Nude Per L’Assassino: Sex And Violence And More Sex

Horror movies, like pretty much any other movie, are products of their time and the culture in which they’re made. And horror movies also tend toward transgression, since they’re largely dealing with the kind of stuff more polite entertainment doesn’t. What this means in practice is that the older the film, the more likely it is that it will have…not aged very well. Values and norms change over time, and some things that used to be acceptable aren’t any more. So I’ll sometimes find myself watching a movie where I’m more grossed out by the way the people in it behave than I am by blood and gore.

In my limited experience, gialli are especially susceptible to this. A type of film made largely in the 1970s and 1980s in Italy, gialli have some ideas about sex, sexuality and gender that are by modern standards pretty repugnant. And Nude Per L’Assassino (Strip Nude For Your Killer) is definitely no exception. I mean, with a title like that, it was never going to be subtle. But even though it isn’t as viciously nasty as some I’ve seen, the way it seems to be equal parts murder mystery and softcore sex film ends up being pretty distracting.

It comes in pretty hot, opening with a woman at a doctor’s office getting an abortion. It’s not as lurid as it could have been, thank goodness, but it’s pretty easy to figure out what’s going on. Halfway through, she appears to expire quietly in the chair. It’s an unusually low-key sequence, ending with the doctor calling someone in a panic. They’re going to move her back to her apartment and make it look like she died of natural causes. They dump her in the bath and start the water running, then they leave.

Some days later, a mysterious figure catches up to the doctor as he’s about to walk into his house, and stabs him to death.

Meanwhile, elsewhere, fashion photographer Carlo is busy trying to bed an attractive woman while he’s out in public…taking photographs, I think? He’s very much the kind of dude who doesn’t take “no” for an answer, which is gross enough, but somehow it’s worse that the woman he’s pressuring into sex (in a public place, no less) relents and goes along with it. Apparently, “no” means “yes” in this movie, and it’s pervasive. When Carlo brings her back to the fashion design house, he sort of dumps her on the head of the agency and finds out that one of their models apparently died of natural causes. Hmmm. And then only a couple of days later, another employee dies. It takes a bit for people to start putting it together, but a mysterious killer is targeting everyone who works for this design house. Someone’s out for revenge.

The biggest problem with this film is the same problem as pretty much any other Italian movie in the genre from the mid-70s – pretty much every man in this film is one flavor of pig or another. It’s more chauvinistic than misogynistic or homophobic (I still haven’t gotten the taste of New York Ripper out of my mouth), but there’s plenty of dudes who don’t take no for an answer, who have no sense of boundaries, who’ve never heard the word “consent.” And on top of that, most of the women in this film are sexually available in one way or another. Carlo has a brief, tense exchange with aspiring photographer Magda, who is intent on proving herself as a photographer on her own merits, but this doesn’t stop her from turning around and seducing Carlo in a darkroom for…reasons? It really does underscore the idea that boundaries and consent don’t really mean anything. No matter what she says, she really wants it. Even a scene with two cops interviewing someone can’t resist having one of the cops spend the whole thing leering at a scantily-dressed woman in the office. Why is she scantily-clad? That’s a good question. With the exception of two nurses in a brief hospital scene, pretty much every woman in this film ends up getting naked, whether it makes sense or not. It ranges from the somewhat uncomfortable - there’s a brief scene of a woman getting slapped around toward the end - to the pathetic, as another executive at the design house attempts to pay a woman to sleep with him, and when he’s unable to perform, he cries for his mother. I didn’t feel dirty after watching it (still looking at you, New York Ripper), but I did yell “ew, gross!” more than a few times at the way dudes acted in this film and at the subtext about sexual availability. I’m usually able to calibrate for older films, but in this instance it ends up being distracting.

So it’s very much of its time, to the point that it is kind of a distraction, but there’s also not a whole lot of movie outside of the gratuitous T&A. Apart from that, it’s sort of a mixed bag. The editing comes straight from the school of “meanwhile, in another movie,” the acting is nothing to write home about, and there’s very little mystery to it. It’s not so much that the killer is immediately obvious as it is it just one person after another dropping like flies until the very end, where the killer is revealed mere seconds before process of elimination would make their identity clear to the audience. It doesn’t have the stylishness of Argento’s work or the deranged vision of Fulci at his weirdest, but it’s mostly cohesive (if not especially interesting in how it develops the story) and it does manage a decent amount of suspense with a repeated motif of running water, heavy breathing, and a near-subliminal insert shot from the beginning of the film heralding the killer’s arrival. The deaths are quick and nasty, full of blood that looks like tempera paint, but they aren’t overly sadistic, and both men and women get killed. So it isn’t as icky as I was afraid it was going to be, landing more on inappropriately horny in a way that mostly just made me roll my eyes. It’s grainy, with pops of color and rainy streets at nighttime, and it’s got the requisite cop-show up-tempo score mixed in with some lighter pop music from the period. I’m beginning to see what people mean by “Eurosleaze” after watching this, and though it has its merits as a style of film, the “sleaze” part makes it a little tough to appreciate.

Film - especially horror film - is a place where you can explore difficult or upsetting ideas, grapple with uncomfortable emotions and express things in strong, vivid terms. I don’t like moral panics or pearl-clutching, and I don’t think that any particular creative work’s value should be determined by its adherence to a particular set of norms and values. Judging the films of 40-plus years ago by the values of today doesn’t make much sense to me. But anything that yanks me out of a movie is going to be a problem, and this one’s just juvenile and gross enough to be distracting. 

IMDB entry

Available on Tubi

Available on Amazon

A Wounded Fawn: Hell Hath Plenty Of Fury

It’s tempting to say that the fables and fairytales we’re told as children have been sanitized (and there is some evidence that the original stories by the Brothers Grimm were, well…really grim), but if you stop and think about it, there is some heavy shit in those stories. It’s just that as kids the gruesome can be as entertaining as the relatively innocuous can be frightening. So when the Big Bad Wolf wears the grandmother’s skin to deceive Red Riding Hood, it isn’t necessarily met with horror by children. But present someone wearing someone else’s skin to an adult and it’s a whole different vibe. Gretel And Hansel knows this...that fables and fairytales are generally really fucking scary.

And that’s why I think A Wounded Fawn works as well as it does. It’s an interesting, surreal fable that nestles neatly in between Piercing and Fresh, while going to darker and stranger territory than either of them.

The film sets out its stall early, beginning in an high-end auction house, where a sculpture of the Erinyes is up for bidding. Lots of people representing very wealthy people, one hand holding their phones, the other gesturing to up their bids. The sculpture is finally sold to a woman named Kate for more than twice the opening bid, and we follow her home, as she sets the sculpture down and opens a bottle of wine. A knock on her door brings Bruce, the representative of another client from the auction. He wants to make Kate a backdoor deal for the sculpture, paying her twice her bid and throwing her a bonus on top of that. She asks for a percentage of his commission on top, and he winces, but agrees. She asks him why the additional effort, and he says that his client saw something beautiful, and wanted it. Kate does not live to see the sunrise.

Cut to Meredith, a museum curator out with some friends. She’s met a guy - handsome, charming, who has invited her on a weekend getaway. She’s looking forward to getting some for the first time in awhile, even if she doesn’t know much about him. He was at a recent antiquities auction for whom her museum had done some provenance work. His name is Bruce.

He sees something beautiful, and he wants it.

So right off the bat, you’ve got your dude who is obviously not what he seems and the woman that he takes somewhere for nefarious murder-type purposes. And, like in Piercing and more recently Fresh, things do not go like he planned. Which is, in and of itself, not that surprising. There’s definitely an audience for films where someone takes a woman to a secluded location and then tortures her for an hour and a half before killing her, but those aren’t really my kind of film. So the reversal of expectation is in and of itself expected. But where Piercing and Fresh were both battles of will between the protagonist and antagonist, as well as studies of weak, fragile men who commit violence against women, this film almost immediately gets weird with it, showing us everything that follows from Bruce’s perspective. And it’s kind of a doozy. Like I said, the film really is giving you an idea of what’s going to happen by beginning with an image of the Furies, and this is mythology given teeth. Kate was not his first, not by a long shot, and what follows is a long night of retribution that dives into imagery that is equal parts classic Greek mythology and surrealist art. We aren’t sure where it’s going to go, but it isn’t going to be anyplace good.

