Analog Hacks, Italian-disguised-as-American-Style: GHOSTHOUSE & WITCHERY (aka LA CASA III and VI) Double Feature

Saw AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON or 'Robots smashing Robots in endless pixelated scrimmage II." Was it entertaining? Sure, but also spectacularly uninvolving.  Was there ever a time when we collectively dreaded the sight of a flashing knife going into a stomach, dreaded it in the same blood-chill, heart-in-the-throat way we get now only when we're at the tippy-top of a roller coaster or looking down from a high railing-less ledge? Hurling a spear or waving a sword took at least some muscle or dexterity back then, and both killer and victim were pressed right up against one another. By contrast, watching our amped-up immortal superheroes battle Ultron and his many digitally-encoded robot soldiers--everyone armored up and invulnerable--is to feel that 'watching someone else play a video game' boredom unique to modern CGI movies. When the stakes are no higher than getting your initials on the board, action becomes just compulsive as a rat pressing a lever over and over that once, long ago, dispensed a single treat.

Low-investment pixel-bashing didn't exist in the 80s, at least not on the big screen (TRON aside).  Effects were done with models, fake blood, exploding plaster heads. In the fast, from-the-hip world of Italian horror especially, things ain't perfect: stuntmen trip over carpets and miss their fake punches by a mile. But we're about as far from ULTRON's empty bot-bashing as it's possible to get.

So far away, in fact, you're practically all the way around again.

I didn't come here to pixel-bash, though, I came to make a ridiculous claim, that Scream Factory's new GHOSTHOUSE / WITCHERY Blu-ray double feature is better than ULTRON, By virtue of its analog tactile hurtiness, pre-CGI Italian 80s horror like these go far deeper than its pouffy hair and rotary phones might suggest, back to the innocent time when we were still too young to not be horrified at the sight of intestines being pulled out of a screaming Tom Savini. Every slow walk through a darkened hallway was once fraught with a gut-tingle anxiety. We needed to be able to sneer at the fakeness of the gore even as we needed to look away. 

Though allegedly billed as sequels to Sam Raimi's EVIL DEAD movies, which were huge hits in Italy (and there called LA CASA -"the House"), both GHOSTHOUSE and WITCHERY have nothing much in common with Raimi's films except the presence of a house. But today both glow with a quaint air of cheap ambivalence, both generate a certain ominousness and even if they're just imitating Fulci's imitations of America's imitations of Argento's imitations of Bava, or imitating Sean Cunningham's imitation of John Carpenter, hey, the Italians like GHOSTHOUSE's director Umberto Lenzi imitate better than anyone, or at least cheaper.

And though the budgets be low they were shot on 35mm, and they look good. They are serving drive-in dream logic distance and graphic violence. Shit like this was ideal for the post-midnight 'last' film on the drive-in bill after something like NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET IV or WAXWORK before coming straight to video... then to complete obscurity... gone and unmissed, unwanted for over two decades, But now, restored on Blu-ray in a double set from Shout... GHOSTHOUSE and WITCHERY demand your agog disbelief! 

Did anyone ever love them? Many have tried. All have failed.... so far.

Will you be the first, or wretch like the rest?  

 GHOSTHOUSE 

"La Casa III" (1988)
Dir Umberto Lenzi (As Humphrey Humbert)

*1/2

"Oh Paul... I saw death..."

Kids will be ghosts with clown dolls killing kids in late-80s Italian films set in 70s America--instead of just adults with axes and chainsawed because Poltergeist, and Nightmare on Elm Street had cleared away the tired slasher tropes, and Europe is a lot slower to change once it finds a style it likes. When I was in Buenos Aires in 2000 they were still dressing and acting like it was the 70s, and I loved it. So I accept that Lenzi thinks that in 1988 American' kids still give a shit about ham radios, or even CB radios for that matter, and are such good sports that when they hear someone screaming for help on one of the bands, you just know they have to triangulate the signal and rush, a few days later, to the rescue. In case, you know, the killer is really... really slow.

 Turns out, that message came from a deserted house where long ago an evil kid and her singing clown doll killed her parents. Now her ghost is down in the basement, killing anyone who ventures therein, including a diverse roster of good-natured hippie-punk squatters. The ham band join them and they all hang around the house like a mix of SUBURBIA squat and Scooby gang abandoned mine. Not sure why they feel so compelled to linger (we presume they have homes to go to, since they also have a cushy trailer, but you know how kids will be: they just hang out waiting for their creative deaths to find them. 

