Horror Challenge rundown: The first update
#1 - Frozen Scream (1975, Frank Roach): Imagine carving a statue. Think about all the bits left over once you’ve chiseled your work from solid, shapeless rock. Now imagine trying to build another statue from those cast-off shards using only a hot glue gun. That’s as succinctly as I can describe Frozen Scream, a film that feels crafted from random leftovers of a larger, less nonsensical piece. The basic situation is simple, woman-besieged-by-evil-forces stuff, and if it had stayed basic it might have been more coherent. It might have also been duller, more generic and less memorable than the singularly screwy final product - normal movies don’t have radio-controlled frozen zombies, white-coated German mad scientists (one of whom’s motivations & moral allegiance switch from scene to scene) surrounded by boxy electronics and blinking whatzits in the basement of a gymnasium, knife-wielding stab-happy figures in black cloaks or a heroic policeman whose voiceover narration intrudes at unexpected, ill-timed intervals, including during exposition-heavy dialogue scenes. The editing makes the film lurch from scene to scene, occasionally slipping back in time for a flashback or a dream sequence, neither of which end up meaning much of anything. Acting uniformly terrible, camera never quite where it should be, script dopey and inscrutably bizarre, Frozen Scream is a terrible, terrible movie. But it’s one of a kind.
#2 - The Corpse Grinders (1971, Ted V. Mikels): Part of me wants to like this simply for its off-the-wall supporting cast. Mikels clearly digs the freaky, the strange and eccentric - more so than his square doctor protagonists - and as such fills his film to burst with weirdo characters (a mute crippled secretary, a scruffy semi-homeless dude, a burly gravedigger with a nutbar wife who “feeds” a baby doll and generally acts like a reject from an Andy Milligan flick) who float in, do their thing and float right back out. The intent, I guess, is to goose the dull plot with these oddballs so that there might be something worth watching; if so, Mikels fails in execution if not intent. The Corpse Grinders is a bad film, but that’s not its greatest sin. It’s not just bad, it’s boring and lifeless. If you tried to remake Herschell Gordon Lewis’s The Gruesome Twosome without the gore or bizarre sense of humor, this is what you’d get. Also, cats? Still not intimidating.
#3 - Cat People (1942, Jacques Tourneur): The temptation to psychoanalyze this film’s baldy Freudian setup is strong - sexual hysteria rarely gets this blunt. Which makes the climax, featuring a psychiatrist and an angry panther, all the more amusing - the message seems to be, “Go ahead and rationalize it all you want. Ain’t gonna help.” Tourneur directs the holy hell out of this thing, with deep shadows and creative uses of limited lighting casting dread into every corner. (Replace the dread with despair and you’ve got noir.) A slow builder, setting up its conflict between the rational and the superstitious, the New World and the Old, with patience and care until the subconscious rips through and tears everything asunder. Potent shit.
Tell them who you are.
Now that’s a credit list. As long as you’re choosing pseudonyms, why not go nuts?
(From Dale Berry’s Hot-Blooded Woman, 1965)
A bigger buffet.
For yet another year, I’ll be participating in Adam Lemke’s Halloween Horror Challenge. Once again, I’ll try and keep some capsule reviews going of what I’ve seen (and I’ll try not to give up halfway through the month again), probably doing weekly capsule updates to save time. Also, as usual, I’ve amassed far more films than I’ll actually be able to watch within a month. So what the hell: Here’s the options, so you can at least know the pool from which I’m drawing. I severely doubt I’ll be able to watch all of these, but I’ll sure as hell try to knock out as many as possible. Note that this doesn’t include any potential theatrical releases which might catch my eye (i.e. Tucker and Dale vs. Evil), nor does it account for any wild hairs I might get up my ass to watch something random. So… yeah. Good luck with this, I suppose.
