Look out! He's got a knife

Future Boy Conan (1978)

2011-03-02T12:40:00.001+13:00

Years after the world was almost destroyed in an epic war, a young boy called Conan lives with his grandfather on Remnant Island. They believe themselves to be the last human survivors until a young girl called Lana washes up unconscious on the beach. Soon she is followed by soldiers in a seaplane, who kill Conan's grandfather and take Lana prisoner. Conan takes to the sea and attempts to track them down, getting into all sorts of adventures along the way and picking up a sidekick, the simple-minded and greedy but good-hearted Jimsy. But when he rescues Lana from the nightmarish island of Industria and takes he back to the idyllic High Harbour, it turns out that this is just the beginning of their troubles.

Conan, the Boy in Future was the first major directorial work by the master Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, after years of working for his mentor Isao Takahata. His only significant directing work until this point has been co-directing most of the first season of the Lupin III with Takahata; otherwise he had worked as an animator on a handful of films and on a couple of Takahata's television serial adaptations of classic novels. Though it's more primitive than anything he would do later, Conan features many Miyazaki trademarks over the course of its twenty-six episodes. The ideas that appear in embryonic form here would in particular be developed through his long-running manga series Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and its anime adaptation, culminating in Princess Mononoke.

If I'd had the chance to watch this show as a kid, it would probably have been my favourite tv series of all time. It features engaging characters, silly comedy, a bit of romance, many exciting action scenes, cliff-hangers galore, unexpected plot twists, the odd meditative moment, and enough high adventure to drive most kids insane. Conan and Lana are brave, loyal, selfless and deeply committed to each other. A number of the supporting characters start off as villains and are inspired to heroism by their admiration for Conan and Lana. In addition, many people in Industria are shown to be heroic while some people in High Harbour are selfish or downright rotten. As with most of his later movies, Miyazaki gives most of the "bad" characters more complex motives than traditional villains.

Although the series centres on a male protagonist and some elements of the story reinforce traditional gender roles to a far greater extent than any of Miyazaki's better-known stories, the female characters are strong throughout. The only reason that Conan is rescuing Lana instead of vice versa is because he has superhuman strength, something that he takes for granted but which is a constant source of astonishment to everyone around him. Although physically weaker, Lana is every bit as brave and resourceful as Conan, and considerably more intelligent. The other main female character, Monsley, is the head of Industria's armed forces and is depicted as constantly frustrating the sexist male characters' expectations of a woman's behaviour. She is also the single most complex character in the story, and her character development is key in Miyazaki's filmography, leading directly to Lady Kushana in the manga version of Nausicaä (she's unambiguously a villain only in the anime adaptations) and to Lady Eboshi in Princess Mononoke.

The most problematic character is Captain Dyce, a villain who turns into one of the heroes early in the story. Dyce has a paedophile fascination with Lana that is made even more creepy by being played for laughs. It is portrayed to be more romantic than sexual in nature, but it still made me deeply uncomfortable. This isn't the first time I've noticed this sort of thing in an otherwise kid-friendly anime; is it a Japanese cultural thing?

The conflict between technological progress and nature, represented by Industria and High Harbour respectively, is another theme that Miyazaki would take a lot further in later works. Conan is also Miyazaki's most explicit endorsement of socialism, as well as his most simplistic and naive; he would explore this much further in Nausicaä, in both cases linking socialism with environmentalism. As he looked deeper, Miyazaki started to realise that the ideals of a political system are always compromised in reality, leading eventually to the sophisticated political commentary that underlies Princess Mononoke.

All of this is secondary to the sense of fun, danger and adventure that runs through Conan, the Boy in Future. Our three young heroes get to zip around in the air and on sea, run into giant robots and pirates, and generally get into endless amounts of trouble. A goofy sense of humour runs through the series, though it doesn't shrink from killing off characters from time to time.

It's a shame that there are no legitimate English-language releases of this series. There are dvd versions in Korea, France, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and of course Japan. I won't tell you where to find versions with fan-created English-language subtitles, but this is possible.

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970)

2011-02-16T11:12:00.001+13:00

This movie opens with plain white-on-black opening credits without music, which finish with this full-screen card:

We then see a man lurking outside of an apartment building in Rome in full daylight. He looks smug and confident, and is looking up at a window where, behind billowing curtains, a woman is smiling down at him. He goes through the gate, ascends the stairs, and enters her apartment. They embrace, and she says to him, "How will you kill me this time?"

"I will cut your throat," he replies.

She gets into bed and reads a yellow paperback book while she waits for him to undress. This is a giallo, a kind of Italian mystery novel that has become synonymous with convoluted, stylised and sexualised murder stories, mostly because of movies that were made around the same time as this one.

The man then gets into bed and pulls the covers over the two of them. After a few seconds the woman rears up and then collapses, and the man sits up, covered in blood. He wipes himself off on the sheets then goes to take a shower. Once he has washed the blood off himself he goes around the apartment and methodically leaves his fingerprints and footprints on as many surfaces as possible. He takes jewelry from her drawer, but pointedly leaves a large roll of cash behind. He steals a blue tie, plants a shred of it under the dead woman's fingernail, then wears it. He calls the police and reports the murder, being very careful to make sure that they have the address right. Then he takes two bottles of champagne from the fridge and leaves, making sure to be noticed by a young man who is arriving at the same time.

The man then takes the two bottles of champagne to his work and shares them with his colleagues to celebrate his last day as the head of the Police's Homicide Unit, before starting his new position as head of the Political Crimes Unit.

As opening scenes of movies go, this is a really good one. Ennio Morricone's score certainly helps, with its striking mixture of goofy sound effects and sinister strings. The mixture of suspense, black comedy and political satire combine to make Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion a striking and unusual movie that Franz Kafka would have loved.

Gian Maria Volonté (Le Cercle Rouge, A Fistful of Dollars) is outstanding as the unnamed policeman, only referred to as "Il Dottore". He makes for a thoroughly unpleasant and strangely compelling character, who at first seems to have committed murder just to see if he can get away with it, but who is revealed in a series of flashbacks and surreal set-pieces to have much more complex motives. He gives a remarkable monologue at the press conference covering his new appointment where he says that every criminal is politically subversive, every subversive is a criminal, and all of them are motivated by sexual deviancy. He receives thunderous applause for this fascistic speech - which, of course, is mostly describing himself.

As he goes through his day, bullying and intimidating his subordinates and members of the public while toadying to his superiors, every piece of evidence he has planted comes back and is then routinely dismissed. The more this happens, the more reckless he becomes, until at a certain point the movie loses all touch with conventional reality and enters fully into surrealism. Those looking for a realistic thriller will be disappointed, but as a black comedy, a political satire, and an analogy for the corruption and abuses of power and authority, the movie is watertight.

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1970, as well as a raft of other awards including the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes and an Edgar for Best Film from the Mystery Writers of America. It was a smash hit in Italy and helped to pave the way for a number of other subversive thrillers. Unfortunately it seems to be largely forgotten today, and is very hard to get hold of in an English-friendly version.

Although it's obviously a product of its time, from the fashions to the awesome interior decorating to the topical political references (co-writer/director Elio Petri was a Marxist and fills the movie with references to pro-Communist protests; it's probably a lot harder to sympathise with Stalinism and Maoism knowing what we do now) the essence of the movie remains topical. It's hard not to associate Il Dottore with a certain Italian Prime Minister.

See this movie, if you can.

Part of Todd Mason's Tuesday's Forgotten Films lineup. Thanks Todd!

Review: Black Swan (2010)

2011-02-01T12:46:00.001+13:00

I decided that my Black Swan belongs more on my other blog, even though way less people seem to read it, so I posted it there.

Tuesdays forgotten film: The Fountain of Youth (1958)

2011-01-25T13:18:00.001+13:00

This 27 minute tv episode was written, directed, designed and narrated (on screen and in voice over) by Orson Welles. It was intended as the pilot for an anthology series that would have resulted in a new Orson Welles short movie every week, I guess in a similar manner to his astonishing Mercury Theatre on the Air radio show. Unfortunately Welles never quite broke into television, leaving us with two brief BBC series and a handful of pilots.

Despite never being picked up as a series, the episode won a Peabody award for Best Comedy. Ahead of his time as usual, Welles anticipated such series as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits and Thriller with this anthology idea.

The Fountain of Youth, based on a story by John Collier, concerns a love triangle involving a scientist who has apparently found a way to halt the aging process. The story is quite clever, although its twist ending is rather predictable. More fascinating is the way that Welles gets around his tiny budget and short running time. There is constant and very clever use of backdrops, mostly taken from photographs, and he deliberately calls attention to this in a way that anticipates and defuses criticism.

He also manages to pack an awful lot of backstory into the first few minutes through the use of still photographs and his own expert narration, seguing brilliantly into the more conventional sequences that make up the main story. The sound of his voice coming from Joi Lansing's lips at one point is very funny indeed.

This really is one more for Orson Welles fanatics than for the more casually interested. The copy I saw was taken from what seemed to be bootleg VHS with some tape damage and an intrusive watermark running across the bottom of the screen. But if you're the sort of person who longs to trawl through all the raw footage of The Other Side of the Wind and Don Quixote, this is for you.

There's only a six-minute clip on YouTube. However, it can be found if you know where to look.

http://rapidshare.com/files/137117880/The_Fountain_of_Youth.rar

Part of Todd Mason's Tuesday's Forgotten Films lineup. Thanks Todd!

Orson Welles (1915 - 1985)

2011-01-14T13:58:00.003+13:00

I think that Orson Welles was one of the most fascinating people of the 20th century, and certainly one of the most misunderstood. Even more than twenty-five years after his death, the general consensus of opinion of him seems to be that he scared people with a radio play about Martians and made one great movie, then did nothing else of much interest for his remaining forty-four years.

I have seen seen eleven of Welles's twelve completed feature films (missing only the almost impossible to see Filming Othello, his last completed movie), listened to a huge number of his radio productions, watched a lot of movies in which he appeared as an actor, read six biographies of him, watched at least three documentaries about him, and watched, read and listened to countless interviews with him. I feel as if I'm only scratching the surface of this remarkable, furiously talented man.

Welles is often painted as being undone by his own self-destructive tendencies and as torpedoing himself through his own fear of completion. This is pure myth. He was clearly rather undisciplined, and he doesn't seem to have been very good at raising money himself or picking commercial projects, but this was not his undoing. His difficulties in getting movies made were far more complicated than that.