First up, naturally, is a fat black kid who is also a petty thief, and a freeloader: he hitches a ride, uses a skeleton hand for cheap shocks and pick-pocketing the kids who pick him up and basically shoves people out of the way to be the first to die. Maybe that's Ghosthouse's way of trying to "pass" as an American movie before that racist cliche became too glaring to ever use again. And hey, John Saxon shows up as the sheriff (see replies below for correction), vainly trying to make it better film. He tries to coax the kids to move on, albeit without success. Only Italians would think American suburban law enforcement would ever be nice enough to kids to actually ask them to stop trespassing on private property, then giving up with a chuckle and a sigh once the kids refuse. Even after they begin dying one by one, they feel compelled to linger, like the guests in Luis Bunel's EXTERMINATING ANGEL. It never occurs to them to even walk next door or drive away, or even drive down the block a bit, even though trespassing on private property is a crime (in America), and even they arrived in a still-working RV, and despite the cop's warnings that this isn't a legal, safe and community-oriented way to spend their weekend.

With the English dub, everyone but Saxon (who dubs his own lines, thank god) sounds like a semi-illiterate seventh grader doing a cold read at a junior high school audition while his lacrosse buddies snicker in the hallway. 

One quibble with either the sharpness of the transfer, the color grading or the way Italians overuse stage make-up of the time, the clarity of the HD Blu-ray image drains the lighting of nuanced skin color (if there was any) so we can see the thin color differentiation where the pancake make up line is around the base of their necks and the thin brush stroke marks of every foundation application, even on the men.. The result is the impression the entire cast has been living in a basement for the past decade, or England, or in their third year of clown college (or some Weimar cabaret). Is it just the restoration, or part of a gambit to make Italian actors look more Nordic (as in their general obsession with red hair, or if it's the color grading (1). Either way the cumulative effect is... demoralizing.

But there's joy in GHOSTHOUSE's many little life-affirming accidental Brechtian details, like the shot of a hand swinging a hammer down into a guy's forehead. The swing downward is held just a few frames too long in the editing so we see the hammer slow to a stop an inch from the victim's forehead before the quick mismatched jump cut to said hammer buried in his suddenly thicker (padded) and darker-hued forehead (the painted-on latex skin color doesn't match). I love this kind of thing as Lenzi's effect crew use the the same camera and effects tricks my buddy Alan and I used in our old super 8mm epics, and I find comfort in knowing we did it better, or maybe since our image wasn't HD, it just looked cleaner. Certainly our editing was better. Anyone can make a decent cut between the axe swinging down and the effect of the axe in the head so that it looks real. Only someone with no idea what they're doing, or a Brechtian like Godard, would leave the frames where we see the axe stop right before it hits the actor's head. But I'm so glad it's there. Without it, the scene would just be another lame murder with bad latex effects instead of a little life-affirming incident (fake death keeps real death at bay).

Finally, as GHOSTHOUSE lumbers towards its required 90-95 minute mark, all the "best kills" come tumbling out. One kid drowns in a boiling lake of skull-sprinkled cream-of-wheat under the basement floor as a cheap great din of 80s SUSPIRIA-ism howls in the bones of the soundtrack. The little sister is cut in half at the waist; a kid is diced up by a fan blade; blood comes out of the sink. There's even ghost doberman like in THE OMEN (though I like to think it's from FACE OF MARBLE). The clown doll is too similar to the one in POLTERGEIST and the ghost girl too similar to the one in KILL BABY KILL. But the scenes of graveyards and old tombs recall all the touchstones of the Fulci and Argento canons. John Saxon is always playing sheriffs, but he always elevates.  It's crap, but it's priceless... crap, And the Blu-ray comes with....

WITCHERY 

"La Casa IV"
(1988) Dir Fabrizio Laurenti (as Martin Newlin)
*

WITCHERY is both much worse than GHOSTHOUSE as far as unrealistic yet nauseating prolonged gore / torture scenes, but better as far as far as cast and writing, with several recognizable American movie faces and a theoretically understandable reason for hanging around an unoccupied murder house while everyone is being picked off (they're stranded on an island due to an alleged off-camera storm).

 Linda Blair is a pregnant lady looking to buy or sell a very old abandoned seaside island hotel --its gray shingles flap in the ocean wind most atmospherically. Pouty Catherine Hickland plays a virgin grad student squatting there while writing her term paper on the 'witch light' that has regularly appeared out of the window throughout the building's early colonial American history and up to this very day! Hickland's then-real life husband David Hasselhoff is her sexually frustrated boyfriend/photographer, forever pressuring her to yield unto his desire, but her grimoire asserts "virginity can be a virtue and not the barrier that separates innocence from knowledge." Touche! He can't argue with that, though he knows it's really her all-consuming fear of penetration, and he can't argue with that either. She has this great slurred drowsy way with a line, like she spent the whole shoot on Valium, and who could blame her? Her imdb.com page notes that after her acting career she became a professional hypnotist, which makes perfect sense considering the pulse-slowing alpha wave-inducing speaking pattern. 

