The Fiend

The Fiend (1972) Dir. Robert Hartford-Davies. Written by Brian Comport. Starring Ann Todd, Patrick Magee, Tony Beckley,

Could it be that I'm finally losing interest in early seventies horrors; that the "Kensington Gore" has finally reached saturation point? "The Fiend" should be a favourite of mine; there are murders a plenty, Patrick MaGee in full-on weirdo-priest mode, seventies dolly-birds, choice dialogue: "Get off your fat arse!" "Charming! Not so much of the fat arse!". And Camp Freddie from The Italian Job as a mother-fixated, religious-zealot, swimming instructor. There are a few knocked-off references to "Peeping Tom" and the soundtrack is surprisingly funky.

So why did I find it so...meh? Well, the story didn't really go anywhere. Freddie is a nutter for no obvious reason; some bits of business about his mum and dad. Well I'm sorry but you don't see Bruce Wayne carrying on like that! There are extended and tedious parallel scenes between the swimming pool and the baptismal font. The police, personified by always delightful David Hodge, show up and do nothing. The two sisters at the centre of the plot, a nurse and an investigative journalist, are poorly sketched at best and the resolution seems to be a bit self consciously "controversial".

And of course every girl who dies in the film, and they're all girls, dies with her tits out. I think maybe I'm just getting tired of the casual despatching of blameless women, that seems to have no consequence other than a newspaper headline or a radio report. A blonde girl in a short skirt in a 1970's film is a juicy big-eyed cow wandering blithely into an abattoir. One of the victims actually ends up on a hook in a meat-locker; discovered by a courting butcher* and his fancy-piece. No wonder they had a three day weeks in the seventies - who wants to empty the bins or bury the dead when you could be having a squalid fumble by a side of pork?

Still the music is very good. Music to kill girls by.


*the most un-erotic words in the English language are "Courting Butcher"

Death Line

There is a consensus on the Big Three of British Horror films. They are, in reverse order, "Blood on Satan's Claw" "The Wicker Man" and "Witch-finder General". While they are all excellent films, each sharing a sense of rustic dread, an arable 'istory if you will, (though the binding cheerfulness of the Summerisle community is a million miles away from the cruel, blasted heaths and sheep-like peasantry of "Witch-finder") I have problems with each of them.

"Blood on Satan's Claw", the least well known of the three, has an extraordinary plot, incredible music and a fabulous cast. It suffers from having a very confused second act and a protracted, lip-smacking rape scene. "Witch-finder General" is certainly an excellent film in a lot of ways, not least for Vincent Price's "you'll wish I was camp again" performance and unlike a Dali painting I find it a hard watch. It's too cruel, too bleak, too nihilistic. I like a bit of fun in my 70's horror romps and this, like the similar but weaker "Cry of the Banshee", is unrelenting in its depiction of man's inhumanity to woman. The Wicker Man is brilliant, obviously; the soundtrack beautiful, the plot hilarious and Chris Lee is hot buttered charm all the way through. It's my problem really; I've just seen it too many times. There was a point in my life where I was watching it on a weekly basis. Nothing holds up to that level of scrutiny, not even the very worthy remake starring Nicholas Cage.*

The major problem that I have with these films however is that they are not the best of 70's British Horror. I wouldn't ordinarily pitch perfectly worthwhile and clearly unrelated films into spurious competition with each other, and if I do so now it is because the truly best 70's horror is so over-looked. Even Gatiss and Rigby ignored it on their laudable exploration of horror cinema on BBC4. That film, as you may have guessed if you've read the above title, is DEATH-LINE. And it is a pip!

Death-line starts like no other horror film. We are introduced to what sounds like a stripper's anthem played on a mini-moog and a spare drum-kit. The music accompanies a colourful blur with what appears to be a smudged keyhole in the centre of it. As the camera gradually focuses we see it is the bowler hatted silhouette of a man staring into the window of a Soho peep-show. We're a long way from Summerisle. The camera blurs in and out as we follow the moustachioed perv around the porn warren, neon signs in red and blue deliquescing like lava lamps, the unnatural Formica yellows and greens lending the streets an indelible verisimilitude. This is Soho in the seventies. It could be nowhere else.

Having completed his circuit, to no obvious end, our saucy salary-man makes his way to Russell Square (bit of a walk) where he propositions a young woman and gets a knee in the knackers for his pains. Wheezing, as well as dealing with the crushing sense of ennui that comes with a blow to the under-carriage, he suddenly realises that things can get a lot worse than a kick in the balls.

On the last train home come Alex (David Ladd) and Patricia (Sharon Gurney - last seen in the Corpse where she play's Michael Gough's daughter. In real life she is his daughter-in-law). He's a deeply unpleasant American student and she's a woefully soppy English one. As they step over the body of the businessman these credentials are quickly established: "Patricia, in New York you walk over these guys!". Patricia insist that he goes to tell the guard and he does so, grudgingly, telling her to stay with the body. She doesn't want to be left with it a follows him awkwardly up the stairs like a beaten dog. They find the guard and then a policeman. But when they return to view the body it has disappeared! So they look like dicks!

Cut to the offices of Inspector Calhoun (Donald Pleasance); a ranting, unshaven lunatic in a misshapen hat and soiled raincoat: he's our hero! It is the next morning and Calhoun is going about his day; blaming tea-bags on "Indians", fishing said tea-bag out of his cup with a biro or a dart, bollocking a female officer and confiding to his assistant "I fancy 'er". While all the "business" is going on he has been listening carefully to Detective Inspector Roger's retelling of the incident on the platform of Russell Square. It seems the bowler-hatted perve was not without influence. He is James Manfred O.B.E. a big shot (Calhoun pronounces it "shit") at the Ministry of Defence. This rings a bell with Calhoun as he remembers another person going missing at Russell Square. He brings in the hapless Alex for questioning and accuses him of being a thief. As a parting shot Calhoun barks "Get yer 'air cut!" at the sullen hippy and gives him a look of such malicious joy that it's impossible not to like him.

Next comes one of the truly remarkable scenes in British horror and for my money in all cinema. After a brief expositional detour with Clive Swift, where he explains that in the 18th century an Tube tunnel collapsed on the workers who were digging it (men and women) and the bankrupt, morally and otherwise, Rail Company left them there to die, the camera works its way through the glistening bowels of the abandoned tunnel. In what seems like one glorious tracking shot we move past dripping masonry to the empty eyes of the half-dead Manfred, propped up beneath the hanging corpses of other half eaten victims, Manfred's certain fate. The camera continues its unblinking journey through more rotting viscera and piles of rubble until we come across "The Man", a shuffling Neanderthal figure and his dying and apparently pregnant sister-wife. Hugh Armstrong, the actor who plays "The Man" didn't work as an actor for another ten years after "Death Line" and after that assayed roles such as "Jun Priest" in "Beastmaster" or "Station Officer" in "Minder". This is baffling. His performance as "The Man" is a towering achievement, turning a shuffling madman role into something sympathetic and sensitive, quite a performance considering he has to communicate his entire emotive spectrum through straggling hair, a thick beard and a single line of dialogue! How the Oscars missed this astonishing turn I will never know. It's like they had something against murderous, incestuous, subterranean sub-humans in low budget British horror films! After this sentimental introduction to the Man and the Woman, the camera continues its journey, through piles of corpses, fallen family members arranged in neat stacks, each commemorated with stolen jewellery arranged on their chests. The distracted sobs of the grieving Man abate and what we get now is a dumb-show of the tunnel collapse story, from the pounding of pick-axes on rock, to the tunnel's collapse, to the screams of the condemned. It is told beautifully in sound, effectively negating Clive's thumb-nail sketch, the cold eye of the camera drifting onto salient details, the sign for the abandoned "Museum" station, the illuminated hoops of tunnel walls, the forbidding pile of rubble that sealed the fate of those trapped behind it and then the camera lifts up, like a departing spirit, and out into the still familiar Russell Square tube. People tell me I like bad films but that scene, with its economy, technical accomplishment and nagging suggestion, can compete with anything in cinema.


Calhoun and Rogers nip round to Manfred's flat, Calhoun helping himself to booze and breaking into his locked drawers ("suspicious bastard") until Chris Lee turns up as a patrician M.I.5 enforcer and warns them off. Calhoun isn't having it!

Alex and Patricia break up, but bless her, she can't last five minutes on her own and pitches up back at the flat with a bottle of chianti and her mascara running down her cheeks. She still continues to use the tube, late at night, alone, as if nothing odd has happened.

The Man attacks and kills three London Underground workers, one of whom might reasonably be called the most Cockney man who ever lived. This is his day in his own words. "Yesterday? Let me see, ah. Got up 11. Had a nice day in. Got up 11 o'clock. Ham, eggs for breakfast. In the afternoon went to the pictures. In the evening I saw that bird. What a sort, what a performer I tell ya! Lovely...hey!". He stops there to get his head kicked in by The Man.

