As with ‘Catman..’, the title is intriguingly silly, betraying an attempt to hang onto the coattails of Universal’s waning horror output (they’d released both ‘The Mummy’s Ghost’ and ‘The Ghost of Frankenstein’ in the proceeding years), but... mixed results here, I'd say.

From the outset, ‘The Vampire’s Ghost’ proves to be a rather inert and talky affair, set amid the confines of a pokey and generally uninspiring backlot version of darkest Africa, wherein a largely undistinguished cast of white colonial types trudge through their allotted paces with no great surfeit of enthusiasm.

On the plus side though, it sure has some interesting notions buried within it.

Though he’s certainly no ghost, our resident vampire here turns out to be a former member of Queen Elizabeth I’s court, who - perhaps uniquely in the annals of cinematic vampirism - now finds himself running a gin joint in a fictional central African state, fleecing sailors in dice games and ruing the weary burden of his immortal condition, like some cut-price, blood-drinking Rick Blaine.

An odd fit for the vampire role, John Abbott initially looks more like the kind of guy you’d cast as an accountant or an elevator operator. But, he has a deep, sonorous voice and Peter Lorre-worthy bug-eyes, and ultmately leans into his unusual characterisation very well.

There’s an absolutely sublime scene for instance where, after being wounded by a spear whilst out on ‘safari’, Abbott uses his powers of mental persuasion to command the film’s hero (Charles Gordon) to carry him to the summit of a nearby mountain, where he luxuriates in the healing light of the full moon, his head resting on the precious Elizabethan box containing the grave soil of his original resting place, presented to him by the Queen after the Armada. Great stuff.

At first, it seems as if the vampire is going to be characterised as a variation on the Wandering Jew/Wolfman archetype - condemned to walk the earth for all eternity whilst seeking an escape from his supernatural affliction, and trying to warn the other characters away from him, lest they fall victim to his curse.

Later on though, he seems to have lost this benevolent streak, and, having given fair warning, gets straight on with the business of dominating Gordon’s mind, reducing him to a brain-dead slave, whilst he claims the leading lady (Peggy Stewart) for himself, whisking her off to the remote, abandoned temple of a supposed “death cult”, where, inexplicably in view of the film’s geography, a four-armed Hindu idol awaits them. (I liked the way Abbott plays all this with  “another day, another dollar” resignation, as though he’s been through it all a hundred times before.)

Many of these interesting and unconventional story elements can presumably be traced back to legendary screenwriter and SF pioneer Leigh Brackett, who takes co-writer and original story credits here, the same year she worked for Howard Hawks on ‘The Big Sleep’. And, as I can’t locate any additional background on her involvement with this film... that’s about all I have to say about that.

Stylistically meanwhile, the movie seems to draw heavily from Val Lewton’s then-recent series of b-horror successes at RKO, even directly mimicking ‘I Walked With A Zombie’ (1943) during scenes in which the white folks sit nervously in their bamboo-shaded bungalows, muttering darkly about the jungle drums affecting the productivity of the natives down at the ol’ plantation and so on, whilst the presentation of the vampire’s killings seems to echo both ‘The Leopard Man’ (1943) and ‘Cat People’ (1942) in places.

Unfortunately though, Selander proves unable to muster even a fraction of the atmosphere Jacques Tourneur brought to those projects - largely through no fault of his own, I’m assuming, as a “first take, best take” policy clearly seems to have been in operation, whilst even the film’s best ‘horror’ moment (the vampire’s murder of the bar's sultry dancing girl Adele Mara, in a shadowed bedroom with the incessant pounding of the drums as a backdrop) is subjected to a disappointing early fade.

As ever with movies like this, I’m also obliged to note that events play out in what is very much the boilerplate “white man’s Africa” of the era’s pulp magazines and Jungle Jim serials. So, even if it can’t quite summon up the energy to be overtly racist about it, if you’re looking for sympathetic portrayals of indigenous African characters or veiled commentary on the vampiric nature of colonialism or somesuch, well, I’m afraid you won’t find it here, partner.

As usual with these things, the sight of African-American actors forced to play benign, half-witted tribespeople gabbling away in pidgin English also rather grates, especially in view of the film’s failure to conjure any of the gravitas or sense of place which Tourneur, or even Victor Halperin (‘White Zombie’), brought to their respective entries in the sub-genre. So, if you’re the sort of sensible viewer who doesn’t feel the need to tolerate this kind of crap when watching old movies - be forewarned.

Indeed, whilst dedicated scholars of pulp horror, vampire lore or off-beat poverty row programmers are sure to find enough intriguing content in ‘The Vampire’s Ghost’ to keep them occupied long after the credits have rolled, purely in terms of the film’s entertainment value, I’m going to have to close by suggesting that more general horror fans might want to think twice and/or keep their expectations in check when approaching this one.

I hope you’re all having a good one out there.

And so, yeah, sadly I didn’t manage to get as many posts up here this season as I’d hoped to - but I hope readers got something out of the ones which did make it to the finish-line nonetheless.

I do have a couple more good ‘uns in various states of completion however, so happily the Horror Express will be rattling on through November to some extent, and, perhaps more importantly, I’ve also managed to watch a lot of movies, and make a lot of notes, which will be fed into a bigger project or two just down the line, all being well.

For now though, let’s settle in for the evening, heed the words of Roky and let the spirits run free.

- H.P. Lovecraft, ‘The Thing On The Doorstep’

Though it was apparently drafted as early as 1933, ‘The Thing On The Doorstep’ was actually the last of H.P. Lovecraft’s story to see publication during the author’s lifetime, appearing two months before his death, in the January 1937 issue of ‘Weird Tales’.

Employing a relatively direct and unadorned prose style, ‘..Doorstep’ opens not with, say, a dense and baroque description of the stunted trees growing around some rarely used pike off the road in the depths of the Miskatonic valley, but instead with a concise sentence more deliberately designed to draw in the casual pulp magazine reader. (“It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to show by this statement that I am not his murderer.”)

This has led some to speculate that this tale, chronicling decadent writer Edward Pickman Derby’s enslavement and bodily possession by his sinister wife Asenath, may have been concocted with a greater degree of commercial consideration than was usually the case with HPL’s work - possibly reflecting the occasional necessity of actually earning a buck or two from the coffers of his long-suffering editors. Perhaps as a result, it is rarely cited as a favourite by Lovecraft’s more ardent devotees, and remains a bit of an outlier within his canon of core ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ tales.

Nonetheless, I’ve always found it surprising that ‘Thing on the Doorstep’ hasn’t more frequently drawn the attention of those seeking to adapt the Lovecraft’s work for the screen, given that it features the only significant female character in entirety of his fiction (well, sort of), and that the essence its core body transference plot-line remains pretty cinema-friendly, requiring no on-screen realisation of unearthly locales or sanity-shaking monstrosities.

And verily, the drought of ‘..Doorstep’ adaptations has finally come to an end in grand style this year, as some familiar faces have teamed up with some less familiar ones to bring us ‘Suitable Flesh’ - an acknowledged tribute to / continuation of the legacy of Lovecraftian cinema created by the late Stuart Gordon, and a far from unworthy one, if I’m any judge.

Dragging the core conceit of Lovecraft’s tale into the 21st century by means of gender-switching both the narrator and the best friend character who forms the subject of the narration, Paoli has succeeded in whittling the story down into a highly effective, tightly-plotted modern horror movie (just as he did with Reanimator and From Beyond all those years ago), adding additional interest to the narrative by considerably complicating the nature of Dr Elizabeth Derby’s relationship to the unlikely sexual partner who drags her into a hellish predicament of body-switching black magickal terror.

Elizabeth’s friend and professional mentor, Dr Daniella Upton (Crampton), boldly steps through the bolted door, intent on subjecting her latest patient to a good ol’ “let’s go through it one more time” talking cure. And so, after Derby has obsessively reiterated her insistence that the corpse of one Asa Waite - a badly mutilated teenage boy currently residing downstairs in the morgue - be cremated immediately, we shift straight into Film Noir-approved flashback mode, taking us back to the day when awkward and inarticulate goth kid Asa (played by Judah Lewis) first burst unannounced through the door of Elizabeth’s private practice office, pleading for help, claiming he was being pursued and persecuted by his father, before suddenly undergoing a sudden, alarming shift in personality.

Patterned more after a thriller or noir than a gothic horror, Paoli’s script renders the assorted twists which follow with a precision that any ‘40s RKO or Columbia screenwriter would have been proud of, threading a wealth of verbal tics and visual motifs (a concentration on hands, the details of the various characters’ smoking habits, etc) through the narrative to help us glide through this potentially confusing yarn in smooth, exposition-free fashion, whilst allowing all the knotty inter-personal relationships to pay off just the way they should come the inevitable, bloody conclusion.

As such, I’m glad to report that ‘Suitable Flesh’ keeps at least a bit of Mythos mayhem in the mix, allowing Asa’s father (or at least, the malevolent entity inhabiting him) to remain a black magician and disciple of the Great Old Ones. In fact, his portrayal (by Bruce Davison, when in his ‘original’ body) as a foul-mouthed, narcissistic, lecherous old bastard  proves one of the movie’s highlights - both surprising and genuinely menacing.

(Could Davison’s character perhaps be read as a reflection of the evil wrought upon contemporary American culture by certain other predatory, self-obsessed baby boomers… or is that maybe a stretch too far, do you think?)

That aside though, we’ve still inevitably lost a lot in the transition to the screen. With the constraints of low budget filmmaking being what they are, you’ll be unsurprised to hear that there are no unspeakable rites in unhallowed caverns beneath the Maine woods to be enjoyed here, no - ahem - “shaggoths”, no hints of nameless cults sniffing around the Derby/Waites’ doors, and - sadly - no remnant of the original story’s Innsmouth angle (which effectively makes it a sequel of sorts to ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’).

There are some remaining hints that ‘..Flesh’s script may at one point have retained this connection (eg, some references to Elizabeth’s husband (Jonathan Schaech) catching and cooking fish, and the couple’s use of ocean footage when they're making love), but, unlike the rest of Paoli’s script, these little winks to the Lovecraft-literate viewer never develop into anything significant.

As a result, we lose probably the single nastiest idea from Lovecraft’s story (that of the elderly sorcerer Ephraim Waite fathering his “weak-willed, half-human girl child” purely in order to take possession of her body, leaving her spirit screaming mad in the attic in his mouldering carcass), along with that persistant sense of a wider occult conspiracy which permeates Lovecraft’s mythos tales.

Making up for these absences however, ‘Suitable Flesh’ does give us, well… a hell of a lot of sex, to not put too fine a point on it.

As some commentators have already noted, many of the sex scenes here have a bit of a ‘skinemax’ / cable TV vibe to them, and not necessarily in a good way, as tastefully shot, nudity-free kinky/vanilla encounters remain the order of the day, in spite of the outlandish circumstances surrounding them, making ‘Suitable Flesh’ perhaps the world’s first example of a fully-fledged Lovecraftian erotic thriller. (Fifty Shades of Great Old One, anyone? I’ll get my coat…) (1)

Moving away from such pastel-hued sweatiness however, the climactic body transfer / seduction scene between Heather Graham and Judah Lewis in the study of Waite house proves rather more disquieting - probably the closest ‘Suitable Flesh’ gets to the trademark moments of transgression which Gordon brought to nearly all his films, as the teenaged Asa - inhabited by the spirit formerly residing in his father - uses telepathic ooga-booga to force himself upon Elizabeth Derby, as the corpse of the old man - soon to be decapitated and flambéed - lays dead on the carpet behind them.

It’s a great, show-stopping scene all round, but, the curious disjuncture between ‘erotic thriller’ and ‘cosmic horror’ can still be felt here to some extent, in the sense that, whilst all this was going on, I kept finding myself wishing they’d give it a rest and check out those oh-so-tempting sorcerer’s bookshelves behind them instead. I mean, softcore sex films are ten a penny, but how often do you get a chance to have a good poke around in ‘Unaussprechlichen Kulten’, y’knowwhatImean?

(Admittedly, we do get a pretty good look at Waite’s ‘Necronomicon’ here, but sadly I fear the prop the design team came up with looks a bit naff. Bit of a niche gripe to put it mildly, but I do sometimes wish people could move past the look of the book as defined by ‘The Evil Dead’ and try a different approach…)

As always, Crampton is cool as ice here, and the male members of the cast (Lewis, Davison, Schaech) are all excellent, but really - in acting terms, this movie belongs to Heather Graham. I mean, I must confess, I’ve not exactly been following her career much over the past few decades, but I don’t recall seeing her in a role this full-on, since... I dunno, ‘Boogie Nights’, perhaps? She delivers a totally fearless, multi-faceted and appropriately unhinged performance here anyway, chewing up and spitting out some challenging material with ease, so - respect is due.

Could this be the start of a new career trajectory for her I wonder, joining Nick Cage as a former A-lister battling it out every couple of months in the realm of crazy, mid-budget horror movies? Here’s hoping.

Moving on to Joe Lynch’s direction meanwhile, it would be all too easy to say, “Stuart Gordon could have done this better”, but that would be an unfair comparison. Gordon, after all, was a much-loved horror director with a consistently strong body of work behind him, whereas, at the point I sat down to watch ‘Suitable Flesh’, Lynch was just... some guy, as far as I was concerned.

If I were feeling critical, I could take issue with a few bits of sub-par production design, a few goofy transitions (one ‘ceiling fan wipe’ in particular raised a few unintentional laughs in the cinema), the aforementioned blandness afflicting some of the sex scenes, and a reliance on the kind of modern effects (pointless gliding camera moves, rumbling “woosh/BANG!” sound design timed to the cutting, etc) which one would imagine Gordon, as a filmmaker of an older generation, would possibly not have embraced.

But, these are minor criticisms, and thankfully the film built up such a weight of good feeling elsewhere that I certainly wasn’t feeling critical when I left the screening. Lynch stepped into some big shoes by taking this project on and making it happen, and by-and-large he’s done pretty damn well with it. Good for him.

If not exactly a mind-blowing, game-changing triumph by any stretch of the imagination, ‘Suitable Flesh’ is solid, whether viewed as a more-than-decent 21st century horror film, a really weird-ass erotic thriller, or a noteworthy new addition to the tangled canon of Lovecraftian cinema. Perhaps most importantly though, it’s also a worthy continuation of the cinematic world Stuart Gordon created across his lifetime, and proof positive that that spirit can be still be taken forward, even though he’s no longer with us. Well done everybody. Any chance of another one, do you think..?

(1)In view of this, it was no surprise to hear director Joe Lynch popping up on the always entertaining The Movies That Made Me podcast last month, discussing his long-standing and unrepentant love for the erotic thriller genre.

As such, it seems appropriate that the story’s movie adaptation should take the form of an orphaned, 28 minute short, originally intended for inclusion in a 1988 Empire Pictures anthology flick named ‘Pulse Pounders’ which never saw the light of a projector at the time, remaining unreleased due to (it says here) circumstances arising from the company’s bankruptcy.

Furthermore, it appears that the original film elements for ‘The Evil Clergyman’ were subsequently misplaced or destroyed, leaving the footage presumed lost until, a quarter century later, Charlie Band found a VHS work print knocking about in his attic and smelled a quick buck to be made.

A bit of a clean up, a new credits sequence and a newly commissioned score from brother Richard later, and ‘The Evil Clergyman’ finally premiered, streaming on Band’s Full Moon Features website, in 2012.

I’m unfamiliar with the back story re: how exactly those film elements ended up disappearing, but I can only assume it must have been the result of some terrible and unprecedented freak accident, as any other explanation would frankly beggar belief given the breadth of talent involved in creating this segment, and the relatively lavish budget obviously invested in this thing.

With the exception of an AWOL Stuart Gordon in fact, ‘..Clergyman’ is effectively a ‘Reanimator’  reunion, with Dennis Paoli providing the script, photography by Mac Ahlberg, effects by John Carl Buechler, and a cast comprising Barbara Crampton, Jeffrey Combs and David Gale, with the ever wonderful David Warner (R.I.P.) thrown in for good measure.

In the grand tradition of Poe/Lovecraft adaptations through the ages, the film’s narrative has pretty much nothing in common with the supposed source story whatsoever. Instead, Paoli’s script sees Crampton taking centre stage, playing a woman returning to the attic chamber of a medieval castle which she had previously shared with her lover (Combs), a lapsed priest and alleged black magician who has recently taken his own life, prompting her to flee and leave the room vacant.

This ill-stared chamber is apparently still up for rent from the castle’s acid-tongued landlady (Una Brandon-Jones) however, and, once ensconced within it (ostensibly to “collect her things,” although the room looks bare), Crampton begins to experience a series of increasingly hair-raising manifestations related to her deceased partner, and reflective of the unholy depredations the pair apparently got up to prior to Combs’ decision to sling a noose slung over the high beams, and depart this mortal coil… temporarily, at least.

Along the way, Warner pops up as the revenant spirit of another dead priest, who pops up to warn Crampton of the error of her ways, whilst Gale is in full effect as Combs’ familiar, a chittering, man-faced rat-thing straight out of ‘Dreams in the Witch House’.

And... it actually all works really well. Paoli’s story is weird, memorable and unnerving, leaving plenty to the imagination, whilst the production design and performances are excellent.

Though she’s not really called upon to do much more than act terrified, confused and distraught here, Crampton achieves this quite brilliantly. Always a good few rungs up the ladder from yr average ‘80s ‘scream queen’, the sheer intensity scruff of the neck and drags us through this compressed ghost train ride of a viewing experience very effectively.

By contrast, we get a relatively low-key turn from Combs, but there is still a hell of a lot to enjoy in his sleazily sinister presence. His introductory “hi” at the moment his character first takes on corporeal form is a delight in itself, and the spectral love scenes he shares with Crampton take on an appropriately fevered quality, drawing us further into the odd story being told here.

Warner meanwhile seems a bit surplus to requirements here in terms of the narrative, but it’s great to have him along for the ride, and he’s clearly having a fine time regardless. In the midst of a seemingly endless series of rent-a-villain / mad scientist roles at this point in his career, the old boy knows exactly how to pitch a high-handed spectral priest, managing to deliver lines like “I’m a bishop, from Canterbury, sent to expel your lover from our church” entirely straight, without eliciting laughs from the peanut gallery.

As for the long-suffering David Gale meanwhile, one shudders to imagine the indignities he must have been subjected to in the process of realising Buechler’s man-faced rat effects - an inspired mixture of puppetry and facial prosthetics which is actually extremely effective, allowing Gale’s face and voice remain present, even when seemingly attached to a repulsive, ankle-high critter capering about on the castle floor.

Essentially functioning as a foul-mouthed, perpetually enraged manifestation of the Combs character’s id, Gale manages to deliver a memorable performance under what we might reasonably assuming were challenging circumstances; his spittle-flecked delivery of words like “WHORE” and “SLUT” in particular are imbued with an old world, puritan gusto which I very much enjoyed.

Shot, inevitably, amid the imposing environs of the swanky Italian castle which Charles Band inexplicably ended up owning in the late ‘80s (also see: ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ (1991), ‘Castle Freak’ (1995)), ‘..Clergyman’ benefits greatly from the location’s in-built atmosphere, adopting an almost abstract / fairy tale-like vibe which slips further into delirium as Crampton’s visions take told, and the world outside her lofty chamber effectively ceases to exist.

Moodily lit by Ahlberg in a none-more-80s manner, with deep shadows and shocks of blue-tinged moon light drifting in across the ancient brick-work, this is certainly one of the more accomplished efforts I’ve seen bearing Charles Band’s name as director. As is often the case, it’s perhaps questionable to what extent creative decisions here were actually taken by Band, but for what it’s worth, everything here is very solidly done. (I particularly liked the striking use of vertiginous high and low angles, reflecting the constant presence of both the swinging noose above, and the skittering rat-thing below.)

Even Richard Band’s retrospectively recorded orchestral score goes over gangbusters, really classing up this murky VHS-sourced work-print, much like his similarly bombastic/melodic work on Gordon’s ‘80s films, hovering just on the precipice of Elfman-esque parody, but never quite taking the plunge, or overpowering the action on-screen.

Given how strong this short is overall, it’s easy to see why a few elements ended up being recycled in other productions during the years in which the material shot for ‘Pulse Pounders’ remained unreleased.

Most notably, the effects used to create the human-faced rat creature were repurposed pretty much in their entirety for the creation of Brown Jenkin in Gordon’s 2005 TV adaptation of Lovecraft’s ‘Dreams in the Witch House’, whilst the “erotically charged predatory haunting” conceit of Paoli’s script also strongly reminded me of another Gordon-adjacent film, Danny Draven’s 2002 ‘Deathbed’ (not to be confused with the late George Barry’s outsider masterpiece of the same name), an interesting obscurity, also shot by Ahlberg and executive produced by Band, which saw release on DVD under the rather niche banner of “Stuart Gordon presents…”. (Were there any other entries in that series, I wonder? I don’t recall ever seeing any...)