Even so, we feel for the horny Hasselhoff. Why does he stay around? Dost he not know how Hoff he art!? There's other fish in the sea, and what a rod and bait box he surely packeth.  

If only we stayed with this pair and their push me-pull you but stay respectful sexual thing, the film might not be such a drag. If it did that and cut the grotesque yet unconvincing torture scenes down to a manageable length, it might even be watchable. As it is, WITCHERY is brilliantly summarized in Leonard Maltin's Film Guide as "uncomfortable."

I don't mind a certain level of gross-outs, but the victims here get sucked into some kind of sub-basement Middle Age horse barn Hell, consisting of a row of horse stalls that have been converted into an alternate dimension Hell by doing... exactly... nothing to them. They don't even remove the straw. But who needs webs and chains and flames and damned soul when your stable has mocking old pilgrim-cum-carny geek lady and deranged Pagan-looking old man, straight out of a Bruegel painting (those tacky white hoods!), reaching out through the horse stall slots as victims try to pass by, laughing and gibbering like caffeinated mental patients at a Jaycees haunted house for charity? I do. 

After enough suffering, we begin to learn that each victim stranded on the island is there because they are needed for a stern German witch's spell (the one with the witch light!) - each death is an invocation of one of the seven deadly sins in some vague way, so they suffer suitable stable-set punishments: for the pregnant Linda Blair, the Bruegel painting old lady and Satan (not even horns) fight over, and then eat, a premature (very fake-looking) newborn baby. In one prolonged, grotesque scene, the bossy Jewish mother real estate mogul gets her nails broken off, her lips sewn together--a terrible appliance job and we see almost the entire process of sewing all across the mouth, as if the producers were sure they'd have to edit it down (2). She's then is hung upside down in the chimney as the rest of the survivors unwittingly start a fire right under her hanging head and since her mouth is sewn shut they can't hear her screaming as her hair goes up in flames. Oh the humanity! Hickland the virgin is--in the most vile sequence--raped by a sickly youth with sewn-shut lips (what's with the lips thing, Fabrizio?) while the old lady and Satan hold her down -- Yeccch!! Thank 'god' then that Linda Blair's hair gets wild once she's inescapably possessed by the devil, and there's the old classic of when the nympho real estate girl starts seducing the Matthew Broderick-ish dweeb real estate guy in a room with a big mounted swordfish on the wall.... wait for it..... 

Maybe I ate too much of something or other while watching, but I came away from WITCHERY with little but a lingering nausea. I think the film may have been seeking the kind of kinky equilibrium of Clive Barker, whose HELLRAISER was a big horror hit the previous year. But Barker would be too outrageous and creative to let the nausea and ennui take hold. In the Barkerverse you understood the difference between both dimensions (the pinheads' S&M club and tawdry Britain) and felt they were both real, even if just dreams in each other's spaces (the pain/pleasure trip was more or less theoretical). But in WITCHERY, there is no difference, and both feel false. In Barker, the mutilated masochistic demons are trippy and funny. Here, they're 'uncomfortable.' And the latex effects are betrayed by the clarity of HD Blu-ray, making them less shocking and more like arts and crafts. 

There are things I like about WITCHERY though, despite all that.  I like the foreboding sense of isolation, with the eerie wind and dim lapping waves. I like that no one dares take a boat out from the mainland to rescue them, because the ocean is allegedly so choppy from a coming storm, like this is some kind of lost zone off I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING Scotland where everything seems tranquil but nothing is. Take their word for it. Even if you can see the shore from the island. I've had dreams like that. I get it. 

No amount of witchery can made that lipstick color and thick eyeliner work
anything but woe on all who gaze herein

As the seven hundred year-old witch lady mastermind of the murders, Hildegard Knef (left) is hit and mess. In general she reminds us there's a dispriting abrasive flipside to the unflinchingly carnal allure of Germanic lady icons, In specifics, her terrible make-up choices remind us of how some things are never meant for HD, such as old person skin when caked in too much bright oily white make-up, the smell of bad perfume over 'old person' mustiness that evokes slogging one's way through a tedious 'party' at your unfun grandma's. Torture all you want, but in truth it's Knef's black eyeliner and the garish horror of her orange lipstick that are the real horrors of WHITCHERY.

