Glowing in the dark, p.7
Glowing in the Dark, page 7
Subotai talks at length, if occasionally contradictorily, about his plans to get revenge on the Colman family who apparently killed him a hundred years ago, and also killed his ancestor three hundred years ago in Hungary, I guess. The Colman family has been busy, and I like to imagine them as precursors of the Belmont clan in Castlevania. As luck would have it, the only three remaining Colmans in the world, the older Sr. Colman and his two predictably lovely nieces, happen to live right nearby and are already acquainted with Count Subotai, who shows up at their house unannounced to interrupt some piano playing and then immediately leave again.
The piano playing in question is being performed by Rudolfo Sabre, who has some sort of romantic attachment to one of the Colman nieces. He studies music that produces “peculiar effects” and, wouldn’t you know it, happens to know a song that drives away vampires.
From there, the film devolves into the usual sequence of vampires showing up at peoples’ bedsides, those wonderful rubber bats, underground rituals complete with sacrificial altars, and long vampiric monologues. One of the nieces, Leonor, falls almost immediately under Subotai’s sway and becomes a vampire, while the other, Mirta, takes on the role of the film’s damsel in distress. Rudolfo, our ostensible hero, also gets bitten by a vampire fairly early on, and for the rest of the film undergoes a slow transformation which primarily involves his hands getting progressively hairier.
There’s a lengthy fistfight between Rudolfo and the count’s hunchbacked assistant, who looks more than a little like Gomez Addams, before the film’s final reel. In addition to being disabled by that one particular melody, the vampires in The World of Vampires seem to be particularly weak against punching, as Rudolfo manages to beat up an entire room full of them in order to rescue Mirta from their clutches. I hypothesized that this was because their masks made it hard for them to see.
In the end, Subotai is defeated and the vampires all disappear, except for Leonor, who looks to be cured, though at the last moment she flings herself down onto the same stakes that destroyed her “master.” Our theory was that she couldn’t stand to return to her old life after seeing how much better her makeup and wardrobe were as a vampire. Also, who could give up being able to turn into such an adorable rubber bat?
Author’s Note: This is one of those movies that desperately needs a high-class Blu-ray release from some boutique label like Indicator or Arrow or Eureka. But honestly, only if they also get Rhett Hammersmith to do a colorized version.
Speaking of which, that is something I’ve learned since this piece originally appeared on my website. Where Rhett Hammersmith “got the oddly color-cast images” I saw is that he made them. For those who aren’t already familiar with Hammersmith’s Tumblr, it is a treasure trove of weird gifs from old movies.
Also, if anyone has an actual prop of one of those rubber bats, I want it.
Originally published November 2018
orringrey.com
“Today we need to break the nose of every beautiful thing.”—Suspiria (2018)
No other movie is ever going to be Suspiria.
The 1977 original is something of a miracle film, and I’m not at all confident that anyone, even the people who made it, have any idea how or why it is what it is. It’s the film I always use as an example of a movie that would be worse if it was any better; a movie that transmutes, by some intangible magic, its own weaknesses into strengths.
To its credit, Luca Guadagnino’s remake never tries to be the original Suspiria. From the earliest scenes, we are told quite clearly that he is using the blueprint left behind by the original film to fashion a very new edifice. As I said right after seeing it, the differences between Argento’s film and Guadagnino’s are neatly summarized by the distinctions between the buildings in which the two films take place: The candy-colored art deco interiors and Haus zum Walfisch exterior of the ’77 version replaced with dimly-lit Brutalist architecture facing directly onto the Berlin Wall.
The 2018 Suspiria knows that we already know that there are witches in the walls, and so it doesn’t play coy, dumping us into the reality of the witchcraft early on, even if it still takes most of the film for anyone to react to it. Guadagnino also ties the witchcraft and the dancing much more closely together than Argento’s version ever did. In this Suspiria, dances are spells, and they have very real consequences. In one of the strongest (in most senses of the word) scenes in Guadagnino’s version, the effects of one such spell are graphically, grotesquely displayed in a bit of gruesome body horror that the film never really tops.
The academy in Guadagnino’s Suspiria is also a house divided. That view of the Berlin Wall is more than just a reminder of the times, or the different tones of the two movies. It serves as a metaphor for the divide among the witches themselves, with some wishing to continue following Mother Markos, while others want to throw their lot in behind Tilda Swinton’s Madame Blanc.
It is this division that drives most of the film to its climactic moments, where a plot twist that can be seen coming like a slow-moving freight train chugging down the tracks leads to an extremely bloody denouement, shot with music video artistic license, one presumes to cover up the fact that the CGI blood splatter effects which it leans on heavily are nowhere near ready for prime time.
Ultimately, Guadagnino’s film is a (sometimes) beautiful one and an ugly one; at times smart but never subtle; filled with horror touches that it doesn’t seem to know what to do with. There were audible gasps from the theatre I saw it in, hands covering eyes, shrinking back in seats, but the images on the screen were often more exploitative than scary. Gasps were more likely to be gasps of disgust than fear. While sitting in the theatre, I scribbled down comparisons to other things, including the video to “Invisible Light” and 120 Days of Sodom.
