INANIMATE CARBON GOD

So we need a bit of Hammer if we’re doing horror films for October, and I’m trying to limit myself to first-time viewings this year to whittle the watchlist down some, which meant going with this (one of the few unwatched Hammer horrors I still have on said watchlist). 70s Hammer, of course, was not what it had been just a couple of years earlier, struggling to keep up with changing times, the ascent of Michael Carreras who hated the studio’s traditional gothics, and the deaths of some key production crew like designer Bernard Robinson, as well as suffering the general British film industry slump of the time. Sinclair McKay’s book on Hammer, A Thing of Unspeakable Horror, is pretty harsh on this period, but even he calls Hands of the Ripper one of the studio’s best films, and that’s probably fair. Hammer were trying a few different things by 1971, and this was one of those, a Jack the Ripper film… sort of.

The daughter of Jack the Ripper, in fact, is the subject here; as a small child she witnesses him killing his wife, her mother, and as she grows to young adulthood it appears she may be, well, carrying on her old man’s trade. A well-meaning psychiatrist takes her into his care, but will this just make things worse in the end? No prizes for guessing. I don’t think any of the cast were Hammer regulars, interestingly, and though other Hammer productions of the time ramped up the sexiness and nudity, this one went heavier on the violence; there’s a kind of nastiness to it most other Hammer films don’t really have. Hands of the Ripper is elevated by its two main leads, Eric Porter as the doctor and Angharad Rees as the Ripperette, they’re quite appealing and well-played characters (as are most of the secondary cast). It struggles to reclaim the old Hammer atmosphere, but it’s a valiant effort, and on the whole definitely one of the better examples of late Hammer.

Still in Japan but somewhat further back in time, both in terms of story setting (1600s) and production era and style (late 1950s). The story itself is based on an 1825 kabuki play (itself somewhat loosely based on a true story; presumably there was no supernatural vengeance in real life), which has been filmed dozens of times in Japan since 1912; indeed, there was another version of it released by Shintoho just a couple of weeks after this one from Daiei. I gather that different versions of the story do emphasise different aspects of it, and director Kenji Misumi seems to have been mostly interested in the romantic melodrama side of things with a bit of additional swordplay. The crucial difference with this telling of the story, though, appears to have been with the male lead character of Iyemon, who’s not the villain here that he usually is; there’s other changes but that seems to be the biggest one. Iyemon is an impoverished samurai offered a position with the Ito clan, but one of the conditions of the job is marrying the lord’s daughter… and Iyemon is already married to Oiwa, who will have to be dealt with. Usually this is Iyemon’s task in the story, but here he’s actually being conspired against by the kind of shitty people he insists on associating with. Oiwa’s murder doesn’t happen until about 20 minutes before the end; once the supernatural shenanigans finally begin they’re fairly good, it’s just a fairly long haul to that point. I suspect this version may not have been the ideal first viewing of the Yotsuya story for me, but it was the one Radiance included in their Daiei Gothic blu-ray box (logically enough), so it was the one I watched; hunting up the Shintoho version now so I can compare…

Also known as “the Japanese Evil Dead” for reasons that quickly become clear: it is an obviously Japanese production and an obvious knockoff of… er, homage to Sam Raimi’s classic, translated from a cabin in the American woods to a house in the Japanese suburbs. Except it was made with resources so limited that Evil Dead looks like a major Hollywood production by comparison (even Raimi wasn’t limited to eight millimetre film). I don’t know exactly what year to file this under, cos it was mostly shot in 1995 but then bits were reshot over the next fourteen years and it was another five years before it actually got a proper release. 1995? 2014? I don’t know, but whatever, you kind of have to admire director Shinichi Fukuzawa’s determination to get it out there even if it took nearly two decades; he’s never made another film since then, but he really wanted this one out there at least…

Anyway, Fukuzawa also plays the titular bodybuilder, who reconnects with old girlfriend Mika who’s investigating a supposedly haunted house. They go with a psychic in tow. Things go sideways, obviously. But this is not the sort of thing you’re watching for its originality or technical brilliance. You’re here for the gore, which is ridiculous in both quality and quantity, and I think Fukuzawa does things with it I can’t remember even Raimi doing. BMB also kind of put me in mind of Dennis Muren’s Equinox, which started life as a semi-amateur production before getting an actual proper release; it began as a bunch of teenagers making the sort of film that they themselves would want to see, and BMB gives a similar vibe… except that, unlike Dennis Muren, who wound up on a stack of major Hollywood effects jobs and has nine Oscars to his credit, Fukuzawa never turned it into a career. And yet BMB feels like that wasn’t the point anyway; it feels more like Fukuzawa was in this for the hell of it, it was a labour of love more than money. It’s a film that needs some understanding of the circumstances of its production, but there’s a weird charm to it. And it’s only 62 minutes long, a compactness you have to admire as much as anything.

Until tonight one of the bigger (nearly wrote “bugger” there, which would’ve been kind of appropriate, I suppose) gaps in my film knowledge has been The Fly, both the original and the Cronenberg version… I have now filled at least one of these holes, and finally got to know one of the major works of the genre from that period; the 50s were a great age for monster horror, and though the man-fly hybrid actually gets surprisingly little screen time it’s still a worthy example. Also, if you’re doing horror films for October, you need something with Vincent Price, and even if he’s really secondary here, this fits the bill. The Fly‘s impact has perhaps dissipated a bit over the decades through familiarity and parody, but it kicks off in a grisly way that still surprised me, with our nice scientist lead having a fatal close encounter with a hydraulic press operated by his nice wife, who then proceeds to tell a very strange story…

The Fly is a tale of well-meant science going terribly wrong; André, our good doctor, envisages his matter transportation technology as a way of delivering food and medicine and stuff like that to wherever it’s needed, maybe even transporting people. But when he’s experimenting with the latter, he gets a bit careless… There’s a review on Letterboxd that calls this “Maybe the cruelest story in the sci-fi canon”, and I find that hard to argue with, because the characters are all, you know, perfectly nice and appealing; André’s drive is essentially altruistic, so there’s something terribly tragic about how things turn out. It’s a handsome production for what was effectively a jumped-up B film (actually produced by Fox’s Regal Films unit, overseen by Robert L. Lippert whose films were usually a lot cheaper than this), mostly interiors shot in Cinemascope, and well-played by all involved; alas that director Kurt Neumann died just after finishing it and never saw it become a hit. I should really have seen this decades ago (though if I had I’d probably have been stuck with a shitty pan/scan version), and I really must get around to the Cronenberg remake at some point too…