13 FOR HALLOWEEN #8: Suspiria

Part way through the opening credits of Dario Argento’s ‘Suspiria’, a calm and reassuring voice intones “Suzy Banyon decided to perfect her ballet studies in the most famous school of dance in Europe. She chose the celebrated academy of Freiburg. One day, at nine in the morning, she left Kennedy airport, New York, and arrived in Germany at 10.40pm local time.” It’s the first and last time in the movie that any degree of calmness or reassurance occurs. And it’s at least an hour till anything else remotely resembling exposition finds its way into the dialogue.

It’s probably just as well we’ve been told that Suzy (Jessica Harper) has landed in Germany, since there are no real cues – apart from some oompah music in a bar whose patrons guzzle from steins; and this comes much later in the film – as to the locale. In fact, the concourse we see Suzy walking through in the opening shots barely resembles an airport. A set of automatic doors slide open (Argento’s camera lingers on the mechanism as if something nasty is about the happen) and Suzy is propelled outside into a raging storm.

There are several storms in ‘Suspiria’, each one crashing away as if the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse have just come galloping into town. These storms are a welcome aural relief from the sustained assault of Goblin’s score. The soundscape of ‘Suspiria’ makes Ministry at their loudest sound like the Penguin Café Orchestra. I can’t think of any other film whose soundtrack – not just the music, but the unearthly noises that reverberate along corridors, the disembodied voices that gibber and cackle, and the foley work that drowns out the dialogue and footsteps ring out like gunshots and water trickling down a plughole sounds like somebody’s death throes – is so explicitly keyed in to its aesthetic.

Everything about ‘Suspiria’ is purposefully and punishingly designed to disorientate, disturb and mindfuck the viewer without cessation. It’s pure cinema: immersive and visceral, it unfolds with the intensity, inescapability and illogicality of a fever dream. Plot synopsis? Oh come now, that would suggest that ‘Suspiria’ has a plot. It barely even recognises narrative. Indeed, its few concessions to narrative – a bit of exposition utterly detracted from by camerawork; a villain identified and defeated; a denouement (in the sense of everything goes, quite literally, to hell just before the film ends) – are almost a statement of anti-narrative in and of themselves.

Argento’s script, co-written with his then partner Daria Nicolodi, takes Thomas de Quincey’s essay ‘Suspiria de Profundis’ (a work that makes your average William Burroughs text look like a “just say no” commercial) as its starting point, and throws in some guff about witches at a ballet school that Nicolodi claimed had happened to her grandmother as a young woman, but which Argento later blew the whistle on as bullshit. Essentially, Suzy turns up at the academy the night a fellow student flees the place and is killed at a friend’s apart; Suzy experiences weird shit, including having some kind of spell put on her; Suzy’s one friend Sara (Stefania Casini) dies after speaking too freely about the aforementioned weird shit; Suzy uncovers witchery. But even this précis dignifies ‘Suspiria’ with too much coherence. Sara’s concerns about what’s going on behind closed doors don’t take the cinematically popular form of amateur sleuthing, clues being uncovered and building up a picture; on the contrary, her ramblings are senseless and paranoid. Nor does the weird shit Suzy experiences indicate what’s going on behind the scenes. Argento and Nicolodi’s script doesn’t engage with the idea of witchcraft beyond, “hey, witches are women and they do weird shit, right?”

In many a film, these elements would be incredibly problematic. ‘Suspiria’ claims them as part of its aesthetic. And what an aesthetic! ‘Suspiria’ is an aggressive barrage of sound, imagery and nightmarishly unnatural colours. The principle of which is red. It may have been Argento’s previous film that gloried in the title ‘Profondo Ross’, but ‘Suspiria’ is his true hellish symphony in red.

