Andrzej Zulawski's Dead: An Acidemic Tribute Round-up

 I just fond out the great Polish Insanity Clause himself, Andrzej Zulawski, died last Wednesday, forcing we fans in the States to cry and then rear up and make sure all our precious Mondo Vision collector item DVDs are still there.... waiting for the time to be 'right' again - their dust jackets keeping the art pristine, not that we'd ever sell them. Nay, instead let us take his passing as a cue that the time is nigh upon us. Drugs in the system or no, these films have been growing in us like a seed mutating and pulsating since we last saw unsheathed them - and thus Zulawski--in some hideous protean form conjured in the unfettered madness of his art--still lives. Though unscreened in theaters or given US releases, his films are done justice on these fine DVDs, testament to his cinematic bravery and ability to so vividly entwine genuine druggy hallucinatory madness, classic Russian literature (and Shakespeare), Godardesque meta-deconstruction, depravity, and covert anti-Stalinism.

In America, especially, outside of POSSESSION, which was able to be billed as an arty horror movie, his films are appreciated only by a few marginalized madmen. Situated within a specific category in our weird film libraries, POSSESSION fits the 1970s-80s 'Euro-Horror' category so we know what to do with it which is why for a long time it was our only taste of Zulawski. Until the recent Mondo Vision restoration, it was only avail. only as the flipside of a double feature disc with the terrible Lamberto Bava's terrible BEYOND THE DOOR II. But it belongs where it is now, on a beautifully restored disc, ready to be filed on the same shelf as Kubrick and Godard and Bergman.

Just look at him, at left, with long-time girlfriend Sophie Marceau, with whom he made four films, two of which are seeable in the US, (one on a Mondo disc and one on Amazon Prime). Maybe it's that Cyrano de Bergerac is one of France's key mythic heroes, leading the greatest beauties in this or any generation to find great writers as sexy as rock stars and actors. Either way, I trust her judgment, and wish I was in Paris. So RIP to a great visionary mad man who made far too few films, and whose possibly greatest work, the science fiction film ON THE SILVER GLOBE, was never finished thanks to Polish government intervention. What were they afraid of?

Whatever it was, maybe they were right. Decades on and his best work is still dangerous. I'm not sure it could topple a regime, but even the more sex-drenched of the lot could topple your sanity right quick. I think you can handle it, though. And prayers and thoughts to his family and friends, and all those still sick and suffering in and out of Warsaw.

Here's a round-up of some of the Acidemic features on Zulawski's shimmering ouevre:

Surf the Maelstrom: POSSESSION

... the landscape of POSSESSION could be summed up in terms of SUNSHINE's mind washing machine, with Sam Neill trapped in inescapable loops with the same woman in different forms, with Winslet's hair changes and bi-polar mood swings reflected in Adjani's careening back and forth between the sterile apartment she shares with Neill and their son, Bob, and this decayed East Berlin apartment building, with its goop-covered floor and writhing tentacled lover like a decayed animal carcass swathed in glistening rainbow brown blood / oil paint palette runoff and being devoured by long large white worms. "He's very tired, he's been making love to me all night," Adjani says of the beast to a horrified gay detective before bashing his brains in with a jar of paint. She's so crazy by then she makes Klaus Kinski seem like Water Pidgeon.

By this time Neill has more or less detoxed and is playing the clean-cut parent, subject to fits only when Adjani comes careening back to put laundry away (in the fridge) and throw some cold cuts from the pantry into her suitcase and carve herself up with an electric knife while shouting and convulsing like she's receiving electro-shock therapy in the midst of a Macbeth monologue. Her character splits between two poles: one Adjani as nurturing elementary school teacher potential love interest (Sam's idealized femme) vs. the homicidal birther/fucker/painter of her own monster (ala Susan Hogan and Samantha Eggers and in The Brood) a blazing insane nightmare woman, shrieking and miscarrying an array of colors as if dissolving a painting in her womb to start again. (there's a kind of mention that she brought the ejected fetus whatever-thing over to that apartment and its been her sick lover ever since). Is it a metaphor for art, a masterpiece or an example of the way a true artist is in a state of exalted frenzied madness when working on their project, giving themselves over completely, maybe never to return, except in the form of that immortal art? It's ambiguous of course, cuz it's artsy first, horror second, but both far more than others. Zulawksi is exorcising emotions brought up by his own crumbling marriage at the time, the frustrations of jealousy and confusion when your lover is drifting over to the arms of another and reluctant to fill in the blanks your mind paints with lurid insane speculation, but--since he pursues the emotions to their extreme end-- the cumulative effect becomes far more cosmic.

Neil's characters have always made me dislike him and need to be cock-blocked by some younger, looser man, i.e. Harvey Keitel, Billy Zane, even Jeff Goldblum, so his innate sexually frustrated petulance has an intertextual context. But when delivered from being just a weird side platter of Pierce Brosnan /Anthony Perkins, and when given a part that calls for truly insane and giddy grace, he's suddenly big as all the ocean and the land. He makes you want to keep an eye on him so he doesn't suddenly appear behind you, smiling and showing you his new razor from your insides out. What makes him such a good secret agent (his last mission was something across the Wall where he'd been sizing up some scientist defector in pink socks on other side of the wall or something) lies in his ability to ride this tide of lunacy with confidence, able to match crazy for crazy, and then some. Wherever Adjani's crazy boat's going, he's going to match her, bob for bob. Sometimes going under, sometimes rising above, absorbing everything and everyone he sees, from his son's crashing toy airplanes to his rival's 'love of everything,' he's always more or less on the crest of that Poesy maelstrom. (cont.)

The Sorrows of Softcore are the Joys of Art: L'IMPORTANT C'EST D'AMIER

In Zulawski-ville you can have you cake, eat it too, store it in the fridge, throw it away in a fit of pride and self-will, fish it out later and freeze it, all at once, but it's still not going to satisfy your cake craving. And that is why his image is always stronger than the reality it services, like neo-realism reversed, and reversed back and forth atop, until it becomes raw blood, guts and modernism. As consumers of the image we're forced to reckon with the inescapable idea that baser arts such as smut make the higher arts possible and even 'high' by definition. Was not even Shakespeare once considered a 'low' art? It's only the dumbing down of already dumbed-down dumbness and the changes in linguistic structure that has made Shakespeare a "higher" art, just as flowers can't blossom without the girtty, ugly, muddy soil and the leering gaffers who tape it down. It is what it is because of what it isn't (the basic tenet of structuralism!) Thus artists are always courting the bourgeoisie for grants in order to make art that criticizes artists for taking grants from the bourgeoisie. No wonder Kinski has to kick so much ass just to get an orgy on for the night!