A good example of how these myths can be knocked down is provided by the example of Simon Callow, a very distinguished actor and talented writer who is in the midst of writing a huge, multi-volume biography of Welles. The first two books in this series have appeared, and the contrast between them is fascinating. Volume one, The Road to Xanadu, was written with the stated aim of not asking "What went wrong after Citizen Kane?" but rather, "What went wrong before Citizen Kane?" and provided a thesis that Welles had already demonstrated the traits that would become his own undoing by the time he made his remarkable first movie at the age of twenty-six. This book is highly critical of Welles and depends rather heavily on the unreliable accounts of John Houseman, Welles's first theatrical producer, an extremely valuable collaborator in his early years before their relationship unfortunately soured to the point where the two became bitter enemies.

The second volume, Hello Americans, appeared eleven years later and this lengthy wait between volumes clearly reflects the heavy amount of work and research that Callow put in to it. Where the first book covered the first twenty-six years in Welles's life, this second volume covers a scant six years while having almost as hefty a page count. The book starts off with the real beginning of Welles's downfall: the production of his second feature The Magnificent Ambersons, which may have been his masterwork before it was irrevocably mutilated by the studio with the aid of some of Welles's most trusted colleagues; and the closely linked disaster of It's All True, the documentary he was convinced to make in South America for the war effort which both kept him away from being able to defend Ambersons and the expensive collapse of which gave him the undeserved reputation of being frivolous and wasteful.
The other main focus of Hello Americans is something that only Callow has investigated in depth, and that's Welles's political activities. He became heavily involved in progressive politics in this period, inspired partly by his friendship with US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and campaigned so heavily for issues raised by the NAACP - particularly the case of Isaac Woodard, a black war veteran who was savagely beaten and blinded by racist police - that he was hung in effigy in the American South. Welles ended up with a thick file at the FBI for his "subversive" activities, and his unalloyed passion for social justice made him more than a few enemies.

I recently watched a lengthy BBC documentary about Welles centred around a long interview conducted with him in 1982, three years before his death. Although by this time he was sixty-seven years old, had a white beard, and was immensely obese (which made him the butt of many cruel jokes), in his attitude and demeanour he seemed almost not to have aged at all for the most part. But when he spoke about the movies that had been taken away from him the weight of his years seemed suddenly to fall upon him, and his sorrow at their loss was so tangible it was hard to watch.

Despite all of these difficulties, and the continual insistence by many of his producers on removing him from his own movies, his track record as a director is outstanding.

His 1942 movie The Magnificent Ambersons, despite being mauled in his absence to the extent that he claims the entire point has been lost, remains a fascinating and unique movie that's essential viewing even in its current form. Based on a book by Booth Tarkington that's really only remembered now because of the movie, it tells the story of the changes that technology was bringing to society as mirrored through the downfall of a wealthy family and, in particular, the insufferably self-centered and arrogant boy who seems to be their last heir.

The essential book This Is Orson Welles contains an attempt by film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum to reconstruct what the original cut might have been like. Based on this, the loss of Welles's original version might be the greatest artistic tragedy of the 20th century.

The Stranger, from 1946, was Welles's attempt to create a purely commercial movie. It's a thriller in which he stars as a Nazi war criminal hiding out in small-town America, but even with this generic story and his determination to please the box office Welles was still able to include some fascinating touches. It's a shame that he was unable to convince the studio to let him cast Agnes Moorhead as the Nazi hunter doggedly pursuing his character, though Edward G. Robinson does fine in the role. A lengthy prologue involving the villain's escape through South American was cut, which Welles claims was the best part of the movie. It's a little more bland than the rest of his oeuvre, but still fascinating, and it went so far as to use actual footage from concentration camps to illustrate the evils of Fascism - the first movie to ever do this. In another director's hands this might have seemed exploitative, but as handled by Welles it seems completely responsible.

The movie was his only box office hit - though it should be noted that both Citizen Kane and Touch of Evil did very well in the few theatres they were shown in, despite severe distribution problems specifically designed to make both movies fail (a sadly frequent occurrence in Hollywood, believe it or not).

It was probably because of this success that Welles was easily able to find financing for 1947's The Lady from Shanghai, a dark and baroque film noir in which he co-starred with his recent ex-wife Rita Hayworth. His cinematic technique is magnificent in this movie, which features an astonishing and nightmarish "hall of mirrors" ending that has been copied many times since, but producer Harry Cohn had about an hour cut from the movie before its release and this footage has long been lost. The movie was made mostly to help finance a gargantuan stage musical production of Around the World in 80 Days that Welles was working on at the time, into which he sunk (and lost) a lot of his own money. This was to become a pattern in his filmmaking career, as his artistic goals continually trumped commercial concerns.

In 1948, Welles dramatically dropped his budget when he convinced Republic Pictures (who usually made Westerns) to finance a film of Macbeth, the first of three astonishing Shakespeare adaptations he filmed. Welles had a life-long obsession with Shakespeare, editing & publishing several extremely popular abridgements under the umbrella title Everybody's Shakespeare while still in his teens. In fact his first big success was a stage production of MacBeth in Harlem with an all-black cast, which is #1 on my list of 20th century stage productions I wish I'd seen (a brief snippet was seen in a newsreel at the time, and it looks incredible).

Unfortunately the movie of MacBeth was hampered by poor rented costumes, all they could afford on the tiny budget. Welles himself came off the worst; as he himself has noted, in some scenes "I looked like the Statue of Liberty," and in others he seemed to be "wearing a foot stool on my head." The result was unintentionally comic. The movie was also redubbed and cut after the fact (just this once at least Welles was able to supervise the changes himself) largely because the producers felt that nobody would understand the Scottish accents. Luckily, the original version has long been reinstated and Welles's preferred soundtrack is now the standard. MacBeth is easily the weakest of Welles's Shakespeare movies, but it is magnificently dark and many scenes are astonishing.

Welles was so disillusioned by his Hollywood experiences at this time that his next movie was made completely independently as far away from America as possible. Shot in Morocco and Italy over a prolonged period, and financed mostly by movie roles that Welles played during this time (to the extent that he would sometimes leave the cast on location - staying in luxury hotels at his own expense - to quickly shoot a movie role and raise some money), his version of Othello went on to win the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1952. It's an astonishing achievement all around, and the first of Welles's movies largely made through extremely creative and innovative editing. Up until this point he was known for movies featuring many meticulously planned long takes, but the fast editing of Othello must have been dizzying to 1950s audiences. Much of this was to cover the fact that the movie was made over such a prolonged period and in several locations, so that sometimes a single scene would have been shot in two countries, three cities and with gaps of several months.

Unfortunately Welles's daughter Beatrice, who inherited the rights to this movie, supervised a "restoration" of Othello in 1991 where some dialogue was recut and the music was completely re-recorded. Most Welles scholars believe that this version has harmed the movie, and unfortunately it's the only version that's been available for almost twenty years.

The movie co-starred Michael MacLiammóir and Hilton Edwards, the two producers who had been the first to put Welles on the professional stage in Ireland in 1931, when he was only sixteen years old.

1955 brought Mr. Arkadin, a movie so badly mangled by producer Louis Dolivet that for the rest of his life Welles hated to be reminded of it. It tells the story of a tycoon who hires a small-time crook to investigate his own past, ostensibly because he has amnesia but actually for much more sinister purposes. A bizarre, daring, dark and surreal movie, it originated in Welles's most famous movie role that he didn't direct himself, the brilliant Carol Reed/Graham Greene movie The Third Man. This movie was so popular that Welles's character went on to his own radio show, The Lives of Harry Lime, and two episodes of this provided the spark of inspiration for Arkadin.

Many people have attempted to put together what Welles's version might have looked like, culimating in an "integral version" released on dvd by the Criterion Collection in 2005, but we'll never know what he would have done with it if he had been allowed. What remains is a frustrating but (in my opinion) vastly entertaining pulp thriller, with so many versions (at least eight including the original radio version and the interesting novelisation published as by Welles but actually written in French by Maurice Bessy and translated into English by hands unknown). It's a fascinating jigsaw puzzle, hampered somewhat by a deliberately obnoxious lead performance by Robert Arden as small-time crook Guy Van Stratten but distinguished by a series of terrific, grotesque turns by a supporting cast including Michael Redgrave and frequent collaborator Akim Tamiroff.

After this heartbreaking disappointment, Welles fell into his next directorial role almost by accident. He was cast as the heavy in a B-picture to be called Badge of Evil, but on the insistence of co-star Charlton Heston he was also hired as director. He agreed on the condition that he was allowed to completely rewrite the script, and the result is one of the great classics of late film noir: 1958's Touch of Evil. Welles plays the grotesque Hank Quinlan, a corrupt and racist police detective in a town on the border between the USA and Mexico whose perfect record of convictions is the result of a lot of manufactured evidence.

The movie was taken from Welles during editing because the studio were unhappy with the rough cut, and he was barred from the studio. Until he died, he claimed that nobody ever told him what was supposed to be wrong with the movie. In 1998 a significant attempt at restoration was made, mostly by the brilliant editor and sound designer Walter Murch working from a 50-page memo sent by Welles to the studio in an attempt to salvage the movie. Murch was astounded to find that every single one of Welles's many suggestions worked in the movie's favour; he said that Welles's ability to keep the entire movie in his head (previously evidence by the production of Othello) was almost super-human. This version is very good indeed, and includes some of Welles's most innovative sound design ideas, but once again we will never know what his version would have been.

This was the last movie Welles would make for an American studio, though for the rest of his life he longed to be able to work productively in his home country.

After some experiments in television, Welles was shown a list of books supposedly in the public doman by producer Alexander Salkind, and picked out Franz Kafka's The Trial. The result is one of his favourite of his own movies, an astonishing waking nightmare about the nature of guilt and innocence. After designing elaborate sets, Welles discovered that Salkind did not actually have as much money as he'd claimed to make the movie, and managed to scout some incredible locations which he put to brilliant use.

Hard to enjoy (as designed) but easy to admire, The Trial is almost certainly Terry Gilliam's major model for Brazil and is loaded to the gills with great performances from Anthony Perkins, Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider, Akim Tamiroff (returning from both Arkadin and Touch of Evil and Elsa Martinelli. It's one of the great treasures of cinema.

Three years later Welles returned to Shakepeare with his best ever shot at filming the Bard. Chimes at Midnight had started with an enormous production in the 1930s called Five Kings where Welles had attempted to link all oft he history plays together in a show that took two nights for every performance. It was a huge failure and collapsed utterly before it could really be finished, but he kept the idea for many years, finally paring it down to tell the story of Sir John Falstaff as a tragic hero. Made on the sly while he was supposed to be concentrating on playing Long John Silver in Jess Franco's film of Treasure Island (a movie that was never finished), it is Welles's most emotionally affecting movie. Yet another tiny budget and severe technical limitations barely hurt the movie, which boasts an incredible battle sequence that has been enormously influential on many later movies, and which features still more terrific performances from Sir John Gielgud, Margaret Rutherford, Jeanne Moreau again, Fernando Rey (a Spanish actor who is dubbed by Welles), and of course Welles himself in perhaps his best-ever acting role.

