Perversion Story

“Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly”... Yes, the Dalai Lama really said that in a chain email forwarded round and round the world in 1999 by people who probably also owned refrigerator magnets saying “Forget love, I'd rather fall in chocolate.”

Or perhaps he didn’t. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is that it’s generally good advice and, if you look at the evidence – Picasso painted realistically as a teenager; Stephen King was a high school English teacher – it also holds true. It’s certainly a good argument to use when you want to counter anyone who claims that “Godfather of Gore” Lucio Fulci couldn’t tell a coherent story.

Prior to his whirlwind run of insane splatter masterpieces beginning in 1979 with Zombie, Fulci crafted dozens of straightforward comedy, drama and action films – as well as a number of neatly-constructed gialli, including the widely-praised Don’t Torture a Duckling and, my favourite of his, Lizard in a Woman’s Skin.

But it’s his first giallo, Perversion Story (aka One on Top of the Other), which he also co-wrote, that shows him demonstrating his tightest grip on plot. It’s a kind of giallo spin on Hitchcock’s Vertigo, even set in San Francisco, and focusing on a man (Jean Sorel) who becomes obsessed with a woman who looks just like his dead wife. In this case, however, she’s a nightclub stripper fond of disrobing atop a golden motorbike in front of a screen covered in psychedelic blobs (ah, the Sixties) and he’s an adulterous surgeon who may have been responsible for his wife’s death in the first place (ah, the giallo genre).

While, naturally, the situation quickly descends into a complex web of deceit and murder, the perhaps surprising thing is that it never stops making sense and, particularly as it moves into its final third, becomes extremely tense. There’s no killer on the loose stabbing prostitutes in the eye with a melon baller but, what Perversion Story lacks in gimmickry, it makes up for with pacy plotting and a couple of genuinely surprising twists. And what it lacks in kitchen utensils, it also makes up for in fabulous Sixties fashion and decor (seriously, it’s one of the most sumptuously designed 60s flicks I think I’ve ever come across).

If there is a fault, it’s that none of the characters are particularly likable, although this is tempered by the fact that Jean Sorel and his co-star Florinda Bolkan are two of the best-looking stars in all of giallo, and together share a subtle but devilish kind of chemistry. The ending, while conclusive, also falls perhaps one scene short of being totally satisfying, but not in a way that spoils proceedings. Well worth checking out, it’s also the Dalai Lama’s favourite film... Honest.

Rating: 4/5
Review originally published at Retro Slashers, 22 August 2011.

Jack's Back

I've beamed this review over to AiP from the Retro Slashers website, where it was published on 26 September 2011. Things have changed a little since then... Jack's Back is now available on Blu-ray. And, oh yeah, we now have Blu-rays.

With its twins, dead prostitutes and copious dream sequences, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Jack’s Back is a lost Brian De Palma movie. In fact, it was written and directed by Rowdy Herrington, who – although probably best-known for the 1989 Patrick Swayzefest, Road House – specializes in hard-edged thrillers like Striking Distance (1993), A Murder of Crows (1998) and I Witness (2003), the latter of which reunited him with his leading man from this project, James Spader.

Spader plays rebellious medical student John Wesford, who splits his spare time between working at a free clinic and getting interviewed for the local news about the plight of L.A.’s homeless people. Also on the local news – and aggressively foreshadowed every time any character so much as walks past a TV set – is the ongoing police investigation into a serial killer who’s copycatting the crimes of Jack the Ripper one hundred years after the fact to the very day! Why he’s doing it in Los Angeles, however, is never actually addressed. Anyway, the gist of all this is that (a) prostitutes are turning up dead in very messy crime scenes, (b) a pregnant woman is probably going to be butchered next, and (c) Wesford is somehow going to get dragged into all this, along with his super-hot secret admirer and fellow med student, Cynthia Gibb!

That’s all you’re getting on the subject of the plot, however, because Jack’s Back is one of those films that works better the less you know about it on the way in. I’m tempted to draw a comparison with De Palma’s Dressed to Kill – not because this movie is anything like as good, but because the twists come satisfyingly thick even if you’ve guessed the identity of the killer (which, admittedly, isn’t a massive kick in the grey cells). That also means it’s good for a re-watch, making it all the more unfortunate that it hasn’t yet had a proper DVD or Blu-ray release. The closest is a full-frame video transfer put out on DVD in the UK a few years ago by a company I’ve never heard of before or since, called 111 Pictures.

That being said, Jack’s Back is a movie that really isn’t harmed by a VHS viewing. It’s one of those lumpy little late-80s gems like I, Madman or 976-EVIL that takes place largely at night in a world of its own making, where common sense gives way to a kind of frenzied internal logic that carries you along on a suspense-high, despite the surfeit of silliness if you actually stopped to think about it.

There’s solid work from Spader, who’s always an interesting actor but never more so than when he’s asked to be ambiguous – a quality that this tricksy whodunit explores from all angles. Cynthia Gibb is also on fine, hyper-likeable form as the love interest who gets to be a little bit more than the standard woman-in-peril.

The really fun thing about this film, however, is a characteristic it shares with a handful of sometimes less-than-perfect slashers like Cutting Class and Fatal Games: the frequent use of plot devices requiring characters to sneak out in the middle of the night, leaving the safety of their homes to prowl around deserted buildings, strangers’ houses, and anywhere else the killer might be lurking in search of clues. To me, this “scary adventure” quality is the chief pleasure of a good midnight movie, and one that can sometimes even be heightened by the nostalgia factor of fuzzy VHS. If it’s that you’re after, Jack’s Back provides it in spades.

Rating: 3/5

Terror Stalks the Class Reunion

Get a load of that title Did you ever hear anything that sounded more like a slasher movie? Unfortunately, Terror Stalks the Class Reunion isn’t a lost slasher – for a start, there’s no slashing – but, while part of me is writing this review to stop others repeating my mistake, it’s also worth pointing out that there’s a little something here to entertain slasher fans looking for a fix slightly off the beaten track.