Part of what makes the film work is the degree to which it is stylized. It’s shot on film, which in addition to the grain and texture gives it a slightly retro feel. Much like Piercing, this looks like a solid remaster of a much older film, and the only real concessions to modernity are mentions of ridesharing services and smartphones. Otherwise, this could easily be a giallo-inflected horror film from the late 70s or early 80s given a loving restoration. Warm lighting and appropriately bloody, gooey practical effects add to this feeling and lend the film an immediacy that underlies even its most surreal turns. The performances are solid, and though the dialogue’s a little purple (much moreso as the film gets stranger), it’s not to the point of distracting and even makes sense given the nods to classic mythology. It also benefits a lot from a very crisp editing style and cinematography that favors alternating longer takes with vivid stills and quick close-ups, almost like punctuation marks, which creates tension even if it does rely a little too heavily on at least one type of shot.

It's not clear how much of what is happening is supernatural and how much could be explained by the hallucinations of someone who is badly injured, but I think that’s sort of the point – the most practical explanation is that we’re watching someone finally have a reckoning with the life they’ve lived up to this point in a way that combines memory and art and myth into a nightmare fugue, another is that the myths are all real and this person’s time has come in the ways of old. The conclusion does land on one particular explanation, but only at the very end, with a long final take that reminds me of a more blackly comic version of the ending of Pearl. But in this sense it reminds me of the better parts of As Above, So Below, harnessing classics and myth to tell a horror story.

That said, there are some definite flaws. The second half of the film goes a little slack with an extended pursuit sequence that consists of someone just sort of running through the woods and seeing things, which feels a lot less interesting after the close tension of the film’s first half, It also use some of the same jumpscare-adjacent shots a little too often, and there’s one sequence involving a wood-burning stove that ends up just being silly, but it ends well, and the strange turn it takes works in its favor. Not a complete success, but its ambition is impressive and it has a strong, consistent vision that makes me want to see more takes on myth in horror. Fables and fairytales and myths are intended to be instructive, and scaring the shit out of people is certainly one way to teach them that their bad deeds will lead to a bad end.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon 

Haute Tension: Final* Girl

It’s years in the rear-view mirror by now, but one of the through-lines for what got me writing about horror movies for fun was the New French Extremity. It’s not a label anyone really uses anymore, which is probably for the better, since - at least in terms of horror films - the whole thing sort of fizzled out quickly. To the extent it ever was a movement (which is debatable), it produced some excellent films, and some absolute turkeys.

Haute Tension (High Tension) is one of the most frequently mentioned examples of New French Extremity, but I have to say, it’s much closer to the turkey end of the continuum. What we basically have is an effective, if workmanlike, slasher film that starts off strong before being marred by a slack third act and what has to be one of the most head-clutchingly ridiculous twists I’ve ever seen in a film.

We begin at what is presumably the end. There’s a woman sitting on an examination table in a hospital gown. Through the gap in the gown, we can see that her back is striped with deep cuts and abrasions, some severe enough to need stapling shut. There’s a camera recording her as she mumbles something about nothing keeping “us” apart again. Then we flash back to this same woman, running through some woods, covered in blood. Something bad has happened, but we have to go back to the beginning to understand it. Marie (the young woman from the introduction) and her friend Alex are college students, off to Alex’s family home in the country to study for exams, far away from the distractions of the city. No booze, no parties, no boys. Lots of winding country roads, and they pass by a truck driver parked on the shoulder in a rusty cargo van. It becomes clear pretty quickly that he’s got someone else in the truck with him, in the act of fellating him. But Marie and Alex have driven on by this point. And they’re long gone by the time the truck driver tosses what turns out to be a severed head out the window. It’s a striking moment, I’ll give it that.

Meanwhile, Marie and Alex arrive at Alex’s house, and after meeting her folks and her little brother, Marie repairs to her guest suite to get some rest. It’s late at night, it’s been a long day, and it’s been a long drive.

It’s late at night, and there’s a knock on the door.

So I’d say it sets its stall out early, but in a way that really effectively builds the tension of the title. We’re introduced to Marie and Alex, take some time to get to know them and their whole deal, and then this sudden, shocking segment with the truck driver gets dropped into the story like a time bomb before returning to these young women on the road. Something very bad is going to happen, but it’s not going to happen yet, and now that we know this lunatic is out there, we’re just waiting for the other shoe to drop, as Marie and Alex and Alex’s family are all blissfully unaware of what’s headed straight for them. In some ways, it reminds me of how the original Halloween teased Michael Myers through the better part of the film, always just slightly out of frame or out of focus or partially hidden behind scenery. The longer he’s out there, the worse it gets.

And I’ll say this, when this film works, its stock in trade is definitely tension. Once night falls, it doesn’t really take long for things to pop off. And once they do. they don’t really let up. We don’t really know anything about any of these people apart from Maria and Alex both being sort of party girls and Alex’s family seeming nice enough. But at least for the first couple of acts, sheer momentum gets the film over in the absence of much emotional investment in any of the characters. Once the action starts, it doesn’t really slow down. It’s a violent film (as slashers often are), but the violent segments are a mixture of off-camera restraint and almost confrontationally detailed. We don’t always see what’s happening, but what we do see is more than enough. There’s a lot of blood in this movie, spattering and pooling and spraying, and a lot of people in visible distress, and if it doesn’t always linger on the violence it does linger on their suffering and pain. It’s a grubby film as well – a lot of it is shot in sort of a sickly yellow that makes everything look sort of stained or used, at least outside of the farmhouse setting, and the killer is oily, sweaty, and grimy in a filthy jumpsuit, dirt under his nails, as bestial as his introduction would have you think. He doesn’t talk much, mostly just grunts as he brutalizes everything in his path. Crisp editing helps to keep the action moving, Marie trying to avoid this sudden menace in the confines of a fairly cozy farmhouse, so for the first couple of acts, it’s a film in almost constant motion. But that’s the first couple of acts. The third is where everything falls apart.

First, the film, despite being a French production, is dubbed into English, and although it isn’t too distracting at first (there is the odd verbosity you get when you’re trying to fit dialogue in one language to the speech patterns of another), as the film goes on more and more of the dialogue is in French and subtitled in English, and any attempt to make dubbed dialogue fit the actors’ speech goes right out the window.. It doesn’t seem like a stylistic choice, as much as someone just stopped doing their job. Why it wasn’t all in French and subtitled from the get-go is a mystery. I don’t know that it would have saved the film, but it would have seemed like less of a rush job. And for all of the tension of the beginning of the film, once the action moves away from the farmhouse the pace grows looser and looser until we’re left with a not-especially-exciting “chase scene” that consists of two cars driving at a sensible speed through the woods, capped by increasingly ludicrous levels of violence - cartoonish in a way that earlier moments weren’t - and false endings. It goes from claustrophobic and…well, tense…to something much more bland and formulaic.

But the worst of it has to be a reveal in the third act that makes very little sense in term of literally everything that came before. I don’t mind twists, for the most part. But a good twist relies on the film playing fair with the audience up to the moment it’s revealed, so that rewatching it (or even getting the flashback that spells it all out) gives you the opportunity to put the pieces together yourself, to see how the truth was staring at you the whole time. Clever use of misdirection and new context goes a long way, but this isn’t like that at all. It’s not just that there’s no opportunity to figure it out, or even anything we could observe that might suggest that not everything is as it seems. We actually see things throughout the film that actively contradict it. You can use clever staging of shots to hide things in plain sight, but this film doesn’t bother. It just…I guess for lack of a better term, it just straight-up lies about everything we’ve just seen, for no apparent reason. It adds nothing to the film except sort of a cheap “gotcha” moment. The end result is the feeling that the filmmakers had about an hour’s worth of a decently suspenseful if not especially substantive movie and realized they needed to come up with another thirty minutes, so they just sort of winged it. And it shows. In the sloppy dubbing, in a climax that wanders aimlessly, in a last-minute revelation that makes absolutely no sense, it fucking shows.