Tragically, this is one of the most difficult of Welles's movies to see as his daughter Beatrice has effectively suppressed it for many years.

Following another television movie, The Immortal Story, Welles embarked on his most ambitious project yet: The Other Side of the Wind. Only fragments of this movie have appeared over the years, as the final editing was ground to a halt after Welles was severely ripped off by someone who was supposed to be organising funding but ended up pocketing the money himself, and the movie was seized. The two major scenes that have emerged (both seen in the excellent documentary Orson Welles: The One-Man Band, about all of his unfinished projects - of which there are many I haven't even mentioned) indicate that this would have been an astonishingly experimental and vivid movie.

While trying to complete his magnum opus, Welles was approached to narrate a documentary about art forger Elmer de Hory. While working on this, it was revealed that dr Hory's friend and biographer Clifford Irving was himself at the centre of a mammoth hoax involving a faked autobiography of reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes, and Welles was inspired to buy the footage from the documentary and, with the addition of new and old footage, make the incredible and still-unique "personal essay" movie F for Fake. Almost impossible to describe or classify, this movie features Welles as himself and is about fakery, hoaxes and art, as well as being partly an autobiographical movie and a cinematic love letter to his partner Oja Kodar.

I defy anyone to watch F for Fake and conclude that Welles was washed up after Citizen Kane. It is overwhelming evidence that he was a vital, original, fabulous creative force throughout his entire life.

Welles's last completed movie, Filming Othello, seems to be a more low-key and less innovative sort of "personal essay" movie, built around a monologu by himself and a filmed dinner with Michael MacLiammóir and Hilton Edwards. It was finished in 1978 and I am dying to see it.

Welles started but did finish at least five other movies that I have not mentioned here. He also appeared in dozens of movies directed by others, and had many more achievements besides. As well as directing numerous acclaimed and innovating stage plays from the 1930s until the 1960s, he was an accomplished stage magician (from entertaining the troops during World War II with his Mercury Wonder Show to countless appearances on chat shows) and tried his hand at every kind of radio show going. At one point he made a concerted attempt to become a successful radio comedian; at others he concentrated on politics; other times he put together anthologies and almanacs, performed highlights from Shakespeare, and was very popular playing the pulp character The Shadow.

He also tried his hand at television, with everything from travel shows to educational shows to his own try at a chat show, which sadly usually only made it to "unaired pilot" stage.

Believe it or not, this has been a desperately brief and incomplete account of Welles's life.

My top 5 albums of 2010

2011-01-03T12:34:00.004+13:00

Because life's too short for making a top ten.

All Delighted People EP by Sufjan Stevens

Sufjan Stevens put out an album this year, but this lengthy EP (running almost an hour) kicks all kinds of arse over it. Nuff said.

The Dark Night of the Soul by Sparklehorse & Danger Mouse

Originally intended to be released in 2009 but held up by legal issues, by the time this came out in July 2010 both Mark Linkous (aka Sparklehorse) and album guest Vic Chesnutt had committed suicide. The album features artwork by David Lynch, who also performs vocals on two tracks; other guests include The Flaming Lips, Suzanne Vega, Jason Lytle (Granddaddy), etc. Chesnutt's track "Grim Augury" is devastating even without knowing that he would die that Christmas, but my favourite is this one.

High Velvet - The National

I freely admit that I am a bandwagon-jumper who never paid any attention to the National until this, their breakout album, despite many recommendations by my reliable friend Scott. I'm going to have to check out their back catalogue, because I thought that High Velvet was gorgeous from start to finish.

I'm New Here by Gil Scott-Heron

I did not expect Gil Scott-Heron to put out an excellent album in 2010, but he did. He even covered a Smog song, which fits in perfectly with the personal self-written material.

Archandroid by Janelle Monáe

Over the course of eighteen tracks and sixty-eight minutes, this science fiction concept album bounds from genre to genre with stunning ease, from orchestral symphony to contemporary pop to acoustic folk to psychedelic guitar rock and beyond. It was classified as R&B, probably mostly because Janelle Monáe is black but also because record stores had to put it somewhere.

The album storyline (actually parts II and III of a IV-part movement) is inspired by the silent movie Metropolis and the books of Philip K. Dick and, in the tradition of most concept albums, is quite opaque.

Mondo Cane by Mike Patton

In which the singer from Mr. Bungle, Faith No More, Tomahawk and Fantômas makes an album of '60s Italian pop music with a 65-piece orchestra. If you hate this album then you're probably completely normal, but I love it - cheese and all. Strangely it does not feature "More", the chart-topping theme from the movie Mondo Cane, but it does feature "Deep Deep Down" from Danger: Diabolik so that's okay.

This one is called "Che Notte!"

I didn't hear any straight-up hip-hop that really impressed me last year. What the hell was with people rating Kanye West's album so high?

Friday linky

2010-12-24T13:17:00.000+13:00

I did Friday linky at From the Morgue as Morgue and Cal are busy with their new baby.

Head on over and check it out. His blog's better than mine anyway.

Black Dynamite (2009)

2010-12-16T12:49:00.000+13:00

Somehow, I have not yet written of Black Dynamite.

Black Dynamite was unexpected. Black Dynamite is co-written by and stars Michael Jai White. When I think of Michael Jai White, who played the lead role in Spawn and, more recently, was on hand just long enough to be killed by the Joker in The Dark Knight, I don't think "Now there's a first-rate comedy writer and actor." Maybe I'm crazy, but to me he just doesn't look the part.

A lot of people did not get down with Black Dyamite, but I thought that Black Dynamite was the funnest movie that I have seen in a long time. I'm talking that kind of embarrassing "I can't breathe" honking laughter that had barely troubled me since I was a small child. That's right -- Black Dynamite is Road Runner funny.

Black Dynamite tells the story of a man called Black Dynamite (Michael Jai White) and how raises hell when his younger brother is killed by drug dealers. Black Dynamite is like a combination of Shaft, Dolemite and Hammer.

A lot of people did not get down with Black Dyamite, but I thought that Black Dynamite was the funnest movie that I have seen in a long time. I'm talking that kind of embarrassing "I can't breathe" honking laughter that had barely troubled me since I was a small child. That's right -- Black Dynamite is Road Runner funny.

Amid the many laughs, Black Dynamite actually has a fairly complicated plot that kept me engaged throughout. The supporting cast is also very funny, especially Tommy Davidson as Cream Corn.

The movie also has a great funk/soul soundtrack that amusingly describes the action as it happens.

Look, I can't possibly tell you if you are going to enjoy this movie or not (unless your name is Bruce Norris, in which case you've surely already seen it). If you enjoy blaxploitation movies, especially the cheap ones, you'll almost certainly get a kick out of it.

Here's a clip that I found hilarious in context, but which might just make you scratch your head and say, "What?"

Coming Soon

2010-12-10T12:58:00.000+13:00

Movies recently seen

2010-11-08T13:16:00.000+13:00

Crumb (1994)

I first saw this documentary about underground comics legend Robert Crumb in 1996, with my then-girlfriend. It is not a date movie. Crumb's comics are notorious for their misogyny and racist imagery, while at the same time he is regularly acclaimed as a genius. Although his surname is a common word, a Google image search on the word "crumb" brings up nothing but images relating to his comics. This is despite the fact that he has never been published by any of the "major" comic book companies, and has actually self-published much of his own work. He is a strange-looking guy (skinny and gawky with coke-bottle glasses and deliberately old-fashioned clothes) who is apparently very shy, but on film he has a real charisma. He's a mess of contradictions, and this movie is a fascinating portrait of his work, his family, and himself.

The movie takes you through quite a but of his comics work, some of which is very disturbing, and gives equal time to his defenders and his critics. It's interesting that Crumb does not actually defend himself; he says that he made a decision many years ago to never censor himself and to let all the most disturbing images in his head come out onto paper, and that his creative process is largely unconscious and he doesn't know where his stories are going until he draws them. He says that sometimes he thinks perhaps he should not be allowed to draw this stuff and that maybe he should be locked up and have his pencils taken away from him, but at the same time it seems clear that drawing his comics is what keeps him on an even keel.

We don't learn too much about how Robert Crumb ended up the way he is, apart from some references to his father being a domineering and violent tyrant, but the interviews with his brothers and his mother make it pretty clear that Robert is the most well-adjusted member of his family, at least among those who appear in the movie (his two sisters declined to be interviewed).

This is a top-notch documentary that is best watched when you are not already feeling depressed.

Peeping Tom (1960)

Set in the sordid milieu of under-the-counter pornography, this movie is about Mark, a young photographer who is making his own snuff movies. It has some interesting parallels with the same year's Psycho, directed by the expatriate British director Alfred Hitchcock in America. The main difference is that while Psycho solidified Hitchcock's position as the master of thrillers, Peeping Tom caused director Michael Powell's reputation to plummet; he had been at the very top of his profession to this point, but was subsequently unable to make any more movies in Britain and ended up settling in Australia.

Melodramatic in the extreme and rather dated, Peeping Tom still has a curious power. Mark is very open to the idea of being caught, and manages to get caught between falling for a young woman in his apartment building and feeling driven to complete his "work". I found the comic relief scenes tiresome, but they actually drew big laughs from the audience I saw it with so that must be a matter of personal taste.

The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)

Vincent Price stars as a crazed organist who is bringing the Ten Plagues of Egypt down on the surgeons he holds responsible for the death of his wife. He also talks through a gramophone horn connected by a tube to a hole in his neck. He has somehow convinced a beautiful silent woman to assist him in his murderous task.

As you can tell from the above plot description, this is the greatest movie ever made.

His Face All Red

2010-11-07T10:38:00.000+13:00

I really want to push this wonderfully creepy short horror comic on to people. It's called His Face All Red and it's written & drawn by Emily Carroll.

Click on the picture below to read it.

I had not heard of Emily Carroll before, but after this I am very keen to read more by her.

Hallowe'en movies

2010-11-01T13:26:00.000+13:00

I watched three movies on Hallowe'en.

Fellini Satyricon (1969)

Oh dear. This movie was very lavish. I'm sure it was also very artful. It certainly was bugfuck insane. It consistently kept me off-balance, did things I didn't expect, and everything about it was very inventive and bold.

So why was it so terribly dull?

The story involves two students in ancient Rome who have picaresque adventures while fighting over the favours of a svelte young slave boy. These largely involve people going on & on & on at great length against extremely elaborate backgrounds and on extremely elaborate sets. It felt like an extremely wordy stage play that was barelay adapted to an extremely expensive movie, and then filmed by people who were very stoned.

As Michael pointed out, it felt a lot like an Alejandro Jodorowsky movie in terms of how completely weird it is. But for me, it had little of the intelelctual and spiritual charge of Jodorowsky's movies, and almost none of the interest.