In summary then, ‘The Evil Clergyman’ stands as something of an unexpected minor miracle for fans of the Empire/Full Moon/Stuart Gordon milieu. Alongside this year’s Suitable Flesh, it offers encouraging proof that the spirit of Gordon’s Lovecraft movies could live on and flourish, even in circumstances in which the man himself was unable to call the shots. Well worth making a small amount of time for if (as is understandable) it passed you by upon its belated release in 2012.

Well, cards on the table - 2023 was not exactly a great year, on either a personal level, a global level, or I daresay on many of the myriad levels found somewhere in-between.

But, mustn’t grumble, right? Even as my (our?) quality of life takes a (personal / collective?) battering, we’re all (mostly?) still here, still reading things and watching movies, and still (occasionally) updating blogs.

In fact, I’ve found myself thinking recently about exactly why watching movies has become my primary form of recreation in recent years, and, in the end, I think what it comes down to is cinemas ability to transport me to a different time and place, and to do so more efficiently and immediately than most other entertainment media.

This doesn’t always even need to involve ‘escapism’ as such (although that’s nice too), but (at the risk of descending into utter pretention, given that I largely gravitate toward movies concerned with the travails of lesbian vampires, psychotic killers, girl gangs or flesh-eating monsters of one kind or another), even the most absurd and poorly realised examples of global genre cinema can offer instant, full strength access to different perspectives, different cultures, different problems and different solutions - no supporting reading or conceptual re-adjustment required (tho this can always follow later).

Case in point: unexpectedly, two of the films on last year’s ‘top ten’ list below concern the experiences of indigenous peoples in Canada. This is not a subject I had previously paid much attention to, or taken an active interest in, to be perfectly honest - but now it’s very much on my radar. Thanks, movies!

As per last year, the following is definitely not a list of the best films I saw in 2023, or even necessarily a ljst of the best films I saw for the first time in 2023. Rather, it’s just a list of movies that surprised me, or made an impression on me, or that I just feel like telling people about and encouraging them to watch, for whatever reason. If you take my advice on any of ‘em, I hope you enjoy the experience.

It has a modest, gutsy DIY spirit which I absolutely loved, and a rare sense of inter-generational appeal. If you’ve got kids, try watching it with ‘em - see what happens.

The tone is totally all over the place, to the extent that we’re never quite sure whether we’re watching a serious, Watergate-era thriller or a heart-warming talking animal movie (a confusion of genres perhaps unique in the history of cinema), initially leading me to assume the film must have been subject to a long and torturous back story of behind-the-scenes monkey business.

But no - aside from a few expected grumbles about Scott being difficult on-set, the version of ‘Day of the Dolphin’ which ended up on screen was written by one guy (Buck Henry, no less), directed by one guy, and released by AVCO Embassy, no questions asked. And yet, it still turned out like this? Mind-boggling.

Apparently the script has very little in common with the more sensational source novel, with hearsay suggesting that the filmmakers instead took inspiration from the real life work of Dr John Lilly. But, aside from featuring a research scientist working with dolphins who has a contentious relationship with government intelligence agencies, the story has very little in common with anything he did either, so, what are we watching here, exactly?

Well, whatever it is, the narrative is under-developed in several key areas and the vibe of meditative earnestness which Nichols seems to be going for is undercut by a cheesy, Lassie-defeats-the-bad-guys resolution which feels like a total joke… but for all its faults, ‘Day of the Dolphin’ remains weirdly fascinating, beautifully shot (the dolphin footage alone is stunning), and packs a massive emotional punch, becoming more affecting than it really has any right to be during its startlingly bleak final minutes.

Sitting comfortably next to ‘Silent Running’ in the limited canon of first wave / post-hippie environmental tearjerkers, Nichols and Henry hit those “man is the only real monster” buttons more effectively than much of what followed once these kind of themes began to filter into the mainstream during the 80s and 90s. A uniquely weird, “only in the ‘70s” proposition which I’m very glad I made time for last year.

Despite clear nods to Lang, Hitchcock and goodness knows who else, it still feels like a highly original entry in the genre, replete with dense, shadow-haunted photography, a great sense of visual storytelling, sickening suspense and an unsettling mixture of humanism and bleakest nihilism, all anchored by a desperate, almost monstrously menacing, performance from Lino Ventura.

Now available on blu-ray on both sides of the Atlantic (thanks respectively to Kino Lorber’s French Film Noir collection and Radiance’s World Noir set), it would be great to see this overlooked minor classic picking up a bit more of a following in the English-speaking world.

For the first half hour of your first viewing, you’ll be apt to wonder quite why you’re watching this seemingly aimless drift through a garishly-lit world of conceited mid-century WASP contentment and dreary socialite gossip, watching struggling alpha male Ned Merrill (Burt Lancaster) attempt to find his way home by traversing the swimming pools of his privileged neighbours in up-market Connecticut on a balmy summer day.

But, as Merrill’s quest continues, becoming increasingly fraught and uncertain, things will gradually begin to make more sense. Then, suitably crushed by its conclusion, you will be drawn to watch the film again - at which point it will REALLY start to make sense.

Taken out of the Perrys’ hands prior to editing, additional / replacement scenes shot at the behest of producer Sam Spiegel initially feel mystifying and out of place, but eventually add a queasy, proto-psychedelic beauty to proceedings which makes the ground beneath our feet feel even more uncertain, lending the film an even more fascinating sense of outside-the-box strangeness.

You’re always guaranteed the real deal from a Lancaster perfromance however, and he holds together one of the most formally challenging films ever to have emerged from the Hollywood system with what I can only describe as a sense of tormented, masculine ease, confidently navigating a role which I’m sure no other male lead of his generation would have touched with a barge pole, driving us ever onward toward a harrowing, almost Poe-like gothic conclusion which feels like a tombstone raised above the aspirations of the USA’s entire post-war culture.

So, I mean, no wonder it didn’t really go over big at the box office, right? But, now that we’re less personally caught up in those generational aspirations and can give the film the attention (and repeat viewing) it deserves in the comfort of our own homes, it’s really quite the thing. 

But, before we get too dour, I should clarify that ‘Clearcut’ (its title referring to the process of intensive logging which leaves areas of land looking like “the dark side of the moon”) also stands tall as an engrossing and violent quasi-supernatural / metaphysical thriller, shot through with a welcome vein of pitch black humour, largely emerging from a brilliantly mannered, scene stealing performance from Oneida actor Graham Greene.

Long story short then: Ron Lea plays activist-lawyer Peter Maguire, who has just lost a case, attempting to defend indigenous lands from exploitation by a logging conglomerate. Despite ineffectual protests and civil unrest, tribal elders (as represented by Floyd ‘Red Crow’ Westerman) seem resigned to their fate, but, as Maguire plans his return to Toronto to mount an appeal, he notices a new “Indian” with a fierce intellect and unnerving, passive-aggressive attitude on the scene - Arthur, played by Greene.

Before long, both Maguire and belligerent mill owner Bud Ricketts (Michael Hogan) have been taken hostage by Arthur, and, with the tacit approval of Westerman’s tribe, transported to the unmapped depths of the river valley threatened by Ricketts’ logging operations, where, we must assume, the two white men are about to be subjected to some seriously harrowing rites of passage.

Due to its intense concentration on indigenous mythology and ritual, its occasional moments of savage violence, and its eventual blurring of consensus reality, ‘Clearcut’ has recently found itself re-evaluated (primarily by critic Kier-La Janisse in her documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched and its accompanying blu-ray box set) as an exemplar of ‘folk-horror’. And, given the crucial ambiguity which is maintained re: the story’s interpretation, I think that this dubious prescription more or less holds up.

What, after all, is Arthur, in the end? A violent native rights activist? An externalised personification of Maguire’s unrealised anger? Or, simply a spirit of the violated land, summoned to extract vengeance? Naturally, Bugajski’s film is far too canny to give the nod to either a material, psychological or spiritual interpretation of events, and is all the stronger for it.

And likewise, though ‘Clearcut’s occasional pigeonholing as “the Canadian ‘Deliverance’” initially seems trite, the comparison persists, not as a reflection of any shared setting or story elements, but simply because both films eventually concern ‘civilised’ men encountering something atavistic and nameless within the landscape, and finding themselves forever changed by it.

Like both Boorman’s film and the best entries in Janisse’s beloved sub-genre, ‘Clearcut’ carries a power which is impossible to fully explain, impossible to reduce to its constituent parts, and impossible to forget. It is recommended to appropriately brave viewers in the strongest possible terms.

-- 

To be continued…

With apologies for the delay…

A world away from the pop-art outrages and wacky satires in which he participated as an actor/composer through the ‘60s, ‘Je T’aime..’ feels closer to the aesthetic of the ‘New German Cinema’ of the ‘70s - specifically, the romantic/minimalist style which Wim Wenders would introduce to America in the ‘80s, and the emotionally wrought, outré subject matter of Fassbinder - as Gainsbourg painstakingly delineates a self-contained, somewhat unreal desert world which is not quite France, but never quite the American West either, in which taciturn, musclebound queer characters bestride heaps of mouldering garbage, their minds seemingly attuned to higher things than the brutish squalor which surrounds them.

With Serge at the controls though, story-telling remains direct and concise, and the film never veers into pretention, its somewhat meditative tone interwoven with fart jokes, overweight strippers, slabs of bloody horse meat, a mountain of abandoned toilets and a central narrative concern with the best way to undertake anal sex without upsetting neighbours/co-habitants, exhibiting a mixture of earnest, doomed romanticism and grotesque vulgarity which is frankly exactly what we’d hope for from a Gainsbourg joint.

As our leads in this strange and tragic love story, Jane Birkin and Joe Dallesandro are… well, I don’t know if there’s a way to put the effect of their screen presence into words without resorting to cliché, but both are simply stunning, let’s leave it at that; every moment they’re together on screen feels charged with an enervating, dangerous power.

It’s certainly by far the best, least wooden work I’ve ever seen from Dallesandro, whilst Hugues Quester (best known around these parts as the uncooperative male lead in Jean Rollin’s ‘La Rose de Fer’) also makes a strong impression as his cuckolded partner. Star of the show though is definitely Birkin, who - again, a million miles away from her usual, glamourous public persona - delivers one of those performances for which critics tend to use “fully committed” as a euphemism for frequently naked, cold, brutalised and involved in intensely awkward/uncomfortable situations, all whilst remaining fully in control of her character, and of the almost Zulawski-level intensity she manages to dish out to co-stars and audience alike. An incredible portrayal of a kind of lonely, displaced feminine anger which has never quite been given a name.

In its matter-of-fact portrayal of the relationship between a straight woman and a gay man, the film’s fluid and non-judgemental approach to sexuality feels startlingly ahead of its time. Unfairly overlooked and dogged by censorship upon its release, I think it’s fair to assume that ‘Je T’aime..’ would probably have swept the board at every festival across the globe had it been made in the 2020s, and justifiably so.

Certainly, viewed today, as the famous title song finally rises on the soundtrack during the pivotal scene in which an act of sodomy in the back of a garbage truck becomes a transcendent moment of divine love, it feels like the apotheosis of everything Gainsbourg was trying to communicate through his art across the decades; the sacred and profane singing in filthy unison. 

Of course there’s very little I can find to say about it which has not been better expressed elsewhere, but, given the frequency with which I champion an ideal of “pop(ular) cinema” on this blog, it would be remiss of me not to acknowledge such an exhaustively epic expression of that ideal, existing on a plain which feels much closer to the exuberant, two-fisted spectacles of 60s/70s global genre movies than to the cynical, middle-brow self-awareness which suffocates most contemporary Hollywood product.

Naturally there are a few oddities here which feel rather uncomfortable when encountered in a mainstream/blockbuster context (such as the 20+ minute public torture sequence, and the excessive outburst of literal flag-waving nationalism at the end), but these are the kind of things I’ve learned to roll with during my limited forays into the realm of vintage Indian cinema, so they didn’t put me off unduly.

In fact, despite it being a long-time bugbear of mine re: Hollywood output, I even found myself coping ok with the super-human level of historically questionable individual exceptionalism around which much of the film’s action resolves, simply because, well… I dunno - N.T. Rama Rao and Ram Charan are just so darn loveable, I’ll allow those guys a bit of individual exceptionalism. I mean, talk about ‘star power’, jeez. Just the smiles on their faces in that big dance sequence, I can’t even…

ANYWAY. A few other quick notes;

1. Given that I’m the kind of viewer who tends to spit and leave the room when presented with a CG car chase, and finds all that Marvel crap unwatchable, how was I able to both embrace and enjoy the ludicrous, gravity-defying digitally rendered mayhem which comprises at least 50% of ‘RRR’s 3+ hour run-time, you ask?

The answer is - I really don’t know, but I can only assume that, when watching both this film and director S.S. Rajamouli’s previous works, I can latch on to the excitement of a filmmaker totally abandoning any pretence of ‘realism’ and just going hog-wild with the insane new possibilities of his multi-billion rupee digital playpen.

Since time immemorial for instance, filmmakers have clearly needed to be careful and considerate in their use of animals on-screen. But NO MORE, a film like ‘RRR’ tells us. Here in India in the 2020s, we can launch antelopes through the air, we can punch tigers in the face, fire them out of catapults or swing elephants around by their goddamn trunks, and no one in the audience is going to be stupid enough to believe that a real animal was anywhere near the film set, let alone being mistreated. Such freedom! [NB: I don't think any elephants were actually swung around by their trunks in ‘RRR’, I just put that in because I thought it would be funny.]

It’s the same kind of spirit you can see in the ‘70s/’80s Indonesian and Taiwanese fantasy films I love so much, in which imaginative ambitio proudly tramples any thought of realistic execution, yanked forward four decades and ripped through vast quantities of investment and processing power.

2. Doing for the enforcers of British colonial rule what ‘Raider of the Lost Ark’ did for Nazis? Yes please! Speaking as a suitably contrite British person, I’ve got to say, I was down with that, and that it’s about bloody time. An effective and long overdue bit of script-flipping for those of us who were somehow still allowed to grow up spending our Sunday afternoons watching heroic pith-helmeted Victorians strut around foreign climes in one televisual context or another, and props to the late Ray Stevenson for stepping up to portray one of the best moustache-twirling villains since Tod Slaughter trod the boards. 

I went into this one cold (no pun intended), having never really encountered much enthusiasm for it amongst old school Hong Kong film fans/commentators, but, I needn’t have worried. Rather than the over-blown, headache-inducing farrago I was half expecting, ‘Iceman..’ is a blast in the best possible way, easily crashing straight into my hypothetical top five ‘80s HK action movies.

As per the template laid down by Meyer’s film, the psychotic Wah takes to the chaotic, over-stimulated environment of the modern day metropolis like a duck to water, installing himself as the machine gun-toting supremo of a violent criminal syndicate and wreaking shocking, Category III-worthy sadism upon anyone who crosses his path, whilst the chivalrous Biao meanwhile bumbles around in a state of fish-out-of-water confusion, eventually finding himself ‘adopted’ as a live-in man-servant / human curio by high end sex worker Maggie Cheung.

It would probably be an exaggeration to claim that ‘hilarity ensues’, but, this is still one of those rare HK action-comedies in which the comedic elements do frequently hit the right notes for me - largely thanks to the fact that all three leads are so relentlessly, almost preternaturally, charismatic.

Cheung in particular is a veritable human dynamo here, giving every impression of having a whale of a time with character whose wardrobe and behaviour seems cvlosely modelled on Madonna circa ‘Desperately Seeking Susan’, whilst the details of her perilous and hap-hazard lifestyle as a prostitute/hustler are depicted in an interesting and unconventional fashion, even before the complication of a defrosted medieval swordsman gets thrown into the mix.

Meanwhile, those who recall Yuen Wah for his scene-stealing bad guy roles in films like ‘Eastern Condors’ and ‘Dragons Forever’ will be fully aware of how much ass this guy can kick, and in ‘Iceman..’ he turns it up to 11, transforming himself into one of the most gleefully terrifying villains in movie history - a lithe, hyper-athletic engine of omni-directional destruction who still somehow manages to look like the coolest motherfucker in SE Asia, resembling some kind of insane, Shaolin master version of Warren Oates in ‘..Alfredo Garcia’.

And, completing the central trio, good ol’ Yeun Biao just kind of does what he always does, which is to say - being absolutely fucking brilliant.

Amidst all the carnage, ‘Iceman..’ is also a beautifully directed film, shot with a rich, dark colour palette, slickly edited and betraying none of the ad-hoc choppiness which sometimes afflicts HK movies. One of the things I loved most about it though is the way director Clarence Fok manages to maintain a frantic, light-hearted action/comedy tone without downplaying the darker elements of the movie’s subject matter.

Although Maggie’s antics in the worlds of crime and prostitution are on one level presented as being pretty, uh... kooky?, her character is still constantly faced with threats of violence or abuse, maintaining a rough edge of realism and danger, especially when, inevitably, she crosses paths with Wah - who, as mentioned above, reinforces his full spectrum evilness by indulging in some jaw-dropping excesses of perverse brutality.

By rights, this should all feel completely out of place in a movie that’s liable to have you chuckling over some screwball shenanigans five minutes later… yet somehow, with typically mad HK movie magic, it all comes together just so.

Which is all well and good, but what about the action, right? Well, ok, I mean… oh man, it is so good. A central chase/fight set piece here involving a horse, a jeep and a shipping container swinging perilously from a dockside crane is absolutely one of the most astounding / unbelievable stunt sequences in HK cinema (which is saying something), and the extended final showdown between Biao and Wah - involving swords, gunplay, blasts of hair-frazzling electricity and (of course) a ‘power powder’-suffused hand-to-hand throw down of nigh-on superhuman agility - is as intense and imaginative as any fight fan could hope for.

In one moment during the climax, we see a long shot of Biao and Wah facing off in profile, ‘Street Fighter’-style, on a rooftop, as immediately behind them, a jumbo jet glides in to land at Hong Kong’s notoriously perilous urban airport… at which point, I felt like pausing the movie, falling to my knees, and simply giving thanks to the gods for the particular time and place in culture which brought us insane masterpieces like this one -- just a few decades behind us, one day’s flight away, but somehow feeling like an outburst of joyful mania from a completely different universe. 

Unfortunately for the newly inseparable couple however, that Hare Krishna guy ended up defying medical science by inexplicably dying of shock following the finger-bending incident, meaning that grizzled and toothless homicide detective Hoke Mosely (Fred Ward) is now on Junior’s trail, instigating a ramshackle cat-and-mouse between the two men which can’t possibly end well, least of all for Suzi.

Attempting to make a whimsical film noir takes some balls, but that’s exactly what Armitage and producer Jonathan Demme seem to have been going for here, and against the odds, they succeeded brilliantly, creating a world in which toe-curling brutality, systemic corruption and random, meaningless death exist side-by-side with impromptu pork chop dinners, misplaced dentures and recipes for ‘vinegar pie’ (whatever that is).

It helps that Armitage proves adept in staging long, intense inter-character scenes which seem capable of turning on a dime between good-natured bonhomie and psychotic violence, and Willeford’s complex and morally ambivalent characters are lent an additional spark by career-best level performances from Baldwin, Leigh and Ward.

As with ‘The Iceman Cometh’ discussed above, this is one of these films in which all three leads are basically right up in our face, all the time - but it doesn’t matter, because they’re all such captivating, horribly loveable human disaster areas, we could happily watch their antics for weeks, and still never really know what’s coming next.

Meanwhile, DP Tak Fujimoto coolly resists the temptation to riff on the visual style of a certain other Miami-based ‘80s crime franchise, instead turning the city into a candy-coloured pastel wonderland which actually looks like it might be quite a nice place to live, aside from all the blood.

Inspired use is made of Norman Greenbaum’s ‘Spirit in the Sky’ during the opening and closing credits (a perfect musical shrug-of-the-shoulders to sign off a nihilistic crime movie, now that I think about it, and you’ve got to love the irony of “..gonna go to the place that’s the best” playing over an aerial shot of the smog-choked city), and the always welcome appearance of faces like Charles Napier and Martine Beswick in the supporting cast feels like a thinly veiled high five to the cult film fans who have followed Armitage and Demme from their days on the grindhouse/exploitation circuit.

I confess, I’m not familiar with Willeford’s series of Hoke Mosely novels, but on the expectation that they might nail something akin to the uniquely schizophrenic tone of this wonderful movie, I’m clearing space on my bookshelves as we speak. 

At the time of its release, ‘Light Sleeper’ often seems to have been dismissed as a middle-aged rehash of ‘Taxi Driver’, and on one level it is easy to see why. But, if you can manage to approach it without reference to the structure and plot beats it shares with its more famous predecessor, this tale of former addict John LeTour (William Defoe) attempting to break out of his emotionally neutered existence as a bagman/delivery boy for high class coke dealer Ann (Susan Sarandon) carries a singular power which transcends its time, place and subject matter.