Calhoun and Rogers go to the pub and get pissed for no reason at all. The scariest thing in the film is Calhoun pissed. As Rogers plays pinball in his over-coat, Calhoun mercilessly harangues the bar-man, his mood swinging like Benny Goodman in a gibbet, alternating pissed joshing "Are you aware that it is an offence to sell alcoholic beverages outside of proper drinking hours?" with surly digs "What's the matter with you?" "Where'd you get that coat? Are you aware that that is stealing by finding?" to apoplectic ranting "The Queen? Indeed god bless her. AND DON'T YOU SMILE WHEN YOU SAY THAT TOO! Are you aware that her gracious majesty is over there, over-seas, working the far flung empire, helping to keep the world safe for the likes of...flogging her pretty little guts out, so you can live in a democracy? Look at this place, a knocking shop!". This scene doesn't move the action on or have any bearing on the film at all really but it's my favourite scene and by far the most frightening. Calhoun is the sort of raging repressed lunatic you feel could do anything!

Late at night, on the platform, Alex and Patricia become separated. The Man drags her off to his lair immediately. The police find blood on her handbag. The abductor is suffering from acute anaemia and plague! Calhoun knows he's onto something very unusual indeed and the film spirals into a desperate man-hunt before The Man can kill Patricia. Or eat her. Or worse.

Actually the film gets bit lost here, there are no real surprises and, while the suspense is ratcheted up, Alex gets most of the screen time so inevitably some of the tension is lost. David Ladd's performance as Alex is both wooden and sullen, like a teenage wardrobe on holiday with its parents. But it's not his film, it's Donald Pleasance's film, in a role I would have liked to see him play again and again. An alarmingly hairy police officer hands him a file and says "Anything else sir?". Without looking up he replies with gravitas, "Beards".

It's the way he tells 'em.









*kidding! Alright? KIDDING!

I think I like the "Charlie's Angels" films. I'm very surprised.

Gold.

Gold certainly has an interesting history. Filmed in a month in 1968 by Bob Levis, Gold is a self conscious attempt to break down the conservative attitudes prevalent in American culture. It was banned in America, made its cinematic debut in London in 1972 and is finally making its DVD release for its fortieth anniversary. It was considered a lost film for 40 years and its legend fore-shadows it as the craziest, most out-there blast of counter-cultural craziness ever committed to celluloid.

And it is almost unremittingly awful. In 1968 America was entrenched in the Vietnam war, the civil rights movement had reached a boiling intensity after the assassination of Martin Luther King and in Paris the students were fighting the police in the streets. The smell of cordite and burning hair was in the air and the world seemed ripe for revolution. The tag-line for this movie is: “The Revolution has Begun – Clothing Optional”. It’s that level of bone-headed, stoner credulousness that scores through this film; there’s no script, no jokes, no story. There is no technical aptitude or anything worth conveying – that’s what society wants them to do with its rules!

The dialogue is inaudible, even when it’s been re-dubbed, the acting is like a fourth-form drama club sponsored by Red Bull and the politics equates to “Hey wouldn’t the world be a better place if, like, uptight squares could just like mellow out and go skinny dipping?”.

And yet there’s a lot more of the “the Man” lurking in these hippy’s make-up than they realise. The women here have nothing to offer the revolution but their tits and some occasional backing vocals. In one scene Jinks, having rigged the elections introduces a stripper named Miss Gold-Nugget (Caroline Parr) to entertain the bovine local electorate. Back stage he beats her into unconsciousness for acting like a whore. Oh the hypocrisy, but whose is it: the reactionary Jinks or the revolutionary film-makers who play violence against women for laughs?

A plot coalesces eventually like a scab on a wound: Jinks imprisons the local hippies on trumped up charges of public-indecency in what looks suspiciously like an over-grown tennis court. It’s up to limping local half-wit Hawk (Del Close) to save them which he does using his home made bombs. Eventually Jinks is captured by the naked mob and forced to skinny dip until he likes it. He does.

The film does have one thing going for it: the soundtrack is uniformly excellent with tunes from the MC5, David McWilliams and Beastly Times. But these songs are all available else where and really have no bearing on the film other than making it more palatable than it has any right to be.

You know what they say: if you can’t remember the sixties you’re probably trying to block out the primal trauma of seeing this film.

Wetherby

directed and written by David Hare. 1985. starring Vanessa Redgrave, Judi Dench, Tim McInnerny, Suzanna Hamilton


A quietly disturbing, beautifully written meditation on alienation in Thatcher's Britain. They really don't make 'em like this anymore. They didn't make many of them then.


This is a story of loneliness, about the unbridgeable gaps between people. It is quiet and it is savage; full of unspoken/unspeakable moments and furious drunken soliquising. And while it is unmistakably a period piece now it is also a timeless study on what it means to "live a life of quiet desperation"; or what it is to be English.

Vanessa Redgrave, in a TOWERING performance, plays Jean Travers, a teacher in the Yorkshire suburb of Wetherby. A drunken dinner party she holds for her friends is attended by John Morgan (Tim McInnerny) an enigmatic young man whom she assumes is a guest of Marcia, (Judi Dench) her best friend. Shortly afterwards he returns to her house carrying a pair of dead pheasants and without warning commits suicide in front of her at her kitchen table.

So there is a puzzle at the centre of "Wetherby" - why did Morgan choose to shoot himself in front of Jean? Was it the desperate act of a lonely man looking for any sense of connection. The police investigation reveals that Morgan was obsessed with local librarian Karen Creasy (Suzanna Hamilton) described by Jean as "the sort of girl people become obsessed with" but known to Marcia for her "central disfiguring blankness". Karen invites herself to live with Jean for the next few days until a tense confrontation sends the young woman away.

This is a film about emptiness and dislocation, about one generations inability to interact with another: the drunken ranting post war generation and the numbed separateness of Thatcher's babies. This dislocation is reflected in the film non-linear structure too, and in the haunting parallel narrative of Jean's doomed romance with an Air Man.

This is a quiet film, intercut with splenetic ranting, a simple human story, striated with shadows thrown forward and back, colouring, shaping and obfuscating. And it is simply a classic of English cinema from a time when English cinema was about to stop.

The Night of the Demons

Adam Gierasch's re-make of the "big-in-Detroit" 80's gore-fest is a surprisingly fun way to waste your time. Assuming you can get past the soundtrack: there's horror and there's just bloody awful.

Well this was a surprise. I was expecting a version of "Night of the Demon", Jacques Tourneur's inky black foray into shadow and suggestion, fatally flawed by the unwanted intrusion a big scary monster. But this is a remake of "Night of the Demons": tawdry 80's shlock-horror gore-fest. And things dont stat well...

Director Adam Geirasch's "mission statement" ( and I am franky horrified by the idea of a director's mission statement! ) reveals "My aim for "Night of the Demons" was to make the ultimate film that my seventeen-year old self wanted to see. Punk rock, demons, scantily clothed women, gore and big scares!" I suspect me and Adam were very different kinds of 17 year olds, given that my idea of a good time was wearing an off-the shoulder cardigan, covered in badges and hanging around in record and coffee shops never buying anything. But I'm older now and sufficiently coarsened so I can see where he's coming from.

The film opens with some dodgy sepia back-story. Eighty years ago, on Halloween night, Evangeline Broussard hanged herself from the balcony of her New Orleans Manor house. This Halloween Angela (Shannon Elizabeth) has rented the place out and everybody who's anybody is going. This doesn't include local drug dealer Colin ( Edward Furlong, and he's really let himself go - he looks like James Dean Bradfield!) who is desperate to get inside and reap the rich rewards of a captive audience. When the police arrive and break up the party only seven guests remain behind: three moronic men and four nubile young women in light bondage gear. It's then that they realise that the gates have been locked and their "cell-phones" have stopped working. And that's when weird shit starts happening.

Inspired stuff, eh? Did i mention it comes with that dull, chugging American version of goth-music that was everywhere in nineties, and fewer acting chops than you might expect from your local butcher's window.

However, HOWEVER. I did quite like it. Sure, it's the sort of film that IMDB reviewers would describe as a "turn off your brain, get a pizza and a six-pack" classic but in fact it's not quite that stupid. Furlong is remarkably unaffected and scuzzy and, despite the uber-boobedness of many of the women, the playing is fairly naturalistic. There are some great lines: "Maybe pantry is French for fucking deathtrap" and "she stuck a lipstick in her boob and it fell out of her pussy, okay?". It's the okay that gets me every time!

And it has the best "breasts-behaving-badly" scene since Ken Russell's "Gothic".

By the end you are really rooting for Monica Keena's Maddie, so much so that at the rather matter of fact end to the film,she makes it seem cool and stylish, rather than hastily pat. No mean feat.

So "Night of the Demons" came from behind, hacked bloodily away at my preconception and eventually made me like it. Though maybe i'm not such hard-arse after all: I DID thrill to the blink and you miss it Linnea Quiqley cameo. And it takes a special kind of pathetic nerd to do that!

