Month: October 2024

RIP Paul Di’Anno

Apparently even he agreed Bruce Dickinson was the definitive Maiden vocalist, but let’s not discount his own good work out front of them on those first two albums; and, to be fair, he was in the band a lot longer than most of the other early members of the band, which was a chaotic affair that didn’t really settle down until a couple of years after this stuff…

It! The Terror From Beyond Space (1958)

An expedition from Earth travels to an alien planet and picks up one of the local life forms that’s determined to kill them. Hang on, isn’t that the plot of Alien? Kind of, but It! got to it first… in this case, the alien planet is Mars and the people from Earth have gone there to retrieve the only survivor of a previous mission, all of whom otherwise appear to have been murdered; he’s going back to Earth, therefore, to face court-martial and summary execution, cos who could possibly believe his claims that some hostile Martian life form was the real killer? At least until they discover said hostile Martian is on the ship bound for Earth with them… I haven’t really done an old-school creature feature for this “festival” so far, though I do have a fair bit of that sort of thing on the watchlist, indeed I think a few of them come from the same director too. This is a good example of what I used to call on my old review blog the narrative economy of older films, a lot of which were on average notably shorter than modern ones and didn’t fuck around when it came to telling the story; It! wastes remarkably little time in setting up its situation (which it does in somewhat clunky fashion, to be sure) and getting shenanigans underway, all over and done with in 69 minutes. It also doesn’t exactly waste time on niceties like clear characterisation or things like that, but it’s that sort of film… the shoot seems to have been kind of unpleasant due to the female lead being angry about being in a monster movie (as if the rest of her career had amounted to anything big; at least she got credited in this, unlike most of her other films) and the alien performer being a drunk, obnoxious shit. In fairness to the film, though, it has no pretensions to being anything other than what it is, i.e. an efficiently made B-film for a double bill that probably cost less than $100,000 to make; the monster costume is pretty good for this sort of thing, and the shadowy camerawork probably works in its favour, plus the actual ship interior design is pretty cool too and is where I presume most of the budget went. It! is what It! is, and however good Alien might be with a similar plot but more budget, I kind of appreciate the basic honesty of its small predecessor…

The Lair of the White Worm (1988)

And that’s the THIRD film so far in this festival with someone getting cut in half… at least this time it was horizontally, so, hey, variety! I’ve actually read the book this is rather nominally based on, that being Bram Stoker’s final novel of the same name; I remember finding the book more than a little baffling, reading as it did like a posthumously published first draft that was never properly finished, except it was actually published in 1911 before Stoker died. Apparently this mess of a book was what he considered a finished work… Anyway, Ken Russell (no known relation to your humble scribe) got money from Vestron in the late 80s to make a film of it, and the end result was a peculiar film more faithful to the peculiar spirit of the book than its letter. The book was at least partly inspired by the actual legend of the Lambton Worm, though Russell seems to have leaned on that more than the book itself… it’s the depths of rural England, Peter Capaldi’s doing an archaeological dig on the land of Hugh Grant’s local lord, discovering evidence of some sort of snake cult in the area, while Amanda Donohoe’s local ladyship has returned to town to oversee said cult. Visions of nuns being molested by Roman soldiers ensue, because it’s a Ken Russell film so OBVIOUSLY.

The film’s Wiki page cites a critic comparing it to 70s films like Horror Hospital, and I can definitely feel something of that film’s tonal oddity with its uneasy mix of humour and horror in White Worm. I’m not sure everyone in the film was on the same page acting-wise; Amanda Donohoe is clearly having a fun time in what she considered a nice light change from her usual work, while Hugh Grant is oddly wooden (giving absolutely no sense of the romcom star he’d not yet become) and has little or no discernible joint heroic chemistry with Capaldi, whose archaeologist seems to be grumpy and crusty because he’s Scottish rather than for any actual reason. And probably the less said about Catherine Oxenberg the better. It’s a very odd film and yet somehow something about it works, even if I’m not sure what; I think in the end the humour just proves so weird (like Capaldi distracting the possessed policeman with bagpipes) you can’t not laugh at it, and, like the aforementioned Horror Hospital or Psychomania, approaching it as a comedy more than a horror film probably really is the key…

Basket Case (1982)

There’s a Letterboxd review of this film that just says “There’s something maniacally impressive about a movie where the only good performance comes from a screaming flesh basketball”, and that is about as perfect a summation of Basket Case as anything I could come up with. This has been a reasonably sizeable hole in my cult cinema knowledge until now, and it is finally filled (parenthetically, I thought it was kind of hilarious that this restoration that I watched came from none other than the Museum of Modern Art; I always knew they had a film department, but that this would be in it?)…I don’t really know what I was expecting from it, but I think I got what I should’ve expected, if that makes sense.