The importance of Kinski has still yet to be fully gauged, there is yet no meter with which to measure it. So when he hears that the RICHARD III will get the last part of the funding if they cast Nadine as Lady Anne, he suddenly remembers her from her last film, Nymphocula! (a Jess Franco film title if ever there was one!) which he remembers as "the one with two dykes in a castle with a dwarf. "She was fantastic," he cries, "amazing!" Kinski's own appearances in Eurosleaze titles are not only numerous to measure (he was in Nymphocula too, whether it exists or not) but intrinsic to the genre. He's the crucified, screaming (but angrily not in pain) scarecrow at the crossroads between genius, insanity, art, exploitation, raving anger, and complete detachment. Both creepy and sexy, he's never a full hero or villain: half debonair intellectual aesthete, half wild orangutan, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde swirled together like soft serve. Somehow when he does these low-rent high art man on a wire flicks his insanity keeps him grounded and he emerges unscathed from the carnage.

The sane, however, to judge by Zulawski's moping protagonists at any rate, remain permanently traumatized. They wanted to do Shakespeare and wound up in Eurosleaze; they're despondent about their failure but Kinski knows better: he brings the Shakespeare to the porn and the porn to the Shakespeare. (cont)

The Ancient She-Shaman and her Shrooming Exhumer: SZAMANKA

In that sense, no one does it quite as shamanistically correct as old Andrzej Zulawski --Jodorowsky is too vulgar, Emir Kusturica too whimsical, Lynch too straight, and Gilliam too bent. None are the types to take "fucking flybanes" at their science lab and pitch a doctoral thesis to their advisor and future father-in law while rolling around on the floor in the hospital chapel. In other words, to offer fusion of the dramatic, forward-thinking, mystical, druggy, and socio-political all without whimsy, vulgarity, raunchy, weird-for-weird's sake-ism, or any semblance of humor... or drama... Because Poles, like their Russian neighbors, just don't give a fuck. They sidestep altogether the things that trip up America--for all its talk of freedom--in unhackable tendrils of churchy censorship and narrative, in morasses of need to explain things to the rubes in the cheap seats. These students don't need to worry about narcs or rubes, due to the joys of the socialist education system. If they find some shrooms in the ancient pocket of the exhumed shaman, they're going to eat them. And wait for the shaman floating in the tub to make the first move. And they're going to hide that they did them from even us, so you have to know what the signs are, cuz they don't want to share. And the signs are indistinguishable from 'everyday' Warsaw life in the 1990s. (more)

The Luxury of Desperate Gamblers: L'AMOUR BRAQUE

Like Godard whom he clearly (and rightly) emulates, Zulawski throws you a new film language and expects you to hang on while he pulls you around by motorboat, and like Godard your enjoyment must depend on your ability to associate certain quotes, movements, and gestures with other films. When you see the bank robbers in their Disney masks knocking off a bank in the opening sequence you might think of Kathryn Bigelow's Point Break (1991); when they're horsing through an impromptu number on their getaway route, you might think of the Marxes on a cocaine bender or Emir Kusturica's frothy gypsies; the way the bourgeoisie endure endless abuse without ever losing their nonchalance evokes Bunuel -- but these names just locate the onscreen insanity in some kind of loose contextual framework. It doesn't help. This stuff is so fucked-up in its mad play on words-on-action genre and bourgeoisie art film expectation subversions that it can be hard to know where to set your bearings, but isn't that just Kubrick? It's a madness that can be hard to 'sink into' unless you are first "experienced" or have spent time in a lunatic theater company, or seen a lot of Bergman movies about lunatic theater companies, or are on meds, a lot of meds.

One of my biggest regrets as an actor/filmmaker was-- in Queen of Disks (2007)--when a Viking woman stuck a knife to my throat as I was drinking coffee and I missed a chance to do a spit-take; my innate decency and worry about spilling coffee on my ratty jeans stopped me from doing one and/or dropping the coffee cup, just letting go. You know how impossible those things can be to do intentionally? Like when someone pays you to pee in your pants, and you just can't do it, no matter how hard you try, even though the money is good? The actors in this film don't have that problem --they crowd surf into total candy-coated confusion, they roll around on tables laden with food and the waiters don't bat an eyelash. They spazz out and sing at the top of their lungs while being chased by cops in riot gear, and then the riot cops forget where they parked. And it would all just be posturing if Zulawski didn't capture a realistic sense of Parisian hustle and bustle like he's a freakin' Oscar-hungry auteur riche. (cont)

See also the excellent entry on Andrzej on Breakfast in the Ruins: 
And here to MONDO VISION

The Mephisto from Missouri: THE RAVEN, COMEDY OF TERRORS, TOMB OF LIGEIA, HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL... etc. (Blu-ray review)

Eyes and voice a purr of delight at his own ghoulishness, Vincent Price made the grim stare into the Poe-Lovecraftian void as cozy as a fireside flanked with sleeping wolfhounds, and last week the Shout Blu-ray set Vincent Price Collection II dropped... like the gallows' floor, like the guillotine blade, like the axe on the neck of the turkey. Hear his legion of eternal fans gobble it up!

Forgive my gauche similes, for part of what makes Price such a treasure is his contagious sense of macabre humor, the obvious fun he has in playing evil rather merely just trying to appall. His luxuriant voice finds worthy dialogue in the classy but sensationalist Poe-Matheson-Towne scripts for Roger Corman, for whom Price would become like what De Niro would become to Scorsese, or Monica Vitti to Antonioni, i.e. the alchemical miracle when an actor and director merge into one mind to form some magic third element, a form of lightning that could zap a film into life around a star like the earth around its molten core, building up a wondrous mood with little but candles, camera, and cobwebs.

