WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Night Warning

Once upon a time (i.e. the late 1960s) Mom and Pop leave li’l Billy in the care of his aunt Cheryl (Susan Tyrrell) before heading off on a long car journey. The kid’s screaming his head off, and with what happens in the next 90 minutes it’s almost as if he knew what’s coming. As Mom and Pop drive off, Cheryl turns away, obscuring Billy from view and smiling a knowing smile. Director William Asher freeze-frames the moment. It’s the first indication that something isn’t quite right.

We rejoin Mom and Pop far enough into their car journey that they’re navigating a twisty mountain round. Mom’s looking at snapshots of li’l Billy and cooing over how cute he is. Pop’s opining that he’s missing the li’l guy already. Hands up everyone who’s already marked these mawkish sentimentalists out as our first victims. You’re absolutely right. Pop begins the mountain road descent, tamps the brakes and … whaddaya know? … they don’t work. He reacts in the time-honoured tradition of characters in movies who find their brakes non-functional: he drives faster and steers wildly.

Allow me to pause for a rant. The implication is obvious (and is confirmed later in the movie): Cheryl wants Billy all for herself. Therefore the brakes have been sabotaged. Therefore Cheryl must have cut through the brake lines before her sister and brother-in-law left. So, rant the first: are we honestly supposed to believe that Mom and Pop have travelled far enough to arrive at a fucking mountain pass without once having to use the brakes? No stop signs, no intersections, no requirement to slow down because of volume of traffic or someone pulling out in front of them? Suburban house to mountain pass without ever needing to brake?

Allow me to indulge in another rant. Why do characters in movies who discover they’ve got no brakes always respond by mashing the accelerator pedal to the floor and jerking the steering wheel side to side? Why not, y’know, pop the motherfucker in neutral and yank the handbrake? Sure, you’re going to knacker the sychromesh, you’re looking at an insurance write-off and you’re probably going to suffer a little whiplash into the bargain, but – hey! – the chances of survival are infinitely better.

However, back to Mom and Pop on their own personal highway to hell, and Pop decides to go with the drive faster/steer wildly option and damned if the family saloon doesn’t go into the back of a logging truck with ten foot of tree-trunk overhanging. Said lumber goes through the windscreen and pulverises Pop. Mom gets hers when what’s left of the saloon goes over a cliff and plunges into a river whereby it explodes. Cars generally explode if an impact triggers a detonation of the fuel tank. This particular car has already been submerged in water.

So, I’m five minutes into ‘Night Warning’ – also known as ‘Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker’, just plain ‘Nightmare Maker’ and ‘The Evil Protégé’, none of which have a lot of bearing on the film itself – and nearly 500 words’ worth of ranting is marching through my head. Then we flip forward 14 years and it’s the early 80s. Yup; we’re in a cinematic landscape of high school, tight tee-shirts and dodgy perms. And that’s the guys. Li’l Billy is now 17-year-old Billy (Jimmy McNichol) – he’s living with aunt Cheryl, pinning his hopes on a basketball scholarship and dating wholesome girl-next-door type Julie (Julia Duffy).

Cheryl isn’t too keen on any of this. “College is for rich kids and people with brains,” she tells him discouragingly: “you wouldn’t fit in there.” The real trouble starts on Billy’s birthday. Having refused to let Billy bring Julie home as his date for his birthday meal (“I’ll be your date,” she coos ickily), Cheryl packs him off to school and stays in to await the arrival of the TV repairman. If you think this scenario sounds like it belongs in a cheap porno, then wait till you get a load of Cheryl’s cringe-making seduction technique. The TV repairman declines her advances and gets a kitchen knife in his back by way of remonstration. Billy walks in on a scene of carnage.

Less than half an hour in the proceedings, and the potential narrative developments are manifold: we could have Billy coerced into corpse disposal and the movie play out in cat ‘n’ mouse as he tries to extricate himself from Cheryl’s control while her domineering behaviour threatens to become murderous once again; we could have Billy’s fragile emotions lead him down a dark path where he becomes the killer in order to safeguard his aunt from prosecution (a concept that would justify the ‘Evil Protégé’ alternative title). Both of these options would certainly play up to the heavily implied incest theme. Or we could go the “Billy is imprisoned by Cheryl while Julie, suspecting something is afoot, sets herself up for final girl duties when she decides to investigate” route. Or we could jump forward another 14 years (although this would have made ‘Night Warning’ essentially sci-fi) and explore the thirty-something Billy’s life as he struggles to keep the past in the past and that skeleton of aunt Cheryl walled up in the cellar.

Instead, Asher and his three scripters – Steve Breimer, Alan Jay Glueckman and the wonderfully named Boon Collins – have a couple of neighbours barge in (rant number three: why the fuck don’t movie characters who are faced with unexpected corpse disposal requirement lock their front doors first?), the police are called and Detective Joe Carlson (Bo Svenson) immediately smells a rat. With Cheryl having sustained no bruising and none of her clothes ripped, he doesn’t buy her rape attempt/self-defence story. And with the first witnesses at the scene putting the murder weapon in Billy’s hands, he begins to wonder what the real story is.

Ordinarily – for the slasher film is a great respecter of stereotypes – Carlson would be the tenacious cop who, for all his instincts, is always one step behind as the bodies pile up. Ordinarily. But not here. Carlson is out and out obnoxious, a detective who questions suspects by repeatedly yelling at them, calling them liars and asking impertinent questions about their sexuality. Pace the latter, he’s a homophobe of the highest order. And when he does some digging and discovers that the TV repairman was gay and in a relationship with Tom Landers (Steve Eastin) – Billy’s basketball coach – his bigotry breaks ground and creates havoc.

And it’s here, against all odds, that ‘Night Warning’ – otherwise a blandly-directed and often lazily scripted piece of work – manages to be interesting. With its obvious genre trappings and its ooooh-isn’t-this-controversial incest subtext, the film suddenly (if only temporarily) side-steps overt melodrama in the form of the clearly demented Cheryl and instead mines a squirmily unpleasant seam of social horror from Carlson’s attitudes and behaviour.

Initially given over lambasting Billy with questions like “It doesn’t make a whole lotta sense for a fag to be raping your aunt, does it?”, and later shown to pull a gun on a (notably Hispanic) suspect, the filmmakers seem to set Carlson on course to becoming the most loathsome (and potentially dangerous) character in the movie; a character whose venality stems not from insanity, dark secrets from the past or quasi-supernatural influences but a social prejudice that is still depressingly prevalent. Hints of misogyny and xenophobia shore-up Carlson’s gay-bashing mindset. And this guy carries a gun and badge!

Carlson’s crusade against Billy and Landers – misreading their relationship as two sides of a gay love triangle – occupies the middle third, with Cheryl’s machinations weaving in and out of the narrative in the background (her milk-and-cookies approach to scuppering Billy’s basketball scholarship attempt is as malicious as it is subtle), until everyone involved in the production suddenly seems to remember that Cheryl’s supposed to be the villain of the piece. At which point Tyrrell – always one of Hollywood’s more eccentric talents – ramps up her performance from wannabe milf …

… to outright loony …

… while the screenplay piles up the final act excesses like melodrama’s going out of style. Lurching from hidden corpse to dark familial secrets revealed to secondary character trapped in House of Psycho to final girl running through the woods shenanigans to despatched villain coming back one more time to nutcase cop getting the wrong idea to an end credits “what happened next” crawl that’s as ludicrous as it is abrupt, ‘Night Warning’ spirals off into increasingly contrived histrionics as if hellbent on holding back an actual conclusion ... as … long … as … possible.