 

First off, Terror Stalks the Class Reunion (1992) is based on a Mary Higgins Clark short story and, as such, joins roughly fifteen other TV movies inspired by the works of “America’s Queen of Suspense”. Bar some atmospheric 70s offerings, the small screen isn’t exactly famed for its classic slasher output – and, fittingly, its thirty-year flirtation with Higgins Clark adaptations has resulted in nothing more than a barrage of glossy but middling potboilers that form the very definition of safe Sunday-evening viewing.

 

It’s interesting to note, however, that when a certain Sean S. Cunningham was looking to follow up his breakthrough Friday the 13th with something more mainstream but still in tune with his slasher sensibilities, he turned to Higgins Clark. Her novel A Stranger Is Watching was the basis for the 1982 thriller of the same name, which allowed Cunningham to indulge his nasty streak with a succession of showpiece deaths built around a hostage scenario played out in the deserted depths of Grand Central Station.

 

Terror Stalks the Class Reunion is a similar tale of a kidnapped woman held prisoner by a lunatic. But where Stranger had an incomparably brutish Rip Torn as said psycho, here we get Geraint Wyn Davies as the once “Fat Tony”, who’s lost 110 pounds – along with most of his marbles – over the course of an eight-year obsession with his old teacher Kay (Kate Nelligan).

 

That’s where the class reunion connection comes in: Kay and her friend Virginia (Jennifer Beals) are in town for a get-together of staff and pupils from a US Army base school in Germany. Amidst the frivolities, Kay gets a message purporting to be from her husband and, heading back to her hotel, bumps into her former student in the parking lot except the meeting was no accident, and Tony’s plans for his favourite teacher involve handcuffs, humiliation and a harrowing stint in an escape-proof cabin deep in the woods.

 

But don’t get too excited – Terror Stalks the Class Reunion is no horror film. There’s no Misery-style hobbling, no Captivity-like poodle-killing mindgames. Instead, there’s the threat of an enforced “marriage” performed by a videotaped priest on a TV screen, and a lot of time spent on a largely unrelated subplot about an escaped killer thought to be stalking the area. Tension mounts in the sequences where Kay (predictably) tries to escape from her shackles while Tony’s truck (inevitably) pulls up outside; and excitement peaks as the climactic wedding ceremony turns into a violent fracas involving concealed nail scissors and a gun hidden inside a Bible. But then everything goes up in smoke in an explosive ending that stops somewhere slightly south of satisfying.

 

Nelligan whimpers convincingly throughout but doesn’t really do anything to make you care about her character – which is probably more of a fault with the writing, considering the feeble nature of her escape attempts. Beals on the other hand has even less to do but manages to come across as smoking hot in a slightly gutsier role. On a sad note, Werner Stocker, whose local detective, Franz, is the only character with any real charisma, died from a brain tumour a year after filming.

 

Terror Stalks the Class Reunion is available on DVD in the UK under the far less fun but generally more apt title For Better and for Worse. Picture quality is pretty poor; in fact, if the DVD hasn’t been ripped from an old VHS (most likely the 90s US release) I’ll eat my hockey mask. The film’s just about worth a look if you like woman-in-peril movies but don’t go looking for slasher-movie thrills There’s more to be found in National Lampoon’s Class Reunion.

 

Rating: 2/5
Review originally published on Retro Slashers, 25 March 2010

My Dear Killer

Italians would use the term “giallo” to describe any mystery or thriller story, particularly those tales in the tradition of Agatha Christie, whose novels were originally published in the yellow-backed format that gave the genre its name. In fact, it’s only amongst us film fans that “giallo” has come to refer exclusively to the particular brand of violent, titillating shocker of which Tonino Valerii’s My Dear Killer (1972) is often cited as an example. But My Dear Killer also falls firmly into the first camp, being driven by a traditional whodunit narrative that some might say outweighs the lurid thrills. So which is it? A gruesome giallo or a more conventional mystery?

Show me an over-the-top, style-heavy thriller full of gruesome murders – like Tenebrae or Dressed to Kill – and I’m a very happy slasher-fan, although I’m just as likely to be found pondering over the more reserved convolutions of a drawing-room puzzler like The Honey Pot or Sleuth. Thankfully, movies like My Dear Killer prove that you can have it both ways: while carefully and densely plotted, it’s also one of the more fast-and-furious gialli I’ve seen – one that whistles briskly through its dark twists and turns like an underground train hurtling down a tunnel, before bursting out into the light with a clever and satisfying resolution.

George Hilton plays Inspector Peretti, called out to a flooded quarry to examine the decapitated body of an insurance investigator, but soon drawn into an older case involving the kidnapping of a little girl called Stefania, whose body was found nearby. Convinced the two cases are related, he visits the family of the dead child, only to initiate a further string of increasingly nasty murders. As Peretti probes further, the killer proves always to be one step ahead.

I’ve seen Hilton in several other gialli – and, having made around ten, he probably qualifies as the male equivalent of Edwige Fenech – but this is the first time he’s struck me as an irremovable part of the film. Definitely not just a serviceably bland leading man, he seems fully in charge of this investigation, revealing and explaining each new clue for the audience in such a logical way that you can’t help but be drawn in. In a romantic subplot that for once doesn’t feel extraneous, we also see the effects his workaholic nature have on his relationship, culminating in a confrontation with his girlfriend that indirectly breaks the case.

Though more concerned with plot than many a giallo, My Dear Killer also has the requisite visual touches: the quarry location returned to again and again is always bleached in eerily harsh sunlight; the camera whirls around the apartment of a victim in an extended POV scene, before closing in on a blood-spraying murder using a circular saw. There’s even a little homage to Orson Welles’ celebrated hall of mirrors scene from The Lady from Shanghai, as Peretti encounters the killer in a darkened room full of smashed glass. Like all the best gialli, the most important clue involves looking at a picture in a new way – in this case, a child’s drawings (an element that also effectively incorporates another of the genre’s obsessions, childhood trauma).