Shot very much as it would have been a few years earlier, at the very apex of high gloss, ‘80s cinematic style, Defoe’s slow glide through the reflecting, desaturated surfaces of nocturnal Manhattan conveys an icy, uncanny emptiness which barely even needs to be elaborated upon by Schrader’s script. For all the surface level composure required by his trade though, LeTour’s faltering attempts to rekindle his relationship with ex-girlfriend Dana Delaney emerge just as desperate and cack-handed as Travis Bickle’s attempts to make human contact, in spite of two whole extra decades of hard-won life experience.

Denied permission to use the Bob Dylan songs he had written the script around, Schrader - in a brilliant example of makin’ lemonade - hired Christian rock singer Michael Been to record original music for ‘Light Sleeper’ instead, and, whilst the moody vistas of overwrought, sub-Springsteenian pomp which resulted might well have been unbearable on record, in the context of the film, the songs work superbly, their tides of smouldering passion effectively acting as LeTour’s inner voice, providing a soaring, white-hot emotional contrast to the cold, clean surroundings and transactional relationships of his material existence.

Schrader is on record as saying that he regrets turning the latter half of the film into a thriller, complete with an all-too-familiar violent bloodbath at the finale. Presumably he sees this as a concession to commercialism which detracted from the more existential core themes he was trying to address here. For my own purposes though, the plunge into genre proved very welcome, adding a vicious (neo)noir hook to the guts of a story which might otherwise have floundered into aimless introspection, reeling us in via a spiral of loss and collapse which could only reasonably conclude with an explosion of violent self-definition / self-immolation.

More than anything, I love the pace of this film - the slow glide, almost menacing simply in its constancy. Even when the characters are static, the camera prowls, like time creeping away at a consistent, doom metal tempo, taking us on a journey which has got to end somewhere, irrespective of the director’s more nebulous Sartre-via-Antonioni type intentions. And, when it does finally arrive at its destination - fragmented, hand-held footage documenting the blood-splattered walls of a modern art-bedecked penthouse hotel suite - the film achieves a moment of transcendence whose weird, spiritual power speaks to the religious angst and search for grace at the core of all of Schrader’s work more effectively than anything he’s ever managed to get across on paper.

As I say, it’s difficult for me to explain why ‘Light Sleeper’ had such an impact on me. I suppose that, like LeTour, I’m mid-way through my adult life at this point, dealing with the choices I’ve made. But - thankfully - the similarities end there, so there’s very little direct character identification going on here.

Could it be that, in the final analysis, this is simply an excellent movie, and that, by their very nature, the best movies become more than the sum of their parts - more than their creators intended or understood, even? And, they do not always give up their secrets so easily.

Looking back, it seems I began 2023 with a rare round-up of ‘new’ movies I’d seen recently, and… things seem to be going that way for 2024 too, so why don’t we make a Jan/Feb tradition of it? The first of two planned posts, this one will be looking at a few recent releases your friends, co-habitants and co-workers might actually have heard of, including the latest iterations of two of Japan’s (and my own) favourite cinematic franchises.

Truth be told, I didn’t emerge with particularly strong feelings either way, but I enjoyed it - which in blockbuster terms, seems about as good a definition of ‘success’ as any.

Rowing waa-aa-aa-ay back from the sophisticated political satire of ‘Shin Godzilla’ (which often felt more like being dropped into a Japanese equivalent of The Thick Of It than watching a monster movie), Yamazaki’s film is a far more conventional/commercial proposition, mixing state-of-the-art kaiju chops with a hefty dose of tear-jerking melodrama, a sheen of the kind of progressive/pacifist we’re-all-in-this-together patriotism that 21st century Japan (to its credit) does so well… and I suspect, more than half an eye on the overseas market, which has been richly rewarded by the movie’s success in the USA.

Leaving all that aside for a minute, it must first be acknowledged that the monster stuff here is all really good. Though perhaps not quite up to the level of that seen in the 2017 American Godzilla, the quality of the CG work has improved immeasurably since ‘Shin Godzilla’ (which I personally found conspicuously lacking in this regard).

The Big G’s appearances here are always dramatic and cool, he is sufficiently huge, weighty and terrifying to invoke comparisons to the gold standard of Honda’s ’54 original. Both his destruction of a battleship and his obligatory rampage through a painstakingly assembled facsimile of post-war Ginza prove to be incredibly effective set-pieces, giving us punters what we paid for in no uncertain terms, whilst reconfiguring his bursts of heat ray breath as individual nuclear detonations proves an especially frightening and powerful touch.

Unfortunately however, the accompanying human storyline (which comprises a somewhat higher percentage of the overall run time than it really should) proves ridiculously melodramatic, heartstring-tugging stuff, weighed down with coincidences and unlikelihoods which border on total absurdity in places. Even as a gaijin, I feel like I’ve seen these familiar historical narratives (survivor’s guilt experienced by a former kamikaze pilot, new family units being reconstituted out of the ruins of war, the desperation and gradual reconstruction of post-war Tokyo) done so much better, with so much more nuance and honesty, so many times in Japanese cinema and literature, that Yamazaki’s latest attempt to rinse my emotions just didn’t wash.

It’s always watchable mind you (much in the same way that we in the UK could probably spend the rest of eternity watching tales of dashing spitfire pilots romancing pretty young code-breakers on sepia-tinted bicycle rides to the NAAFI), but despite some strong performances from the supporting cast, both my wife and I basically found ourselves sniggering and whispering sarcy comments to each other whilst the the film was clearly trying to get us to weep and beat our chests. So… less of a success on that score, I reckon.

Somehow, based on advance publicity, I’d gotten the mistaken impression that ‘Godzilla Minus One’ was going to look at the events of the original '54 Godzilla, as experienced from the POV of ordinary folks on the street - an approach which, personally, I would have found that a lot more interesting than yet another tale in which our central characters get to enjoy multiple up-close-and-personal encounters with the Big G, before their sense of individual exceptionalism drives them to single-handedly save Japan and resolve their respective existential life crises at the same time. Oh well.

Beneath the Big Themes of national togetherness and reconstruction, there are a few bits of political sub-text bubbling away somewhere in the background which I found interesting, although they never really add up to much. As per ‘Shin Godzilla’, I liked the way that the occupying American forces are basically like, “eh, no - sort it out yourself please” once the kaiju threat emerges, leaving war-ravaged Japan to try to pull together a solution to the Godzilla problem using a few old fishing boats and bits of wire.

And, I also found it note-worthy that the coalition of ex-military/scientific expertise which eventually comes together to defeat Godzilla is a privately funded enterprise, operating independently of the (assumed to be useless) state apparatus - certainly a very different approach from anything seen back in the old days, and one whose implications quite possibly feel even more sinister than that of the big, quasi-utopian global super-organisations who used to call the shots in so many of Ishiro Honda’s SF movies. 

Still, I’d rather see in the new year whilst watching a contemporary ‘cuckoo in the nest’ type takedown of the moribund British class system than I would catching a throat infection whilst queuing endlessly for drinks in a catastrophically over-crammed pub, listening to somebody’s idea of ‘party music’ blaring from a shit-fi PA, so - result.

But anyway! The problem with getting old as a fan of movies/culture in general is - you’ve see it all before.

This, for instance, is a perfectly well-made, compelling film, and had I watched it when I was within the same age group as the central characters, I may have found it all terribly thought-provoking and subversive and so on.

As it is though, by the halfway mark I already had this tale of a proletarian scholarship boy at Oxford (Barry Keoghan) inveigling himself into the stately home-based family life of disgustingly posh classmate Jacob Elordi pegged as 50% ‘The Talented Mr Ripley’, 40% ‘The Servant’, and 10% some random TV drama about the lives of the rich and privileged which I didn’t bother to watch - and thus simply spent the remaining run-time contemplating the potential of re-watching / re-reading the first two of those again instead. (Actually, I think there’s a fair bit of Ken Russell’s adaption of ‘Women in Love’ in here too… but this is only meant to be a short review, so I shouldn’t get carried away.)

As per Fennell’s previous film as writer/director (2020’s ‘Promising Young Woman’, which I liked quite a lot, for the record), innovation here largely stems from the unconventional and kind of knowingly ‘unfair’ games played with the audience’s sympathies, and the deliberate holding back of certain key pieces of narrative information - a technique which holds up well here, but feels pretty precarious also. I’d be wary about the prospect of Fennell pushing it further in film # 3, but let’s see, eh?

There are a few nods to classic gothic imagery here - most notably, a startling scene of sexualised vampirism which put me in mind of Theodore Sturgeon’s novel ‘Some of Your Blood’ (you see what I mean about getting old?)

For the most part though, realism predominates in spite of the dream-like grandeur of the setting, and the particular ‘vibe’ of a landed, upper class household adapting to the more open and inclusive norms of late 20th century life - studiedly casual, lethargic and welcoming on the surface, yet still hidebound by a bottomless cauldron of prejudices, petty cruelties and labyrinthine rules of conduct bubbling just beneath - is both beautifully captured and entirely convincing.

Sadly for good ol’ Richard E. Grant - perfectly, if obviously, cast as the clan’s pained patriarch - however, the whole affair also feels aggressively contemporary, in the sense that there's lots of pervy, uncomfortable sex stuff going on, but nobody actually enjoys any of it, and the characters all swear and say nasty things about each other incessantly.

All the malignancy and kink which Joseph Losey and Patricia Highsmith were obliged to deal with through allusion and smoke signals in their earlier iterations of this tale are dragged up to the surface of the murky bathwater and beaten black n’ blue here by Fennell… which is not necessarily a criticism, merely an indication that I can sometimes feel the generation gap yawning wide when I watch stuff like this. (Although, mercifully, it’s at least set in 2006, so they’re not all banging on about each others ‘socials’ and covertly videoing everything all the time once the inter-personal skulduggery gets underway.)

Barry Keoghan is certainly a very striking central presence - an old man’s face on young man’s body, with a weirdly disconcerting muscular torso, he’s like the genetically engineered mutant grandson of Dirk Bogarde’s character from 'The Servant' or something. Difficult to say whether the recognition he will inevitably gain from this role will totally make his career, or whether he'll be forever cursed by Anthony Perkins-esque type-casting, but either way - he definitely makes an impression.

As mentioned above in fact, the main thing which allows ‘Saltburn’ to live on in the memory is an uneasy ambiguity over the extent to which we’re invited to feel implicit in / sympathetic toward his character’s machinations.

As much as ‘The Servant’ may have caused controversy back in 1963, watched today, what seems most remarkable is that, despite his socialist convictions, Losey declined to re-tool Robin Maugham’s source novel as a take of class revolt. Instead, for all its many qualities, his film primarily still just reads as a warning to louche aristos that perhaps their Northern-accented man-servants should not be trusted.

Much as we might wish we could side with him, Bogarde’s character is unambiguously presented as an evil, depraved man (his implied Jewishness and homosexuality making this characterisation feel even more questionable to modern eyes), whilst James Fox remains his hapless victim, and Sarah Miles the rival predator whose position he usurps (a role assigned to Archie Madekwe’s Farleigh in ‘Saltburn’s expanded cast list).

It is unsurprisingly therefore that, six decades later, ‘Saltburn’ takes a rather more ambivalent position. Going in, Keoghan is our identity figure, front and centre; we feel sorry for him, and accept what we learn about his inner life at face value. An uncomfortable sense of disjuncture thus occurs when we subsequently become distanced from him, as he begins doing things which do not square with the character whose thoughts we felt we were privy to, and as the film is forced to adopt a colder, more objective perspective as a result.

But, nonetheless, the notion of an (admittedly sociopathic) member of the lower orders using the illusion of an ‘open’ society to gain the foothold be needs to bloodily claw back the privilege and luxury traditionally denied him will still be read by most 21st century viewers as a necessary corrective to historical injustice, rather than as the horrifying upending of the natural order envisaged by Maugham. 

At the same time though, few of us are likely to applaud the character’s conduct on a personal level - thus creating an interesting ethical tension which is likely to go back-and-forth across the nation’s (world’s?) dinner tables and office spaces for months to come, like nothing this side of Bong Joon Ho’s ‘Parasite’ (yet another noteworthy precursor, now that I think about it).

And what can I say? It’s bloody magnificent.

It’s probably a redundant observation to make about a Miyazaki film by this point, but this is such an aesthetically beautiful film - the mere act of looking at it feels like bearing witness to a expertly curated exhibition of natural/cultural wonders. The attention to detail evident in the background of nearly every frame speaks to a lifetime of dedicated craftsmanship and visual research, whilst the compositions and the gentle, gliding pace of the cel animation are - of course - relentlessly exquisite.

I confess I’ve found many post-‘Spirited Away’ Studio Ghibli projects a bit too frenetic and whimsical for my tastes, and my attention to their output has lapsed as a result - but the more sombre, more reflective tone adopted here suited me perfectly.

The film’s fantasy aspects are mysterious and intriguing, carrying a persistent undertow of physical menace and flat-out scariness which prevents them from veering too far toward the twee, and, as in all of Miyazaki’s best films, the accompanying human drama takes a potentially sentimental subject, but steadfastly refuses to dumb it down for a ‘family’ audience or to engage in manipulative heart-string tugging, meaning that (whilst not exactly an original concept within either cinema or fantasy literature), the core tale of a boy processing trauma and grief through a retreat into imagination remains incredibly moving, in a way that almost defies verbal explanation.

Likewise, during the film’s ‘real world’ segment, Miyazaki’s eerily surreal image of factory workers laying out the insect-like glass carapaces of fighter planes amid the beatific environs of a provincial shinto shrine said more to me about the effect of war upon Japan than two whole hours of ‘Godzilla Minus One’s sepia-tinted historical bombast. A small moment in a long and densely-packed film, but one which will stick with me.

Admittedly, the film does lose focus at times - I fear the opening act may prove too slow for a mainstream  audience to latch onto (although I liked it just fine), and later on, once we’re embroiled in the calamitous fate of the trans-dimensional fantasy kingdoms through which our young protagonist has travelled, sense does get a bit lost for a while in an endless cavalcade of stuff exploding and collapsing, brightly coloured creatures flying/flapping around and the weird details of the script’s fantasy-land logic etc, etc.

Perhaps a tighter edit might have helped mitigate this a bit, but - a minor criticism, in the face of great wealth of things within this film which feel good, and right, and true. There is so much good here in fact, so much spirit and compassion and visual/conceptual inspiration, it almost makes me feel that, so long as the human race can knock out something like this once in a while to pass on to future generations/civilisations, all the shit and pain that comprises life on earth will have been worth it.

I’m unsure how things stand with Miyazaki at present (I thought he had retired, until this one popped up as a new release), but if ‘The Boy and the Heron’ does turn out to be his final film, he’ll be going out on a high. For my money, it stands as one of his finest achievements… and in fact, as one of the finest pieces of human artistry I’ve seen from this sorry century for quite a while, to be perfectly honest.

3:00pm on 1st January, but if I see a better film than this during 2024, I’ll be surprised.

So, synopsis time! A painfully introverted PhD student specialising in behavioural patterns of marine life, Siobhán (Hermione Corfield) is reluctantly persuaded by her supervisor to undertake a bit of fieldwork - namely, signing up for a research excursion on rust-bucket fishing trawler the Niamh Cinn Oir, wherein she makes the acquaintance of the unfeasibly diverse crew with whom she (and we) will spend the next 90-odd minutes.

In contrast to the wall-to-wall rough bastards you’d reasonably expect to find manning an Atlantic trawler, we’re instead introduced to hard-bitten yet well-meaning husband and wife skipper team Gerard and Freya (Dougray Scott & Connie Neilson), their sturdy and ever-cheerful son Johnny (Jack Hickey), and the family’s superstitious, and indeed suspicious, grandma Ciarra (Olwen Fouéré). Below stairs meanwhile, we’ve got Syrian refugee and unrecognised engineering genius Omid (Ardalan Esmaili) and another young man of middle eastern descent, Sudi (Elie Bouakaze), whose girlfriend is expecting a baby back home, and who regales us with his plans for a happy future, so -- I’m sorry mate, but you realise we’re in a who’s-going-to-die-first horror movie here, so might as well just get you measured up for that body bag right now, eh?

Speaking of which, exposition of the film’s supernatural plotline is wisely kept paper-thin, but long story short: after Skipper Gerard plots a course through a maritime ‘exclusion zone’ in search of a better catch, the trawler finds itself colliding with what transpires to be an unprecedentedly huge, translucent squid-like creature, whose suckers soon cause little patches of alarming, corrosive goo to begin seeping through the hull.

Sadly, the conspiratorial angle implicit in the fact that this massive, unknown creature is simply flopping around happily in an area from which the powers-that-be have pointedly prohibited civilian shipping is never investigated by Hardiman’s script, but no matter, as there’s plenty else going on to keep our characters busy once their vessel breaks away from the squid’s grasp. Not least, an unknown infection of spreading through the crew causing a variety of unpredictable, scary symptoms, furiously multiplying parasites in the water supply, a sabotaged engine, no means of contacting the outside world, and… well, you get the picture.

During ‘Sea Fever’s first half, the film’s gloomy tone, overcast, seaweed n’ barnacle-drenched ambience and plausible-seeming scientific chat all rather put me in mind of early ‘70s UK TV staple Doomwatch, establishing an atmosphere of drab realism which nicely enhances the impact once the full-on SF/horror elements are let out the bag and given a run around later on.

In particular, the low key atmos which prevails aboard ship contrasts nicely with the notes of Lovecraftian awe conjured up by the effects-heavy underwater sequences wherein we encounter the mysterious life forms first-hand, in footage whose eerie, CG-enhanced beauty proves surprisingly effective.

By far the film’s strongest suit though turns out to be its ensemble performances, with the cast having clearly been given a free hand to treat the whole thing as a long-form chamber piece/collaborative exercise, as all concerned do great work in transcending the potentially clichéd roles assigned to them by the script, effectively capturing our sympathies/attention in the process.

Though it can make few claim toward originality (see below), writer/director Neasa Hardiman’s screenplay is nonetheless peppered with curious bits of detail which also help add a bit of depth to proceedings, whether through random folkloric digressions (such as grandma Ciarra explaining the significance of the trawler’s name, or the crew reacting with consternation to the discovery that they’ve inadvertently set sail with a redhead aboard ship), or the assorted cool, DIY schemes Siobhán and Omid come up with to try to fight back against the alien incursion (using a hacked smartphone to generate UV light for instance); schemes which, refreshingly, totally fail to work in most instances.

There are, it must be said, a few glaring absurdities which stretch credulity along the way - most notably the vexed issue of the radio, which apparently falls apart after the boat bumps into the squid, causing the skipper to immediately declare that they’re now out-of-contact with the mainland, despite not even bothering to ask the two highly proficient tech bods on-board to try to fix it. (And what, no back-up radio? GPS tracking? Distress signals? FLARES, fergodsake? I mean, I’ll cop that it’s a been a few years since I spent any time on a boat, but I’d imagine it must take more than a few loose wires on the ol’ CB for a 21st century fishing trawler to declare itself lost without hope…?)

But, the crew must of course be entirely isolated in a confined space - that’s the point, for such is a prerequisite of the formula which inevitably takes ‘Alien’ as it’s foundational ur-text. In addition to which, it must be acknowledged that Hardiman draws heavily on the blue-print provided by John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’ here, hitting most of the same basic plot beats to one extent or another, and repurposing a number of that film’s key set-pieces in a manner which I scarcely need to unpack here, so bleedin’ obvious will it be to the vast majority of the viewing public.

But, if you’re going to steal, steal from the best etc, and within the limited gene pool of ‘Alien’/‘The Thing’-type movies, ‘Sea Fever’ makes optimum use of its modest resources, rarely putting a foot wrong. Not exactly a mindblower or shredder of preconceptions then, but, the next time you find yourself in search of something to fill that particular salty sweet spot in your viewing schedule - look no further folks, this one’s solid.

Later on said night though, spirits were subdued (and low level spending priorities reassessed), as it was agreed that Josh Forbes’ gonzo horror-comedy just didn’t quite hit the spot.

It’s difficult for me to put my finger on quite why that is though, given that all the necessary elements for a good time do indeed seen to be present and correct in this saga of an anxious prog-rock obsessive William Brown (Jonah Ray) battling to complete his home-recorded magnum opus in the face of overwhelming disruption from his bestial new neighbour (Alex Winter of ‘Bill & Ted’ fame, unrecognisable under a mass of prosthetics).

Indeed, there are a lot of individual bits and pieces here which I liked a lot - not least copious amounts of muso/record nerd humour, partially arising from the amusing mythos surrounding the film’s fictional prog titans Dawn Dimension, and a ton of wild and oft-impressive practical gore effects sure to warm the heart of any ‘80s horror fan.