S

Easily the most beautiful film ever to be stuffed full of horrible and troubling images – an already eviscerated body plunging through stained glass; an attic crawling with maggots; a young woman plunging helplessly into a room filled with razor wire; a reanimated corpse with nails in its eyes – ‘Suspiria’ gains another layer of unease from the prowling, gliding, queasily subjective camerawork Argento had already become famous for. Everything disorientates or defamiliarises. Even a boilerplate scene of exposition where Suzy consults Professor Milius (Rudolf Schundler) for an academic perspective on witchcraft is punctuated by a vertiginous bit of architecture porn …

… and pays off with a long zoom that floats between the protagonists and comes to rest on their murky reflections:

I love the way Milius’s reflection ghosts, giving him the look of a man with two heads. As if Argento is commenting on the schism between intellectualism and superstition, or reinforcing an earlier comment by Milius’s colleague Dr Franco (Udo Kier): “bad luck isn’t brought by broken mirrors, but by broken minds”. 

It’s a phrase of such potency that Maitland McDonagh chose it for the title of her cornerstone study of Argento’s work. It sums up so much of his work. And for ‘Suspiria’ it’s a statement of intent.

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?

There’s an elephant in the room when it comes to ‘My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?’. It’s a big elephant with floppy ears and a trunk like a fire hose and somebody’s painted on the side of it, in garish pink letters, “this is, y’know, that Werner Herzog film produced by David Lynch that looks more like a David Lynch film than a Werner Herzog film”. If someone would be so kind as to take the elephant outside and pass me my elephant gun, maybe we can have an intelligent conversation.

Oh, don’t worry about the elephant by the way. The blunderbuss is for use on the next jackass who sits up excitedly during the scene where a dwarf in a tux wanders onscreen, and points and says “Look, it’s a dwarf! That’s a David Lynch moment!” I have five words for said jackass: Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen.

Granted, ‘My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?’ – hereinafter, ‘My Son…’, since even the acronym treatment (‘MSMSWHYD’) is liable to give me RSI – starts out in startlingly non-Herzogian fashion with Detectives Havenhurst (Williem Dafoe) and Vargas (Michael Pena) shooting the shit in their cruiser as they head over to a murder scene. The deceased is a Mrs Macallam (Grace Zabriskie); the perp is her son, Brad (Michael Shannon). Brad has holed himself up across the road from the murder scene with a couple of hostages. A large chunk of the movie consists of Havenhurst and Vargas trying to open up a dialogue with Brad before the SWAT team open up a different kind of dialogue that involves hot lead. 

In between attempts to appeal to Brad, Havenhurst and Vargas interview his girlfriend Ingrid (a winningly sympathetic Chloe Sevigny) and his erstwhile mentor, theatre director Lee Myers (Udo Kier). Brad’s increasingly fragile mental state is thus revealed in a series of flashbacks – some of which say more about the witnesses than about Brad – which document the months leading up to the murder. The first signs that he’d bummed a ride out of Normal, we learn, were after he returned from Peru. No sooner is this bit of dialogue out than we’re in Herzog territory good and proper, and to all the naysayers I offer this screengrab:

 

Of course, we were in Herzog territory all the time. The desperately self-delusive Brad is a man-child redolent of Bruno S. in ‘The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser’ and ‘Stroszek’. Herzog’s bleak vision of Americana in that latter film may have been upgraded from Wisconsin to San Diego in ‘My Son …’, but the same sense of dislocation, of alien-ness, remains. The dancing chicken at the end of ‘Stroszek’ finds is corollary in the flamingos that turn out to be Brad’s hostages. 

The genius of Michael Shannon’s performance is the glimpse he gives us of the stunningly out-of-kilter way Brad’s mind works. You can easily imagine Brad sitting cross-legged in front of the TV for a Herzog marathon, favouring the crazed, messianic performances of Klaus Kinski in ‘Aguirre, Wrath of God’ and ‘Fitzcarraldo’ and fancying himself as America’s equivalent thespian talent. He’s an actor, is our Brad. Or at least he thinks he is. What we see of his rehearsals for Myers’s howlingly pretentious production of the Orestes tragedy is enough to convince otherwise. 

