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.
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.)
The Rosetta shot: “The Shuttered Room”
You don’t see it in every film, but most films have ‘em - a single shot that sums up the entirety. These shots can communicate vast amounts of vital information about the work in question even to those who are unfamiliar with that work. In an effort to keep some kind of content flowing through here, I’m going to start periodically highlighting these types of shots. And I’ll try to avoid the obvious - if I were to try and find one shot that could sum up, say, E.T., I damn well wouldn’t just pick a shot of E.T.
Having said that, here’s a shot of the shuttered room from The Shuttered Room:
However, my reasons for singling out this shot have less to do with its titular edifice and more with the building as a whole. If you’re like me, the first thing that passes through your mind when looking at this isn’t, “Hey, a shuttered room,” but, “Wow, that room does not belong there at all.” It’s this deliberate incongruity, this sticking out, that interests me, because The Shuttered Room is built on and stuffed to burst with these incongruities. Even beyond the blunt city mouse/country mouse dichotomy of its plot, there’s an element in a good majority of the shots that simply does not belong and draws attention to itself because of it (a strangely foregrounded eagle, a modern car in front of a dilapidated ancient mansion, Oliver Reed peering in any number of windows). This, of course, all feeds into the big Thing That Ain’t Right in the narrative: the resident of the shuttered room. But that’s getting ahead of myself.
It’s on his face, expensive taste.
I have to admit, this is one of my favorite reaction shots in all of cinema.
Look at him. He’s just so damn happy. I couldn’t look that happy if I ingested ten pounds of meth and pulled the corners of my lips up with clothes hangers.
And why, might you ask, is this bespectacled goofball so happy? Uschi Digard is across the room from him, and she’s not wearing clothes. If you don’t know what Uschi Digard looked like in the ’70s… well, she looked like this:
Gotta admit, I’d be pretty thrilled too. Still don’t think I could pull that face, though.
(Stills from Edward Montoro’s Getting Into Heaven.)
Horror Challenge entry #7: Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (1972, Sergio Martino)
I love Edwige Fenech, but her introduction into this Poe-inspired giallo blows apart the focus. Before she shows up, Your Vice is an intriguing portrait of the diseased relationship between alcoholic writer Oliviero and his timid, withdrawn wife Irina, stressed to its breaking point by some mysterious murders of young women with ties to the philandering Oliviero. Then the killer is abruptly caught. Then Fenech arrives and starts humping everything in sight. Fortunately, it does pull itself together for a splendid climax/twist. And it’s certainly well-made - Martino’s sharp, direct style has a crackling punch to it that keeps it fairly lively even in its lumpier moments. Even when the film is nicking from other sources (i.e. the pan following a body tumbling down a staircase bearing a striking similarity to a sequence in Four Flies on Grey Velvet), Martino’s style has a brutality in it far removed from the languid dreaminess of Dario Argento. This lends itself, too, to the emotional brutality in the film that mirrors the physical brutality. Late in the film, Martino even sums up the entirety of the film’s thematic heft in one loaded image:
So it’s minor Martino, but minor Martino is stronger than a lot of people’s top efforts.
(Also, I watched Martino’s The Suspicious Death of a Minor in the same evening. Despite the title, it’s not a giallo but a Eurocrime flick about a dogged, irreverent cop investigating the title event. It’s terrific stuff, propulsive and involving, but what amused me most is that there’s a scene set in a movie theater. Two characters walk into a film, and guess what movie’s finale is playing? Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key, of course.)
Wait for it….
CHAOS… REIGNS!
(Still taken from Peter Podehl’s 1957 oddity The Big Bad Wolf.)
Horror Challenge entry #4: Dark Universe (1993, Steve Latshaw)
This film is a fucking awful earthbound ripoff of Alien. And it’s not like they’re even trying to hide it. Seriously, check what the monster looks like:
The fact that the filmmakers (one of whom is the legendary Fred Olen Ray) made a point to stick little praying-mantis arms onto their monster speaks to me about how much of a ripoff they were consciously making and knew they had to change something about the design so they didn’t get their asses sued off.