Baba Yaga (1973, Corrado Farina)
Barracuda (1978, Harry Kerwin & Wayne Crawford)
Bedlam (1946, Mark Robson)
Bereavement (2011, Stevan Mena)
Blood Hook (1987, Jim Mallon)
Boardinghouse (1982, John Wintergate)
The Body Snatcher (1945, Robert Wise)
Boy Meets Girl (1994, Ray Brady)
Burial Ground: The Nights of Terror (1981, Andrea Bianchi)
Cat People (1942, Jacques Tourneur)
The Chilling (1989, Deland Nuse & Jack A. Sunseri)
A Chinese Ghost Story (1987, Ching Siu-Tung)
A Chronicle of Corpses (2000, Andrew Repasky McElhinney)
The Corpse Grinders (1971, Ted V. Mikels)
The Corpse Grinders II (2000, Ted V. Mikels)
Curse of the Cat People (1944, Gunther von Fritsch & Robert Wise)
Deadly Sweet (1967, Tinto Brass)
Death Smiles on a Murderer (1973, Joe D’Amato)
Demons (1985, Lamberto Bava)
The Devil (1972, Andrzej Zulawski)
Don’t Deliver Us from Evil (1971, Joel Seria)
Don’t Go in the Woods (1981, James Bryan)
Don’t Go Near the Park (1981, Lawrence D. Foldes)
Dylan Dog: Dead of Night (2011, Adam Munroe)
Fall Down Dead (2007, Jon Keeyes)
The Forest (1982, Donald M. Jones)
The Funhouse (1981, Tobe Hooper)
The Ghost Ship (1943, Mark Robson)
Grizzly (1976, William Girdler)
Harpoon: Whale Watching Massacre (2009, Julius Kemp)
High Lane (2009, Abel Ferry)
A Horrible Way to Die (2011, Adam Wingard)
Island Fury (1983, Henri Charr)
Isle of the Dead (1945, Mark Robson)
It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958, Edward L. Cahn)
I Walked With a Zombie (1943, Jacques Tourneur)
The Leopard Man (1943, Jacques Tourneur)
Madman (1982, Joe Giannone)
Maniac Cop (1988, William Lustig)
Nail Gun Massacre (1985, Bill Leslie & Terry Lofton)
Negative Happy Chain Saw Edge (2007, Takuji Kitamura)
A Night to Dismember (1983, Doris Wishman)
Paranormal Entity (2009, Shane Van Dyke)
Pop Skull (2007, Adam Wingard)
Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky (1991, Ngai Kai Lam)
The Rite (2011, Mikael Hafstrom)
Screwed (1998, Teruo Ishii)
The Seventh Victim (1943, Mark Robson)
Seven Women for Satan (1976, Michel Lemoine)
The Sinful Dwarf (1973, Vidal Raski)
Sombre (1998, Philippe Grandrieux)
Stake Land (2011, Jim Mickle)
Syngenor (1990, George Elanjian Jr.)
The Terror (1963, Roger Corman)
Three on a Meathook (1973, William Girdler)
The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism (1967, Harald Reinl)
The Uh-Oh Show (2009, Herschell Gordon Lewis)
Vanishing on 7th Street (2011, Brad Anderson)
Video Violence (1987, Gary P. Cohen)
Video Violence 2 (1987, Gary P. Cohen)
Virgin Witch (1972, Ray Austin)
White Zombie (1932, Victor Halperin)
Box these tales, Donnie.
Sharp-minded blogger (and two-time White Elephant participant) Jaime Grijalba is currently hosting a weeklong Richard Kelly blogathon over at his blog Exodus 8:2. I’d planned to contribute a piece on The Box, but I wasn’t able to get a copy in time. Still, there’s time yet to participate if you’ve got something you want to write, so I figured I’d at least let others know about it.
Here’s Day 1 and Day 2. More will be added throughout the week. (Blog’s in Spanish, but translation is piss-easy when you’re on the ‘Net, don’cha know.)
Looking for mushrooms.
While I tentatively get the Dusk to Dawn Project (v. 2) under way, I might as well throw this out there: There’s a number of films I’d very much like to cover for this that have proven a little elusive. If anyone has a line on where to find a copy of any of these, I’d be really appreciative. (Not that I expect anyone reading this to have a print of Santa’s Christmas Circus or a non-German-dubbed The Manson Massacre in storage somewhere, but maybe an old taped-off-HBO copy of Birds Do It, Bees Do It or the VHS of The Stepdaughter, which I’ve missed opportunities to purchase affordably at least three times?)