Knef in the 50s - nicely unadorned

Maybe my reaction towards Knef (L'ATLANTIDE) reminds me of my stern and disapproving late German grandfather. Old Germans, man, are the worst - somehow more decadent than any French libertine yet so joyless about it you become a conservative almost instinctively. Their favorite thing is to torture their grandchildren with endless long lunches and dinners und schwarzwaldkuchen. Hours and hours with nothing to do but try to understand their wearingly adult conversation, as the only book or magazine they have in their Apple Canyon cottage is a Reader's Digest from 20 years ago, and the only game in the rec room closet some 1000 piece puzzle of a dull landscape. So one endures a full week of being bored near to death, minutes stretching like years, hushed constantly as children aren't heard, symbolic lips sewn-shut.. waiting as lunch turns to dinner and dinner turns to drinks (which you can't have - you're too young) Being crucified upside down, stabbed with a swordfish and set on fire is an indulgent luxury by comparison...

Long azzits annalog.

NOTES:

1. Italian fondness for red hair in cinema means lots terrible red-on-black hair dye or bad wigs on people who could never in a thousand years pass as Irish, the hot sun melting their brown bronzer intro rivulets of opaque desert sweat (as in the grotesque McBain family wiped out by Fonda in ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST

2.so they do what so many directors do, add about 20 seconds more gore than they really want, so they can begrudgingly remove it at the censors behest, thus satisfying both of their power trips and ending up right where the director wanted it to begin with (but then if the censors don't say anything, viola- way too much to the point it loses its blunt force impact)

Capsules of Crank: THE HORDE, RAGING PHOENIX, PIG HUNT, DARK ANGEL: THE ASCENT

DARK ANGEL: THE ASCENT

(1994) ****

Directed by a woman (Linda Hassani) who is seemingly from another planet, DARK ANGEL (no relation to the TV series starring Jessica Alba) has a bit of a space cadet glow, kind of like MY SO-CALLED LIFE if Angela Chase was a demoness looking to find herself in the world above her Hell home, etc. Charles Band's Full Moon company utilized beautiful Romanian architecture and painterly craftsman lighting to overcome the relative lack of CGI or budget, towards turning this into a sweet 'so wrong it's right' dusty-dream theater fairy tale ala LEMORA: A CHILD'S TALE OF THE SUPERNATURAL or VALERIE AND HER WEEK OF WONDERS. Veronica (Angela Featherstone) feels called to the surface, strictly forbidden the demon set by their Angel employers. Dad's so upset he's motivated to shout in her face in spittle-flecked hysteria of the sort only Nicolas Worth (so chilling as the psycho in DON'T ANSWER THE PHONE) can provide, flogging and striking her, and generally driving her from his door. She escapes with her dog Hellraiser and together they wind up cleaning up an surface city. Romancing a young handsome doctor and wandering around the crime-ridden park at night, ripping spinal columns out of rapists and racist cops and feeding their impure hearts to her dog, Hellraiser. Soon she hooks up with an ER doctor whose karmic balance is strong clearly due to all his selfless healing work, and who's hot and has a nice studio loft apartment for her to move right in.

"To turn away from evil is to be an accomplice to evil"

Through Veronica's actions we learn that demons aren't evil so much as determined to cause suffering and death to those who do evil, and that when acting is really really bad it becomes almost like innocence. Angela Featherstone's zombie acting style gives her crazy lines--part alien free of all humanity's typical shame and fear as she seeks to get the whole picture of life above--and part biblical vengeance--a deadpan flatline sincerity a better actor couldn't hope to match. Her bravely imperious tone when being questioned by suspicious cops is out-of-step even for 90% of other Satanic representatives in film. The way she delivers lines like "I don't require the blessings of the church to engage in unsanctioned sexual relations, Max" is so good I wish I had it as a ringtone. Even the sex scene is tasteful, and I love when she unfolds her true form--wings, horn, tail--after orgasm, in bed, and he's surprised but doesn't freak out, he's just like "hey, it's all right," in a normal late night bedroom voice. He's cool with it! It's all played dead straight, which is why it works so damn well, like Jacques Tourneur making films for a a Satanic Sunday school.

It might not be for all tastes, but in addition to Featherstone's wondrously low-key performance, I love the dreamlike grungy fairytale threadbare Guy Maddin meets Silk Stalkings ambiance (Hassani's directed a few episodes of the latter). It's the perfect film to pass out to by the tenth whiskey of the night. And if you're one of those sober Bickle-ish horror fans who has to really search his collection to find a suitable date movie, here it is. Once you see Veronica offer the would-be rapists spinal column to his intended victim as a trophy, you know there really is a God... and God is good.

--

Though if he really loved us, there would have been eight sequels, or even one.