Herzog throws out satirical barbs left, right and centre. ‘My Son …’ is poisoned love letter to a nation’s obsession with fame; a skit on actorly eccentricities (you can almost feel the ghost of Kinski hovering just offscreen); the most deadpan send up of cop movie conventions you’ll ever see; and an exercising in bouncing bizarro ensemble combinations off each and seeing what happens. Case in point? This scene …

 

… where Brad, already way up Bonkers Creek and demonstrably deficient in the paddle department, goes to borrow a sword from his jaw-droppingly racist and homophobic white trash ostrich-farmer uncle (Brad Dourif) while Myers camps in up in the background. Or the dinner table conversation which redefines awkward, where we have Shannon, Zabriski and Sevigny playing the scene as if it were written by Strindberg and directed by Mike Leigh and the two of them were at fisticuffs over how it should be played while their cast tried to do the take under a veil of abject embarrassment. 

Did I mention that ‘My Son …’ is a weird little film? 

Perhaps its weirdest element is its visual aesthetic. While images proliferate that could only have been conjured by Herzog, it looks uglier, muddier and less ecstatically poetic than is to be expected from a Herzog film. It was filmed using lightweight digital cameras, and while a whole generation of directors might have embraced the RED ONE, it pissed Herzog off no end. “An immature camera,” he declared, “created by computer people who do not have a sensibility or understanding for the value of high-precision mechanics which has a 200-year history.” 

Fortunately, the film was created by a man whose understanding and values are at the other end of the spectrum. Oh, and it was produced David Lynch.

Iron Sky

The war movie. It’s a strange beast. The genre encompasses pared down character studies, ‘Boy’s Own’ action spectaculars, psychological dramas, brutally realistic accounts of actual campaigns and blisteringly ludicrous men-on-a-mission blockbusters.

Sometimes what you want of a war movie is an unflinching commitment to finding the truth of its subject matter, so you watch ‘Downfall’.

Sometimes what you want is a razor-sharp satire of the dangers of giving too much power to what Michael Moore would call stupid white men. So you watch ‘Dr Strangelove’.

And sometimes, ladies and gentlemen, sometimes the only thing that hits the spot …

… is Nazis on the moon.

Timo Vuorensola’s ‘Iron Sky’ gives you not only Nazis on the moon (as well as Nazis in fuck off big Zeppelin-shaped spaceships) but homages to ‘Downfall’ and ‘Dr Strangelove’, not to mention a conceptually brilliant inclusion of Charlie Chaplin’s ‘The Great Dictator’.

 I’d not be doing my job as a reviewer if I didn’t admit that ‘Iron Sky’ doesn’t quite add up to the sum of its parts, doesn’t go as batshit crazy with its wonderful central conceit as you want it to, and ladles on the ironies of its Strangelovian denouement a little too heavy-handedly … but, ach mein Gott if it didn’t have me twenty minutes in with an inspired spoof of the Hitler Reacts meme.

The plot goes something like this: at the end of the war, the remnants of the Third Reich split for the far side of the moon. Fast forward to 2018 and The President (Stephanie Paul), a gung-ho Sarah Palin type (she has a lot of stuffed animals of a decidedly Alaskan genus in the Oval Office), has backed a moon landing in order to bolster her re-election campaign. Rather cynically, she’s pushed Afro-American astronaut James Washington (Christopher Kirby) into the spotlight just so she can use “black to the moon” as a publicity slogan. (The mission, I hardly need to add, is to the dark side of the moon. The dark side. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the film’s most subtle racist joke.) The President’s entire campaign is the work of PR guru Vivian Wagner (Peta Sergeant) … and in case you didn’t get that joke, there are motifs from ‘Der Ring Des Niebelungen’, ‘Tannhauser’ and ‘Der Fliegende Hollander’ all over the soundtrack.