Anyway, here’s the missing pieces. Gimme a holler if you can make any of them un-missing. (Also, if anyone has a copy of Randall Clark’s book At a Theater or Drive-In Near You, I’d kinda like to read that.)
Birds Do It, Bees Do It (1974, Nicholas Noxon & Irwin Rosten)
Blazing Battle (1983, Imam Tantowi)
The Brave Little Tailor (1956, Helmut Spier) [the English dub, preferably, but even a subbed version would help, since the extant OOP German DVD has no subtitles]
Danish Love Acts (1973, Erwin C. Dietrich)
The Double-Barrelled Detective Story (1965, Adolfas Mekas)
The Fountain of Love (1966, Ernst Hofbauer)
Four for the Morgue (1962, John Sledge)
Hard Candy (1976, Stephen Gibson) [the hardcore version; a softer re-edit is available on an OOP DVD under the title M 3-D]
Helga (1967, Erich F. Bender)
Isle of Sin (1960, Johannes Kai)
Kenner (1969, Steve Sekely)
Lost in Pajamas (1968, Radim Cvrcek)
Macabro (1966, Romolo Marcellini)
Maniacs on Wheels (1970, Guido Malatesta)
The Manson Massacre (1971, Kentucky Jones) [original English-language version - there’s a German-dubbed print out in the wilds of the greymarket, but I speak zero German]
Martin the Soldier (1966, Michel Deville)
The Mating Urge (1959, no director credited)
Nest of Spies (1956, Jean Stelli)Pigeons (1970, John Dexter) (due on DVD in the near future from Scorpion Releasing!)
The Road Hustlers (1968, Larry Jackson)
Sabu and the Magic Ring (1957, George Blair)
Santa’s Christmas Circus (1966, Frank Wiziarde)
Sexy Susan Sins Again (1968, Franz Antel)
The Stepdaughter (1972, William W. Wall)
Summerlust (1973, William R. Kowalchuk)
Tobo the Happy Clown (1965, Edward Finney and William Rowland)
The Tough One (1966, Jose Luis Romero Marchant)
2000 Years Later (1969, Bert Tenzer)
Violated! (1974, Albert Zugsmith)
The Weed of Crime (1962, Jun Fukuda)
Women for Sale (1969, Ernst Hofbauer)
Yakuza Deka: No Epitaphs for Us (1971, Ryuichi Takamori)
Tear up the map, draw a new one.
I’ve never been good at sticking to things. I don’t think I’ve ever finished something I set out to do, honestly - eventually, it gets to be a chore just keeping myself going. This has only gotten worse in the years since I’ve taken on a modicum of responsibility at my job, gotten married and so on. This is why I haven’t written much these last few years.
But these days, I can’t stop myself from thinking that the Dusk to Dawn Project… well, there might be something there. When put together, the films I’m dealing with aren’t just amusing, unpretentious entertainments - there’s a whole world, an alternate history of cinema that says important things about the prevailing culture in which they swam. The more I turn it over in my head, the more it becomes clear: If I finish one damn thing, this has to be it.
So, that’s what I’m going to do. Go back to square one, start clean. In the past, I’ve tackled these films haphazardly as I acquire them; now, I’m going to attempt to do this in roughly chronological order, to give a sense of how things progressed, how trends waxed and waned. Accordingly, the first entry will be up soon on Claude Alexander’s THE WONDROUS MIRACLE OF BIRTH, which actually isn’t as old as I figured it to be but does make for a solid bridge between the roadshow days and the time period with which I’m dealing. The reviews I post here will hopefully be more comprehensive than some of my earlier stabs at this stuff, yet they probably still won’t represent the final product in my head - there’s still a lot of reading, a lot of research that I have ahead of me. Think of these as skeletons of eventual men.
So there it is. This is what I must do. Hopefully, you’ll find some value in it. If you do, let me know. I could use the encouragement.
A true White Elephant, galumphing and ghastly.
I must write it all down. Exactly as it happened. While it is fresh in my memory. But my hand trembles. Why? Twice I’ve dropped the black keyboard. Now I sit at the computer screen, making the greatest effort to calm myself, not only for its own sake, but also for you, Internet, who never dreamed that anyone could witness totally a fantastic artistic abortion and survive….