Daughters of Darkness

From the sheer oddness of seeing the words "Cine Vog" before the credits sequence, from the squat black font of the titles played out against the blood red back-drop, from the oscillating progishness of the music, you know that "Daughters of Darkness" is going to be a wild ride. And it doesn't disappoint. There is something cruel and kinky at bottom here; this is a world (well a Belgium) where relationships are marked by violence and betrayal, where nothing is tender or kind, and words when spoken are not used to mollify and placate but to wound. That's when words are used - the Francois de Roubaix' furious player-piano soundtrack does a lot of the talking here.

Daughters of Darkness is the story of newlyweds Valerie (Danielle Ouimet) and Stefan (John Karlen - Harvey from "Cagney and Lacey" unrecognisable here as a kind of evil Bjorn from Abba!) who arrive at the amazing Hotel des Thermes in Ostend as a stop-gap before taking the ferry to England to meet Stefan's mother. It's at the hotel that they meet Countess Elizabeth Bathory (the sublime Delphine Seyrig) and her secretary Ilona ( an astonishingly foxy Andrea Rau.) A rash of bloody murders anticipate both of their arrivals and all is not what it seems: Stefan is in no hurry to get back to England, and the Concierge recognises the Countess from 40 years before and though he is in in late middle age she hasn't aged a day.

There is a lot going on in Daughters of Darkness. It's an exercise in glorious style which never-the-less has a coherent narrative. It has a truly international cast but this only adds to the starkness and oddness of the circumstances: the two couples wander around the enormous, Art deco hotel haggling over who will get the Royal Suite to the only member of staff! The food is delicious but there is no one to cook it! The film should be a picture postcard from Belgium, in the same way "In Bruges" was, but Ostend pictured here is unremittingly bleak, the sea view from the hotel window turbulent and dotted with ferries. The retired detective who investigates the murders "as a hobby" spends much of the film standing on the grey sand-flats outside in almost comically torrential rain.

There are old and new horror tropes here; when Stefan cuts himself shaving, a la Jonathan Harker, he is wearing a modish shorty dressing gown. The Countess clearly models her style on Marlene Dietrich but Ilona is a dead-ringer for Guido Crepax's "Valentina" comics, themselves a a reference to Louise Brook's timelessly chic bob. (Crepax's creation was filmed as "Baba Yaga" in 1973 but I maintain Andrea Rau's creation is he more impressive).

It's Delphine Seyrig's film, from the first time we see her; her brilliant teeth framed by blood-red lips, framed by the darkness of her veil, like a 40s key-light was trained upon her. She is seductive, mesmerising and controlled, perfectly presented and precise. Her fluttering hands, the way her inner life moves like changing weather across her bone white face. And then suddenly she is ruthless and pragmatic. The masks slips to reveal another mask.

I love this film. Beautifully shot, wonderfully realised, stinking of decadance and amorality like three day old lillies. And this is a rare bloom, director Harry Kumel made hardly any other films of note ( barring 1973's little seen "Malpertuis") his last outing being almost 20 years ago. This is a timely realease and while it's difficult not feel short-changed by the complete lack of extras ( a travelogue around Ostend from the time would have worked !) it's good to see this amazing film released for a wider audience.

The Flesh and Blood Show

1972. dir. Pete Walker. starring Ray Brookes, Jenny Hanley, Robin Askwith, Luan Peters

It took four goes before my DVD player accepted the disc for "The Flesh and Blood Show" - it evidently had some difficulty digesting it. When it did finally stutter into life the first thing on screen, apart from a muted, grainy sea-scape is the legend: "The final sequences in this film have been photographed in THREE DIMENSIONS". It then advises me to reach for the "coloured viewer" provided on my entrance into the theatre. Balls. I will now never be able to enjoy "the pleasures of the THIRD DIMENSION".

The caption dissolves into the murky sea and, once a spectral mist lifts, we see the west Pier at Brighton hove-ing* into view, like Lina Romay parting the veil at the start of "Female Vampire". The camera moves slowly towards the pier and the soundscape distorts from lapping water and wheeling gulls to a snatch of "Othello" extravagantly applauded and as the camera moves down amongst the blackened supporting struts beneath the beleaguered structure, to a woman's screams. And there on the dark water we see a slick of Kensington Gore coiling through the tide. It's a surprisingly effective opening, or it would have been if the print wasn't so horribly muddy and indistinct.

We cut to a London "pad" where the doorbell rings in the middle of the night. The flat's occupants, two girls in their early twenties, one of whom is naked, bicker about answering the door. This being the seventies, and a film, the naked one goes. It's Luan Peters, Hammer-babe and all round good egg. On opening the door, still naked, she encounters a man clutching a knife which is buried deep in his chest. He stumbles into the flat, stumbling and painfully rising to his feet again, like James Brown winding up a show. In fact it is the two girls he has been winding up and he produces the fake knife with a flourish. What a good joke! Turns out he's an actor; they're all actors. That's why instead of phoning the police about this unfunny mad-man, Luan slips on a dressing gown and makes everyone coffee, ready for a chin-scratching session about cahier de cinema.

It turns out that all three of them have been invited to perform in a theatrical piece called "The Flesh and Blood Show", rehearsals starting in an old abandoned theatre on the pier at "Eastcliffe-on-Sea". This isn't so much clumsy exposition as the entire plot being given away early so we can see the cast being hacked to pieces as quickly as possible. So what's next? Meeting the cast; a series of human scabbards each more dopey than the last. We've met bosomy social nudist Luan already, as well as her plain-Jane flat-mate and chuckles the comedy stab-victim. Next up is Jenny "Magpie" Hanley, as an up-and-coming starlet, tied to the engagement with an iron-clad contract and desperate to get away. There's throbbin' Robin Askwith and his familliar bum faced grin, an exact cross between Brian Jones and Doctor Zaius. Ray "Mr Benn" Brooks brings his usual pragmatic charm to the proceedings and the rest of the cast are made up galumphing "New Generation" types with voices like "I speak your weight" machines and the sort of rangy, gangling bodies you just don't see any more: austerity kids who didn't see a Sherbert Dab until they were 15. There will be a winnowing. A muddy and unecessarily murky winnowing, where breasts could be knee-caps and thighs could be shoulders and the best cuts are all over the floor of the editing suite. Luckily the explanatory dialogue is as thick as the shit smeared over the camera's lens.

First murder: hearing screams the thesps go and investigate. In the bowels of the theatre they find a row of wax masks. Wait a minute - THAT'S NO WAX MASK! After the gruesome discovery a long tracking shot with a gloved hand stuck on the end of it hyperventilates over the corpse. Well there's your baddy!

(an aside)

The soundtrack by Cyril Ornadel (well known to...well to me as the composer of "Sapphire and Steel"'s theme music) is surprisingly varied and affecting; the mournful oboes giving it a sort of "Small Films" melancholy. It would never be allowed today where everything would be Murray Gold-ed to the max, but here, with this creaking narrative and submarine palette, it adds much needed colour and detail.

The actors descend upon a local cafe and are loud and rude to the staff in a way that suggests they are "Free-Spirits". They meet a retired major there who is very taken by them and they refuse his offer to go back to his. Then Candace Glendenning turns up to replace the murdered girl that nobody, save Ray Brooks, gives a shit about.

Murder 2: Our bosomy pal goes for an unbelievably inky stroll along the pier after an arguement with her boyfriend. Not a good idea. She gets chatting to some sort of wheezing tramp who subsequently attacks her in a way that's not immediately obvious as the screen is basically black throughout. I wonder if a young(ish) Derek Jarman sat through this. She survives but weirdo stab-myself-in-the-chest-guy has disappeared.

Candace's aunt has a guest-house and they de-camp there for baths and tea. Candace's aunt starts, unprompted, to tell them the story of the famous actor Arnold Gates who performed on the pier during the war and disappeared mysteriously with his young wife and another actor. She goes into this in some quite exacting detail. Then the boring major turns up and Jenny Hanley is rude to him. He doesn't mind, he's just happy with the company of the young people, but she is getting de-ja-vuey all over the place! There may be something afoot!

I have to say, even discounting her bosom's bra-vura performance, Luan Peters is pretty good in this, about the only actor who impresses. Her Carol is, in turn, snippily sarcastic, a sneering bitch, fluidly theatrical and itchily panicked. She spent most of her career, sadly, as a pair of comedy tits in ITV sitcoms but she is he only one in this film, apart from dependable Brooks, who appears to be acting at all! Of course this is a Pete walker film and acting in a Pete Walker film isn't everything - in fact it's rarely anything! She dies, falling out of the bottom of a pier. You don't really see it. It IS filmed but you don't really see it. Then Candace dies, tits out under a spotlight, and knackering the actor's chance of free bed and board with her aunt. That's the final stroke for Ray who immediately works out who the real villain is prompted by the mysterious major.