Fittingly for a film that juggles whodunit and slasher elements so well, we arrive at a double-climax: the first is a gruelling stalking sequence with an unlikely (and likeable) final girl; the second a traditional unmasking, with all the suspects gathered in one room in the manner of an Hercule Poirot mystery, and Peretti beginning by announcing, “The story of Stefania is also the story of your insanity, my dear, sick killer!”

Whilst not quite on the level of some of the classic gialli, which transcend the genre to become horror/mystery masterpieces, My Dear Killer is a more-than-solid outing and one that’s a good introduction for anyone interested in getting into the genre as a whole. Just bear in mind that things can get much more crazy and colourful than this.

Rating: 3/5
Review originally published on Retro Slashers, 11 August 2011

Skull Mountain Symbolism

Seventies horror film The House on Skull Mountain doesn't seem to draw much praise these days, other than for a clever recreation of Charles Allan Gilbert's visual pun, All Is Vanity. But here are three more great shots that gave me pause -- or at least made me press pause. (Also includes spoilers!)

The sequence where Lorena and Andrew scoot into town for a somewhat inappropriate cousins-in-love musical montage comes off as a bit of a mood-breaker, considering it's also one of the few set outside the ol' mansion. But this layered composition rescues it for me. Dried-up old terrarium thingies -- like the one Andrew picks up in a shop here -- are a major motif in the film, their glass domes and murky contents representing the deathly bubble the characters find themselves trapped within. And what do the couple do after their morning of happy-go-lucky freedom? Buy themselves another little trap, of course -- a queasy reminder of the inescapable evil surrounding them. I also like that Lorena watches the transaction from behind yet another layer of glass... Is the real trap inside or outside the bell jar? Shudder! 

Snakes appear throughout Skull Mountain (even inside a terrarium at one point) but, most notably, coiled around the vertical wooden posts in the subterranean voodoo den. This kind of snake-on-a-stick treat also goes by the name of the Rod of Asclepious, a Greek symbol associated with medicine and health care -- and also resurrection. In this shot, Harriet stumbles over a shrine riddled, as shrines tend to be, with religious imagery. The centrepiece is a Virgin Mary figurine wearing a not-so-feathered boa (of the constrictor kind), which conjures up all kinds of associations with resurrection and the return from the grave... all of which very nicely foreshadows the climactic reappearance of Mrs Christophe, whose death set the story in motion. 

Finally, notice the machetes stabbed into the ground around the body of poor Louette at the film's climax. I don't think we see how they get there but what they do achieve is a neat reference to the Eight of Swords tarot card. (I know we're four blades short but this sort of symbolism doesn't happen accidentally.) The Eight is a card of hopelessness, helplessness and fear, and dealing it out at this point marks the grisly fate of one character and the agonizing powerlessness of another -- the scene's main protagonist, Andrew, who's forced to stand by and watch it happen. 

A bit of a cheesy film, perhaps, but with its rich symbolism of death in the Deep South, Skull Mountain is well worth another visit.

Red Mist

Here's another review rescued from the depths of the Deep Web... originally published by Retro Slashers on 22 July 2009.

 

I never thought I’d live long enough to see a remake of Aenigma – Lucio Fulci’s blending of Carrie and Patrick, which featured killer snails and death by Tom Cruise poster. But that’s essentially what the recent British horror Red Mist (known as Freakdog in the US) is, albeit one that’s short on molluscs and big on Jason Goes to Hell-style body-hopping.

 

The premise is simple: What would happen if you inadvertently sent a mentally retarded hospital janitor into a coma when a hastily organized prank designed as retaliation for a blackmail plot went wrong, only to discover that secretly injecting him with an untested wonder-drug gave him the ability not only to astral-project into the bodies of your friends, but also to stalk and kill your friends in a variety of gruesome ways while seeking misguided revenge for a crime you weren’t entirely responsible for in the first place?

  

Yes, we’ve all been there, and in Red Mist it’s the turn of junior doctor, Catherine, played by highly likeable Katherine Heigl-a-like, Arielle Kebbel, who’s since gone on to star in the uninvited remake of A Tale of Two Sisters (itself called The Uninvited, aptly enough). Since it’s not until the halfway point that Catherine actually gets handy with the hypodermic, it’s a bit of a wait before the horror kicks into high gear but, with car-door head-slamming, forced acid-drinking and naked stomach-slicing in the middle of a busy nightclub, it’s certainly worth it.

 

What’s less attractive is the last-act lull, which puts Catherine in a very reactive (as opposed to proactive) position and, in these post-Sidney Prescott days, means she doesn’t quite cut it as a top final girl. That’s not to say the movie peters out, though; in fact, it all ends quite satisfyingly – especially in comparison to director Paddy Breathnach’s previous horror effort, the hallucination-themed Shrooms, which didn’t so much peter out as flatline during an epileptic fit of meaningless, are-they-tripping-or-not jump scenes.

 

Breathnach is Irish, and you’ll remember I described Red Mist above as a British film, which it is despite being set in America. With a couple of exceptions, it appears the cast is a mixture of English, Irish and Scottish actors, all valiantly attempting American accents with differing degrees of success. The movie, too, is a tag-team of styles and subgenres, mixing the morbid medical school hijinks of Pathology and Unrest with torture scenes, guilty drama, and supernatural slashing. It’s as the latter it delivers most wholeheartedly, however. That, and as a gory Aenigma variation.

Rating: 2/5

Amsterdamned

This review was originally published on the now sadly defunct Retro Slashers website on 21 October 2009. I'm archiving it here at AiP for the sake of all humanity...