The motion picture that couldn’t have been made? It was made. It shouldn’t have been made. but it is. This is it.
This? What is this? It is Myra Breckenridge. A film by Michael Sarne. A film that destroyed Michael Sarne. It has nothing, nothing for you, nothing for anyone. It rapes and pillages the Hollywood of old, hoping to find a scrap, a piece that can redeem or lend meaning, credence, import, any fucking thing. Any fucking thing to hang an idea upon.
Ideas. Yes. There are supposedly ideas here. Glimmers, whispers of thought. Leftover slivers from the reputedly-quite-good Gore Vidal novel, no doubt. What are they? What are they, indeed. The film is edited and assembled at random. Scenes lurch and stagger with no concept of flow. No pacing. I have witnessed celluloid wreckage, and my job is to tear through and pull out any survivors, leaving the dead to wither before the red-red-red lights of the ambulance. But no one, nothing is alive. My hands are bloody with pretension, gender-role noodling and copious footage from other, better films.
What is this? I think it is a satire. Intended, maybe. Myra Breckinridge has Rex Reed getting a sex change from John Carradine and becoming Raquel Welch. Funnier than anything in the movie proper is that notion - the idea that lopping off a dingle and installing a pair of silicon bags could turn a bad critic into a bad-but gorgeous actress. “The destruction of the American male in all its particulars,” is a chunk of dialogue given to Welch. No actress I know could make that palatable. Welch makes it painful. Her tone through the film is arch. Faux-British, enunciated. Take this actress seriously, it says. I refuse. The overwritten dialogue dies in her mouth. Ashes, ashes. She needed to be nowhere near this project. Back in that fur bikini, maybe.
The film knows this. Her introduction is intercut with footage from One Million Years B.C. That happens a lot. No worth in the main body of the text - might as well try to import some from other works. Piggyback on past success, coast on the unearned goodwill of old loves. A precursor to Seltzer and Friedman? This could be true, Internet. The juxtapositions are crass and on-the-nose always. Rex Reed masturbating? Show a shot of Oliver Hardy being sprayed in the face with champagne. Ladies lounging by a pool? Hey, there’s Marilyn Monroe wet and swinging her leg horizontal in Something’s Got to Give. Intellectually lazy, artistically suspect. I cannot go on, yet I must. Where was I? So cold… so hazy…
Satire? That’s right, I must double back to satire. This thinks it’s being satirical. It has old men talking about smuttiness and the devaluation of culture and movies while also expressing prurient desires (“I saw this picture where people were fornicating. Fornicating! God’s honest truth, Buck - I’ve seen it three times…”). Sarne thinks he’s being clever with this, and with the fact that said old men are played by people like John Huston and Andy Devine. (Huston! What the fuck are you doing here? You directed The Maltese Falcon!) Hollywood’s old guard, you see - they aren’t with it like the youth of today is. They could be, if they’d only admit their own desires. This is base, level-one shit. Get out of my face, Myra Breckinridge Your breath is terrible - I think you’ve been eating onions.
There is also a brief bit where a hippie is beaten by cops while a pro-America ballad plays on the soundtrack. This has no bearing. Means nothing. It’s just there. Smug, easy. Satire needs teeth and bite - it needs a stance, for fuck’s sake. There is no stance here because that would require belief, commitment. Juvenile nose-thumbing. Tweaking authority and social mores for the sake of it, the same as blowing a snot rocket in public. Stupid. Stupid.
I lay this at the feet of Sarne. Director, co-writer. Sarne, oh Mr. Sarne. Who are you? Where did you come from? Who gave you this job? You reportedly spent eight hours one day filming a cake, yet it is beyond your grasp to even intelligibly frame a simple close-up. You have no feel for this material. You are overwhelmed, you swing about madly dragging in bits and pieces in hopes of constructing some sort of magpie counter-culture document. Failure is total here. In a way, I admire your audacity. Swinging for the fences, you were. But all you have to show for it is ten pounds of audacity and a quarter-ounce of quality. At some point, you have to trust your audience. The easy way, the blunt way, is not always the right way. Especially when working with volatile materials.