No spoilers here, well no further spoilers here, but pretty soon we're in 3D murder recreation scenario-land. You couldn't call Pete "Unlikely Stand-up" Walker a meat and potatoes director, this is some pretty thin gruel, but there's lots of ace fun to be had with a great cast and lots of early seventies "physical theatre" bollocks contrasted with Arthur Gates fruity Donald Wolfett stylings. I really wish you could see what was going on though: this is like a glass-bottom boat-ride without the glass-bottom-boat: there's lots to see here but no way of seeing it.






*east sussex coastal town pun, there.

The Horror of The Black Museum

1958. dir. Arthur Crabtree. starring: Michael Gough, June Cunningham,Shirley Ann Field

I'm often asked which film is my favourite film. (I'm not, I'm usually asked "Are there any films that you don't like?" To which I usually answer "Of course: I don't like "Apocalypse Now", "The Exorcist", "The Godfather" or any of the "Star Wars" films. There's usually a fight. I'm often called "a professional contrarion" which is inaccurate: I'm never paid for these opinions. Or anything else for that matter.)

So, if I'm rarely asked to name my favourite film I have had stock answers for years: "A Matter of Life and Death" (I'm not sure that's even my favourite Powell & Pressburger film now) or "Valerie and her Week of Wonders". Both great films to be sure but not the films I watch the most. That peculiar honour belongs to "The Horror of The Black Museum". In terms of sheer watchability it destroys the competition like a BBC producer rigging the results.

It starts well; the rigged binoculars are literally blinding and open up some of the charged and tin-eared dialogue that binds the entire production together: the seam that runs through this film like fat through bacon is dunder-headed, clumsy and often unecessary exposition, most obviously in the tin-mouth of Shirley Ann Field who invests lines like "I certainly hope I can come again because some day soon I expect to be part of Rick's life" with a sort of sing-song lifelessness; like an echoing chorus of a skipping song from a long abandoned play-ground. She is equally, remarkably, dreadful in Edmond T Greville's "Beat Girl" a year later and in "Peeping Tom" the year after that (though Michael Powell cannily cast her as an excruciatingly bad actress in that one!). At the other end of the spectrum is a truly apoplectic performance from Michael Gough; swivel-eyed, limping, lip-smacking and sneering Gough has clearly decided that the only way to get the bitter taste of the dialogue out of his mouth is to spit it like chewing tobacco into a spittoon.

Gough plays Edmond Bancroft; true-crime writer and professional gadfly to the local police. Indeed we know he's a bad egg from the very off so the only real mystery to this film is why the police keep allowing him into their headquarters, crime-scenes or parties. He turns up, limps around a bit, calls them cocks and toddles off again. A series of terrible murders are baffling the police and of course it's Bancroft who's doing them. In the safe confines of his own self constructed Black Museum ("better than the police's")he details his plans to his dozy ward Rick (Graham Curnow). For a crimial genius he leaves a lot of loose ends lying about: the woman he buys his horror-props from and whom later attempts to blackmail him (she meets a sticky end). The blousy girlfriend who calls him half a man (another a sticky end). The doctor who recognises a link between his heart palpatations and the crimes and follows him back to his evil lair (a sticky end followed by a very clean end). He's right to mock the police - they haven't got a clue!

There's so much to enjoy here: the Welsh madman the police interrogate over the murders ("I have a death ray in my eyes!"), the transatlantic accents used to indicate tough-guy hepness, June Cunningham's suicide blonde performance as Bancroft's bought woman, including a cha-cha-cha for one in an empty fifties saloon bar. Rick's Jimmy Dean bomber jacket and gargoyle death-mask combination. The fact that Bancroft's Black Museum appears to have both a working laser and acid plunge pool (it really is better than Scotland Yard's!)and that he has invented a Jekyl and Hyde serum! In most films that would be the plot - here it is barely even mentioned! That's the strength of this film - it is truly organic, it buds and grows off in all sorts of directions as and when it feels like it! The ending feels like a parody of King Kong! Why not? That neatly sets Crabtree and Gough up for their next endeavour - Konga!

Donkeyskin

Donkeyskin (Peau d'ane) (1970) dir. Jacques Demy. starring Catherine Deneauve, Jacques Perrin, Jean Marais, Baroness Delphine Seyrig,

We open on a book-case book-ended by blue lions rampant against an ivy covered wall. Michel LeGrand's music is beautiful here: stately but jazzy, with rococco flourishes. The music here seems almost too ornate, too frothy to ever penetrate but no...there it is: Deneauve's "Amour Fou" song in particular will persecute you relentlessly, jabbing away like a mosquito with boundary issues.

But I'm getting ahead of myself...

One particular leather-bound tome sweeps open and we're at a beautiful French castle with Jean Marais' handsome jaw jutting so far out of a window he looks like he'll need flying buttresses to hold it up.*

Jean Marais is the King. He is happy because he lives in a castle and has a beautiful wife and daughter and a donkey that shits gold. No really. This may be a fairy story but it's a French fairy story.

He also has this thing about the colour blue; he wears a lot of blue, his castle is blue and his servants are painted blue, even their faces. Clearly William Wallace was involved at the recruitment stage.

So everything's alright in the garden until, disaster, the Queen falls ill. And, get this, on her death bed she makes the King swear an oath not to marry again until he has found a woman more beautiful than her!

As an aside, at this point, I should point out that Deneauve is playing both the Queen and the Princess in this film and to play the dying Queen she wears a long red wig. The resemblance to her sister, and co-star in earlier Jacques Demy film "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon", Francoise Dorleac is quite uncanny. Dorleac had died in a car crash between the making of these two films and I find the effect quite disconcerting; adding a real frisson to these scenes.

The King agrees to her request, believing he will not have to act on it, and the Queen is buried - in a giant snow-storm. But the King's advisors will not let him be: they insist that it is bad for the state for him to remain Queenless and harangue him endlessly as he sits on his throne (which is a giant white Jeff Koons cat). They search throughout the land for eligible batchelorettes but they all ming to the highest mong, excepting one. She is graceful and regal, poised and self posessed. She exceeds even the dead Queen in all queenly qualities: she's his daughter. These are some of the worst advisors ever! How did the princess' portrait even get in there with the others?

At that moment the King sticks his head out of the window and there in the courtyard, dressed in blue, playing her harpsichord and singing about "l'amour fou" is the Princess - talk about playing into his big incestuous hands!

He decides to woo her by reading "the poets of the future" (Jean Cocteau at a guess - research? I don't do research!) while following her around the room like a sexually aggressive smell. Lynx Java, perhaps. He pops the question and, when she's not best pleased, rephrases it as more of a definite statement. He then goes to visit an Apothecary who has a nice line in leather-bound books and foaming conical flasks but a very poor line in advice, as he too thinks it's a capital idea for the King to marry his daughter. The King and his advisors seem to be a little bit "country". The princess, a little bit rock and roll, flits off in her dinghy to ask advice of her Fairy Godmother, the magnificent Delphine Seyrig. The foxy F.G. sings an excellent song advising that "a daughter who marries her father can expect nothing but tainted offspring". It's a bold but timely lyric and one the King should probably hear.

She sets the Princess up with a series of delaying tactics: she must demand of her father three impossible dresses; one the colour of the weather, one the colour of the moon and one the colour of the sun. If he cannot provide them for her she will not marry him. The King get's his best man on it and, with remarkable ease, the dresses are manufactured to her satisfaction. She's easily pleased: the sun dress is just gold, the moon one silver with spots and the weather dress is just clouds. Moving clouds admittedly but still just clouds!

The next request is the real stinger though: she promises to marry him if he gives her the skin of his magic bauble-shitting donkey. This is bad news; the King relies upon regular deposits from the bank of ass. He gets pondery with the quandary until the wee small hours and finally delivers the pelt personally while princess feigns sleep. Realising that she cannot escape from her father's nuptual intentions, she slips on the skin (donkey-jacket anyone?) and heads off into the night.

And there, I think, I'll leave it because I really do want everybody to see this film. This is candy-coloured craziness from first to last; a great, gaudy puzzle of a film. Look out for:

A slo-motion Catherine Deneauve, dressed as a wobbly-headed donkey, running through the forest. The flowers that wink and smile, the old lady who spits frogs, the topless women living in bushes in the King's throne room, and the ending, which has to be seen to be believed.

The only films "Donkeyskin" even vaguely resembles are "Valerie and her Week of Wonders" (a bit more Angela Carter-y) and "The Bluebird" (a bit more rubbish. Though it does feature George Cole as a dog.)Neither of which are half as much fun.

This film is beyond camp, beyond kistch and beyond much of cinema. You've seen nothing like it. So see it.

*yer actual Medieval architecture joke there.