You have to hand it to Amsterdamned – it’s got one hell of a gimmick. By 1988, the slasher genre had given us killers who hid their faces behind hockey masks, gas masks, clown masks, William Shatner masks, owl masks, pillow cases, chunks of stitched-together human skin... It was only a matter of time before one came along in full scuba gear. But Amsterdamned’s killer isn’t just in it for the Lycra and heavy-breathing. He (or she!) actually swims around the canals of Amsterdam, popping out to drag victims to a watery grave! Yes, you read that right. There is popping, there is killing, and there is also a giant knife in case the victims aren’t in the mood for a dip.

Amsterdamned is basically a Dutch giallo, but one that’s as much informed by slashers as it is Italian sleaze. As the murders mount up via a series of violently effective, Jaws-like set pieces, Detective Eric Visser (Huub Stapel) is called in to catch the underwater killer. Visser gets results – he’s the kind of cop who jumps out of his car when stuck in traffic and thwarts a hold-up in a pastry shop (this is Europe) before getting back behind the wheel and driving off. He also looks a bit like Greg Evigan and has a smart-mouthed teenaged daughter who, in a genius subplot, is tracking the killer herself, with the help of a psychic friend. It’s all terrifically fast-paced, being mainstream enough to appeal to thriller fans but just perverse and nasty enough to satisfy slasher aficionados (check out the killer’s souvenir-stocked lair, as well as the final gruesome reveal of their identity).

Fittingly, it’s also swimming with red herrings, the most devious of which is a psychiatry motif that calls the sanity of a number of characters into question. Dozens of startling stunts, seemingly performed in real-time, lend a genuine sense of danger to the proceedings – none more so than in the first of the movie’s two climaxes, which famously finds cop and killer tearing around the tight waterways of the city in speedboats. The second, equally effective final sequence brings Amsterdamned back to its slasher roots with an unbearably tense bit of hiding-from-the-killer on the part of the film’s final girl.

For anyone wishing to pick this up – and you should be – the UK’s Nouveaux Pictures/Cine-Excess label has recently released a fine region 2 DVD, featuring an uncut widescreen transfer (the previous UK release on video lost a few seconds of a knife appearing between a girl’s legs) and a front cover that makes it look like a UFO movie. Special features include a nice making-of documentary from the 80s, but best of all is that fact that you can choose from the original Dutch language track with English subtitles or an English dub. The latter has taken some criticism for that fact that many of its actors speak with a sort of vaguely Dutch accent, but I consider it one of the best and least distracting dubs I’ve ever heard (in fact, I even forgot I was watching a dubbed version at times). Either way, with both language options available, everyone should feel catered for. The fear-soaked Amsterdamned is definitely one to splash out on.

Rating: 4/5

Coming soon... in 1978

It's a Twin/Thing

There’s something about 1982’s The Thing (rating 4/5) that affects me now in ways that failed to grab me back when I first encountered it as a teenager. It’s a cold, draughty and dragging film. It’s sludgy, unforgiving and a bit of an effort. It’s, well... brilliant, really. If you never thought a monster movie could feel in any way realistic, this one’ll leave you sprawled face-down in the ice. I’ve heard that winter crews at Antarctic outposts watch it when all the home flights have left for civilization. That’s pretty brave! We’re talking about a film where the only comic relief is the borderline hysteria brought on by its ever more extreme and disgusting developments. Kurt Russell is incredible in it, delivering a performance that’s 87% beard and cowboy hat, but which somehow holds the whole thing together. Not that it’s in danger of falling apart: the idea’s neat, the script solid, and John Carpenter’s direction note-perfect in its mixture of chilly observation and steaming relish. You’ll probably have questions afterwards, but that’s one of its strengths. It’s a film that encourages debate; that wants you to work at it and pick it apart. And then it wants you to puke.

The new The Thing (3/5) slavishly fills in the backstory of Carpenter’s original, attempting to explain how each snowmobile came to be standing in which particular snow-covered parking spot of that abandoned Norwegian base; how each individual icicle formed on each particular overhang; and many other thrilling enigmas barely worth wasting another semicolon on. One thing it doesn’t explain is why the Thing itself – formerly an unutterably squelchy dollop of melted face and hyperactive spaghetti – is now a smooth, shiny digital effect that never stands still long enough to let you get a decent look at it. Neither does it explain why the Thing doesn’t just give all that mutating a rest for, like, five minutes and pass itself off as a dog long enough to escape triumphantly into the wilderness like a more evil Littlest Hobo... Hey, Miss Thing, I found myself thinking in a sassy voice, just rent Invasion of the Body Snatchers if you want to see how a self-replicating pod-person really gets shit done!

All of which got me wondering why this Thing had to be called “The Thing” again, when even “The Thing Again” would’ve been a better title. This is, after all, a proper prequel rather than a remake – a touch of mild novelty surely worth pointing out by way of a more imaginative title. I suggest The New Thing... Oh no, that’s wrong. Technically, it’s The Old Thing... although that makes it sound like the original film again. How about Before the Thing? First Things First? The Thing-ummy? Baby Thing? That Thing You Do? (Hmm, maybe The Thing wasn’t such a bad title, after all...) 

It’s not a bad film, either, being enjoyable in the manner of a Resident Evil movie, and challenging us to accept Mary Elizabeth Winstead as a leading 1980s palaeontologist in a way that’s so serenely audacious it’s actually entertaining in itself. As a monster movie, it’ll likely be as much of a relic as The Relic in ten years’ time, having had as much deep impact on the sci-fi genre as, er Deep Impact. But, if the worst it does is drive you back into the squiggly arms of the original Thing, then that’s no bad thing. (Hmm... The Bad Thing? No... stop that now!)

Let’s turn our attention instead to Seconds Apart (2/5), a sort of telekinetic torture-porn slasher movie that weds Carrie and Willard in ways that make less sense than this sentence. The film features Edmund and Gary Entin as twins – both evil, both psychic, and both able to command other people to kill themselves against their will – and Orlando Jones as a detective who’s scarred both physically and mentally after leaving his wife to frazzle in a house fire. Said detective is investigating said twins following a spate of suspicious suicides, while said backstory allows flashbacks that pad out the running time.