When Washington is taken prisoner by the moon Nazis, he meets stereotypical blonde Aryan poster-girl Renate Richter (Julia Dietze). Renate is engaged to the arrogant and ambitious Klaus Adler (Götz Otto, who actually was in ‘Downfall’). How ambitious is Adler? Well, he only wants to execute a putsch against against incumbent Führer Wolfgang Kortzfleisch (Udo Kier) – a man who really fucking hates it that everyone still shouts “Heil Hitler” when they address him – and install himself as ultimate leader of the thousand year space Reich. Renate’s head is turned by Washington and she convinces him to go along with a purification programme which essentially turns him Aryan. (I told you the racist jokes got less subtle, didn’t I?)

When Renate’s scientist father Doktor Richter (Tilo Prückner) discovers that Washington’s iPhone has greater processing capability than any of the equipment in the moon base, he gets permission from Kortzfleisch to use it to reactivate the Nazi destroyer-class spaceship Götterdammerüng (I told you Wagner was all over the place) only for the experiment to fail as the battery dies after mere seconds. Adler, Renate and the newly Aryanized Washington are dispatched to earth to round up more mobile phones. It’s in New York, however, that Adler and Renate meet Vivian, who is so impressed by their chiselled good looks and propagandist spiel that she builds The President’s entire re-election campaign around Nazi ideology.

Meanwhile, Kortzfleisch – tired of waiting and suspecting Adler of treachery – decides to launch his fleet against earth without the Götterdammerüng. The President is delighted: “All presidents who start a war in their first term always get re-elected.”

‘Iron Sky’ is a movie that should have had a budget of $100,000,000 and a script by Terry Southern, Hunter S Thompson and Christopher Brookmyre, preferably on a day when they drank the Jack Daniels distillery dry and got fucked up on some seriously manky crack. As it is, it cost $7½ million and was written by Michael Kalesniko (whose biggest previous deal was the Howard Stern biopic ‘Private Parts’) from an original story by Johanna Sinisalo (who apparently won the Finlandia book award about a decade ago) from an original concept by Jarmo Puskala (who wrote Vuorensola’s previous outing ‘Star Wreck: In the Perkinning’), all of which smacks of a bunch of people sitting around going “Yeah, but, Nazis on the fucking moon, dude!” until someone actually managed to turn it into something remotely resembling a plot.

The effects work vacillates between the fuck-awful and the holy-fuck-that’s-actually-quite-impressive; the humour vacillates between clever and cringe-worthy; the performances – I gotta be honest here – are uniformly pretty decent, with Kier’s camp Führer and Sergeant’s foul-mouthed but foxy PR bitch emerging as standouts; and the set pieces fluctuate the most drastically of all, Washington’s attempt to talk down some gangbangers pissed off at Adler and Renate proving stultifyingly unfunny, whereas a summit conference in which the Finnish and North Korean delegates are the butt of the joke hits all the right satirical notes.

It seems pissy to quibble, though. Vuorensola shoots for the moon (pardon the pun) on a prohibitive budget and gets more right than he gets wrong. The steampunk (Reichpunk?) aesthetic is brilliantly realized. Nazis on the moon is a sparsely populated subgenre (‘Iron Sky’ rubs shoulders with an early Heinlein novel ‘Rocket Ship Galileo’ and the odd episode of ‘Star Trek’, ‘Star Trek: Enterprise’ and ‘Star Trek: Voyager’ and a bizarro 60s Japanese production called ‘Attack from Space’) and Vuorensola’s opus stands, for now, as its defining statement.

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #2: Cigarette Burns

As ‘Jenifer’ and ‘Pelts’ provided a surprise (albeit small screen) return to form for Dario Argento, so ‘Cigarette Burns’ for John Carpenter, one of his two contributions to the TV series ‘Masters of Horror’.