I hope that Fellini's earlier movies turn out to be more interesting. This one was just self-indulgent wank. His fellow countryman Mario Bava, who worked in much more low-brow fields, was able to accomplish a lot more with a lot less many times. (And he seemed to know it; Fellini was a huge champion of Bava and was known to give his movies standing ovations - as well as the ultimate compliment of ripping him off; Fellini's Toby Dammit draws extensively from Bava's Kill Baby Kill.)

The Devil Rides Out (1968)

My favourite Hammer horror movie pits an imperious authoritarian figure (Christopher Lee) against a free-thinking mystic (Charles Gray). It feels like the establishment railing against some goddamned hippies, but I liked it anyway. Gray is superb as Mocata, the black magician inspired by Aleister Crowley (Dennis Wheately, who wrote the source novel, met Crowley once and seemed to take a lot of influence from him).

The best scene involves Mocata having a conversation with Marie Eaton (well played by Sarah Lawson) in which he methodically lulls her into submission and takes over her mind. If you watch the movie, pay attention to the editing of this scene; it's brilliantly put together.

Trick 'r Treat (2007)

Probably the best horror anthology movie I've ever seen, edging out the George Romero/Stephen King collaboration Creepshow (which it resembles in some ways), Trick 'r' Treat was a complete delight. It tells four stories that take place on the same Hallowe'en and in the same neighbourhood, which is being watched over by a creepy little urchin who seems to embody the spirit of Hallowe'en. The only cast members I recognised were Brian Cox (made up to resemble John Carpenter) and Anna Paquin (pre-True Blood). (I guess first-time director Michael Dougherty must have brought them over from X-Men 2, which he co-wrote.)

All of the stories in Trick 'r' Treat were smarter than I expected, and the EC comics-style twists were perfectly realised. The Hallowe'en atmosphere was perfect, and the stories overlap in a fun way that reminded me of Pulp Fiction. More horror movies should be this well made and this much fun.

It's nearly Hallowe'en...

2010-10-29T12:33:00.000+13:00

I always get too excited about Hallowe'en. I'll share some of my excitement around now.

Here is an animated version of Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Tell-Tale Heart narrated by James Mason. I first saw this on the dvd of Hellboy, where it was in a section titled "Hellboy Recommends" along with some Gerald McBoing-Boing shorts.

Here is a clip of Ken Nordine, of Word Jazz fame, reading Poe's poem "The Conqueror Worm", taken from the great cd Closed on Account of Rabies. Nordine has the best voice imaginable for this poem.

My buddy David Schmidt wrote & directed the fascinating short film The Lovecraft Syndrome, inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft. Warning: this one is quite disturbing. It's available to view here on Spike.

Arch Oboler wrote & produced a classic episode of the old-time radio show Lights Out called "The Chicken Heart", rather absurdly about a chicken heart that eats the world. Years later, Bill Cosby did a terrific comedy routine about the effect it had on him as a small child.

Here is the only version of "The Chicken Heart" I could find, much shorter and taken from Oboler's album Drop Dead: An Exercise in Fear.

Here is Cosby's routine, for some reason split into two parts:

Finally, here is one of the scariest things ever: "The Thing on the Fourble Board" from the old-time radio show Quiet, Please. Download the mp3 and then, late at night, on your own, turn out all the lights and settle down to listen to this one. It's old, it's dated.... but it's still scary.

Happy Hallowe'en, everyone!

More movies seen recently

2010-10-26T13:43:00.000+13:00

Touch of Evil (1958)

Pulp grandeur. Orson Welles wrote and directed, as well as playing the villain. The wonderfully dark and oppressive black & white cinematography is by Russell Metty, but it is of a piece with Welles's filmography and is unlike anything else Metty achieved (Welles was known to be heavily involved with lighting his own movies). This was at the Embassy in the version restored by Walter Murch; if you haven't seen Touch of Evil your movie knowledge is woefully incomplete. And watching this, damned if it wasn't clearly a huge influence on Hitchcock's Psycho.

Kick-Ass (2010)

Terrific fun, this is both a satire on comic book conventions and a splendid action movie in its own right. Unlike most other modern action movies I've seen, it was both clever and coherent. The controversy is unsurprising, but misses the point.

The Leopard (1963)

Luchino Visconti's masterpiece about the reunification of Italy from the point of view of a Sicilian prince is, well, a masterpiece. I'll admit that it made me sleepy at first, but as it went on I was more and more captured by it, until I finally reached the climactic 45-minute ball sequence - one of the greatest setpieces I've ever seen. Just the part where Prince Don Fabrizio Salina (Burt Lancaster) dances with Angelica Bertiana (Claudia Cardinale) would be the mark of a master filmmaker on its own. Again, seen at The Embassy.

Le Cercle Rouge (1970)

Jean-Pierre Melville's existentialist heist movie is long, slow, and immensely cool. The news that Orlando Bloom is starring in a remake is just appalling. Someone please convince that guy to join a monastary or something.

Any Wellingtonians who haven't been seeing these classic films at the Embassy on Sundays are really missing out. There are only two left, and I've already got tickets to both.

And just to prove that it's not a complete love-in here at He's Got a Knife Headquarters:

Gladiator (2001)

Ridley Scott's multiple Oscar-winner, starring Russell Crowe as a Roman general turned gladiator, is the worst movie I've seen for a while.

It was a great shame that it turned out to be Oliver Reed's last movie, but at least he got to drink himself to death.

This movie was so dull, it was sort of depressing. The high-point was Joaquin Phoenix's performance as the insane, incest-obsessed Roman Emperor, Commodus. He was terrible, but at least he was flamboyantly terrible.

Also appearing was Connie Nielsen as Commudus's sister Lucilla, who is also Maximus's former lover.

What else can I say? This movie sucks. I think it may mark the end of my Ridley Scott marathon.

I think I may have seen some other bad movies lately and forgotten them.

Movies seen recently

2010-10-13T13:42:00.000+13:00

People keep emailing me and saying that I should update my blog more often. I swear, I keep meaning to. I have some lengthy posts in preparation. But in the meantime, here are some movies I have seen recently.

A Single Man (2009)

This movie was flat-out brilliant. Anchored by a sublime lead performance from Colin Firth, it tells the story of a man who, eight months after the death of the love of his life, has decided to end it all. Which sounds like the movie should be downbeat and depressing, but in fact it is exactly the opposite. A Single Man celebrates life in its every frame. It's based on a novel by Christopher Isherwood, which I am going to have to read.

It was very hard to believe that this was co-writer/director Tom Ford's first movie. Almost everything about it is confident and assured. I've never been particularly impressed by Firth in the past, but he is just spectacular here. It's amazing how deep inside the lead character's head we get - something that's very difficult to do in film. Ford and Firth deserve major awards for their accomplishments here. The supporting cast (including Julianne Moore, Nicholas Hoult and Matthew Goode) are uniformly excellent, the movie looks gorgeous, the music is swooning and beautiful. You should see this movie, and someone should fund Tom Ford to make more (he apparently paid for this one out of his own pocket).

Slipstream (2007)

Anthony Hopkins wrote, directed, scored and starred in this movie. It is baffling. It involves a scriptwriter whose movie seems to be taking on a life of its own. Or maybe he's dead and the whole movie is his life flashing past his eyes. Or maybe he's come "unstuck in time" like Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5. Or maybe something else - I don't know.

It's nightmarish, funny, clever, and completely weird. If this is a peek into Hopkins's mind, then he is clearly a very strange man.

Kingdom of Heaven - director's cut (2004)

Ridley Scott's movie about the Crusades is very nearly a masterpiece. It's only significant flaw is the miscasting of its lead character; Orlando Bloom is just not convincing as a charismatic leader. It's easy to see why, as Robert Fisk reported, this movie was cheered in Lebanon; this is far from the sort of jingoistic racist crap you'd probably expect from a Hollywood Christians vs. Muslims movie made in the wake of 9/11. A superb supporting cast, rousing battle scenes and plenty of Ridley Scott's trademark gorgeous visuals are the icing on the cake.

This is a movie where surrender can be noble, and people are more important than ideals. If only it had starred someone more impressive - Edward Norton, in a small role as the King of Jerusalem, manages to be a far more inspiring presence despite playing a character with leprosy who is swathed in bandages and keeps a silver mask over his face.

Blade Runner - the final cut (1982)

Ah, Blade Runner. This movie is a bastardisation of a great book, Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? In some ways it is the complete inverse of the book.

And yet, it's a masterpiece. I have much to say about this, and currently no time in which to say it.

Lupin III: the Secret of Mamo

This is the first movie featuring the character Arsène Lupin III, the Japanese grandson of the fictional French gentleman thief Arsène Lupin. Lupin III had previously featured in a series of manga and two seasons of an animated series. This movie features Lupin, his sidekicks Jigen and Goemon Ishikawa XIII, nemesis Zenigata, and love interest/rival Fujiko as they are all entangled with a seemingly immortal criminal mastermind known as Mamo.

The last time I watched this movie, I had problems with how obnoxious and unlikable the lead character is. I had previously seen the second Lupin III movie, The Castle of Cagliostro, which was written & directed by Hayao Miyazaki and which softened the character considerably. In the meantime I have seen the first season of the tv show (also largely directed by Miyazaki) and came to realise that Lupin was much more fun when he was self-centred and randy than when he was altruistic.

The Secret of Mamo is weirdly paced and a bit too long, but it has a great psychedelic design sense, and is very much a tribute to such European anti-heroes as Diabolik, Fantomas, Raffles and Irma Vep. I enjoyed it.

The Duellists (1977)

2010-10-05T13:31:00.000+13:00

The Duellists is based on a short story by Joseph Conrad, but the movie is all about the visuals. Ridley Scott was making his feature debut, but had actually directed a number of tv series and thousands of commercials.

The story involves two French officers in the Napoleonic Wars who become involved in a series of abortive duels over an obscure matter of honour. Armand d'Hubert (Keith Carradine) finds himself having to constantly look over his shoulder in case Gabriel Féraud (Harvey Keitel) is around. Féraud seems to want to kill d'Hubert just for the sake of killing him; d'Hubert goes to every length to keep his distance, but Féraud keeps popping up regardless. The movie looks like an historical epic, but it feels like a Western.

I'm a big fan of Westerns that are not set in the American Old West, from No Country for Old Men to Mad Max 2, and as it turns out I am a big fan of The Duellists as well. Its appeal is almost entirely in the way that Scott uses his amazing powers as a designer and a camera operator. The Duellists looks amazing from start to finish. Almost any frame of the movie could be printed up and hung on the wall.