Ray does great twitchy, whining, self-pitying work in the lead role, whilst still managing to make his character at least somewhat sympathetic, and there are numerous scenes and individual gags along the way which are genuinely very funny, but… I dunno, man. Somehow the overall structure and tone of the whole thing just felt off - its story and characters presented in an indigestible, sometimes frankly just plain obnoxious, fashion which I didn’t really care for.

The problems begin, I feel, with Winter’s characterisation of Vlad, the nightmare neighbour. Buried under such heavy, orc-like make-up that we initially wonder whether he’s even supposed to be human, Winter seems to be going for a kind of broad, Eastern European macho stereotype here, dropping weird, garbled dialogue which frequently proved difficult to decipher. He’s certainly an unnerving presence, that’s for sure, but… I think he’s also supposed to be funny, and on that level, well… I just don’t get it, I guess?

Likewise, several of the film’s other OTT comic characters (the coke-addled, Crosby-esque singer-songwriter who makes William’s day-job at a recording studio a misery, the hobo who hassles him for croissants on his way to his car, etc) represent an aggressively emphatic brand of low-brow / one-joke character comedy which soon becomes both tedious and exhausting.

This is especially regrettable, given that the bits of the film which actually are funny (such as William’s attempt to bribe the security guard outside a blast furnace with a rare demo tape, or his interactions with his long-suffering girlfriend (Kiran Deol)) tend to be those which adopt a more low-key / down-to-earth kind approach, letting the surrealism of William’s increasing disconnection from the world outside his head sink in more effectively than all the putty-faced gurning / shouty stuff utilised elsewhere.

Although it was presumably Forbes’ intention for us to feel thoroughly disorientated by the descent into hallucinatory psychosis which accelerates after [not-really-spoiler-alert] William kills Vlad and dismembers/disposes of his body, the film soon begins to feel confused and rudderless at this point, in a manner which I don’t think was entirely intentional (an effect not exactly helped by a number of exceptionally unlikely plot twists).

By the time we reach the grand excelsis of the movie’s conclusion, which sees William finally finishing his album aided by a band of re-animated monster corpses in a hi-jacked studio utilising phantasmagorical, lightning-blasting equipment, we can certainly enjoy all the triumphant audio-visual, effects-driven absurdity of the situation, but at the same time, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the essential point of the exercise had been rather lost in transit (a feeling perhaps not inappropriate to the film’s unabashed celebration of bombastic prog excess).

Is this, essentially, a parable about the dangers of shutting the people around you out of your creative life? If so, I fear it doesn’t really come across terribly well. And, I realise that being cynical and un-PC and so on is cool in this cultural context, but should the film really be taking William’s ghastly crimes quite so lightly? Are we supposed to continue to identify with his personal/creative struggles as he alternates between whining self-pity and delusional slaughter? Because doing so is tough-going, frankly, but as we’re never allowed to leave his increasingly suffocating subjective POV, we’re never offered an alternative.

Whereas the presumed prime influences on Forbes’ film (Frank Henenlotter, early Peter Jackson) managed to skate across such questions in their work with charm, grace and a certain degree of humanity, ‘Destroy All Neighbours’ instead ultimately collapses in on itself, leaving behind a nasty residue of white boy smarm and mild nausea.

Perhaps that old chestnut about the perils of deliberately setting out to make a ‘cult movie’ may be applicable here? Or, pure speculation on my part, but perhaps the film’s problems simply stem from the contributions of its three credited screenwriters being insufficiently integrated into a coherent whole? Whatever the case though, sadly ‘Destroy All Neighbours’ many virtues as a piece of crazy-ass, low budget genre cinema find themselves scattered unevenly amidst a flood of nasty, unpalatable goo which just won’t wash out.

Naturally, this set me to wonderin’ what became of the film’s director, who looked to be the Great White Hope of US horror cinema for a few minutes back there. To be honest, I lost track of his career following 2011’s underwhelming ‘The Innkeepers’, so, it’s a great feeling therefore to catch up with his triumphant return to the world of mid-budget horror all these years later, and to discover that it builds upon many of the qualities which impressed me so much in ‘House..’.

So, once again, ‘X’ gives us a beautifully detailed period setting (late ‘70s rather than early ‘80s in this case), and again includes an extremely lengthy (but almost hypnotically captivating) ‘slow burn’ build up before anything happens to 100% confirm that we’re definitely watching a horror movie. But, when those things do finally begin to happen, they do so in a way which proves extremely satisfying.

Before we get to all that though, ‘X’s initial set up - in which a threadbare cast and crew set off for a remote Texas farmstead to shoot a zero budget porno movie - proves interesting, fun and (like every aspect of the film) reflective of a writer/director with an innate understanding of (and love for) the aesthetics of vintage genre filmmaking.

It’s easy to imagine for instance that any number of the ultra-scuzzy regional ‘70s porn flicks which survive today as anonymous, public domain scans of heavily damaged prints could well have been the one these guys are setting out to make here, whilst the character dynamic which plays out between the opportunistic strip club-owner producer and his seasoned sex industry ‘stars’ on the one hand, and the high-minded film student cameraman and his girlfriend/assistant on the other, seems modelled to some extent on that documented in Joel DeMott’s legendary Demon Lover Diary from 1980.

Which is to say that, as in any good slasher film, there is plenty going on here to keep us busy until the vaguely defined threat lurking somewhere out in the darkness finally takes shape and makes its presence felt - and, needless to say, plenty of opportunity to fill the opening act with sex, and arguments, and people running around at night without (m)any clothes on, without seeming too forced or far fetched.

And, make no mistake - this is an extremely good slasher film. No more, no less. (Well, perhaps just a little bit more? See below.)

Without resorting to Tarantino-style fanboy blather, West dutifully doffs his cap to all the requisite precursors in this particular backwoods corner of the genre (not only ‘Psycho’ and ‘Texas Chainsaw..’, both directly referenced in the text, but also ‘Eaten Alive’, ‘Tourist Trap’, etc), and proceeds to do right by them.

And, once ‘X’ locks into a familiar stalk n’ slash pattern during its second half, the director plays a very nice little game with genre expectations which I’ve rarely seen any other contemporary filmmaker achieve too successfully. Namely, giving us exactly what we expect to happen - but still making it work.

When discussing music after a few drinks, I’m sometimes inclined to grandly declare that the art of great rock n’ roll lays in doing the simple stuff well, and, in both ‘X’ and ‘House of the Devil’, West seems determined to prove that the same formula can also be applied to horror filmmaking.

Based on these two examples at least, notions of surprise and unpredictability (usually so key to horror/thriller storytelling) play very little role in his cinema. Anyone with the slightest familiarity with genre conventions should be able to grok the entire premise of ‘X’ right from the outset, and in each of the film’s ‘kill scenes’ in turn, exactly what we think is going to happen happens.

But, in West’s hands, it happens really fucking well. Like a chef who has spent his life carefully refining the same menu night after night, he gives it to us but good.

(In fact, West’s dedication to perfecting the predictable even goes so far as orchestrating the best needle-drop of ‘(Don’t Fear) The Reaper’ in movie history, right at the pivotal moment bridging the film’s “slow burn” and “horror” sections. Again, original it ain’t - but awesome it surely is.)

Meanwhile, another similarity which unites ‘X’ and ‘House of the Devil’ (and indeed ‘The Innkeepers’, insofar as I recall) is the idea of the old preying upon the young, drawing explicitly upon the implicit fear of the elderly or infirm which lurks just beneath the surface of so many teen-centric ‘70s/’80s horror films.

Which brings us neatly to is what is ostensibly ‘X’s main talking point (though it is not something I found terribly interesting whilst in the process of actually watching it) - namely its status as quite possibly the first film in history to feature characters aged in their 20s and their 80s played by same actress (rising star Mia Goth, who delivers one hell of a performance in both roles, just for the record).

Surprisingly unaddressed in the writing I’ve seen about this film is the fact that, whichever way you cut it, the concept of getting young actors to don heavy aging make-up to play elderly characters seems pretty damned offensive, even in cases where those characters aren’t portrayed as psychotic killers. (As a comparison, just consider how far you’d get these days trying to make a film in which the same methodology was applied to race, or to disability, and you’ll see my point.)

At best, this could usually be considered fairly distasteful practice, inherently disrespectful to the older actors who may potentially have appreciated the chance to play these roles; but, in this case, as so often in the best horror movies, I think we can make an exception.

By which I mean, in addition to the practical difficulty of finding elderly performers willing / able to pull off the kind of physical extremity required of ‘X’s Pearl and Howard, I think we can also place ‘X’ within a lineage of horror cinema going all the way back to Tod Browning and Benjamin Christensen, in which filmmakers have purposefully stepped beyond the bounds of ‘good taste’, courting offense or disgust in order to confront viewers with taboo imagery and uncomfortable ideas, viscerally challenging conventional screen representations of ‘difference’, and hopefully provoking some thought in the process.

By casting heavily made up young actors as his damaged and homicidal geriatrics, West seems intent, not just on forcing us to question our own discomfort at the idea that aging/unattractive bodies may still harbour physical desire and the yawning gulf between flesh and spirit implicit in this, but also in drawing our attention to how thoroughly such unexamined fears permeate many of the 20th century horror films we all love so much.

Heavy stuff to unpack, you'd have to admit, but, like all truly great pulp/genre art, ‘X’ evokes these ideas merely as a by-product of simply being a fun watch - a perfectly-crafted, fantastically enjoyable exemplar of its sub-genre, whose side order of taboo-breaking thematic discomfort never spoils the deep sense of basic, popcorn-munching comfort this implies.

Yes, I know that he had a great run, that he lived a long and rewarding life, and that ‘celebration’ rather than ‘sadness’ should usually be the watchword when a beloved individual passes away at the age of 98…. but damn it all, I was really hoping Roger Corman would make it to 100. I mean, that would just have perfectly capped a life of such great and indefatigable achievement, wouldn’t it?

To be honest, I was already vaguely planning the party, but we’ll just have to have it now instead, I suppose.

Trying to summarise the full scope of his work and influence across the decades is a daunting prospect, so for now, I’ll just say that, whenever I hear some accursed young person utter that insipid phrase “living your best life”, my mind automatically flashes to Roger Corman.

Because, yes, I know he had some difficult moments in his career, and I know he sometimes made some questionable decisions, but for the most part, whenever he put his hand to something, he aced it.

As both a filmmaker and an enabler of other filmmakers, he created an incredible body of work, changed the face of American cinema on all levels and exerted an influence on culture (both the kind we celebrate on this blog and the more mainstream variety) which is truly incalculable. But, the kicker is, he did this whilst simultaneously making a shedload of money, living a long, happy and fulfilling life, and even (for the most part) playing fair and treating other people well along the way.

That’s a combo I feel very few people in the entertainment industry have managed to achieve, and - though again, he didn’t always manage it perfectly - the way he consistently found a way to square the circle between art and commerce is exemplary. Cutting the bullshit from the creative process and following a straight path from lofty inspiration to exacting planning, necessary compromise, hard graft, successful execution and ensuing reward - he’s the American Dream personified, let’s face it!

If yr proverbial (wo)man on the street knows one thing about Roger Corman, it will be his reputation as ‘King of the Bs’ - the all-time don of schlocky ‘50s monster movies, cranking out double feature 60 minute wonders (primarily at the behest of the fledgling American International Pictures) which a speed and sense of budgetary efficiency which must have shaken his competitors to the core of their being.

This rep is all well and good, but what people who haven’t bothered to watch the films he made as producer/director during this period so often fail to appreciate, is that a fairly high percentage of them are actually really good as well.

Despite focusing on a field (low budget sci-fi/horror) which the the film industry in that era still regarded as sub-normal junk, Corman never looked down on his audience, and took the work seriously, going all-out to deliver films which were well-written, funny, fast-paced, and which explored unusual / intriguing ideas, in spite of their modest means. As a result, the vast majority of his early quickies remain engaging and entertaining to this day, whilst the best of them stand up as classics.

Meanwhile, if our proverbial street person reaches thing number # 2 about Roger Corman, it will probably be pen portrait of the time he spent heading up New World Pictures through the long 1970s - a more cynical, more divisive and (famously) more tight-fisted figure perhaps, as he moved into a role as shaper and controller of other peoples’ art, but still an eerily benevolent and even-handed overseer of the decade’s grindhouse carnage.

Stories from this era tend to focus more around the frustrations of his protégées as they tried with varying degrees of success to resist Corman’s often crass, commercially-minded demands (details of which we needn’t go into here), or struggled to bring projects in on the oft-impossible budgets he had set for them. But for all that, it’s rare to find a New World veteran unwilling to laugh off his unreasonable demands and occasional lapses of judgement, with most instead praising him for his mentorship, wisdom and willingness to listen to their crazy ideas and/or admit his mistakes - virtues not noted in many studio bosses in the cutthroat world of independent commercial cinema.

Without wishing to digress too much into specifics, I’ve always thought that one particularly interesting example of the “have yr cake and eat it” balance Corman struck between idealism and cynicism during his New World / Concorde years concerns his oft-noted championing of female filmmakers. (See for instance a great quote from Gale Anne Hurd, stating that she initially thought Hollywood was a really cool, equal opportunities workplace, until she left New World and immediately encountered a barrage of sexism from the major studios.)

All of which is very admirable, but if you check the stats, you’ll soon realise that Corman almost exclusively assigned female directors to projects with potentially misogynistic subject matter and demands for copious nudity - presumably in the expectation that the presence of a woman at the helm would help nullify criticism and keep the feminists off his case. (You can see this pattern all the way through from Stephanie Rothman making ‘The Student Nurses’ in 1970 to Amy Holden Jones directing ‘The Slumber Party Massacre’ in 1982, Katt Shea’s ‘Stripped to Kill’ in 1987, and probably beyond.)

Just one example of the jaw-droppingly ruthless / ingenious, high risk tactics Corman employed in his years as a producer of theatrical features - but at the end of the day, for every New World movie which emerged as an ill-judged, misbegotten mess, there were three or four which just plain rock, and probably at least one which (once again) is now recognised as a canonical genre classic. And thus, his batting average remains impeccable, right into the gaping maw of the late VHS era.

BUT ANYWAY - rewinding a bit, if you’ve been lucky enough to have picked an especially hip and well-informed person off the street, the third Roger Corman they might be inclined to tell you about is probably Corman the auteur - the thoughtful, cultured director who allowed his fascination with European art cinema, Freudian psychology and altered states of consciousness to filter through into his landmark series of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations during the first half of the 1960s.

Drenched in purest decadent aestheticism, this incredible cycle of films, whose status as beloved comfort objects for multiple generations of horror fans hasn’t prevented them from simultaneously remaining provocative, multi-faceted and deeply weird, swing from canonical gothic beauty to raging sexual hysterics, from cosmic terror to broad comedy - all delivered within the same frantic five year period which also saw their creator’s creative flame burning bright on such fascinatingly outré projects as the harrowing civil rights drama ‘The Intruder’ (1962) and existential / proto-psychedelic SF fable ‘X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes’ (1963).

And, somewhat adjacent to Auteur Corman of course, we have Corman the counter-culture instigator - the curious, avuncular, slightly older guy who spent time hanging out on the Venice Beach / Santa Monica beat scene of the late ‘50s / early ‘60s, livening up the texture of the movies he made during those years with way-out artwork, freaky personalities and eerie locations drawn directly from that pungent milieu, before later - in a characteristically careful, pre-planned manner - he tripped his brains out on LSD and parlayed his pre-existing interests in fringe psychology and psychoanalysis into a brave (and possibly ill-judged) attempt to create an entirely new, thoroughly psychedelic form of popular cinema.

Somewhat to the alarm of his more straight-laced partners at AIP, the forty-year-old Counter Culture Corman let his freak flag fly (for a considerable profit, of course) through the wild and woolly years of ‘The Trip’, ‘Psych Out’ and - perhaps most significantly - 1966’s ‘The Wild Angels’, a film which not only kick-started the biker craze which fed directly into the production of ‘Easy Rider’ (and, by extension, the subsequent convulsions which brought about the birth of “new Hollywood”), but also managed to pre-empt the nihilistic aesthetic of early punk rock, exploring the notion that its teen biker anti-heroes don Nazi regalia purely to piss off their WWII veteran elders, and directly inspiring the wardrobe and attitudes of confrontational bands like The Stooges in the process.

Then, zooming forward again, on the other end of the spectrum, we’ve got Concorde-era Corman - battling his way through the tail-end of big screen exploitation cinema and on into the straight-to-video era with a steady stream of kickboxers, barbarians, latex suits and big tits, restricting himself by this stage largely to backroom pursuits of ruthless, Reagon-era number-crunching and sharp-toothed deal-making, leaving the ‘creative’ end of things to a new, rather more utilitarian, generation of protégées - artistic wings clipped, commercial expectations made clear, and close supervision no longer really necessary.

I’m not sure that effectively becoming a competitor to Charles Band or Lloyd Kaufman in the DTV realm really befitted the great man all that well in his old age to be perfectly honest, but he certainly never faltered in his output, that’s for sure, and it is from this era, and on into the even gnarlier hinterlands of the post-2000 cable/streaming market, that the vast majority of his 495 IMDB producer credits were racked up.

And, even though in later years, especially following his association with the SyFy Channel, these credits begin to appear almost exclusively on the kind of films which few sane and sober people have even heard of, if you run the numbers on Concorde’s output, you’ll still find a wealth of minor highlights and memorable oddities - a direct extension in a sense of the “make ‘em cheap, pile ‘em high but don’t forget the make ‘em INTERESTING” methodology upon which Corman launched his career half a century earlier.

There are other Cormans out there too, I’m sure, many of them. And, perhaps we’ll begin to identify some of them as I try to revitalise this blog over the next few weeks / months by watching Corman-related films which I’ve never seen before, and trying to write something about them.

So, RIP to one of the absolute giants of popular culture, and, don’t touch that dial, folks.

A big name for what is, by anyone’s estimation, a fairly minor movie, but not by any means an unenjoyable one.

If nothing else, the film certainly delivers on its title in short order (a lesson Corman had clearly learned from the failure of The Beast With 1,000,000 Eyes a few years earlier), as we are immediately introduced to our Viking Women, and quite a fetching bunch they are too, led by Abby Dalton (Corman’s main squeeze at the time) as the fair-haired Desir, alongside another memorable turn from the Corman regular Susan Cabot (The Wasp Woman herself!) as treacherous / witchy brunette Enger.

(Amusing anecdote from this production # 1: apparently, another actress had originally been cast as the lead Viking Woman, but on the first day of shooting, she turned up to meet the bus to the location accompanied by her agent, who refused to let his client sign a contract until she was awarded a higher fee. Assistant director Jack Bohrer got Corman on the phone, and recalled being immediately instructed to, “make Abby the lead and move all the other girls up one spot in the cast. Have the girls learn their lines on the bus ride to the beach. Tell the agent to get lost.”) (1)

When we join them, the Viking Women are hanging around in a wooded grove, having seemingly been abandoned by their long absent sea-faring menfolk.

They do still have one man with them for some reason - Ottar, played by Jonathan Haze of ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ fame. If there was a line of dialogue to explain why he’s not off with the other Viking Men, I must have missed it, but… anyway, he’s here too, and the Viking Women are holding a vote on what to do about their lonesome situation, through the long accepted Viking movie means of throwing spears at a pair of tree trunks. (So much more dramatic that just raising hands, don't you think?)

Naturally, the faction who want to set out to sea in search of the menfolk emerge triumphant, and so that’s exactly what they all do, casting off from the balmy shores of Southern Cali - sorry, I mean, uh, the Nordic Lands - in a rather fetching little longboat.

(Amusing speculation about this production # 1: in a cliff-top long shot of the longboat casting off, we clearly see the rudder fall off. Cut to the studio-bound / back projected medium shot on-board ship, and there is some dialogue along the lines of, “oh no, what are we going to do”, “we can’t steer this thing with just an oar”, etc. Given though that this plot point never really plays into anything else in the script, would it be cynical of me to to suggest that maybe the rudder falling off in the long shot was a total accident, but, given that there was no time to re-take the shot, they just had to make the best of it and improvise by working it into the dialogue..?)

Anyway, once they’re out on the open sea, the initial scenes scenes on board the longboat are actually quite nicely done, complete with satisfactory back projection and some elegant, moody lighting. It seems as if the Viking Women have only been drifting rudderless on the ocean for a few hours though, when - in a development which feels like a vague, subconscious comingling of Homer’s Odyssey, medieval cartography and Poe’s ‘Descent into the Maelstrom’ - they find themselves drawn into the currents of “the vortex” - the film’s obligatory vast, ship-wrecking whirlpool - and encounter its guardian, the terrifying Sea Serpent!

So yes - bingo! About twelve minutes into the run time, and we’ve met the Viking Women, we’ve had the Sea Serpent - and thus the filmmakers can be confident that no one’s going to be storming to the box office demanding their money back after this one, irrespective of whatever happens next.