Yes, Seconds Apart has interesting ideas but fails to do anything very appealing with them. Its idea of style could be described as “tones of decay and some stuff with a snowglobe” – which is probably a direct quote from the script. What it really could’ve done with is the colourful, black-humoured histrionics of a Tim Burton rip-off like the aforementioned Willard (and I believe that may be the first time Willard has ever been aforementioned) or May. Or an actual Tim Burton film like Edward Scissorhands. Or perhaps any film that takes its title from the name of its main character, with the possible exception of Rocky. 

Ooh! And The Thing!

Dean Koontz's Intensity

Boy, it’s just amazing what you’ll get up to in your efforts to put off doing something you don’t want to do, isn’t it? Namely, avoiding working on the book you’re writing, which is the reason you haven’t updated your blog for 64 million years, give or take a century. So here I am with a little look at Dean Koontz’s Intensity. Yup, not only have I sought out a three-hour TV movie to watch, but now I’m actually writing about it... Can you say “procrastination”? Of course you can! But can you spell it? Ha!

Things got so bad on the putting-off-work front today that, besides shampooing my carpets with Head & Shoulders – surprisingly tough on rug dandruff – I also managed to watch a Mary Higgins Clark TV movie... you know, the kind where a woman’s kidnapped, her fretful friend falls in love with the detective, something explodes (probably a yacht) and you wish you’d watched a proper thriller instead. The one I picked was For Better or for Worse, aka Terror Stalks the Class Reunion (now you see why I gave it a go) and you can read my review over at Retro Slashers... But hold your horses there, pardner! I haven’t even started this review yet!



Funnily enough, Intensity is also about a kidnap but, believe me, it’s a whole lot better than the Mary Higgins Clark outing. The clues are in the titles. Where For Better or for Worse has little of the former but lots of the latter, Intensity lives up to its name with a smattering of prolonged suspense sequences and a running time that, far from dragging everything out, actually gives it the feel of a decent novel. (This is probably the part where Dean Koontz fans point out that that’s because it’s based on one.)

And – oh – Intensity... there’s another reason you’re interesting, and that’s down to the fact that you’re basically a blueprint for the 2003 French horror film Haute Tension/Switchblade Romance. (This sent the blogging world into a frenzy seven years ago, so I’ll let you do your own Google search.) Haute Tension is basically the jacked-up, hyper-gory, streamlined version, and a safer bet for horror fans, I guess, but taking the trip with Intensity is well worth the ride too.

What are you in for if you do? Well, Molly Parker stars as an emotionally damaged waitress called Chyna, who can’t flip an egg without having a disturbing flashback of her awful childhood, in which she was apparently raised by Mickey and Mallory Knox whilst being pursued by a camera mounted on the back of a bee with balance problems. Chyna is visiting the family of her friend, Laura, at Thanksgiving when a serial killer played by Scrubs’ John C. McGinley (slightly distracting) breaks in and kills everyone... Everyone, that is, except for Laura, whom he decides to tie up and kidnap, and Chyna, who sneaks undetected into the back of the killer’s getaway vehicle (a mobile home) and tries to think of a way of freeing Laura without getting captured and killed herself.



The whole home-invasion is a great piece of sustained tension, as is almost every ensuing scrape Chyna manages to get herself into, from dodging the killer during a blood-splattered stopover at a gas station, to mounting an escape from the his home past a pack of hungry guard dogs. Piper Laurie pops up as a motorist dragged into the chase, and there’s also the small matter of a kidnapped child who needs rescuing from the monster’s lair. If it’s woman-in-peril thrills you’re after, you can’t go wrong with this one, really. It’s twice as suspenseful as most similar offerings, not to mention twice as long.

Intense procrastination material, then.

Rating: 4/5

Bloodbath at the House of Death

If you’ve ever wanted to see Vincent Price bang his hand on an axe-head and shout “Oh shit!” then this British horror spoof is the movie for you. Price appears as “The Sinister Man”, parodying his roles in various Roger Corman films, and is for a while the best thing about Bloodbath at the House of Death (1984), until his unceremonious exit about halfway through. Amongst the rest of the cast – most of whom play scientists and other experts investigating the titular mansion – Pamela Stephenson (Not the Nine O’Clock News) probably comes off best, despite enduring copious fart gags, Kenny Everett’s dubious attempts at physical comedy, and being stripped naked by an invisible force à la The Entity.

Yes, the standard of jokes in Bloodbath is about on a par with The Kenny Everett Television Show, meaning that you’ll likely either love it or hate it depending on your taste for innuendo-strewn, frequently incoherent grossness. If anything, however, the freedom to push the gore and nudity to the limit results in a lazier approach, meaning that the writers are too often content to rely on the aforementioned fart gags, while anything approaching a clever spoof of horror clichés falls by the wayside.

Bloodbath works best through a haze of nostalgia, recalling a time in British history when increasing permissiveness on TV collided head-on with escalating concerns over violent “video nasties” – and this feels like the bloody aftermath. Call an ambulance... Or, better still, a coroner.

Rating: 1/5

Wet Gold

Does DVD picture quality reflect the quality of a film? I’ve often wondered, but no more so than when I got about halfway through Wet Gold, a 1984 TV movie that tries to do for underwater adventure stories what The Deep did for underwater adventure stories. And fails. (I’d like to say “spectacularly” but putting that word anywhere near a review of this film would be misleading.)

So, anyway, the DVD’s picture quality – if you can call it that – is not good, but that’s not always a problem. A bigger one for Wet Gold is the fact that it very quickly descends into a quagmire of dull double-crossing between people you care very little about. There’s Brooke Shields as a Florida waitress who dreams of bigger things (shame she turns out to be so lazy and self-centred, then); Burgess Meredith as a drunken seadog who knows the location of a fortune in sunken gold; and Thomas Byrd and Brian Kerwin as the deckhand and diver competing for Shields’ affections.