This second Shout Factory volume of Price Blu-rays only has two examples of this lightning planet-building: The Raven and Tomb of Ligeia, add in Jacques Tourneur-directed Comedy of Terrors, and William Castle's House on Haunted Hill  and the set is still an instant essential. Extras include Corman commentaries, interviews with screenwriter Richard Matheson, and--as with the first set--those lovely lyrical Price on a staircase introductions made by Iowa Public Television for a series of weekly Gothics from the 70s.

Shout's remastering of the AIP films for Blu-ray lengthens and deepens the image, saturating the palette with deep dark reds and greens, glowing amber and inky opaque blacks; firelight reflections glisten on maroon velvet drapery. Every gossamer strand of the cobwebbed covered gates, every brush stroke of Bud Shonberg's twisted portraits, every shade of the psychedelic paint swirl credits, is now aliight with new fire. Maybe it all adds up to little else but classic horror fan crack, but no matter how threadbare the situation, Price's aesthete air of mephistophelean delight never wavers. Price fans I bid thee: Pounce! Thy prey has alighted. 

THE RAVEN

1963 - dir. Roger Corman
 **** (Transfer: A+)

A personal October perennial, this loose comedic 'adaptation' of Poe's poem has reluctant sorcerer Vincent Price longing for his Lenore on a dark and stormy night, reading forgotten lore until Peter Lorre (bloated but hilarious) as the raven interrupts his moody brooding with a request for aid. A brother sorcerer of lesser skill, Lorre tells Price he was turned into a raven by Dr. Scarabus (Boris Karloff)--whose castle is right down the coast (Big Sur!). Scarabus killed Price's master sorcerer father in a duel years earlier; what he doesn't know is that the lost Lenore (Hazel Court) is alive and shcaked up with Scarabus as well. Soon Price and Lorre are dressed and headed off to Scarabus in Price's carriage, along with a young Jack Nicholson as Lorre's son Rexford and Olive Sturgess as Price's cute daughter. Hilarity and sorcery ensues!

The Blu-ray remastering is jaw dropping --as different from the old MGM DVD as beautiful soothing night is from shitty gray-ass day. Corman's vast and impressive sets now shine and breath in their vastness (all the castle walls and furnishings from past Poe films are here; Corman just built more as he went, so by the time of The Raven the castle is a vast sprawling Gothic maze). On the old MGM Midnight DVD, the distance between walls made the dark look always looked kind of brownish and washed out, but now every flicker of the big fire pit glows in a new hauntingly lovely greenish gold reflective light and the blacks are oceans deep. The Les Baxter score at times errs on the side of Disney cartoonish (I'd love to be able to re-score these films, the way Baxter re-scored AIPs Bava imports, only taking him out instead of putting him in) but this is still pure uncut Halloween delight, so you might as well bring the kids, by which I mean depressed lovelorn college sophomores reeling from too much bad acid, as I was, catching this at the Student Union while a sophomore, and needing desperately at the time to return to the Gothic chambers and forgotten lore of childhood, wherein every fairy tale was grim but comforting, especially when goosed up by Price's melodious purr.

In the land of the damned Price is as the soothing balm of Ativan.

THE TOMB OF LIGEIA

1964 - Dir Roger Corman

*** 1/2 (Transfer - B)

Definitely one of the better and more unnerving in the cycle, this capstone to the Poe-Price-Corman series, and that's thanks largely to a ripping script by Robert Chinatown Towne, who captures Poe's horrified eloquence via elaborate double-blind metaphors, which Price then rolls through like a velvet serpent, waxing--for example--about how he wishes his rotting mind could be wrest open as easily as the cabbage thrown at Ligeia's trickster spirit animal cat. "What else is madness but belief that inwards does not exist?" Now don't get me wrong, I love Richard Matheson, who wrote many of the earlier Poes for Corman--but over repeat viewings his dialogue tended towards repetitive arguments between a young man refusing to leave the castle until he gets the truth and Price withholding it as long as possible, as if waiting for the censor to go to bed before the torture devices and elaborate Poe musing might be brought forth. Towne, on the other hand lets the rich existential musing flow freely, with lots of off-camera dialogue flowing over dream-like images (Rowena climbing the abbey stairs while Price talks of madness to his barrister; tales of his father told to Rowena over long shots of their honeymoon wanderings), trusting the audience to get the metaphors even as they triple and quadruple back on themselves to obscure their tracks. The result is that Price's natural eloquence is finally unchained, which is good, because he's also sans mustache, as he was in the first in the series (Usher) which I find as unnerving as the dreary English countryside daytime exteriors. I do like his steampunk wraparound shades but Poe should never see natural light--especially not England's wretched gray skies. I prefer Corman's soundstage-bound Poes, which eschew reality in any form. Proving my point, this is one of the worst color-graded HD transfers - with many scenes still uncorrected / bleached out and very light grey blacks, unusual for the deep deep dark the better transfers offer (like the gorgeous liquid blacks of Pit and the Pendulum in the first set). Maybe it's the cinematographer going for a kind of wan, washed look ala Huston's Moby Dick but I think the color restorers on the disc just ran out of energy when they saw those skies. Who wouldn't?

Meanwhile Price decides to go a different route too, and plays his mournful Heathcliff de Winter-Rochester without any of his usual velvet flourishes. But as a result we can't fathom why the piercingly self-confident English Lady Rowena (Elizabeth Shepherd) would want to marry such a sullen, naked-lipped poseur. Rowena is such an awesome fully-awake British heroine that it's hard not to be mad at Price for treating her so evasively.

All that said, Price still runs the Poe gamut and has a great time despite his possessed air. Dig his excitement during the hypnosis scene, convincing Rowena she almost caught a butterfly! The old Price hamminess really comes through then. Shepherd also does a great audio commentary, though it's with scholar Constantin Nazir, who irks me in daring to suggest Poe wasn't as big an opium addict as legend says. (Nazir, I think, hasn't really either soaked up Poe's druggiest work OR done opiates, let alone read Poe ON opiates, which is to truly understand just how laudanum-soaked all Poe's most memorable work is, and I mean that as the highest of compliments). Meanwhile, Nazir interrupts Shepherd's inimitable on-the-moment observations by lumbering through some Price letter gushing over her. Dude, who cares? We can read it later. Oh if only she was with erudite raconteur David Del Valle instead! Instead the great DDV gets the FLY and LAST MAN ON EARTH films, and folks like Nazir and Stephen Haberman take the Poe films (perhaps to not overlap with the DDV interview with Price?).