This is a film that gets mentioned as one of the biggest of the New French Extremity (for what little that’s worth), but it’s easily one of its biggest disappointments. It doesn’t have Martyrs’ well-crafted story, or Inside’s claustrophobic, confrontational tone. It’s closer to something like Frontier(s), with its reliance on blood and screaming and active contempt for storytelling. I was spoiled for the big twist going in (part of why I’ve taken so long to write about it) and I was still surprised at how half-assed it was. The more I think about this film, the angrier I get.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon

Lo Squartatore Di New York: Not A Nice Place To Visit, And I Certainly Don’t Want To Live There

As near as I can tell, there are a couple of different types of Italian horror films that get filed under giallo. You’ve got the stylish (or at least stylized) murder mysteries, where lots of people get stabbed or strangled or otherwise dispatched by mystery figures in black leather, and then you’ve got the zombie/demon movies, where some gate to hell or another gets opened up and all kinds of gooey monstrosities emerge to kill, eat, and both eat and kill people. Where do cannibal movies fit? If/when I ever make a point of watching any, I’ll let you know, but I wouldn’t hold your breath. I know that giallo describes a wider range of movies than this, but this is what I’ve observed so far. And regardless of which of those two types it is, there’s one thing they have in common: They’re bonkers. Not a shred of subtlety to be found. The more I think about it, “outrageous” really fits, in that they’re both wildly unconcerned with plausibility and also likely to evoke outrage.

And in both those regards, Lo Squartatore Di New York (The New York Ripper) fits the bill in spades. It’s the kind of film that gets described as being “very much of its time,” but really that just means it’s sleazy and gross on multiple levels. Worse, as far as I’m concerned, it seems to bring together the two types of giallo I outlined above, but does so without including the strengths of either. The narrative doesn’t hold together, and it’s bloody and violent without being either stylish or over-the-top enough to get over. It’s kind of the worst of both.

That said, I have to applaud the opening. We get a scenic view of what is presumably the East River, and an older gentleman walking his dog along the trash-strewn asphalt adjacent to the riverbank. Ah, city living. He finds a chunk of wood and he throws it. Like the very good girl she is, his dog brings it back. So he throws it again, and she dives into some bushes to retrieve it. But when she comes out, he looks at her in dismay, as the camera cuts to her standing there holding a decomposed human hand in her mouth. It’s not an especially surprising scene, I would have been more surprised if it had gone any other way, but then it freeze-frames on the shot of the dog holding the rotting hand and plays all of the opening credits over it. It makes you look at that hand. The movie is saying “you are in for some shit,” and it’s right.

Cut to world-weary police lieutenant Fred Williams at the precinct house, taking the statement of a dotty old landlady who is reporting one of her tenants missing. Does his cop intuition tell him there’s more to this than a flighty young woman who’s taken off for an impromptu trip? No, not really, but he’s the protagonist, so he’ll have to do. We move from New York’s finest standing around looking bored to a young woman riding her bike to the Staten Island ferry. She accidentally scrapes against a car along the way and the driver makes a point of loudly explaining to her that she’s a menace to society with the brains of a chicken and how “you women” should stay at home where they belong. And yeah, that’s…this movie came out in 1982, and that’s pretty much how the whole film is going to be. As luck has it, he’s parked on the ferry, and as they get underway, this young woman takes the opportunity to slip into his car and write “shit head” on the inside of the windshield in lipstick.

But before she can finish, she is interrupted by someone with a switchblade. Permanently.

So Lieutenant Williams gets assigned to investigate the Mysterious Case Of Why Women Are Turning Up Dead. He is ostensibly assisted by a psychologist named Dr. Paul Davis, who will be helping him develop a profile of the killer. I say “ostensibly” because mostly all Dr. Davis does is play chess, look smug, and belittle the people around him. What follows is a lot of stuff happening, in no particular order. This is a film that doesn’t move from scene to scene so much as it lurches from scene to scene, and though you can make out something of a story, there’s not a whole lot of attention paid to pacing or structure or anything like that. Characters are routinely introduced with little to no context in the way that you expect that connections between them will be revealed, or that they’ll cross paths and things will make more sense, but not so much. In most cases (at least the women), they’re in the movie to get murdered and that’s kind of it.

So this is a film about a police investigation into a series of murders, but I can’t really call it a procedural, because that implies that there’s anything resembling procedure. This film makes leaps in logic that would easily take Olympic gold if it were an event. Apparently, Wiliams is able to determine the killer’s age and that they’ve lived their entire life in New York City from…a blood test. That’s…that’s not a thing. The killer makes a point of calling the police to taunt them, and even though this taunting consists of the killer saying “you’re so stupid” a lot and quacking (yes, quacking), Davis determines from this that the killer is very intelligent and cultured. In theory, Williams is working with Davis to catch the killer, but they confer maybe three times over the whole film – large sections go by apparently having forgotten this was supposed to be happening. Davis’ analysis of the killer is empty psychobabble, but really, that’s just par for the course. It’s easy to tell that everything in this film is based on someone’s speculation about what police work and psychology are, since presumably there was no money or time for a consultant, and so they just made shit up. Most of the film is just ping-ponging between characters, setting up red herring after red herring. Is it the man with two fingers missing, who attacks a woman on the subway? Is it the wealthy doctor with some very specific kinks? Is it the young painter whose girlfriend narrowly escapes the killer? Is it Dr. Davis? Hell, is it the police chief? The answer will surprise you, because it’s totally unrelated to any of the clues the film has planted.

So it’s a clumsy, incoherent story, told in clumsy, incoherent fashion. The dialogue’s as stilted as you’d expect from an Italian production set in New York (Williams to the police chief: “Well, if it isn’t the big chief person himself”), although there’s enough location shooting that it feels like New York, and it’s New York of the early 80s, all grubby and run-down, subway cars scabbed over with graffiti and dingy apartments and porn theaters in Times Square. All of which is explored in the most prurient and salacious way possible. Is there any real reason why one of the murders requires a lengthy sequence at a live sex show? Not really, and yet here we are. There are more than a few shots of nude female bodies on morgue tables, many of the women happen to be naked when they get killed, and there’s one sequence involving a nude woman and a razor blade that is genuinely nasty. The effects are still obvious, but well-done enough that it isn’t as comical as it could be. And there’s one sequence with the wealthy doctor’s wife and two men in a bar that had me wanting to take five or six showers once it was over. Put simply, the film is misogynistic as fuck. Women exist in this movie to be naked and/or stabbed. They’re sex workers, or someone who had the nerve to talk back to a man, or stuck-up rich women slumming for rough trade, and even the one the film goes out of its way to tell us is a genius? She’s also prone to hallucinations. Bitches be crazy, am I right? We learn that Davis is most likely gay – does it end up mattering? No, thank goodness, given the genre’s track record with homosexuality, but it’s portrayed through a fairly leering one-off scene that ends up contributing nothing to our understanding of him either. It’s an uncomfortable film to watch, and not in the sense of being confrontational, so much as it feels like you’re stuck in conversation with an oily little creep who thinks jokes about rape are funny.

It just sort of bounces back and forth between murders and aimless conversation until the third act, which keeps you guessing (or more specifically, confused) right up to the end, revealing a rationale for the murders absolutely head-clutching in how convoluted it is. Even by giallo standards, it’s kind of a doozy, coming out of nowhere, just like everything else about this film. It’s a thriller without the visual flair of those giallo at their best, and it’s got the graphic violence of the more straightforward horror giallo without being evocative, and it manages to preserve all of the gross attitudes of the period. So it’s evocative of another time, absolutely, but it’s a time that nobody in their right mind would want to revisit.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon 

Terrifier: Insane Clown Parting (Your Head From Your Shoulders)

It’s been a long time since I took the month of October to do something a little different. While most people are talking about the horror films worth watching, that’s what I’m trying to do most of the year, so instead I try to change it up. But I think the last time I really committed to the bit was a month of films that aren’t horror films, but are totally horror films, and that was a long time ago.

So I decided that for this spooky season, I’m going to focus on the kinds of movies I usually avoid. I got the idea after watching Malignant, which, despite my reservations, ended up being fun. Although I can’t guarantee that any of the others film I watch this month will get the same reception, there’s a willful perversity to the idea that I like. I spend most of the year focusing on my lane, so October seems like a good time to stray from it, maybe interrogate my dislikes a little.

With that in mind, I really don’t like slasher movies. I like watching horror films that unnerve me, get under my skin, make me feel things, that scare me. And I don’t find slasher films very scary. Because once you get past the spectacle of ludicrously graphic violence, there’s not much there, usually. I know many people find gore and violence upsetting – and don’t get me wrong, when graphic violence is used to help tell a story with relatable people and actual emotional stakes, it can be a powerful storytelling tool, but gore and graphic violence by themselves, for their own sake, don’t really move me. At that point it’s hard for me to see them as anything other than an exercise in special effects. There’s often not much consideration for the characters, not a lot of effort to make them relatable, sympathetic people, and at their worst they can be downright reactionary.