PS  6/16 - see my updated close-up on this swell film here

 RAGING PHOENIX

(2009) ***1/2

Jija Yanin (CHOCOLATE) is a miracle, a wiry, scrappy little kicking so much ass she should charge by the truckload miracle, especially when she learns a hilarious mix of drunken monkey-style and break dancing. She's an avenging angel against kidnapper gangs, but rather than dipping into the usual sleaze and dispiriting inhumanity at the core of the Thai white slave trade, RAGING PHOENIX involves kidnapping women for their precious pheromones, which are mined via their precious tears in a bizarre underground nightmare lab/dungeon, eerily reminiscent of the tunnels talked about in reptilian conspiracy circles, replete with humans being hypnotized and farmed for emotional response-generated fluids --though melancholy reverie here rather than pain and fear; it's all masterminded by a transgendered martial arts master in a red kimono who does not go down easy.

Unlike the basic stuff from Hong Kong, these Thai guys never use guns, or weapons of any kind... just martial arts, not even bo staves, shuriken, or nunchaku. What kind of gang is that? How can you ever expect to compete with the Yakuza, the Tong, or the Golden Hand? I would have liked to see the booze show up at the last minute like Popeye's spinach, to go with the drunken monkey style, but instead there's some last minute emoting, as the guy our Phoenix loves, well blah blah - you know how those Asian countries are when it comes to sweeping soapy doomed young love, but they do some great couple martial arts in between all, he throwing her all over the place an a big elaborate set piece on a stacked series of rope bridge crossings over a vast deep pit is pretty wild, with more of that swanky high-def deep black-saturated color whiplash camera (so freely used in THE HORDE, our next film)  circling and sliding and whirling around our various heroes. And the martial arts--from choreography to camera to high-kicks--are wondrous.In the end, though, where are you, whiskey? I went to do the dishes afterwards and smashed a plate I was so pissed off they forgot about booze, their secret weapon - you can't have drunk monkey style without it, I don't care what your sen-sen says. ! As the subtitles say: "I want Vengence!" (sic)

 THE HORDE

(2009) **1/2

Borrowing liberally across a long line of John Carpenter, George Romero and 28 DAYS, this French allegory is shot in that whiplash urban chic way that's become synonymous with modern horror films. Dudes, are running zombies all the rage now? In the original DAWN OF THE DEAD for example, the slow comical zombie moments allowed the human survivors time to reflect, reload and recognize themselves in the zombie's eyes, and it was more like our actual nightmares, wherein we're always running in mud or trapped as something shambles or crawls inexorably towards us. Then there's the whole RESIDENT EVIL virus that's infected so many zombie movies with 'money shot' climactic moments of one lone human discharging his/her armaments in full slow mo Matrix camera abandon and the shells come popping out of each machine pistol as they flash at acres of zombies pressing forward like literally rabid fans at a rock concert (see my Hell's Angels Vs. The Flower Child Dead).

But as for humans, you can do worse than the old Carpenter's saw of cops and robbers teaming up to fight the common foe. Eric Ebouaney is awesome (he's the guy slapping Rebecca Romjin in FEMME FATALE), playing a crazy Nigerian ex-child soldier turned drug dealer, with--exactly like Ice Cube's situation in the eerily similar GHOSTS OF MARS--a hothead brother who doesn't trust their new white cop allies. I like that they all get jacked up on cocaine--cop and crook alike-- before rushing out to battle, and a female zombie pinned to the floor provides weird cokehead gang rape frisson without having to get icky and dehumanizing and depressing like DEADGIRL (here just implication is enough), and when an old neighbor 'Indochine' veteran gets involved, and thinks the zombies are a "chink" counter-attack, you have the deadpan allegory of Romero, if not the shambling.

PIG HUNT

(2008) **1/4

There's just a few problems here, one is making the sanctimonious pretty boy murph dillweed good guy the hero -John (Travis Aaron Wade) --and having his self-important dillweed girlfriend (Tina Huang) invite herself along on an all-guys Northern California camping trip / boar hunt just so she can make wise-ass cracks about their phallic gunsmanship --just what every boys' night out needs, a girl inviting herself along to heckle and emasculate them. Why even bother? If  a guy can't kick his girlfriend out of the car he doesn't deserve to come!.

 Ben (Howard Johnson Jr), Quincy(Trevor Bullock), and Wayne(Rajiv Shah) are the other friends, killed more or less in accordance with their stereotypes (Asian guy first, fat guy second, etc.). But hey, this film isn't about breaking new ground, its about giant man eating pigs protecting pot fields.


