Category Archives: Horror

Horror, Imaginary British Cinema

#132 – Carrion Crow

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(1974, GB, 100 min) Dir Harold Andsley. Cast Ian Ogilvy, Franco Francini, Maria Perschy.

Good old Harrow Productions – there wasn’t a popular British film of the seventies that they didn’t half-assedly rip off and in Harold Andsley they had their star director. The Devil Rides Out does well? He can get you Death to the Devil! knocked off in a fortnight. Witchfinder General causing a stir? He’ll get you Carrion Crow – the tale of a medieval demon hunter – in a trice. The one thing that nobody could have foreseen however is that Andsley might have made a good film. Perhaps it was his passion for the subject, having studied the Middle Ages in Oxford? Perhaps it was a complete accident? Who knows! Carrion Crow is Ogilvy’s Crusades scarred knight brought into the service of the church to scour the haunted isles of Britain, rooting out the demonic influence that is trying to take hold with his aged Italian aide Father Carfat (Francini). The film finds them having completed passage to Ireland where it seems they might have met their match in rural priestess Maria Perschy (who was Austrian but dyed her hair red for the part and was totally dubbed so let’s not split hairs) and her village of acolytes. A surprisingly effective and atmospheric picture and worth seeing for evidence that Andsley could make a good film if he really tried.

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Horror, Imaginary Australian Cinema

#125 – Hannah Blet

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(1981, Aust, 104 min) Dir Chuck Mallory. Cast Jenny Bitz, Pete Pooter, Jim Billing.

Through the desert haze comes Hannah Blet, a twentysomething woman with an antique suitcase. She takes up position at the side of the road. Cut to a wide shot – this road is running through the middle of nowhere and the desert that she has just emerged from goes on forever in every direction. Cut to a close up – Hannah has a smile on her face, the same smile she’ll be wearing throughout the film no matter if she’s watching a child play or pulling apart a trucker who’s made unwanted advances like he’s nothing more than a rag doll. Who is Hannah Blet? Why is her suitcase full of Victorian clothes and sand? The film does little to answer these question but gives us a very still, very stylish atmosphere in the shape of DOP Jim Dixon’s spare compositions and Dingo Drift’s synthy score, a still atmosphere that is occasionally punctuated by very effective and very bloody violence. An accomplished debut from Chuck Mallory and a fine performance from Jenny Blitz set this Ozploitation classic apart.

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Erotic, Horror, Imaginary French Cinema, Imaginary Spanish Cinema

#114 – Baroness Lesbos

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(1978, Fr/Sp, 99 min) Dir Catherine Dominique. Cast Ewa Rohm, Adrianna Belle, Hans, Peter Allison.

Originally titled The Mother of All Sin this is the one film of Dominique’s she seems incapable of standing behind, despite what even she admits are some moments of beauty studded throughout. “It was taken away from me by the bastard producers,” she told me at a 2010 retrospective in Berlin, “They cut it and take out what they don’t like. They film more things and put them in too. Even they take it’s name. I find it hard to look at still, you know?” As you might expect what was taken out was atmosphere and what was added was sex, but that’s not what upset Dominique: “The actors – Adrianna and Hans and Peter – they all work with me before so they refuse to not work with me. All they have then is Ewa, who I never wanted anyway.” That’s not all they had – they also had another woman in a blonde wig pretending to be Adrianna Belle but who looks so unlike her it completely sinks the back half of the film which is a shame as the first half is as strong as anything she has made with fantastic use made of the sunsets along the Spanish coast. Dominique would be back on solid ground three years later with the crown jewel of the sexploitation half of her career – the beautiful and romantic Falling Blossom.

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Art Film, Erotic, Horror, Imaginary French Cinema

#113 – Bête érotique avec quatre jambes, La (Four Legged Sex Beast)

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(1974, Fr, 88 min) Dir Catherine Dominique. Cast Beau Modeste, Jean Fillet, Peter Allison.