Either way, Shepherd knows her shit- able to rattle off a vast list of Corman proteges, and to describe in detail her method, in that great resonant deep purr of lordly confidence only British women seem to have.

The whole film itself, in fact, even more than the story, makes a a grand metaphor for drug addiction and alcoholism. I relate to the whole 'having a will beyond death' with Lady Whiskey as my Ligeia, feeling her call every time I walk past a liquor store window display, or the beer aisle at the grocery store. No mention is made of drugs in Ligeia, but the resemblance to Price's big breakthrough role, as a drug addicted lord in Dragonwyck, is as clear as the story's resemblance to Jane Eyre. The whole last act is like being a wife shut out of her husband's addiction, his weird nocturnal dalliances. When she finally breaks into his secret chamber and learns the vile truth, we see the cool pad we've been missing, and then all that's left is ye olde collection of Corman burning and collapsing wall shots - that old familiar roof caving in and her agog horror.

Meanwhile, Towne and Corman leave it deliberately open-ended as to whether there really is a spirit of a willful real life woman floating around, or if he's just a paranoid necrophiliac trapped in his late wife's post-hypnotic suggestion--and then they take it to the logical conclusion, which so few other writers do--of getting us to the point where we understand finally that there is no difference, that reality is subjective, that Satanic panic, dreams, hypnosis, and reality are all just slight neurochemical adjustments away.

If the tree falls in the woods, but we hear it like a tolling bell, it's probably our alarm clock. A fitting final thought perhaps for this series that plays like one bizarre extended dream.

COMEDY OF TERRORS

1963 - Dir Jacques Tourneur 

*** (Transfer: A)

People aren't dying fast enough for poor Price to pay both his wine bill and keep his Victorian era funeral parlor 'afloat' and he's nothing if not a man of enterprise, i.e. a true American, so he does what needs to be done: thin the herd of rich idiots clogging the streets, boosting his rep for prompt arrival time at their chamber door.

This film used to give me a massive headache with all the nasty bickering between Price and his buxom wife, her off-key caterwauling, assistant Lorre's baggy eyes and bloated body, father-in-law Karloff's funeral-ashen pallor. Here was the the unnerving sight of three of my favorite stars decaying into elderly humans (Karloff unable to even stand up), and Price in his most unlikable role outside of the Witchfinder General (it would have been great if he was nice to at least one person). Luckily Basil Rathbone--baggy-eyed but unbowed, firing on all five of his ancient steam-punk Holmes-y pistons--is so over the top in the crazy semi-dead vengeance climax that even Les Baxter's terminally bouncy score has to catch up, and Price seems at last impressed.

Luckily this new Blu-ray compensates for the shrill farce aspects by making every image gorgeous--the deep maroons throb and the blacks now creep darker than any Stygian shore.  Price's evil funeral director now seems to have more of a right to be luxuriating in his own evil. I've changed too, and now I've been married and divorced and I've had a girlfriend who fancied herself a good light opera singer, and many a pained look did I get from her audiences, as if it was my responsibility to stop her, yet I dared not. When she glanced my way in a loving look I made every effort to smile in support, feeling my ire and shame swell up in a terrible Poe-like maelstrom. So now Price's pained revulsion towards his ever-wailing wife hit deeper than they did. And sure, Lorre's a mess but his drunken leering is just the surface of a real affection for the buxom Jameson. And now I notice that despite his drunken bloat, Lorre is still as nimble as if he was Peter Kurtin-ing around Weimar Berlin. And since Price is killing people to support the lot of them, after all, they could be a little grateful! They do get drunk together, but that only worsens Price's mood. It might have been fun to act but--unless your favorite childhood memories include long nights of parental bickering--isn't that fun to watch.

As they proved in The Raven, Price and Lorre make a great team, somewhere between Burke and Hare and Abbot and Costello and better than both put together. All that stops it from greatness in my regard now that it looks so spiffy is director Tourneur's rigid slapstick regimen (he didn't go in for improvising, which Corman encouraged for The Raven and which led to its light wry air) and Les Baxter's overly jaunty score, which hovers over everything like a helicopter parent at the circus, worried you're laughing enough at the clowns. Look at the clowns, Caitlin! Oooh, that one fell down! Corman's last minute decision not to direct probably cost us a true horror-comedy classic. I'm pretty sure he'd have pinpointed both the bad vibes of the prolonged verbal abuse and the cloyingness of the score, whereas Tourneur was probably more concerned with delivering what was in the script rather than delivering a well-rounded good time at ye olde drive-in.

But hey, it's still cool - with sparkling Matheson dialogue that's a sublime blend of Shakespeare and beat poet, with the undead Rathbone thinking he's Macbeth brought back to life to sleep no more, and all sorts of wry lines from Hamlet and Midsummer Night's Dream deftly shuffling themselves in amidst macabre humor dark enough to get a smile from even the sourest of marital demons.

HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL

1959 - Dir William Castle

***1/2 (Transfer: A)

A perennial public domain Halloween favorite, Shout's HD remastering has infused William Castle's first big ballyhoo masterpiece with a dark rich sense of inner space that alas, don't necessarily do the spare empty sets any favors, but do add an overall feeling of late-50s murk. Deep shadows now go way back into the depths, evoking an eerie sense of cavernous modernism, like a carnival spook show moved into a vast, empty, unlit museum. Instead of looking like heavy oak paneling on the walls, the walls now look like wallpaper painted to look like wood by rushed studio craftsmen. Was this noticeable to audiences back in the day? Does HD show us too much?

