 'human' he plays in Ex-Machina. Ugh. I liked The Machine but the rest can all go take an animatronic walk. 

I mean, I get that the name is a futuristic riff on the name Eve, but jeeze, Garland, if you want to be intertextual, call her Pris.... or Ash... ley... and have her say "I want more life... fucker." In other words, don't rip off films made two years earlier that were even made in your same damned country, and if you must insist trawling the same old ground in the same old way, at least change the characters' names or get different actors!

There are original touches to be had in Ex-Machina but they're mostly dull and pretentious, unless you love-love-love uber-minimalist sterile boutique hotels. (Personally, I loathe them!) Most of the film's running time is spent in the company of awkward programmer ginger Caleb (Gleeson), an employee of a five minutes-into-the-future version of Google, selected to do some top secret tests at the house of his reclusive, burly, bald-but-bearded billionaire boss Nathan (the ubiquitous Oscar Isaac). Currently living in a big post-modern, sterile, TV-less, locked-down research mansion in the middle of the Norwegian fjords, visiting entails a helicopter ride with no easy point of exit from the endless Northern woods. With his sleek exercise equipment, fully-stocked bar, cadre of pleasure models and table full of experimental brains (but none of the equipment that would presumably go with them), Nathan is a bit like Dr. Coppelius from Tales of Hoffman crossed with Omni-publisher Bob Guccione if he hid out on an hipster Island of Lost Souls and had enough employees he could just fly over his choice of Mr. Parkers to try out his Lola the Panther Woman. 

Hey, it might have worked but unfortunately for us all, he picks super awkward programmer Caleb, who could handle the project a dozen better ways than his rote nerd bag of smarmy tics and poses, all no doubt gleaned by Garland from tech-noir coffee shop eavesdropping. As Ava, Swedish model-actress Alicia Vikander is beautiful and properly inexpressive, but that whole granny dress crew cut, petit Williamsburg hipster thing she rocks leaves me even colder than boutique hotels, smarmy passive aggressive gingers, and gym-muscled, nose-breathing bald CEOS pretending to be tech geniuses.

Passive-aggressively bullying Caleb like a rat in a maze, Nathan challenges him to bully 'the woman' through an even smaller maze. With Eva, you see, Nathan thinks he's invented a genuine artificial intelligence, one that thinks for itself and works towards its own self-interest rather than merely following its creator's hack algorithms. Nathan wants Caleb to be the fresh meat that awakens her predatory lusts, the Parker. 

In interviews, writer-director Garland says that he wanted to convey how Nathan considers himself just a tool through which evolution and art coincide, but this idea of a superior man supplanting mankind with his own creation isn't as clearly or cleverly illustrated as Garland seems to think. Instead, filmed in a beautiful but depressingly posh designer Nordic scenery hotel, where every room is either locked or openable with a pass card (which can in an instant to trap you wherever your are), with no TV or stereo, it's too hung up on bourgeois minimalist surface to posit any question other than: when will this joyless, airless, suffocating, isolating, infuriating experience end?

To me, boutique hotels work only for COMD majors who enjoy having their personal comforts stripped to nonexistence by some post-modern minimalist interior decorator for $500 a night. For a would-be lodger with no love of "forms" over function it's like that overpriced spa where they expect you to relax and let it all hang in their high-tech chill-out environment out but sneer at you if your toenail accidentally scratches their glazed concrete floor.. When I'm in a boutique hotel, I feel like I'm sleeping in the middle of an overpriced posh shop, I imagine some unseen hotelier adding up my every breath of oxygenated air via remote sensors, all while rolling his eyes over my every uncool micro-gesture, lamenting how I'm not blending with the ambience, how plebeian of me that I'm not relaxing as fully as the designer intended. How can I relax in a room where I'm sleeping next to an array of candies and drinks that I can't touch unless I want to feel guilty and humiliated by paying $40 for a goddamned airplane bottle or $10 for a Snickers bar the next day at check-out?

Fuck those places, and fuck those small town bed and breakfasts too, where some gaseous old lady scolds you if you're not in bed by midnight and freaks out if you wear your shoes on her moldy antique carpet? 

So... anyway, this wearingly austere locale is where we learn (slowly) that AI testing is apparently common in this near future, to the point that testing AIs is a whole craft unto itself (apparently we've come a long way since Voight-Kampff). Caleb therefore comes armed with a buttload of tiresome textbook questions, and won't even try to drink beer like a normal person (at first), or ask to borrow a pleasure model (at first). Naturally ere long we hate Caleb for being so uncool, and we hate Nathan for choosing him, apparently for no real reason other than apparently insecurity, making himself so much less dorky by comparison with this dweeby smarm merchant. The only good wrinkle with Caleb is a moment where he can't even tell if he's real (whatever that means) or artificial, which recalls a great, hilarious bit I'm sure Garland cribbed from Phillip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (but Scott left out of Blade Runner).