It’s easy to see why it ended up on the DPP’s video nasties list in the UK in the 80s (albeit as a peripheral title rather than one of the 39 that were actually prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act), but it’s so over-the-top that the only elements of the film liable to truly offend are the atrocious sound editing (particularly in the final act thunderstorm that seems to come and go depending on whether someone’s about to get offed) and the demented intensity of Tyrrell’s performance.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Blind Beast

The artist and the model. The muse. The creation of the masterpiece. These elements have found their way into more than one cinematic work that has emerged as its own masterpiece. Jacques Rivette’s ‘La belle noiseuse’ springs to mind.

Yasuzo Masamura’s ‘Blind Beast’ is kind of like ‘La belle noiseuse’ only two and half hours shorter, about sculpture rather than painting, and you’d need to imagine Michel Piccoli as a sightless mother-dependent nut-job who kidnaps Emmanuelle Beart.

Okay then: ‘Blind Beast’ is actually quite different to ‘La belle noiseuse’ aesthetically. Nonetheless the artist/model relationship connection would probably make for a good double bill.

In Masamura’s film, Mako Midori plays Aki whose provocative work for a famous photographer has just been the subject of an exhibition. A nude study sculpture is also on display, and we catch our first glimpse of rival sculptor Michio (Eiji Funakoshi) in an otherwise empty gallery feeling up the statue like he’s about to reach for the Kleenex.

Later, posing as a masseur, he gains access to Aki’s apartment, uses the old handkerchief soaked in chloroform routine, and – with a little bit of help from his dear old Ma (Noriku Sengoku) – whisks her off to his studio in the middle of nowhere. It’s here that he puts a proposition to her: stick around, be his model, and she’s free to leave once he’s completed his masterwork.

There’s just one contentious point (apart, y’know, from the kidnapping): being blind, the only way he can capture Aki’s physical essence in his work is through the medium of touch. In other words, he’s decided to hold a young woman against her will so he can give her a thorough groping in the name of art. With clay-ey hands.

Initially repulsed, Aki is suspiciously quick to agree. And so begins a game of cat ‘n’ mouse complicated by the Oepidal overtones to Michio’s relationship with his mother, something Aki senses early on and is quick to exploit. In an already fucked-up movie, things take an even darker turn in the last third as Aki and Michio find themselves locked into a masochistic and mutually destructive web of passion that seems to presage Nagisa Oshima’s ‘In the Realm of the Senses’ (made seven years later).

‘Blind Beast’ is a beautifully shot if somewhat intellectually and emotionally confused movie that relies almost solely on Aki’s voiceover to denote the various stages of their unhealthy relationship. Certainly nothing else in the script, or the arc of the performances, suggests a convincing development from mind games to sexual power play to mutual dependence to flogging and biting and the non-artistic application of craft knives. 

Which isn’t to say the performances are bad, although Funakoshi vacillates, often quite hilariously, between “I’ll suggest my character’s blindness by moving really slowly and waving my hands around and fuck whoever just said I look like a zombie” and “what? my character’s supposed to be blind!” Sengoku invests a one-note character with a low-key menace. Midori gives it her all, equally beguiling whether she’s being docile, coquettish, sly or seductive.

But the real star of the show is Shigeo Mano’s art design. Michio’s studio is a bizarre piece of grand guignol, a workspace assembled in the depths of the id, its walls dominated by larger-than life anatomical friezes. An eyrie of eyes on one wall, a nest of noses on another. Here an outcrop of arms, there a maze of legs. Lips that could swallow a grown man or woman if they suddenly opened. Breasts of every shape and size round out the collection. The floor space is occupied by two halves of a female nude, bosom uppermost on the first, ass in the air as regards the second.

Fifteen minutes in, and virtually every scene between Aki and Michio plays out against these images; indeed, they’re often dwarfed by these grotesque exaggerations of the female form. (Parenthetically, it’s interesting to note that Piero Schivazappa’s ‘The Frightened Woman’, in which a gynaecological bit of set design is used to unforgettable effect during a similarly masochistic sexual duel between a supposedly dominant anti-hero and an ostensibly threatened heroine, was the made the same year.)

‘Blind Beast’ is an interesting conflation of art house and exploitation which, even if it doesn’t quite hang together convincingly enough, makes unfailing use of its unique mise en scene. It’s a curio, the kind of film you just know would never get made today. They’d have to call it ‘Visually Impaired Beast’ for a start!

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Hitch-Hike

To hear Franco Nero, Corinne Clery and David Hess reminiscing on the special features “making of” documentary about how well they got on during filming and how proud they are of the work they produced, you’d think ‘Hitch-Hike’ was a high-point of world cinema, something worthy of comparison to Fellini or Antonioni. Actually, it’s a mean-spirited little exploitationer that was directed by Pasquale Festa Campanile. 

Campanile was incredibly prolific in three disciplines: as novelist, screenwriter and director. He was apparently something of an aesthete. You wouldn’t think it to watch ‘Hitch-Hike’. Its original Italian language title is ‘Autostop Rosso Sangue’ which means exactly what you think. ‘Blood Red Autostop’ – not exactly subtle, is it?

In a film utterly devoid of likeable or sympathetic characters our ostensible protagonists are Walter and Eve Mancini (Nero and Clery), an Italian couple holidaying in America. Walter is a burned out and borderline alcoholic reporter stuck in a stagnant decade-long marriage to his boss’s daughter. Apparently affluent enough (they’re tootling round the States in a big car with an even bigger caravan behind it and doing the odd bit of hunting with a pair of expensive-looking rifles), their lifestyle seems little compensation for the fact that they can’t stand each other. Walter is boorish and verbose. He treats his wife like a piece of meat – in an early scene, he mauls her in the back of 4x4 next to the corpse of a deer he’s just bagged – and that’s when he’s not fantasizing about doing her in.

The opening credits play out over Walter tracking Eve through the cross-hairs of his rifle, only hesitating from pulling the trigger when a deer presents itself as an easier target. Eve is waspish and petulant, not averse to attracting attention from other quarters in order to score points against her husband.

After spending quarter of an hour with these two, it’s almost a relief when – against Walter’s express instructions – Eve pulls over to offer a hitch-hiker a lift. Oh, wait a minute, the hitch-hiker’s played by David Hess. Yeah, this one’s going to end badly.

Hess began his career in the music industry, first as a singer (recording ‘All Shook Up’ a year before Elvis took it to the top of the charts and scoring a middling hit with a cover version of ‘Living Doll’), then as a song-writer (random pick from the CV: Pat Boone’s ‘Speedy Gonzales’), before establishing himself as an actor as the loathsome Krug in ‘Last House on the Left’ (he also wrote the score), a persona he continued to draw upon in ‘Hitch-Hike’ and ‘The House on the Edge of the Park’. Yes, folks, we live in a world where Wes Craven and Ruggero Deodato’s go-to guy when they needed a deranged rapist once recorded a Cliff Richard cover. Personally, I’m counting that one single fact as more mind-warpingly fucked up than anything I have ever featured as part of the Winter of Discontent.