(Amusing anecdote from this production # 2: according to Corman, his chief takeaway from ‘Viking Women and the Sea Serpent’ was a decision never again to “fall for a sophisticated sales job about elaborate special effects”. Effects artists Iriving Block and Jack Rabin had apparently won the gig on the film by firing up both Corman and AIP’s Jim Nicholson and Sam Arkoff with a swanky presentation of painted mock ups demonstrating their skills - only for it to become abundantly clear upon completion of the promised footage that, “..they had simply promised us something they could not deliver”.

Quoth the director/producer himself: “First, I saw that they had shot the plates from the wrong angle and I couldn’t possibly match them. Second, the serpent was too small. I thought: My God, I’m not going to fit this into a ten day shoot. It was supposed to be thirty feet tall. I had rarely shot process myself because it is a specialized art, but I did the best I could […] with the boat rocking and the girls moving to obscure as much of the process print as possible. I shot the scene very low-key and fairly dark so you didn’t see too much.” ) (1)

In view of these circumstances though, I actually think the sea monster shots - brief and murky though they may be - come off pretty well. You get a good ol’ scary, scaly monster head arising from the murky water, emitting a suitably horrendous, unearthly yowl, so I mean, what more could you ask for? Seems like an entirely passable low budget Godzilla knock off kind of affair to me.

As Corman correctly notes though, what really sinks the effects here (no pun intended) is the disparity in scale and angles between the back projected ‘monster footage’ and the ‘live in studio’ foreground action. Presumably arising more from a combination of miscommunication, poor planning and the general inexperience than from any incompetence on the part of the effects guys, these problems are very much the kind of thing which could have been easily fixed up on a better resourced production, but on an AIP-financed double feature filler, with a few hours on the sound stage already booked and paid for no doubt, there was no obviously no option but to make do and plough ahead.

So, understandably, that’s more or less the last we see of the dreaded Monster of The Vortex, with the remaining two thirds of the movie instead concentrating on the primarily land-based exploits of the ship-wrecked Viking Women, who now find themselves washed up in the land of a barbaric tribe known as the Grimolts, who seem to specialise in enslaving / plundering the survivors of ships which have fallen victim to The Vortex.

“They can be handled, they’re only men,” Desir defiantly announces when the women’s captors start getting rough with them, thus earning the film a minimal scintilla of proto-feminist cred which it somewhat makes good on in subsequent scenes, as our heroines undertake a good deal of rough-riding, spear-hurling and brawling, rejecting the boorish advances of various Grimolt warriors, and generally proving themselves the equal of their male agressors (at least until their musclebound, aryan menfolk eventually make the scene, at which point they compliantly assume a secondary role in proceedings).

Stark, the king of the Grimolts, is played with no great amount of charisma by hard-working character actor and TV stalwart Richard Devon, looking here rather like a school headmaster who has had an unfortunate run-in with a shag pile carpet whilst on his way to a fancy dress party as Genghis Khan.

Making a rather more of positive impression however is Jay Sayer as Stark’s son Senya, delivering as good a rendition of the age old “snivelling, cowardly / effeminate son of domineering, tyrannical patriarch” archetype as I can recall seeing in recent years. (Like so many Corman actors, Sayer has a bit of barely supressed beatnik vibe about him, which I rather enjoyed.)

Elsewhere during the Grimolt sections of the film, we get to appreciate the fact that the production actually managed to obtain the use of some fairly decent looking ‘banqueting hall’ and ‘castle exterior’ sets, as well as rustling up an actual, honest-to-god boar for the hunting scenes. Look out also for Wilda Taylor, credited as ‘Grimolt dancing girl’, delivering an admirably wild and energetic routine during the obligatory banquet hall scene.

For the most part though, as soon as the Viking Women realise that - inevitably - it is Stark and the Grimolts who are keeping their long lost menfolk prisoner, the remaining run-time settles down into an entirely routine succession of escapes and re-captures, complete with lots of lots of interminable running around out in the scrubland surrounding Iverson’s Movie Ranch and (inevitably) the ever-ready Bronson Canyon caves.

In his memoir (see footnote), Corman claimed it was whilst feverishly shooting all of this running around type stuff that he broke his own record for ‘most set ups in a single day’, but for all the impact it has on screen, he might as well have chilled out and let everybody clock off and drive back into town for an early martini instead. It’s precisely the kind of undistinguished, work-a-day ‘action’ padding which, with a few changes of costumes and props, could have been slotted straight into any two-dollar western, war movie or sci-fi flick, making it tough not to zone out and let your mind wander, as the sundry Viking Women, freed Viking Men and Grimolts charge hinder and yon across the sand dunes.

I had previously assumed that the cycle must have been birthed from the success of Kirk Douglas epic ‘The Vikings’ (1958), or Jack Cardiff’s ‘The Long Ships’ (1964) - but, as checking those production years has made clear, ‘Viking Women and the Sea Serpent’ actually beat both of those films into cinemas. In fact, I’m not aware of any Viking movies made prior to 1957, so maybe we can chalk up a bit more originality for Corman and screenwriter Lawrence L. Goldman here than I had otherwise assumed.

Subsequent to ‘The Vikings’, Mario Bava made a couple of corkers in Italy during the ‘60s (‘Erik The Conqueror’ (’61) and ‘Knives of the Avenger’ (‘66)), whilst Hammer produced ‘The Viking Queen’ in ’67, and, a few years after that, the Tarkan films out of Turkey picked up the baton, delivering all the berserk psychotronic craziness one could possibly ask for.

Not, you’d have to say, something that could really be claimed of Roger Corman’s modest contribution to the sub-genre. As I think has probably been made abundantly clear by now, we’re not exactly looking at an all-time classic here, but regardless; for a breezy, 66 minute time waster, ‘Viking Women and the Sea Serpent’ proves perfectly enjoyable.

Most of the primary cast deliver engaging performances, and the whole thing swings by with an easy-going, upbeat vibe which makes it seem as if everyone was having a lot of fun with this material, however much of a nightmare the anecdotes related above suggest it must actually must have been to make. 

Rich in the kind of random eccentricities, sly humour and abundant charm which helps so many of these early Corman / AIP movies worth a watch in spite of their shortcomings, it’s difficult not to hit the closing titles with a smile on your face - especially if, like those lucky 1957 drive-in patrons, you’ve just seen it on a double bill with ‘The Astounding She Monster’ (which I’ve not seen, but it boasts an Ed Wood writing credit, and one of the greatest Sci-Fi posters of the ’50s). What a time to have been alive!

(1)Unless otherwise stated, all quotes and production stories in this review are taken from ‘How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime’, by Roger Corman with Jim Jerome (De Capo press edition, 1998), pp. 45-47

One thing which must be understood straight away about ‘The Intruder’s status as a political / message movie, is that it is a diatribe. Anyone in search nuanced characterisations, multiple points of view, or a general recognition of the ever-shifting shades of grey which define the contours of our lives on earth, should probably look elsewhere.

Thankfully though, it is at least a diatribe with which I (and, I would suggest, all reasonable and right-thinking people across the globe) can wholeheartedly agree, and as an unflinching exposé of the manipulative tactics employed by self-serving demagogues seeking to squeeze personal power from the rotting fruit of pre-existing hatreds and social inequality, well… blindingly obvious though may be to say so, it remains as relevant to life in the western world circa 2024 as it was in 1962, if not more so.

Taking its cue to some extent from Orson Welles’ similarly button-pushing ‘The Stranger’ from 1946, ‘The Intruder’ takes us to the emblematic, petri dish-like environment of Caxton, Missouri, a small town into which a dangerous outside element has just been introduced - Adam Cramer, played by William Shatner, an agent provocateur apparently dispatched to the town from Washington DC on behalf of something called the “Patrick Henry Society” (a fairly obvious analogue for the far right John Birch Society).

Stepping off a Greyhound and checking into the town’s only hotel, Cramer, armed with a distinctive white suit and oversized personal confidence, immediately begins canvassing the local citizenry vis-à-vis their views on the Kennedy administration’s then-recent anti-segregation laws, which are due to result in a small number of black pupils soon beginning to attend the town’s previously all-white high school for the first time. Suffice to say, the down home folks’ responses to this topic prove a lot encouraging to Caxton’s purposes than they do to those of us implicitly liberal viewers.

In fact, Corman’s main jumping off point from the template laid down by ‘The Stranger’, and the element which ultimately makes ‘The Intruder’ so much more disturbing, is that, whereas Welles’ film began by evoking a familiar ‘white picket fence’ ideal of the benign American small town into which a corrupting fascist element is introduced, L.A. native Corman’s conception of down home Americana is already pretty close to hell on earth, even before the demonic influence of Shatner’s transient, shit-stirring carpet-bagger is added to the mix.

Shooting in the southeast Missouri towns of Charleston and East Prairie, it’s safe to assume that Corman and his brother Gene (credited as executive producer) very much hedged their bets when it came to letting the townsfolk know exactly what kind of film they were making here. Details of the script were kept a secret, but this reticence apparently didn’t prevent the filmmakers from being thrown out of the latter town by the sheriff on account of being “communists”, whilst Shatner has reported that the production also regularly needed to contend with threats of violence, sabotaged equipment and the like.

Whilst the film’s primary actors were cast in L.A., locals in Missouri were employed on an ad-hoc basis to fill out the rest of the supporting and non-speaking roles, and perhaps the single most disturbing aspect of ‘The Intruder’ when viewed today is that, after Shatner’s character has gotten warmed up and started delivering a series of anti-integration tirades, dropping the N-bomb incessantly as he demeans and demonises the town’s (thus far invisible) black population, the (presumably genuine, and minimally briefed) locals simply listen to him and nod in quiet, uncontested agreement, as if he were talking about repairing potholes, or repainting the local fire station or something.

None of the non-actors and white passers by bearing witness to his hate-filled oratory seem to register even the slightest surprise or unease, whether in the context of a hotel lobby, main street diner, or eventually, at a mass rally on the steps of the town hall. It’s pretty chilling stuff.

Retrospectively adding to this profound sense of discomfort of course is the casting of Shatner, seen here in one of his first significant screen role after a few years spent cutting his teeth in TV and the theatre. Of course, no one in 1962 could have known the path his career would take, but needless to say, the sight of the future Captain Kirk practically frothing at the mouth preaching racial hatred has the potential to prove pretty alarming to multiple generations of Americans, and this cognitive dissonance is only enhanced by the fact that Shatner’s performance here is absolutely superb.

In terms of conventional acting chops in fact, I think this is the best work I’ve ever seen from him by a country mile. Having apparently not yet developed the hammy, staccato diction which would make him such a beloved figure of fun in years to come, Shatner instead plays it totally straight, capturing that very particular brand of weaselly, ingratiating, blank-eyed intensity unique to psychopathic politicos and conmen to an extent which is little short of terrifying.

To 21st century eyes though, the most obvious failure of ‘The Intruder’ is the chronic absence of actual black characters, and the reluctance to assign much of a voice even to those who do appear on screen.

Early in the film, Cramer views the poverty of “N***ertown” through the glass of a taxi window - just as the filmmakers, capturing this more-or-less documentary footage, presumably also did - and effectively, that’s all we in the audience get to see of it for quite a long time thereafter. Eventually, we get a few scenes of a black family group, some more vérité footage of some suitably apprehensive, disheartened looking dudes silently hanging out on their stoops, and then - in the film’s primary image of Civil Rights era emancipation - the sight of a column of primly attired new black pupils, led by the handsome Joey Greene (Charles Barnes), making their way to high school for the first time, as the white populace radiates hatred in their general direction.

It’s a great sequence actually, orchestrated and edited by Corman with Eisensteinian immediacy, but, of all the black school pupils, Joey is the only one allotted much screen time or a role in the narrative - or even a name and personality for that matter. And, even he fits neatly into the reassuringly well spoken, well turned out mould established on screen in the preceding years by Sidney Poiter and Harry Belafonte - a decidedly conventional, unthreatening presence.

Very much the weakest aspect of the film, this limited engagement with actual black life can’t help but nail ‘The Intruder’ squarely as the work of the kind of well-intentioned white liberals who lack the experience or insight to actually conceive of black people as human beings, complete with flaws, complexities and ranges of interests and opinions which extend beyond a set of benign, outdated stereotypes. (Exactly the kind of attitude punctured so brilliantly in a SF/horror context by Jordan Peele in ‘Get Out’ a few years back, funnily enough.)

About the only moment in which the filmmakers even consider the possibility that young black people might want to do something other than be ‘integrated’ into the institutions of a cowardly and gullible white society inhabited by pinch-faced creeps who hate their guts, is the sole scene featuring by far ‘The Intruder’s best black character - Joey’s pre-teen younger brother (who sadly remains uncredited, insofar as I can tell).

A resplendent hep-cat in waiting, this kid is introduced licking on an ice lolly as he listens to blaring be-bop on the radio (“whatchu talkin’ about ‘junk’, that’s MUSIC, man”), and he clearly gets an almighty kick out of mocking his square older brother; “well it’s too bad I ain’t old enough to go to school, I wouldn’t be scared, that’s all … man, you know what you oughta do? I’ll tell you what you oughta do, get yourself a gun, play it cool see, and the first grey stud looks at ya sideways, BLAMBLAMBLAMBLAMBLAM…”

A bit more time spent with this kid brother, or some similarly outspoken black adults, might have allowed the filmmakers to wrangle a hell of a lot more verisimilitude into ‘The Intruder’, but… what can you say - at the end of the day, they meant well.

I mean, it would certainly have been a lot easier, and a lot more profitable, for Roger, Gene and scriptwriter Charles Beaumont to chill out by the pool back in Hollywood and knock out a couple of radioactive monster flicks, so we at least owe them props for standing up and being counted, putting their careers, their money, and even their personal safety on the line to make a film like this one, live on the scene in the south, whilst the battles of the Civil Rights era were still raging.

A far more interesting element of Beaumont’s script meanwhile is the nature of Cramer’s main antagonist, Sam Griffin, played to perfection by Corman regular (and occasional script writer) Leo Gordon. Griffin and his demoralised wife Vi (Jeanne Cooper) are, ultimately, the only characters in the movie who become more than cyphers, developing an intriguing and contradictory mess of personality traits as we get to know them better, and the material dealing with Cramer’s interactions with them yields many of the film’s strongest dramatic moments.

Staying at the same rundown hotel as Cramer, Griffin is initially introduced as a loud-mouthed, drunken braggart, apparently employed as some kind of showman / barker charged with luring customers into a shop in a neighbouring town. Much to his chagrin, Cramer initially reads Griffin as a clown, and, as a result, hones in on the clearly-sick-of-it-all Vi with an especially predatory look in his eye.

After Cramer ‘seduces’ Vi in a horribly uncomfortable scene which modern audiences are liable to read less ambiguously as a ‘rape’, prompting her to flee the rest of the film in shame, her husband’s character turns on a dime, dropping the ‘comedy drunkard’ shtick and squaring his shoulders as if he’s suddenly realised he has seriously nasty little fucker to take care of here.

Evidently the immature Cramer’s superior in terms of guts and life experience, Griffin initially disarms and humiliates him in a sweaty hotel room confrontation that pushes the film about as close as it gets to the realm of film noir, whilst, back on the rails of the central political narrative, the decision to put Gordon up against Shatner during the story’s final act proves absolutely inspired.

More-so than a conventional liberal saviour (such as the film’s mild-mannered school principal), Griffin’s background as a store front barker and confidence man means that he instantly recognises the kind of two-bit crap Cramer is peddling, and knows how to deal with it too - publically tearing him down, exposing his lies and allowing the ephemeral power he holds over the suckers to drain away like filth down a storm drain, leaving Cramer sitting alone and forlorn on the high school swing-set from which, just a few short minutes earlier, he was orchestrating an out of control lynch mob baying for blood.

Viewed at this particular point in history, it’s nigh on impossible to get through this closing scene without fervently wishing that a similar scenario could play itself out on a nationwide scale in the USA today… but unfortunately, life is never quite that simple, is it? Just as it’s never as simple as the strawman-baiting and scapegoating of the ‘other’ peddled by Cramer and his ilk.

And just as, likewise, the true darkness of Corman’s film lays not in the spectre of Cramer himself, but in the spectacularly bleak fact that, when the would be lynchmobbers shamefacedly shamble away from their erstwhile leader, they’ve still learned nothing from the experience. They may have given this week’s demagogue the heave-ho, and they may be temporarily willing to observe the law and allow black people to remain alive and attend their schools… but there is no suggestion here at all here that the townsfolk are any less dyed-in-the-wool racists than they were at the start of the film.

The good looks and clear diction of Joey Greene have clearly not won over these representatives of Ugly America, and the town’s black population remains silent, cowed and fearful. After Cramer slinks off to nurse his psychic wounds like a defeated alley cat, how long will it be before the next mean-spirited agitator shows up, or until the next black boy gets accused of looking at a white girl the wrong way, as the fuse on that same old powder keg starts tediously fizzing away yet again?

Enjoy yr ‘happy ending’ whilst you can folks, the film seems to say, because in the long run, this shit is going nowhere, irrespective of who’s holding the mop and bucket at any given time.

AND SO, let’s pencil in a parallel discussion of exactly why this ended up being the only film Roger Corman made during the ‘50s and ‘60s which failed to turn a profit shall we? How about, ooh, let’s say, 4th July in a couple of week? See you there!

If we were to chart Roger Corman’s engagement with socio-political issues in his work upon some kind of hypothetical scale, then at the opposite end of it from the uncomfortably effective The Intruder, we would find ‘Gas-s-s-s!, or, It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It’ [henceforth ‘Gas’, just for the sake of our sanity], an inexplicable, rather hare-brained movie which, over fifty years later, is difficult not to see as one of its directors greatest failures. (I mean, say what you will about Creature From The Haunted Sea, but at least it had reasons for being crap.) (1)

This is extremely regrettable, given that the project represents an important milestone in Corman’s career on a number of levels. Not only does it mark the conclusion of his cycle of ‘counter-culture’ films (following on from ‘The Wild Angels’ in ’66 and ‘The Trip’ in ’67), but also his final collaboration with American international Pictures (following fifteen years of fruitful co-dependence), and in fact his final work as a director of independent commercial cinema in the United States. (2)

So, what’s ‘Gas’ all about then? Well… it’s difficult to say really, and that very uncertainty soon becomes a pretty big part of the problem.

A pastel crayon animated prologue introduces us to some high ranking military officials (including such personages as ‘General Strike’, and ‘Dr Murder’ - and if you find that magazine cartoon level of humour uproariously funny, there’s hope you might enjoy this movie yet), who, in the process of attending a ceremonial function at a chemical research base in Alaska, accidentally uncork a beaker containing a cloud of custom-made poison gas which now promises to spread across the earth, killing everyone aged over twenty-five.

Moving into live action post-credits, we meet a long-haired, wise-crackin’ campus troublemaker (Bob Corff) and his adorable, only marginally less wide-crackin’ girlfriend (Elaine Giftos), who depart Dallas in a salmon pink Cadillac and promptly get involved in a series of tiresome comical capers, eventually joining forces with a group of other sketchily-defined, more-or-less hippie-aligned young people (including amongst their number both a young Bud Cort, and one Tally Coppola, later to become Talia Shire). Together, this merry band traverse a marginally post-apocalyptic version of the American South-West, enduring a multitude of symbolic / quixotic encounters and threats as they vaguely pursue an Oz-like quest to consult an ‘oracle’, whose billboards (including a count-down in miles) they spot along the highway.

And… that’s about it, really. I mean, I wish I could tell you what the wearying procession of factions, marauders, aggressors, cultists, herd-like victims and all-purpsoe extraverted weirdos our protagonists run into along the way were actually meant to represent, but, as the film’s attempts at satirical humour alternate wildly between blunt, eye-rolling obviousness and head-scratching, lost-in-translation obscurity, it is honestly difficult to locate anything here which we squares might term a ‘point’.

Which might have been all well and good, if only Corman and his collaborators been able to wrangle some other value from these narratively unglued proceedings, but, sadly, the kind of pupil-dilating visual excess and subversive, taboo-breaking chaos which defined the era’s more successful underground/counter-cultural filmmaking is in very short supply in ‘Gas’.

Shot in a range of uninhabited / wreckage-strewn desert locations across Texas and New Mexico, the film’s footage soon becomes fairly monotonous, in spite of the natural beauty of the surroundings and some intermittently impressive photography from DP Ron Dexter. The tone of the action meanwhile remains cloyingly light-hearted, employing a gratingly twee take on hippie-era surrealism, whilst the characters remain vacant, distant and uninteresting.

Even the garish, mid-century Americana of the costumes and production design simply remain… standard issue, for the most part. Please bear in mind that I say all this as a viewer who usually maintains an extremely high tolerance for what Kim Newman has termed ‘Weird Hippie Shit’, but in a word, ‘Gas’ simply feels tired.

Just a few short years earlier, Corman could reasonably have claimed to have had his finger on the pulse of the intersection between popular culture and the underground (after all, ‘The Wild Angels’ not only launched a whole new era-defining genre, but provided direct aesthetic inspiration for generations of proto-punk rebels in the process).