The four of them head out to sea, they find the treasure, they see a SHARK! (at this point, I thought things were going to get interesting... alas not) and they have a run-in with some pirates. But mostly they go skin-diving and argue about their shares in the loot. It’s all quite dreary, really, although there is a nice moment involving the underside of a boat and the topside of a character’s skull that redefines the term “propellerhead”.

I’m easy to please when it comes to underwater action movies. There simply aren’t enough of them (unless you count submarine flicks, which to me are as interesting as films set in warehouses) but Wet Gold isn’t a good example of one, despite some decent scenes inside a sunken shipwreck. If you’re looking for a schlocky oceanic crime story along the lines of The Deep and Into the Blue, try Shark or Night of the Sharks instead. This one sunk without trace for a reason.

Rating: 2/5

AiP’s annual post

Don’t joke! If not quite my only post this year, this is certainly my first in over a month. And I feel bad about that, I really do. I could write a list of excuses, I could tell you how busy I am with my other blog, My First Dictionary, I could ’splain it all to you over croissants and a mint julep, but I sense none of those would do any good anyhow. And pastry with cocktails is never a good idea.

A bunker like that from which I emerged today

Perhaps the main reason I’ve not been updating recently is that I simply haven’t watched anything in an AiP vein to write about. I’ve hardly watched any films at all, in fact, since I last reviewed the new Last House on the Left a few weeks back, although the ones I have seen (Gran Torino, Bolt, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince) – mainstream as they are – have all been quite good. There’s also been Abbott and Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff, which I hope to write about here shortly (because it’s really quite interesting, y’know) and something called Red Mist.

Bunker fish. I saw lots of these in my bunker.

 

What about the stuff I haven’t done? Well, I’m mad, mad, mad, MAD with myself for missing the submission deadline for Vince Liaguno’s mouth-watering upcoming slasher book, Butcher Knives & Body Counts. Not that I expect to have had anything accepted but – damn – it would’ve been worth it to get the chance to have something included in the kind of good company that’s been announced so far.

And, speaking of good company, I happen to know that super-scribe Amanda By Night is working on something pretty special at the moment, which she asked me to be a part of but which I’ve unforgivably neglected of late. Let’s see if I can get back on track a bit and enable her to get it finished before AiP’s next annual post.

In the meantime, I highly recommend becoming a follower of Tower Farm Reviews, in my opinion the natural successor to Anchorwoman In Peril, where Billy and JM have an uncanny knack of picking the movies I keep meaning to be review... Seriously, can you think of any other site that could segue effortlessly from Ticks to Roller Boogie in the space of a few reviews? I rest my case (and hopefully not on your foot).

See you intermittently!*

*No guarantee of intermittent reader-writer reunion is implied or should be inferred.

Next house on the left

Because I generally like films about rape and murder – and because, as we all know, remakes are always just great – I decided to rush out and give the new Last House on the Left a try on its UK opening day. So I sat there in the dark with about eight strangers – some of whom gasped at the graphic stabbings, sexual assaults and miscellaneous mutilations – and thought: Why am I doing this? Am I sick? But you know what? This film is just great. And I’m not sick, I assure you... Although I guess I would say that.

I’m a fan of Wes Craven’s original. What horror fan isn’t? It’s not perfect (I’m sure you’ll have your own reasons – possibly several – as to why) and Craven would come on leaps and bounds as a filmmaker throughout the rest of the 70s, but it works by succeeding at everything it’s trying to do and, crucially, horrifying the hell out of you three decades on.

The new Last House actually smoothes out a lot of these imperfections both plot-wise and stylistically. Which isn’t to say it’s a superior film; I think the original holds its own just because it got there first. But it certainly doesn’t insult the original, unlike many a recent remake, and it stands alone in a way the Friday the 13th and Halloween remakes don’t.

Quality films about rape and murder are usually foreign, and sometimes quite boring and pretentious. The Last House on the Left is certainly quality – it’s got a lush, orchestral score, beautiful cinematography and a capable cast – and it drags you in on the weight of your own gloomy expectations that its initial idyll can’t last. Of course bad things are going to happen to its teenage protagonists, although I can’t say whether or not you’ll find them more disturbing that those in the original (I found them less so – just slightly – thanks to the high production values and reduced sense of humiliation).

Pretentious it definitely isn’t, however. While it’s sensible enough to make you believe it, it’s also plenty pulpy when you just want that revenge-kick. It doesn’t pussy-foot, but it’s not tactless either. By dishing out dollops of nasty mayhem in its final third it does what Funny Games (the original and remake) denies – that is, allows you to wallow in the horror. After all, it’s a horror movie. It’s supposed to be chock-full of horrible, and it’s supposed to be a cathartic experience... In fact, now that I’ve seen the new Last House, I think I’ll be able to get through the next three weeks without kicking a single kitten.

It’s that good.

Rating: 4/5

Bad day at the office?

Some recent gallivanting around Europe has put me in possession of a couple of obscure horror films with a workplace theme. But without visiting the IMDb and spoiling all the fun, I know next to nothing about either, other than what’s written (in Dutch) on the DVD covers...



First up, there’s Office Party, a “psychologische thriller” starring Michael Ironside and David Warner, one of whom appears to be wearing a scary mask in the stills on the box. While Ironside is touted on the front cover, however, it’s Warner who’s mentioned in the plot description on the back, so I can’t really tell which is the hero. I’m guessing it’s Warner because his character appears to be called Eugene, and I can’t imagine a masked killer going by that name (oh, how quickly we forget Eric’s Revenge). From the looks of things, I’m thinking Eugene and his co-workers are trapped inside an office building by a deranged murderer and must fight to survive the night!



