Glowing in the dark, p.20
Glowing in the Dark, page 20
If giallo is, indeed, a genre, rather than a moment in time and space—that is to say, if giallo can be made outside Italy in the late-’70s/early-’80s—then Malignant is a giallo in every way that matters. Gory, brutal set piece kills splashed with flat light. A killer who is black-gloved and, for most of the picture, faceless. Police procedural aspects, with a pair of detectives and their supporting cast who could have stepped straight out of a cop show. A civilian who knows the solution to the mystery, but it’s buried in her memory, inaccessible until the pieces are all put together. All that’s missing is a prominently placed bottle of J&B Scotch.
Much as he did in Insidious 2, Wan and his collaborators also carry forward one equally integral part of the standard giallo formula, albeit one that has more problematic resonances in the present day: the explanation for the killer that is both logistically absurd and scientifically unlikely. And, in true Wan style, he cranks that to eleven.
In this case, that takes the form of Gabriel, our protagonist’s parasitic twin, who literally shares her brain. Thought to have been excised when she was a child, Gabriel has actually been lying dormant in her body, gaining power through a method every bit as grotesque as the “human puppet” scenes from the end of Dead Silence, and he uses their psychic link to render her inert while he uses her body to kill.
So, it’s The Dark Half if George Stark had superhuman strength and could control electricity. (Others have also pointed out the parallels with Basket Case.) Wait what, you’re saying, but no, there’s not enough time to stop and discuss the superhuman strength and the controlling electricity because we need to talk about the fact that Gabriel literally emerges from the back of our protagonist’s skull, meaning that when he kills, she is walking around backward.
And by “walking around,” I mean doing parkour up walls. And by “kills,” I mean everyone. People will tell you that this film’s third act is off the rails, and they’re right. But this movie was never on the rails. This thing went off the rails before the cold open. By the third act, it’s plowing through all the people on the platform.
It’s stupid and reckless and bold and breathtaking and it doesn’t really seem to care whether you’re along for the ride or not. It’s going. Grab on if you want to come, too. Otherwise, get out of the way.
Author’s Note: If anything, my affection for Malignant has only grown since I originally wrote this review after grinning my way through a theatrical screening. It is well on its way to being my favorite James Wan film, and one of my favorite flicks of the 21st century so far.
Originally published September 2021
Signal Horizon
“Every Day and Hour Now Outrages Are Taking Place”—Born for Hell (1976)
“You can kill, or get killed, but you’ve no right to kill yourself.”
Released in the U.S. under the much more lurid (and worse) title Naked Massacre—imagine, just imagine, having a title like Born for Hell at your fingertips and opting for Naked Massacre instead—the logline of Denis Heroux’s 1976 shocker is pure exploitation.
Based loosely on the real-life crimes of Richard Speck—which were committed only a decade before the film came out—in order to get that “it could happen to you” inspired by true events text crawl up front, Born for Hell tells the tale of a Vietnam vet set adrift who eventually breaks into the home of eight nurses and methodically torments, brutalizes, and slays them. What sets it apart from any number of other movies with similar premises is the decision to shift the action from Speck’s Chicago to then-contemporary Belfast in the midst of the “Troubles.”
This is all part of a larger effort, on the part of the film, to recontextualize the crimes of its Speck-alike as part of “the spirit of uncontrolled violence at loose in the world today,” as one in-camera news reporter puts it. Before we even really meet our killer, he has already been caught in a church bombing and watched a group of children pantomime an execution by firing squad.
Is this intended to suggest that our killer isn’t really responsible for his actions? Or is it, rather, an indication that the system has failed to get him the help he needs, as surely as it has failed his ultimate victims by not protecting them from him? Or is it just a way to further sensationalize its tale of brutality and degradation? You can find plenty of people online taking just about every one of these positions, and I honestly couldn’t say for sure which one I agree with.
What I will say is this, the movie takes a long time getting to the crimes themselves. We spend a lot of time with our antagonist, as he drifts from shelter to bar and back again. We watch him watching the habits of the nurses, see him rescue and then torment an older prostitute. He spends time with a fellow drifter from Vietnam, who suggests that women are all prostitutes, and that our killer is “afraid of women.”
Nor does it spend all of its time on the killer. We meet all the nurses who will become our eventual victims. They get various subplots and backstories. One is in love with one of the others and is trying to find a way to tell her. One is pregnant. One is engaged but her parents don’t approve. One witnesses a death in the street on her way home from the hospital, a result of the violence that is gripping the city.
The film’s brutality toward these women doesn’t start until around the halfway point, and when it does, it follows the playbook of Richard Speck’s actual crimes relatively closely, even while embellishing several points, including the only thing that could possibly justify that Naked Massacre title, when he takes the lesbian nurse and her unaware love interest and attempts to force them to have sex with one another.