A midway film from Dominique, straddling her earlier art house efforts and her later sexploitation work, the amusingly titled Four Legged Sex Beast concerns the porcelain Modeste as the powdered and perfumed Lady Pea who is being transported to the home of the man that she is being married off to by her father when one of the carriage wheels breaks on the rutted country road, stranding them in the dark woods. As night falls first the coach driver is taken screaming into the night and then her father too. It’s only a matter of time before whatever it is that’s out there returns for Pea. Of course the beast wants something more than meat from her too – the last twenty minutes of the film form the notorious extended sex scene that saw the film quietly banned in a lot of places. But what is the nature of the beast? Is it a real life Sasquatch type or is it the physical manifestation of Pea’s suppressed sexuality? Who knows! The only film starring the beautiful Modeste, filmed as she rested on the cusp of fame after the one-two hits Je Suis un Tracteur and Petit Chat de Fourrure stormed the French charts and before the suspicious snorkelling accident that took her life. Her performance is limited to be sure but the camera just can’t take it’s eye off her.

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Giallo, Horror, Imaginary Italian Cinema

#110 – Three Deaths for the Magi

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(1973, It, 93 min original (61 min surviving)) Dir Andrea Tontorre. Cast Marco Bostoni, Angella Min, Franco Francini.

Super rare festive knife-fest from shooting star Andrea Tontorre, the Jean Vigo of the giallo with a mere two films to his name before he died, run over by his own car on the outskirts of Rome when he opened the driver’s door to be sick and fell out. Unlike Vigo his innovations went unheralded by the film mainstream and his features remain out of print – I’ve only seen Three Deaths for the Magi by virtue of attending a private party thrown by octogenarian über-producer Hans Belli, appropriately enough in the catacombs under Paris. The print was old and scratched and the loss of two of its six reels left more gaps in logic than is usual, even in giallo, but despite this Belli’s old eyes were brimming with tears by its end, so moved was he by the sight of so much youthful vigour lost. The basic plot is your basic giallo meat and potatoes – Marco Bostoni witnesses a murder and finds himself of the killers hit list. There are only three days until Christmas and killer’s M.O.? You guessed it – leaving gold, frankincense and myrrh at the crime scenes. Can Marco work out the connection and find the killer? The set prices that remain still stun, bursting with a colour and verve that should be equally credited to Tontorre, similarly doomed cinematographer M. Bris (seafood accident, 1977) and soundtrack artists Imp. Hopefully one day Tontorre’s slim oeuvre makes it out of an old man’s catacomb party and into the world at large…

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Action/Adventure, Horror, Imaginary Hong Kong Cinema

#104 – Night of One Thousand Bastards, The

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(2011, HK, 100 min) Dir Jackie Woo. Cast Nicolas Cage, Regina Ho, Mo Yun-Fang.

I know he’s had a long and a varied career but still, it’s hard to reconcile the disreputable Jackie Woo of old with the disreputable Jackie Woo who is now deemed worthy of invitation to Cannes but I guess that says a lot about the post-Grindhouse world we live in. His inaugural fest film was Bloody Dolls, an uncharacteristic convent-set revenge flick that spent the guts of it’s runtime following the actresses gazing wistfully out over the mist-shrouded countryside and not, you know, disembowelling someone. He was back to his old form with this, his third film of 2011, and not only that but he snagged Nicolas Cage too! Okay, late-period low-budget in-hock-to-the-tax man Cage but still, it’s something. So Cage is a US government hitman in mainland China, there to kill a party functionary (Yun-Fang, looking tired) holidaying in some backwater town when the titular bastards arrive – a horde of freshly dead zombies hungry for blood. The tables now turned, Cage and Yun-Fang must team up to survive. The luminous Regina Ho plays Yun-Fang’s daughter and Cage’s inappropriately young love interest who spends the whole film under a table screaming. Don’t let the chorus of boos that trailed the film from Cannes fool you – this is a fun bit of trash that doesn’t attain Woo’s manic heights of the past but will keep you going the four months until he makes another.

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms

Horror, Imaginary British Cinema, Imaginary Irish Cinema

#103 – Dark Watch, The

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(1996, GB/Ire, 105 min) Dir Fintan O’Driscoll. Cast Bob Hoskins, Stephen Rea, Bronagh Gallagher.

Belfast, 1974. Joe Wilson is the head of the Dark Watch in Northern Ireland – a secret regiment deployed into warzones on behalf of the British army to spread superstitious fear. He’s an older man now, a veteran of service against the Mau Mau in Nigeria and various unspecified deployments in South East Asia. Now he’s using the popularity and the scandal of the recent films like The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby and so on to leave evidence of black magic and witchcraft in the bombed out buildings of Belfast and Derry, to instil fear into the population and make them think twice about going out at night. Unfortunately for him this means that Wilson himself is out at night with three decades worth of ghosts in his head. Is this why he’s seeing the devil in the shadows of burned out buildings? Is that why he hears the sound of hooves following him down the empty streets? A fantastically atmospheric chiller with a cracking performance from Hoskins that has the advantage of being filmed on the streets of a Belfast still divided by conflict and marked out O’Driscoll, following the also excellent The Peat Cutters, as a director worth watching. While dismissed by many a critic at the time for the absurdness of it’s premise it has been found, in recent years, to have had a greater basis in fact that might have been supposed.