Hess’s character is called Adam, hence various references in the script – adapted from the sensitively titled novel ‘The Violence and the Fury’ by Peter Kane – to Adam and Eve. Which would imply that Walter is the serpent. Events in the last third suggest there might be something to this reading. Indeed, it’s in the last third that Campanile starts to do something really interesting with the material, having rather abruptly curtailed the Adam-terrorizes-Walter-and-Eve/will-Adam-rape-Eve-before-Walter-fights-back dynamic of the first hour. And let’s face it, said first hour trades on sexual threat and a leering objectification of its leading lady to such an extent that it would have become utterly tedious if Campanile had played his string out any longer.

‘Hitch-Hike’ delivers its best moments in the early scenes when Adam is happily playing Walter and Eve off against each other (at one point Adam, picking up on Walter’s disaffection with his job, offers him the story of a lifetime tagging along in his swathe of crime and brutality as official biographer, kind of a Beauchamp to his English Bob), and towards the end when a confluence of wounded masculinity and bad influence bring things full circle.

Challenges to Walter’s full-blooded Italian masculine imperative are rife: his marriage has devolved into a lust-hate relationship; his father-in-law is his employer, to whom his vocational ambitions are in hock; early on he breaks his fingers, necessitating a surrender of the driving duties to Eve; he gets drunk easily, suggesting an inability to hold his booze; Adam goads him into a stunningly politically incorrect debate on how gays are making the world their own (I can’t help but wonder whether the drunken dwarf’s monologue on blacks vs whites in ‘In Bruges’ owes a debt to ‘Hitch-Hike’); and ends up on the receiving end of a sadistically executed practical joke by a bunch of free-loading students.

While the scenario presents him as the ostensible hero – tested to the limits in order to prove himself – Walter is continually painted as little better than Adam. Verbosity, quick-temperedness and self-importance are traits they shared. And while the scenario presents Eve as the ostensible victim she does herself no favours, deliberately provoking Adam when commonsense ought to compel her to fade into the background. That the sexual rivalry and one-upmanship resolves in the most ambiguous rape scene this side of ‘Straw Dogs’ just adds to the general unpleasantness and moral retardation on offer.

It’d be reprehensible and worthy of immediate dismissal … but it’s just too well made.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Savage Streets

‘Savage Streets’ is a film so sleazy you could almost be forgiven for thinking that, instead of adding it to the rental list, it had accosted you in some trash-strewn back alley. It’d be wearing a raincoat and puffing on a foul-smelling cheroot. It would have some teeth missing and sport a lot of stubble. Its fingernails would be dirty.

“Hey, buddy,” it’d say, “you wanna see sumthin’ fucked up and nasty?”

As a devotee of the Winter of Discontent season on The Agitation of the Mind, you’d nod and aver that, yes actually, you would.

“Rape/revenge exploitationer,” it’d say, by way of introduction. “Low budget, shot on the streets.”

“Hmmm,” you’d reply, non-committal. “Sounds like it’s been done before.”

“Yeah, but it’s usually some guy who’s out to avenge his wife or girlfriend, amiright? With me, it’s this hot chick in a leather catsuit tracking down the scum who raped her sister. And wait till ya get this! The sister’s a mute – can’t scream for help when they’re putting it to her. How fucked up is that?”

You’d respond that a scenario of that description was pretty fucked up indeed. You might also cast a glance about you to determine available exit routes.

“And then these fucktard scumbags,” it’d continue, snickering a little in a manner that puts you in mind of Muttley by way of Cthulu, “chase down the hot chick’s best friend and toss her off a bridge. Right before she’s due to get married. That’s some nasty shit, right?”

Again, you’d voice agreement that said shit was most certainly of the genus nasty.

“So the hot chick gets herself a crossbow and some bear-traps and it’s fuckin’ payback time. Know what I mean? Eh?” It would cough and expectorate into the gutter at this point, then turn its attention back to you, grinning dementedly. “Hey buddy, here’s the best part. The hot chick, yeah? The one in the leather catsuit? She’s played by Linda Blair. Y’know, the chick from ‘The Exorcist’. But she’s all grown up in this one. You know what I mean, buddy?”

You’d indicate that you did indeed comprehend the insinuation. You are, after all, both men of the world. The movie would open its raincoat – you’d raise an eyebrow that it was a VHS – and give you a flash of some lurid cover art …

… and you’d be sold. Linda Blair … exploitation flick … crossbow … bear-traps. You’d hail a cab and take it home with you and hope the neighbours didn’t notice. You’d hook up the old video player again and slide it in. You’d draw the blinds and crack open a beer. An hour and a half later you’d find yourself with mixed feelings, the only unambiguous one being that you’re in dire need of a shower.

‘Savage Streets’ ticks a fuckload of exploitation boxes – rival gangs, drugs, rape, murder, switchblades, crossbows, fast cars, nudity, rock ‘n’ roll – and there’s barely a frame of it that doesn’t ooze seediness. But for every genuinely nasty scene, there’s an unintentionally hilarious one. And for every five minutes of tense cat ‘n’ mouse or vicious revenge, there’s half an hour of tedium.

Let’s break down our raincoated friend’s selling point by way of example: this is a movie where the rape of her sister and the murder of her best friend motivate teenage girl gang leader Brenda (Blair) to embark on an orgy of violence. It clocks in at 93 minutes. The rape (crassly intercut with a shower room bitch fight between Brenda and her cheerleader rival) happens about half an hour into the film. The best friend’s murder occurs just shy of the hour mark. Brenda’s vengeful rampage lasts approximately 15 minutes. Using the formula a + b / c = x, where a is the time it takes to establish Brenda’s primary motivation for revenge, b is the time it takes to establish Brenda’s tertiary motivation for revenge and c is the duration of actual catharsis, you can discover the value of x (the ratio of fast-forwarding to running time).

For those viewers disinclined to approach ‘Savage Streets’ as a maths problem, it also serves as a time capsule from an age where fashion descended into a cocaine-fuelled absence of self-consciousness and the ozone layer was irreversibly punctured by the combined output of every teenager in the western world blasting industrial quantities of hairspray over their follicles. As reprehensible a movie as it is, arguably the most disturbing facet of ‘Savage Streets’ is its parade of mullets. I kid you not. Every freakin’ character sports the kind of bouffant ’do that makes Jon Bon Jovi circa ‘Slippery When Wet’ look like a shaven-headed thug.

And speaking of time capsule, ‘Savage Streets’ also gives us Linda Blair at twenty-five playing seventeen and looking all of twelve in the scenes where she’s meant to be at her angriest and most predatory. There’s something uncomfortable about watching an actress who looks so young strutting so much cleavage. And speaking of cleavage, Linnea Quigley – who I recall as being pneumatic in such erudite fare as ‘Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-a-Rama’ and ‘Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers’ – seems positively flat-chested here.