There's odd inconsistencies I shan't spoil, but there's also moments of genuine schlock anarchy: a coven of dope-growing hippie girls who preach back-to-nature while sporting silicone breast enhancements; in-joke homage and quotations (as in the fat guy quoting APOCALYPSE NOW); some good looking buds on the fields (John wants to call the police about the crop, which made me see red... hairs that is - a fucking narc tattletale like that deserves death); a rocking theme song from the reliably deranged Les Claypool (he shows up onscreen as a preacher who dies in a ROAD WARRIOR-homage) and a great antihero duo in the form of DELIVARENTS-ish local boys played supremely well by Jason Foster and Nick Tagas. Spiking their coffee, and ripping crank off their hunting knives, they show the right way to psych yourself up for killin'! I was rooting for them the whole time! Root, Hogs! Gut yourself some narc!

When the situation gets explosive and the DELIVERANCE boys rally the locals against these clean-shaven intruders, there's some riveting driving around and waving guns, and the emotional anguish and subsequent carnage is awesomely bodacious. However the monster finale is disappointing. For one thing, it seems oddly blocked, with a set-up that we don't know where anyone is in relation to each other half the time when they're all in the same outdoor pit. Why is everyone standing around watching this pig, with special fx snot hanging out of its nose, rooting around for victims? Wouldn't they want to hide... or something? It's kind of a let-down. But hey, four beers in, you won't give a sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeYIT

"Hell ish my Natural Habitat" - UNDER THE VOLCANO (Great Acid Movies #88)

 "Theresh nothing betterr.. to sober one uhpp... than beer!"

That's a line my friends and I would quote amongst ourselves when surrendering to the grim alcoholic gallows humor of UNDER THE VOLCANO, John Huston's 1980 adaptation of the "towering" Malcolm Lowery novel (which I've never been able to get more than 5-8 pages into), about the last day in the life of a British consul named Geoffrey Firmin in the 30s Mexico. Slouching against a historical backdrop of jostling Nazi and British diplomats, our Firmin (Albert Finney) drinks heroically to metaphorically match the decay of the global politic, shot by shot (and if that analogy runs out he'll find another excuse). My friends and I loved this film in the same way; it validated our drinking the way the incumbent world war validated Geoffrey's. After a late night screening (and drinking 'heroically' along) of my old, blurry VHS version, we'd talk for days in Albert Finney's eloquent slur, digging that our mirth was rooted in violently escalating alcoholism, a black humor joke where we were all too aware of being the punch line, and we wouldn't have it any other way.

Neither would Finney's Geoffrey, even after Jacquelyn Bisset as his gorgeous ex-wife Yvonne drifts suddenly back into his life. At first he thinks she's a mirage conjured from his wracked longing (like Susan Strasberg in THE TRIP); appearing as she does while he's contemplating the early dawn and an old woman with a chiggen (incluse me, "chicken"), he figures she's a contrasting DT hallucination, and so shrugs her off. Then he realizes maybe it is her, come back to him. But why didn't she write? No! She's just another hallucination --the last temptation of a booze-crucified saint. Now excuse him while he resumes his wide-eyed stare into the abyss.

No, he didn't get your letters, Yvonne. He's been busy as you can see.

While Yvonne's been away, brother Hugh has been taking care of Geoffrey, giving him strychnine to taper off with (the invention of benzodiazepine being, sadly, still decades away) and listening to his endless impersonations of pirates with detached indulgence, but he's also very creepy and laden with suspicious agendas ala Bruce Dern from THE TRIP (if Dern was after Strasberg instead of Fonda). There's no acid in the film (though surely that would be good to "shober up with" as well) but I assure you that being drunk for days on end will get you pretty much to the same psychedelic place (just sloppier) and this movie has the same ability to transcend the life/death dichotomy and point towards the terrifying ambiguity of the real.

Finney's slur is much more decipherable when heard under some sort of influence (I dimly remember), but there's little that can help with Huston's belabored attention to visual metaphor as he cuts from El Dia de la Muerte skeletons to Finney's "skull eye socket" sunglasses and white tuxedo over and over. Despite the incessant cutting, the comparison never quite gels--Finney's too plump--and the fact that his bloated face never looks enough like a skull seems to drive Huston crazy, but that's the problem--we associate the big dark glasses white linen Panama suit look with drug cartel kingpins and Nazi secret agents smuggling uranium in Buenos Aires --that slot is 'filled' in our iconography. Huston keeps trying though, and now, on the superbly rendered new Criterion DVD, these allusions scream with subtlety. On the muddy VHS tape I had (old and heavy and faded), by contrast, the tracking was bad and the image was so blurred that Finney in his many close-ups seemed to be slowly dissolving into wormy, mismatched horizontal lines of Gerhard Richter-style abstraction, which mirrored the souvenir skulls mucho mejor- each a perfect symbol for our drunken viewer souls' unstoppable slow drip deterioration.