We classic horror fans who were too young to have seen it in the theater (with 'Emergo!') first fell in love with Haunted Hill on TV, when it appeared in a haze of local UHF TV antenna static on some lost Saturday afternoon or late night/early morning. It's built for such ghostly arial travel, strong and sparse enough to blast its way through blurry dupes and fuzzy reception like a shot from a cathode ray gun out of a tiny party favor coffin, and to maintain its ghoulish gleeful spookiness even in a theater full of kids throwing popcorn at the screen and the skeleton on the string being squeakily wheeled over their heads. Without such interference, the film can seem cautious and empty, but that passes, it's just too sturdy to let any obstacle get it down. The Robb White script is full of bitchy marital vitriol which of course the kiddies love as much as the heads in the suitcase, and blind caretaker being reeled along like a 'scare' pop-up on a five-cent carnival ride.  Even if Castle's full empty ersatz fly-by-the-seat reckless effrontery is all the more apparent in the merciless clarity of HD, it's still the perfect Halloween party all-ages show, and Price is on full throttle, riffing off a sly Carol Ohmart and a doomsaying Elisha Cook Jr. while rolling his eyes at progressively hysterical Carolyn Craig.

LAST MAN ON EARTH

1963 - Dir Ubaldo B. Ragona

**1/2

Price's neo-realist Italian film, this long-held in public domain adaptation of Matheson's I am Legend now has its creamy/gritty black-and-white widescreen photography restored, and with its post-apocalyptic/futurist Rome mise-en-scene it would make a great double feature with Antonioni's L'Ecilisse which came out the previous year, which uses some of the same juxtaposition of ancient ruins, post-war ruins, modern architecture and post-modern futurism. The script is intelligent and faithful to Richard Matheson's novel, even though it's mostly just read as a voiceover--a trick that gets real old real fast. If the film has any real lasting power it's mainly because the last 3/4 get pretty fun and intense (with finally some dialogue + an almost Wellesian chase through and around a vast apartment complex and ruined church). There's also the (admitted by Romero) clear debt owed this film by the first Night of the Living Dead: masses of pale dead hands come grabbing through the boarded windows; shambling figures are illuminated in the glare of high-contrast headlights; one guy even looks like the mangy Italian cousin of the very first zombie we see in Night--the one who palms Barbara's car. The lead zombie talks, though (in an echo-drenched slur), and is played Italian star Giacomo Rossi Stuart (Kill Baby, Kill!; War Between Planets). 

Alas, even with the spiffy upgrade, I find the bulk of this film dispiriting. Like the next film in the set, it's just isn't the same Price when he's not moving his lips to his own voice. Price seems to feel it, too. The weight of the world seems on not just his character but himself as well. Luckily, the classic horror archivist and raconteur David Del Valle provides a great commentary track.

DR. PHIBES RISES AGAIN

1972 - Dir Robert Quarry

**1/2

One thing I never understood about the Dr. Phibes films is why they waste Price's beautiful voice with pre-recorded poesy-ridden monologues that seem like something Criswell would read for an Ed Wood movie.  For the sequel it's even more pronounced. At first director Fuest's mix of campy TV show style over-the-top poetry, a mix of bible, babble and decadence, is fun in the way where you can imagine Austin Powers watching this and thinking "Groovy, man! Horror is my bag". But after half an hour or so, one longs for structure, some kind of situational cohesion, or--as in the case of the 60s English cult TV show The Avengers--a deadpan center, i.e. the laid back cool of Diana Rigg and Patrick Macnee. And since Price has to do most of his acting with his eyes it's lucky they have a great red ring around them that glows in the pink light. It's a nice look, especially in the new Blu-ray upgrade, where the light perfectly accentuates his heavily powdered cheeks. Yet there's just something strange about Price essentially pantomiming a recording of himself reading floridly poetic monologues that makes it all seem almost too ridiculous, too campy even for the late-60s. It's like he's listening to one of his old LPs he made during the classic monster heyday--the ones wherein he reads Poe and spells from Macbeth and Midsummer Night's Dream and old witch yarns--and vamping around to it while he folds laundry. Luckily he has Vali Kemp as the silent but beautiful Vulvania, his deadpan cool sexy automaton assistant. They make a cool pair. And Kemp is perfectly still and on-point. Running through a list fey little props and rituals with nimble grace, Kemp can match his stare with a delicious conspiratorial knowingness. 

Speaking of eyes, what about the bugged-out (like his head's about to explode), intense, round ones of Robert Quarry (i.e. Count Yorga)? He plays the odious and eternally young Darius Beiderbecke (great name). Price's first supernatural opponent Darius needs the same eternal amulet, or whatever, hidden at a lost Egyptian tomb, that Price is trying to find to reanimate his dead wife. Quarry's bug-eyed peepers have a sweaty intensity that cuts through the frivolity and suggest genuine depths and make a fine contrast with Price's wide, sad, Irish wolfhound kind of eyes. They'll stop at nothing to get to the secret tomb first. For Darius that means subjecting his men to verbal lashings and Phibes' to murderous traps (he almost drowns between the paws of the sphinx) For Phibes, it means wafting around with Vulvania in various campu disguises, and murderous trap-setting galore!

Reality and any sense of geographical space are tossed to the side. Phibes and Vulvania can seemingly show up at the ruins of the Egyptian tomb-standing by a giant half-destroyed foot- only to celebrate their arrival by stepping up some marble stairs to his Crowley-meets-music hall art deco organ to play a few tunes. Did he bring his lair with him across the channel? The next scene is some over-the-top comedy at Scotland Yard as they prepare to go to Egypt to track down the killer. And so it goes. Fuest makes sure we come to loathe the oppressive and egotistical Beiderbecke, trying to reign in his rebellious and hip fellow expedition members to his iron will, and that we marvel at Phibes' and Vulvania's ability to somehow set up pointlessly elaborate traps way out in the middle of the desert, all by themselves, unseen, in the dead of night, and then whoosh- celebrate with champagne and music back in the groovy lair. Repeating as needed.

Perhaps the most stunningly transferred film on this Blu-ray set, with an eerie array of purple and pink hies, all a-glowing in a 3D depth of space. The problem is that this that this lovely clarity reveals clapboard TV-show-style sets that were made with the not-unreasonable assumption most people would be seeing this cropped on TV or at a drive-in through a dense English fog. I'm sure we were never meant to see so so clearly we can almost touch the grains flaking up on Price's whiteface make-up and powdery Beatle wig. Now he seems like some sad gay diva drifting like a Tennessee Williams diva through half-torn down Fellini movie sets in the middle of the night while the crew is home asleep. Don't think I'm quibbling. I don't mind the near total absence of exteriors or connecting or establishing shots. I dislike British exterior shots in general--they're often weighed down by murky grey skies and eerie stillness. But here the lack thereof makes for confusion, to a West Village off-off Broadway pantomime play degree. Even when the whole shebang allegedly moves onto a yacht or then onto the deserts of Egypt, there's never any doubt they're on sets, which I love, usually. I do especially love the giant stone feet entrance to the Tomb (shout out to Ozymandias!), but with the Blu-ray clarity you can practically see the stress creases on the sky backdrop, and the brush strokes on every gold pillar.