However, let us not forget that, at least ‘round these parts, fucking awful and fucking unwatchable are two different animals. Dark Universe may be a terrible film, festooned with brutally declamatory acting, loathsome asshole characters, two-buck effects and hysterically clumsy dialogue. But it’s also grandly entertaining, precisely because it never makes the mistake of trying to be anything other than a cheap, amusing ripoff made to kill an evening with the help of tons of beer. Latshaw may not have much in the way of directorial chops, but he does well in keeping the film moving from setpiece to setpiece, and he wisely doesn’t attempt to hide the script’s retardation. (Golden moment: When a character complains about the futility of trying to find a wrecked spaceship in the middle of an enormous swamp, then turns his head and sees said giant wreck five feet to his right.) Most importantly, the film offers hearty helpings of everything a potential viewer would like to see without any of the stuff that they wouldn’t give a crap about. So the film has your daily recommended allowance of gore, slime, goofy monster outfits, bad science, morphing FX and tits. (Yep, tits. In a film set almost entirely in a Florida swamp, with exterior shots comprising 95% of the footage, the filmmakers still found a way to get two of the women in the film to doff their tops.) Wonderful crap.
Oh! There’s also Joe Estevez! He doesn’t have much to do as rocket-building rich guy Rod Kendrick, but he does get to set the film rolling with a beautiful display of low-budget intensity in the prologue.
D2D entry #63: Zombie Holocaust/Dr. Butcher, M.D. (1980, Marino Girolami)
(Featured in Grindhouse Universe.)
The question remains, why do I do this? Why do I feel compelled to wade through the unrespected flotsam of cinematic history? The answer is mainly so I can find things like Simon, King of the Witches. Barring that, it’s so I can find films like this one.
Whether you call it Zombie Holocaust (its Italian title) or Dr. Butcher M.D. (its notorious American title), Girolami’s splattery gutmuncher is little more than a crass, stupid, near-incompetent cash-in on the twin box-office forces of Fulci’s Zombie and Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust… and it’s precisely its crassness, stupidity and incompetence that makes it such a deranged treasure. Girolami (hiding behind the Americanized moniker of “Frank Martin”), apparently not content with a mere Bruno Mattei-style ripoff, decided that if he was going to jack the plot from the Fulci flick and even go so far as to use some of the same sets, he’d also attempt to go toe-to-toe with Lucio in terms of gore and goofiness.
Thing is, though, Fulci for all his faults was an artist and tried to always make the best film he could, while Girolami is a hack through and through, so he ladles on the gore and violence because it’s all he’s got and all he can capture of that Fulci feeling. It’s a case where a guy knows the notes but not how to properly play them, so what comes out is weird and screwy and ugly and thoroughly wrong, yet it magically lands in the rarefied zone where its ineptitude starts to look inspired. There’s an early shot where a guy (who has just been caught trying to eat a heart) throws himself out a window, wherein we cut to a shot of a falling dummy. The beautiful part is that the dummy is poorly constructed and when it hits pavement, its arm clearly goes flying off.
I don’t know if they didn’t have another dummy and couldn’t do a second take or that no one involved gave a damn, but I treasure this sort of fleeting, obvious seamwork. This kind of cheapjack mania is everywhere - whenever the pacing flags, there’s a bit of splattery madness waiting around the corner to bring us back to attention, like when Ian McCullough pulps a paper-mache zombie’s head with an outboard motor simply because it happened to be handy. Furthermore, the dialogue is oft-priceless (i.e. the infamous, “I could easily kill you now, but I’m determined to have your brain!”)
And then there’s this, which is simply one of the funniest things ever put into a film:
Is it a good film? Hardly. Did I love the everlovin’ fuck out of it anyway? Oh yeah, because its crassness is its chief asset - the makers of this are fully aware that you’re just here to see some bodies get torn apart but good and make sure that you get it in spades, with some inexplicable goofiness to hold it all together. Truth be told, I think I prefer Zombie Holocaust to Zombie; while the latter ultimately works out to be a creepy apocalyptic horrorshow, this flick is more consistently entertaining.
Sixty-six days on the rack.
This still from Benjamin Christensen’s 1922 pseudo-documentary Häxan accurately represents the look on my face during much of the film. Why, you ask? Because of scenes like this:
Yeah. That’s a woman giving birth to the Devil’s children, which as far as I can tell means the Devil is a Brundlefly. There’s an eye-popping, mind-raping image like that roughly every three minutes in Häxan. Don’t know how reliable it is as a documentary, but as a phantasmagorical sensory assault, it’s aces.
