The Rosetta shot: “The Toolbox Murders” (1978)
So, yeah. A naked, bruised woman with a nail gun held point-blank at her head by a black-gloved figure. That’s… blunt.
Look at that debased image. No, really. Look at it. Process it, roll it around in your mind. That is an actual shot from an actual movie that was actually released in general release. What does that say about the film that contains it?
For one thing, it says that the people who made this film do not want you to feel safe. Like it or not, The Toolbox Murders does not fuck around when it comes to being, you know, a horror movie. If the primary purpose of a horror film is to either A) frighten and scare, or B) disturb the senses, then the people who made this film decided to go straight for the throat and choose B. Toolbox is, above all, a truly nasty and unclean film, a movie where you can practically see the sickness oozing off the screen. The question is, is that necessarily a bad thing? If the intent is to make a film that leaves you feeling sucker-punched by the feeling that nothing is going to be okay any time soon, shouldn’t the makers commit to the idea? This film, if nothing else, is god-damned committed. The first act is nearly contextless unmitigated stalk-and-slaughter fodder, like a giallo with the plotty bits removed. The second act then slows down to fall into a half-hearted sort of investigative-plot routine, with the brother of an abducted teen working to find her and, ostensibly, the slasher of the first act. The slasher, incidentally, is deranged Puritanical apartment superintendent Cameron Mitchell at his most drunkenly, sweatily fervent. This bit hits all the expected marks, but you can tell that it’s there because it has to be. Then you get to the bleak, bleak third act, and suddenly the air of dutifulness makes a horrid, nihilistic sense.
The hell of it is, this isn’t poorly made. This is crafted by people who knew what they were doing and spent all their talent on visuals, dialogue and plot beats that serve only to repel and discomfit. During the first body-discovery scene, the filmmakers toy with expectations (and later revelations) by having Mitchell bobbing up and down, out of focus but recognizable, in the background while the cops on the scene discuss whoever could have done such a horrid thing. There’s a long sequence with Mitchell and the kidnapped girl, where Mitchell treats her with nothing but genial patriarchal concern - while sucking on a fucking lollipop, no less! - that ranks as one of the most skin-crawling things I’ve seen in a film.
Given the talent and skill on display, I suspect that the wallow in extreme violence and extreme imagery has less to do with callow shock and more with the expulsion of psychic damage (which sets it apart from pathetic “provocative” dreck like David DeFalco’s Chaos). Director Dennis Donnelly spent his entire career working in television working on things like “Simon & Simon,” “Hawaii Five-O” and “Hart to Hart.” This was his only feature film, and after viewing it you understand why. The Toolbox Murders is not a film you make if you’re trying to secure future career prospects. This is a film you make if you have something terrible and icky inside of you welling up, and you need to expel it and turn it into art. This is a film you make if you desperately need to deal with your own darkness so you can continue on with life.
Toolbox is not a great film. I can’t even really defend it as a good film - unlike, say, I Spit on Your Grave, there’s no real point here to the degradation aside from, possibly, personal catharsis. But it is undeniably effective. Its bluntness means to get under your skin, and it does.
The Rosetta shot: “Deported Women of the SS Special Section”
Yeah, more boobs. It always gets worse before it gets better, etc.
Seriously, though, look at that shot. What do you see? Breasts, naked flesh, a large phallic nightstick. You know what you don’t see in that shot? Swastikas. Uniforms. Nazi paraphernalia. Things like that. You’d think that, if I am to capture a film that openly traffics in Nazi symbols, I’d have to include an actual Nazi somewhere in the shot. The fact that I don’t should tell you something very important about the particularly rancid chunk of sputum horked up by writer/director Rino Di Silvestro, and here it is:
Deported Women of the SS Special Section is dismal, an absolute failure on every artistic level right down to that awkward mouthful of a title. Most importantly, though, it is not a Nazisploitation flick. Not really, anyway - I mean, it’s got the costumes and the German accents and everything. But it plays out like a standard Women-in-Prison film. I get the feeling it was intended to be one, but Di Silvestri got a great deal on Nazi uniforms halfway through writing the script.