Kirby (Norman Reedus), a film collector and owner/programmer of a run-down independent cinema, is hired by the effete but sinister Bellinger (Udo Kier) to track down the one existing print of a French art film so notorious that its only public screening incited sociopathic behaviour in its audience. ‘La Fin Absolue du Monde’ (trans. ‘The Absolute End of the World’) is a film Kirby’s always been curious about, but apprehensive of. He recognizes in Bellinger an obsession with it that borders on addiction. Kirby knows all about an addiction. He’s a recovering drug addict (his wife – to whose antagonistic father he owes a fuckton of money invested in the cinema – was a victim to his lifestyle). He knows Bellinger and ‘La Fin Absolue du Monde’ spell trouble, particularly when he’s shown an, uh, “artefact” from the film as part of Bellinger’s private collection. But the money that’s being offered – more than enough to bale out the cinema – sways him.

Carpenter structures the first half of ‘Cigarette Burns’ almost as a slow-burn detective story with Kirby tracking down film historians and critics associated with the production and its disastrous debut, a trail that leads him from America to France and the troubled daughter of the film’s quixotic director. En route, Kirby is plagued with visions/recollections of his wife, disturbed by the subject matter of ‘La Fin Absolue du Monde’ (I don’t want to spoil anything so let’s just say it contains material that pretty much fits the definition of unholy), warned off by those with a vested interest in the film, and – albeit unwillingly – made complicit in the actions of certain parties who are perversely inspired by it.

“All this filming,” alcoholic landlady Mrs Stephens (Maxine Audley) says in Michael Powell’s career-destroying controversy-fest ‘Peeping Tom’ – “it isn’t healthy.” ‘Cigarette Burns’ could easily serve as an hour-long exposition of this sentiment. Leo Mark’s script for ‘Peeping Tom’ focused on scopophilia, defined medically as the morbid desire to watch. Obsession; addiction. Bellinger’s desperation to see ‘La Fin Absolue du Monde’ owes to a desire to experience art – cinema – on a visceral and dangerous level. Bellinger wants something stripped of the obvious safety net of fiction/fabrication. Kirby’s motives are those of professional interest tipped slightly too far by an admixture of financial necessity and morbid curiosity.

And that, in a nutshell, is the appeal of ‘Cigarette Burns’: it’s a morality tale for the cinephile; a ‘Bluebeard’s Castle’ for every horror fan, obscurist or completist out there. If ‘La Fin Absolue du Monde’ existed, and its reputation was as tarnished by controversy and I had a copy within my grasp despite warnings against even thinking about watching it, would I walk away and always wonder, or sit down with a fearful tremor of anticipation and relish the possibility of reviewing it for The Agitation of the Mind?

No contest.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: The House on Straw Hill

I have a soft spot for Linda Hayden, mainly because of her deliriously seductive turn in the otherwise jumbled horror flick ‘Blood on Satan’s Claw’, and I’d pretty much watch her in any old POS.

Sadly, the phrase “any old POS” encompasses most of her filmography. It’s one of those crimes of the film industry that someone so stunning, with such presence and capable – on the very rare occasions that anyone gave her decent material to work with – of demonstrating real acting chops never rose to the heights that equal (or even lesser) talents achieved.

I approached ‘The House on Straw Hill’ (a.k.a. ‘Exposé’) knowing very little about it except it was a home invasion thriller, it was directed by James Kenelm Clarke, it had made the DPP’s video nasties list and there was a girl-girl scene between Linda Hayden and Fiona Richmond.

Already I had cause for concern. The home invasion subgenre is usually done badly. There are relatively few good examples. Sam Peckinpah’s ‘Straw Dogs’ is probably the greatest home invasion movie, and the very title of ‘The House on Straw Hill’ suggests nothing more than a ham-fisted attempt to cash-in on the controversy and box office success of Peckinpah’s film and Wes Craven’s ‘Last House on the Left’.