Lifeforce

Lifeforce. (1985) dir. Tobe Hooper. starring:Sir Aubrey Morris, Mathilda May, Patrick Stewart, That Bloke from "The Stuntman",

We begin up the arse of a disaster. A disaster, so the film claims in one of its periodic winnets of exposition, is one of the earliest names for a comet; literally an "evil star". Like Piers Morgan. Despite the film's tidal blood-letting we are never flushed from this black-hole. Which is not to say that this not a brilliant film; it may not be the last word in British cinema but it's probably the colon.

Some British Astronauts (yeah yeah yeah - the past is a foreign country etc) are being menaced in the tail of Halley's comet by a giant umbrella. Nicholas Ball glides about on a nifty and clearly non-British made jet-pack against snippets of unused incidental music from Excalibur.* It's a solidly British space mission. You can tell this because the ship is called "The Churchill" and you can open the air-lock with the head of a cork-screw. There is dialogue like "Soft-dock confirmed" and an awful lot of "Oh My Gods!". There is pencil-snapping tension as the astronauts pad about the mysterious umbrella-ship like cacky-nappied toddlers. One of them isn't English. Keep your eye on him.

It's thirty days later and Halley's comet is still in the sky. But three strange caskets have been brought back to earth from the mysterious ship, though the astronauts have disappeared.

"We were just talking about the caskets when they popped open of their own accord" says a security guard. They continue to be mysterious as they contain three sexy naked people; two boys and a girl. The girl wakes up. Peter Gothard (that's his name, not a description of the action) runs through a series of doors to see the beautiful naked alien-girl (the perfectly cast and formed Mathilda May) nipping off, the security guard freshly toasted behind her. Why Gothard remains immune to her charms is not altogether clear. He confesses she was "The most overwhelmingly female presence I have ever encountered". But it doesn't seem to do much for him.

Meanwhile, in Texas, an escape pod from "The Churchill" is found with Col. Tom Carlsen (Steve Railsback - The Stuntman, with his worried animal eyes) still alive. ("I'm sure you'd rather be recuperating with a pretty nurse.") He is flown to London and tells how the crew were drained of their life-force. In order to save the Earth, The Stuntman set fire to the shuttle and escaped in the pod. During hypnosis it is clear that The Stuntman has a psychic link to the female alien so he and Peter Firth, try to track down the female alien in a confusing business with Patrick Stewart and a heavily sedated woman in Yorkshire. It reminded me of Patrick Wymark's "We must allow the evil to grow" line in "Blood on Satan's Claw" - a weird caveat to justify an otherwise padded and pointless part of the film.

Some good dialogue here-

"I notice from your door that you're interested in bio-chemistry."

"That girl was no girl!"

"I'm not paid to believe nuffink, am I?" (from the pen of Colin Wilson, ladies and gentlemen**)

The alien chaps come to life but are immediately despatched before you see any of their bits. The murdered guard wakes up at his own autopsy and makes a noise like a rusty wheel-barrow before sucking the life out of the surgeon. This needs to be nipped in the bud!

(Mooted tag-line for the film - "They're not on for long")

Mathilda turns up in a diaphonous hoodie and gives The Stuntman magical powers and a savage hot-flush. But never mind that - Frank Finlay's turned up and he's got a magic sword!

At the 120 minute mark there is some more exposition; and not before time:

"She took some of my energy and she gave me some of her energy!"

Ah.

There is an audience with the Prime Minister about the Space Vampire question. He proves to be a sweaty fella with an on-going blue-light problem. More choice dialogue:

"Sterilisation by thermo-nuclear device!" "Have you heard anything about the ship?" "Ship?" "The space ship" "Oh yeah, it's directly over London!"

We're moving at break-neck speed now! (cautionary note to The Stuntman: if you're driving through a plague of zombies, as he is now for some reason, wind your window up! You wouldn't do it at Longleat!) The magic sword works! Yay. But Frank Finlay's been got at! Boo. The space vampire turned to dust when the sword was removed. What? Meanwhile Peter Firth is being chased down tunnels by an angry mob before being startled by a Prefab Sprout poster.

The Stuntman and Mathilda have a floaty naked snog, Firth stabs them with the magic sword and she bogs off back to Spencer Tunick world in a beam of light.

And that's it. What have we learned? We have learned that smooth and urbane Henry Mancini wrote the theme for this cin-emetic. We find that Adrian Hedley from "Jigsaw" was involved as "head of mime" (where was all the mime?) And we have learned that Colin Wilson has a deft and naturalistic touch with dialogue. But we haven't learned what happened for the last two hours. That much remains a mystery.






*Wagner wrote a lot of incidental music, right. Incident packed!

** It isn't really. He wrote the original novel "Space Vampires" and had no part in the screenplay here. I'm sure his original dialogue was marked with authenticity and a vivid sense of nuance.

Villain

Villain. (1971) dir. Michael Tuchner starring Richard Burton, Ian MacShane, Joss Ackland, Fiona Lewis,

Imagine "The Krays" scripted by the writers of "The Likely Lads". There are no gentle treatises on male identity here though, just a seething turnip-faced madman throwing a croupier out of a window. Meet Vic Dakin, East End mummy's boy, all-round bad egg and dropper of the afore-mentioned croupier from a great height, just because he assumes that he might be about to talk to the police. Imagine, if this is what he does to a croupier what would he do to you or I; simple, humble folk? The croupier does talk but only to ask Vic not to hurt him. This makes Vic despise him even more and he does not comply with his wishes. Next Vic's going about his business: being rude to a man with an acid stomach and dissing the general public: "Punters," he snarls, "telly all week and a fuck on Saturday!". Which sounds alright to me, actually.

The only thing he doesn't despise is pretty-boy Ian MacShane's Wolf, (that's his name, not an exotic pet) whom he fancies rotten. You can tell he fancies him as he repeatedly punches him in the stomach and flings money at him so that he can "buy a new suit".

Don't waste any tears on Wolf though, he makes his money pimping posh totty Fiona Lewis (airing her tits like a greivance) to ageing satyr Donald Sinden (every man in this film is a stuffed envelope or a stuffed bra away from corruption). MacShane's Wolf is very similar to Tony Curtis' turn as Sydney Falco in "The Sweet Smell of Success*"; two weasly, street-smart hustlers trading on their good looks. Except in that film, a decade earlier and American, Curtis only sustains a metaphorical bumming. MacShane isnt quite so lucky (though to be honest we never see him take more than a punch in the guts).

Hot on the trail of Vic and his glam-rock associates (only a horse-brass shy of being in Mud) are the indomitable Colin "The English are coming" Welland and a bloke. You can tell they're coppers because they wear trench-coats all the time and rough up narks outside betting shops. Time is surely running out for Dakin with these bloodhounds on his trail. So when Dakin sets up a job with fellow East-end toughnut T.P. McKenna (silver-haired and puckish; imagine Gay Byrne as a cockney gang-boss - he disappears halfway through the film and is never spoken of again). This job is well off Vic's patch and involves a suitcase with go-go gadget legs you know he's on a hiding to nothing.

I'm not a big fan of "grit". There's a world of difference between Giallo's rich, red blood, ornate stage sets and neatly appointed studio apartments and the grey and brown, mitten-on-a-railing mien of seventies London. This is a London where blue-skinned strippers perform in pasties with sleepy snakes and a gang-land boss lives in a few pokey rooms with his mum upstairs. But there is a lot to love in this film: Burton's committment to glaring madly at everyone and his lack of commitment to his accent which veers from Sid James to James Cagney depending on his level of apoplexy. MacShane is appropriately oily as Wolf, but crucially, is good looking enough to get away with it; insinuating in his honeyed Northern tones (another suspiciously north-of-Watford cockney - what happened to Eastend equity in the seventies? Were they all in Hollywood playing hairdressers?). The script is littered with juicy one-liners and harder hitting than you might imagine. And I did enjoy one Clement/La Franais aside: when Vic gets serious he wants to bring "the tough-nuts down from Newcastle". Surprisingly Bob Ferris and Terry Collier don't make an appearance.


* A properly brilliant film. I should probably review that too.

Torso

Torso (1973) dir. by Sergio Martino, starring Tina Aumont, Suzy Kendall, Luc Merenda,

This may be the perfect film.It has everything that you could ever want from a film. You don't believe me? How about these for a multiplicity of pretty persuaders...opportunistic lesbianism, a hippy orgy with flute and bongo freak-outs, a bit with a scarf. A black-gloved murderer in a mask. The crumbling gorgeousness of Rome (it may well be the eternal city but it's getting on a bit!), "positive" racism as a charming postcard from a simpler, more apalling age, ditto the dribbling village idiot. A fantastic score, great cinematography and sets and did I mention girls, girls, girls. And of course it wouldn't be an early seventies Giallo without a nonsensical title: who's torso? Or who is Torso? I remember that Adam Ant's dance troupe were called "Torso" - are they in some way implicated? (Incidentally don't go looking for help from the film's original Italian title. In Italy the film was known as "I corpi presentano tracce di violenza carnale" or "The bodies contained traces of carnal knowledge" which is typically innacurate. Of all the murderer's victims only the first could feasibly (I nearly wrote conceivably) contain...er..."traces" and even then the...cough...traces wouldn't be the murderer's.)

