WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Anthropophagus: The Beast

Watching exploitation movies, there’s always the risk of an anticipation/actuality disconnect. Sometimes the title sets up the false expectation. ‘Lesbian Vampire Killers’, anyone? I was expecting a movie about lesbians hunting vampires, Buffy gone muffy as it were. Sometimes the cover art suggests a lurid thrill-ride only for the viewer to realise, as the end credits roll, that the artist had given up on the piece of shit movie ten minutes in and painted what they would have conjured on screen if only someone had demonstrated the foresight to hire them as director instead of the talentless fucking hack who actually called the shots on the rancid slab of celluloid in question.

On which note: ladies and gentlemen, please give a big warm Agitation of the Mind raised middle finger to Joe D’Amato’s ‘Anthropophagus: The Beast’.

Approaching the film, I was aware of two things: its presence on the DPP’s “video nasties” list, and the embryo-munching scene that earned its place there. I was aware of its director, his reputation and the catalogue of cinematic excrescence that bears his name. He’s not even a stranger to the Winter of Discontent; back in 2010, I wrapped up a review of the loathsome ‘Emanuelle in America’ – a film whose woman-on-horse masturbation scene is something I would give a lot to unsee – with the heartfelt homily “fuck you and rot in hell, Joe D’Amato”.

So I’m not going to clog up the thousand words of this review with any bemoaning the fact that I didn’t know what I’d let myself in for. I was even aware, courtesy of an entry in Tim Brayton’s 2010 Summer of Blood season on Antagony & Ecstasy, that this was one of the least ineptly made entries in the D’Amato canon even if it’s first half was terminally low on tension, incident and drama.

What I didn’t expect of ‘Anthropo-Fuck-This: The Cheese’ was that it would be so turgidly and dust-gatheringly slow. That the set-pieces would be so tortuously contrived and so utterly leeched of tension. That, at 91 minutes, it would contain more padding than an orthopaedic mattress. That, in short, it would leave me not disgusted, not outraged, not corrupted or depraved, but plainly and simply bored.

The opening scene has a German couple holidaying amongst the Greek islands finding themselves a nice empty beach. He stretches out and works on the tan, a pair of industrial sized headphones clamped over his ears; she plunges into the invigoratingly cold sea and swims out to where a rowing boat, seemingly devoid of rowers, is bobbing on the waves. What she finds in the boat isn’t revealed, but it occasions a piercing shriek, only the boyfriend doesn’t hear because of said personal stereo equipment. A POV shot of something heading from boat to shore suddenly gets very sinister as we see droplets of blood preceding its passage up the beach. The boyfriend looks up just in time to get a cleaver in his head.

It’s a reasonably effective opener. It sets the scene, it plays out in a somewhat unexpected manner and the sharp-instrument-meets-cranium pay off promises video nastiness a-go-go. So how much screen time do you reckon it accounts for? Minute and a half? Two? Three at the most?

Six minutes.

And how about the next sequence where Julie (Tisa Farrow), on her way to the island residence of an English couple to whose visually-challenged teenage daughter Rita (Margaret Mazzatini) she acts as carer, cadges a lift with sojourning twenty-somethings Maggie (Serena Grandi), Arnie (Bob Larsen), Carol (Zora Kerova), Danny (Mark Bodin) and Andy (Saverio Valone), only to find the island deserted and her friends’ house empty apart from a traumatized Rita? Ten or fifteen minutes? Twenty if you really want to probe the interrelationships?

Try forty minutes. Almost half the Christing movie.

And the interrelationships in question? Arnie’s married to Maggie who is heavily pregnant (hands up anyyone who can guess where this is going; congratulations, you’ve just won two tickets to the DPP’s annual ball); Andy and Danny are best buds, but Andy’s not too struck on the fact that Carol, his sister, has a thing for Danny, while Carol herself is gets royally pissed off very quickly over Danny’s immediate attraction to Julie. 

D’Amato establishes all of this so laboriously you’d think a Strindbergian angst-fest was on the cards. But no, Carol’s antagonism towards Julie pays off in a “locked in a cemetery at night” prank which (a) detracts from what could have been a tense “band of survivors hole up against unknown/unseen attacker” sequence, and (b) is curtailed arbitrarily before any atmosphere or tension can be developed. Otherwise, that’s it. The character dynamics are never explored.