Basically, bloody death without a story and emotional stakes or worse, presented as entertainment, isn’t my deal. And so I decided to watch Terrifier, which has a decent reputation as a pretty unapologetic slasher film. To its credit, isn’t especially reactionary (maybe a little), and it’s made with style, but at the end of the day, it’s the prototypical slasher movie stripped down to its bare bones. It’s a movie where nobody exists as anything more than cannon fodder, and the violence is the only point.

We open on a news program, where the host is about to interview a woman who is the only known survivor of the Miles County Massacre, a murder spree that occurred a year ago, last Halloween. It ended with the killer – known as Art the Clown – dead. Or so the survivor says, despite his body mysteriously vanishing from the morgue. But she’s insistent, and it’s easy to see why, as Art left her with a face that’s very hard to look at. The idea that whoever did something that horrible could return is not a comfortable one. And somewhere out in the city, there’s someone watching this program. Someone so incensed by what they see that they smash their television.

Someone putting on greasepaint and a clown costume and gathering up a bag full of very sharp implements.

And then back at the studio, we cut to the host in her dressing room talking on her phone, making all kinds of disparaging comments about the appearance of the woman she just interviewed, before the very same woman suddenly attacks her and begins mangling her face while laughing maniacally. That is a thing that happened. Now we’re following two young women, Tera and Dawn, who’ve just left a Halloween party, and discover that someone’s slashed Dawn’s tire. Tera calls her sister Victoria, who’s busy studying for finals, but agrees to come get them when her roommate staggers in drunk with some dude in tow. Tera and Dawn walk into the nearby pizza joint to get a slice while they wait. And then they look over and there’s this, like, really creepy dude in a black and white clown costume who just, like, keeps staring at them. Dawn teases Tera that he thinks she’s really cute, and then gets a selfie with him while Tera’s just getting wall-to-wall bad vibes and you can kind of tell that Tera probably prevents Dawn from making some seriously bad decisions on a regular basis. The clown never speaks, never blinks. He just keeps staring.

This is basically a slasher film with all of the fat trimmed from it. It’s not even an hour and a half long, and the story doesn’t really extend past there being a bunch of people out on Halloween night for one reason or another and now an evil clown is murdering all of them. No history, no backstory, no legends. There’s an evil clown and he’s killing people. So it gets right down to business. On the one hand, the near-minimalism of its approach is something to appreciate, but at the same time it’s also laying bare just how little there is going on beyond sensationalism here. No niceties, you just came for the killing and we know that, so here you go. In that regard, it’s all pretty two-dimensional.

But I will give it this: this film has a well-realized aesthetic. It’s grainy, the colors are garish, and everything is starkly lit. Every scene feels like a well-lit island in a sea of darkness - almost theatrical, as if spotlights are illuminating sets that consist of what’s necessary for the scene and nothing else, which makes the stripped-down, minimalist feel seem more intentional than crass. The score is ominous synthesizers right out of a 1980s slasher movie, and so along with the visuals, the whole thing feels vintage without feeling like pastiche. It evokes a mood and feeling without calling too much attention to it. Art the Clown does make for an interesting antagonist as slasher-film killers go. He’s clad and painted all in black and white, which stands out well against the blues and reds and purples and harsh light sources spilling over the rest of the frame. His face is stark white with gaping black holes for eyes and a mouth, and he’s totally silent, doing all of his expression through mime. I have to say, it’s a nice change from your bog-standard hulking figure in some kind of mask, and it ends up making for a lot of pretty striking moments, along with injecting some pitch-black wit into the proceedings. I don’t know that I would have wanted a backstory or any kind of dialogue or anything from the antagonist, because the inexplicable, near-supernatural murder clown thing worked better than I expected it to.

Outside of that, it’s wholly of its type. It's a grungy film, where every location is believably deserted, abandoned, and filthy, and there’s a lot of blood and guts (with Art’s costume getting more and more bloodstained, and the shocking red against the white is an effective visual), and though the effects aren’t the cheapest I’ve seen, they’re low-rent enough that it’s relatively easy to maintain some kind of comfortable distance from the horrible shit that’s happening. Which, yeah, that’s one of those things I don’t like. That’s what makes pain and suffering entertainment, when you can hold others’ torment and ugly deaths at arms’ length. The camera lingers on bodies getting punctured, stabbed, shot, mauled, gnawed on, stomped, and sawn in half. That’s the point of the film and really the only thing that matters. I don’t dislike these characters, certainly I don’t think they deserve their fates, but I can’t really say that I care about them either. You know right off the bat that this is a film where lots of people will die, and they do. There’s no surprise to it, no shock or upset, really. And we don’t get to know them, no there’s nothing to hope for, nobody to root for. It’s a bunch of gross death scenes broken up by cutaways to other people or someone walking from one place to the next to meet whatever fate has in store.

This film is unapologetically what it is - a film made for people who expect scene after scene of violence, and on that front it delivers. It’s got a more cohesive aesthetic than I expected, and some vivid moments among the gore, but I can’t say it’s changed my mind about the genre.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi
Available on Amazon

Malignant: Out Of My Head

It’s probably safe to call me a member of the No Fun Club when it comes to horror films. I don’t especially like horror comedies, and I like my horror to be bleak and unsettling and not especially interested in entertainment. I get that, and I’ll own it. This is mostly because the whole reason I started writing this a really long time ago was because I felt (and still feel) like horror isn’t extended enough respect as cinema. And so, as a result, I tend to be very much into Very Serious Horror That Is Not Fun At All, Because Entertainment Is Bad.

And that’s probably not fair. And I realize this because although I didn’t find Malignant frightening, let alone bleak or unsettling or whatever, it was so much fucking fun to watch that I can’t dismiss it. It’s a love letter to earlier eras of horror film crafted with thought and vision and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

It opens on a shot of an old, gothic-looking building, looming over a stormy night. A title reads “Simion Research Hospital, 1993.” Inside, Dr. Florence Weaver is recording a report about a patient named Gabriel to tape (we know it’s videotape because it’s got that viewfinder overlay with a blinking red light in the corner, like you don’t actually see on videotape unless it’s in the movies). And then, as you’d expect, someone interrupts to tell her that Gabriel has gotten loose. There’s a lot of hurrying down corridors lit in lurid, flashing colors, as this other person exposits that Gabriel isn’t affected at all by electricity, that he’s almost drinking it up, and there’s a trail of bodies along the corridor. Something’s been cornered inside a room, almost feral. Finally it’s subdued and strapped into a chair. That’s when Dr. Weaver says “it’s time…to cut out the cancer.”

On that note, we jump to the present day, and a young woman named Madison. She’s visibly pregnant, and very tired. She’s been working extra shifts to save up money for after the baby comes. Her husband, Derek, is lounging on the bed watching television, presumably tired after his arrival from Abusive Creep School. Madison is really concerned about this pregnancy after suffering a number of miscarriages, and Derek starts off unsympathetic, before moving pretty quickly to cruel, and from there he gets rough, pushing his pregnant wife into a wall. She hits her head hard enough to leave blood behind. When Derek walks out, she locks the door behind her and lies down on the bed, where she has a horrible nightmare about a mysterious figure getting into the house and stabbing Derek to death.

And when she wakes up and walks out of the room, Derek’s lying there, dead. Just like she saw it happen.

So what we’ve got here is Madison and her sister Sydney trying to convince the police that she didn’t kill her husband, and that’s she’s having visions of more murders as they’re happening. And, as you’d expect, the pair of detectives assigned to the case aren’t believing her. If this sounds like something you’ve seen before, maybe more than once, that’s probably not an accident, because this film is an homage to a whole range of things. It’s got elements of 1980s slasher films as well as the weirder, grungier stuff Stuart Gordon was doing back then, along with giallo, proto-slasher films like Black Christmas, and thrillers like Eyes Of Laura Mars. It’s not self-consciously retro, it’s got the effects budget of a more modern horror film, but everything else about it screams one flavor of 80s schlock or another.