The cast fares less well. Keith Carradine is wooden, as he almost always is. (The only notable exception I can think of is his Wild Bill Hickock in Deadwood.) Harvey Keitel would later develop into one of the best actors os his generation, but he was not there yet. Diana Quick and Christina Raines are there as set decoration, and are unable to do much with their underwritten roles. Albert Finney is fun as Joseph Fouché, but he's only in one scene.

However, the actors all look marvellous and the authentic-seeming duels are magnificently staged. Despite the acting deficiencies, the thin script and the jarring voice-over (nicely delivered by Stacey Keach but as unnecessary as that later foisted onto Ridley Scott's third - and best - film Blade Runner) I was enthralled throughout.

Scott was never an intellectual director, despite Blade Runner, and The Duellists is not an intellectual movie. It is sensual and sensuous, exciting and entertaining, and utterly beautiful from start to finish.

I liked it.

Review: Centurion (2010)

2010-09-15T13:05:00.000+12:00

This movie follows the misadventures of the Ninth Legion as they invade Scotland in 117AD. Although inspired by real events, it is a work of complete fiction. It is also a work of complete shit.

I won't bother getting into historical inaccuracies or "Roman soldiers didn't fight like that" trainspotting nonsense. You don't care about that, and neither do I most of the time. Unless it's a particularly glaring mistake, that sort of thing does not spoil a movie for anyone who is not being a dick about terms.

Centurion could have been a good movie. The disappearance of the Ninth Legion could certainly be spun into a fascinating story, and writer/director Neil Marshall is definitely interested in making the story morally ambiguous. The protagonists are the Romans, who are out for dominion; the villains are the Picts, who are fighting off invaders who plunder their lands, enslave and kill them, and (in the course of the story) murder their children. Marshall himself is Scottish and there is a clear, intentional irony in his depiction of the Picts as savage and dehumanised proponents of guerilla warfare, and also in the way that the Romans speak Latin as English with pronounced English accent, while Pict is guttural and inhuman (and Picts speaking Latin do so in a Scottish brogue).

Unfortunately, Neil Marshall is the director of Dog Soldiers, The Descent and Doomsday, all pulp horror/action movies. If Dog Soldiers was "Aliens with werewolves" then Centurion is "Dog Soldiers with Scottish people" with all of the third-hand self-referential problems that suggests.

The movie is packed with good actors (Michael Fessbinder, Liam Cunningham, Davic Morrissey, Dominic West) but you wouldn't know that they were good just from watching this. It's filled with violent action scenes that are completely unexciting. It doesn't trust the audience to have a clue; every plot and thematic point is hammered home with expository dialogue and endless amounts of voice-over narration. Both the dialogue and narration are head-slappingly obvious, so predictable that I was able to mouth along with the actors at many points.

This movie casts a model as a cliché mute "woman warrior" - presumably to safeguard against non-acting. The only major female character to have any dialogue may as well have "love interest" carved into her forehead. (And if she's exiled to live alone, why does she wear so much modern-looking makeup?)

The battle scenes are filled with heads and limbs being lopped off and CGI blood spraying everywhere, in almost a textbook case of "more is less". Compare them with the battle scenes in Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight for a lesson in the difference between mere excess and genuine impact. These battles are clearly influenced by those in Chimes, though I would wager that the influence is actually via intermediary movies such as Braveheart.

In summary, this is a terrible movie that isn't even a guilty pleasure. It's a shame, as The Descent seemed to mark Marshall as a filmmaker to watch.

Movies seen recently

2010-09-14T13:27:00.002+12:00

I've seen a few, at the movies and on DVD. Here are some of them.

Enter the Dragon

Bruce Lee's American movie is great fun, although the fight scenes are not as well-staged or well-filmed as the ones in his best complete movie Fist of Fury or in the the footage released from the incomplete original version of Game of Death. Enter the Dragon functions better as an American exploitation movie (poor Jim Kelly doesn't fare as well as he would have in a real blaxploitation movie though). John Saxon is miscast as a kung-fu expert; I would much rather have seen Rod taylor in his role.

But Bruce Lee's charisma saves the day, and although the ending is a straight copy of the superior ending of Orson Welles's The Lady from Shanghai it still works here.

There Will Be Blood

A bona-fide masterpiece. Daniel Day Lewis is superb, and the movie earns its two and a half hour length. Worthy of an entire post, so it'll get one.

The Haunted Palace

Roger Corman directs Vincent Price from a Charles Beaumont script based on H. P. Lovecraft's longest story, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. It was shoehorned into the Corman/Price Edgar Allan Poe series with a retitling and some brief readings of Poe's titular poem. Great fun, and with the next one will be an entire future post.

The Resurrected

Dan O'Bannon's early '90s adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft's longest story, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, was mangled by its producers in post-production, leading to some obviously-truncated scenes and unnecessary voice-over. What remains takes a while to warm up, but emerges as a superior Lovecraft adaptation in its final act. Chris Sarandon actually tops Price as Charles Ward and, er, another character, and the two movies contrast in a fascinating way. A whole post will soon compare both movies with the original story.

Robocop

An old favourite, this action-packed satire of the Reagan era is still hilarious. Superstar Dutch director Paul Verhoeven's best American movie; packed to the gills with great scenes.

Piranha

John Sayles's first script is far from his best, but director Joe Dante and a great cast (including Kevin McCarthy - who just died aged 96, '60s Italian horror queen Barbara Steele, Sterling Hayden, Paul Bartel, and of course Dick Miller) make it all fun.

Piranha 3D

Hilarious intentional-comedy makes great use of 3D effects, and even of Jerry O'Connell! Big, dumb, silly fun with a great in-joke cameo in the opening scene. Recommended to people who loved Gremlins and Mars Attacks.

I'm sure there were more. I'll remember later. It was a good weekend.

Darker Than Amber

2010-09-08T13:56:00.000+12:00

It's a crime that Darker Than Amber is impossible to get hold of without resorting to bootlegs. It closes with one of the best fight scenes ever captured on film, in which Rod Taylor and William Smith go at it. The video quality is terrible, but just check this out.

Vincent Price

2010-09-07T13:20:00.001+12:00

In my opinion, the most fun horror star of all time was Vincent Price. In real life he was a charming bon vivant with a deep knowledge of cuisine and fine art; in the movies he had the face of a villain, a great fruity voice and a flair for being both sinister and funny. Only one of his roles - the lead in Witchfinder General - is still genuinely frightening, but if you want a fun time you can do a lot worse than just picking a random Vincent Price vehicle from the 1960s. Especially if you happen across any of the Edgar Allan Poe adaptations he starred in for director Roger Corman.

In a comment attached to an earlier post, my friend Sonia (who I wish would update her blog a little more often) referred to Price as "man-candy". Here is the image that prompted this outburst.

When Price guest-starred on The Muppet Show, he delivered a memorable performance of the song "You've Got A Friend". Unfortunately this was cut from the DVD release because Disney cheaped out on music rights.

Fortuately, we have YouTube.

Price's distinctive voice was a natural for radio, and he made many appearances on many different shows. Perhaps his most memorable was "Three Skeleton Key" on Suspense, which he starred in on several occasions. Here is an mp3 of what is supposed to be the best version of this, from March 17 1950, three years before Price's horror movie career took off with House of Wax.

A very cool late Vincent Price appearance was Tim Burton's wonderful stop-motion short film Vincent, which he narrated. This is available on the DVD of The Nightmare Before Christmas, but again it's on YouTube. Price went on to appear as the father/inventor of the title character of Burton's movie Edward Scissorhands, which proved to be a fitting end to his long career.

Many horror movies today seem to me to be too concerned with torture, gore and cruelty. I don't mind any of those things and have enjoyed some of these movies, but I think it's a shame that the naive and innocent fun of the old-style horror villains are all but forgotten. Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre and Peter Cushing were better actors, but for me there are very few movie stars of any kind who are as much fun to watch as Vincent Price.

Here is a sample of his distinctively spooky laugh, from the end of Michael Jackson's Thriller. Use it wisely.

Combust In Unity

2010-09-06T13:13:00.002+12:00

My friend Billy made a documentary! It's about Kiwiburn, the NZ equivalent of Burning Man.

Here's the trailer:

Dario Argento Tuesday

2010-08-31T13:52:00.000+12:00

I missed another one!

Oh well, never mind.

Satoshi Kon R.I.P. 1963-2010

2010-08-25T12:23:00.000+12:00

My favourite animator has passed away, aged only 46. I loved cartoons as a kid, but it wasn't until I saw Perfect Blue that I had any regard for them as a grown-up.

Maybe I should do a career retrospective. He made so few films, it wouldn't be hard.

Chimes at Midnight (1964) part one

2010-08-23T12:39:00.000+12:00

Chimes at Midnight is one of the best movies ever made. Unfortunately because of ongoing rights disputes it is a movie that has been very difficult to see for decades. Writer/director/star Orson Welles, working with a miniscule budget and an inexperienced crew, combined elements from five of Shakespeare's plays (Henry IV Part 1, Henry IV Part 2, Henry V, Richard II and The Merry Wives of Windsor) as well as Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles (the primary source material for Shakespeare's history plays) to tell the story of Falstaff.

Despite the abundance of no money, the technical limitations of his crew, and the fact that he basically stole the resources to make the movie when he was really supposed to be acting in an adaptation of Treasure Island for another director, Welles managed to make a profound and beautiful movie that I regard as the greatest Shakespeare adaption I have ever seen. Welles was 49 when he made the movie, though with his makeup and padding he looks much older, and it is the most mature and complete movie he ever finished. It was the last feature-length fictional film he ever made as well as his last movie in black & white.

Part of the reason for the huge artistic success of Chimes at Midnight is that it was a project Welles had been working on for over twenty-five years. It started as a stage production in 1939, when he was 23 years old and two years before Citizen Kane. That production, which attempted to adapt Shakespeare's full history cycle as one mammoth production, was his first spectacular failure. Welles previously had been very successful with two landmark Shakespearian productions, a version of MacBeth set in Haiti with an all-black cast and a version of Julius Caesar set in facist Italy, but his tendency to try and outdo himself with each successive project finally got the better of him with this one. Eventually by 1960 he had pared the material down to focus on John Falstaff, usually portrayed as a clown but reinterpreted by Welles as a noble and ultimately tragic ruffian who he described as "the most completely good man in all of drama." It's a curious statement about a character who is a drunkard, a wastrel and a thief, but Welles is very sincere in his affection for Sir John.

The interview with Welles linked to above is one of his best, and his description of the themes of the play relating to death is very instructive:

I can see that there are scenes which should be much more hilarious, but I directed everything and played everything with a view to preparing for the last scene, so the relationship between Falstaff and the Prince is no longer the simple comic one that it is in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part One, but always a preparation for the end. And as you see, the farewell is performed about four times during the movie, as a preparation for the tragic ending: The death of Hotspur, which is that of Chivalry, the death of the King in his castle, the death of the Prince (who becomes King) and the poverty and illness of Falstaff. These are presented throughout the film and must darken it. I do not believe that comedy should dominate in such a film.