There are entire screeds to be written on ‘Savage Streets’ – why it’s so scuzzy, why it has such longueurs, the precise nature of that interminable scene in the English Literature class, why John Vernon agreed to appear (my guess is gambling debts, although there’s always the possibility that he did it to win a dare) – but this isn’t the time. There’s a grubby VHS in a raincoat smoking on your sofa, getting ash everywhere and eyeing up your DVD of ‘Thriller – A Cruel Picture’. It knows you’ve got more beer in the fridge and it has designs on making itself at home. Spark its next stoogie, give it a can of something cheap and nasty, and kick it the hell out. Send it to chez Agitation; that sick li’l puppy’ll get a thousand words out of it.

Nun liebe kinder, gebt fein acht

The clocks have gone back, Halloween is past, there’s nothing left on the calendar but the nauseating goodwill and rampant sentimentality of Christmas. Time, then, for the Winter of Discontent, this blog’s third annual celebration of exploitation. Here’s a raised glass to filmic filth, movie malevolence, picture palace perversity, VHS venality and DVD damnation.

And before I ask forgiveness (yeah, right) for what I am about to do, here’s a more pertinent confession: Winter of Discontent 2011 wasn’t all it could have been. Illness and pressures of work meant the unfestivities got under way later than intended. Some titles I’d been promised through various sources were unforthcoming.

But not this year, oh my droogies. Preparations have been underway since summer. Some sleazy new titles have been added to the collection. The rental list has been prioritised such that I’m probably now on some MI6 watch list. And I can promise you some dark delights. There will be blood. There will be horror. There will be nudity, weaponry and profanity. The Agitation of the Mind is about to become a two month repository of the kind of movies your parents wouldn’t let you watch.

It all begins tomorrow, and the word on the street is … savage.

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #13: The Ward

‘The Ward’ – John Carpenter’s return to the big screen after nine years and the nadir of ‘Ghosts of Mars’ – suffers from two things: one minor and one that couldn’t really be helped. The minor problem is the inclusion of a cheap last-minute scare so arbitrarily incorporated that the film ends not with the shiver but a groan. The other is that is came out the same year as ‘Shutter Island’ and a year before ‘Sucker Punch’. Conceptually and in terms of their narrative third act, these three films inevitably get pigeonholed together. And whereas ‘Shutter Island’ had the big budget and the epic sweep, and ‘Sucker Punch’ five girls in short skirts and an epic sweep, ‘The Ward’ kind of gets forgotten. That Scorsese’s and Snyder’s films proved divisive and engendered screeds of internet debate, while Carpenter’s plays extremely fair and doesn’t delve into histrionics, pushed it further towards the sidelines.

Personally, ‘The Ward’ is my favourite of the three. If ‘Shutter Island’ is a sweeping symphony and ‘Sucker Punch’ a triple gatefold prog-rock concept album, then ‘The Ward’ is a three-minute punk single: raw, blunt, unpretentious and stripped of anything it doesn’t need.

In a short, creepy pre-credits sequence, the inmate of a psychiatric institute is seen cowering from something stalking the corridors outside her cell. Next thing it’s in her cell and it’s goodnight Vienna. The credits themselves are an artful concoction of sepia images – all with an asylum/disturbed psyche/mental illness theme – fragmenting as if made of glass. That’s your first clue, right there.

Then we’re off good and proper, as a police car belts along a country road – a title card tells us it’s 1966 – while a girl hides in the woods, watching nervously as it passes. Meet Kristen (Amber Heard); the next thing she does, after a quick sprint through the trees, is burn down a farmhouse. There’s a mixture of terror and exhilaration in her eyes as she watches the conflagration, and can I say right here and now, for the record, what a freakin’ terrific actress Amber Heard is.

While the building is still burning, the aforementioned police car comes sweeping up and Kristen kicks and struggles to minimal avail as she’s bundled in the back seat and cuffed. Swap the cruiser for an ambulance and Carpenter gets rid of the whole slow-grinding process of the legal system with a single cut as Kristen arrives at the North Bend Psychiatric Hospital under the care of Dr Stringer (Jared Harris) and under the suspicious and ever-watchful eyes of Nurse Lundt (Susanna Burney, channelling more than a soupçon of Louise Fletcher) and gruff porter Roy (D.R. Anderson).

She quickly meets her fellow inmates: the moody Emily (Mamie Gummer), artistic but delusional Iris (Lyndsy Fonseca), narcissistic Sarah (Danielle Panabaker), and childlike, frightened Zoey (Laura-Leigh). She’s assigned to a cell occupied by Tammy, of whom the others are unwilling to speak, and soon discovers two things. One, Stringer is an advocate of experimental therapy; two, the institute appears to be haunted. And Kristen strongly suspects that the other girls know more than they’re telling. Then the disappearances begin …

‘The Ward’ plays its string out for a good chunk of its fairly short (84 minute) running time, Carpenter building tension as effectively as anywhere else in his filmography. Everything coheres to convince you this is a straight-up horror movie, including a grotesque and somewhat J-horror inspired ghost girl who perpetrates some pretty nasty acts. With its scenes of electro-shock treatment taken to the extreme and the kind of eyeball trauma normally reserved for a Lucio Fulci production – not to mention a sequence of flashbacks which culminate in a pretty unambiguous inference of paedophilia – ‘The Ward’ trawls the very rim of its 15-rating.

But Carpenter plays fair with the twist, seeding pertinent information throughout and delivering the big reveal with the minimum of expositional dialogue. Harris has the appropriate gravitas as Stringer to make the scene work, and Heard delivers a convincing vacillation between raw anger and shocked disbelief. I’ll say it again: Heard is fantastic. In fact, kudos to the whole cast: Gummer, Fonesca, Panabaker and Laura-Leigh give it their all, while Anderson finds a recognisably human quality in a character that could easily have come over as a sleazeball or a thug. There’s a wonderful little scene where he’s stuck with the repairwork following an escape attempt by Kristen, his labours interrupted by the flirtatious Sarah, and the look on his face and the weariness in his voice totally sell Roy as a wage-slave with a thankless job who really appreciate it if everyone would just piss off and leave him alone.

Yaron Orbach’s cinematography recalls the glory days of Dean Cundey’s collaborations with Carpenter’s. Mark Kilian’s score is also reminiscent of Carpenter’s stripped-down, atmospheric work as composer. And yet – maybe because it trades on generically obvious heavy-handed foley work and by-now-cliched ghost-girl visuals rather than breaking new ground – ‘The Ward’ doesn’t quite measure up the old-school Carpenter. And maybe this, as well as the reasons mentioned in the first paragraph, accounts for the indifferent box office response. Nonetheless, with lesser fare pulling in the punters, it was just criminal that ‘The Ward’ did such poor business.

Even allowing for the four years between ‘Ghosts of Mars’ and his superior episodes of the TV show ‘Masters of Horror’, and then another four years between those works and ‘The Ward’, Carpenter seems to have relapsed into inactivity. I really hope ‘The Ward’ doesn’t prove to be his swansong but if that is the case, then he’s bowing out on his best feature-length film since ‘They Live’. (Mr Carpenter, in the unlikely event that you’re reading this, I’d like to keep doing 13 For Halloween on this blog for a good many years to come, and I’ve reviewed an awful lot of your filmography already. More films would be greatly appreciated.)