Even when ‘Anthropo-Fake-Ass: The Puh-leeze’ creeps past the halfway mark and our merry band of stupid-decision-making protagonists fetch up at a creepy old house which seems to have shared an architect with the domicile in ‘Deep Red’, there’s no sense of D’Amato infusing his narrative with any degree of urgency. Chase scenes ebb to the soporific. Hushed and supposedly urgent dialogue passages are punctuated with more pregnant pauses than a Harold Pinter manuscript. Characters split up, get distracted or go wandering off on their own with such moronic regularity that you very quickly cease fearing for their safety and instead get bored at how fucking long it takes for the inevitable blood-letting.

Which brings us to the gore. It’s incredibly fake. Even by the standards of Italian horror movies. That horribly unconvincing mannequin that tumbles down the mountain at the end of Fulci’s ‘Don’t Torture a Duckling’? Documentary freakin’ realism compared to what’s on show here.

So, yeah: the viscera is phoney, the tension is a non-starter, there’s no nudity, and the music is like listening to a rhinoceros trying to emulate the stripped-down synth-heavy score of a John Carpenter classic using some saucepans and a kazoo. Take it from me, the only reason ‘Anthropo-Dickless: The Zzzzzzzs’ got put on the DPP list was to protect audiences of the day against the possibility of RSI from repeatedly ramming their thumbs down on the “fast forward” button.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: A Virgin Among the Living Dead

Made in 1973 and, arguably, a consolidation of the aesthetic triumphs and bold narrative experimentalism of ‘Vampyros Lesbos’ (1971) and ‘The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein’ (1972), the transitional ‘A Virgin Among the Living Dead’ denotes a continued rejection of genre imperatives and a deeper, more profound embrace of the director’s own iconoclastic vision. Indeed, ‘A Virgin Among the Living Dead’ – or, to use the more appealingly poetic original title, ‘Christina, princesse de l'érotisme’ – can be seen as the vanguard of Jesus Franco’s true golden age as auteur.

Who the hell am I kidding?

‘A Virgin Among the Living Dead’ was one of at least ten films that Franco made very quickly and on the cheap during 1973, which in turn was just one year in a decade which saw him churn out at least 70 titles. Apologies here for the lack of specificity, but given the panoply of pseudonyms the guy used (personal fave: Dave Tough), the 197 films that IMDb attributes to Franco as director is less a comprehensive filmography than a jumping off point for anyone determined enough to undertake their own research into the Spanish maverick’s long life and crazy career.

In the pantheon of cult and curious cinema, Franco’s name is up there with Jean Rollin, Joe D’Amato and Bruno Mattei, though it’s always seemed to be that he falls into something of a middle ground. Franco never quite attains the hazy dream-like conjurations of Rollin, nor does he go all-out in the pursuit of unapologetic exploitation a la D’Amato. And there’s enough of a signature style in evidence that he (mercifully) sidesteps Mattei’s rancid ineptitude.

‘AVAtLD’ charts the hallucinatory experiences of titular virginal heroine Christina Benson (Christina von Blanc) as she returns from schooling in London to the ancient and decaying family seat in wherever (I couldn’t determine whether it was in Europe or Latin America) for the reading of her father’s will. A local innkeeper tries to dissuade her from going to the house/chateau/mansion/castle [check out the screengrab below and delete as applicable] …

… and makes some pointed comments which suggest the place is empty. Factor in the English language title and I don’t think you’ll be in for any surprises come the denouement. She’s collected from the inn by chauffeur-cum-handyman Basilio (Jesus Manero – i.e. Franco himself), a tubby individual with a pre-Village People moustache, some evident learning difficulties and an inability to express himself in anything other than grunted monosyllables.

Arriving at chez Benson, she meets, in short order, eccentric pianist Uncle Howard (Howard Vernon), stern and unfriendly Aunt Abigail (Rosa Palomar), slatternly Carmence (Britt Nichols) who may or may not be related to someone, anyone or no-one and is given over to wandering around in a half-open nightgown most of the time, and a blind girl (Linda Hastreiter) who I don’t recall being referred to by name. This visually-challenged young lady seems to be a seer or medium and tells Christina that her soul is white, meaning she’s pure of heart, and oh by the way it might be in her best interests to pack her bags and head back to London like immediately.

