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.