BOND-A-THON: Skyfall

Let’s talk about the mythical “third Bond movie”. There is a school of thought which avers that the third outing is where an actor truly settles into the role, the formula really clicks together, God is in his Heaven and all is right with the world. This bunch of hogwash is based on the fact that Connery’s third Bond movie, ‘Goldfinger’, was when the producers really ramped up the whole “girls, guns, gadgets and globetrotting” ethos, while Moore’s – ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’ – marked the point at which the filmmakers decided to stop trying to force him into the Connery mould and let him be more, well, Moore-ish. Oh yeah, and they went to town on the girls, guns, gadgets and globetrotting as well.

It’s a rule of thumb you can’t even apply to Lazenby and Dalton because, respectively, they only appeared as Bond once (mercifully) and twice (tragically). And let’s utterly confound the theory by pointing out that number three Brosnan was the god-awful ‘The World is Not Enough’.

Now let’s talk about a couple of things I’ve said on this blog previously apropos of ‘Skyfall’, the expectations attached to it, and its director Sam Mendes. Two years ago, in a rambling review of ‘Quantum of Solace’, I said this: “I came across an article on the net last week speculating whether Sam Mendes was on board to direct the next Bond film or just as a consultant and I groaned inwardly. Don't get me wrong: ‘American Beauty’ - belter; ‘Road to Perdition’ - handsomely mounted; ‘Jarhead’ - moments of brilliance. But nothing in the filmography that says "hey, you know what, that Sam Mendes bloke has got Bond movie director written all over him". I shook my head and thought, Great, first Marc Forster and now Sam Mendes ...”

Re-reviewing ‘QoS’ – which is only one letter removed from ‘PoS’ – nine days ago for this very blog-a-thon, I concluded: “ ‘Skyfall’ doesn’t have to do much more than be edited properly and have a coherent script to emerge as infinitely better than its predecessor. But, please EON, please please please, after a four year wait and with only a finite amount of times the now 44-year old Craig can reprise the role, please let ‘Skyfall’ be awesome.”

With regard to that first comment: please accept my apologies, Mr Mendes, you’ve turned in a damn good film. With regard to the second: although ‘Skyfall’ does a lot more than just deliver better editing and a coherent script, it stops just short of awesome. But damn good is more than acceptable, particularly after the shoddy and joyless place Marc Forster had taken the series.

‘Skyfall’ gets off to one hell of a bloody good start with Bond (Daniel Craig) in the middle of a mission that’s swiftly going tits up. He’s in Turkey where a generic bad guy has swiped a hard-drive containing the identities of a fuckton of deep cover MI6 agents. A car chase segues into a motorcycle chase (which pisses all over the motorcycle chase in ‘Tomorrow Never Dies’), in turn segueing into a fight on the top of a moving train (which pisses all over the fight on the top of a moving train in ‘Octopussy’), the whole thing concluding with a “wait a minute, this can’t happen in a Bond movie” moment akin to the ostensibly downbeat pre-credits payoffs in ‘You Only Live Twice’ and ‘Die Another Day’.

Following a pretty effective opening credits sequence (kudos to Adele for delivering the most appropriately Bondian theme song since Tina Turner kicked ass with ‘GoldenEye’), the focus shifts to M (Judi Dench). Notwithstanding that Dench’s M has come to redefine the character, the secret service hasn’t had an easy ride on her watch. Between the bad decisions motivated by personal feelings in ‘The World is Not Enough’, her mistrust of the 14-month imprisoned Bond in ‘Die Another Day’ and the revelation that a long-term member of her personal staff has been working for the enemy in ‘Quantum of Solace’, it’s kind of surprising M’s still has a job. In ‘Skyfall’, she faces some pretty harsh questions from the establishment with new intel chief Mallory (Ralph Fiennes) pressuring her to take voluntary retirement. Meanwhile, axe-grinding politician Clair Dowar (Helen McCrory) forces M to give evidence at an enquiry over a series of MI6 debacles culminating in a terrorist attack on HQ.

During all of this upheaval, Bond returns to duty albeit physically unfit, psychologically battered and borderline alcohol dependant. There’s a Metallica song that contains that lines “breaking your life / broken, beat and scarred / we die hard”. A pretty good description of the bad place Bond is in. And it doesn’t get any easier as he sets off in pursuit of Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem), a cyber-terrorist and an unwelcome blast from M’s past, who is orchestrating a campaign of revenge.

This is about all I can give away in terms of the narrative. ‘Skyfall’ is the most spoiler-laden Bond movie yet made, with a final act sucker punch that gives it real weight. It’ll probably be all over the internet within the next couple of days, but I’m honour bound to keep it under wraps. This also restricts me in terms of discussing the film on any deeper level.

Here’s what I will say: ‘Skyfall’ is at one and the same time a Bond film for the modern age (and manages to be so without the horribly misjudged Bourne-stylee crapola of its immediate predecessor) and the most regressive Bond movie in ages. Its modern age credentials take the form of a debate, which forms the backbone of the movie, of the purpose and relevance of MI6 – and therefore, by extension, of Bond himself – in an era where the geo-political map of the Cold War has long since been blurred and enemies of the state can literally be anywhere.

It’s no coincidence that, of all the Bond movies, ‘Skyfall’ spends the most time on home soil. Of the three major action sequences, one is chase/shoot-out plays out through London’s cavernous and sepulchral Underground system and then erupts into its crowded streets, while the denouement takes place in Scotland.

As to the regressive elements, most of them gel with overall aesthetic. Mendes finds a way to balance the fanboy imperative with his personal vision as a filmmaker. And with ‘Skyfall’ marking 50 years of Bond, he includes some nifty in-jokes to far greater effect than the horrible parade of references in ‘Die Another Day’. The Aston Martin DB is a case in point: brought quite literally out of cold storage and still boasting all the bells and whistles from ‘Goldfinger’, it’s a startling moment of discontinuity since Craig’s Bond won the thing at cards in ‘Casino Royale’ (which, in the current timeline, was essentially Bond #1) and yet its machine guns and ejector seat explicitly recall Connery’s third outing. (We’re back to the mythical Bondian rule of thirds again.)

Elsewhere, ostensible Bond girl Severine (Berenice Marlohe) is written in, bedded and written out even more perfunctorily than Gemma Arterton’s Agent Fields in ‘Quantum of Solace’. Bardem’s characterization of Silva sails very close to outright camp and, sad to say, a borderline homophobic scene reminiscent of the mincing Wynt and Kidd in ‘Diamonds Are Forever’ got the biggest laughs at the screening I attended. At least Silva isn’t out for world domination and presents a definite threat to 007, sparing us a return to the flamboyant but laughably ludicrous villains of the Moore era.

Q returns – kudos to Ben Wishaw for sweeping away all thoughts of John Cleese in the last couple of Brosnan movies – as does another staple of the franchise, while the baton is passed on in terms of … but that would be telling. In its concluding scenes, ‘Skyfall’ totally eradicates Bond’s past and joyfully re-establishes the expected tropes, a decision which seems almost contradictory. Indeed, there’s a puppy-doggish eagerness to evoke the Bonds of old in the very last scene that’s tonally at odds with the dark drama that’s occupied the preceding two and a quarter hours. There is, in other words, a sense of transition where I’d expected consolidation.