Chimes at Midnight is a very difficult movie for me to write about. It's my favourite movie by my favourite director, and it's also my favourite Shakespeare adaptation. I feel like my knowledge of Orson Welles's filmography and other work is more than sound, but my knowledge of Shakespeare's history plays and their sources is much more shaky.

My blog posts on Chimes at Midnight, therefore, will serve to help me sort out my feelings for the movie and for the character, and maybe they will help to nail down exactly why I feel such a strong affinity for Welles's work.

Orson Welles

2010-08-18T13:59:00.000+12:00

Best horror movie titles for Friday

2010-08-06T12:45:00.001+12:00

Horror movies seem to have the best titles, but Italian horror movies really take the cake. These are some of my favourites.

Your Vice is a Locked Door and Only I Have the Key

Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion

The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire

Lizard in a Woman's Skin

All the Colours of the Dark

The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh

Don't Torture a Duckling

Strip Nude for your Killer

Twitch of the Death Nerve

What Are These Strange Drops of Blood Doing All Over Jennifer's Body?

Bonus: this one is not Italian, nor was it every made, and it probably would not have been a horror movie. But I really love that it made it to the poster stage.

Amer (2009)

2010-07-29T10:43:00.001+12:00

The best thing about this movie is its poster.

Amer uses the iconography of the giallo in service of a non-narrative art movie. It is extremely technically adept. The first third of the movie is a near-perfect synthesis of visual & aural ideas from Dario Argento's Suspiria and the "Drop of Water" sequence from Mario Bava's I Tre volti della paura. This segment follows a young girl as she attempts to steal her dead grandfather's pocket watch, while hiding in fear from her grandmother (who is portrayed very much as Helena Marcos from Suspiria). There is palpable tension throughout, with a series of vividly creepy images fractured through interesting editing.

Unfortunately I was far less entranced with the second third of the movie, depicting the same girl as a teenager. This third was closer to Stan Brakhage in its extreme visual deconstruction, but without his intellectual rigour. The whole movie seems built around linking sex and death, a theme that's taken from many gialli but which is not developed in an interesting way here: a girl sees her parents making love while she is already in a state of fear and for the rest of her life equates sex with violence.

The final third of the movie depicts the same character as an adult, and returns to the more threatening tone of the first part of the movie. This is the part where the sexualisation of violence reaches its apex, and my interest was once again piqued. The movie comes full circle at this point: where the first segment features sex depicted as violence and death, the end features violence and death depicted as sex.

It's just a shame that it was all so empty. If there was more to hang the movie on, or perhaps if the movie was half its present length, the impressive visual and aural techniques (the soundtrack inventively reuses giallo themes by Ennio Morricone, Bruno Nicolai and Stelvio Cipriani) wouldn't seem so much like a formalised experiment. The juxtaposition of sex and death is such a constant in the giallo (and in film in general) that just serving it up once again isn't enough on its own.

This probably sounds like a complete pan, but I actually quite enjoyed Amer. It absolutely nails the aesthetics of a good giallo, and it's a genre I have a lot of affinity for. I have absolutely no problem with style over substance, and I'm a fan of non-narrative film. I loved the homages to many individual movies throughout Amer - not just gialli but also things ranging from Un Chien Andalou to Jan Svankmajer's Down to the Cellar.

Amer is a feast for the senses, deeply sensual and arousing. I guess I'm a little confused by it - I'm tempted to go again to the Sunday session.

The Guardian (1990)

2010-07-26T11:50:00.001+12:00

Here we have a movie in which a dull American couple with a new baby hires an English nanny, which turns out to be a bad idea. Not just because, as the audience knows from a pre-credits sequence, this particular nanny has a penchant for sacrificing babies to a tree; but because their first reaction to having a child is to turn its care over to a complete stranger immediately.

At least the nanny loves her tree.

The movie actually opens with a disclaimer telling us that not all trees are evil. At first I thought this might be an in-joke, referring to the disclaimer before co-writer/director William Friedkin's earlier movie Cruising which started with a disclaimer stating that not all homosexuals are extreme S&M fetishist serial killers, but by the time the movie finished I was convinced that it was earnestly meant. This is an earnestly stupid movie.

Friedkin has made some terrific movies including The French Connection, To Live and Die in L.A. and (most relevant here) The Exorcist. The Guardian has no good dialogue, no good acting, weak cinematography, terrible music (by Jack Hues from '80s band Wang Chung) and a terrible story full of plot holes. Friedkin has said that the movie is an attempt to create a modern-day version of a Grimm's fairy tale, but it fails miserably in this respect as well. Even the gore scenes are dull.

The movie was originally by Stephen Volk (who also wrote the insane Ken Russell-directed Gothic, the silly but fun Joanna Pacula vehicle The Kiss, and Ghostwatch) and this is the worst movie I've seen from him. As his script was rewritten by Friedkin, I'm reluctant to pass any of the blame on to Volk.

The story involves a woman who is either a Druid or a tree-spirit (the movie seems a bit confused about this) who has to sacrifice babies to a malevolent tree for reasons that are unclear. The babies need to be less than 20 days old, or else their "baby genes" will have turned into "normal genes" and presumably the tree won't want them anymore.

In one of the more memorable scenes, she is hanging with the baby in the woods when three cartoonish rapists appear seemingly out of nowhere and threaten her with a big knife. She lures them to the tree, which then kills them in gruesome fashion. They are impaled, eaten (yes by a tree) and spontaneously combust. Later she goes back to the tree so it can heal the rather nasty stab wound she received during the fracas; it's unclear as to why she needs to leave and come back to do this, except that it allows an uninteresting minor character to follow her and see what she's up to, so that she can send her magic wolves to eat him.

I'm unsure why a tree spirit can command magic wolves, unless it's just to add to the supposed fairy-tale ambiance that the director needed to explicitly point out before I noticed that it was there.

There is a rather stupid scene where the father takes the baby and runs off into the woods while the nanny flies after him and the mother drives alongside in the family four-wheel drive. (Finally explaining why wealthy city & suburb dwellers drive those sorts of vehicles - I guess the fear of tree-worshipping nannies is more prevalent than I had assumed.) It concludes with her driving her car full-force into the nanny, who slams into the tree and seemingly dies. The parents are then furious when the cop on the case (played by the irritating husband from Candyman don't take their story seriously.

The finale of the movie involves the mother fighting the nanny for the baby while the father goes at the tree with a chainsaw. When the father cuts off a tree limb, the nanny's leg falls off. That was the best part of the entire movie - an unintentional laugh.

This movie, in case I have not been clear enough, is quite aggressively bad. It is not so-bad-it's-good, nor is there a case for critical appraisal. I fell asleep the first time I tried to watch it.

Also, what the hell is up with evil trees in horror movies? I've already written about Poltergeist but off the top of my head I can also think of The Woods, Evil Dead & Evil Dead 2 and From Hell It Came, and I'm sure there's plenty more.

If you want a good Grimm's fairy tale for adults movie, see A Company of Wolves (directed by Neil Jordan, based on stories from The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter).

Blacula (1972)

2010-07-19T12:32:00.003+12:00

Our movie opens in Transylvania, 1780. Prince Mamuwalde (William Marshall) and his wife Luva (Vonetta McGee) are the guests of Count Dracula (Charles Macaulay). Over dinner, they attempt to convince the Count to join their mission to abolish the slave trade. As well as being an undead fiend who feasts on the blood of the living, Dracula turns out to be a racist. After taking time out to mock and insult Manuwalde and Luva, he bites Mamuwalde, turns him into a vampire, locks him into a stone coffin, and seals up Luva in the same chamber to die...

In the early 1970s American movie studios woke up to the fact that although they had a long history of exploiting black people, and an equally long history of exploiting audiences, it had never really occurred to them to exploit black people as an audience. Writer/producer/composer/director/star Melvin van Peebles showed the way with his independent movie Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, which made a huge amount of money for him and co-financier Bill Cosby. MGM "legitimized" the trend with Shaft, an even bigger hit with the added bonus of a smash-hit award-winning soundtrack album. Suddenly every producer in town wanted a movie about a cool black dude who beats up honkies to a hot funk beat.

In an always-racially charged country going through a particularly stressful time, a prominent black cinema could have offered a chance for expression. As is so often the case with a new trend, the first wave of movies out the gate were exploitative and often unpolished. Many of these movies were consciously made with mostly black crews, who had been locked out of the unions until very shortly beforehand. Because of this there was a dearth of experienced black talent. The first wave of blaxploitation movies (as they came to be known) offered a training ground for a new black cinema.

There should have been a renaissance of black-led cinema at this point, but an unfortunate series of events prevented this. The first was simply that audiences tired of the movies becoming too formulaic. At first the mere depiction of the black experience onscreen was considered to be a revelation; a number of people have written about how it felt to see Richard Roundtree being unable to hail a cab at the start of Shaft because nobody would stop for a black man. Black leads had been incredibly rare until then (just look at how everybody still points at Night of the Living Dead, from 1968, as being a real marvel because its lead role just happened to be played by a black man - the idea that a character could be written without any regard to race and then cast as black was completely unheard of before this). There was an element of overcompensation to many of these heroes: Sweet Sweetback floored many people just because the hero actually survived past the end of the movie, but later movies would feature leads who were effectively superheroes. But when people eventually tired of this specific portrayal of black characters in movies, producers interpreted it as meaning that audiences were tired of black-oriented movies.

Another factor was from pressure groups (particularly the NAACP, the Urban League and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, who joined forces to form the Coalition Against Blaxploitation) who were dissatisfied with the portrayal of black people in blaxploitation movies. They did have a point, as a number of the most prominent movies featured pimps and drug dealers as heroes, although this was not true across the board. But this controversy, combined with audience drop-off and the (mostly white) producers' failure of imagination, lead to the cycle being shut down pretty quickly. No new attempts to reach a black audience were made, except by a handful of (mostly black) independents, and the cliché of "the black character dies first" picked up where it left off. The next wave of black filmmaking didn't really take hold for over ten years, with actors like Eddie Murphy and directors like Spike Lee breaking into the studio system on their own terms.

All of which is, I think, much more interesting than the movie currently under discussion, but let's get back to that anyway.

After a fun animated opening credits sequence involving a bat chasing a woman (see the YouTube video at the bottom of this review), we cut to 1972 where two gay-stereotype interior decorators have bought the entire contents of Dracula's castle, including Mamuwalde's coffin. When they break it open,he promptly bites them and escapes. Before long he runs into Tina (McGee again) and realises that she is the reincarnation of Luva.