The nicest thing I can say about Nathan is that he likes to get hammered but if you're just drinking with robots, ain't that drinking alone? That's kind of pathetic, bro, and I say this as someone who considers W.C. Fields or Nick Charles a legitimate person to drink with. Then again, even preserved in amber liquid and film stock, Fields and Charles are more alive on my stoner 1995 living room VCR than the preservative-based characters of Ex Machina within their own diegetic reality.

Or is it all a metaphor for a closed-off, ever-shrinking sense of public space, the death of the non-digital? Not with a bang or even a whimper but silent.... silent.... goes the world. 

It was only a moment for you. You took no notice?

Or is it just an example of a self-isolated rich and privileged over-praised auteur whose lack of contact with the real world has cut him off from knowing that his great 'fresh' ideas are already done a dozen times over (and no assistant ballsy enough to tell him). Is Garland someone who--like latter-day Malick or Kubrick--maybe got called a genius once too often and so stopped listening to the heartbeat of the world and presumed the world would just listen to his, irregardless of if it was beating last year's tune? Maybe, too in love with peace and quiet of boutique hotels in the middle of nowhere, too far away from contemporary cinema to stay relevant, even a talented writer is unable to realize his brain's 'new idea' is just a dimly received satellite signal from Netflix?

To belabor that last point: watching this film I was reminded of the first time I saw Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket the day it opened at a local Syracuse theater. My friends and I were thinking we were in for some real genius of the sock-blowing-out-of order, but we came out thinking Kubrick's legendary production slowness had resulted in him being about five years behind the curve. A Vietnam pop culture inhumanity satire choked up with jingoistic jargon, ridiculous pop songs ("The bird is the word") and doublespeak (M.O.U.S.E) had been done and re-done by that point. The only thing left that was new was perhaps the kind of self-aware misogyny where a man must size up and conquer/understand/destroy/mate with - an alien/unknown wild woman (the VC sniper, a robot, a madwoman), which is pure myth, rather than a style, so will never age.

That mythic duality--the unknowability of the feminine, and the inescapable objectification that often goes with copulation-- is all that's fresh in Ex Machina. It presumes it's asking tough questions about the future of artificial intelligence and what constitutes 'free thinking' but it the result feels like watching Hardcore Zen 'master' Brad Warner passive-aggressively bitch out a Starbucks barista. More drive-in friendly films like Android, Creation of the Humanoids, The Machine, Demon Seed, Terminator: Salvation, and The Matrix, might be gonzo nuts, but they go all the way around the track nuts--like a crazy hopped-up mechanical hare--before jumping the track, crashing into the dog race bleachers and bursting into flames. That's an AI film I'll give my steel pot to any day. Garland's film instead plods inexorably forward like a jewel-covered Huysmans tortoise --sure, it's pretty in the ambient light but only going 1/20 the speed of its less weighty competitors within the same slot of time. That's fine if you want to hang back and tune in to the nowness - but who wants to do that around smarmy hipsters like Caleb and Nathan?

Only in the female-male dichotomy--the Pygmalion/Trilby hybrid--does this Machina work, and even then it works anemically, especially compared to the exact same dichotomy in The Machine three years earlier. Give this "Eva" some Nephilim blood and set her loose into the Freddie Francis dawn rather than just rolling out a ribbon of trenchant faceless street corner reflection B-roll. 

And if those vaginal dentatas should castrate you, well, at least you did something to deserve it. And at least she had to touch it first, right buddy?

If you did it to yourself, you might go blind, and miss all those views....

For those who like their reptile houses without reptiles, and their airless tombs without any cable TV. 

Monster Capsules: BIG ASS SPIDER, WAKE WOOD, WOMAN IN BLACK, DRACULA, PRINCE OF DARKNESS, VALLEY OF GWANGI

BIG ASS SPIDER

2013 - ***

A sometimes not wince-inducing monster film, Big Ass Spider shows director Mike Mendez knows how to keep a low budget giant monster flick fleet-footed. Greg Grunberg (Alias, Heroes) shoots for a Seth Rogen vibe as the semi-dopey exterminator who "thinks likes a spider" and really wants a girlfriend, a combination that eventually proves him the best man for the job of tracking and wrangling the titular amok experiment. First it gets loose inside a hospital, then grows to titanic proportion and climbs a downtown L.A. office building. Playing a kind of PG version of Seth's unforgettable psychopath in 2009's Observe and Report, Grunberg walks against the tide of fleeing extras in slow-mo to a haunting cover of the Pixies' "Where is My Mind" and even if the film defies regulations by showing full monster too early, and even though the thundering orchestral library military leitmotif quickly wearies the nerves, low-key bemusement endures throughout. Ray Wise (Leland Palmer in Twin Peaks) is the head of the military clean-up squad that at first wants nothing to do with the dopey Grunberg; Clare Kramer is the hottie lieutenant who winds up all webbed up and waiting for rescue. Lombardo Boyar is a kind of less funny Michael Peña from Observe and Report (my review here). That's not a dis on Boyar, he's fine, but Peña is hilarious because he's genuinely dangerous, Boyar is merely genial. If Pauline Kael had been alive to praise Observe and Report in 2009 she would, and maybe it wouldn't have bombed and as a result Boyar would be edgier. She'd probably also enjoy, to a point, Big Ass Spider, because she liked bad bug movies. She was a great, great lady, man.