So, yes, perhaps the “third Bond movie” ethos holds true: just as ‘Goldfinger’ and ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’ weren’t necessarily the best that Connery and Moore delivered but rather the clearest distillations of the formula, ditto ‘Skyfall’. Let’s hope that whatever comes next doesn’t relapse into the formulaic.

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #12: Frontier(s)

Imagine ‘Hostel’ meets ‘La Haine’, but moving from the urban jungle to the isolated rural locale of, say, ‘Calvaire’ or ‘Haute Tension’, and with an anti-Nazi commentary, and you’ve got ‘Frontier(s)’, Xavier Gens’ brutal and shattering feature-length debut.

As Paris riots following the election of a right-wing government, a gang of youths dodge the bullets, the burnt-out cars and the ministrations of a bludgeon-first-ask-questions-later police force. They have a bag of stolen money and one of their members is nursing a wound that’s leaving him closer to death every minute it goes untreated. Their priority is to get the fuck out of Paris, head through the country and make for the border. They have a vague plan involving getting to Holland, but just staying alive is going to prove the real challenge.

Let’s meet our hoodie (anti)heroes, and I’ll be honest here – for the first twenty minutes of the movie they present as a bunch of total wankers. We’ve got Alex (Aurelian Wiik), the nominal leader of the group; Tom (David Saracino), his unpredictable and moody second-in-command; the moderately more sensible but gauche Farid (Chems Dahmani); Sami (Adel Bencherif), the aforementioned injured party; and Yasmine (Karina Testa), Sami’s sister, who is pregnant with Alex’s child.

For a while, ‘Frontier(s)’ reminded me of Kim Chapiron’s ‘Sheitan’ (made a year before Gens’ opus) – a bunch of unlikeable youths head for the country and fall afoul of some scarily fucked-up backwoods types. But whereas ‘Sheitan’ has a barnstorming and perversely likeable performance from Vincent Cassel as the anti-heroes’ chief antagonist, ‘Frontier(s)’ gives us a villain whose icy, buttoned-down aesthetic allows for no guilty pleasure style empathy. A villain, moreover, whose agenda anchors the second half of ‘Frontier(s)’ despite Gens’ increasingly frenzied set-pieces. If ‘Sheitan’ is ultimately a black comedy, there is nothing funny about ‘Frontier(s)’.

With the script splitting Alex’s gang up – to the point, as things progress, where they’re often alone and confused and pitifully unprepared for the nasty shit that’s in store for them – they delivered into the less than tender care of former Nazi war criminal Von Geisler (a genuinely terrifying Jean-Pierre Jarris) and his family of grotesques. How grotesque? Put it this way: the Von Geisler clan make la familie Leatherface look like the freakin’ Waltons.

Von Geisler (known as “papa”, the only remotely comforting aspect to his persona) is keen for son Karl (Patrick Ligardes) to take his place as the head of the family. And who can blame him with only the corpulent Hans (Joel Lefrancois) and the thuggish Goetz (Samuel Le Bihan) offering any competition? He is entirely blameworthy, however, in pimping out his daughter Gilberte (Estelle Lebefure) to ensnare victims, and forcing the abducted and cowed Eva (Maud Forget) into a life of servitude at the family’s behest.

The travails that the Von Geislers put our delinquent protagonists through are straight-up torture porn, as visceral and unflinching as anything that venal subgenre has served up. For the most part, though, he doesn’t linger on the violence – it is sudden, shocking and all the more effective as a result. If anything, Gens pays more attention to the grue when the remaining survivor fights back in the protracted finale (particularly during a bit of business involving a circular saw).

There’s also a suspenseful woman-in-peril sequence as Yasmine realizes that, unlike the outpouring of race-hate that motivates the attacks on her friends, the family have a different fate in mind for her. Which isn’t to say that ‘Frontier(s)’ channels suspense tactics over outright gore. The film is as blood-soaked and gruelling in its catalogue of nastiness as any other example of the new wave of French horror – and, yes, I’m including ‘Martyrs’ and ‘Inside’ in that assessment.

Indeed, with the spatial peregrinations which suggest that the film’s second half plays out across an area at least three times bigger than the establishing shots of the Von Geisler farm imply, and with a shoot-out-and-explosions finale that seems to have wandered in from a Luc Besson production, there’s no denying that ‘Frontier(s)’ goes increasingly over the top the longer it unspools. What prevents it from going off the rails is the absolute conviction of Gens’ political agenda, culminating in a final scene – which fades to end credits at precisely the right moment – guaranteed to leave you feeling as gutted as anything that’s preceded it.

Oh, and that parenthetical plural in the title? It refers to borders that are geographical, social, political and historical/ideological.

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #11: Roadgames

Perhaps the most amiable serial-killer thriller I’ve ever seen, Richard Franklin’s 1981 cult Ozsploitation opus ‘Roadgames’ features an eccentric truck driver, a sassy hitch-hiker, a seemingly motiveless killer, a collection of oddballs who generally hinder our poetry-spouting hero, some squirmily tense sequences and more laugh-out-loud funny moments than any film of this ilk has any right indulging itself in.

We open with Pat Quid (Stacy Keach) berating himself for not picking up an attractive hitchhiker earlier in the day. His regret his compounded when he sees a van driver taking side hitchhiker into a motel, and coincidentally taking the last available room which Pat had kind of figured on checking into himself after several nights sleeping in the truck. Waking early the next day to pick up a refrigerated trailer full of meat, Pat notices the van driver at his motel room window, eagerly watching the garbage men hauling off some heavy-looking black bags.

He thinks no more of it and tools off to pick up his load. Then, in true Willie Nelson style, he’s on the road again, and the first half hour or so of ‘Roadgames’ unravels leisurely as Pat whiles away the miles talking to his pet dingo Boswell, spouting poetry and making up stories about the motorists he passes. Franklin fundamentally understands the ennui that essentially fills a truck driver’s day, even if – to use Pat’s much-repeated admonition – “because I drive a truck does not make me a truck driver”. (I’m certainly hard-pressed, as the son of a trucker, to think of many gentlemen of that profession who listen to Mozart, even if they do try to keep up with the zesty pizzicatos of ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik’ on the mouth-organ. My dad was more a Johnny Cash kind of guy. But I digress.) Franklin also understands the distances travelled and the tedium of the passing miles, never mind how rugged the scenery.

Then things take a darker turn when he witnesses the van driver burying something in the middle of nowhere. News reports of a “Jack the Ripper type” murdering young women flood the radio. Pat picks up sassy hitch-hiker Pamela (Jamie Lee Curtis), an heiress looking to dodge the stultifying expectations of her upbringing and experience a little excitement.

The old adage about being careful what you wish for applies.