Mamuwalde divides his evenings between romancing Tina (who doesn't need much convincing about the reincarnation idea, and who is remarkably calm upon learning that her beau is a vampire) and biting more people. He wants to turn Tina into a vampire so the two of them can be together forever, but he only wants her to come willingly. As played by William Marshall, a very tall actor with a Shakespearean background, Mamuwalde is an old-school gentleman with impeccable manners, charm and style. Though he is slightly out of place in 1972 (as one guy keeps saying, "That is one straaange dude!") he seems to adapt to the modern world with no difficulty at all.

He also has no problem with killing white cops who would shoot an unarmed black person in the back. This is really the only way in which he is a typical blaxploitation character.

Mamuwalde's nemesis is Dr. Gordon Thomas, a forensic scientist working with the police who was a friend of one of the interior decorators. Dr. Thomas is another atypical character for the genre - he's not a criminal and he's not precisely a cop. He's also highly educated, intuitive, and figures out that Mamuwalde is a vampire who's killing people very quickly. Unlike many vampire hunters in movies he doesn't run off at the mouth about his theories and get judged as a nutcase, but gathers actual incontrovertible evidence that he can present to his white cop buddy to gain the support of the police force.

Inevitably, things do not go well for Mamuwalde and Tina/Luva. After she is shot in the back by a white cop while unarmed and running away, Mamuwalde is compelled to bite her in order to save her life. Unfortunately she is swiftly staked by Dr. Thomas's white cop buddy. All the fight goes out of Mamuwalde at this point, as he considered her to be the only thing worth living for. He goes up onto the roof, exposing himself to the sun, and melts away to a skeleton in a nicely disgusting worm-eaten finale.

Blacula was the first blaxploitation movie to move away from the action genre. It takes a similar idea to the same year's Dracula AD 1972 in bringing the story of Dracula (if not the character, in this instance) into a contemporary setting. The Hammer movie was a lot more polished, but Blacula is more in touch with its time; where Hammer made a movie that was so self-consciously modernised that it instantly became a period piece, Blacula is just a movie that's typical of its milieu.

I'm spending a lot of time avoiding the point here: Blacula is a bad movie. It's one of those movies where you can see the blocking. The cinematography is borderline inept, and there's no atmosphere to the movie at all. The acting ranges from competent to dreadful, with Marshall the one notable exception. The music (by Gene Page) is far from the best that the genre has to offer, though the musical interludes in the club are fun. The script is terrible, as is the pacing. None of this stops the movie from being perfectly entertaining, especially if you're a fan of cheesy low-budget horror movies or blaxploitation.

Lead actress Vonetta McGee sadly died ten days ago, so I'm not pleased to report that she is the worst actor in the movie. She looks lovely, but she's completely wooden. William Marshall, on the other hand, is terrific as Mamuwalde. Marshall has a deep and very theatrical voice, and is completely convincing as an essentially good-hearted aristocrat who loathes what he has been turned into. He is commanding and dignified, though his dignity is slightly dented by the silly vampire makeup he wears in a few scenes.

This is a movie that the Coalition Against Blaxploitation would probably have had little problem with. None of the characters are pimps, drug dealers or criminals. The villain, though black, is portrayed with dignity and his villainy stems from being infected with vampirism by a white racist. The hero, also black, is a forensic scientist whose white cop buddy is deferential towards him. It also features strong anti-racist rhetoric, though mostly in the pre-credits sequence.

If you want to see a cheesy horror movie packed with early '70s decor, fashion and music, Blacula should fit the bill nicely. If you want a good movie, best to keep moving.

As for the Dracula factor, the appearance of Dracula himself is not inconsistent with the novel or with other portrayals. As the pre-credits sequence is set a hundred years before Bram Stoker's novel, the idea of Dracula as an internationally-known dignitary is not completely unreasonable. His treatment of Mamuwalde is reminiscent of the legend about Vlad Tepes (Dracula's main inspiration) where, when foreign ambassadors refused to remove their hats for cultural reasons, he ordered them nailed to their heads. And given the nationalistic fervour he has in the novel, it's not at all surprising that he's hideously racist.

The theme of a vampire encountering a reincarnation of his lost love centuries later was later used in two Dracula movies I know of, the 1973 tv movie written by Richard Matheson and starring Jack Palance, and the 1992 movie directed by Francis Ford Coppola and starring Gary Oldman. I'm sure that it must have appeared earlier than in Blacula but nothing immediately comes to mind.

I'm planning to watch the sequel Scream, Blacula, Scream soon, but I'm unsure as to whether it actually counts as a Dracula movie. Given that Dracula himself appears in this first movie (but presumably not in the second) and that Blacula is a racist epithet bestowed on him rather than his name, I'm reluctant to view Mamuwalde as a Dracul substitute. He's far too distinct a character in his own right anyway. But what do other people think?

This is the trailer, showing most of the 'best' scenes:

This is the fun opening credits sequence, featuring Gene Page's theme music:

Blah

2010-07-09T12:29:00.002+12:00

I was feeling a little Dracula-ed out this week, what with all the Hammers in the previous fortnight, and then giving a presentation at work yesterday comparing four portrayals of the character.

I'm planning on getting to Blacula in the not too distant future. In the meantime I've got a not-for-public-consumption writing project that I need to be working on, with a fairly tight deadline of a couple of weeks.

The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974)

2010-07-02T13:10:00.000+12:00

In 1804, the evil warlord Kah (Shan Chan, Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan, Five Fingers of Death tracks down Dracula's tomb and asks him to revive the 7 Golden Vampires under his command. Dracula (John Forbes Robertson) mocks his request and decides instead to kill Kah, assume his form and head to China to command the 7 Golden Vampire for himself.

One hundred years later, Professor Van Helsing arrives in China to learn about Chinese vampires. Addressing the Professors of Chongqing University, he tells a story about a small village which is under the thrall of the 7 Golden Vampires. This story is played out as almost a self-contained horror story, as a farmer discovers that his daughter has been kidnapped by Kah (presumably actually Dracula) along with a number of other young women, and charges in to save them. Both the farmer and his daughter are killed, but not before he manages to kill one of the 7 Golden Vampires, who are accompanied by a huge horde of other vampires that have risen from the grave to do Kah/Dracula's bidding. Some of these vampires can be seen to hop, following the tradition of the Chinese hopping vampire that was later used in Sammo Hung's Mr. Vampire series.

Anyway, the response of the learned audience is to say something along the lines of "You stupid European peasants might fall for such superstitious bullshit, but here in China we have a civilisation going back thousands of years, so please credit us with some intelligence," as they all walk out on him.

Later he is approached by a man who had attended the lecture, Hsi Ching (David Chiang, The Water Margin, New One-Armed Swordsman), who claims to be from the village Van Helsing had spoken of and asks for his assistance in killing the 7 Golden Vampires. Finance is put up by a rich widow, Vanessa Buren (Norwegian model Julie Ege, Up Pompeii, Rentadick) and the team set out accompanied by Hsi's sister and six brothers, all kung fu experts. Van Helsing's son Leyland tags along as well.

The rest of the movie basically follows this troupe as they make their way to the village, getting into kung fu fights with bandits and later with vampires, until they finally reach the cursed village and get to fight the 7 Golden Vampires. There are a couple of surprises along the way.

First of all, I expected the character of Vanessa to be a love interest for Leyland Van Helsing, and indeed at first he does seem to be courting her, but he is soon put off by her independent ways. ("They'll be wanting the vote next!") Leyland finds himself much more taken with Mai Kwen (Shih Szu), who despite being a kick-ass kung fu fighter is portrayed in non-fighting scenes as being submissive (as was typical of Western portrayals of Asian woman who weren't actively evil). So far so boringly normal.

Much more interesting is that Vanessa turns out to be the love interest of Hsi Ching. This is very unusual indeed. Asian men are usually denied any kind of sexuality in Western movies - even today - unless it is to ridicule them. (Think of Long Dong Duk in Sixteen Candles.) To pair David Chiang with Julie Ege would have been positively revolutionary at the time. Unfortunately it doesn't quite pay off - one of these couples lives and one of them dies, and you get exactly one guess as to which is which. However the death scene is a real doozy: Vanessa has been bitten by a vampire and turned, and goes on to bite Hsi; his response, realising that he will also turn, is to impale them both together on the same stake.

Another surprise is that the kung fu fighting is actually pretty good. I knew that the movie was packed to the gills with stars of Shaw Brothers movies, as this is a co-production between Hammer and Shaw, but I expected that Roy Ward Baker's typically stodgy direction would get in the way. From what I've since read (in the book Roy Ward Baker by Geoff Mayer) Baker wanted to direct all the kung fu fighting himself, but after producer Run Run Shaw viewed the rushes from his first attempt, he insisted on bringing in Chang Cheh to handle these scenes with a second unit.

Chang Cheh is one of the absolute masters of martial arts cinema. For a point of reference, John Woo considers him to be his mentor. He directed such movies as The One-Armed Swordsman, Five Deadly Venoms, Golden Swallow, and (my favourite) the epic The Water Margin. Cheh used his favourite choreographer Lau Kar-Leung (who went on to direct such classics as 36 Chambers of Shaolin, 8-Diagram Pole Fighter and the Jackie Chan movie Drunken Master II) and many of his regular stars and stuntpeople. I wouldn't say that Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires represents anything like their best work, but it's respectable, and the movie never gets TOO dragged down in scenes of the Van Helsings holding their own against obviously-superior opponents.

Cheh was the director most responsible for bringing explicit bloodshed to the Chinese/Hong Kong martial arts movie, so it's good to see plenty of the red stuff being splashed around here. Shaw Brothers blood actually resembles Hammer blood quite closely, so there's a definite link in styles there, even if Cheh's fluid direction clashes somewhat with Baker's more static mise-en-scène.

The sexual element of vampirism is far less pronounced than in Hammer's previous Dracula movies. The reason for this is simply that Dracula himself is even more of a background figure than usual (sadly we are spared any scenes of a kung fu Dracula) and the 7 Golden Vampires all appear as desiccated corpses, with no obvious sex appeal and no apparent sex drive. However, Baker confirms his reputation as Hammer's most exploitation-minded director in several scenes of topless Chinese women being tortured by Kah/Dracula and the 7 Golden Vampires.

The end of the movie is a little anticlimactic. After a huge final battle, in which all of the seven brothers and the 6 remaining Golden Vampires are all killed, Van Helsing faces off with Kah and convinces him to resume his original form as Dracula before easily staking him. The End!

John Forbes Robertson is, erm, not good as Dracula. He's wearing silly theatrical makeup (reminiscent of that worn by Howard Vernon in Jess Franco's Dracula Prisoner of Frankenstein) and is dubbed by someone else. I'm not surprised that Christopher Lee refused this one, but it's a damned shame they didn't cast someone who could fight, act, or at least look the part.