WAKE WOOD

2010 - ***

Hammer is back with this keen medley of Monkey's Paw-ish family grief, Wicker Man pagan rural secrets, and the never-gets-old 'terrifying child who kills for no apparent reason' motiif. When a veterinarian (Aidan Gillen) moves his family to the small rural England town of the title, and his daughter has her throat torn out by a guard dog, the townsfolk (led by Mike Leigh-regular Timothy Spall) spill their secret: the town is cursed/blessed with the ability to restore the suddenly dead to life for three days so loved ones can say their proper good-bye. But the grief-stricken mother (Eva Barthistle - who was in the similar The Children two years earlier) doesn't want to let her daughter go when time's up. Ungrateful woman! Doesn't she know what will happen? Did no one tell her?! No they didn't. Pretty short-sighted of them! Soon the child's using telekinesis in combination with a crowbar to off the protesting locals and her dull yellow raincoat in the dark woods conjures vaguely Don't Look Now-ish unease. What do the dead locals care, though, when they can always come back for a visit? Aside from a heart being ripped out, some crowbar blunt force trauma, and dying farm animals, there's not much gore. Ahhahah that's a joke. It's Hammer!

WOMAN IN BLACK

2012 - ***1/2

Hammer does it again! They are really on a second roll and, despite the immense attention to Edwardian period detail--enough to suffocate any ordinary picture--Woman in Black is never stuffy and really rather ripping. A surprisingly solid Daniel Radcliffe is a London lawyer sent, Harker-style, to inventory to a dark decaying mansion in a remote, fearful hamlet. There's a great metaphysical shocker ending involving a speeding train, and the woman in black turns out to be a vindictive wraith like Eva Graps and her ghost daughter rolled into one malevolent spirit, but not some Disney type, she's a genuine fright. And if the story follows a too familiar pattern (Dark Water / Ringu meets some Innocents), hey, Hammer practically invented this shit. The ample presence of tight-lipped, suspicious locals at the inn harkens back to the days when a crisply attired Peter Cushing would get a similar cold shoulder while asking for directions and ordering a pint, and the sense of pacing is superb. Even if there's the usual stretches of our Harker-ian hero running around the dark mansion with a drippy candle, here it's done briskly with the dark always a breath away from swallowing him whole. Director James Watkins shows that the chilling power of his Eden Lake (2008) was no fluke, that he is not afraid of bleak but compelling endings, and that he is a new force on the scene, poised to become the next Terence Fisher.

 DRACULA, PRINCE OF DARKNESS

1966 - **1/2

Then again, even Terence Fisher isn't always Terence Fisher, such as in this second entry in Hammer's Dracula series (or third counting the Drac-free Brides of Dracula), which I'd been struggling to see for a long time, there having been only a terrible non-anamorphic old Anchor Bay disc which I could never get into, thanks to terrible color fading. Well, this new Blu-ray version is gorgeous proof it wasn't just the non-anamorphic washed-out dullness that made it so avoidable. Even pristine and robustly colored it's a bit of a silly mess, depending on all sorts of idiocy (like a heroine who falls for the same trick twice, and never thinks to keep wearing the cross that saved her life mere scenes ago) to generate suspense. Most of this movie consists of posh Brits leisurely debating whether to spend the night at Dracula's castle. Once Christopher Lee is revived he seems to resent having to wear fangs again, so churlishly appears only 1/3 the way through, and the script thinks one can make a cross out of just about anything (stopping just short of the old crossed fingers trick scared kids are so fond of -see also: my piece on the confusion of symbols and reality in horror films), yet the vampire's got no problem at all strutting around a monastery. So he's fine in a house of God, just not if some atheist points out the cross pattern in the tiles on the floor.