These sequences are also extremely hard to watch. Not because of any actual violence or gore—there’s some of both, of course, he does kill eight women before the night is out—but because they are so grounded in a kind of reality. Mathieu Carriere turns in a sweaty, unsettling performance as our killer, alternating convincingly between cold-blooded and pathetic. Among the victims, there are no final girl heroics, and no A24-style histrionics—just people coming apart in various ways, and not always ones that “make sense.” Because our reactions to stress and trauma rarely “make sense.”
There’s no music during these scenes, and precious little to pull you out of the immediacy of the harrowing ordeal the women are undergoing. Off-key dubbing and tempera paint blood can only do so much to break the illusion of this queasy nightmare.
“The tension is repulsive,” Bob McCully writes in his Letterboxd review. “The violence is incredibly sleazy. There’s no music and no hope. […] You are sinking with these women, deeper and deeper into his throat.”
Which is to say that Born for Hell—good or bad—is most definitely an unpleasant watch. And it should be. We can argue whether films like this glorify their sex predator, serial killer antagonists by humanizing them, and we can debate whether the movie has a problem with women or just accurately depicts men who do, but we should all be able to agree that it should probably not be fun to watch even a fictionalized reenactment of a night of hell in which Richard Speck tormented, brutalized, and killed eight real women.
Author’s Note: I received a review copy of this movie around the same time as Cannibal Man, though I watched them a bit apart. They would certainly make for a feel-bad double-feature.
Originally published September 2021
Unwinnable
“I’m telling you, if you don’t hand him over, you’re going to be in a lot bigger trouble than you bargained for!”
Siege (1983)
Also released as Self Defense, Siege is a 1983 Canadian exploitation flick that is one of a long line of movies aping John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13. It’s also probably one of the best ones. A review at TVGuide.com calls it “frighteningly effective” and “reminiscent of Assault on Precinct 13, though it is not quite as effective,” while also (as so many synopses of the movie seem to do) getting the plot details slightly wrong.
The actual plot goes something like this: During a (real life) police strike in Halifax in 1981, a right-wing militia calling themselves the “New Order” push their way into a gay bar and start roughing up the clientele. The opening assault is deeply disturbing, even before any violence begins, and violence begins in relatively short order, when the confrontation ends with the bartender dead after a fall onto a broken bottle.
The toughs panic and call their handler, who comes in and methodically executes everyone in the place because otherwise this could be “very damaging to our cause,” as he puts it. Only one of the bar’s patrons escapes, eventually taking refuge in a nearby apartment, which puts us firmly in Precinct 13 territory, even if the film’s opening titles and pulsing soundtrack hadn’t already done so.
Armed with military-grade weapons (complete with silencers) and a sniper with an infra-red scope on the roof across the street, the militia lays siege to the apartment, while the group of folks inside have to defend themselves with nothing but a few homebrew booby traps, a rifle with two bullets, and a bow with a single arrow. From there, Siege hits a lot of the usual beats, but manages to maintain a sense of highly-pitched tension throughout.
Here’s the thing, though: No, Siege isn’t as effective as Assault on Precinct 13, but it may be more socially responsible. It would be easy enough for a movie with this logline to glorify the kind of rugged survivalism so often exalted in action movies of the ’80s. “If only everyone were more prepared for this kind of trouble,” it could easily say, “think how differently this could have gone.”
Except that the people who fare the best are, in many ways, those who are the least prepared. Indeed, Siege is a movie that feels like it has a lot to unpack when it comes to masculinity, and the connection between machismo and using violence to get what you’re after, whether that’s intimidating people who (let’s be honest) intimidate you, like the right-wing militia at the beginning, or just making it through the night, like the survivalist member of the besieged apartment-dwellers.
After all, the folks in the apartment would have had more bullets for that rifle had he not fired them off at the beginning of the police strike. And it seems not for nothing that Chekhov’s sleeve-knife ultimately goes unused when it is most needed.
What really helps to establish Siege as a more socially-conscious take on the material, though, is in the identity of its bad guys. I’ve argued before that Assault on Precinct 13 is not really interested in a “cops and robbers” type storyline. That the silent, implacable, multiracial gang that terrorizes the precinct (staffed with mostly civilians) are really a force of nature, sharing more in common with Romero’s ravening hordes of flesh eaters than any real-world outgroup.
Which is a long way of saying that, while on its surface Precinct 13 looks like yet another movie lamenting society’s collapse into lawlessness in the wake of the Manson Family murders and the failure of the Summer of Love, it’s actually not terribly interested in being about that, and is just using it as the set dressing to tell a cosmic horror tale about individuals assailed by a carnivorous cosmos, pretty much.
Siege, on the other hand, foregrounds the motives of its villains. They are here to “send a message” to the patrons of the gay bar they terrorize at the beginning of the film. “Being a homo is not a normal way of life,” one of them tells the bartender, shortly before the latter is dead on the barroom floor.