And it works. It works because those flavors are note-perfect. This is a film from a reality much like our own, but one where there’s a mysterious gap in the dictionary where the word “subtle” should be. I really thought that the opening scene would end with an off-screen voice calling “cut” and establishing the protagonist as an actor in B-grade horror movies, but no, that’s just the vibe. From jump, it’s ridiculous. Performances are consistently over-the-top, the dialogue is immediately overheated and mostly consists of pure exposition of the “you know you haven’t been the same since [insert long string of events here]” variety and lots of stating the obvious (during a firefight, someone actually says “they’re shooting at us” without any irony whatsoever.) You’ve got the stock wisecracking police detectives, and a crime scene technician whose sole defining features are that she is 1) mousy and single, and 2) clearly hot for one of the detectives. And everything is played completely straight, without a single ounce of self-consciousness or winking at the camera. Which is exactly how you do something like this.

Almost all of the scene-to-scene beats are predictable, which is a big part of why I didn’t find the film scary, the rhythms are so familiar that they’re almost comforting. But they’re all executed with a great sense of visual style - a shot that follows Madison through her own house from a top-down cutaway view, the doors and walls stretched impossibly high comes to mind, as does the way the killer is presented as an entirely black shape as if he’s a living silhouette, all black leather and a stylish gold dagger like he stepped right out of an Argento film. There are plenty of Dutch angles, everything is slathered in the most lurid reds and blues you can find, and there’s sinister music painted over every scene. With the exception of a few sedate exteriors, everywhere in this film is shadowy, covered in cobwebs, foggy, and with light pouring in from one angle or another. It’s like the cinematographer was instructed to make everything look like a nightmare sequence from one of the early Elm Street films. Much like the dialogue and performances, it’s all so earnestly overblown that it comes out the other side as art.

And it’s all paced with a wonderfully delirious sense of escalation. By and large it seems like the story of a young woman who has some kind of mysterious psychic link to a killer, and it continues along in that vein until the last act, when everything gets more grisly before going utterly apeshit. It gets much weirder and much bloodier than everything preceding it without getting any more serious in tone, blending the giallo-style flashbacks that reveal exactly how everything really happened with some classic body horror. Like everything else about this film, it swings for the fences and I found my jaw in my lap at how melodramatic and audacious the whole thing ended up being. As much as I’m partial to grim, unsettling, straight-faced horror, I have to admit I was absolutely delighted to take this ride. I guess I needed a reminder that I don’t need to always treat this like some kind of intellectual crusade, that it’s okay to loosen up and get out of my head sometimes, and I’m glad this film provided it.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
Available from Amazon 

Knock At The Cabin: Apocalypses Great And Small

I get really nervous when horror that I like in other media gets slated for development as a film or series. If it goes right, it adds more really good horror to horror film. But if it goes wrong…it’s like someone playing your favorite song and missing all the notes, or deciding that what it really needs is kazoo and fart noises. You know what it could be, so when it falls short, it’s more disappointing than usual.

So when I found out that the book The Cabin At The End Of The World by Paul Tremblay was getting made into a film, I was happy about it. It packs a wallop, is at moments pretty cinematic even as a book, and avoids a lot of the obvious choices in favor of a relentless ambiguity that leaves you on the hook to the very end and past it. And then I found out it was being directed by M. Night Shyamalan. 

Now, I try to avoid talking too much about the specific directors or actors or writers involved in a film because I want to keep my focus on the finished product, and I think horror fandom focuses way too much on personalities. But Shyamalan’s track record has some pretty wide swings - you’ve got really solid efforts like The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, but then you’ve got films like The Lady In The Water and The Happening, films that generally appear on those “how did this ever get made?” lists. Like, not just less good or mediocre, but actually inviting scorn and derision. When his films are good they’re very good (I really like The Village, do not @ me or X me or whatever it is now), but…I had to wonder which M. Night Shyamalan would be showing up for this.

Well, Knock At The Cabin (who the fuck thought this title was a good idea?) ends up being sort of a mixed bag, but I suspect the low points have little to do with the director. It’s skillfully made, but it’s brought down by some disappointing choices that feel like things studio executives would demand. 

Wen, who appears to be eight or nine years old, is vacationing at a lakeside cabin with her fathers Eric and Andrew. She’s catching grasshoppers, naming them, and noting their characteristics in a book like a budding scientist. Eric and Andrew are on the back deck, enjoying the view and some wine and snacks. It’s lovely and idyllic. The idyll does not, however, last long. Wen looks up, and there’s a man walking toward her. He’s very big, dressed in jeans and a white button-down shirt, like the Hulk became a Mormon missionary. He tries to strike up a conversation with Wen, but Wen doesn’t talk to strangers. The very large man says she’s right not to talk to strangers, so he introduces himself. His name is Leonard. Leonard asks about her grasshoppers, helps her catch some.

And up the road come three more people, dressed similarly, with long, sharp, homemade implements. You see, Leonard and his acquaintances Redmond, Adriane, and Sabrina, have a very important job to do, and they’re going to need Wen, Andrew, and Eric’s help.

They’re going to prevent the end of the world.

What follows isn’t really the siege film you might think it’s going to be. Sure, you have the trapped family and what appear to be four fanatics obsessed with the idea of sacrifice, but the bulk of the film is really more about the seven of them than anything else. If it’s a siege film, it’s a siege film in which for most (not all) of it, conversation replaces violence. Leonard and the other three are there to convince Eric, Andrew, and Wen that they need to help them, and they come across less like bloodthirsty zealots and more like four frightened people delivering some very bad news on a tight deadline. What they’re asking is unspeakable, but they seem aware that it’s unspeakable and are almost apologetic but no less urgent for all of that. It’s an interesting tack to take. Needless to say, neither Eric nor Andrew are on board, but they’re two very different people- Eric a quiet, reflective man of religious faith, and Andrew a tough, unbelieving pragmatist. But they aren’t cartoons in the slightest. What’s happening at the cabin is punctuated by flashbacks that sketch out their lives together, from early on in their relationship to adopting Wen. These are two men who love each other and who have been shaped differently by the forces with which they have to contend for that mere fact. Cold, silent visits with family. Polite lies to satisfy authority. Bottles across the back of their heads. Adversity has shaped them differently, and so they respond to this adversity differently as well.

Just in terms of execution, this film is put together extremely well. Shyamalan, for whatever you might think of the stories he tells in his films, has a lot of experience directing, and it shows. The dialogue is a little dialogue-y but not so much as to be distracting, and the performances are consistently strong. They manage the difficult feat of making the antagonists much more sympathetic than a lesser film would have them as being, and everyone comes across as a distinct, believable person with their own feelings and doubts and fears and flaws, and it’s in how they talk, how they carry themselves, the looks on their faces. Cinematically, I can best describe this film as very self-assured. Cinematography and lighting do a lot to keep what is effectively a single location from feeling static and adding tension, and frequent use of close-ups keeps the focus on the people, locating the tension in the turmoil that everyone is experiencing. Shot composition does its fair share to communicate relationships, the editing and (mostly) pacing are crisp, and the whole thing rides on a score of minor-key swells that communicates danger and unease without being shrill. 

From a technical standpoint, it is a very well-made film. And in terms of faithfulness to the source text (which isn’t always my biggest priority, I know what works on the page doesn’t always work on the screen), it’s very good for the first two acts. Like I said at the start, I feel like the book was already pretty cinematic, and apart from the opening scene, which I felt was shorter and more perfunctory than the book, losing a lot of the mounting dread in the process, it captures how I imagined it while reading pretty well. But the third act is, well, mostly a problem, diverging from the original at the expense of what made the source text so good to begin with.

This story, in either case, centers around sacrifice and apocalyptic endings. And in the source text, there’s a very personal apocalypse - a profound loss, and whether or not there’s an actual global apocalypse is left more uncertain. The film shifts the first in service of an obvious, definite answer to the second, and I think the film suffers as a result. The source text doesn’t give us any easy answers, so when the film does, it feels smaller somehow. And it really goes to town in the last act mopping up and eliminating any trace of the ambiguity that was so central to the original story. Not only was it not a cut-and-dried good-versus-evil story, but it was also a story that hinged very much on the tug of war between belief and doubt. And by the end of this film, there isn’t a trace of doubt left, not even about the smallest things, giving us something much safer, more sanitized, in exactly the kind of film that shouldn't feel safe and sanitized. The more I think about it, the more it pisses me off.

This was not indie horror. This was big-studio horror, with a big-name director and at least one name that would bring in box office. I can only imagine that somewhere, some studio suit with a deficiency of spine passed down a note saying that those things had to change because nobody ever went broke assuming audiences were dumb and thin-skinned and couldn’t handle ambiguity or seriously heavy feelings. It’s something that feels unique to the U.S., this idea of horror as being limited to safe thrill rides instead of confrontational art, and no, I’m not angry, just disappointed. No, wait, I am angry.