Franklin structures the film cleverly. An Hitchcockian murder scene in the motel gives credence to Pat’s concerns, yet the string of misunderstandings and embarrassing situations engendered by his burgeoning obsession with his van-driving nemesis gradually overwhelm the narrative to the point where it’s easy to believe that Pat’s overactive imagination has tipped him into the realms of outright paranoia. This interpretation seems to be consolidated by a sequence late in the film where Pat, sleep deprived and hallucinating weird patterns of yellow lines and jay-walking kangaroos, pursues the van into downtown Perth in what has to be the slowest chase scene in the history of cinema. The pay-off that Franklin delivers, however, is not just generic – which, in itself, isn’t necessarily a cause for criticism – but tortuously contrived: the aforementioned oddballs, all of whom have spectacularly got the wrong idea about Pat, converge in the unlikeliest of circumstances to point the finger as the cops close in.

But the gleefully macabre coda which solves the mystery of why Pat’s truck was running slightly overweight steers the tone back the admixture of droll black comedy and edgy suspense that makes ‘Roadgames’, notwithstanding its one narrative flub, such a winning and eminently watchable little film.

13 FOR HALLOWEEN #10: The Innkeepers

I reviewed Ti West’s ‘House of the Devil’ as part of last year’s Summer of Satan retrospective and it was a real find. West respected his audience’s intelligence, respected his heroine’s plight (Joceline Donahue’s performance was spot-on and her character never corralled into being a mere scream queen), and built tension through atmosphere and character rather than relying on cheap scares or torture porn nastiness. 

Featuring a Ti West movie as part of this year’s 13 for Halloween was a done deal!

‘The Innkeepers’ consolidates much of what made ‘House of the Devil’ a success: an empathetic heroine who is recognisably human with all the confusion and vulnerability anyone would display if confronted by the unexplained or horrific; a slow-burn approach to narrative that suggests and unnerves rather than lambasting with exposition or playing the horror card too early; and a clearly defined location that anchors the movie and defines its atmosphere so effectively that its architectural presence is almost a character in its own right.

In ‘House of the Devil’, it was the kind of gothic-styled house that wouldn’t look out of place in Amityville or Haddonfield. In ‘The Innkeepers’, it’s the Yankee Pedlar Inn, a hotel on the verge of closing down. The owner is in Barbados and not really concerned about business – or the lack during – during its final weekend as a going concern. Staff is down to two junior employees – Claire (a never-better Sara Paxton) and Luke (Pat Healy) – the rooms on the top floor have been stripped and closed off, and the only remaining guests are actress-cum-medium Leanne Rease-Jones (Kelly McGillis), Gayle (Alison Barlett), a brittle and recently estranged woman with her young son in tow, and an unnamed old man (George Riddle) who checks in demanding the third floor suite where he spent his honeymoon.

The events that happen to, and around, this small cluster of people have their beginning and their end in the story of Madeleine O’Malley (Brenda Cooney), the betrayed bride whose spirit is said to haunt the establishment. Luke buys into the legend, spending his time building a Yankee Pedlar website and filming and recording various areas of the inn, determined to capture some supernatural activity on tape. Claire, though sceptical, assists him. Yet it’s Claire who becomes attuned to the first hints that the past is coming back to haunt the place.

West does two very canny things with ‘The Innkeepers’. Firstly, he lets the Yankee Pedlar grow on you (and gradually begin to creep you out) at the same rate that it does the protagonists. He lets you discover things about the inn – and about Madeleine – at the same time that Claire and Luke discover them. In a genre where filmmakers often rush to play their hand, almost desperate to telegraph to the audience that the protagonists are in peril, West understands the virtue of patience. Accordingly, there is a pacing and elegance to his work absent from most contemporary cinema. ‘The Innkeepers’, with its haunted hotel imbued with the shadows of the past, has the ingredients of a classic ghost story and that’s what West lets it be.

Secondly – pace – my use of the description “haunted hotel”, West has the infinite wisdom not to try to walk in the footprints of ‘The Shining’. It would have been so easy, and so disastrous, to set up the Yankee Pedlar as a kind of Overlook Jnr. West sidesteps this potential pitfall with all the elegance that he demonstrates elsewhere.

And if all this talk of elegance and classicism suggests that ‘The Innkeepers’ is more redolent of the old BBC ‘Ghost Story for Christmas’ adaptations than American horror cinema’s most exciting young practitioner, then send for the bellhop and have him take your worries away. When it needs to be, ‘The Innkeepers’ is genuinely creepy. And what it comes time for the big nasty scares at the end, West conjures a claustrophobic and downbeat finale.

There is very little wrong with this film – the for-the-sake-of-it final shot is a minor annoyance – and once again West demonstrates an excellent facility with actors (across the board, the performances are note-perfect) and conjures an incredibly handsomely mounted production on a limited budget. With his contributions to anthology films ‘V/H/S’ and ‘The ABCs of Death’ well received, and ‘The Sacrament’ and ‘The Side Effect’ in pre-production, West is a talented guy who’s doing consistently good work – that he’s barely into his thirties bodes well, hopefully, for more great genre movies in years to come.

THE ITALIAN HORROR BLOGATHON: Eaten Alive!

Posted as part of the Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies 3rd Annual Italian Horror Blogathon

Of all the Italian horror movie subgenres – from ridiculously gory zombie epics to the excessive aesthetic of the giallo – the most notorious is the cannibal movie. The ‘Citizen Kane’ of which is indisputably Ruggero Deodato’s ‘Cannibal Holocaust’, a film I featured on this blog two years ago. That review turned into a three-part appraisal: 3,500 words on one of the most reviled films of all time, a piece of work so controversial that … well, drop the title in conversation at the office tomorrow and see what kind of response you get.

It only takes the briefest perusal of the subgenre to realise that, alongside Deodato, one name stands tall in the canon of cannibalism: Umberto Lenzi. It was, after all, his 1972 opus ‘The Man from Deep River’ (a.k.a. ‘Deep River Savages’) that properly kickstarted the cannibal boom of the mid-70s to late-80s, and his farewell to the flesh(munching) was no less a controversy-fest than ‘Cannibal Ferox’ (a.k.a. ‘Make Them Die Slowly’), a flick that cheerfully billed itself as “the most violent film ever made” and laid claim – with probably only the mildest exaggeration – to being banned in 31 countries.

Inbetween ‘The Man from Deep River’ in 1972 and ‘Eaten Alive!’ eight years later, two things happened which shaped the narrative of Lenzi’s second cannibal movie. The first was a matter of inevitability: a couple of early cannibal movies made a chunk of money and Italian exploitation cinema did what it’s best at and jumped on the bandwagon. Giallo master Sergio Martino sent Ursula Andress into the clutches of a primitive tribe in ‘The Mountain of the Cannibal God’ (a.k.a. ‘Prisoner of the Cannibal God’); sultan of sleaze Joe d’Amato threw porn into the mix with ‘Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals’ and ‘Papaya, Love Goddess of the Cannibals’; and Ruggero Deodato’s excesses in ‘Last Cannibal World’ (a.k.a. ‘Jungle Holocaust’) merely served to soften his audience up for the real deal, i.e. ‘Cannibal Holocaust’. In 1980, the year ‘Eaten Alive!’ was released, the cannibal boom reached its zenith, with Marino Girolami’s ‘Zombie Holocaust’ (a.k.a. ‘Queen of the Cannibals’), Joe d’Amato’s ‘Orgasmo Nero’ (oooh, he was a subtle one with titles, our Joe), two efforts by Jess Franco – ‘White Cannibal Queen’ and ‘The Devil Hunter’, both of which have multiple aliases – and Hark Tsui’s ‘We’re Going to Eat You’ all riding the coat-tails of ‘Cannibal Holocaust’ into the grindhouses and fleapits of the world. There was, in other words, a surfeit of cannibal movies vying for a paying audience at the time ‘Eaten Alive!’ came out. A canny filmmaker – and exploitation filmmakers, from whom a fast shoot, a lurid title and a low-budget were the key ingredients to turning a quick profit, are amongst the canniest – would be turning his mind at this point to the question of how to make a cannibal film that was just different enough.