The Criterion DVD of course loses that blur, and reveals Huston's sense of period piece over-craftsmanship. Every scene is packed with prettiness now (no matter who's throwing up), lots of flowers in the Mexican sun and a romantic Alex North score that clearly doesn't get it either (one longs to hear what a master of abstract antithesis like Ennio Morricone might have done instead). Alas, now we see--in the clear pretty light of dawn--that even a fellow great white writer facing drunken death like John Huston can make the mistake of assuming that just by filling a drunkalog with (suspiciously well-polished) old cars and conniving Nazi sympathizers in tuxedos, a story will add up to anything that might qualify as "sweeping" or "romantic." We all know Lowry's book is 'great literature' adapted from one Great White Drunk by another. But does the greatness transfer to historical evocation and white elephant sweep when Even George Stevens or William Wyler would have realized expressionism was being loudly and clearly called for!

The video cover (pictured lower left) tries to spin the film's plot around to a love triangle, playing up Bisset's infidelity with Hugh (reflected in Finney's skull socket shades) as the trigger for some kind of cold blooded vengeance, rather than just the alleged wound for which booze is the cure (the vertical lines making it seem like he's some merciless killer watching them from outside their window at night in the rain). It's misleading but in a way might be the poster designed by Geoffrey himself, were he in denial and playing the blame game, turning the whole film into a kind of remorseful drunkard rationalizing. Considering Huston's own legendary propensity for indulgence... and Lowry's of course, it might make sense but it's certainly misleading from what the film is really about.

Still, I'm not complaining, because when things really get properly weird, they go all the way, as if Huston has been holding back the surrealism gates to make the entrance of a dwarf whoremaster--(Rene Ruiz) making lewd gestures towards these drunk British marks-all the more shocking, a kind of 'too late to turn back' signpost. I think he was a regular villain on WILD WILD WEST, which gives his raw vulgarity a traumatic association with hazy childhood (like if you saw Gilligan making lewd tongue gestures at Ginger in a bad dream). Seeing him arrive, and leap atop the bar, we know this dwarf pimp is the rat Don Birnim sees peeping out from the hole in the middle of his apartment wall but this is no hallucination, this is the real that makes his last 24 hours seem a final dream of placid river drifting before plunging over the falls.

The rest of the horror comes from Finney--his wild eyes, each floating in the liquid of his skull with no thought to the other one's direction of gaze; his skin flushing and growing pale as each new wild thought cascades down his spine; he is a formative titan, his groovy-strange monologue about halfway in: staring off into the abyss as Yvonne and Hugh try to reason with him, trying to urge him to get help, says it all.

"Geoffrey, what possesses you?" Yvonne asks.
"Sobriety, I'm afraid," he answers. "I must drink desperately to regain my balance." And so he does. And so used to I. And my friends and I used that line constantly when toasting out ninth and tenth glasses of the hour.

I think in the same scene he also leans back and says, "Hell.... is my natural.... habitat!" A perfect battle cry for those of us for whom booze, drugs, and the inability or unwillingness to stop using them, had led to spiritual, mental, and cul-de-sacs.

Perhaps the novel really cries out for a more poetic or abstract approach, something they might do today with CGI to create ever so slightly shifting hallucinations or, failing that, to cast an actor we perhaps love more than we do Finney, someone like Richard Burton, who had to tell us he "was at the end of his rope" in NIGHT OF THE IGUANA, but we never really believed it --or the way Dean Martin in RIO BRAVO or Ray Milland in LOST WEEKEND never quite made their characters' drinking problem unsexy. These were actors who were real life notorious drinkers so they certainly knew what their characters were suffering through yet they never really seemed to sink deep into the depths, understanding implicitly that even in social message movies we don't like to be turned off. Most actors are far too vain to get too ugly. No matter how low their character sinks, they know we still want them to be charismatic stars --we have to look at them on big screens after all, for a long time. We can't look away and keep walking, stepping over them in a hurried manner. These actors wiseky figure we can use our imagination to carry their character the rest of the way into the pit --and they're right. We don't want to see them get all bloated and sweaty and wild-eyed -- we see enough of that just looking into the mirror.

That's the thing --with his weird wavy hair and puffy pink froggish face, Finney looks like a drunk--his face pale and pink, blushing and bloated on too many empty booze calories. No one had ever come this close to actually looking like a near-end drunk while playing a near-end drunk before. Finney gets the jerky St. Vitus movements and out-of-breath reality-break 'keep it togethergottakeepitogetherkeepitgetherrrr" wits' ended spastic hilarity of real alcoholism just right, maybe 'too' right.