Then there’s Office Killer, which – joy of joys – stars Carol Kane. Judging by the cover (a dubious practice, I hear) she’s in mousy mode, but don’t be fooled, as “she will kill her way to the top!” apparently... Just like Michael Caine in A Shock to the System, perhaps? Quite frankly, I’ll be happy enough if this is simply better than the disappointing The Temp, which it also appears to resemble. But I can’t get enough of stationery-item-related violence at the moment (Drag Me to Hell’s stapler and ruler antics had me in fits) so, if Carol gets handy with a letter opener – or even just a few paperclips – I’ll be pleased as (a hole) punch.

I’ll be scheduling Office Party and Office Killer for their performance appraisals just as soon as I find a free slot in my Filofax.

It!

It’s no secret that my goal in life is to watch every movie Roddy McDowall ever made. But did you also know that my other goal in life is to watch every giant killer statue movie ever made? Well, it is. And I made this life-altering decision about two minutes after I watched the 1966 Brit flick It! – which not only stars Roddy McDowall but also features a giant killer statue. Talk about everything clicking into place!



You want to see the Rodster overacting like he’s never overacted before? Watch It! You want to see giant killer statues punching holes in London landmarks? Again, watch It! In fact, we could all save a lot of time if you just switched off your computer right now and went and watched It! – but I understand you come here for in-depth critical analysis and film theory, so let’s plough on.

Roddy plays Arthur Pimm, a curator’s assistant who lives at home with his elderly mother. And, when I say “elderly,” I mean old... Cobwebby old. Yes, Mrs Pimm is actually a rotting corpse sitting in a rocking chair in her son’s bedroom. (I know... where have I seen this idea before, right? It’s on the tip of my tongue...) Anyway, Pimm talks to her, dresses her, and carries her around the house, but mostly she just sits there rocking quietly in her chair. Quite how she manages to rock is never actually explained. She is, after all, dead. But rock she does, and very spooky it is too, thankyouverymuch.

One evening sometime in Scene 2, Pimm is called out to the museum’s storage warehouse, the scene of a devastating fire that’s destroyed almost everything the museum owns. Oh, except for a large, scowling stone figure, which may – or may not – be a giant killer statue. I’m giving nothing away. Pimm gives it the benefit of the doubt but, when his boss gets an unseen whack to the back of the head whilst standing near the statue, things aren’t really going in its favour. Particularly when the curator dies as a result.

Was it the statue that delivered the fatal blow? All we know is that, where once its arms were in an extended position, one of them now seems to be pointing downward, and Roddy does to great lengths to illustrate this using an umbrella and a range of puzzled facial expressions. I tell you: you don’t know what acting is until you’ve seen someone using a brolly to mime the motions of a giant killer statue.

Let’s cut to the chase, anyway, because It! doesn’t keep you guessing for long. It’s a Frankenstein story at heart and the statue is actually a golem, which is to say it’s an ancient, folkloric monster of unlimited strength, compelled to do the bidding of its master. In the right hands, it could be the most lethal WMD the world has ever seen. In Mr Pimm’s hands, it helps steal a few bracelets and smack anyone round the head who stands between him and the job of head curator.

Around about this point, I’d love to provide you with a screen grab of the golem but, since I watched It! on TV, I can’t do my usual high-tech wizardry – and there don’t even seem to be any good pictures online, either. But I will say it’s quite an effective-looking monster and I’m sure would’ve caused me a nightmare or two when I was younger. Oh, hang on, here’s a likeness from an old print ad... Prepare to shudder!



Golems aside, I had to marvel at Pimm’s other secret weapon: his marvellous filing cabinet. Whenever he needs anything (or, alternatively, needs to hide anything) it’s straight into the top drawer and the problem’s solved. It’s so good, in fact, and so devastatingly handy, I actually began to wonder if that filing cabinet was really the “It!” of the title. Again, a screen grab would be wonderful here, but you’ll just have to make do with this randomly-sourced image... Prepare to marvel!



Sheesh! Look at that thing go! Anyway, I don’t want to spoil the rest of the film for you but I can’t not mention that the last twenty minutes of It! are so insane, they make the build-up look like a serious documentary about dangerous stonemasonry. There’s motorbike stunts, old ladies being torched, and the dropping of a nuclear bomb somewhere in the Home Counties. Those sweet, sweet 1960s!

Wheel out your Wondrous Filing Cabinet of Wonder and file under “It!’s awesome!”

Rating: 3/5

Don't be a dummy

You’ve seen Dead Silence. You’ve seen Magic and Dead of Night. If you’re a real straight-to-DVD masochist, you may even have seen The Dummy and Triloquist. But can anything prepare you for...



Now tell me that’s not the scariest ventriloquist’s dummy you’ve ever seen. I’m not sure about Melbourne Ales putting life into you, so much as The Fear Of God!
I found that newspaper ad in a copy of the Yorkshire Evening News from 1955. The reason behind me posting it? Um... yeah, ya got me there. Although I have been watching 1967’s It! which is all about a murderous statue come to life. So that’s kinda like a deadly dummy, no?



Okay, no. But it does have Roddy McDowall in it... Therefore It! equals automatic joy! Review on the way.

Slaughter High

Slaughter High is a slasher that goes straight down the middle. It’s not great, it’s not crappy and, when I watched it, I forgot why I supposedly like slashers so much in the first place. In fact, I felt like any normal person watching a slasher. I was mildly entertained, yet I was unmoved. I felt no affection towards the genre, nor any great loathing of it. I wondered why I wasn’t watching something with more famous people in it. Or any famous people. Or some explosions. It was weeeeeird.

The movie itself hasn’t been put together with any great thought. It starts with a prank that goes predictably wrong... Well, I say “predictably” but I’m not sure if anyone who hasn’t seen this would be able to imagine how said prank goes from humiliating the school nerd in the locker room to said nerd having his face blown off by an exploding jar of nitric acid. I guess It’s just another sad incidence of violence in our schools...