The shadow-haunted autumn/winter of ’69 though found Corman and screenwriter George Armitage (future director of ‘Grosse Pointe Blank’ and the fantastic Miami Blues) beginning work on ‘Gas’ at precisely the moment in which the optimism of the 1960s evaporated, leaving something darker and more fragmented behind it, ready to curdle as the decade turned… and ensuring that the film’s happy-go-lucky, flower-child hipster-isms must have felt painfully irrelevant by the time their film finally opened in September 1970. (3)

In this context, scenes which may have passed as wild, Godardian po-mo provocations back in the mid-‘60s (such as the film’s lampoon of a western shoot-out, in which characters point their fingers at each other whilst shouting the names of famous cowboy actors) simply play out as eye-rolling tedium - self-satisfied acting class wheezes dragged out for far longer than is really necessary.

Indeed, for a Corman production, ‘Gas’ feels uncharacteristically bloated and excessive. Shot across multiple locations in several states (and dogged by inevitable weather-related delays along the way), he seems to have become fixated here on mounting vast public spectacles of one kind of another.

The finished film is stuffed full of marching bands and parades, crowds of extras fleeing through the streets of Western town sets pursued by gangs of stuntmen on brightly painted bikes and sidecars, convoys of golf carts, JCBs and tooled up dune buggies (triggering entirely accidental flashes of Mansonoid paranoia), cheerleaders, football teams and hundreds of people crammed onto a remote mountaintop for the film’s conclusion… all, ultimately, to very little effect.

Amidst all this sound and fury, it becomes difficult to avoid the conclusion that the man who once shot a film as beautifully crafted as ‘Little Shoppe of Horrors’ on a single set in two and a half days has lost his way very badly somewhere along the line.

Perhaps the sole quantifiable pleasure I took from ‘Gas’ in fact came from the music - and this is entirely due to the fact that I’m a big fan of the perennially underrated Country Joe & The Fish, and in particular of their gifted lead guitarist Barry ‘The Fish’ Melton, who was charged with composing ‘Gas’s songs and incidental cues (as heard in the rare moments when the brass marching bands, cheerleading chants and honking car horns shut up for a few minutes). (4)

It’s nice to hear the various bits and pieces Melton came up with (recordings never otherwise released, insofar as I’m aware), and we also get to enjoy some choice footage of the band in full flow at some kind of outdoor festival held at a drive-in theatre, backed up by a bitchin’ psychedelic light show, inter-cut with footage of two of the young hippie characters making out during an acid trip, and accompanied by subliminal flashes of underground movie-style abstract imagery.

Arguably the film’s strongest sequence, the overall effect here is only partially spoiled by the presence of Country Joe McDonald (who I’m fairly sure would not have made the twenty-five year old cut-off point required for this movie’s plot, incidentally) doing some kind of terminally unamusing skit about how he’s an omnipotent, god-like figure named ‘A.M. Radio’, or somesuch. (My god, this obnoxiously performative, satire-lite fucking hippie ‘humour’, I swear… it’s enough to make me want to shave my head and enlist in the nearest para-military organisation post-haste.)

Aside perhaps from hardcore C.J. Fish fans though, it’s difficult to imagine that anyone at the time of ‘Gas’s original release was actually digging what Corman was laying down here. Whilst ‘straight’ audiences must have simply been confused and alienated by all this mystifying hullaballoo, the campus radicals and garage band suburban punks the movie was presumably supposed to appeal to would surely by this point have felt patronised and turned off by its parade of quirky, central casting hippies mouthing half-baked flower power witticisms, long past their sell-by date in the hyper-accelerated climate of mid-century pop culture.

Even within the sphere of disastrous, released-too-late hippie movies, ‘Gas’ ranks low, lacking the lo-fi earnestness of the Firesign Theatre’s “electric western” ‘Zachariah’, the wild artistic vision of Dennis Hopper’s ‘The Last Movie’ or the magisterial visual gimmickry of Antonioni’s ‘Zabriskie Point’.

But the saddest thing of all is that, despite all this, ‘Gas’ seems to have been a project which mattered to Corman a great deal.

He spends over five pages of his 1990 memoir ‘How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime’ discussing the film, acknowledging the gruelling nature of the production, and regretting his decision to begin filming without a finished script. But, he also speaks enthusiastically of his success in creating “an apocalyptic, Strangelovian satire,” - one which, sadly, sounds a lot more exciting in Corman’s recollection than any of the footage which actually ended up on the screen;

Although everything Corman describes can kind of be seen in the movie if you squint hard enough, I think the failure of any of it to actually make much of an impression on the viewer simply goes to prove that, much as I love him, Roger Corman was no Alejandro Jodorowsky. Logic, working within fixed limits and careful advance planning were the engines which powered his best cinema, and the mellow ideals of middle class So Cal suburbia remained his aesthetic base-camp, even as the wily tendrils of psychedelia and European decadence repeatedly threatened to drag him further afield. At the end of the day, maximalist cosmic wig-flipping was simply not his bag, man.

Nonetheless, Corman remained extremely unhappy about a number of cuts he claimed were made to ‘Gas’ in post-production, and which he blamed primarily on AIP’s James H. Nicholson, whom he felt had become increasingly conservative and intolerant of risk-taking in the films his company released, citing these arbitrary cuts as reasons for the film’s incoherence and commercial failure.

Strong words perhaps from a man who in later years would become famous for insisting his protégés’ films came in at under 88 minutes in order to save on film canisters, but above all, AIPs decision to cut the film’s intended final shot remained a source of great bitterness to Corman, ending one of the longest and most productive relationships in the history of independent cinema on an extremely sour note;

“The unkindest cut of all was the last scene. I ended the film with a spectacular shot from on top of the mesa, with a view sixty, seventy miles to the horizon. We had the entire tribe there and everyone else who had been in the film. It was a celebration. The leading man kisses the woman and I zoom back. It was a cliché I had never used to end a film. I did it precisely because it was a cliché. I had the entire marching band of the local high school. I had a whole group of Hell’s Angels. I had a bunch of guys on dune buggies. I had a football team. I had our whole cast in this wild celebration as the camera zoomed back and over the shot. God, who was a running character throughout the film, made his final comments on what went on. 

There must have been three hundred people on top of that mesa. It was one of the greatest shots I ever achieved *in my life*. And AIP cut the entire shot. They ended the picture on the couple’s clichéd kiss - because they didn’t like what God was saying. The Picture ended and made no sense.”

For a more revealing take on Corman’s state of mind during the production of ‘Gas’ though, I think the last word must go to production manager Paul Rapp, quoted in the same book;

---

(1)According to IMDB trivia, ‘Gas’s lengthy sub-title was inspired by an unnamed Major in the U.S. Army, who is alleged to have justified the total destruction of a Vietnamese town and its inhabitants on the basis that, “it became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it” - a reference which would have stood as the darkest and most effective piece of satire in the entire picture, if only an effort had been made to draw the audience’s attention to it.

(2)The WWI aerial combat epic ‘Von Richtofen and Brown’, which Corman shot in Ireland for United Artists, saw release in 1971, and subsequent to that he did not return to the director’s chair until 1990’s ‘Frankenstein Unbound’ - a film which I would argue stands more as a one-off vanity project produced by his own studio (albeit, a very worthwhile and interesting one) than as a strictly commercial proposition.

(3)Ironically in view of how badly the film falls victim to it, it’s interesting to note that Armitage’s script for ‘Gas’ is both aware of the hyper-accelerated fashion cycle of the ‘60s, and indeed pokes fun at it via the character played by Cindy Williams, a devotee of ‘old timey’ pop music who hangs around the jukebox listening to “golden oldies” by the likes of Jefferson Airplane and The Grateful Dead; a familiar motif found in near-future fiction written at the time by slightly bamboozled older geezers, and in Thomas Pynchon novels all the way up to 2009.

(4)It seems that Corman had originally planned to make ‘Gas’ with The Grateful Dead appearing on-screen and providing the soundtrack, only to end up - in characteristic Corman fashion - telling them to get lost when they turned up demanding more money than had been agreed upon, and immediately getting Country Joe on the line instead.

(5)All quotes in this review are taken from ‘How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime’, by Roger Corman with Jim Jerome (De Capo press edition, 1998), pp. 162-167.

Ok, several days late and several dollars short this year, but I mean… I couldn’t just let this blog fade away into the digital void with a snarky hatchet job on a Roger Corman film at the top of the page, could I..? 

Despite all manner of time / life related pressures, I’m still doing my damnedest to meet the now traditional “one horror movie a day” challenge this year, and have been posting notes on my viewing over at the Rock!ShockPop! forums, so… it would seem churlish of me not to work ‘em up into posts for this blog at the same time really, wouldn’t it? In fact, it’s the least I owe any kind and patient readers who are still hanging on in there.

More-so than ever, the usual October disclaimers will apply here: these bits of writing are basically just slightly tidied up versions of initial notes I scribbled down immediately after watching the film; they have no particular structure, make no particular point, probably do nothing to upset the established critical consensus regarding any particular movie, and are only researched / fact-checked in the most hap-hazard of fashions. But, they’re something - and after nearly three months of nothing, why not? 

As I’m a bit behind, I’ll try to put the first few post up within the next 12 hours, and we’ll go from there…

Released, I believe, one year prior to Franju’s definitive ‘Les Yeux Sans Visage’, this early outlier in the ever-popular field of plastic surgery / facial reconstruction-themed horror differs slightly from the norm, in that Anton Diffring’s Dr Schüler [formerly Rossiter] is actually really good at restoring facially scarred women to their former beauty, requiring neither non-consenting skin-donors nor years of gruesome trial and error grafting experiments to get the job done.



Unfortunately however, despite his exceptional expertise and high success rate, fame and fortune do not await the good doctor and the brother / sister team of assistants who inexplicably follow him around, partly due to that stuffy ol’ medical establishment refusing to countenance his radical innovations… but largely due to the fact that he is also shady as fuck, in addition to being played by everybody’s favourite cold-eyed, expressionless Nazi officer.



As such, Schüler / Rossiter instead finds his true vocation acting as the tyrannical manager of a continental travelling circus, whose artistes are in fact petty criminals and prostitutes whose faces the Doc has surgically altered in order to grant them a new identity (as well as apparently training them all to be world class acrobats in the process), and whom he inevitably ends up murdering via various circus-appropriate staged accidents when they decide to leave his employ and/or threaten to expose his sinister racket. All of which falls pretty far from anything which might normally be deemed to make “a lick of sense”, but hey, who’s counting?

Unleashed upon the British public by Anglo-Amalgamated productions shortly after they’d delivered the sublime-to-the-ridiculous double whammy of Michael Powell’s ‘Peeping Tom’ and Arthur Crabtree/Herman Cohen’s ‘Horrors of the Black Museum’, it’s probably fair to say that ‘Circus of Horrors’ falls somewhere between those two poles, quality-wise, but a lot closer to the latter than the former.

Indeed, most of the plotting and character stuff here consists of tacky, ultra-lurid sado-melodrama, very much in the vein of the three films Cohen made with Michael Gough during this era, the details of which need not concern us here. But, at the same time, the production values are FAR higher than on any of Cohen’s flicks, with the use of a genuine circus (and its performers) lending a sense of scale and visual interest to proceedings which belies the low budget, whilst the cast also do a bang-up job breathing life into their corny, under-motivated roles.

Douglas Slocombe’s photography though is what really seals the deal, balancing rich colours with deep shadows, and adding real depth to Hayers’ oft-imaginative framing, especially during the scenes set in the big top, which (unusually for circus stuff in movies) have some decent atmosphere to them, and are quite fun to watch.

By the standards of a late ‘50s British production, this is strong stuff content-wise too, beating Hammer at their own game by including at least one absolutely startling bit of gore, whilst the circus setting meanwhile allows the glamorous (and numerous) female cast members (notably including both Yvonnes - Monlaur *and* Romain) to display acres of pulchritudinous flesh, whether crammed into kinky outfits, getting frisky with the ever-lecherous Diffring, or indeed with the equally randy cop/hero character who belatedly attempts to, uh, save the day?

Also - there’s a superbly fruity early Donald Pleasence performance to enjoy here too, as he pops up (with hair!) in the 1947-set prologue, playing the shell-shocked, alcoholic owner of a destitute circus, collapsing into despair amid the ruins of post-war France. And boy, does he ever get his teeth into it. It’s a shame he exits the film so early, but seeing him meet his sorry fate, crushed beneath the weight of an entirely inanimate dancing bear, is worth the entry price alone.

Given that I’m a big fan of both Hammer Films and eccentric, black & white British sci-fi movies more generally, the awkwardly titled ‘X… The Unknown’, Hammer’s immediate follow up to the success of ‘The Quatermass Xperiment’ a year previously, and the very first scripting credit from Jimmy Sangster, certainly fits the bill.

Essentially dealing with the travails of a giant, sentient oil slick from the centre of the earth as it rampages around some less picturesque areas of Scottish highlands eating radioactivity (and people), Sangster’s story is an admirably straight-down-the-line, bullshit-free exemplar of a ‘50s radioactive monster movie, but one which still, somehow, remains curiously compelling, touching at least in passing on the kind of Big Ideas and weird thematic resonances which Nigel Kneale reliably brought to his Quatermass stories.

By and large though, the feel of the movie is… dour in the extreme, reminding me somewhat of other military-focussed British films like Cliff Owen’s ‘A Prize of Arms’ (1962), whilst also pre-figuring the ‘Doomwatch’ franchise of the early ‘70s via its emphasis on lengthy scenes featuring blokes in great-coats stomping about in the frozen mud, poking patches of oil, taking Geiger counter reading and talking about science, whilst bored squaddies hang around in the cold awaiting orders. Grim weather, military manners, very few smiles, and no female characters whatsoever.*

A bit less of this kind of thing and a bit more excitement might have livened things up during the first half of the picture, but nonetheless, it’s all very well made (much as you’d expect of a Hammer production of this vintage) and moves at a fair old clip, with a varied and interesting cast (including such notables as Leo McKern, Anthony Newley and - of course - Michael Ripper) all doing good work re: keeping the audience engaged. It’s also worth mentioning meanwhile that, as the token American ‘star’, the bumbling, softly spoken Dean Jagger proves a vastly more likeable and convincing presence than Brian Donlevy did in the Quatermass movies.

The shock / horror scenes, when they eventually arrive meanwhile, are pretty great too. There are some really cool effects, and the black, amorphous crawling creature is genuinely quite unnerving - a totally alien presence, not so far removed from the kind of thing which might have slurped its way up from the depths of some ancient, pre-human vault at the end of a Lovecraft tale.

In fact, it is the few brief moments in ‘X… The Unknown’ which veer into gothic horror territory, splitting the difference between a scientific and occult threat, which prove to be by far the most memorable. 

For all the nuts n’ bolts SF logic of Sangster’s writing, it’s difficult not to feel that some weird, atavistic race memory has been unleashed, as we see the residents of a remote Scottish village cowering for protection in a cold, stone church as an evil, nameless menace which has literally crawled up from the depths of Hades slimes its way through the misty graveyard outside, demolishing the pretty dry stone walls, and narrowly missing an errant toddler who is pulled to safety at the last moment by the heroic vicar.

Great stuff, needless to say, and hey, check out this amazing Japanese poster I found (featuring a far cuter monster, apparently sourced from a different movie altogether, but never mind).

* Ok, precisely speaking, I realise there’s a nurse who turns up at one point and has about five lines, and there’s the mother of a boy who’s killed by the monster, and some old dears being hustled into the church by the vicar… but we’re pretty much looking at an all-male affair here, perhaps reflective of the same awkwardness / inability to find things for women to do which later became a hallmark of Sangster’s gothic horror scripts?

The story here concerns a mentally fragile, just released-from-the-nuthouse heiress Penny (‘Dark Shadows’ veteran Kathryn Leigh Scott), who, left at home one night by her boyfriend in the remote commuter belt cottage they apparently share, is menaced and assaulted by a stranger, whom she kills with a shotgun blast to the face (providing the episode’s requisite split second of gore in the process).

When Penny’s obviously caddish BF (Simon McCorkindale) returns to find her absolutely freakin’-the-fuck-out and scopes the mess, he insists they cover up the killing and bury the body in the woods, in order to avoid a return to the institution for her, and charges for owning an unlicensed gun for him. But, before long, Penny finds herself tormented by apparitions of her gory-locked victim, and is driven in desperation to seek the assistance of a stereotypical gypsy fortune teller and an even more stereotypical Indian yogi, in an attempt to exorcise the unquiet spirit of the dead man who is apparently pursuing her.

Aaaand, if you’ve got through that synopsis and/or about ten minutes of this episode without clocking that some gaslightin’ is a-going on here, well… I envy you, to be honest. Watching badly scripted movies must be so much fun for you.

All in all, this is a drab, dispiriting sort of affair with precious little to recommend it. Hinds’ script is hackneyed, predictable and tired, offering none of the shock or surprise which a story like this traditionally demands. I suppose you could credit Sasdy with trying to bring a bit of atmos to proceedings from time to time, but he doesn’t get very far with it to be honest, and also probably also needs to bear a degree of responsibility for the fact that the acting is terrible across the board.

I don’t want to be unduly unkind, but it must be said that Leigh Scott’s attempt here to portray a mentally ill woman is just plain excruciating, comprising largely of flapping about in hysteria and emitting bursts of incomprehensible shrieking. In particular, the moment when she seemingly forgets how to speak midway through attempting to pronounce the word ‘rape’ is unbearably uncomfortable - and probably not in the way she or the filmmakers were intending.

Even she takes second place though to Gareth Thomas, who appears here in full brown-face as the Indian mystic guy, bellowing away in what sounds like a Welsh accent as he attempts to drown out a super-imposed floating head during one of the most unintentionally hilarious séance sequences in screen history.

To avoid needing a file a wholly negative review however, here are a few notes on some minor redeeming features which entertained me along the way:

1. The shot towards the start of the episode showing McCorkindale parking his Jaguar XJS alongside a white Range Rover outside his all-mod-cons thatched cottage nails HHofH’s distinctive “home counties yuppie gothic” aesthetic just way too perfectly [see screengrab above].

2. Likewise, McCorkindale’s thoroughly dodgy character makes a fine addition to this series’ rogues gallery of truly horrible male protagonists, strolling around in a cricket jumper and apparently purporting to enjoy country pursuits and (unlicensed) pigeon shooting, when he’s not disappearing overnight to hang out in Soho wine bars on ‘business’, covering up murders, and getting into disagreements over gambling debts with violent, heavy-handed geezers.

I particularly liked the bit where haughtily declares that he’s been out shooting birds, “to make a pigeon pie for dinner”. I mean, who the hell was making pigeon pies in 1980?! Not this bloke or his pill-popping, neurotic missus, that’s for sure. What an absolute tool.

3. There are also some really cool music cues used in this episode, featuring adorable ‘War of the Worlds’ type fuzz guitar stings and laser gun ‘phew phew’ noises. Marc Wilkinson of ‘Blood on Satan’s Claw’ fame is credited as composer, and I wish his work (assuming that’s what we’re hearing) was higher in the mix.

Unfortunately, ‘Visitor From The Grave’ breaks a long run of really good episodes of ‘Hammer House of Horror’ (the preceding four or five episodes were all absolute bangers - try clicking through to the ‘Hammer’ label below and scrolling down if you’d like to catch up with my thoughts on ‘em). Only two more episodes to go now, before my three year October odyssey finally concludes. Let’s hope they can go out on a high.

Soon to be celebrated in a new documentary from Severin Films, the possibilities for low budget filmmaking opened up by this era not only saw ex-pat directors like Jess Franco and José Larraz returning home to produce some of their most distinctive work, but also encouraged a brief outburst of one-off sex-horror films, including the likes of Mas Alla Del Terror, the more widely seen Satan’s Blood, and - delving further into the depths of obscurity - films like ‘Sexo Sangriento’ (I don’t need to translate that for you, do I?), which at the time of writing remains available only as VHS-sourced bootleg.

Interestingly, ‘Sexo Sangriento’ explicitly acknowledges this political context, at least to some extent. Set in 1975, it begins with its characters listening to (and pointedly ignoring) a radio announcement reporting the Generalissimo’s death, as they motor on toward the snow-capped mountains of (we assume) a sparsely populated rural area somewhere on the country’s Northern border.

Despite this curious touch of historical verisimilitude though, real world concerns are soon forgotten (at least for a while), and this is in fact one of the few early ‘80s Spanish horrors which immediately harkens back to the genre’s more escapist golden age a decade beforehand, presenting us with a trope unseen since the glory days of Paul Naschy - namely, that of a group of beautiful young ladies who share a passionate interest in parapsychology and medieval witchcraft, getting way out there on a field trip to a remote, mountainous locale!