A young lad she meets while out skinny-dipping (this kind of situation being par for the course in a Jess Franco movie) also proves reluctant to visit the house, while a strange old man they meet outside a nearby chapel opines that death is upon everything in the immediate locality. Me, I’d have been on the big silver bird for Heathrow or Gatwick at this point, but our heroine is incapable of taking a hint. The disturbingly erotic hallucinations she’s been having don’t convince her to relocate either, and even when the ghost of her father (Paul Muller) shows up to warn her she’s in grave danger of having her soul claimed by the Queen of the Night (Anne Libert), she stubbornly stays put. Although, to be fair, the Queen of the Night is a bit of fox. 

Anyway, what passes for the narrative leaps randomly between:

- Abigail and Basilio plotting against their richer relatives/employers respectively;

- Carmence throwing out a definite Sapphic vibe in Christina’s direction;

- hints that the entire household are vampires, ghosts or Satanists;

- Christina enduring visions of her eventual fate as a sacrificial offering.

Franco succeeds in maintaining an atmosphere of ambiguity – are Christina’s dreams/hallucinations genuine second sight, evidence of mental instability or the result of sexual hysteria? – but whether this achievement was by accident or design is hard to tell. Judged on most of the usual critical criteria, the film’s a mess and no doubt about it.

Acting? Von Blanc is gorgeous but her performance is trance-like; Nichols spends the movie directing a thousand yard stare just off camera as if to warn Franco that if she’s asked to flash her boobs just one more time, he’s getting a slap that’ll leave a mark; Vernon gives the typical Howard Vernon performance of any piece of Euro-shlock he’s even been in, which is to say he seasons the scenery, lightly grills it, gives himself a side order of fries, tucks in the napkin and wolfs in down like he hasn’t had a square meal in months.

Editing? Well, some of the shots match.

Music? Bruno Nicolai’s score veers from atonal brutality to bossa nova cheesiness with no respect for anyone’s sensibilities.

Cinematography? Please, no more zoom. Pleeeeeeeeaaassssse!

Script? It contains the line “Why did you shatter the ebony phallus?” The question isn’t even rhetorical. 

Reviewer’s exit line? That’ll be the one above. Thank you very much and good night.

SOMETHING FOR THE WEEKEND: Christina von Blanc in A Virgin Among the Living Dead

With the Winter of Discontent sweeping isobars of exploitation across the hitherto warm front of this blog, there didn't seem to be any excuse not to resurrect an eye-candylicious old tradition and raise the temperature over the next few weekends.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Almost Human

The aficionado of trash movies gets used to his or her viewing fare of choice going by various aliases (pop quiz: how many alternative titles for Mario Bava’s ‘Reazione a catena’ can you name?), or being lumbered with English language titles that have sweet f.a. to do with the indigenous original. Example: you can tell that Sergio Martino’s ‘I corpi presentato tracce di violenza carnale’ doesn’t literally translate as ‘Torso’ based purely on the difference of the amount of words in the title.

Which brings us to Umberto Lenzi’s ‘Milano odia: la polizia non puo sparare’. In English, and man is it one unwieldy motherfunster of a title: ‘Milan Hates: The Police Cannot Shoot’. A single line of dialogue in the very last scene offers context, but the title seems to have been settled on purely to suggest a connection to Sergio Martino’s ‘Milano trema: la polizia vuole giustizia’ (‘Milan Trembles: The Police Want Justice’) made the year before and itself a nod to Fernando di Leo’s ‘Milano calibro 9’. Because, hey, Italian exploitation cinema is nothing if not derivative.

It was released in the English speaking territories as ‘Almost Human’, a punchier title albeit one that’s utterly meaningless. If it’s supposed to refer to antagonist Guilio Sacchi (Tomas Milian), epic fail – the dude’s nowhere freakin’ near human. If it’s a nod to Commissioner Grandi (Henry Silva), the harried cop trying to prove Sacchi’s part in a kidnapping that has spiralled into a miasma of violence, then a better title might have been ‘All too Human’ since he’s strictured by rules, regulations, superiors and burden of proof.