And...about two thirds of the way through this campy schlock-fest something astonishing happens. As (unlikely teen student)Suzy Kendell is trapped alone in a villa with the killer (and THAT's what they should have called it!) this film turns into a stunningly effective and beautifully realised suspense thriller. A pair of shoes left on the stairs, a twisted ankle and a dropped key all add up to a tortuous twenty minutes of scrotum tightening tension*.

So the plot makes no sense. So the pseudo-Freudian motivation is not so much tacked on as grafted. So there is more significant eye-to-eye contact in this film than on Sergio Leone's show-reel. The last third of this film is as tense and convincing as anything in cinema.

And if the doctor didn't receive a "Best International Cardigan" gong there is no justice in this crazy world.



* If you have no scrotum to tighten why not try tightening a friend's?

Inseminoid

Inseminoid. dir. Norman J Warren, starring Judy Geeson, Steph Beacham, some guys,

As we look at "Inseminoid", the last film to bother cinemas* by Horror auteur Norman J Warren, questions crowd in around us: why is Steph Beacham interviewing everyone? Why did the costume designer think that in the future everyone would be dressed like Mike Nolan from Bucks Fizz**. Have the producers of "Alien" seen this film, or more importantly have their lawyers. And why, dear god why, does that woman cut her foot off?

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

It's the future, or at least the future of the 80s, so that even outer-space mining colonies look like the Multicoloured Swap Shop with moon-rocks; you expect to see Cheggers bouncing off an inflatable around every corner. In this future men are wiry and balding and women rangey and horse-faced; it's "Planet of the Minor Royals". They spend their time banging holes into the crust of this mysterious planet and giving each other back-rubs. It's all pretty idyllic despite what Cliff, the socio-mythologist, (all mining parties have one of those; it's normal - you're just nit-picking)intuits about the worship of dualism in the long dead society,perhaps as a consequence of the planet having two suns. None of which we actually see. Our entire experience of the savage planet consists of an early Pink Floyd light show masquerading as a credits sequence. The rest of the film is a series of violent deaths in a series of dull interlinking caves. The caves are in fact real; much of "Insemenoid" was filmed in Wookie Hole, making the shoot cold, miserable and fatiguing for the cast. The caves have been photographed and lit in such a way as to make them look like papier-mache: you'll swear they shiver when a foot falls near them.

Anyway, plot, plot, plot: Dean, one of the wiry men, goes out, comes back with a sweaty top lip and a couple of scratches. There's a bit of business with some crystals and Judy Geeson comes a cropper from a big, rapey rubber guy who promptly disappears for the rest of the film. Geeson gives a bravarra performance here. The script allows her run the gamut of emotion, below the dignity level, and she gives it everything, gnashing teeth, rolling eyes; limbs thrashing like a tickled squid. Over a punishing and seemingly endless sequence of la Geeson screaming her head off on an operating table while the ship's doctor appears to stick a lava-lamp up her. Quite why she imagines the doctor is doing this (he seems to be a perfectly affable bloke - rangey, balding; you know the type)is not clear. Is this her mind translating unspeakable, unbearable events into a understandable human experience? Is the creature clouding her thoughts with these projected images to the same end? Is it Norman J Warren realising that the least convincing rape in cinematic history was never going to play? (Though Gabriel Byrne's full-suit-of-armour-effort in "Excalibur" comes a close second.)

After this protracted and unpleasant scene the film doesn't seem to have anywhere to go. So we get a lot of running about; Geeson in her shrink-to- fit wranglers, the top-button undone because, you know, she's pregnant. She runs around with a chin-load of gore attacking everybody (though one of the main characters appears to die of a grazed shin). I won't spoil the ending but it is a deeply unsatisfying resolution; a bit like giving up booze for January. It's a Norman J Warren film, so you can expect Captain Zepp style production values, but really it must be the least of his films: there's nothing here to match "Prey's" slow-motion-pond-fight or "Terror's" Mike Yarwood impression of Dario Argento.



*He actually made three more films after this one. But none of them bothered anything but the top shelf of your local video store.



** I always want to put a possesive apostrophe in front of the "s" in Bucks as if the fizz belonged to, say, Buck Rogers. Or a tiny deer. Or a dollar.

Reverb

This seems to be the longest film review I've ever done. I don't know why. The film certainly doesn't desrve it - it's not very good. And in fact it's not really even a review as I'm not really saying anything about the film; I'm merely sarcastically commenting on the action for cheap laughs. There's no commentary, no critical distance, no attempt to analyse its themes, tropes or mores. It's one long sneering spoiler. But it's not like any of you are ever actually going to watch this film...

Oh, and it's not the worst modern British horror film I've seen. That would be House of Nine.

Reverb. (2008) dir. Eitan Arrusi. starring: Eva Birtwhistle, Leo Gregory, Margo Stilley.

We open on the hum of white-noise, grainy footage of viscera on tiled walls; analogue recording equipment and a hobbling figure making its way down a poorly lit corridor.

It's a horror film, then.

But we cut to an attractive indie-ish couple doing their mundane day jobs. It's tedious, repetetive and soul corroding stuff but they haven't lost their edge. He says the company name in a sarcastic manner and rolls his eyes. She draws a v-sign on a post-it note and sticks on her fore-head. No e-mail in that office then. Surely there must be more to their lives than this? They seem so young and spunky: look; he's driving erratically and she's smoking drugs in the car! Cool, they've got me on-side; they're free-spirits, not mindless drones. But which one is Dharma? And which one is Greg?

Meet Alex (Leo Gregory): he used to be in a band with his gal-pal Maddie (Eva Birtwhistle) until it all went wrong for some reason. He's been offered a chance to get onto a compilation album as long as he has the track by Monday - but he doesn't have any tracks at all! Maddie calls in a few favours and gets him a weekend at the world's most ridiculously glamorous recording studio which, for some reason, closes at weekend. And evenings (Rock-star work; it's a steady nine-to-five).

Once inside he starts listening to XFM for inspiration(!) and is flabbergasted by the industrial-lite indie pop that he hears! (listen to some early 90's Curve*, mate - it'll blow your fucking mind!)His creative juices flow and he records a bit of it and shifts the pitch slightly. That's his now. But wait, what's this peculiar frequency?

"There's nothing happening on the outboards," says Maddie, "if it was distorting on the record it would have the same distortion pattern as the recording...it's not happening on either of those!" I don't know what this means - surely the record is the recording? I've been in bands. I've worked in call-centres too but I've never managed to acquire the sort of casual and authoratitive sound-engineering skills exhibited here. I've been walking around with my eyes closed.

Maddie decides to use her dictaphone(from space) to record the room itself and when the recording is played back the soundwave shouts "Help Me" in a spooky voice. So Maddie decides to go for a walk. On her own. Down a hundred miles of dimly lit corridor.

Now, I don't want to come across like a policeman watching The Bill and snorting derisively at procedural innacuracies BUT...every recording studio I've ever been to has beige carpet, a little kitchen for making tea and a couple of bijou studios, built for speed not comfort (or speed cut with comfort, if you get a bad batch). They do not look like high-end hotels with ersatz Jamie Hewlitt art on the walls and endless moodily-lit corridors.

Alex is making music. Where does the music come from? Nobody actually seems to be playing or recording anything but the consoles keep leaping into life and playing hidden tracks of people having a really rough time of it.

"Probably just some muso joke," say Alex, convincingly.

Maddie isolates another track of human suffering - a woman's voice pleading for help. What to do? Ring the authorities saying enough is enough? No, she has sex with Alex. With her knickers on.

He's no better. After a post-coital chat about his creative muse: "One minute there's silence in my head and the next there's a song!" he drifts off into troubled dreams; full of blood and people wandering down tunnels looking like they've shit their pants. He wakes up (or does he?) with blood on his hands (or has he?) and discovers shit emo lyrics felt-tipped all over his body (or are they? Yes. Shit, I mean)

Maddie wakes up paralysed in her pants and terrorised by some shadowy horror. And then she isn't paralysed, so goes and does yet more moody mooching around. She discovers, on the internet, that a musician named Mark Griffin (rock 'n' roll!) committed suicide at the age of 27 in that very studio. We know he was 27 because the on-screen Google-search flashes up the names of Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain before settling on Griffin (so presumably the search request was "musicians who died at 27 who have had films made about them"). Griffin believed, as the shamen believed, that the recorded voice steals the subject's soul. Though Mr.C has subsequently distanced himself from these comments.