With a budget of apparently only $35,000—or still only about $120,000 in modern money—Basket Case is inescapably a thing of cheapness; before ever watching the film I recall seeing one of the stop-motion sequences and thinking yeeeee, that’s tatty-looking… and it still was tonight (obviously, it’s not like the film’s changed since 1982) but in fairness the rest of the film holds up well enough. As that review I cited suggests, the acting in Basket Case is, frankly, the cheapest thing about it; It’s pretty basically made and basically played, hardly any of the performers have anything like extensive (or indeed any) credits outside this. But it makes the most of the grotty location in which a lot of the film happens, that being the flophouse hotel where our “heroes”, former conjoined twins Duane and Belial, base themselves on their mission of revenge against the surgeons who separated them against their will; Belial is pretty monstrous but at the same time weirdly sympathetic in spite of everything, and it’s hard to really blame him for being pissed… So not exactly a masterpiece of world cinema, but you don’t always want that sort of thing on a Saturday night anyway, a bit of cheap and cheerful monster movie business. Parenthetically, this is the second film in this “festival” to feature someone getting chopped vertically in half…

Opera (1987)

I think this was the last of the major Dario Argento films I hadn’t yet seen from his golden period (i.e. those first two decades); indeed, I think this is also generally considered his last great film, and judging by what I’ve seen of his later work that’s probably a fair assumption. He said regarding his 2004 film The Card Player that with that film he’d made a deliberate attempt to update his visual style, having apparently forgotten that his 70s/80s visual style was his strongest selling point… and Opera is nothing if not all about visual style. It is a definite case of style over substance (not quite style-as-substance in the way Suspiria is), but it’s a hell of a style nonetheless. Plotwise, it’s kind of a riff on The Phantom of the Opera by way of Argento’s own experience directing an opera, by which I mean he got asked to direct a production of Rigoletto but his vision for it was considered a bit too whacked out by the theatre so he never actually got to do it; the man running the show here is a horror movie director staging a decidedly avant-garde version of Macbeth, and it is sorely beset by things going wrong much like the production of the film seems to have been. Like I said, Argento’s style was his real strength rather than his rigorously logical plotting (and is Verdi’s opera actually considered “cursed” like the play, or was Argento confusing them or just taking a liberty?); the visuals here do most of the heavy lifting—people talking about the “POV” filming of In a Violent Nature need to watch this and learn how that actually works—and at its best Opera is quite a wonder to be hold (the scene of Daria Nicolodi’s character getting shot is particularly amazing). The film’s major problem, perhaps ironically, is the music, not the operatic stuff but the incidental score… however fashionable that sort of hard rock thing might’ve been in 1987, it’s aged poorly and didn’t fit then either. But on the whole this was a pretty good time for a Friday night, and it was high time I finally watched it apart from anything else.

RIP the Angel of Frequency

And it’s goodbye to Ollie Olsen, pioneer of electronic and experimental music in Australia since the punk era. He’s been an exceedingly ill man for a lot of years now with multiple system atrophy, so his passing isn’t surprising, but still it’s another door closed on that time and place…


Firstly, here’s one I’ve only just discovered via a friend on FB: Olsen’s own Whirlywirld version of “Rooms for the Memory”, which would be redone by a certain Michael Hutchence from INXS for the Dogs in Space soundtrack…


…and the aforementioned pop hit version. Obviously sounds much bigger and more mid-80. I love this. I also love that it was a top ten chart hit here when the film was rated R, so a bunch of Hutchence’s younger fans wouldn’t even have been able to see it…



Logically, therefore, we continue with the other great Hutchence/Olsen collaboration, Max Q. “Only fear under another name…”


And we probably shouldn’t overlook Ecco Homo, which Olsen put together for another kind of extraordinary figure, Troy Davies…


This was where Olsen went in the 90s, you can kind of hear it starting to happen on “Sometimes” but he started properly trancing out with Third Eye and the Psy-Harmonics label…


I can’t find a Youtube video for The Reals, Olsen’s first band in which he played guitar, and whose “Nothing to Say” (on the old Do the Pop Redux compilation from years ag0—try hunting that up) has one of the most obnoxious guitar sounds I’ve ever heard (and granted that recording is a rehearsal demo so not an even remotely professional one, but still), so I’m ending us instead where we began with Whirlywirld. RIP Ian.