Which makes ‘Almost Human’ sound like the Italian ‘Dirty Harry’, a prospect to set trash fans salivating when taken in conjunction with the presence of Henry Silva, he of the thousand yard stare that instantly communicates an inclination to challenge the mortality of the recipient of said stare. And there’s a slim case to be made for the comparison come the closing scenes. However, the focus remains on nervy, edgy, twitchy criminal Sacchi throughout. In other words: if this is ‘Dirty Harry al’ Italiana’, then it’s a fucked-up re-edit that gives Scorpio most of the screen time.

We first meet Sacchi in a tyre-squealing five minute opening sequence where he’s acting as getaway driver for a gang of bank-robbers. Approached by a cop threatening a ticket because he’s in contravention of a parking restriction, he panics. Net result: the bank job goes south, a child is kidnapped, the high speed pursuit ensues, they’re lucky to get away, and Sacchi takes a beating from his disaffected partners in crime. Later, ameliorating the humiliation with a skinful of liquor, he turns up on his on-off girlfriend Iona (Anita Strindberg)’s door demanding sex and money. He’s a regular charmer, our Sacchi.

Iona works for billionaire businessman Porrino (Guido Alberti) – that’s billionaire as in lira, by the way; dude’s probably worth about ten grand in dollars and the price of a second-hand car in pounds sterling – and when Sacchi learns that Porrino has a daughter, Marilu (Laura Belli), an only child, he hatches a kidnapping plot and ropes in loser friends Vittorio (Gino Santercole) and Carmine (Ray Lovelock).

From the outset, the script paints Sacchi as an asshole incarnate, a small man with a big ego and a loud mouth, and Milian positively embraces this characterisation. He takes risks when he doesn’t need to, kills when there are less psychotic options available, and creates dissent between Vittorio and Carmine. The kidnapping itself is a complete mess, Sacchi hopped up on amphetamines which he insists Carmine also takes; the snatch ends with Marilu’s boyfriend dead and the girl herself begging for sanctuary at the house of some well-to-do socialites, a situation that escalates into home invasion as Sacchi and his buddies pursue her.

This sequence is easily the film’s most exploitative moment, and seems to set things up for a juxtaposition of Sacchi’s scheme going tits up while Grandi’s dogged investigation brings him ever closer. Then Ernesto Gastaldi’s script hares off into Ripley territory as Sacchi races to establish an alibi, even if means allaying himself again with his erstwhile associates (another slapping around proves to be part of the deal). The ensuing cat and mouse shenanigans between Sacchi and Grandi detract from the human drama of the kidnapping on the one hand and the procedural elements of the investigation on the other. It gives ‘Almost Human’ a very different vibe and, particularly after its welter of car chases and casual violence, slows it down quite a bit.

There’s also a sense of the perfunctory, notably in the way supporting characters are tossed aside as soon as Lenzi and Gastaldi lose interest in them. The denouement, too, is somewhat by rote, although it does showcase Henry Silva in a magnificently badass image. Welcome to your month as an Agitation of the Mind banner icon, sir.

5th ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL: 13:11

On 13th November 2007, I posted my first article on The Agitation of the Mind. I acknowledged Werner Herzog as one of my favourite filmmakers and ’fessed up that I’d stolen the name of the blog from him. There followed, through the remainder of that month, a short Herzog season.

Five years and approximately 1,100 posts later, we’re firmly entrenched in this year’s Winter of Discontent and trawling through all things sick and twisted. I guess it’s like they say: it ain’t what you do, it’s what it does to you.