That said, composition and blocking are sublime, like Kubrick on poppers at a gay ball. It would be great with the sound off at a party or projected behind my old acid rock band if we played Abba covers and had a bubble machine. As a narrative, though, it's infuriating. Phibes and his Vulnavia's self-congratulatory champagne toasting and dancing seems the height of self-aware camp, which is the only type I dislike. Their relentless perfection and disregard for the laws of reality (i.e. that you can bring your entire secret lair with you while you visit in Egyptian tomb. And shame on the credits for saying it co-stars Peter Cushing as he has but the teensiest cameo. On the other hand, the mechanical jazz band is cool, as is Phibes' Phantom of the Cinecatta disco organ. You can see why Tim Burton and Johnny Depp have their eye on this character for a remake. 

(PS - rewatching this now on Svengoolie, and like it a lot better. The framing seems more cropped, but in a good way so it makes sense, and the relative lack of close detail gives everything an aura of magic. Yeah, baby! I think I was a bit harsh in the above review, but hey, - 5/23/22)

RETURN OF THE FLY

1959 - Dir Edward Bernds 

**2/3

Released in 1959 to capitalizing on its predecessor’s runaway success, this should really be called Son of the Fly. Price reprises his supporting role from the original; he finally gets to help restore a human headed fly back to normal, undoing the damage wrought by the teleportation chamber, rather than just looking askance with blanched horror and then tossing a rock, but otherwise he has little to sink his teeth into and the whole middle stretch--involving grown-up Phillipe (just a boy in the first film) with a giant bulbous fly head, tracking and killing a pair of industrial spies who've made off with his patents--goes on without him. As 'monster on a vengeance-based killing spree' films go, it's okay (his habit of bumping his giant head on chandeliers is a nice touch) but aside from abundant gay subtext and nice lighting, it's pretty familiar stuff. There's the same confluence of attractive and concerned upstairs maid, the same basement whirligigs, the same lofty scientific rationale, the same untrustworthy assistants, that kept Karloff in lab smocks and gangster burial clothes all through the lean 40s. It's all been done better, and worse. 

Not to spoil the end (spoilers!), but when Price restores Phillipe (Brett Halsey) to his former peevish self, we're left with the odd feeling that he's going to get off scott free for his two murders since that was the fly head and not his that orchestrated the deaths (why the fly head didn't spend its time pursuing sugary snacks instead of vengeance makes no sense of course, either - shhhzzzz). And what about the detective left with guinea pig hands? Also, I don't know why you would kill an enemy by teleporting him and then re-teleporting him back to the world. Leave him in the ether - along with that poor cat from the first film! What a way to dispose of bodies! Zzzzitt! No mess. Non habes corpus, non crimen. 

---

FINAL (TOTAL) GRADE: A - It would have been nice to see The Tingler and/or Tales of Terror instead of some of these last three lesser works, but it hardly matters when the films look this good and the extras are abundant. (a Del Valle commentary = gold). Even at the set's high cost, it's worth getting just for The Raven!! Sorry to be such a fan! Price rulez!

Monster Capsules: BAD DREAMS, THE ROOST, DAMNATION ALLEY, AFTER MIDNIGHT, TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE

 BAD DREAMS

(1988) Dir. Andrew Fleming
***

This is a film that took a long hard look at the Nightmare on Elm Street 3: The Dream Warriors box office receipts in 1987 and said, "I have great idea for a movie!" So in they cast the same girl from Nightmare 3: Dream Warriors, Jennifer Rubin, to play basically the same role in basically the same mental hospital." Instead of a Freddie (that would be pushing their luck) there's Harris, a hippie cult leader who burned himself up, intentionally (rather than let someone else do it --see, it's not the same film at all!) played by Richard Lynch (who also burned himself up intentionally in real life!). In the 70s-set prologue he coaxes his hippie flock (called "Unity Field") to burn themselves alive together, in order to "unify" their souls. Rubin is the only survivor, she chickens out, and is pulled from the roaring flames, full head of hair intact, and in a coma. She awakens 13 years later, and finds herself promptly stuck in a mental ward and, worse, it's the 80s. Jeffrey (Re-Animator) Combs is the strange, handsome shrink who brings her to group therapy in order to introduce a rapidly bumped-off set of emotionally troubled young patients. At night, the stressed Rubin sees the ghost Harris wafting around the hospital, beckoning to her with a ghostly 'Join us!' wave of his burned hand, and settling for one of her group when she declines. As in Dream Warriors, it's hard to sound sane while trying to convince the authorities that a rash of suicides amongst your fellow mental hospital inmates is the result of a long-dead burn victim taking revenge. But Jennifer Rubin just keep trying.

The creepiest aspect here--far creepier than Englund's Freddie, actually, because he's trying not to be--is surely Richard Lynch as the cult leader. This Lee Strasberg-trained and scary-funny as all hell actor makes a great villain, as anyone who's seen DEATHSPORT well knows, though he's not a convincing cult leader. Look at that picture at left, would you want to follow him? A cult leader needs to be seductive as well as just creepy. Could you imagine Robert Englund running a cult? It's hard not to imagine what a cobra-hypnotic presence like Lance Henriksen or Michael Ironside might have brought to the role. No offense to Lynch meant. His voice alone could run a cult-- it's serpentine, deep and magnetic, but even before his character burns up, it looks like he insisted on having a textured flame retardant gel around his face at all times (which seems wise considering the amount of flame he's exposed to in the film --and his real life burns - I'm not surprised). Maybe I'm jealous because I've always felt I'd make a great cult leader, and my dad was always urging it on me, saying that's where the real money is. In other words, I want my own Unified Field! I almost started one once or twice but then realized the old Groucho Marx adage, paraphrased for cult leading (I'd never want to lead anyone gullible enough to follow me).