Volatile. Satire again - supposedly. Lots of F-bombs and sexual material (the kind that Andy Devine wouldn’t like). Everyone is horny, everyone is licentious. Mae West floats though, mostly unrelated to anything in the film. She is a totem - a symbol of Old Hollywood corrupted, the id finally untethered, being allowed to say the things she couldn’t get away with even pre-Code. Saucy does not equal dirty, sadly. None of it works. The show-stopper setpiece is an anal rape scene, I think it’s supposed to be funny. At least, I think it’s intended as a savage rebuke to all the talk of “fags” that gets bandied about quite casually. Because, manhood, of course. But shock is a cruel mistress. Lean too hard to the side of shock and you’ll go hollow inside. Because shock, like satire, must be connected to something like a worldview. Otherwise? Baseless crudity. Not shocking.
Myra Breckinridge, the candy-coated cream puff that wishes it were a sharp, cold peppermint. It wants to sting and discomfit. But it’s all meringue and air inside. No impact. It melts away, unremembered and unloved, leaving nothing behind but a slight soupcon of stale sugar. What do you do with something like this? Forget it. Let it melt. Expunged from memory so soon - where did you go? The will to carry on is strong, Internet.
Myra Breckinridge is a piece of shit. And don’t you ever forget it, you motherfuckers.
The Rosetta shot: “Hatchet II”
You know how teenaged gorehounds sometimes make excitable lists of all the bizarre and hyperbolic ways they’d like to see people dispatched in films? There’s a reason big-budget movies aren’t made from those lists.
Adam Green’s Hatchet isn’t a great movie. It’s not even a good movie. But it does scratch, however nakedly, that old-school slasher itch; once it gets going (and, like the films it emulates, it takes way too long to get going), it offers some undemanding cheap thrills. Dumb as dirt and half as useful, Hatchet nevertheless delivers on the splattery promise it makes to its audience. That said, it doesn’t do anything else worth consideration and is ultimately kind of pointless. Hatchet is to cinema as a 7-11 microwave burrito is to food - it’ll satiate hunger by the most basic understanding of the concept, but there’s no reason to consume it unless you’re drunk or desperate, and even then you’ll probably hate yourself afterwards.
With that in mind, Hatchet II is what happens after the burrito combined with the alcohol and/or shame turn on you. In the ignominious tradition of pretty much every slasher sequel, it’s a wretched piece of regurgitated rot, the kind of film that still takes half a movie to set up its universe despite having thoroughly set it up in the first part. The only innovation, as with a good many of these types of things (i.e. the Friday the 13th series), is the escalated brutality of the money scenes, yet Hatchet II screws up even that by pushing its kills so far over the top that they become extravagantly ridiculous. The intended effect is to make the audience go, “OH COOL WOW I’VE NEVER SEEN THAT BEFORE,” but the actual effect is an alienation - Victor Crowley’s dallying with belt sanders and table saws and so on try so hard to be so unique and KOOL that they become faintly insulting, like we’re being pandered to.
Compounding the issue, Green’s puerile sense of humor gets even freer reign than it did in the first film. For instance, consider the two hunters (one of whom is an Odious Comic Relief black dude who’s all rampaging, sassy id) who get ambushed by Crowley as he wields the most enormous chainsaw in creation. The two are then simultaneously bisected from crotch to cranium, and in most slasher flicks that’d be it - the wild death is the punchline. Green can’t resist trying to plop a cherry on top of the sickness sundae, though, so we’re treated to a shot of one unfortunate party’s disembodied testicles flopping to the ground. That’s not clever, son, that’s just moronic gilding of the bloody lily.
But let’s be honest - it’s not like Green doesn’t warn you from the get-go. As you can see above, his writing/directing credit appears on screen hovering above a fresh puddle of vomit. That alone sends enough of a warning, but here’s the kicker: Guess who that is in the scene as the ashen-faced fratboy responsible for said vomit? Adam Green, of course. Essentially he’s saying before things have even started, “Yep, I puked this thing up, and you’re stuck watching it. Too late to get your money back now, sucker.” Prost to you too, buddy.