IMDB entry

Available on Amazon

I Corpi Presentano Tracce Di Violenza Carnale: Sex And Violence

For as much lip service as Halloween gets for being the beginning of slasher films, there are any number of films that precede it, and something I’m starting to realize the more I dive into Italian horror is just how much of the prototypical slasher film’s DNA comes from giallo. Sure, it’s a term that encompasses more than just horror, but within the ones most commonly associated with horror, starting with The Bird With The Crystal Plumage, you see what would eventually lead to Halloween and all the dross that came after. And as someone who doesn’t really like slasher films, a lot of the early examples are more interesting in how they don’t hew to a formula (because the formula didn’t exist yet) or bring in elements of other films. 

And to this end, I Corpi Presentano Tracce Di Violenza Carnale (Torso) is a noteworthy addition to the list. It’s an Italian horror film that doesn’t have the visual flair of something like Suspiria or Deep Red, or the gonzo weirdness of something like The Beyond, but acquits itself well and probably works even better now because of a shift in cultural norms.

It opens, as many of these films do, lurid and weird. Someone’s photographing a bunch of women sort of writhing around naked in soft focus. There’s a child’s doll, and a set of fingers comes into frame to gouge out its eyes. So already we have a pretty good idea of what we’re in for. Cut to an art history lecture, and a professor examining the relationship between sacred art and artists who are non-believers. We’re introduced to a number of female students - Flo, Carol, Dani, Katia, Jane and Ursula. It’s coming up on the weekend and they’re making plans. For Flo, “plans” consist of driving to a remote area and making out with a guy.

They did not include a masked figure murdering both of them, but there you go.

The basic structure of the film is as simple as any slasher film - people try to figure out who’s doing all the murders, murders keep happening, often strangulation with a very distinctive-looking scarf, eventually there’s a final reveal and confrontation. The music’s pretty stock, the settings aren’t especially flashy, but it’s well-paced and has, I think, a couple of things going for it. First, intentionally, it makes good use of the trappings of the whodunit. Just when you think you’ve got a particular character nailed as the killer, something comes along to upend that and make you question your own judgment. It’s pretty engaging on that front, and the final reveal feels earned, if not just as melodramatic in its explanation as any other film in the genre. I don’t like thinking of films in terms of “kill scenes,” but I think it handles the requisite scenes well - they’re mostly set-up, and though the violence is sufficiently graphic, it’s not lingering or gratuitous. It gets pretty gnarly at points but you never feel like it’s indulging for the sake of it.

The second thing is, I think, not intentional, but more a factor of the way sensibilities have changed since the 1970s, when this was made. It’s a film that is very much of its time. The original title translates to “the body showed traces of carnal violence” and if I didn’t know better, I’d say this film was key in the inclusion of sexual content in later slasher films. There is lots and lots of gratuitous nudity in this film, starting with the opening credits but by no means ending there. The scenes don’t need it, and it’s lingered upon. It’s strictly directed at the female characters and it’s utterly unapologetic. The camera leers and so do pretty much all of the men in the movie. Like, literally there’s one scene that’s just a bunch of men gawking at a woman. Like, that’s it. Both in how they’re treated visually and in how the male characters talk about them, the women in this film are completely objectified. So right off the bat, there’s something alienating about this film, in the degree to which it is the product of a sensibility you rarely see depicted so blatantly any more. But I think the alienation helps it - we’re presented with a world very different from our own, and that creates a certain atmosphere.

This is further assisted by the nature of the men in the film. With a couple of exceptions, all of the men in the film are creepy to one degree or another. It’s tough to tell how much of it is intentional and how much of it is just because it was an Italian film made in the 1970s. but, as it does in Black Christmas, it adds this uneasy layer to the film - it’s already a hostile atmosphere, and on top of that, pretty much anyone could be the killer. Is it the art professor who hits on Jane and takes a compliment about his eyes really strangely? Is it the student clearly obsessed with Dani, who wears a suspiciously familiar-looking scarf and starts choking a sex worker when she suggests he might be gay? Is it the apparently well-meaning doctor who gives a bunch of them the once-over on a train out of town? Is it the weaselly owner of the newsstand who sells scarves like the one from the killings? Is it one of the two dudes who grope Katia and then try to beat her up when she rejects them? Is it Dani’s uncle, who isn’t above checking her out surreptitiously while she’s just wearing a towel? It could be any of them because they’re all equally complicit in treating women like objects that exist for their pleasure and nothing else. It’s like these women are adrift in a sea of predators because misogyny makes everything a minefield for them.

The first act sets up all the suspects, the second act starts picking people off, and the third brings it home, though interestingly enough, instead of getting more frantic toward the climax, it slows way down and plays most of it as an extended game of cat and mouse, making the big reveal pretty much at the last possible minute. True to the form, there are plenty of cryptic flashbacks, murders performed by a mysterious figure in black leather gloves, the requisite pop-rock soundtrack (chase scenes are never more mellow than they are in films like this), and plenty of blood. There’s strangling, stabbing, eyes getting gouged out, heads getting crushed by a car, the usual, though the violence is far less fetishized in this film than the sex, about which attitudes are as confused as you’d expect - plenty of women traipsing around naked for reasons, dialogue about what this particular man would do to that particular woman, but a scene of the killer peeking in on two women kissing has the kiss itself obscured by a conveniently placed headboard. There’s also an early instance of the Final Girl, predating Halloween by a good five years. It doesn’t hit the most deliriously berserk heights of the form, but it’s also much more coherent and keeps up a good sustained feeling of tension and unease. Nobody and nowhere feels safe in this film.

It is, in some ways, a very workmanlike film. It doesn’t exceed expectations, but there’s also not too much to complain about - there’s one very goofily choreographed fight scene that looks more like a slapfight than anything else, but that’s about it. If you have a low tolerance for men being gross about women, this is not your film, and though it isn’t as transcendent as something like Suspiria or The Beyond, it’s very solid.

IMDB entry

Available on Tubi

Available on Amazon

Phantasm: The Undertaker’s New Clothes

 I always feel a little uneasy when I plan on tackling something that’s considered a classic in one way or another, especially when it’s something I’ve never seen before. There’s always the concern that a longtime favorite won’t have held up, but when something I’ve never seen before has a history and reputation and a devoted following and it doesn’t click for me, well…

…well, then you get Phantasm. It’s a definite cult classic, spawning multiple sequels and firmly embedded in the horror lexicon. Years ago I watched it (or tried to) and I remember feeling confused and underwhelmed enough that I don’t think I finished it. But that was a long time ago, my tastes have broadened, and it’s a gap in my cinematic education. But having seen it now, I find myself very confused by the adoration for this film, because I really don’t think it works.

It opens on a man and a woman, in a graveyard, engaging in what I think is supposed to be sex. It’s tough to tell, because they aren’t really doing the things you expect from a couple having sex, like expressing enthusiasm, or moving. The man mumbles something about how good it was, in a tone of voice you usually associate with falling asleep. But suddenly the woman has a knife! And she stabs him! For just a moment, her face is replaced by that of a gaunt, unsmiling old man. On to the next scene. The man who we just saw getting stabbed was Tommy, and his friends Jody and Reggie meet outside the funeral home adjacent to the cemetery where Tommy met his end to discuss his passing (“hell of a way to break up a trio”) and the upcoming service (“I just don’t get off on funerals, man. They give me the creeps”). Jody’s thinking about leaving town, but he has his little brother Mike to think of. They lost their parents in a car accident, and ever since, Mike’s had real abandonment issues, sticking to Jody like glue. Jody told Mike to stay home because the funeral would be upsetting, and so Mike sneaks out to the cemetery (on a very loud dirt bike) and hides in the woods to spy on the funeral through a pair of binoculars. You know, like you do. And once the service is over and the mourners have left, a tall thin man comes up to the grave, grabs the casket as if it didn’t weigh a thing, and loads it into the hearse.

It's the man we glimpsed while Tommy was dying.

So a sad young boy with abandonment issues and creepy voyeuristic tendencies discovers that strange things are afoot at the local funeral home, and after that it’s all over the place. There’s no real story to speak of, this is a movie where something happens, then something else happens, then another thing happens with varying levels of abruptness. It’s one of those movies that’s so cheap and so clumsy that it attains a level of surrealism -see also Messiah Of Evil and Carnival Of Souls - but unlike those films, it never really manages to develop much of an atmosphere or mood, so all you’re left with is one what-the-fuck moment after another, and if anything the cheapness and clumsiness undercuts a lot of the horror, rendering what should be tense, eerie moments comical.