Anyway, to celebrate Agitation’s fifth anniversary, I’m rehashing a little gimmick I used back in April on the occasion of my fortieth birthday when I selected forty DVDs from the collection and took a screengrab at the fortieth minute. Here, I’ve hit pause and taken the screengrab at thirteen minutes and eleven seconds; and just to make it even more gimmicky, there are twenty four films: thirteen I’ve already reviewed on these pages, and eleven I haven’t … yet.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Bride of Chucky

Poor old Jesse (Nick Stabile). All he wants to do is skip town with his poor-little-rich-girl sweetheart Jade (Katherine Heigl) and leave behind his trailer park roots. Hell, he’s so hung up on the girl that he even turns down the buxom charms of white trash cougar Tiffany (Jennifer Tilly). But there are obstacles. The chief one being Jade’s uncle and legal guardian Warren Kincaid (John Ritter). And chief is the operative word. The dude’s chief of police. Obstacles two and three are: Norton (Michael Louis Johnson), Kincaid’s deputy who’s been assigned ongoing hassle Jesse duties; and Jesse’s total lack of funds.

Still, Tiffany’s not so miffed at Jesse’s rejection that she can’t offer him $1,000 to drive a couple of dolls from her oddball collection across country, and Jesse eagerly seizes upon the opportunity, finally convincing Jade to run away with him. Only, whaddaya know, there’s another obstacle. See, Tiffany’s been electrocuted in the bath by this point and her soul has transferred into a squat, ugly talking bride doll …

It should come as no surprise between the title and the synopsis above that Tiffany happens to be the former consort of one Charles Lee Ray, a gentleman of psychotic temperament who similarly found his essence trapped in the limited physicality of a plastic doll in Tom Holland’s superlative character drama grubby little slasher ‘Child’s Play’.

The ‘Child’s Play’ franchise limped along for three instalments, winding up with no small degree of contrivance at a military academy, before it received a thorough (and thoroughly unjustified) castigation at the hands of the British press after the gut-wrenchingly horrible killing, in 1993, of two-year-old James Bulger by two boys who were only ten years of age themselves. Just as the tabloids led a witch-hunt against ‘First Blood’ after the Hungerford massacre six years earlier – without any real evidence – so ‘Child’s Play 3’ bore the brunt of tabloid proselytizing and calls for it to be banned.

The seven-year hiatus between ‘Child’s Play 3’ and the revival of the saga with ‘Bride of Chucky’ speaks for itself. Ditto the jettisoning of the ‘Child’s Play’ brand the elevation of Chucky’s name to title-card identifier.

Oh, and there’s also the matter of writer Don Mancini (who has had a creative hand in all the Chucky films to date) re-imagining the whole thing as outright comedy. Sure, Chucky had dealt in pithy one-liners – what stalk ‘n’ slash anti-hero debuting in the 80s didn’t? – but the first three opuses were generally played straight.

Mancini and director Ronnie Yu did us all a favour conceiving of ‘Bride of Chucky’ as a delivery system for bad taste laughs. And they played a blinder in casting Jennifer Tilly. Although Tiffany is consigned to the bride doll’s body less than a third of the way into the film and her performance – like Brad Dourif’s as Chucky – is thereafter voice-over work, her live action turn for those first twenty five minutes is a showstopper. And even afterwards, her verbal sparring with Dourif is priceless.

Stabile and Heigl, however, are bland. Fortunately, Ritter and Johnson as their badge-and-gun wearing nemeses are suitably hissable. Chucky’s targeting of Chief Kincaid gives the film is best visual pun, an homage to 80s horror that is foreshadowed in an enjoyably over-egged evidence room theft sequence early in the film which tips its hat to Jason, Michael and Freddy.

The popularity of ‘Bride of Chucky’ led – inevitably, given the icky final reel hint as to the direction a follow-up might take – to a fifth outing, a few years later: ‘Seed of Chucky’. Then it was all quiet on the killer doll front for almost a decade. But the sneeringly murderous li’l fella’s back next year, though early word suggests (unpromisingly) that it’ll be a DTV release, in ‘Curse of Chucky’. “Chucky’s so Eighties,” someone scornfully, and unwisely, observes after clapping eyes on the doll. That’s as maybe, and his filmography is intermittent at best, but with the Chuckmeister about to embrace his fourth decade as a bona fide genre icon there’s no doubting his durability.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: The Loreley’s Grasp

Wotan … Lorelei … the sirens … the Rhein-gold … the treasure of the Nibelungen. Don’t worry if you’re not familiar with Richard Wagner’s epic cycle of four operas – neither are the makers of ‘The Loreley’s Grasp’. They can’t even spell “Lorelei” properly, FFS. 