Bloody Moon (1981)

Thought it was time for a bit of Tio Jess, and an authentic video nasty to boot (it was also banned in Germany until as recently as last year, per IMDB)… by my count I have now seen 19 Jess Franco films, which many would say is 19 too many; this was his contribution to the early slasher trend, and it was actually kind of instructive watching this after Terrifier cos I can see just how far low budget gore effects have come since Franco made this. The setpiece killing involves the “saw of death” of the German title, and it’s fucking ridiculous; I know Franco was working on minimal budgets even for that time, but still, Damien Leone could probably have whipped up something ten times more realistic for just spare change… anyway, the setting is a young women’s language school, where one of the resident staff is a deeply scarred (mentally and physically) young man who killed one of the students there five years earlier. Could he be responsible for the mysterious killings happening now that he’s back? Or is he just a rank red herring? Bloody Moon is shittily written and performed even by Franco standards, and the dubbing is awful even for that time; if you know enough about Franco’s films to imagine what a Franco slasher might be, you’d probably envisage something like this and be correct. Although Franco does inject a bit more interest into the formula with an incest sub-angle and a child getting killed along the way too (alas, there’s also what I feel certain was an actual animal killing too… ugh)… I will give the film points for casting Olivia Pascal, cos I have a thing for dark-eyed blondes however terribly they’re dubbed, but otherwise… you know, it’s a Jess Franco film, and you probably know what you’re getting into with it. Don’t really know what else to say.

RIP George… Somethingorother

The legendary George Negus has left us; alas, I had no idea he’d been suffering from Alzheimer’s and was basically non-verbal for his last few years. Never a good way to go, but even worse when communicating with people was your job. Apparently someone miscommunicated with Channel 10, though:

George NEBUS? Who’s he? Well done, you professional television network, you…

Karajan would never

I don’t suppose classical music actually has much of a public reputation for its practitioners misbehaving. Obviously it’s a field in which there have been and must still be dickheads, but I can’t think of many stories of orchestra members attacking each other mid-performance Jane’s Addiction-style, or so fucked on drugs they couldn’t play like Syd Barrett, that sort of thing. However, John Eliot Gardiner recently chose to make a public shithead of himself by physically assaulting a singer for the heinous crime of coming off the podium on the wrong side (?!) during a performance of Les Troyens last year. This, however, has had fewer complications for his career than you might think, apparently:

We learned some time ago that two of the ensembles Gardiner founded, the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, would no longer be working with the conductor following his physical attack on a company member during a concert last summer. The rest, you could hardly make up. In a move that looks dangerously close to being motivated by spite, Gardiner looks set, at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, to gazump those two ensembles in the most brazen manner.
Does the following sound normal to you? On 14 December, the Monteverdi Choir and EBS will perform two Bach cantatas and a Charpentier Mass at the concert hall in Hamburg, fulfilling a contract agreed many months ago. Given the decision by those ensembles not to continue working with Gardiner following his violent conduct, the conductor Christophe Rousset was engaged by the ensembles themselves to lead the concert.
Then, a few weeks ago, the Elbphilharmonie issued an oddly contorted press release. It announced that Gardiner would conduct exactly the same programme, a week earlier, with the musicians of his newly established ensemble The Constellation Choir and Orchestra. Just to make sure the Monteverdi Choir and EBS were thrown completely under the bus, the Elbphilharmonie got all excited about Gardiner’s new ensembles and offered anyone who had booked tickets to the Monteverdi/EBS concert the chance to exchange them for tickets to the Constellation one instead.

Damn. I suppose this is kind of the classical equivalent of Taylor Swift re-recording her old albums, except that “Jiggy” doesn’t own that music in the way she owns hers. Any ensemble’s entitled to perform it, Gardiner has no exclusive right to it, and this is just him being a dickhead. Kind of impressed by the apparent speed with which he’s pulled his new orchestra together and made it ready to do these shows, just not so sure how I feel about the people who’ve agreed to join it, cos I assume they know about the punching incident (the latter, for what it’s worth, seems to have just been the last straw, with Gardiner apparently having had a reputation for being short with his performers for years)… but that’s the show for you, it has to go on, doesn’t it.