This is not the first time I’ve elected to watch a Halloween film on Halloween itself; indeed, the last review I posted on my old film blog was Halloween II on October 31, 2021. This is also not the first time I’ve regretted that decision, too… at least there’s no “Sam Hain” nonsense in this one, someone clearly got handed a note this time round. Anyway, John Carpenter and Debra Hill hadn’t wanted to do a Halloween sequel in the first place, and they were even less excited by the prospect of another one, so they insisted it not actually be a sequel at all… which was a really interesting idea, potentially opening the series up to being more of an anthology thing telling different stories around the Halloween theme. Alas, however, this wasn’t what audiences wanted from the series; they wanted a big goon in a William Shatner mask getting stabby, not these androids in suits ripping people’s heads off, and so number four in the series wouldn’t happen for several years. It didn’t help that the film itself wasn’t much good, either; Nigel Kneale was drafted to write the script, which was then so reworked he demanded his name be taken off it, and the end result was not the most coherent film ever made. What exactly was the point of the androids, for one thing, what was Cochrane’s broader plan there? How do the chips in the mask medallions have… you know, that effect? And I’ll allow some credit for the mass murder of children as a plot device, that’s darker than most horror usually goes, but what was it for? Ropey dialogue, ropey pacing, ropey acting… that fucking ad jingle… the film’s IMDB entry has a good selection of plot holes, too. There is a school of thought that says, with hindsight and now that we know what Carpenter wanted to do with the series, that HIII was actually much better than its early critics said it was. I am not part of this school, and really didn’t like this at all. Also, I rather doubt I’ll be watching any future installments of the series on future Halloweens…
Tag: The Matraville Horror Film Festival
Dark Waters (1993)
Just in time for Severin’s second folk horror box set, I’ve finally made inroads into the first volume… never let it be said that I am especially current or up to date in any way with these things. Anyway, this is a film I’ve been curious about for literally decades; I first read about it in Andy Black’s old Necronomicon journal which came out in 1996, so it must’ve been about that time when I did, with the first volume having contained an article by Black himself on “Lovecraftian” cinema… and Dark Waters being hailed as having the most “Lovecraftian” aura on film yet (i.e. to the mid-90s) in said article. To be perfectly honest, having finally seen the thing, I’m not really sure what Black saw in it on that front; for me it was far more reminiscent of other Italian horror than anything in HPL, especially Michele Soavi’s The Church, which has a similar theme (the church/monastery containing a monstrous demonic presence). Add in a whiff of Argento (Suspiria with nuns, sort of) and Fulci (the general befuddling disregard for plot coherence), and Dark Waters is kind of what you get, I suppose…
Black acknowledges the film is more style than substance, but as I said of Opera the other day, it’s quite some style; director Mariano Baino shot the film in Ukraine (one of the first Western productions there after the fall of the USSR), which made for immensely difficult conditions given the region’s wobbly politics but offered spectacular locations. Alex Howe’s cinematography does most of the heavy lifting in this film, along with the foul weather that most of it takes place in, and the general atmosphere is super-strong; alas that Dark Waters is severely let down by its lead actress, Louise Salter as the young woman who discovers her late father has been paying for this mysterious Ukrainian monastery and wants to know why, and I suspect there’s a reason why her career since this film has been so limited… I don’t think it’s just the fault of post-synchronisation. Not a great film, after all this time, but fascinating to watch nevertheless… even if, frankly, I’m not sure what’s so “Lovecraftian” about it.