I suppose this gets into what we expect (or should expect) from this nasty-ass genre. The way I see it, there’s two options when making a Nazisploitation film, and the more I think about them, the more I consider the genre to be thoroughly unworkable. The first is damn the torpedoes and barrel full speed ahead into the uncomfortable area beyond the pale. If you do this, you are clearly a terrible person who does not need to be holding a camera. The second is what we have here - palette-swap a WIP flick and dot it with little soupcons of outre ugliness. Either way, you’re not going to end up with something that most human beings would consider palatable just by virtue of your subject matter. But you, the theoretical filmmaker, know that going in - you’re using one of the 20th century’s darkest moments as fodder for base titillation. So if you make a point to set your exploitation film in a Nazi camp, then proceed to use that solely as window dressing, you’re a huckster and a charlatan indulging in the lowest form of carnival barkering. Deported Women uses the legacy of Nazism and the Holocaust as a simple financial hook and nothing more. This strikes me as far more obscene than a sick, horrible atrocity exhibition would.
That then calls me to answer whether I would really want to see the kind of film that the former tactic I delineated would create. To which I can only say: Of course I don’t. Di Silvestri’s shockingly tame, incoherent constructed sad-sack shitheap may not have offended me, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I need to be offended. I don’t need a film to throw Mengele-style medical experimentation, gas chamber massacres and shit like that alongside lesbian revelry and big ’70s bush, thanks all the same. This is why I think the genre in and of itself is an untenable proposition - the audience gets slimed if the premise delivers on its horrid promise, but they get cheated if it doesn’t. Best to simply leave it alone, let it gather dust in the bin of bad ideas. (That said, Eloy De La Iglesia’s In a Glass Cage is a fine film, probably the best film you could make in said genre. But Eloy’s aim was art, not commerce.)
(Also: Despite my misgivings, I still want to see Love Camp 7, which invented the genre. Why? Because Lee fucking Frost directed it, that’s why. You make a film like The Pick-Up and I’ll pay attention to whatever you do.)
Feed her!
My review of The Human Centipede (First Sequence) went up over the week at In Review Online. I’m not a fan.
From the Shelf: Bad Santa (2003, Terry Zwigoff)
Acquired: I… I don’t actually remember. Pretty sure I bought it rather than received it as a gift, but couldn’t tell you the time frame.
Seen before?: Several times.
This is a film I adore and have seen a number of times. Because I adore it, and because I’ve seen it a whole lotta buncha times, I don’t feel I have anything to say about it that I haven’t already said. Bad Santa, with its gloriously pungent dialogue and perfectly boozy, sleazy performance from the invaluable Billy Bob Thornton, is the kind of film I’ve seen often enough that I’ve incorporated it into my everyday dealings with the world - I’ll quote the film a few times a week, mostly the line, “Well, they can’t all be winners, kid, now can they?” (Though lately, I’ve also grown inordinately fond of “I’m gonna stick my whole fist up your ass.”) Interesting to note on repeat viewings how the creeping sentiment that defines the film’s last third begins to feel earned because Thornton truly invests himself in the character of Willie and allows us to see the flashes of disappointed humanity that he spends all his waking moments trying to drown in alcohol and licentiousness. This is, if nothing else, a dark portrait of a man on the edge of ruin who wakes up just enough to keep himself from going over the edge, and we laugh anyway because the self-destruction is so outsized and surly that it’s sickly amusing. That’s probably why the vulgarity has an impact beyond simple shock - it’s an expression of existential despair as potent as anything by Bergman.
Up next: From one drunk to another…
From the Shelf: Arang (2006, Ahn Sang-hoon)
Acquired: April of ‘07 as a review screener from the sadly-defunct Tartan Films.
Seen before?: Once - May 7th, 2007.
I covered most anything that’s worth covering in my Blogcritics review of this well-worn ghost movie, though it’s probably worth mentioning that the line of dialogue cited in the review (“It’s better to meet a ghost than a pervert”) more or less serves as a keystone to the entire film. Perversity and rape keep popping up as the film rolls on, making the thing seem like a long Korean knockoff of “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit” (or, as I prefer to call it, “Law and Order: The All-Rape Edition”). Doesn’t make the film any better, but I figured I’d at least bring it up.