Oh well, the Blu-ray is deliciously un-faded, with rich sickly gold yellows and cherry lifesaver red gels, a 3-D-ish feeling of the dimensions and spaces of the castle, laden with all those masonic triangle candle holders, shields and soft serve swirl columns that constitute Dracula's and nearly every other Hammer castle (which is not a dis- I prefer their sets to real castles which always seem moldy). It's good that it's gorgeous, in short, as there's not much else to do in this film aside from watching idiots leaving each other behind to go investigate sounds, saying they'll be right back, slowly walking down halls, entering rooms, slowly pushing doors open, and never returning. So while Darwin chuckles from on high, we're forced to count the minutes as we're shown every last real-time moment involved in stringing a person up by his feet and slitting their throat over a big stone trough full of Drac ashes. The yellow mist is cool, but still... both Hammer and Universal seemed to think audiences wouldn't buy a character killed in the last film if he didn't get magically revived or de-thawed in the next, as if we couldn't imagine say, a prequel. At least old Drac has good taste in brides as usual. When he punks out hottie Barbara Shelley we all benefit: she finally undoes her prim bun and dour persnickety grousing manner, unleashing a wave of beautiful red hair, a gorgeous alabaster gold neckline and a truly English posh bloodlust, thus expressing within a single film the full breadth--from repressed bitter grouse to uninhibited carnal free spirit--of the English Woman, a force to be reckoned with!

The absence of Peter Cushing, though, is felt like a kidney punch.

VALLEY OF GWANGI

1969- **

Here's a bizarre mix of devotional Harryhausen animation and unconscious cowboy brutality that feels wayy too dated for 1969. The tedious story involves a posse of rodeo cowboys, led by James Franciscus, stumbling onto a desert paradise, long hidden from man, that looks almost the exact same as the depressing lifeless desert they just were traversing, with no sort of ecosystem on evidence remotely close to being able to realistically nourish apex predators like the Allosaurus (colored purple here, for reasons which I'm sure exist). I haven't read up on anything dinosaur-related since third or fourth grade but I still knew more than the alleged paleontologist riding with the cowboys --at one point he even calls a dinosaur a "styranosaurus!" which I presume is his shorthand for tyrannosaurus and styracosaurus, since his mutton chops and teeth are so bogus it must be hard for him to enunciate two such Latin syllable-enriched names in one sentence. At least he knows to get out of the sun when it's time for the Allopsaureuys / Styrackosauss smack-down!

And no disrespect meant to the great Harryhausen, but there's only so many times you can watch creatures who could never survive in their depicted ecosystem mix it up in a flat ugly middle shot diorama desert (these films always imagine dinosaurs as being in the desert, since that's where the bones are found, which again betrays a contemptuous disregard for paleontology, since America's deserts used to be fecund jungles) and here their monochrome purple colors and lack of close-up inserts make them look like plastic kid's toys. Harryhausen's no slouch; he even animates the eohippus! A movie this cheap and meant for kids would usually have regular pony footage shrunk... but taken all in all, it's not even as interesting as a typical arc in Land of the Lost and that used goddamned puppets.

So yeah, I tried to love it for as long as I can remember (it used to be on TV a lot) but I still can't dig Gwangi and I with its recent TCM screening I finally figured out why: it's not just that I hate children in monster movies--especially the burdensome cliche'd big-eyed local boy, 'one peso senor,' moppet that all monster movies set in Mexico, Italy, Greece, or Spain seem to insist on (as if to be in any sunny country is to be swamped in cute little scam artists--and it's not just that its sun-bleached scenery makes me depressed and thirsty, it's mainly because of the unconscious brutality on the part of these cowboys. They never doubt their right to grab the still surviving beasts of Gwangi's valley for public display, killing any of the ones that challenge their safety, and ensnaring the rest, thus proving the point that man destroys every thing he touches all in the name of a measly profit or science. Are we supposed to find Franciscus a hero for trapping the beast in an old church, currently under restoration but still clearly the pride of the city, and torching it. Gwangi screams and screams as Harryhausen captures his burning to death as the sacred edifice topples around him.

Harryhausen is famous for getting us to care about his monsters, but that can backfire, such as in Twenty Million Miles to Earth, which also has the tiresome 'one peso senor' kid and a climactic scene where our abused creature here even has to battle another abused creature -- a circus elephant, (also Harryhausen-animated). I love Howard Hawks, too, but have the same problem with Hatari!  I can't abide abducting animals and keeping them captive for no reason other than for a zoo or circus, or worse, medical experiments and/or forced labor, not any more. Hey, maybe we're growing more sensitive as civilization advances, so what was once normal and natural now seems unduly savage, and all the more callous for being so unconscious.

Luckily, that kind of empathy doesn't apply to Big Ass Spider/s, grasshoppers, plant or rock beings, and mantises --they never manage to earn my sympathy which is how I prefer it; the last thing I want from a giant monster film is to feel like I'm getting a PETA guilt trip. Even a genius like Harryhausen can't give a bug a soul, and for that I am truly grateful. It's this realization that prompts me to stop trying to love Gwangi and instead to look away, look away, towards my disc of Jack Arnold's classic Tarantula (1955) like the one man who finally realizes what matters in life... a giant spider... in love... with Mara Corday...

(See also: I Like Big Bugs and I Cannot Lie)