Then we have the dude in the director’s chair. His seven-film CV includes ‘Hardcore’ (not to be confused with the George C. Scott drama), a supposed biopic of Brit sex star Fiona Richmond starring the lady herself, and the desperately unfunny comedy ‘Let’s Get Laid’, starring Richmond (again) and Robin Askwith. (The phrases “desperately unfunny comedy” and “Robin Askwith” are virtually synonymous.) His last film ‘Yellow Pages’, made in 1984 but shelved for four years, was an attempt at a film noir spoof. Let’s just roll out that “desperately unfunny comedy” tag again and move quickly on.

So: the film was almost guaranteed to be a cheap cash-in; the director didn’t have a halfway decent or even acceptably average film to his name; and the unavoidable fact of the DPP video nasties list is that the nastiest thing about most of the titles on it is how drab and often quite boring they are.

Which really only leaves the anticipation of a bit of girl-girl action (promising) between Linda Hayden (very promising) and Fiona Richmond (hmmm). Now, I’m not intending to be cruel, and for all I know Fiona Richmond might be the coolest person on the face of the planet and incredibly kind and generous, but (how shall I put this?) she doesn’t quite conform to the kind of looks you’d expect of someone who attained that degree of fame in the adult entertainment industry. Or to put it another way: despite having the kind of pneumatic figure that guaranteed her décolletage entered the room five minutes before the rest of her, Richmond had a very stern visage. More deputy headmistress threatening to cane you than sex kitten promising to seduce you. (Actually, thinking about the kind of overcoated, repressed, middle-aged British males with boarding school backgrounds who probably made up Fiona Richmond’s core audience in the ’70s, it all makes sense!)

But wait! I started this review in praise of Linda Hayden. And I’ve also (you’ll have noticed) tried to avoid talking about the film. Why’s that? Are we firmly in “any old POS” territory here?

Let’s pause for a synopsis before answering that question. Writer Paul Martin (Udo Kier) has holed up in the countryside to escape the publicity generated by the success of his first novel, work on a follow-up and conduct a controlling and borderline SM relationship with his consort Suzanne (Richmond). The book is progressing too slowly for his publisher’s liking, so the intensely private Martin reluctantly agrees to hire a typist, Linda Hindstatt (Hayden). What follows is a cat-and-mouse game between Linda and Martin which begins with sexual overtones and ends with homicidal ones.

The attentive viewer will pick up a clue in the opening sequence – a TV interview in which Martin is cagey in his answers – that makes the final act revelation an inevitability rather than a surprise. Structurally, the film presents a stagnant, talky and not particularly well shot first hour followed by a frenetic attempt at steering things into psycho-thriller territory. This involves narratively pointless splurges of violence (SPOILER why not just kill Martin first and get it over and done with? END SPOILER) rendered in a not particularly well shot style and way too much reliance on tired ‘Psycho’ homages.

‘The House on a Straw Hill’ is a tired, unengaging piece of hack work with very little entertainment value. Why it ended up on the nasties list is a mystery. Sure, there’s some sexualized violence, but nothing more than your average non-DPP-witch-hunt stalk ‘n’ slash title. Yeah, there’s a rape scene, but it’s so clumsily staged and the emphasis shifts from attack to vengeance so arbitrarily that it’s ludicrous rather than offensive.

The script is clunky, the score intrusive and the cinematography just plain horrible. We shall not speak of the direction.

Acting-wise, Kier blandly suggests Martin’s prissiness and self-regard, but it’s a one-note performance. Richmond is slightly better than you’d expect for someone who’s normal acting range was perforce restricted to writhing suggestively and moaning “mmmm yes … mmmm yes”. Predictably, it’s Linda Hayden’s show and she rises above the shoddy material in fine style. It’s sad that the misogynistic finale ultimately rubbishes the character she manages against all odds (ie. Clarke as writer and director) to breathe life into. Sadder still that this and ‘Blood on Satan’s Claw’ are arguably her career highlights. She deserved better.