Up next: The reason I got a DVD player…
From the Shelf: Angel Heart (1987, Alan Parker)
Acquired: Through the generosity of a certain Ms. Jenny Sekwa. Who is awesome.
Seen before?: Spun this disc once before, back in June of 2002.
I wish more big-ticket Hollywood films would bathe so luxuriously in their own lack of repute. Alan’s Parker’s bombastic, ridiculous voodoo thriller openly flaunts its lack of taste and morals, and the results could have been plug-ugly if they weren’t so nastily entertaining. I think the key is that everyone in front of and behind the camera understands the material and plays it at the level it needs/deserves rather than the level they wish it could be (sometimes, a potboiler is just a potboiler and that’s okay). There’s no great significance, no message being sent… just 110 minutes of a fantastic Mickey Rourke slowly and epically losing his shit. That, for me, is frankly enough.
But there’s also De Niro. It’s amusing, after a long decade of increasingly bored-and-boring work from Robert De Niro, to look back at this and remember a time when he seemed to enjoy his job. Playing the quietly sinister, ridiculously-monikered Louis Cyphre, he appears to be having a grand old time portraying evil as genially as possible. Note his portrayal here, then compare it to his bud Al Pacino in the same role in The Devil’s Advocate for a lesson in contrast and situational effectiveness - Pacino can go way, way over the top because his film is relying on him to be the catalyst for the crazy places it eventually goes, while De Niro mantains a sense of balance and calm because the film he’s in is thoroughly unhinged from frame one and someone’s got to keep it from launching into outer space.
And what a batshit piece of work this is - there’s blood and murders and voodoo and Satanism nightmares and killer gumbo and a set of goofy superimposed yellow eyeballs and tons of sweaty, sweaty atmosphere. There’s also the infamous sex scene between Rourke and Lisa Bonet, which might be the most deranged scene of its ilk this side of Shadowboxer (except Alan Parker seems to know how off-the-wall his film is as opposed to Lee Daniels). Terrific closing credit sequence, too. I don’t think it’s as creepy as I remember it being, if only because the relentless hyperbole renders it less a horror movie and more an elaborate black joke. But it’s entertaining as all fuck.
Up next: The triumphant return of a moral man…
From the Shelf: All Men Are Apes! (1965, Joseph P. Mawra)
Acquired: February 2008, from Something Weird Video.
Seen before?: The first 30 minutes or so, but not all the way through.
Or: Eroticism and Its Discontents.
Joseph Mawra, I’m now convinced, is one of the great unsung savants of exploitation cinema. His films are pitched right at the midway point between what the audience expects from the genre and what his crackpot muse tells him to craft, and he seems to be calling into question the very idea of the erotic (within the boundaries of his chosen field, that is). For one example, witness how quickly the Olga series unhinged itself, going from light bondage/whipping to topless women being threatened with acetylene torches; for another, check this daffy bit of cheesecake.
Apes tells a story, familiar to any student of exploitation, about the rise and fall of a lustful young woman. But, true to the misanthropy of the title, Mawra’s modus operandi is a breed apart from either finger-wagging or pecker-raising. All Men Are Apes! is a film about desire, about perversion and everyone’s particular peccadilloes. The signature setpiece here is a long, early bit set at a swinging party where all manner of offbeat sex stuff happens. In particular, there’s a sequence where a underwear-clad woman lays on plastic sheeting while men and women throw fruit at her. Now, is this sexy? The protagonist doesn’t think so (her voiceover sneers, “It was like a wake for the Jolly Green Giant”), but does it matter if we in the audience think so? I submit that it doesn’t - what’s important is that the characters in the film think so.
It’s this very particular and personal nature of a turn-on - any turn-on - that Mawra’s after; in a sense, he’s implicitly admitting that you can’t make fuck flicks for everyone, so why not make them for yourself and those like you, and why not make them fun in a whacked-out kind of way? If all men are apes, the key is to find the ape who fits your tastes, as our anti-heroine does by film’s end. Her transition from trashy Lolita stealing her mom’s pickups to top-end stripper to femme fatale is marked, at all times, by her need to be the controller in her relationships, which is why her dalliance with Syndicate hood Buddy goes so wildly awry. Her needs are not your needs are not my needs, but they sure make for an amusing time at the cinema.