In fact the only other actor of his caliber who would even come close, who would really open himself up like a can of prickly pears and dump his guts all over the floor, wouldn't even get the part for another 17 or so years. Of course I mean Nic Cage in LEAVING LAS VEGAS. By then, though, even I had mastered the St. Vitus, and now that I'm sober I can't watch either one without an AA Big Book around and a finger on the remote to flip past the grim, terrifying... I AM BLACKSTONE THE PIRATE DO YOU HE--BLACKSTONE!!! ranting. Pay no attention, madame...

New! Stills from the upcoming experimental art film, "To Hell Rode a Hippy"

Shaw Bros' HEAVEN AND HELL (1978) comes to Weinstein.

A distribution deal between Image, the Weinstein and the Shaw Brothers has finally brought the wildest, most surreal martial arts films of the 1960s-80s to our needy shores. Up to this point the only titles were those Quentin Tarantino was able to smuggle out with the help of the Weinsteins (who love to promptly shelve stuff for years and years) But now, international cult film fans in the USA can rejoice without reservation. These are the good old days.

For those new to the myriad pleasures of the Shaw films, the best indication of them is probably through Tarantino’s KILL BILL. The actual Shaw Brothers films are like madcap post-modern kung fu cum Peking opera joints with crazy costumes, goofy special effects, outdoor scenes that are clearly filmed indoors on brightly lit sound stages (often with bare, black soundstage floors). The effect is similar to the weird indoor/outdoor planets Spock and Kirk explore in the original STAR TREK series. My personal recent favorite, available at retail for $19.99, is HEAVEN AND HELL (directed by Chang Cheh, of FIVE DEADLY VENOMS fame) a goofy blend of goofy kung fu action, weirdly surreal humor, and a tour of grisly punishments reminiscent of the Japanese film (avail. on Criterion), JIGOKU.

The film opens with a forbidden love affair up in heaven, which is represented by lots of fluffy clouds, white fog machine fog, and very bad fight scenes (intentionally ballet-like?). When the heroes are sent tumbling to earth, we promptly get a new set of credits, and the tone of the fighting and action shifts to a bizarre expressionist, crypto-Bollywood Kung Fu dance odyssey where the menacing gangsters leap around like they’ve been studying Russ Tamblyn’s moves in WEST SIDE STORY. If you’re not digging this sudden shift to bizarro dance world, you might as well hang it up now, because it only gets weirder from here. The question is, are you going to label it cheap or are you gonna dig that its “Brechtian”?

Certainly the sets--as with many of the more fantastical Shaw Brothers productions--are so minimally rendered as to make expressionism in films like THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI seem opulent. Our heroine’s bedroom prison is a huge, blackened soundstage, demarked by a poster bed, a Caligari-esque distorted free-standing door portal, lots of colored gel lighting, and a window frame. Elsewhere action occurs in front of monochromatic gray walls that stretch into infinity, and with the glory of widescreen, one can almost peer around the set and see the Exit sign and a gaffer or two eating their lunch in the corner.

By the time the lovers and their friend have fallen into Hell, where the bulk of the film will subsequently play out, the fight scenes have improved and the soundstage has transformed into what looks like one of those charity-driven walk through Halloween haunted houses (replete with black lights shining on foil covered cardboard saw blades.) There are all sorts of hells being shown off, from Ice Hell, to Gambling Hell (we pause for some shots of an endless game of mahh jong) to Booze Hell (a boozer tries to get a sip out of a fickle giant bottle of Johnny Walker Red that tilts back and forth above him like one of those weird red “drinking birds”) to the Greedy Hell (where misers are forced to drink liquified gold running down what looks like a mini-golf course volcano) to “Tongue-Pulling Hell” and on and on to the big final, infamous “Plow Hell” where victims are forced to lie on hell's dusty concrete floor while big wooden plows with spikes in front are dragged over them.

Luckily Buddha himself comes to the rescue and instructs our hero to find four other innocent souls over in the next hell, who all happen to be kung fu experts who have been wronged and killed unfairly. We see all this in patient flashbacks for each fighter, and then, conveniently, the villains who wronged them on earth are revealed to be guards and officials in the kingdom of hell, with big ribbons hanging out of their mouths to represent long tongues. Now will come the time for each man to have his revenge, and to fight masked demons for what begins to seem like eternity to even the most patient viewer.

Eventually we wind up in a golden “other” place where souls can now be reincarnated. Some bad humans end up as chickens, but the good ones, standing in the center of a giant swirling spiral of color painted on the soundstage floor, are granted the right to return in a (hopeful) sequel.

If this doesn't sound like cinema heaven to you, then I condemn you to "Endless Chickflick Movie Hell!"

If it does, then good for you, you can come back to this wondrous land where king fu movies now run remastered and cheap with glorious color and original Cantonese language tracks, and coherent, well-written English subtitles.