In between scenes of Mike and Reggie and Jody talking in various combinations and a puzzling interlude with an ostensibly blind and mute fortune teller, there are a couple of nightmare sequences that, to be fair, have a certain raw vitality to them, and the strange things afoot at the local funeral home are certainly very strange - whatever you think is going on, you’re probably wrong - and events go places you wouldn’t expect if you were going into the film blind. But then the action stops so Jody and Reggie can play a quick song out of nowhere. A tense chase scene involves an ice cream truck and is thus scored by an especially tinkly version of “Three Blind Mice.” Mike interrupts a potentially tense scene by literally running through it hollering at the top of his lungs, There’s little sense of continuity and no sense of narrative flow or rising tension, and that combined with wooden acting and beyond-wooden dialogue, consistently cheap art direction, effects and set design, all has the potential to lend everything the sort of gritty strangeness you’d need for the film to get over. It really does have that weird fever-dream vibe, but some of the choices made here…well, it’s hard to tell if they’re supposed to be intentionally comic or not. The result is a film that’s hard to take it seriously even on its own level, or even to meet the movie halfway. It feels like store-brand giallo, or the kind of film out of which Mystery Science Theater 3000 makes an absolute meal.

It does have its moments, albeit few and far between. There are some effective visuals - the antagonist is a tall, thin, unsmiling undertaker who cuts a striking presence and seems to be everywhere at once, and he’s responsible for the moments when things do work. There are some other interesting visual choices here and there - washes of bright red for a particular point of view, a moment in an antique store with an old photograph that’s effortlessly dreamlike and unsettling - but there’s too few of these scattered too thinly throughout to really feel like more than missed opportunity. And so it’s really frustrating and baffling for me, trying to find the film’s appeal as a horror film. I can understand its appeal as a weird bad movie, but it’s given the reverence of something like Halloween or Night Of The Living Dead and I just don’t get it. It’s certainly striking for its time - it was released close enough to Halloween but far away enough from A Nightmare On Elm Street that I can see how could really make an impression on someone who had no idea what to expect. The rules hadn’t been codified yet. But it’s hard enough to get past the flaws now that the gap between the film I saw and the reputation it has me doubting my own sanity a bit.

IMDB entry
Available on Tubi

L'uccello Dalle Piume Di Cristallo: An Odd Bird

Today, I’m going to be writing about my latest in an ongoing attempt to familiarize myself with classic Italian horror. Most of what I’ve taken away so far from the films I’ve seen is that classic Italian horror is visually stylish and utterly unacquainted with things like “subtlety” or “nuance.” And L'uccello Dalle Piume Di Cristallo (The Bird With The Crystal Plumage) is where a lot of this begins. It was director Dario Argento’s first sole directing credit, and it…for better and worse…really lays out the thesis for what would follow.

The film opens on an unseen figure typing a note that appears to be the location for a meeting. And then a pair of hands, clad in black gloves, unwrapping an impressive array of knives. There’s a lingering over the knives, over the leather of the gloves. It’d be really obvious to call it “fetishistic,” but that’s because it’s really obviously fetishistic. It’s an opening that leaves nothing in doubt: People are going to get stabbed.

And then we’re whisked away to meet Sam Dalmas. He’s a writer from the United States, in Rome to write a manual about varieties of birds. He was hoping for a novel, but writer’s block means he’s taking the work he can get. He doesn’t even want a copy of the book he’s just written - the check is enough. Sam is maybe kind of a dick, but he’s a dick with a hot model girlfriend and a week or two left on the lease for his apartment. He’s getting ready to move back to the U.S. with abovementioned hot model Julia. And so Sam’s walking home one night, and he ends up going past an art gallery, well-lit, full of sculpture and a front wall and entryway made entirely of glass…

…which makes it very easy to see the black-clad figure inside attempting to stab a woman to death.

Sam manages to drive the attacker off by creating a commotion, and to his credit, sticks around to make sure the potential victim is okay. He is now also the sole eyewitness to this crime, and after an interview with a detective ends in a game of “whoops, got your passport” that Sam loses badly, he’s stuck in Italy until there’s some kind of resolution. So he does what anyone would do in this position, and begins his own search for the assailant, even though he has no background or credentials in law enforcement. It’s not like there’s much else he can do.

The basic structure of the story revolves around Sam’s attempts, working both with the police and on his own, to figure out who tried to kill this woman even as more bodies start to pile up. It’s a mystery, but not necessarily an especially artfully crafted one. In fact, I think the best way to describe this film is as…eccentric. 

It’s eccentric from a visual standpoint - there are a lot of point-of-view shots from both the killer’s and victim’s perspectives (which actually work pretty well even if they are a little predictable(, a lot of close-ups of eyes and (screaming) mouths, and an editing style that can only be described as “jarring.” It’s a film where scenes of violence cut immediately to scenes of domesticity, often in the middle of a conversation, without any real transition or indication that the scene is about to change. It’s also a film in which a police crime lab is represented by a sterile white room with banks of whirring tape drives, as classic a visual shorthand for “SCIENCE!” as you could want. It’s a more visually subdued affair than Argento’s later film Suspiria, depicting everyday Italy in both its glamorous art galleries and modest apartments in crumbling neighborhoods, but the way it’s shown lends it a sheen of strangeness nonetheless.

But it isn’t always gratuitously strange, some of the visuals can be quite inventive. One especially memorable scene has Julia recounting the other murders to Sam in voiceover while we see stills of the crime scene photos from each killing, and it works really well. It also makes good use of flashbacks, sometimes freeze-framed or played over and over, inserted into the middle of scenes in a way that makes them feel almost like intrusive thoughts. And all of this is scored with a soundtrack that is equal parts discordant jazz and wordless female vocalization, landing it somewhere between a crime film and a supernatural horror film, which is appropriate. Though the killer isn’t a supernatural figure, the narrative requires that we don’t see their face until the final reveal, so for most of the film they seem less like a person and more like a presence, an undetectable, unstoppable force.

It’s narratively eccentric as well. It’d actually be more accurate to say that it’s all over the shop. It’s tough to believe that law enforcement would just let a civilian - an American one, no less - just run around conducting his own ad hoc investigation, and on multiple occasions, we get flashbacks to things Sam’s experienced that depict events clearly and vividly, but he struggles to remember the things we’re seeing right in front of us on the screen. It almost makes it feel like he’s holding something back, though at no point is he implied to be the killer. There are strange comic touches as well, like a stuttering pimp and an informant whose portrayal borders on slapstick and who feels like he wandered in from an entirely different movie, along with a deeply eccentric artist with some peculiar dietary habits, and one especially odd scene where Sam recounts an upsetting phone call to a friend, only to turn around and start making out with Julia with such fervor that the friend shows himself out. Between this and the cinematic choices, it’s a film with a tone best described as abrupt. 

None of those things are necessarily weaknesses, given the right context, but it’s got some full-on weaknesses as well. The sexism is toned down compared to Argento’s film Profondo Rosso, but the casual homophobia and transphobia from that film shows up here as well and is, equally juvenile and off-putting here. The end is a mess of fake-outs before the final reveal, jettisoning the offhand clues we get through most of the film to land on a final reveal that mostly comes out of nowhere (unless you’ve seen Profondo Rosso, in which case you will, like me, be expecting it), explained with a lot of psychobabble that to modern sensibilities will probably land as at least a trifle offensive. 

Still, it was Argento’s first sole directing credit, and though it might not have been the first giallo, it’s certainly where the form took off and it sets a tone for a lot of the films that followed. On that level, it’s an assured and confident debut with a distinct vision, and it pioneers themes and techniques that echo through his later work and into the work of other directors. It’s a clumsy mystery, but one that blazed a trail.

IMDB entry

Available on Tubi

Available on Amazon

Horror In The High Desert: Know Your Limitations

Horror on a small budget can be tough. It’s not impossible by any means - see, for example, Creep, or The Blair Witch Project - but if you’re making the kind of film that’s going to need effects work, it’s really easy for that kind of thing to look as cheap as it actually is and be really unconvincing as a result. And when it’s unconvincing, it takes you out of the film. For my money, some of the best horror films - like any other film - are ones that suck you in so much that you sort of forget you’re watching a movie, and being reminded breaks that spell. And small-budget horror usually runs afoul of this to the extent that the filmmakers’ ambitions outstrip their budget. Monster movies are tough sells in general, but monster movies on a small budget are nigh-impossible to pull off. The limitations of budget translate into limitations around the kind of stories you can tell.