Anyway, the nerd is Marty (Simon Scuddamore) and he’s not particularly likeable, which might be detrimental to the plot if this were a straightforward tale of feelgood revenge (but it’s not). His taunting classmates aren’t especially appealing, either, although they do eventually become tolerable simply due to the fact that the film spends most of its time with them. Where? Back in the school, five years on from graduation, where the guilty gang have arrived to celebrate their reunion. Funny thing is: no one else from the Class of Nineteen-Eighty-Whenever has turned up. It’s just them. The school’s been closed down but their lockers are still there, and each contains an item they thought they’d lost long ago. Spooky, huh?

Faced with a desolate, cobweb-strewn building, some creepy props and no one around, you’d think the teens would blow the joint and find somewhere worth partying in, but they stay to down a few beers – a plan that quickly goes awry when one of their number drinks from an acid-spiked can and finds his intestines bursting from his stomach with the projectile force of the creature from Alien. Most of the teens flee – only to find the doors and windows blocked by electric fencing – while one decides to take a bath, naturally, in the school’s, um... student bathtub? Again, not a good plan, in any case, as acid comes churning out of the mixer tap and bath-girl promptly dissolves like a giant Alka-Seltzer®.

An acid-base slasher, then? Nope. I think that’s it for the chemistry-related killings, although the remaining death scenes are fairly memorable, especially one involving electrocution and dirty talk. It’s not that Slaughter High doesn’t try. It just doesn’t seem to impress. That’s even more surprising when you take into account the climactic chase scenes, which I have to admit are quite brilliantly filmed using a Steadicam. It’s a great technique, and it throws you right into the action... but, again, you probably won’t care enough to get too worked up.

Until recently, Slaughter High was considered something of a lost slasher, having had no DVD release and drifting about in rated and unrated versions on video in the US, and a heavily cut version in the UK. Lionsgate’s new DVD puts out when it comes to being uncut, but is also the most blatant case of poor-quality VHS transferred straight to disc I think I’ve ever seen from a reputable distributor. Now, I wouldn’t have minded at all if I’d been watching on video, but I wasn’t, and that sucked. It’s distracting, disappointing and reeks of cutting corners to cut costs.

On the other hand, the disc’s trivia track invaluably informed me that, when one character donned a hockey mask, it was a tribute to Friday the 13th. Not a total waste then.

Rating: 3/5

Kicking against the pricks

Toby Wilkins knows a thing or two about visual effects, having been in the business for the last ten years, and his first feature film as director bears this out. You can see the proof there on the cover of Splinter: he’s created “the year’s best beast”, according to LA Weekly. And, you know, I’m not going to argue. Splinter’s figure-skating fusion of amalgamated body parts is downright horrific and perfectly realized (I know because I watched the special feature on the DVD and they way they brought it to life really is clever).

Wilkins himself is British, which may explain why we got Splinter on DVD a few weeks ago, while it’s only out in the US today. As a low-budget monster movie, it’s pretty fantastic. The creature’s great, the story works, there’s loads of gore, and the characters’ actions are fairly reasonable. In fact, if there is a flaw, it’s that there aren’t enough characters. We’re more used to seeing superfluous extras picked off left, right and centre, whereas the action here centres almost entirely around three people trapped inside a gas station convenience store. But don’t be put off by the location – there’s plenty of exciting stuff going on (none of which involves beef jerky or porn mags) and when characters meet their ends, they do so in spectacularly nasty fashion.

That’s the US DVD on the left above, with the UK release to the right... One-nil to us Britishers, I say. Give Splinter a go.

Manhunt

There’s backwoods, and then there’s backwoods. And, by the latter, I mean 1970s Norway... Is there anyplace worse to find yourself in a slasher movie? Manhunt, known as Rovdyr in its home country, sets out to answer this question – and does so with a decent amount of gory panache but nothing in the way of originality.

That surprised me, actually. My most recent encounter with Scandinavian cinema was the blindingly unique Let the Right One In, which does things to the teen-vampire genre that would make an Eastern European hooker blush. And, before that, there was Cold Prey: also Scandinavian, also snowy, also bloody brilliant. Manhunt doesn’t have the snow. Nor the brilliance.

It’s 1974, the year of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but Tobe Hooper’s film obviously hasn’t made it as far as Norway yet because the four teenage protagonists of Manhunt don’t seem to realize it’s not really a good idea to drive somewhere remote in a camper van, make fun of the locals, and pick up a half-crazy hitchhiker. Pretty soon, the hitchhiker is dead, one of the teens is dead (shotgunned graphically in the heel, and then – oops – the head) and the survivors are on the run from some scruffy, possibly inbred hunters who prefer human prey to woodland wildlife.



That’s pretty much where the TCM referencing stops and, unfortunately, the story along with it. Manhunt offers nothing else beyond running and hiding in the woods for the rest of its scant, 75-minute running time. We never get to understand, or even meet, the killers in any detail, there aren’t any actual set pieces (like Wrong Turn’s masterful keyhole, treetop or waterfall sequences) and it’s not even particularly suspenseful. But then, I wasn’t bored, either... Damn you, Manhunt! You should be a pointless retread but there’s something – something! – about you that keeps you interesting. I’ll be damned if I know what it is, though.

Quite simply, there’s no justice: the use of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre goes way beyond a simple jumping-off point for Mannunt. It’s more like a straight remake-cum-rip-off, only without the second half. Sorta like this:

Is it really feasible, however, that someone would virtually remake a 35-year-old film and not only fall far short in comparison, but also chuck out all the accumulated slasher learnings of the past three decades? Manhunt does nothing new. It doesn’t even try to do anything new, except set itself in Norway.

Speaking of which, I think I’ll remake Halloween and set it in the Maldives. That Michael Myers could really use a nice tan.

Rating: 3/5