Nearly forty years later, the right-wing fascists at the heart of Siege—with their bullying and their bigotry, their cowardice and their fetishization of firearms—are unfortunately familiar. In the last few years, we’ve seen their ilk rise to prominence in various ways, from the so-called Proud Boys to Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old murderer described by the AP as a “police admirer” who gunned down two people during a Black Lives Matter protest, to the insurrection of January 6, 2021. Siege’s spate of villains could have been any one among their number.
The flick saves perhaps its most damning indictment for the stinger, however. This is a movie that’s only about a decade shy of having been around for half a century, but it’s also one that’s seldom seen. So, if you haven’t seen Siege and what I’ve already written is enough to make you want to check it out cold, stop now, because I’m gonna spoil that ending sucker punch.
As easy as it would be for Siege to glorify a kind of self-made survivalism, it would be even easier for it to lionize police. There’s a reason why all of this is happening during a police strike, after all, right? Oh yes, there absolutely is, but not necessarily the one that you might think.
Sure, the police never come during the night’s long standoff, in part because they’re on strike, in part because the phone lines are cut in short order. But as someone watching the film in 2021 and looking backward, you have to wonder whose side they would be on, if they did show up. The movie doesn’t wonder, though. It knows, and it makes no bones about it in that stinger I mentioned.
Once the last of the assailants are finally done in by the defenders of the apartment, save one who flees because of his injuries, the view cuts to a picturesque scene of a mother and her daughter playing ball in the park, along with titles telling us that the police strike has ended. The ball rolls to a stop at the foot of a police officer and, as the camera pans up, it is probably no surprise that it reveals the cop in question to be the one surviving member of the militia group.
Drop mic. Roll credits.
Author’s Note: Around September of 2021, I apparently got a lot of flicks for review that were outside my usual bailiwick, but that were all pretty damn good. This is the best of them.
Originally published October 2021
Downright Creepy
The Spine of Night Brings Cosmic Horror Back to Sword and Sorcery
Before I start talking about The Spine of Night, I need to disclose some conflicts of interest. Phil Gelatt—one half of the directing duo behind this new animated feature—is a good friend of mine. He blurbed my second collection of short stories, we co-hosted movies together at the NecronomiCon in Providence, and I’ve slept in his house. So I’m not exactly an unbiased party here.
Also, I’ve actually seen The Spine of Night before. I watched a rough cut while it was still in post-production. The animation wasn’t entirely finished, the story was organized somewhat differently, and there were chapter headings breaking up the film’s various time points. Yet, the essence was already there, a beating, bloody heart beneath the unfinished animation and the jumbled story beats.
So, watching The Spine of Night in its finished form hit differently for me than it probably will for a lot of other people. It was like watching something grow up. A film that I knew to be a passion project, something that, the last time I saw it, was still sometimes in bloody pieces, actually taking steps and not just walking but running. Rather like the characters in the picture, who are often alive one minute, breathing and fleshed out and ready to have a whole narrative centered on them, only to die gruesomely and ignominiously the next minute—and sometimes return again later, alive once more.
***
Now we can talk a bit about The Spine of Night. For those who don’t know, The Spine of Night is animated using a technique called “rotoscope.” More than a century old, rotoscope was first invented by Max Fleischer in 1915 and has been used in numerous projects over the years, perhaps most prominently—at least for our purposes—by Ralph Bakshi in films like Wizards, the animated Lord of the Rings, and Fire and Ice, which, along with 1981’s Heavy Metal, is probably the most obvious touchstone to understand what you can expect from The Spine of Night.
In rotoscope animation, animators draw over live action, allowing the animation of more realistic and fluid action scenes, at least in theory. In practice, rotoscope—like stop-motion and other methods of filmmaking—tends to produce a unique feel that is immediately identifiable, and in many ways that feel, as much as anything, helps to establish The Spine of Night on a continuum with films like Fire and Ice and Heavy Metal.
If it didn’t, the movie would still let you know what to expect in short order. One of the first images we see is of a fully nude woman—Tzod, voiced by Lucy Lawless—trudging through the snow. From there, we will be treated to no shortage of full-frontal nudity, gruesome disembowelments, and sundry other, extremely R-rated visuals and themes.
Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to name a film in recent memory that is more bloody or grim than The Spine of Night, which exhibits brutality on a scale that would require a blockbuster budget to accomplish in live action. Yet, there is more going on here than blood and mud.
The fantasy subgenre of sword and sorcery has always been kissing cousins with weird fiction and cosmic horror, but that often takes the form of little more than mumbo jumbo, unspeakable cults, and nonsensical names. The Spine of Night reaches for something bigger, juxtaposing the violence and petty cruelty of human ambition against the very concept of infinity, the scope of a universe that expands both outward and forward, through space and through time.
Something else that cosmic horror on screen rarely taps into well is also mined here to good effect: the idea that this vastness can be as comforting as it is horrifying. There’s a scene near the middle of the movie, where two individuals come together around a campfire after the loss of their homes, to look up at the stars and speculate, suggesting that the night has its back turned, and that human lives are just embers blown up from distant campfires; pinpricks of light dying away as they burn.