Up next: A society in flux, a director in transition, a guy in a trenchcoat…
D2D entry #68: The Centerfold Girls (1974, John Peyser)
(Featured in 42nd Street #1.)
Halfway between an omnibus and an Americanized giallo, this slash-and-jiggle number could have only been made in the ’70s… and maybe that’s a good thing. The thing is split into three parts, each part following a different centerfold girl, with Andrew Prine’s moralistic mad-dog killer as the linking device. The second and third sections offer some low-grade entertainment value, and the climax offers the ever-awesome Prine squaring off against fierce Amazonian blonde Tiffany Bolling, which comes pretty close to redeeming everything before it. But there’s the matter of the opening segment: It follows a young nurse who drives into the woods (for a job, if I remember correctly - it’s been a few months), only to be victimized by both Prine and a group of nasty hippies straight out of a Last House on the Left ripoff. The tone in this segment is ugly (the sequence, as set up, is basically suffer-suffer-suffer-die), but the real problem is that Peyser and co. don’t seem set up to handle this brutality; the remainder of the film, while sleazy, is nowhere near as heartless or vicious as this first bit, and leading off with such material creates a permanent imbalance. Something like Night Train Murders can get away with this level of sadism and horror because its makers demonstrate a basic understanding of the material’s potency and a commanding formal control. Here, it’s just misogynistic window dressing.
Horror Challenge entry #16: Don’t Answer the Phone! (1980, Robert Hammer)
The psychotic ‘Nam veteran was a staple of action and horror cinema for a good number of years, and this film is a prime example of why - it’s an easy way to slam together titties ‘n’ gore into a ready-made framework, and it allows at least one role to go way, way over the top, which is something any semi-pro actor can do. (Subtlety is for nerds and Europeans, man.) Funny thing is, though, Hammer’s flick is really two movies in one; the first, more discomfiting film follows the creepy, sweaty, terrifyingly strong killer around Los Angeles as he kills, lifts weights and taunts a comely radio psychologist (Flo Lawrence) over the phone, while the second is your typical police procedural stuff except the cops (James Westmoreland & Ben Frank) are buffoonish wiseasses prone to random acts of brutality and general assholery. Does that structure sound familiar to you? Surely it’s a formula, but the specifics (rage-a-holic killer whose profession ties into his murders, goofball cops who can’t be taken seriously until they get mean, bifurcated structure) hearken forward to the supremely disturbing Hong Kong serial killer classic The Untold Story. Not that this film is anywhere as effective or impressive as that, and it doesn’t have Anthony Wong’s staggering psycho performance. But the thrust is similar as is the effect - we have, in essence, a world of normality and frivolity rent asunder by a vicious madman (portrayed with believable cruelty and fury by Nicholas Worth), and the only way towards restoration of the balance is to match violence with violence. The Untold Story went further, evolving into a critique of police brutality and human capacity for cruelty in general; this film is not as nuanced, but the primal force remains. Especially potent is the film’s depiction of its killer as a sociopathic type, hateful and murderous but otherwise lucid and reasonable; the lead-in to the climactic action sequence, where a bound & panicked Lawrence attempts to psychoanalyze Worth into submission only to have him mock and debase her attempts to do so, explaining that he just likes to hurt people… well, it’s a jolt. Not quality cinema, but authentically scuzzy.
Horror Challenge entry #10: Mark of the Devil (1970, Michael Armstrong)
It’s probably a sign that a film is failing on any appreciable level when I find myself drumming my fingers impatiently, wondering when the fuck people are going to start getting tortured so that something might actually happen. Dreadfully dull costume drama probably qualifies as the father of the torture-porn genre, and that’s about all it has going for it - even the infamous tongue-ripping scene doesn’t pack the punch of the earlier, far faker yet somehow more effective scene in Lewis’s Blood Feast. And what’s the message in the mutilation? The Church was apparently really corrupt in the 17th & 18th centuries. Wow. Don’t stop the fuckin’ presses for that one.