The second thing that happened took the world by surprise. In November 1978, the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project in Guyana was the scene of an incidence of so-called “revolutionary suicide” which cost the lives of over 900 cult members, a third of them children. The commune was ruled over by religious leader / fraud / fuckin’ wacko [delete as applicable] Jim Jones. History would record the site, the tragedy and the perpetrator in a stark one-word reminder: Jonestown.

‘Eaten Alive!’ – the exclamation mark defiantly up there on the screen in the opening credits – fuses the expected tropes of the cannibal flick with a study of cultism and menticide. This throws us into a state of dichotomy already. Its release just fourteen months after Jonestown – a clear indication that this isn’t a clear-eyed artistic response to the tragedy made after much reflection and having allowed enough time to pass – betokens ‘Eaten Alive!’ as an out-and-out exploitationer. And yet the very fact that Lenzi chose to incorporate the Jonestown holocaust (I feel justified in using that word) in a down and dirty B-movie that would undoubtedly have turned the requisite profit if he’d simply conceived it as ‘The Man from Deep River Part 2’ forces the reviewer to engage with it on a different level.

The film opens at the Niagara Falls, where a harried looking man is assassinated by a Eurasian gentleman who uses a blow-pipe and a poison-tipped dart. Cut to New York where same individual effects two further assassinations in same manner. Fleeing the scene, he’s hit by a truck. Goodnight Vienna. Gruff cops Lieutenant Creal (Gerald Grant) and Inspector Logan (Jake Teague) are stuck for ID or motive; the only thing on him is a reel of home movie footage labelled as the property of heiress Diana Morris (Paola Senatore). Slight problem: Diana went missing some months previously. Diana’s sister Sheila (Janet Agren) is asked to view the footage. It depicts a weird ritual in a foreign locale.

With no idea what it means or where her sister disappeared to, Sheila turns to anthropologist Professor Carter (Mel Ferrer) who offers a couple of suggestions as to the location, the jungles of southeastern Asia being his first guess. That’s where Sheila heads. Engaging the services of J&B-swilling ’Nam deserter Mark Butler (Robert Kerman), they head into the jungle.

An encounter with a former member of a cult run by the charismatic Jonas (Ivan Rassimov) gives them their first real clue, but soon afterwards they are abandoned by their native guide. More by luck than judgement they find themselves at Jonas’s encampment. Though “luck” probably isn’t the operative word; for all that Sheila is reunited with Diana (who is half stoned and half terrified of Jonas), it’s made explicit that neither she nor Mark will be allowed to leave. 

Compounding their problems, Mark falls afoul of Jonas’s brutish second-in-command while Sheila finds herself subject to the same cocktail of drugs, mind games and sexual depravities that Jones practised on Diana.

The film really gets its exploitative funk on at this point. Even before Jonas sets his sights on Sheila, we’re treated to the rape and dismemberment of a girl by a local cannibal tride (yup, this is a cannibal film that gets around the problem of nobody in Jonas’s commune being likely to chow down on some longpig by conveniently having a cannibal tribe live next door), and a ceremony in which recently widowed cult member Mowara (Me Me Lai) is released from her holy union in order to remarry. This ceremony involves the deceased’s three brothers publicly having sex with her. The scene is unintentionally hilarious, mainly for the utterly bored look on Lai’s face and the 0.0001 seconds that brother number two pretends to be doing the nasty, as if the thought of even pretending to have sloppy seconds is repugnant to him.

The scene where Jonas drugs Sheila and utilises a dildo smeared in cobra blood, however, isn’t hilarious. Not at all.

Subject of the poor bastard snake that had to die in order to achieve this scene, it should be mentioned that ‘Eaten Alive!’ is no film for ophidiophobes. The film crawls with snakes, most of them in documentary footage or scenes lifted from other films – ‘The Man from Deep River’ and ‘Primitive Desires’ are heavily plundered – in order to bulk out the running time with random acts of animal violence. Thus we have snake-on-monkey violence, mongoose-on-snake violence, and man-on-snake violence. There’s also some man-on-crocodile nastiness.

So, yeah: ‘Eaten Alive!’ is pretty nasty. It wants its actresses disrobed as much as possible and its wildlife dead. It’s not really all that bothered about how anyone else fares, for that matter. During an escape attempt from the commune, Mark encounters the nearby cannibal tribe and watches them castrate one of their own. No particular reason as far as I could discern, just penis here, penis gone, lots of blood. But there’s also a curious lack of engagement in all this unpleasantness. The animal deaths are inserted into the film haphazardly and without regard to continuity. Scenes of nudity and rape play out with a sort of blank indifference. The big break-out and pursuit that occupies the final reel is weirdly devoid of tension.

And I’m not sure that any of these things can be put down to directorial incompetence. Lenzi had called the shots on more than forty movies by the time he made ‘Eaten Alive!’, including giallo faves ‘A Quiet Place to Kill’, ‘Knife of Ice’ and ‘Spasmo’. Simply put, the man knew how to construct a movie. I have a theory that ‘Eaten Alive!’ – as risible as it is in some respects (case in point: it’s vaguely suggested that the blow-pipe wielding hitman is whacking former cult members who might blow the gaffe on what Jonas is up to, yet Jonas is subsequently shown exiling a follower for a minor transgression, the implication being that Jonas deals with insubordination by sending people home then paying airfare for one of his goons to go and track them down and assassinate them in the most attention-drawing manner imaginable rather than simply passing them over to the cannibal tribe next door) – disinterestedly heaps on the gore and the grotesquery as a comment on the banality of evil.

For all that Jonas has established his sect in the middle of nowhere, the emphasis is always on ceremony and a masquerade of civilised behaviour: there are opulent feasts; the interior décor of native huts betrays a western-capitalist sensibility; Jonas plays recorded music during ceremonial proceedings. These are contrasted against the natural world – and I’m talking the kind of nature that Tennyson described as “red in tooth and claw”. For all that Jonas encourages his followers to participate in what he calls “purification”, every frame that Lenzi puts on screen reminds us that there’s nothing pure going on here. Quite the opposite.

The horror, the (Italian) horror ...

The 3rd Annual Italian Horror Blog-a-thon kicks off over at Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies tomorrow, and runs till All Hallow's Eve.

I've made it a point of contributing in previous years - a few gialli in 2009, and a piece on Fulci's 'The Beyond' last year - and I'm definitely not missing out on the mayhem this time round. I've got something sick and fucked up planned for the first day of the blog-a-thon. 

Tune in to The Agitation of the Mind tomorrow (perhaps best if you don't plan on eating afterwards), and check out Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies over the next week - there'll be plenty of dark delights from other quarters.