Opted for some more Paul Naschy tonight; as the title suggests, this is one of his Waldemar Daninsky films, and an authentic Video Nasty as well (nice to have one of those for one’s October horror viewing), one of the handful that’s still never been released in the UK apparently (Arrow? 88 Films? Why aren’t either of you on top of this?). Speaking of titles, the literal rendering of the Spanish one, “Curse of the Beast”, is actually more accurate; there is markedly more werewolf than yeti to be had here.
Anyway, I’m clearly watching the Daninsky series well out of order, but I’ve always gathered that there’s little continuity to the series, with his origin being different in almost each one. In this instance, Daninsky joins an expedition to Tibet in search of the yeti, picking up after another expedition in search of same ended kind of terribly; perhaps needless to say, so does this one, albeit not in the way you might expect. Naschy is credited with the script, but the film felt to me like he actually wrote a number of different film scripts, took bits of each and just slammed them into one another while hoping for the best. I charcterised The Hunchback of the Morgue as “somewhat unbalanced and not entirely coherent”, and, well, this one is the same but even more so; the pacing and structure are so odd it feels like about 20-30 minutes of material that might’ve made it hang together more was either cut from it or maybe never even filmed. On the plus side, if the film is a mess it’s a pretty attractive one, shot almost entirely on location… Spain obviously stands in for Tibet throughout (a bit less happily, Spanish people obviously largely stand in for Tibetan people too) and looks pretty beautiful in doing so. And there were no burning rats in this one, which is an edge it has over the hunchback film…
Apparently it’s not actually true that Tony Todd negotiated a fee of an additional $1000 every time he got stung by a bee in that scene, which would’ve netted him another $25k or so, but he would’ve deserved it if he had done. Candyman stems from a Clive Barker story I haven’t read (haven’t yet got to the second half of Books of Blood), but despite that I did wonder a few times while watching the film if it wouldn’t be better as a short story than as a film… though you would’ve missed out on Todd’s amazing voice if it hadn’t been made into a film, so. As I said a few posts ago, I’m limiting myself to first-time watches this month, and I’m also trying to knock a few “big” titles off the watchlist too… you know, ones that most people into horror who aren’t me have already seen years ago and I’m preposterously late to… and I watched Candyman tonight cos I was under the impression it was one of the more major gaps in my horror knowledge. Was it, though? I liked it, but I think I was hoping for more from it. Candyman struck me as a film with evident aspirations to be something other than just your regular slasher; 
If there’s one thing I’d never have expected from a Jess Franco film, it’s a Robert Bresson joke. And yet that is essentially how this one begins… fortunately Franco soon remembers this is a film by him, and so even references to classier films and filmmaking (to say nothing of humour; the rest of the film is played fairly straight) go out the window almost immediately; The Diabolical Dr. Z. is nothing if not a Euro-exploitation B film, and a fair example of that sort of thing. This is kind of an early version of She Killed in Ecstasy, in some respects; in that film it’s the wife of the experimenting doctor who takes revenge for his death, and in this one it’s the doctor’s daughter. However, in this case she’s employing her late father’s mind control technology to do so, which is a twist the latter film avoided (Soledad Miranda was enough by herself there); the film struck me as a bit giallo-ish apart from that, though that might be because of Daniel White’s score which sounds awfully similar to some of the music on a DVD compilation of giallo trailers I have… Dr. Z. is also blessed with camerawork by Alejandro Ulloa, alas that he never worked with Franco again cos Ulloa could’ve elevated some of his later works if this is indicative (he would also have films by Lucio Fulci, Sergio Corbucci, Eugenio Martin and Paul Naschy to his credit). It’s not a film about which there’s an awful lot to say, really, and that’s perfectly fine. It’s a Monday night, I don’t need anything heavy, I need an efficient Euro-exploitation B film, and Dr. Z. gave me what I was looking for on that front.
Apparently this beauty has a reputation among HK film lovers for being unusually berserk, and, well, there’s a good reason for that: The Boxer’s Omen IS unusually berserk. I’ve seen some pretty whacked out movies but GODDAMN, few of them have been as fascinatingly mad as this one. Plotwise, it begins in fairly straightforward fashion: a young boxer is crippled in a fight against a cheating Thai boxer, and his gangster brother goes to seek revenge. When he gets to Thailand, though, he gets drafted to help another brother of his (from a past life) who was battling a black magician and killed by the latter in the midst of attaining immortality. Things go a bit odd from there. I have a sort of general rule whereby I’m willing to overlook other issues I may have with a given film if it’s at least interesting to look at, and this is a fine example; The Boxer’s Omen may be weird, incoherent, occasionally disgusting (even the actors look ready to puke in one scene) and blithely unconcerned with whether or not its special effects look realistic or even good (the blood appears to have been left over from Dawn of the Dead, and there are spiders which Lucio Fulci would’ve refused to use in The Beyond for being too fake), but it is nothing if not full of remarkable imagery, especially once it gets to the astonishing and almost dialogue-free final battle in the Nepalese temple. There were multiple times throughout the film where I could only utter the words “what the fuck” at what I was seeing, and I suspect this is a common occurrence among its viewers. Barring a couple of moments of apparent animal cruelty (which I’m obviously not into), this was fantastic; I was genuinely stunned and lost for words after it.
Another first-time viewing, and even I’m kind of surprised by that… I remember all the marketing fuss about it; I dimly recall being in Randwick one day and even there I remember seeing one of those flyers for it pasted on the outside of a shop or something. It was one of the first viral movie hits, and the whole fact-or-fiction thing was a big part of why… obviously it was the latter, the film’s extensive credits were something of a giveaway for anyone who still had any doubts… Anyway, for whatever reason it’s taken me a mere not quite 28 years to finally watch BWP, and, like I said, even I’m surprised at having taken this long. I don’t know why, cos there’s a load of other Reportedly Great Films I’ve never seen, I don’t know why I’m so surprised by this one… but so it is. Maybe all the hype at the time put me off or something. I don’t think I felt anything much while watching it, to be honest, certainly didn’t feel like there was much of a narrative drive; what I did get from it was an interesting sense of naturalism, a fairly impressive sense of authenticity. I could’ve believed that it might be real while watching it, or at the very least that if it were a real situation this is how it would’ve looked and felt. But as a way of actually telling the story? I don’t think it worked for me, and I would’ve probably liked it better as a more conventionally presented narrative. I don’t know. It’s good enough, I suppose, I think I just hoped to be a bit more blown away by it.
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