Helpfully for the film’s exploitation quotient, two of the girls also share a passion for intense lesbian lovemaking, whilst the third prefers to spend her nights hanging out in abandoned castles with a tape recorder, capturing what she calls ‘psychophonies’.

By which point, long-term readers will appreciate, I was pretty much already sold on whatever happens next.

Before long of course, the girls’ car breaks down (“the distributor is useless,” exclaims the driver, in what I’m going to assume is a movie industry in-joke), and right on cue, a sinister older lady (Mirta Miller, essaying the ‘sadistic/domineering mature woman’ role less than a decade after she was doing her ‘glamorous female lead’ bit in Naschy vehicles like ‘Count Dracula’s Great Love’ and ‘Vengeance of the Zombies’) emerges from the woods and invites them to stay the night at her place.

After a hot night in the sheets, some nude posing for Mirta’s suitably creepy, blood-drenched paintings (she is a reclusive macabre artist, it transpires) and a few strolls around the local ruins, strangely nobody seems terribly concerned about getting the car fixed anymore.

A more threatening note is struck by the presence of Mirta’s lumbering, mute housekeeper, whom she cheerfully declares is “gradually turning into a beast”, but you know, I suppose you’ve got to take the rough with the smooth in this kind of scenario, right?

Truth be told, there’s not much of a story to this one, and things are pretty slow-moving, but with frequent elegiac softcore interludes, plus an equal amount of time spent exploring some of those truly incredible, evocative, derelict locations so unique to Spanish horror, who’s complaining?

During the final act however, things take a considerably darker turn, as the expected supernatural shenanigans are entirely bypassed in favour of gory crotch violence, revelations of historical child murder and some pointed commentary on the trauma suffered by Northern rural communities during the years of fascist oppression. Hmm, didn’t see that coming.

In its currently extant version, this film’s photography has an unappealing Shot On Video kind of look to it, but it’s easy to imagine that a more filmic texture (plus widescreen framing?) might be salvageable, if someone were able to get hold of the original elements. (I’m looking at you Severin - fingers crossed.)

A more intractable problem however is presented by the soundtrack which primarily consists of poorly chosen and poorly synchronised needle-drops on cheesy rip-offs of well known pieces (Goblin’s ‘Zombie’ theme, ‘Star Wars’, ‘Air on a G String’ etc); it’s all very distracting, and far too high in the mix.

Despite these drawbacks though, ‘Sexo Sangriento’ is as sexy and bloody as its title promises, and delivers a respectable dose of palpable gothic atmosphere into the bargain; dedicated Euro-horror devotees should find it well worth tracking down. 

The first thing to note here is that, compared to decidedly lo-fi production values showcased in ‘..Possessed’, this one actually seems a bit more ambitious in scope (relatively speaking). By which I mean, Nizet employs a fairly wide range of locations, with shots stolen around airports, military bases and highways, along with some actual, choreographed action scenes, camera set ups that occasionally extend beyond basic ‘point and shoot’ methodology, and so on.

Reassuringly though, the whole affair is also still lurid as a strip club basement and mad as a bag of snakes, with a wild, “absolutely anything could happen next” vibe which makes it feel like an entertainment for a strange and debased form of humanity, beamed in from another dimension.

All of this weirdness however is parsed out on this occasion with lengthy passages of almost transcendental boredom, as if the filmmakers were determined to make every goddamned frame they sent to the lab count.

So, a scene in which a man breaks into a locked briefcase and carefully examines its contents plays put pretty much in real time. A close up of a needle being injected into an arm holds for so long that I actually undertook a brief exchange of messages on my phone, looked back to the screen, and realised it still hadn’t cut. There are many, many phone calls and office meetings in which secondary characters calmly explain the plot to each other. A sixty second shot of a policeman descending a ladder, anyone? You get the idea.

In the context of a film like this though you understand, I am not necessarily criticising the inclusion of all this extraneous footage. On the contrary, it actually has a kind of hypnotic effect after a while, and, whether in a 1973 drive-in or a 2024 living room, it allows ample opportunity for toilet breaks, food and drink preparation and so on - which is helpful, especially within this kind of movie’s natural environment, sandwiched mid-way through a continuously rolling, multi-film marathon of some kind. Grotesque, inexplicable madness, presented in an admirably relaxed, ambient package.

Don’t dawdle too long though, or you’ll miss some of the many “highlights” (for which please interpret those quotation marks to denote a wry and sardonic tone of voice, leavened by a certain underlying leeriness).

These begin with a lengthy, exotica-tastic “African” tribal ritual, in which a gaggle of dancing girls strip out of their zebra-print bikinis, screw a guy and then cut his heart out (shades of Love Goddesses of Blood Island?), observed by a pith-helmeted explorer who sneaks in after the show to steal a vial of what (for some reason) he takes to be the fabled elixir of youth.

Then, at different points, we’re treated to a car chase AND a boat chase, both fairly elaborately staged.

Sleaze junkies meanwhile will want to note the presence of both a harrowing, roughie-esque vampire sex murder, and a later threesome with a few borderline hardcore shots, staged in a desert canyon, which culminates in the participants being shot to death from above and vampirised.

Perhaps best of all from my point of view though was the most awkward father/daughter dinner date in cinema history, which… well, you’ll just have to witness it first-hand, that’s all I’m saying.

As exhibit A, I present his hairstyle, combining sideburns which extend all the way to the corners of his mouth with a disgusting, tangled, oily kiss-curl which hangs down across his forehead, almost reaching his eyebrows. If I walked into a doctor’s office and he looked like this, I would leave immediately, no questions asked.

It is no surprise therefore to discover that Dr Blake has recently been in hot water for performing unlicensed abortions, and is now being prosecuted for manslaughter by the parents of one of his patients, who died following the procedure. (The doc insists it was nothing to do with him, but I don’t believe him for a second.)

During his drive home after another hard day of.. this sort of thing, Dr Blake happens upon a flaming, overturned wreck on the side of the highway. Rather than notifying the authorities or trying to help any survivors however, his first reaction is instead to steal a briefcase with a severed arm handcuffed to it(!) from inside the wreckage, after which he jumps back in his car and heads straight back to his ugly suburban tract home, where he casually sticks the arm in the icebox(!?), and gets to work on opening the case (see above).

Extracting a vial of unidentified, colourless fluid from the case, he immediately digs out a syringe and ties off, injecting the fluid straight into his veins… only to then remember that - oh no - he’s forgotten to pick his daughter up from the airport!

Gentlemen, I put it to you - in all facets of life, Do Not Do What Dr Blake Does, and your life will proceed in a more harmonious and worthwhile direction.

Charles Nizet, one of cinema’s great moralists - truly he hardly knew ye. 

---

Bonus screengrab - the doctor takes a call in his office...

I’ve only subsequently realised however that, in making that assumption, my chronology was actually a bit off. In fact, the Ramsays’ first successful horror film, ‘Darwaza’, came out in 1978, meaning that, in all likelihood, ‘Jaani Dushman’ [which translates as something like ‘Beloved Enemy’, if anyone’s bothered] took its inspiration from the surprise popularity of that film - which actually makes a lot of sense, in view of the way that this one awkwardly crow-bars horror/monster elements into the storyline of what would presumably otherwise have been a standard rural / romantic melodrama.*

Certainly, the horror material here has a very Ramsays-esque feel to it, as the werewolf (think Universal-style facial make up, ingeniously combined with a Fozzy Bear-style ‘furry jump suit’ body) terrorises a remote mountain village, snatching red-robed brides from within the curtained palanquins in which they are carried during their traditional bridal procession. Spiriting them away to a dry ice-strewn subterranean temple, he then gets busy menacing them with his claws, and generally charges around freaking out and so forth, surrounded by ornate stone columns and randomly scattered bones.

During the film’s opening sequence, a honeymooning couple travelling through the dark, dark woods in a broken down taxi end up sheltering in a derelict mansion. Therein, the ghost of a deceased nobleman appears, and helpfully fills them in on how he was possessed by the demon spirit which transformed him into the Wolfman, forcing him to murder his unfaithful wife in the aforementioned subterranean temple on their wedding day, or some such. None of which will obtain any relevance to the rest of the film’s narrative for a very, very long time, but nonetheless - it all feels like quintessential Ramsay Bros type business, that’s for damn sure.

Not that Rajkumar Kohli and his colleagues really manage to summon much of the overloaded atmosphere or bombast of the fully-fledged Ramsays productions, sad to say, but they more than make up for it with sheer gusto during ‘Jaani Dushman’s horror scenes, employing a range of lo-fi, in-camera special effects - most notably, primitive matte shots to create the illusion of the Wolfman’s head rotating 360 degrees, ‘Exorcist’-style, along with some absolutely adorable model work, used to depict people and horses jumping across chasms or plummeting off cliffs.

The movie’s finale, wherein our dashing hero (Sunil Dutt), the film’s now-reformed human bad guy (Shatrughan Sinha) and, uh, some other dude, team up to take on the werewolf in an extended tag-team throw down, is also exceptionally good fun - especially once our heroes get some swinging chains on the go, whilst the Wolfman begins trying to crush them by throwing gigantic stone pillars, accompanied by frequent cutaways to Sinha’s kidnapped bride shrieking in highly theatrical terror. Terrific stuff.

Unfortunately however, whereas the Ramsays were proud and unashamed monster-mongers, devoting probably around 60%-70% of the screen-time in their movies to horror, the producers of ‘Jaani Dushman’ seem to have been far more reticent about adopting the tropes of what, up to this point, had been a universally scorned and despised genre within the Indian film industry.

As such, everything I’ve described above comprises at most 40 minutes of the film’s 155 minute run time - the opening plus the conclusion, essentially. Between which, two further hours stretch out, utterly devoid of any reminder that we’re watching a horror movie.

Thankfully from my own POV, there are few things I enjoy more in life than kicking back with a ‘70s Bollywood movie on a rainy afternoon, so, even though this probably rates as second tier masala stuff at best, I still had a pretty good time with it, even though I swiftly found myself losing track of who was supposed to be marrying who, and who was whose brother, or sister, and so on.

So, within these sprawling, werewolf-free hours, we find many under-cranked scenes of people charging around beautiful mountain landscapes on white stallions, many massed brawls and several exciting tests of masculine strength for our hero and his cad-ish, spoiled-son-of-the-local-aristocrat love rival.

There is also an enjoyable sub-plot at one point about a female character whose painted-on moustache apparently convinces everyone she’s a young man, until she gets trapped in a pit with a deadly cobra, and must reveal her true feminine identity. 

And meanwhile, all of the more lady-like ladies look absolutely stunning in their brightly-hued formal / bridal finery and ceremonial jewellery, imbuing the film with an almost psychedelic overload of visual stimuli in places.

(A special shout-out is due here to Sarika Thakur, playing the lower caste orphan girl rescued from rape by Sinha’s aforementioned spoiled brat character, who has a great take-no-shit attitude, and really shines during the dance sequences.)

Speaking of which, Laxmikant-Pyarelal’s musical score for ‘Jaani Dushman’ is… fairly traditional, I would say, largely eschewing the raging synthesizers, disco beats, electric guitars and crazy echo effects which began to make Bollywood music so awesome around this period - as befits the film’s vaguely delineated historical setting, I suppose. The songs are all quite nice though, the staging of the dance routines is as splendid as you’d hope for, and with Lata [Mangeshkar], Asha [Bhosle] and Mohammad Rafi all present and correct on playback duty, who’s complaining?

Well - horror fans with less tolerance than myself for random Bollywood shtick, that’s who. In fact, they will be complaining like fuck by the time we reach the ninety-minute mark with no further werewolf action on the horizon, and they will find little to salve their woes for a good long while thereafter.

So, whilst I would never condone such a wholesale dismissal of one of the world’s most vital and unique pop cinema cultures, I will at least quietly advise more single-minded monster kids in the audience that, if your sole interest here lays in seeing a Bollywood werewolf in action, well - watch the first half hour of ‘Jaani Dushman’, then skip to the final half hour. Nothing that happens in-between was meant for you.

Consumer guide note: I watched ‘Jaani Dushman’ via a DVD put out by the Italian Filmotronik label, purchased in the UK from Strange Vice. It’s a very soft-looking SD transfer with occasional print damage, but thoroughly watchable, with nice colours, and a definite step up from bootleg quality. The film appears to be properly licenced, and the English subtitles are excellent (including translations of the song lyrics, which I always enjoy), so buy with confidence.

And meanwhile, check out this amazing range of artwork I managed to google up for the film:

*Whilst saying this, I am of course aware that Rajkumar Kohli had already directed an earlier horror film, ‘Nagin’ (1976), which I’ve not yet had a chance to see. Reading around it however suggests that it is likely a rather different kettle of fish to the bloody, monster-centric movies ushered in by ‘Darwaza’ and ‘Jaani Dushman’, so for now I’ll stick by my contention that the former likely influenced the latter.

Ranald Graham’s story begins in what by this point has become conventional HHoH fashion, with a well-to-do family (mother, father and one young child) driving through rural Surrey on their way to a holiday cottage. (Location freaks and aficionados of provisional British oddness will delight in the prominence afforded to a battered signpost specifying the distances to Aylesbury, Stoke Manderville and High Wycombe.)

In the midst of a rainstorm however, whilst traversing what looks very much like the same dark stretch of woodland road previously seen in the Children of the Full Moon episode, they pick up a tall hitchhiker, his face obscured by an over-sized yellow rain mac. Alarmingly, the stranger immediately attacks the father, throttling him and and stabbing him with a sharpened fingernail, causing the car to crash and overturn in the process.

Awakening in a suspiciously clean and idyllic country hospital, the mother of the family (Janet, played by Anna Calder-Marshall) learns that her son has survived unharmed, but that her husband (Gary Raymond) has sustained a number of injuries, and is recuperating following an emergency operation to remove fragments of glass from his throat. The evil hitchhiker, seemingly, is dead, following what the police tell Janet appears to have been an extended struggle with her husband following the accident.

Immediately, the ostensibly quiet and orderly world into which Janet has reawakened is painted by Gibson’s direction as treacherous and threatening. In a Polanski-like manner, perfectly innocent supporting characters (nurses, doctors, policemen) appear sinister and untrustworthy.

Seemingly innocuous dialogue (eg, several unrelated characters making reference to “foxes and badgers”) begins to imply a conspiratorial undertone, whilst a sense of Janet’s post-traumatic shock is very effectively conveyed, as she is assailed by momentary flashbacks to the accident and the violence which followed. This culminates in a harrowing sequence in which - dragging her son behind her - she insists on laboriously collecting the ruined remains of the family’s possessions into overstuffed plastic bags, dragging them back to the holiday cottage and burning them, as if to erase the memory of the accident and the inexplicable assault which caused it.

Subsequently, Nightmare Logic takes hold, as the identity of Janet’s “husband” becomes confused with that of the deceased “hitchhiker”, whose facial features, in defiance of all reason, appear to be identical. Other distinguishing features seem split unevenly between the two bodies, with neither quite matching the characteristics of the husband, and, when the surviving man - bandaged and still unable to speak - is discharged back into her care, Janet notices his sharpened fingernail…

Eventually taking a full on supernatural turn (although gratuitous ‘explanations’ are wisely avoided, allowing the sense of irrational nightmarishness to remain undiminished), ‘The Two Faces of Evil’ is a visceral and uncompromising update on the theme of the doppelganger. Evidently inspired to some extent by ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’, it proceeds to add a more psychotic/barbaric edge to the material, anticipating Jordan Peele’s ‘Us’ by four decades as it disturbingly fuses the disintegration of personal identity with an imminent threat of bloody violence.

Brief, minimally staged and seemingly made with a somewhat lower budget than many of the other episodes in the series, it nonetheless makes for memorable and uncomfortable viewing.

There’s an awful lot to unpack in this ambitious attempt to take the Freudian conception of the unheimlich / uncanny to its ultimate extreme, but, given that I’ve got around to it five years late, and given that it was the high profile follow up to an Oscar-winning hit, I’m sure all of its semiotic / socio-political sub-texts and cultural antecedents so on have already been discussed and picked over ad nauseam. 

So, hopefully instead I can just use this space to throw up a few random observations about how well it stands up as horror film - which will be for more enjoyable for all of us, let’s face it. 

 #1:

There is a section of about ten or fifteen minutes in the middle of ‘Us’ (delineating the script’s first and second acts, pretty much), during which the underground / ‘shadow’ version of the film’s central family make their presence known to their real world/above ground counterparts, which is absolutely, honest-to-god terrifying.

In particular, the impact of this sequence is heightened because everything which has happened up to this point has been pretty light-hearted in tone. A bit of eerie atmos, some quirky character dynamics, lots of ‘80s/’90s cultural signifiers, a few laughs… but then, without warning, the tone crashes down into fucking hades. Suddenly, things have the potential to become incredibly grim and upsetting, extremely quickly, as we enter a seemingly inescapable home invasion / captivity scenario, with (checks watch)… nearly ninety minutes still left on the clock?

Thankfully though, this is not the film Jordan Peele chose not to make - for which I am grateful, because it is not one I wanted to watch either.

So, instead, our family members make their assorted, unlikely escapes from what seemed to be their inevitable gory fates, and for the remainder of the picture we are kept entertained by stylised action sequences, an ersatz Romero zombie survival narrative, the pleasure of watching a bunch of unsympathetic secondary characters get whacked, and - under the circumstances - an unfeasibly swift return to an atmosphere defined by wisecracks, laughs and familial banter.

For a few minutes back there though…. well, let’s just say that the (admittedly rather niche) concept of being tortured and killed by a soulless, inarticulate doppelganger of yourself has rarely been conveyed on screen as powerfully as it is here.

[Not quite a ‘spoiler warning’ as such, but the relevance of this next observation is probably limited to those who have already seen the film, so you might want to skip over it if you’ve not.]

Ok, so, to get straight to the point re: the biggest problem I had with ‘Us’, in spite of its many strengths - am I alone in feeling that everything in this film would have worked so much better if we never received an explanation of what the ‘shadow people’ are, or where they came from?

I mean, we’re given a few fragmentary hints in earlier dialogue about these creatures living underground, subsisting upon raw rabbit flesh etc - which I feel essentially gives us everything we need to pencil in some suitably horrific back story for ourselves, should we care to.

And, I’m about 99% sure that whatever twisted sketches we conjure up as viewers at that point, would prove vastly more effective than the staggeringly absurd, plothole-ridden, poorly thought out ‘rational explanation’ which Peele eventually concocts to help justify the various, totally irrational, scenes and images which clearly inspired him to make this film in the first place.

Given that the ‘big reveal’ segment of the final act is by far the weakest part of the movie, jettisoning it would also have helped slash about twenty minutes from ‘Us’s somewhat bloated run time - but, more importantly, I mean… why can’t contemporary filmmakers just have the balls to keep things mysterious, y’know?

This entire film is basically patterned upon a surrealistic / sub-conscious nightmare scenario, so… can’t we just keep it on that level sometimes, please?

But no. Instead, 21st century cinema’s curse of over-explanation - along with the simultaneous insistence that a story’s protagonists must play a personal/exceptional role in whatever global/societal events are depicted - rear their ugly head yet again.

As a result, we’re left watching the equivalent of a 2.5 hour cut of ‘Night of the Living Dead’ in which the characters travel to the source of the zombie plague and discover that Ben’s dad was actually behind it all, using recovered DNA from Atlantis to re-animate the corpses of astronauts whose deaths were covered up by the CIA, because he just can’t bring himself to reconnect with his estranged son, or some such horseshit.

As I think both Romero’s masterpiece and (more to the point, perhaps) the Two Faces of Evil episode of ‘Hammer House of Horror’ clearly demonstrate, this sort of thing is just not needed - and in fact proves catastrophically detrimental to an attempt to tell this kind of story.

Random talking point:

I realise this will seem like a bit of an off-beat comparison, but having now watched all three of the horror films Jordan Peele has been to date as writer/producer/director, I keep thinking that, in some way, his directorial style and generally approach to things reminds me of no one so much as Dario Argento.

Clearly the biggest difference between the two of course is in terms of subject matter and characterisation, given that Peele seems like a good-natured fellow who invests a lot of thought and affection into his characters, and doesn’t enjoy seeing them hurt, which is certainly the polar opposite of Argento’s approach to such matters (or, the general perception of it, at least).

Aside from THAT, though…

Peele, like Argento, focusses heavily on technically audacious, attention-grabbing Big Shots and painstakingly pre-planned set-pieces of outlandish mayhem, which nonetheless tend to end up feeling a bit confused, emphasising visceral impact over coherence.

And, both directors have a tendency to announce these set-piece scenes through the use of big, booming over-amped pieces of Signifying Music.

Additionally, although ‘Get Out’ was admittedly a pretty lean and efficient piece of work, in his other two films to date, Peele also seems to share Argento’s chronic difficulties with story-telling. As writers, both mean insist on cramming their scripts with far too many ideas, themes, images, cultural references and so, without ever pausing to think them through properly, or to consider how they might cohesively combine into a single narrative.