The rest of the cast is very good in that 80s teen horror sort of way, it's actually kind of a surprise how good the writing and acting is underneath the low budget. Sharp-eyed punk rock fans may wonder whey they're strangely drawn to Susan Barnes (it's cuz she was in both Ladies and Gentlemen the Fabulous Stains, and Repo Man!) and the terrifying Dean Cameron will linger in your mind thanks to his skill at amok basement leaping and bulb punching. As Pauline Kael might say, he all but smashes a hole in the picture. Rubin is very good at wearing her emotions on her sleeve and the Shout Blu-ray reveals every gossamer strand of the glisten in her eyes So yeah, this movie grows on you, separating itself from Freddie Krueger comparisons as it matures. A lot of that probably has to do too with its incomparable pedigree: Gale Ann Terminator Hurd produced, and Andrew The Craft Fleming directed. In their hands, anything can take wing beyond its dubious origins (after all, James Cameron got his start working on Star Wars and Alien ripoffs for Corman - it's the highest flattery of form!).


POST SCRIPT (I wrote this having no idea of the weird link of Lynch's burns coming from lighting himself on fire while on an LSD trip in Central Park in 1967 - now that's a brave actor - not setting himself on fire, but playing a psychedelic-era cult leader who sets himself and his congregation on fire in order to bring them all close together - that's the kind of art imitating life through the artist that lived it kind of meta shit that gets me all a-flutter - so, in its way - this film is a nice harbinger of Freddy's New Nightmare! Art imitating the Imitation of its previous incarnation imitating life!).

THE ROOST

(2005) Dir. Ti West
***

Ti West's first film--hampered only by his inability apparently to motivate actors into a state of wakefulness--The Roost is a surprisingly engaging work of horror retro minimalism. Even the carload of mumblecore hipsters are bearable thanks to their low-key delivery, voices low so as not to disrupt our fading attention span. Taking a midnight shortcut along a mysterious road on their way to a wedding, a bat flies into the windshield causing a crash! Cue a kind of Jim Jarmusch version of Planet Terror on a Plan Nine budget as the bunch knock on doors to get help, and the bats inhabit a nearby barn, and their bite turns humans into zombie monsters.

The acting is pretty bland (with the exception of newcomer Vanessa Horneff) but it's hard not to be awed by West's unshakable grasp of what makes horror work. In this case it means trusting his audience and his grasp of the genre in order to use minimalism to generate unease, rather than the usual overwrought whiplash editing and bombast. West's instincts for how long to play a shot or moment are so spot-on he can confidently throw most of the usual horror symbols and dross away. Close-ups of doors slowly opening, for example, are presented completely out of context and for some reason it's scary because we don't even know who's opening the door or who's standing on the other side, if anyone. Genius. He also makes great use of tick-tock momentum, 16mm grain, no daytime scenes at all, a remote location (the Marnie barn) and, most effectively, only diegetic (headlights, porch, dashboard) light which makes the all-consuming darkness of a lonely rural shortcut palpable. The score's an effectively minimalist avant garde mix of drones and cello.

Maybe all this doesn't sound like much on 'paper' but it's all the spookier for being so apparently haphazard. Too bad there's dull stretches of horror host filler with West favorite Tom MANHUNTER Noonan underplaying to the point of sad distraction. If nothing else, it contextualizes the inner film proper, adding a whole new chill by association. Or if you like- it's filler so West could enter THE ROOST in festivals as a full-length feature.

TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE

(1990) Dir. John Harrison
**

Three stories, with past and future stars: James "Ajax from The Warriors" Remar is a struggling artist who is almost killed--but then spared at the last minute--by an inner city gargoyle; he falls for Rae Dawn Chong on the same night and has never seen Kwaidan (1964) so never makes the connection and/or avoids the same mistake. Another tale has a young Christian Slater, young Julianne Moore, and young Steve Buscemi encountering a shambling mummy (from an Arthur Conan Doyle story) - future stars or no, it's really dull. In another, David "New York Dolls" Johansen is an assassin hired by wheelchair bound William Hickey to kill a cat. It's a segment conceived by Stephen King (Breathing Lessons) and scripted by George Romero (Season of the Witch) but you'd never know. Debbie Harry as a modern cannibal housewife trying to cook for a child occupies the connecting tissue (The Hansel bides for time by telling the tales, ala 1001 Arabian Nights).

I've never been a fan of horror anthologies (except, of course, Bava's Black Sabbath) as too many get hung up on the tired old EC comics-style supernatural comeuppance formula (exceptions might appear, like Toby Dammit) but the film as a whole drags. I have the same problems with Darkside. Even Debbie Harry is surprisingly flavorless as the cannibal gourmet. Haha! "Flavorless,"get it? The script's loaded with that kind of thing.

AFTER MIDNIGHT

(1995) Dir. The Wheat Brothers
***

At last, a trilogy free of 'supernatural comeuppance.' Underrated fringe weirdo Ramy Zada goes for distance as the psychology teacher who pulls a gun out during class and points it at a snickering jock to teach the class all about fear. Said jock is pretty pissed - in both the classic "his pants" sense and figuratively - to the point he later breaks into Zada's basement with an axe planning his own gruesome fear exercise. He doesn't know Zada's upstairs conducting a ghost story round robin with some of his cutest students because hey, it's a dark and stormy night. And hey, one of the students is a psychic who senses something wicked's coming up from the basement... First, lets hear these tales!

I dug the middle segment best, with its looney tunes midnight warehouse dog attack. Most critics prefer the final story, wherein a creepy celebrity stalker switches gears and comes after said celeb's answering service operator, played by the always worthwhile Marg Helgenberger. The first bit is a short and sweet one sure to grab ya with a chuckle and a gasp -if you're not expecting a chuckle and a gasp that is, so forget I said anything. Just make sure you stick around for the bizarre climax, wherein a burnt skeleton chases the psychic girl through all the other sets in a vague nod to the climax of The Terminator and    With its simple minimalist set design and slim budget, After Midnight proves that less can be more when it comes to horror: by contrast Tales from the Darkside has the money but can't venture out of its predictable DC Comics House of Mystery twist-endings uber alles vibe - the sort that, like many of the Amicus anthologies of the 60s-70s, is barely concerned with atmosphere or fun, just set up for the somewhat Diaboloque-ish punchline.  After Midnight isn't that interested in the final destination, it would rather enjoy the ride. It quits all sense of consensual reality, throws its meager budget at the screen as a distraction and lunges straight for the nightmare logic jugular.