I will need time to sit with my feelings about this new Suspiria, and something tells me they won’t necessarily get better with distance. But whether the end result is good, bad, or indifferent, Guadagnino took this film’s relationship to the original and used it to forge something almost totally different using the same floor plan. That’s worth something, anyway, regardless of how the finished product may have turned out.
Author’s Note: I actually got to go to a preview screening of the 2018 Suspiria for work, which is always a nice thing, even if you don’t enjoy the movie. As of this writing, I’ve not actually watched it again since. My estimation of it certainly hasn’t improved in the intervening years, but I still stand by the things I said in this piece.
Originally published November 2018
Signal Horizon
“We are going to eat you!”—Fulci’s Zombie Lives On
Like a lot of horror nerds, I went through a period of time in high school when I was pretty into zombie movies.
Of course, this was a few years before the zombie movie really skyrocketed to mainstream popularity, so the only ones I had available to me were things like George Romero’s original Dead trilogy, Return of the Living Dead, Evil Dead, Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive, Re-Animator, that sort of thing. One time, I was watching a movie called The Dead Hate the Living and I saw that one of the characters had a bumper sticker that read “FULCI LIVES.”
Even then, I knew that Lucio Fulci was an Italian splatter director, but I hadn’t seen any of his films. In fact, until the 40th anniversary Blu-ray of Zombie landed in my mailbox, I had still only seen two Fulci films: The Beyond and The House by the Cemetery. So I was excited to check out one of his most famous flicks, especially in a package as attractive and feature-packed as this one looked to be.
Among the features on this new disc is a (very brief) introduction by Guillermo del Toro, in which he promises “visceral satisfaction,” which is perhaps unsurprising, given the film’s pedigree and subject matter, as well as “some of the most graceful, poetic images” in genre filmmaking, which might be a bit harder to swallow. Somewhat to my surprise, however, Zombie delivers nicely on both promises.
The opening and closing sequences, filmed in New York, help to give the movie an apocalyptic tenor that goes well beyond its budgetary limitations, even if the famous bridge scene is undercut a bit by traffic flowing along normally below.
While most of the actual action involves just a handful of actors in an isolated locale, this bookend, Fulci’s handsome direction, and, of course, the score by frequent Fulci collaborator Fabio Frizzi help to make even otherwise mundane scenes feel iconic.
A friend once described Fulci’s particularly gross brand of gore effects as, and I am paraphrasing a bit here, “like someone took a mannequin and stapled a rancid piece of mutton to its face.”
While this isn’t factual, it is true, and it gives a good idea of what you can expect from at least my experience of a Fulci movie, which is, of course, part of the draw. After all, how many directors have a gore style that is so unmistakably identifiable?
There is certainly no shortage of rancid mutton-style gore in Zombie, even if it takes a little while to really get underway.
While I hadn’t seen a lot of other Fulci films prior to this, I also hadn’t been living under a rock for the past few decades, so I knew at least a little about Zombie going in. Mostly, I was familiar with the cover image of a rotted skull with worms pouring out of one eye—which is immortalized on a lenticular slipcase in the version of the Blu-ray that I got—and I knew that the film featured an underwater zombie fighting a shark. Because everyone knows about that, right?
(What I did not know was that the underwater zombie vs. shark fight interrupts a bit of topless scuba diving which, I don’t know a lot about scuba diving, but that seems like an uncomfortable proposition, at best.)
Strangely enough, not more than a month or two before I sat down with Zombie, I had actually watched the 1957 flick Zombies of Mora Tau, which may be the earliest example of the “underwater zombie” subgenre.
To say that Fulci (and/or screenwriter Dardano Sacchetti) must have at least been aware of Mora Tau when making Zombie is the understatement of the century, even if the underwater zombie of the latter is relegated to that one scene in which a surprisingly limber zombie wrestles an actual, live shark.
In fact, as someone who watches a whole lot of old horror movies from the ’50s and before, I have long been fascinated by the way in which the zombie film experienced a sea change (no pun intended) following the release of Romero’s Night of the Living Dead in 1968.
In spite of never actually using the z-word, Night changed the face of the zombie movie forever. Prior to that, zombies in cinema were not the undead flesh-eaters of Romero’s version, but somnolent products of voodoo.
There are several films that serve as bridges between these two styles. Hammer’s Plague of the Zombies from 1966 is a good example, keeping intact the voodoo zombie proceedings while prefiguring the look of Romero’s shambling zombie hordes. Add to that list Fulci’s Zombie.
Released in Italy under the title Zombi 2 in order to position it as a sort of “unofficial sequel” to Dawn of the Dead—which was just called Zombi over there—Fulci’s Zombie is also surprisingly aware of the genre’s pre-Romero roots.
While its aesthetics and story notes may be purely in the Romero camp, its island setting, voodoo drumbeats, and graveyard full of decayed conquistadors all hearken back to an earlier age of zombie films—and many of them could have been ripped straight out of a movie like Zombies of Mora Tau.