Related to which, both directors are also entirely shameless in their willingness to confront their viewers with events or ideas so ridiculous that they basically short circuit any attempt at rational thought, presenting projects which dispense with real world logic and diverge from their core ideas/themes to a quite extraordinary degree. Which is definitely a compliment in Argento’s case, once you get used to his uniquely peculiar MO. In Peele’s case, I’m note quite so sure...

Certainly, ‘Us’ sees him turning in a movie which gets about half way toward being absolutely extraordinary, then over-reaches itself to the point of absurdity.

Which, in a similar spirit, concludes my random, insufficiently processed, thoughts on ‘Us’ for the time being.

Despite boasting a name suggestive of pulpy gothic horror pleasures, ‘The Mark of Satan’ actually follows the pattern set by the preceding The Two Faces of Evil episode, easily beating it to the prize for the grimmest and most uncomfortable instalment of the series, even though it can’t quite match its predecessor in terms of dramatic power or overall quality.

Eschewing the bucolic Home Counties charm of most earlier episodes, Don Shaw’s script instead presents a grimy, impoverished and morally / emotionally stunted vision of working class England, wherein a weak-willed trainee hospital orderly (Edwyn Rord, played by Peter McEnery) suddenly finds himself afflicted by what we’re forced to assume is a sudden, catastrophic descent into paranoid schizophrenia.

Possibly reacting to the pressures of his overbearing mother, his absent father and his transfer to a gruesome and rather stressful new role in the hospital morgue - or possibly not - we join Edwyn as he becomes obsessively fixated on a series of synchronicities involving the number ‘9’, and, after being put to work on the corpse of a patient who seemingly died on the operating table after subjecting himself to a bit of DIY trepanation, he also begins to believe that he has contracted a “virus of evil” from the dead man.

Crackly police radio messages which Edwyn apparently receives from the weather vein above the hospital car park certainly don’t help, and in short, he is soon nursing one monster of a persecution complex, becoming convinced that his colleagues (including theatrically-minded Welsh pathologist Dr Harris, played with Pleasence-esque relish by Emrys James) are involved in an elaborate Satanic conspiracy against him - orchestrated, of course, by his nagging, rude and relentlessly abusive mother back home.

Things go from bad to worse for Edwyn once he becomes involved in the machinations of the family’s lodger Stella, played with truly bone-chilling, ‘10 Rillington Place’-esque understatement by Ken Russell regular Georgina Hale. A coldly self-serving single mother with a new baby and a psychopathic streak a mile wide, Stella sets about using Edwyn’s delusions to her own advantage in a horribly banal, small-minded fashion (she just wants her landlady out of the way so that she can sit in the front room, basically), exhibiting no recognisable human emotion whatsoever as the ensuing carnage plays out.

Managing to incorporate autopsies, surgical grue, old lady killing, self-trepanation and implied baby-eating, this is the probably the only episode of HHoH which I can really imagine incurring the wrath of whatever censorious bodies oversaw the content of ITV back in 1980, which is perhaps why they left it until last on the broadcast schedule for the series.

Certainly, it’s easy to imagine Mary Whitehouse and her ilk spontaneously combusting as soon as they got a load of this shit, callously pumped into the nation’s living rooms under the guise of family entertainment, but in tone as well as content, ‘The Mark of the Devil’ is some dark, mean-spirited business.

Full of lurid, fisheye-lensed psychotic freakouts, writhing tormented faces and other such OTT visuals, it is baroque, clammy, claustrophobic and nasty; curiously in view of Hale’s presence, it all feels a bit like the work of some pound shop Ken Russell substitute, letting loose in a really bad mood.

Plot-wise, Shaw’s churning brew of unappetising weirdness soon settles down into a ham-fisted and thoroughly exploitative take on the perils of mental illness which, in its own weird way, is probably about as close as anything on British TV ever came to the nihilistic spirit of the ‘70s American grindhouse.

Whether or not you choose to take any of this as a recommendation of course, is entirely down to you and your… aesthetic sensibility? (Doesn’t sound quite as good as ‘conscience’ that, does it, but no frowning judgement from me in these pages.)

So, er, thanks for that, Hammer House of Horror! See you all down the pub for a celebratory, post-series drink? Or, uh…. perhaps not?

This will likely be a short review, partly I don’t really have any deep thoughts I need to unpack with regard to Irish writer-director Damian McCarthy’s second feature film to date, and partly because it is very much the kind of movie whose structure makes it difficult to get too deep into discussion of plot detail without straying into spoiler territory.

But, I do at least want to record the fact that I watched it, and really liked it, in the hope this recommendation might inspire a loyal reader or two to check it out - possibly even in time for Halloween next week, as this one definitely makes a good fit for the season.

So - our setting is contemporary Ireland, where Ted (Gwilym Lee) and his wife Dani (Carolyn Bracken) are in the process of renovating a remote stone farmhouse. Ted is a doctor who works the night shift at a nearby psychiatric hospital, leaving Dani alone overnight.

Subsequent to a suitably baleful and unnerving opening sequence establishing this situation, it becomes clear that Dani has in fact been murdered, seemingly by patient recently released from Ted’s hospital, who intruded into the house during the night, and who in turn has subsequently been found dead in grotesque and inexplicable circumstances.

Jumping forward exactly one year in the timeline, Dani’s twin sister Darcy (also played by Bracken) re-enters the life of Ted, who is living in the now completed farmhouse with his new girlfriend Yana (Caroline Menton), seemingly determined to obtain some kind of closure and/or clarity vis-a-vis her sister’s death.

It is with the introduction of the Darcy character that the tone of the film shifts from a sharp, cynical brand of 21st century realism incorporating all the usual accoutrements of contemporary horror (smartphones, jump scares, dissociative editing, drone shots, rumbling sound design, softly spoken yet totally self-centred characters), and, admirably, instead begins to embrace what I can only describe as a mammoth dose of dusty, old-fashioned creepitude.

Darcy, you see, is a blind woman with keenly attuned psychic abilities, who runs a fantastical antique shop specialising in the sale of ‘cursed objects’ - each of them precisely calibrated via Darcy’s paranormal abilities to ensure that, whilst legitimate purchasers may sleep easy, shoplifters taking advantage of the sightless proprietor will have a very bad time indeed.

Which, needless to say, does not bode well for the substantial locked trunk which Darcy arranges to be delivered to Ted and Yana’s farmhouse, in advance of her own surprise arrival…

…and, if you think that this sounds like a conceit which an early 20th century ghost story anthologist might have rejected for being a bit too whimsical and on-the-nose, well… suffice to say that it ultimately feels as if the contents of several entire Pan Books of Horror Stories have been put through a blender to create the script for ‘Oddity’. In the best possible way, I hasten to add.

Or, perhaps it is instead more helpful to instead suggest that things play out rather like one of those projects in which all of the episodes in an Amicus-style portmanteau movie have been sewn together into a single story - but done with such care that, in this case, you can barely even see the joins.

Picking the film apart post-viewing, I can identify at least six or seven different horror tropes / story set ups woven together here - I won’t list them all, because, again, spoilers - but somehow, they are all successfully combined into a simple, minimal narrative featuring just six inter-connected characters and two locations.

The result, essentially, in an agreeably pulpy kind of supernatural riff on a ‘Les Diaboliques’-model thriller, which, in defiance of all storytelling logic, all hangs together just beautifully.

The unusual mixture of real world verisimilitude and atmospheric, occult-tinged fantasy is finely balanced here too, with the more outré elements of the story taking on an eerie, surrealistic power which they would likely not have achieved had the whole thing been framed as a Burton-esque retro gothic horror type palaver (which, thank the dark gods, it is not).

The scary bits are properly scary, the whimsical/creepy bits are whimsical and creepy… and I’d even go so far as to say that the funny bits are funny, although they’re a long time coming, admittedly.

And… that’s about all I have to say on the matter really.

A great little movie, well worth making time for, and a great choice for Halloween-adjacent viewing, I reckon.

So, if you find yourself ploughing trough the fallow fields of whatever streaming services you’re signed up to later this week after the trick or treaters have gone to bed - take a chance on ‘Oddity’, and I’ll wager a very small amount of money you won’t regret it.

Not exactly a world-beating achievement, I’ll grant you, but given my long-standing failure to finish anything related to this blog, I think it deserves a very subdued toot of triumph.

Anyway. One of the pleasures of watching ‘Hammer House of Horror’ via the Network blu-ray release (which looks lovely, but is entirely devoid of contextual extras) is that I went into each episode cold, with no idea at all of what to expect. Due to its being a TV series, HHoH receives no coverage in any of the horror movie reference works I habitually consult on uch matters, and, prior to viewing, I deliberately avoided seeking any discussion / reviews online.

As a result, I remain entirely uninformed about the behind the scenes deal-making which shepherded this series into existence, about the influence exerted upon it by any individual personalities, or any of that standard issue ‘making of..’ type stuff.

Given that most of the series’ scripts were one-offs credited to professional TV writers though, my assumption is that they must each have been commissioned to deliver a story based on a pre-existing brief, and at least some of the ground rules set down by the producers / script editors are clear to see.

Most obviously, all of the episodes utilise a contemporary, southern English setting. With only a few exceptions, the majority of them also feature a young male-female couple or nuclear family as protagonists / audience identity figures. Further to this, each episode seems to have been obliged to include some mild sexual content or brief nudity (framed in a manner which listeners to the Chart Music podcast will immediately recognise as ‘dadisfaction’), along with some equally mild gore.

Beyond this basic ‘house (of horror) style’ though, my overriding impression is that there were essentially two competing visions in play re: deciding what this series should actually *be*.

On the one hand, we have the idea of a ‘Twilight Zone’-style affair, offering high concept, ‘twist in the tail’ stories which aim to disturb and unsettle. This approach seems to have ultimately been the more successful one; as well as giving rise to the most highly regarded episodes [see below], it also laid the groundwork for the subsequent ‘Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense’ series, which followed in 1984.

At the same time though, there also seems to have been an opposing voice in the room, advocating for the idea that ‘Hammer House of Horror’ should incorporate the kind of content which fans of Hammer’s earlier gothic horror films might have reasonably expected from a televised continuation of their favourite brand. Thus, the series seems to have been obliged to deliver a vampire episode, a werewolf episode, a Satanic cult episode, and so on.

Broadly speaking, the episodes which veered in this pulpier direction seem to have been less well received, but personally I really enjoyed them, which is reflected in my ranking of the episodes below.

Irrespective of whether or not my vision of two battling producers had any basis in reality though, one of the things which I feel makes the series to consistently interesting is the tension created by these two conflicting approaches - particularly when the requirement to drag the more trad / gothic tropes into a present day setting leads to things getting thoroughly mixed up.

We can easily see for instance how a number of ‘mid-table’ episodes (‘Charlie Boy’, ‘Witching Time’, ‘The House That Bled To Death’ ) benefit greatly from the extremely peculiar directions in which their writers have to take the material, in order to reconcile old school horror fare with both a more contemporary TV drama aesthetic and a short story-style ‘surprise ending’ format.

By my reckoning in fact, the only purely straight-forward gothic tales offered up by HHoH are ‘Guardians of the Abyss’ and ‘Children of the Full Moon’; and, whilst I thoroughly enjoyed them both, it’s easy to imagine more critical / mainstream viewers finding their comforting, old fashioned brand of Dennis Wheatley-esque horror a bit of an anachronism by the dawn of the ‘80s, however much the ‘monster kids’ and sundry weirdos in the audience may have thrilled at the rare opportunity to see some full-blooded genre content beamed directly into their family living rooms.

For the most part though, I tend to believe it is the clash between these conflicting agendas which allowed the series to remain so consistently surprising and enjoyable throughout its tenure.

Of the thirteen episodes counted down below, I would say that the top ten all fall broadly within the ‘good’ or ‘excellent’ categories, and of the remainder, even #11 and #12 manage to include some eccentric / amusing elements which make them worth a watch, leaving only the dismal ‘Growing Pains’ as a total write off - which stands as a pretty remarkable hit rate, given how wildly variable the series is in terms of tone, execution, production values and objective dramatic quality.

Without further ado then, here, finally, is my HHoH chart run-down, complete with links to the posts in which I originally wrote about each episode.

1. The Silent Scream

Peter Cushing’s last great performance? Nuff said, I should think.

2. The Two Faces of Evil

Relentless, disorientating and flat out bloody terrifying. A great example of what TV horror can achieve.

3. Carpathian Eagle

Gets about 50% of the way toward becoming ‘The Sweeney vs Dracula’.

4. Guardian of the Abyss

Like a pilot for the ‘80s ‘The Devil Rides Out’ spin-off series nobody asked for, but that everyone secretly wanted. (Or: that insane episode of ‘Lovejoy’ which some kid told you about in the playground in 1987, and which you were *sure* they just made up… until now.)

5. Rude Awakening

Neon meat dream of a Surrey Estate Agent, as a lady in a succession of, shall we say, attention-grabbing outfits leads Denholm Elliot through the tormented depths of his sub-conscious mind.

6. Children of the Full Moon

Diana Dors, creepy Victorian children and some splendid locations all add up to what (given the dearth of competition) still probably ranks as one of the best British werewolf things ever.

7. Charlie Boy

Admirably full-on yuppie voodoo doll mayhem.

8. The Mark of Satan

Nasty, squalid, mad, uncomfortable - and that’s just how I felt by the time I hit the end credits. Still not entirely sure how to take this one, but it certainly makes an impression.

9. The House That Bled To Death

The haunted pebble-dashed semi which lurks deep in my repressed childhood memories… OR DOES IT? Etc.

10. Witching Time

Time travelling witch! Jon Finch with a mullet, on keyboards. The campiest episode by quite some distance, but deliriously enjoyable all the same.

11. The Thirteenth Reunion

A pretty glum business on the whole, but elevated by an absolutely berserk ‘twist’ ending and a fine supporting performance from Warren Clarke.

12. Visitor From the Grave

 A staggeringly inept load of toss from old hands Peter Sasdy and Tony Hinds - but it at least has the decency to be unintentionally amusing in places.

13. Growing Pains

What was this one even about again? I’m not sure I even care to remember, but I do recall some unpleasant business involving rabbits and dogs, just to add insult to injury. The pits.

When looking at a figure like Lynch - who has been a giant presence within any kind of art or culture I’d deign to care about, throughout my life - it would be all too easy to begin throwing ill-judged superlatives around.

For instance, in terms of what we might colloquially refer to as “being weird” - or, more precisely, using art and narrative to open the gates to previously unknown realms within/without/above/beneath the fabric of quotidian reality - I’d tend to remove him from any discussion around late 20th/early 21st century filmmakers, and instead place him in the same category as figures as diverse as Lovecraft, Burroughs (W.S., not E.R., although he’s cool too), Blake or Dali.

Like all of the above, his explorations of unmapped terrain are so totally suffused with his own personality, his own background and aesthetic concerns, they’ve become melded into a totally singular body of work, which for the most part defies comparison with that of any contemporaries in their chosen field. Instantly recognisable yet totally inimitable, impenetrable as an eerily misshapen hunk of granite in the middle of the cultural highway.

Unlike the others on the above list however, Lynch consistently managed to filter this vision through an industry requiring millions of dollars, labyrinthine layers of corporate approval and hundreds of collaborators, and still somehow managed to deliver it to receptive audiences in a form which felt like more-or-less 100% proof.

And, in stark contrast to the aforementioned exemplars, he achieved all this whilst still giving every impression of being a real swell guy, whom I’m sure most of us would have loved the opportunity to share a cup of (damn fine) coffee with - his sense of humour and unflappable, humane optimism as unique and cherished as his approaches to art, craft, metaphysics and whatever else.

But, yeah - overblown superlatives and vast generalisations. Probably not helpful.

Strategy # 2 when composing an obit post meanwhile, is to take the personal angle, so let’s do that.

Have I ever told this blog the story of how I first discovered the work of David Lynch? I don’t believe I have, so, ok, here we go…

I must have been about 14 or 15 years old, and (being a slow starter in this regard, with censorious parents and little access to non-mainstream culture to draw upon), my entire knowledge/experience of cinema comprised science fiction (which I loved across all media), dumb blockbusters and even dumber comedies. Maybe the occasional black & white classic mixed in there, but that was about it.

David Lynch, at the time, was going through an extended period of critical disapproval / disappearance from The Official Culture (post-‘Fire Walk With Me’, pre-‘Mulholland Drive’), and as such his name meant nothing to me.

‘Twin Peaks’, at this point, seemed to be treated as a quirky cultural phenomenon which had come and gone some years beforehand, mentioned in print only in relation to the various cast members whose careers it had helped launch, whilst a year or two later, I recall ‘Lost Highway’ achieving only a very marginal release in the UK (did it even go straight to video?), and receiving Ebert-esque reviews of the, “oh, is this guy still making his pretentious, sleazy films which make no sense” variety.

This was the late ‘90s, pre-internet void in other words, and if you were looking for “weird movie directors” and had no access to somewhat more enlightened alternative/underground print media, you were pointed straight in the direction of Tim Burton or Terry Gilliam - do not pass Go, and do not collect $200.

BUT ANYWAY. One day during the school holidays, my parents had assigned me the task of going through a box of unlabelled, recorded-off-TV VHS tapes, to find out what was on them, and to determine whether or not it was worth keeping. (Nearly three decades later incidentally, it occurs to me that this chore sounds like pretty much the most fun day that I could possibly imagine having - but, I digress.)

So, you probably saw this coming, but, second or third tape out of the box - it was ‘Blue Velvet’.

(How it got there, I have no idea, but I can only assume it was a result of my parents’ habit of occasionally setting the video to record a movie which had been given a five-star rating in the Radio Times, then either forgetting about it or deciding they didn’t like it, or something along those lines.)

Not only was it ‘Blue Velvet’ furthermore, but (presumably due to the fact that either the video player’s timer or the TV schedules were constantly fucking up), the tape had missed the entire opening of the movie (including the all-important credits), beginning - so memory serves - shortly before the moment in which the camera descends into the severed ear.

You can picture the instant “what the fuck is THIS” reaction from teenage me, and likewise imagine the effect which the rest of film had on me; an overwhelming mixture of danger, terror and total bafflement / disorientation which I daresay I’ve been searching for in cinema ever since.

This must have been a BBC broadcast, because there were no ad breaks, and no on-screen idents to let me know what I was watching, or to reassure me that it was actually a commercially released motion picture and not some insane, Videodrome-esque televisual hallucination. (In analogue, pan-and-scan form, with all detail and texture rubbed off the images and sound, such distinctions could easily get a bit blurry.)

The only thing which served to ground me through this fateful viewing was (ironically enough, given how terrifying he is in the film) the fact that I recognised Dennis Hopper. So I knew this thing was… at least kind of legitimate?

With the unlabelled tape subsequently ferretted away somewhere as a powerful piece of contraband, the next thing I recall - imagine this, youngsters - actually going to the local library, finding some massive movie reference book, and looking up the entry on Hopper to try to figure out the identity of this insane spectacle which had wreaked such untold havoc upon my impressionable young mind.

Naturally enough, it was easy to pinpoint the culprit as ‘Blue Velvet’, to follow this to the corresponding entry for David Lynch… and what follows from there is fairly self-explanatory.

My brother and I were just reaching the age where our parents were easing up and allowing us to buy / rent tapes without close supervision, and so a weird twofer of ‘Blue Velvet’ and ‘Wild At Heart’, the first season of ‘Twin Peaks’, ‘The Elephant Man’, ‘Dune’, the initial VHS release of ‘Lost Highway’ and (wow) a DVD of ‘Fire Walk With Me’ were gradually acquired over the next few years, as we spent our days muttering darkly about fire, cherry pie and the nature of “the other place”.

I’m not going to say that this process was directly responsible for my signing up to take an A-Level in Film Studies aged sixteen (by then toting Lynch, Cronenberg and Romero as my heroes, despite having only seen a merest handful of each of their movies), or for anything that’s happened since as I’ve moved deeper into an obsession with / appreciation of film during my adult life; but it definitely played a part.

I’m sure that others, across multiple generations, have similar tales to tell, which is all basically a long-winded way of getting around to the point that, whilst the appeal of Lynch’s work will probably never be universal (and I can easily sympathise with the frustration those immune to its charms must feel as the likes of me bang on, and on, about it), he nonetheless managed to reach an almost unfeasibly large number of people across the globe, and to touch and change each one of us more deeply than we perhaps know how to understand.

He has left us with feelings, ideas, images and sounds which will remain with us throughout our lives, but which will never become settled, nostalgic, over-familiar; they will always be alive, always changing, always lurking just around the corner, behind the trash cans outside Winkies - always wild.

And, churlish as it may seem to make such a comment about an artist whose achievements were so unprecedented, and who left us with eighteen solid hours of new directorial material (which I must get around to re-watching, incidentally) just a few short years ago - it still pains me deeply to realise there will now be no more of them.