DAMNATION ALLEY

1977 - Directed by Jack Smight - ** 

(for male viewers who were kids in the 70s - ***)

Not an easy film to love but, for some of us, loving Damnation Alley is a challenge that beckons like Everest. We really want, even need, to love it, even if the actual film goes out of its way to suck. Still, if you were a boy in the 70s and read Famous Monsters of Filmland, chances are you longed to take that climb, to escape your stupid life by jumping into that cool armored cruiser (above) and setting out across a nuclear landscape, pausing only to jump over giant scorpions on your motorbike, or outrun giant scorpions, man-eating cockroaches, psychotic rednecks, and other things one needn't feel the slightest bit guilty about decimating with rooftop rocket launchers or at the very least, running over or gunning down. Every boy of a certain age dreamt of that kind of bedtime-less freedom. A time when drinking or driving age limits, cops and homework would all evaporate like a bad dream in the fall-out (and if there is a girl, she's an easygoing cool Hawksian prostitute/dancer rather than a bossy Fordian pioneer mother/wife). And who better to teach you to drive and fire roof-mounted rocket launchers as soon as you're old enough to see over the steering column, and to have a beer and a smoke while you're at it, than Jan Michael Vincent and George Peppard?

Directed by Jack Smight, who gave us such other awful but irresistible films as Midway and Airport 1975, Damnation Alley is a film as wholesome in its fashion as reading a Playboy sandwiched inside a Boy's Life magazine at a Boy Scouts lodge meeting instead of paying attention and then sneaking out to light fireworks, choke down sips of stolen beers, and shoot your grandfather's 8 gauge shotgun at his empty beer cans back by the creek before your mom comes to pick you up. George Peppard rocks a terrible fake mustache and lame Southern accent as the dad who teaches you to drive; Jan Michael Vincent is the starry-eyed older brother who gets the girl but lets you ride his cool motorbike; the girl is a young Meryl Streep-style French beauty (Dominique Sanda) they pick up in--where else?--a giant gaseous ant-infested Vegas; Paul Winfield is the fifth wheel black guy, killed off early as was (and sadly still is) the custom.

The film begins in one of the best nuclear war recreations in film history: no drama, no hand-wringing, just by-the-book monitoring of screens at a remote missile silo deep in the American southwest: no women or bleeding hearts, no morality or ethics or drama--they just do everything they've been taught --perfectly-- and then ---oops yeahhh, so did the Russians. Game over all around. A few years go by and a chain reaction explosion at their remote facility makes sticking around inadvisable, as well as trimming the survivors down to a convenient handful. They get word of a small thriving town of survivors out in Albany (of all places), so they take off across country from deep in the desert of the west. There's supposed to be two of these big mad cool vans to traverse the nuclear terrain in, but the film's budget only allows for one, so we seldom see the both of them together. But Smight, we don't need two to start with. Why bother?! Make with tha monstiz!

It's small random stressing of details like that which lead to the true weird charm of Damnation Alley! This is a pre-Mad Max / post-apocalyptic wanderer movie made by a sweet very cool older brother who doesn't want either mollycoddle his young brother or traumatize him with too much brutality. Aside from a few traumatic deaths and a decent into some sadistic redneck threats and danger pre-retaliation, there's almost nothing here that wouldn't get this a 'G' rating - except that title! It had DAMN in it! As kids in the 70s, that title alone was daunting - made it seem like the kind of thing you needed your friend's cool older brother to take you to see, or you didn't see at all... ever.... and only dreamed of how boss it was.

Myriad technical difficulties aside, this has to overall be the mellowest post-nuclear war movie of the 70s, so it's got that at least going for it. Mostly the whole film is long shots of driving through psychedelic electric storms--which I personally love. There's also a strange flood (luckily these vehicles are built to float) and mostly empty deserts. Even the arrival of a kid isn't cause for alarm, since he's played by the perennially feral Jackie Earle Haley, who would never harsh a mellow van vibe. We kids generally hated kids in our movies, but Haley was cool because of Bad News Bears. He was the type who seemed a bit sketchy, from the wrong side of any tracks, unkempt, un-mothered, like he'd be a bully, but in reality he'd only pick on other bullies and protect the snot-nosed rest of us, even from guys twice his size. The 12 year-olds in us thrilled regularly to words like "we can now all take a shower once a week, whether we need to or not."

As for the Shout! Blu-ray, I almost never find anything disparaging to say about this label, who have been cleaning up and releasing to Blu-ray a vast host of previously disrespected sci-fi and horror titles from the 70s and 80s that would likely be forgotten or bungled otherwise. The Blu-ray of Damnation Alley however disappoints on the color front, despite groovy deep blacks. But instead of restoring all the weird colors of the post-apocalyptic open skies, they've just lightened the whole thing and deepened the shadows; the blue skies now have a sun-bleached video box cover look; when they do let the skies look post-apocalyptic, they pick one faded color rather than the multiple hues of the analog original version we can catch on Prime, VHS, Youtube, etc. In the earlier versions, we can see the overlay lines between the actors and the color tint, and the whole movie looked like we were watching it through sunglasses, but so what? Did the restorers not realize this was a post-apocalyptic storm sky and not meant to seem realistic? Thirty degrees of coolness are lost in a brushstroke, or the lack of one.

Aside from that, who can complain; and having it on Blu-ray is literally my 70s boyhood dream come true- seriously, I imagined being able to watch it over and over on a Famous Monsters Magazine - shaped and sized rectangle! And as Lacan might say after a dinner with Lao Tzu, only those fortunate enough to fulfill their childhood dreams have the honor of realizing just how empty such dreams are. Imagine the misfortune of those who die still clutching their Rosebud snow globes instead of the warm hand of a Hawksian Vegas showgirl playing nurse?

Top: Amazon Instant Video / Bottom: Shout Blu-ray

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)