Alex appears back in the room, unecessarily abruptly, with pages of felt-tipped lyrics: "I've got it!" he says. And soon Maddie is doing an accapella version of his song - but something is not right. Alex rips off his shirt and wraps it around the microphone. Perhaps the studio should have scrimped a bit more on the tastefully lit corridors and bought a few pop-shields.

Amazingly, as Maddie has perfect pitch, timing and phrasing, her vocals fit perfectly when Mark hits the button marked "generic indie band".

"This is the one that's going to turn it all around!" he says, convincingly.

Maddie has lost her dictaphone and it's back to wandering the corridors alone again. She ends up in the cellar but it's morning. And nothing has happened.

At home in her surprisingly nice flat for a twenty-something call-centre worker; all high-tec computer equipment and National guitars, Maddie discovers the voice shouting "help me!" is a perfect match for her own voice; using the voice-recognition soft-ware fitted as standard on modern lap-tops.

She does further research. It seems that the song "Blood Room", originally sampled from XFM, is also an experimental film, also made by Mark Griffin in 1971. He's an auteur! The film is shit but it looks an awful lot like Alex's nightmares. Alex goes round to his ex-girlfriend's flat to try and get her to sing on his new project. "Just listen!" he yells, thrusting a C90 cassette at her. A C90? Wha?

Alex and Maddie try to track down "Blood Room" the album. They haven't slept for about twenty four hours by this point and that is possibly why, instead of just looking it up on Spotify they go to see surly record collector Wurzel, who lives in an office full of records and sunlight.

Wurzel has the record and about 300lbs of exposition: Griffin made his record, mysteriously, in one night and nobody knows who the singer is! Hmnn.

Back in the studio and Alex and his ex (Margo Stilley) are rocking the new tune. Maddie wants to show them the spooky cellar. Wurzel turns up, panicked, to tell them he's found out what a "Blood Room" is for. Full house; time for people to start dying! At the 52 minute mark!

"The Blood Room:" says Wurzel,"at the moment of death we released a sound that would open a door between worlds!"

Alex has some sort of fit in the bathroom and wakes up with "help me" scored into his arm like an honest Richey Manic. Wurzel hears a lot of noise and the camera starts to shake. For some reason if Alex finishes his song it will open the gates of hell. It's surprising that this hasn't happened previously given that this is a recording studio - one imagines that songs are recorded on the premises quite regularly.

Alex has got his full invocation on and, after an inept cat-scrap between ex-girlfriend and recent shag, ties Maddie up and threatens her with a mic-stand. Then he grabs the ex and pulls her into what we're now agreeing to call the "Blood Room", where he ties her up in mic-flexes and gets her drunk by messily pouring booze over her head. Maddie escapes, wanders back amongst the corridors and finds Wurzel dead, presumably from a terminal case of vibration white finger.

Alex catches her again, drags her into the "Blood Room" to make her special noise, while she looks into the cold dead eyes of Margo Stilley (no diservice to her, she's meant to be dead).

At the last minute she knocks over her microphone, it lands upon the booze
saturated wires and electrocutes Alex at his recording desk. The Fire Brigade arrive. Maddie thinks she is fine. She isn't.

There. Done. Don't watch this. It's not very good.








*slightly superfluous. There is only early 90s Curve. as far as anybody knows.

Martyrs

Martyrs. (2008) dir. Pascal Laugier, starring Morjana Alaoui, Mylene Jampanoi,

I wouldn't watch this. Here's what you do: go and watch Radiohead's video for "Just". It's exactly the same as this story except you don't have to put up with an hour of watching a woman being skinned alive. The more I watch "transgressive" cinema the more I like seventies' children's television. What is wrong with a kindly rag and bone man? There were no starved tortured women in "Egghead's robot" - there was Roy Kinnear, a brace of Chegwins and a whole lot of running about.

Strip Nude for Your Killer

Strip Nude For Your Killer. 1975 dir.Andrea Bianchi. starring: Edwige Fenech, Femi Benussi,Nino Castelnuovo

If the past, as L.P.Hartley continues to point out (from the past, where he now has his passport stamped), is a foreign country, then the past in a foreign country is a very strange place to be indeed. And so it is. As I sit and watch "Strip nude for your killer" I am aware of how utte

rly without map and compass I am in 1970's Italy. This film begins with a botched abortion and ends, and I don't think I'm giving too much away here, with an anal-sex gag. Amazingly the two are not unrelated!

There is a lengthy sequence in which a very fat man drives a woman at high speed around Rome. Once he gets her into his flat he offers her money for sex. She declines so he has a go at raping her and, when this fails, he becomes weepy and maudlin. At this point she relents, undressing neatly and, when he can't get it up, she comforts him and refuses the money that he offers again. After she leaves he retrieves a blow-up doll from the bedroom but it is he who is punctured by a leather-clad murderer!

Much of this is presented as if it is humorous and perhaps the portly rapist is a stock comic character in Italy. But trying to get a handle on these peculiar cultural conventions is, for me at least, much of the charm of the giallo (much of the rest is Edwige Fenech, of course). All of the usual giallo tropes are obediently in place: the leather gloves, the bottle of J&B (official liquor of throat-ripping Italian men since 1957)the brilliant score are all here. But trying to fathom the motivations of the film makers as bizarre scene lurches into bizarrer scene is harder to map out.

Femi Benussi's lengthy trot past a swimming pool and up into a bar dressed in a bikini too small to hide her luxuriant seventies pubes, plays like a classic Scorcese tracking shot grafted onto an Italian sex comedy. An elderly homosexual is killed and the next time we see his corpse his bum is out! Why?

This is a relatively late giallo and all the memorable murders have been done so to say that the killer's motivations seem a little tacked on is something of an understatement. The entire raison d'etre is tossed off between Edwige Fenech's tits and the afore-mentioned bum-sex gag. Surely its spiritual home!

There's the usual creeping around in the dark, all manner of nonsense in a photographic dark-room. The central conceit; that the murderer only murders the naked, isn't strictly adhered to and, at one point, after stealing a sword from a suit of armour (!) the murderer cuts off and keeps a man's penis. For no reason. The man has just been revealed as the main suspect - though we're now pretty certain it isn't him - that's a pretty impressive alibi! Impressive alibis are surplus to requirements though given that the police in this film are among the most inept in cinematic history. At one point they are unable to catch a man fleeing the scene of a double murder with a drunken woman in his arms. They escape by hiding in the garden! The drunken woman is the always wonderful Edwige; Audrey Hepburn pressed against glass but with boobs till Tuesday. In fact she's in the film far too little, most of the action featuring the elementally unattractive leading man. He is in turn leering, sexist, violent, untrustworthy, smug and the owner of the nastiest pair of swimming trunks of all time. Throughout the film you're thinking well, surely he must die.

You may be disappointed.

The Nightcomers

The Nightcomers dir. Michael Winner, starring Marlon Brando, Stephanie Beacham, Thora Hird

In a way I'm not sure that there's much more I need to to do in this review than list the members of this dream-team cast. If you're of a certain disposition the collision of the worlds of Marlon Brando and Thora Hird is almost irresistable. And Michael Winner is attempting wrangle this remarkable hotch-potch. I'm not sure Michael Winner is a bad director; a bit meat-and-potatoes certainly, lacking a certain zest. But he films the story (a bit stodgily)and his films always look beautiful and that's certainly the case here; the film has tremendous visual atmosphere, the cameras constantly poking their way through silhouetted trees to brooding sunsets, while thick blue curlicues of mist rise from the verdant earth. All that sort of stuff. But a director who allows Marlon Brando to improvise a monologue about his dad selling a horse to the gypsies in a hokey Irish accent, to camera, which takes up fully five minutes of screen-time and advances the plot nary a jot, is clearly, shall we say, in thrall to his leading man.

When really he should be in thrall to the reliably busty Steph Beacham who is able able to portray a governess in the nursery and Marlon's stress-ball in the bedroom with equal facility. I'd like to further rhapsodise on Ms. Beacham's impressive bosoms, but each time they are unveiled Marlon's great fat hands are right in there, sqeezing away like half lemons on a juicer. It's like door-step robbery: she leaves a couple of milky ones out and she's got blue tits for weeks!

Sorry. I'm so sorry.

The story: it's a prequel to Henry James'"The turn of the screw".

A pair of orphaned children are left in the care of a house-keeper,a governess and Peter Quint, who was once a valet but now appears to be a gardener cum household tramp. It's difficult to believe that the tousle-haired fatty was ever a valet, but it's harder to believe that a man with the sexual allure of the one-armed dish-washer from "Robin's Nest" could have la Beacham rolling and panting and submitting to clothes-line bondage.

The children, under Quint's spell rather more than Mike Winner's, start to immitate the pair's kinky antics and things start to go very very wrong with the introduction of a few archery lessons.