And so Horror In The High Desert - an uneven, but pleasantly surprising mockumentary - largely works to the extent it does because it not only works within its limitations, but actually uses its imitations to its advantage.

The film’s presented as a documentary about the mysterious disappearance of a young man named Gary Hinge. Gary lived in small-town Nevada, loved trains, hiking, and outdoor survival. And it was these last two that routinely took him way out into the middle of nowhere as part of his job, which is to map and survey remote areas for hikers to use as reference. To chart the uncharted so less-prepared others wouldn’t get lost. And it was on one of these hikes, that he just…vanished. He wasn’t a novice outdoorsman, he knew what he was doing. 

After three years of Gary being gone, his remaining friends and family have finally gotten some idea of what might have happened to him, and as the disclaimer that opens the film suggests, it’s not going to be pretty.

And that “warning, what you’re about to see is disturbing” is one of a few missteps here, but it’s not a fatal one. One of the things that betrays a lot of found-footage or mockumentary films is a tendency toward slickness - they’re supposed to be stories of real people, but all too often it’s clearly performance and scripted dialogue. They’re supposed to be capturing (at least in part) amateur footage of events, but all too often that gets cheated with cameras put in convenient places to capture shots a single consumer-grade camera couldn’t, or the point of view just gets forgotten entirely. Making films that are supposed to be something other than traditional films can be a safe bet from a budget standpoint, because you can cheat a lot with low-grade footage and you don’t have to worry about lighting setups or expensive camera equipment. But narratively, that kind of film is a lot harder than it looks, because we forgive all kinds of contrivances in regular films, but as soon as something is supposed to be “real,” those contrivances stick out like a sore thumb. Whether it’s a mockumentary or a more purely found-footage premise, you need to figure out the appropriate point of view and commit solidly to it, because otherwise believability goes right out the window.

And the first thing this film gets right is commitment to the point of view. Much like films like Howard’s Mill or Savageland, it looks like a true-crime documentary made by a small crew, aimed at the direct-to-streaming market. And it feels pretty damn convincing on that front. It’s clearly working from a modest budget but it rarely looks egregiously cheap, with production values consummate with a mid-level documentary. The music ranges from tastefully sentimental and forgettable to foreboding, with music stings to highlight the scary stuff. It’s a little on-the-nose in that regard, but that’s true to the form - the kinds of documentaries it’s aping aren’t subtle in the least. And the performances largely don’t feel like acting - they err on the side of understated, everyone seems like everyday folks, and they’re not always especially polished or articulate, but again, since the premise is that this is a documentary about something strange that happened in (very) small-town Nevada, it makes sense that even the professional journalist isn’t the most well-spoken person you’ve ever met. The dialogue reflects these characterizations, never really feeling glib or overly clever. The majority of the movie is a mix of talking-head interviews, archival video, and voiceover laid on top of footage of the Nevada desert, the rural blink-and-you-miss-it town where it takes place, and close-up footage of model trains, an attempt to capture the essence of who Gary was. So in that sense, the pretext is very believable and it’s easy to forget that it’s a work of fiction for most of its run time. 

The characters are largely believable as people - you’ve got Gary’s sister Beverly, racked with guilt over her brother’s disappearance, and Gary’s bewildered roommate Simon, who had no idea what sort of things Gary was up to, and who Beverly suspects had something to do with the disappearance. Peripheral to them are Gal, a local journalist who sees an opportunity for an exclusive not being covered by the big-city outlets, and Bill, a private investigator hired and extremely frustrated by Beverly, who keeps unwittingly interfering with the investigation. And at the center of it, Gary - a somewhat shy, awkward young man seen in archival footage, someone whose biggest passions are outdoor survival, exploration, and railroads. Someone who has a YouTube channel about outdoor survival and exploration, even though he’s not the most charismatic or natural performer ever. They’re all human beings, explored to varying degrees of depth, but none of them feel especially two-dimensional. It’s easy to buy into them as characters, as the kind of people whose lives get turned upside down by exactly this sort of situation.

So it looks right, and the people feel right, and that’s nothing to sneeze at, because these are the kind of details that other films of this type routinely fuck up. But there are problems with how the story plays out. Probably the biggest problems here are pacing and some of the choices made around advancing the narrative. Any crime documentary worth its salt knows how to tell a story. Usually you present the basic facts of the case, and then spend the length of the film drip-feeding hints at greater revelations, eventually dropping bombshells of one sort or another - someone’s hidden past or things they’ve been keeping secret, twists, facts that exclude the obvious culprit but make someone else look suspicious, things like that. And some of that happens here, but it happens fitfully - Gary was keeping secrets (as most people do), but they aren’t really explored - one is sort of brought up but then dropped almost immediately (it almost feels like they couldn’t afford another actor to flesh it out), another isn’t especially earth-shattering (though it is important for moving the story forward) and the way it’s presented it makes Beverly and Simon - the two people closest to Gary - look either like they didn’t actually know him that well at best, or kind of stupid and unobservant at worst. Tension between Gary and his sister over something that happened as children comes up, but doesn’t really go anywhere. Tension between Simon and Beverly gets brought up, but doesn’t really go anywhere. Bill says that Beverly “screwed everything up” (and indeed she did, to the point of evidence tampering) but it too is sort of glossed over, with little sense of how her mistake sets back the investigation. All of the pieces are there, but they’re sort of discarded as quickly as they’re introduced, as if the filmmakers knew they needed to be there, but not really why.

The pacing has problems on a broader structural level as well. A little more than two-thirds of the movie consists of interview footage and voiceovers, and though this is the stock in trade of this kind of documentary, it starts to feel a little inert by about the halfway point. The table-setting phase of the documentary, where we learn what happened and who all the players are, feels like it stretches out a little too long, the surprise revelations don’t mean much in the overall scheme of things, and each of the characters sort of exists in a vacuum relative to the others. Moreover, this film has a tendency to tell us how disturbing or unsettling or shocking something is without actually showing it to us for most of its running time. There’s a lot of variations on people telling us how bad something is instead of showing us the bad thing. It’s like we’re getting a lot of the important information second-hand, as if maybe the filmmakers didn’t have the budget to show something, so instead they had the characters describe it. And this, combined with two initial acts that have very little movement or action to them, starts to feel frustrating, as if we’re just going to get tease after tease with no payoff. 

But there is a payoff, and it does make good well enough on the first two acts. Gary’s last-known footage is recovered (and there’s even an explanation for how it was discovered, someplace where even some otherwise really good found-footage films drop the ball), and the majority of the third act is a tense sequence shot in infrared in the middle of the Nevada desert chronicling his last moments alive. It goes on maybe a touch too long, but it’s another place where the film’s limitations work for it. The footage is very much the footage of a single hand-held consumer-grade video camera, it’s not always pointed in exactly the right place, it spends a chunk of time pointed at the ground, and the stop-start nature of the filming heightens the tension nicely - every time the camera looks away, you dread what’s going to be there when it comes back, and infrared covers up any limitations to the practical effects for the most part. It lingers maybe a little too long toward the end, but I’m pretty sure it’s to a degree that only bothers me and won’t bother anyone else. So it does come good in the end, and that buys it a fair amount of goodwill.

On the other other hand, though, there’s an epilogue that undercuts some of the tension with an attempt to explain what we saw and a cautionary note about content creators not leaving well enough alone (though that’s certainly true to life too), and what seems like a hook for a sequel. It would have worked better with a much sparer ending and it would have worked better if the story didn’t spin its wheels for so long, but it plays like a documentary about actual people and an actual tragedy, and that’s not always the easiest thing to pull off. A quick look at the director’s entry on IMDB suggests his usual fare is the kind of low-budget horror films that miss the mark (at least according to people who post user reviews on IMDB, and we’re not exactly talking Cahiers du Cinema here), and apparently this film is the result of having to work around social distancing in the middle of the COVID pandemic, which is another set of limitations on top of budget. But if you’re trying to make a movie that isn’t in the traditional third-person mold, limitations aren’t just acceptable, they’re downright essential. Trying to cheat your way around those limitations really misses the point, and to the extent this film embraces them, it works a lot better than I expected it would.

IMDB entry

Available on Tubi