The Love Witch (2016)
I have maintained for several years now that horror films don’t do well if they’re allowed to go on for too long (Mr Romero’s Dawn of the Dead being a notable exception), and I think I’ve just found more supporting evidence; at a shade over two hours, The Love Witch is a lot longer than it has any business being. The film is celebrated for its fetishisation of 60s/70s film style, which seems to be a large part of what draws people to it (and I’ll confess to that being the case with me too); it is apparently one of the last films to have been not only shot on 35mm film but edited on film and printed to film from that negative too, there was no digital tomfoolery and the singular look of the film is down to the stock and the camera filters used. I completely understand this visual appeal—which is enhanced aurally by the generous amount of Ennio Morricone music from actual 70s gialli—cos the film does look amazing, and I respect Anna Biller’s grind in getting things exactly how she wanted even if she had to make some bits of furniture herself (e.g. the pentagram rug that apparently took her six months to make). It’s just… the rest of it? There’s an element of somewhat strange humour to the film, with a semi-parodic aspect to proceedings, and I appreciate that Biller is doing a sort of feminist reclamation of period melodrama camp… but the humour here is on a wavelength I clearly don’t share, and the artifice of the enterprise extends into the performances to the extent that I genuinely can’t tell if they’re good or not. Especially Samantha Robinson as the titular witch. And if this were an actual 60s/70s horror, it probably wouldn’t have such withering pacing and it’d be over and done with in about 85-90 minutes. A considerable disappointment.
The Invisible Ray (1936)
Can’t really have a horror “festival” without Karloff or Lugosi, can we? Consequently, let’s have them both together! This was the third, and I think the last, of their jointly starring vehicles for Universal, with Karloff slightly taking the lead in this one; he’s the not-yet-but-eventually-will-be mad scientist who uses the titular ray to look back millions of years in time to observe a meteorite crashing into Africa, which he deduces contains a new form of power, which leads him to join Lugosi in an expedition to Africa to find the thing. Unfortunately, as Orwell observed nearly a decade later, power corrupts, and while Lugosi uses the power for good, Karloff is more inclined the other way… The pseudoscience in this film is particularly pseudo, with Lugosi’s own work on “astro-chemistry” being something that could’ve made a film of its own, and the pacing feels odd in a way I can’t quite describe, like the film’s in two parts but the connection between the two isn’t as strong as it could be. I don’t know. But look, it’s Karloff and Lugosi in their peak period, which is not a bad thing at all (the latter could struggle as an actor, but he’s pretty solid here); and while the production seems to have been difficult (with original director Stuart Walker harrumphing off the lot when Universal wouldn’t give him time to do rewrites) and went massively over budget, you can see that money in the finished product, particularly the amazing laboratory set in the beginning of the film. The Invisible Ray is basically a superior B-film with two genre icons in the main roles, some vintage pseudoscience, and happily little comic relief, and I am very much in favour of that sort of thing. Enjoyed a lot.
Murders in the Zoo (1933)
By now I’ve seen most of the big titles from the 1930s’ horror boom that Wm. Everson covers in Classics of the Horror Film (indeed, on checking the book again, I think Murder by the Clock might be the last of the 1930s left; still got some of the 40s titles to go, though), but for whatever reason this one has proven elusive until now… but recently I discovered Eureka had it on blu-ray as part of a set of these things; I duly invested in it, it duly arrived the other day, and I duly watched it tonight. Duly enjoyed it, too, although I find myself a bit perplexed by Paramount’s decision to assign it to Eddie Sutherland… the latter was much more of a comedy specialist (having started in the business as a Keystone Kop) and I don’t see anything else horror-adjacent in his filmography. I wonder if that’s why the film leans so much on top-billed Charlie Ruggles’ comedy relief (cos Ruggles is a secondary character at best); I mean, so many of these films did back then, but it feels even more so than usual here… But despite that, the film nonetheless has some quite nasty business going on, starting as it does with Lionel Atwill (the real star and villain of the piece) sewing a man’s mouth shut and leaving him to be eaten by jungle animals; that’s not the only thing about the film where I’m amazed it passed the Production Code (I know the latter wasn’t yet enforced and wouldn’t be until the following year, but even so). Atwill gives good heavy in Murders, whose main sticking point is its typically “early talkie” lack of incidental music; there is some scoring but not when the film could really have done with it… King Kong premiered the day after this did, and revolutionised the use of music in films; alas that Murders in the Zoo was a bit too late to benefit from that. Still, had Paramount waited much longer to make it, the Hays office might’ve stopped it being made at all…
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.
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.
You must be logged in to post a comment.