The children, incidentally, grate throughout; the girl has the carbolic-scrubbed dullness of a grown woman playing a child, while the boy has the sort of full throated over-projection latterly seen in "Hammer House of Horror's Growing Pains".* Though separated by a decade there is an eery resemblance between these two twin pillars of bed-wetting poshness. As a consequence the children's artless aping of Quint's hog-tying look like just that; harmless children's games, utterly denuded of any sinister quality. This beyond anything else is the film's great failing. At the story's closure, when another governess turns up at the gate, and as the real story is about to begin, we don't care. We're glad to see the back of them. Precocious little shits.


*this is an excellent reference. Everybody has seen "Growing Pains" and everybody knows exactly what I'm talking about.

Phenomena

Phenomena. 1985. dir. Dario Argento. Starring: Jennifer Connolly, Donald Pleasance, Daria Nicolodi.

This is an astonishing film and there are many extraordinary things about it. Perhaps these choice tit-bits of dialogue:

"They call this the Swiss Transylvania."

"Your insects won't help you now."

"It's an established fact that all insects are psychic!"

"Help! I'm lost and foreign!*"



Then there's the oddness of seeing Bill Wyman's name pop up in the credits of a film starring a 15 year old girl or the incongruity of Motorhead soundtracking lushly photographed Alpine landscapes.

Phenomena is the story of Jennifer, the sleek and confident new girl at a Swiss boarding-school. She's confident because her father is an internationally famous film-star and because her hair shines like a wet, black sun. Throughout the film this confidence is never shaken, whether she's dangling from some guttering, having posters of her father confiscated or treading water in a pool of maggots and bobbing human skulls. She retains the sort of composure, in fact, that suggests some sort of pathological disorder; she remains as unruffled as that perfect hair. The source of this serenity may be her peculiar affinity with insects. Insects love Jenny. To the point that one of them attempts to get off with her. Right there in front of people, he starts secreting his lusty bug juice! Get a cocoon! Or whatever it is you people use.

Not only is Jenny plagued by sexified love-bugs she is also troubled by sleep-walking. And when this sleep-walking means falling endlessly down a series of white tunnels to the sound of Iron Maiden you know no good can come of it.And indeed little does, barring the intervention of a kindly ape and a chair-bound Scottish etymologist, certain that the Greeks were onto something because their word for "soul" is the same as their word for "butterfly" (he's an entymologist etymologist!).

This is classic Argento territory. The wind howls constantly as a pathetic fallacy. Girls, fleeing for their lives, look for shelter in unexplored caves. There's the remote school setting, the abandoned child, the pounding Goblin soundtrack. And maggots. More maggots than you will ever need. It's maggotty in there.

Then there is the plot. There is a murderer and we do sort of find out who it is at the end. The murderer does explain why they're doing the murders. But it doesn't make any actual sense. The murderer doesn't really have any motivation, or screen time (though given the casting fans of Argento will have sussed out who it is immediately). And yet, within its cloistered, hyper-real confines, it makes absolute sense. When the stunning double-punch ending is delivered (and believe me it is an audacious denuement - even if you have sat through the rest of this film under duress you will sit up, eyes a-poppin' over the finale. It's astonishing!) it does make a certain amount of sense. Once you have refurled your tongue and peeled down your eyelids you will sit back thinking, yeah, that is a satisfactory resolution to this film - I can now go about my business.

At bottom Phenomena is a fairytale. Connolly is Snow White throughout; the raven hair, the ruby lips, the unstained whiteness of her dress but she also has a certainty, the sure-footedness that comes from being an exemplar of good. That she doesn't actually do anything good, that she's smug and aloof throughout, makes not a jot of difference - she is symbolically good, just as, and rather more difficultly, a deformed child and his obsessive mother are symbollically evil. Outside of Argento's world this would be troubling indeed but in this environment the child is a troll, an imp; he's Rumpelstiltskin. In fact, in purely transliteral terms, he's Grendel, the mummy's boy monster.

Which is a roundabout way of getting Argento off charges of disabilism; the equation of physical difference with mental abherrance. I don't think that's really what he's doing. After all if we literally accept that Argento equates disability with evil, then we also have to accept that insects are psychic, monkeys roam the streets tooled up, and that a Scottish Academic could afford a studio flat in the Swiss Alps! Oh and HE'S disabled - and he's a goodie.







*I've used that one myself.

Venom

Venom - 1981 - dir. Piers "Blood on Satan's Claw" Haggard. starring: Susan George, Klaus Kinski, Ollie Reed and, of course, Sir Michael Gough.

Warning: here be spoilers (as if anyone is ever going to watch this film!)

London: big Georgian town-houses, red buses, war monuments to "The Glorious Dead", be-furred American women and their posh English children. Susan George is the maid. Ollie Reed is in evil-'tached-butler mode (shades of "Blue Blood" here). The pair of them are plotting against the family: the kid has asthma! Intrigue!

Ollie is cosily settled beneath Susan George's thumb; her knicker removal hypnotises him into submission. Rich American "mom" is off to see rich American dad, leaving asthmatic animal lover Phillip (Lance Holcomb - in one of only three films on his C.V. sadly) at home with grizzled grandad Sterling Hayden and the tender mercies of the below-stairs pair. Ollie goes to meet the third member of their gang and it's Klaus Kinski and his icily popped European collar, relegating Ollie to only second most terrifying man in the room.

Philip has a well flagged asthma attack and is spirited away in a black-cab. He pops over to an aquarium and then onto a pet shop to pick up a package from the soothsayer out of "Up Pompeii". Meanwhile snake-vet Dr Marion Stowe (Sarah "mine's a pint" Miles) and her charming, racist daughter, discover that the giant black-mamba snake they've been expecting hasn't been delivered. But if they haven't got it who has?

Phillip obviously.

The gang are due to kidnap Phillip but the boy wants to get his snake warm first(not a euphamism). Susan obliges and gets a face full of mamba for her trouble - she's dropped her last knicker! The police, tipped off by Dr. Stowe about the serpentine swappage, turn up at the front door and are promptly shot in the chest by a panicked Ollie who has been calling everybody a bastard since Klaus turned up. Smooth move fat-boy because now there's a seige situation - a seige with a snake!

(Incidentally why did the dead policeman arrive at the house in a brown Datsun? Is this usual? In the seventies perhaps...)

Klaus negotiates with a policeman through a crack in the door - it's Nicol "orth’ bháis’s bethad" Williams, essaying another adventurous accent. He may be American - he may be Scottish; there's definitely something going on with him. We are treated to snake P.O.V. shots; the soundtrack twittering like like Stephen Fry with a bee in his bonnet.

Grandpa susses that there's a mamba on the premises, a little late for Susan George, whose deathly convulsions have contrived to show quite a bit of leg. Very sexy, if you ignore the bug-eyed frothing end. Grandpa searches the house for the mamba, armed only with a table-lamp and a cushion. He's bound to cop it - there's only room for one snake expert in this film and that's Sarah Miles.

The snake has found it's way into the air-vent. Would a Georgian house have an air-vent? Well obviously not, it's a ludicrous plot device but it does allow for excellent snake mobility turning the Mamba into a reptillian Cato - where will he spring from next?

The police tow away the crim's getaway car causing a nervous Ollie to freak out again. In an unlikely scenario tiny Klaus slaps him around a bit. Ollie looks as if he could pick his teeth with Klaus.

The police finally hear about the snake and it turns out to be, worse luck, some kind of paranoid super-snake. Buggeration. Sarah Miles, on a mission of mercy, tells Klaus about her suitcase full of anti-venom. He sees this as an excellent opportunity to get a fresh hostage and tricks her into believing that Susan George is still alive and needs a hot serum injection. In a masterful Cleopatra-style deception Klaus hides in a rug emerging with a gun and edging Sarah Miles into the snake-house. That Klaus!

After rubbing his face a bit Nicol Williams looks at the plans of the house and discovers a servant's entrance! Alright! Now we're policing! Meanwhile, Ollie being Ollie, he fancies a drink "to relax him". Bad move brother, because when he opens the drinks cabinet - here's snakey! Ollie escapes and Sarah Miles pipes up with a bit of advice - turn the heating off and the snake will go into a coma. Klaus thinks about it. What he decides to do instead is to cut Sarah's finger off, stick it into a presentation box and chuck it out the window.

Sir Michael Gough turns up from the zoo. They're going in through the servant's entrance. There are now three snake experts on the scene - I'm starting to feel sorry for the snake! The police burst in, shoot Ollie, get attacked by the snake and piss off again. The snake bites Ollie on the cock - this isn't the first time that Ollie's been left with something toxic in his blood-stream - you'd think he'd be pleased. Apart from the bitten cock.

More and more people turn up to this closed crime-scene. A zoo-keeper, then Phillip's mom, then the father's business partner and bank manager. Finally someone called Lord Dunning arrives and has a poke round. It's a crime scene with a cast of thousands.

Finally the snake, pissed off at being out-reptiled by the cold-blooded Klaus, has a pop at the icy German dwarf and the pair are shot to ribbons through some blinds.

Eight out ten, obviously.