Like Romero’s films, while it attributes the spate of reanimated corpses to a local voodoo curse, Zombie is wise enough to leave the actual cause ambiguous. Ultimately, its best explanation of what’s going on is an echo of Dawn of the Dead’s famous “no more room in hell” line, “When the earth spits out the dead, they will rise to suck the blood of the living.”
Though this is mostly Fulci’s show—him and his gross zombies—he needs a living human cast, too, made up of a handful of familiar faces from Italian horror (and Mia Farrow’s sister) alongside The Haunting’s Richard Johnson, who adds a dash of respectability to the proceedings that the chewy gore might not otherwise allow.
For the 40th anniversary disc, Blue Underground has done a new 4K restoration from the original camera negative, and the end product looks pretty great, giving plenty of nice, clear views of all that outlandishly fetid gore.
How much better it might be than previous editions I will have to leave to those more familiar with the film in its other incarnations, but I can say that the Blu-ray comes loaded with special features, including a couple of commentary tracks and interviews with just about anyone and everyone even tangentially related to the making of the film.
The slightly-oversized case also comes with a booklet by author Stephen Thrower talking about the film’s critical reception and a third disc—a soundtrack CD of Fabio Frizzi’s score, including that delightfully jaunty island theme, which I spent most of the movie hoping I would find on the soundtrack.
Author’s Note: This was one of the earliest reviews I did after getting in with various distributors, who would send me discs for review. Many—indeed, most—of the reviews that follow this were written under similar circumstances.
As would be the case with many of my subsequent reviews, I am as concerned with understanding the film’s history and positioning it in the context of its genre and when and where it was made as I am with the film itself.
Originally published December 2018
Unwinnable
Of Giallo and Gore—Torso (1973) and The Wizard of Gore (1970)
“You will live through an experience that you now think no living creature can survive.”
When I watched The Editor (2014) at a midnight screening at Panic Fest (this is going somewhere, I promise), it took me a while to get the joke of the film’s copious incidental nudity. At the time, I had seen only a handful of giallo films. (And, as of this writing, I’ve really only seen a handful more.) By about the mid-point of the film, I had figured out the joke, but I’m not sure that I ever really understood it until I sat down to watch Sergio Martino’s Torso for the first time.
For those who haven’t seen it, I described The Editor on Twitter as “if Anchorman had been a giallo,” and I still think that’s pretty accurate. One of its best gags is that, as the film goes on, background (and foreground) characters are just constantly naked at seemingly random times. The point at which I finally realized it was a joke and not just a stylistic choice was, I believe, when women were doing some light filing in the nude in the background of an office scene.
While Torso doesn’t have quite as much incidental nudity as The Editor, watching it definitely shows you why an homage/send-up of this kind of film would feature a joke like that. Which is a (very) long way of saying that Torso’s victims-in-waiting spend a whole lot of time in the altogether.
The days of squinting at pirated pay-TV channels in the hopes of catching a glimpse of flesh are long behind us, however, and a movie needs more than some bare skin to hold up in the modern day. Fortunately, Torso has a lot going for it besides its generous nudity.
Those who know me would probably assume (as I did for many years) that giallo films would not be my particular brand of poison. I tend to prefer my horrors more existential or supernatural; I’ll take monsters over murderers any day of the week, and, frankly, I have little patience for films that exploit suffering or make a point of victimizing women. Yet the best giallo films carry an air of weird menace that I find entirely mesmerizing and that always makes me completely overlook any of the elements that might otherwise turn me off. Torso is no exception.
In fact, there’s a quote early on in Torso, said during an art lecture taking place in an old church, that acts as a pretty neat summary of what draws me to the giallo genre: “Everything is bathed in an elegance approaching the supernatural.” While Torso may not quite reach levels of elegance that approach the supernatural, it makes extremely good use of its picturesque filming locations to create atmosphere out of little more than buildings and landscapes—and, of course, the music for which gialli are well known, in this case supplied by Guido and Maurizio De Angelis.
It doesn’t hurt that Torso is kind of a misleading title—the Italian original, which translates to “the bodies show traces of carnal violence,” is a little more accurate. In the insert booklet of the Arrow Video Blu-ray, there is an informative essay about Joseph Brenner, the distributor who brought films like Torso to grindhouse theaters in the states, not to mention giving them punchy, marquee-ready titles like, well, Torso.
Giallo films in general—and Torso in particular—are often held up as precursors of the slasher movie, and you can definitely see it in the structure of this picture. The obligatory kill shots are all here, and were probably shocking enough for 1973, but don’t seem like much compared to the kinds of gore most horror fans are used to by now. Actually, a surprising number of the kills in Torso happen off camera, and even the infamous scene of bodies being dismembered via hacksaw—from which, most likely, the film draws its American title—is more suggestion than show.
What is more apparent in Torso is the link between slasher films and voyeurism. Sure, there are the killer’s POV shots that we’ve all come to expect, but the themes of voyeurism come into play in many other ways, from the casualness with which the female characters treat Peeping Toms to the film’s opening scene, which features a threesome intercut by the clicking of a camera shutter.