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Drama, Horror, Imaginary Irish Cinema

#91 – Peat Cutters, The

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(1992, Ire, 91 min) Dir Fintan O’Driscoll. Cast Stephen Rea, Colm Meaney.

Bluff, bolshie Pat (Rea) and quiet, thoughtful Michael (Meaney) are peat cutters in the West of Ireland beginning another day’s shift in the bleak midwinter morning, the uniformity of the grey sky overhead mirrored by the open vastness of the bog around them. Their day is only just begun when Michael turns over a sod to find the leathered face of a long dead bog person within. As there’s nothing they can do with the body until they’re picked up at the end of their shift they leave it in the ground where they found it and go back to their work. Pat laughs off their find but Michael seems shaken by it and takes to speculating about it. Then he starts to talk about a figure, just on the horizon, that Pat can’t see and Pat can’t laugh that off. A spooky little number that gives away little and uses its location, which is like a blasted void or like limbo, to its fullest with director O’Driscoll – who is best known in the theatre – showing a knack for image making alongside his expected strengths with the actors. It’s refreshing to see both leads playing against type too, apparently as a result of a last-minute switch the week before shoot started.

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Comedy, Horror, Imaginary US Cinema

#86 – Ed, Fred and Life Among the Undead

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(2008, US, 98 min) Dir Jay White. Cast Justin Long, Tyler Labine.

A product of the post-Shaun of the Dead zombie comedy boom that brought us the likes of Zombieland and Life After Beth. Ed and Fred are a pair of housemates in Everywhereville, USA. Their lives were going nowhere prior to the zombie apocalypse and now that it’s happened, it looks like their chances of escaping this cycle are gone for good. So far, so Shaun. The difference here is that, like Dawn of the Dead and their zombies flocking to the mall, these zombies also retain some of their prior brain functions. But what does this mean for Ed and Fred? It means that the zombified relatives of both their families, as the film progresses, accumulate around their house since, presumably, they are the last surviving members of both. So Ed and Fred become progressively more and more unhinged, a situation probably not helped by the massive stash of ‘Tibetan Grass’ that they have managed to rescue from the collapse of society. At some point they’re going to have to kick the weed and do something about their situation… It’s a cheap movie but more because of the story it’s telling – which is essentially a one set play – than because they’ve constrained themselves and the invention on display in how it’s shot more than makes up for those constraints. The title also belies the fact that the film is more emotional than you would presume, dealing as it does with growing up, leaving cycles of dependency and saying goodbye to people you love though still, it has to be said, getting in enough adolescent stoner humour and dick jokes to sweeten the pill.

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Horror, Imaginary Italian Cinema

#82 – House of Midnight, The

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(1987, It, 100 min) Dir Mario Andreotti. Cast Paula Pitt, Robert Englund, Romeo Romero.

One film in and already Mario Andreotti needed a comeback but thankfully for him The House of Midnight was it. Young Alison (then muse/now wife Pitt) is somehow convinced into moving into what has to be the shadiest piece of real estate in Rome by what must be the palest, creepiest agent in the biz. Maybe it was young blonde neighbour Al (Romero) and his habit of wandering shirtless into the hall that did it? We’ll never know. So she moves in and everything and everyone there is, as expected, super weird. But it’s okay – Al will protect her. But is he what he seems? Spoiler alert: no, he’s not. Mr Black Harkness on the top floor (a slippery, snakey Englund) wants her young body for something something devil satan and if it means murdering everyone she knows to the accompaniment of Iron Maiden then by gum that just what he’s going to do. The man’s got a bee in his bonnet! It’s not hard to see why this worked commercially for Andeotti – he pretty much stole the story from better and already proven films, he got his attractive female lead to take her clothes off as much as she could and he staged a half dozen inventive and gratuitous murder scenes that would have done Argento proud. Not a perfect film but one that’s definitely worth it’s weight in pure disgusting fun.

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Twitter: @MadeUpFilms