We open with a woman shooing off her husband-to-be the night before their nuptials, reminding him that it’s bad luck to the see the bride before their wedding. Bad luck for her in this case. A scaly creature in a black robe comes crashing through her window, inflicts some heavy lacerations and tears her heart out.

The townsfolk are gripped by superstitious fear, particularly a blind Hungarian violinist (I’m not making this up) who babbles to anyone who will listen about the legend of the Lorelei. Elke Ackerman (Silvia Tortosa), a tutor at a nearby girls’ academy, petitions the mayor (Luis Induni) to provide protection for her charges. 

Local huntsman Sigurd (Tony Kendall) offers his services. Quite what he’d find to hunt along the banks of the Rhein is left unexplained, but when he turns up at the academy on his motorbike with a rifle slung casually over his shoulder he certainly looks the part. The academy, by the way, seems to have just one subject on the curriculum: pool parties.

The girls take a fancy to Sigurd and some early scenes suggest rivalry for his affections and his distraction by their nubile charms … but director Amando de Ossorio doesn’t go anywhere with it. Then we seem to be going down the route of fractious-relationship-thawing-to-romance between Sigurd and Elke … only for de Ossorio to completely sideline this aspect until the final reel when he needs to pile on the motivation for Elke’s ludicrously contrived woman-in-peril sequence.

The mid section consists of: Sigurd being a little too late in responding while various subsidiary characters are slashed by a scaly claw prior to organ removal; Sigurd receiving screeds of exposition from a professor (Angel Menendez) who performs arcane experiments and quite randomly keeps a sheep in his lab …

… and Sigurd becoming infatuated by a mysterious flame-haired woman (Helga Line) who only ever seems to appear near bodies of water and is carried away from him, just seconds before any hanky-panky can occur, by a manservant clad in archaic garb who wades into the Rhein with her. Failing to connect this odd behaviour with the ramblings of the violinist and the scaly appearance of the beast, Sigurd and Elke puzzle over the enigma:

Sigurd: All its traces were lost in the water.
Elke: Can it be something aquatic?
Sigurd: It’s possible.

No shit, Sherlock!

Eventually, our copper-topped temptress introduces herself as Lorelei and even king of the fuckin’ dimwits Sigurd realises that something is rotten in the state of Denmark. Or rather, someone is immortal in the hall of the Nibelungen.

The penny having dropped, it’s a race against time to end the Lorelei’s reign of terror. (Incidentally, for anyone who’s narked at me for not hoisting the jolly spoiler alert, ‘The Loreley’s Grasp’ tips you off about four minutes into its running time. Believe me, there’s nothing to spoil.) While the mayor uses all of his diplomacy to talk down a torch-bearing mob hellbent on getting themselves killed hunting the Lorelei by moonlight …

… Sigurd tangles with manservant Alberic (Luis Barboo), is mesmerised by Lorelei herself and only manages to escape thanks to resentment between the sirens. A word about the sirens: in legend, these are the fabled mer-women who are so beautiful and beguiling that sailors unthinkingly steer their craft into the rocks. In the world according to Amando de Ossorio, they’re a trio of bleached blondes in costumes more suited to a go-go bar than the epic grandeur of Teutonic legend.

De Ossorio is best known for his ‘Blind Dead’ sequence, four films that positively drip with atmosphere, the very fabric of them swirling with the misty dream-logic of folklore. ‘The Loreley’s Grasp’, his antepenultimate directorial outing, lacks any such vibe. It’s a disjointed affair, with entire scenes either truncated just as they’re beginning to develop a dynamic, or simply not revisited or referred to again. Continuity often seems to be an afterthought with one sequence in particular flitting from night to day to night in the space of about 15 seconds – I was unable to determine if this denotes the passage of a day and a half in the narrative or whether the editor had been drinking.

As an exploitationer, it’s similarly confused: De Ossorio lingers over the ripped-out-heart sequences, filming the viscera beneath the skin in gloating detail, but goes all coy when it comes to nudity. The pulchritude factor can’t be argued with, though. Helga Line in particular is a vision and her seductive Lorelei single-handedly gives the film its iconography and memorability.