Cushing is fine as Van Helsing, even though the character should be dead. Hammer continuity is often poor, but this really pushes it. In Dracula AD 1972, Van Helsing is shown to die in 1872; this movie is set in 1904 and he's still moving about quite a bit. I thought that perhaps he might be Lawrence Van Helsing Jr., but reference is made in the movie to him being the one who had fought Dracula, which kills that theory.

(Speaking of Van Helsing descendants: if Leyland actually stays with Mai Kwen, then I guess this means that Lorimer and Jessica Van Helsing are part Chinese. Hammer never did follow Bram Stoker's line about Dracula being a corrupting foreign influence, so it's great to see them actively promoting miscegenation in this movie - even to the point of letting non-white men get with white women, which is still somewhat taboo.)

A bigger continuity problem comes from Dracula himself, who takes on the form of Kah in 1804, heads to China, and is still there in 1904. Even if we presume that none of the previous movies actually happened, there are multiple references to his previous fights with Van Helsing. Was Dracula a dual citizen throughout the 19th Century, dividing his time between China and Europe and changing his appearance constantly? I guess it's possible, but it seems more likely that scriptwriter Don Houghton (who also wrote Dracula AD 1972 and The Satanic Rites of Dracula) just didn't think about it ever hard. Or possibly didn't think about anything ever, or even comprehend the meaning of the verb "think". Amazing to think that this guy had already written some pretty decent Doctor Who stories and went on to write a good one for Sapphire & Steel. Maybe he was in the middle of a massive drug binge when he was working for Hammer. Maybe he just didn't give a damn. He died 19 years ago (to the day as it turns out - I feel a little bad talking shit about him now) so we'll probably never know.

At least we were spared another of those awful ITV soundtracks! James Bernard's score is apparently mostly pieced together from pieces of his earlier ones, and I'm still not a huge fan, but it's a vast improvement over what we had to put up in the previous two movies. As is the rest of the movie - except, of course, for Dracula.

Here ends my Hammer Dracula marathon. Hammer would only produce one more horror movie after this, the dreadful Dennis Wheatley adaptation To the Devil... A Daughter, as well as a handful of movies based on British sitcoms and a remake of Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes. It's a shame that they didn't get to continue putting Dracula into more modern and exotic genre movies. It would have been cool to see them get together with Toho to try and revive two dying franchises at once with Dracula vs. Godzilla.

Next week, a short-lived movie series that was much more successful at bringing the Count into the 1970s.

(Well, more commercially successful anyway. And it's not really Count Dracula himself, though he does make a cameo appearance at the start of the first movie. It also features much better music.)

Ladies and gentlemen, next week I bring you... Blacula!

The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973)

2010-06-30T12:27:00.000+12:00

We begin with a Satanic ceremony being performed, in which a cockerel has its throat cut so that the blood can spurt all over a naked young woman lying on an altar. Is there ever a better way to start a movie?

(Too bad I decided on a "no nudity" policy for this blog - I could have put a really good picture here otherwise.)

While this happens, a man who is tied up in another room manages to escape. He runs a gauntlet of guys in sheepskin coats on motorbikes, who are gunned down by someone in a black car. The man manages to drag himself into the car and is driven back to a secret headquarters, where British government agents quiz him about what he's witnessed. He describes the ceremony in detail (even though he didn't seem to be in the room at the time) including how the woman was stabbed, seemed to die, then revived and her wound healed in seconds. He also has five photos taken with his secret-agent-wristwatch, which show that the leaders of the cult are a top scientist, a peer of the House of Lords, a general, and the government official who actually heads the department the secret agents are working for. The fifth photo shows an empty doorway - do you think it could actually be someone who doesn't show up on film?

Unsurprisingly, they are not pleased about this. They would be even less pleased if they knew that their secretary was being chased down and kidnapped by the guys on motorbikes.

They decide that the only course of action is to call in the same bumbling Scotland Yard inspector from the previous movie, who in turn calls in Lorimer Van Helsing. It turns out that the scientist is an old friend of Van Helsing, so he goes to see him and discovers that he has created a massively beefed-up version of the bubonic plague that will destroy all human life extremely quickly if released. The next thing you know he has been knocked unconscious by a bullet to the head (huh?) and wakes to find that his friend is hanging from a noose and the Petri dishes containing the plague have gone.

The inspector and two of the agents then proceed to head to the mansion where the rituals had taken place and knock on the door, seemingly without any sort of plan or even a coherent cover story, and set about making light banter with the woman who lets them in (who just happens to be the same person who lead the rituals at the start of the movie).

Meanwhile Van Helsing's daughter Jessica (this time played by Joanna Lumley) also sneaks into the building and heads straight to the basement, where she is promptly attacked by four female vampires, one of whom is the kidnapped secretary. Her screams draw the authorities, who rush down to stake their former secretary and rescue Jessica.

It turns out that the cult is lead by someone called D. D. Denham, a mysterious recluse who has never been seen and who just happened to turn up at around the time that Dracula had been staked two years earlier and whose headquarters are on the site of the demolished church. The minute that Van Helsing discovers this, he heads straight to the lion's den and demands to be shown in. For some reason Dracula attempts to disguise his identity by shining a light into Van Helsing's eyes and putting on a funny accent, and he attempts to sway the vampire hunter to his side by explaining that he wants to use the plague to overthrow the governments of the world and set up a new order.

For some reason, Van Helsing doesn't seem to think that this is a very good idea. He promptly tries to shoot the Count with a silver bullet, but is stopped by the intervention of some of the other cult leaders. Dracula has him taken to the mansion, where Jessica has been kidnapped and laid out for sacrifice.

It turns out that the whole plot is basically a huge suicide mission for Dracula: he plans to wipe out the entire human race so that, deprived of a food source, he will finally have his eternal rest. In the meantime he wants Jessica as his consort just to fuck with Van Helsing's head. The rest of the cult are disturbed to hear that they are to be infected with the plague and used to spread it, as they thought they were just going to use it as blackmail to obtain massive power, but Dracula controls their minds and starts forcing them to infect themselves.

Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your viewpoint) the bumbling cop has managed to start a fire upstairs, which now spreads to this room. Van Helsing leaps out of a window, pursued by Dracula, and manages to lure him into a Hawthorn bush (supposedly what Christ's crown of thorns was made from), which messes him up enough that Van Helsing can stake him.

In my review of Dracula AD 1972, I expressed dismay that no effort was made to bring the Count effectively into the modern world, and also observed that the music made the movie seem like an episode of an ITV series. I guess I should be careful what I wish for. While this movie is energetic and fun, it's just about as far from what I want from a Dracula movie as I could imagine, with the Count reduced to the role of a corporate villain in a cheap spy movie.

The heroes are all bumbling idiots - even Van Helsing stupidly walks into a trap for no good reason - and are only saved by sheer dumb luck or (in one mind-boggling instance) because vampires can now apparently be killed by clear running water. Which means that turning on the sprinkler system does in a whole roomful of them. Joanna Lumley, who would go on to kick arse in The New Avengers two years later, spends way too much time here standing around and screaming hysterically.

On the plus side, at least Christopher Lee didn't go out of the series at its lowest point (that was Scars of Dracula, unless the next movie proves to be even worse), and it's still fun to see him and Cushing together. They would continue to be teamed up in movies until House of Long Shadows in 1983.

There's only one more stop in my Hammer Dracula marathon. Having failed to update the Count to swinging London or to a modern spy epic, it was decided that the obvious thing to do was to take him back to period (1904 to be precise), to pit him once more against the original Van Helsing (who Dracula: AD 1972 had showed as dying 32 years earlier), and - crucially - to put him in a kung-fu movie. Tune in tomorrow for the only collaboration between Hammer and the Shaw Brothers: Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires!

Dracula AD 1972 (1972)

2010-06-29T13:01:00.000+12:00

This movie opens with the climax of the previous movie, where Dracula (Christopher Lee) fights Dr. Van Helsing (Peter Cushing) aboard a runaway horse-drawn carriage. This is an exciting scene, with both actors quite literally throwing themselves into it. The scene finishes with Dracula vanquished, and the triumphant Van Helsing dying from his wounds.

The only problem is that this is not how the previous movie ended. It is, in fact, the climax to a movie that does not exist. Damn shame really.

Anyway, one of Dracula's disciples rides onto the scene, collects his belongings and dust, and buries these in the same cemetery where Van Helsing is interred.

We then advance one hundred years to a party where some dirty hippie gatecrashers are annoying the hell out of the posh society types while a godawful psychedelic blues band plays. We get to hear two complete songs, intercut with the "hilarious" antics of the hippies and the "priceless" reactions of the toffs. Meanwhile, a cadaverous-looking young man stalks around looking slightly out of place. He is played by the same actor as Dracula's disciple from the opening sequence. Could there be a connection?

Mercifully, after way too much footage of the shitty band playing, the police are called and the hippies scatter. Several of them converge on a coffee shop called The Cavern (presumably no relation to the Liverpool club where The Beatles used to play). The corpse-looking weirdo, with the not at all suspicious name Johnny Alucard, convinces them that the thing to do next is to go to a condemned church and have a black mass.

Is it a coincidence that one of the hippies is the great-granddaughter of Dr. Van Helsing? Johnny seems particularly keen on getting her to attend the ceremony, but when she is reluctant to be involved in a blood sacrifice, Laura (the gorgeous Caroline Munro) enthusiastically volunteers.

Everybody freaks out (though not in the way they'd planned) and runs away, apart from Johnny and Laura. Soon enough, Count Dracula rises from the grave and makes a snack of Laura while Johnny looks on eagerly.

Back at the coffee shop, everyone decides that the best thing to do is to pretend none of it has happened. When Johnny turns up and tells them he's just put Laura on a train to her hometown, they're a little suspicious but decide to let it slide. Before long Johnny has coerced Gaynor (Marsha Hunt, inspiration for the Rolling Stones song Brown Sugar) into coming back to his place for a joint before heading to the church for another midnight snack.

When the bodies start piling up, the police head to famed expert on the occult Lorimer Van Helsing (Peter Cushing), who is of course Jessica's grandfather. The chase is soon on to save Jessica from Dracula's revenge, as his mission is to punish the Van Helsing bloodline by using the young against the old. Hmmm, Dracula brought back from the dead, spending most of his time hanging out in a desecrated church, and using children against their parents (or grandparents).... Doesn't that sound like something I've seen before?

This is a really dumb movie. It makes the fundamental mistake of keeping Dracula on the sidelines once again, as well as keeping him as an anacrhonism in modern times. In Bram Stoker's novel, Dracula went out of his way to familiarise himself with the modern world. Wouldn't an incarnation of Dracula who was able to make himself at home in the time he lived in be somewhat scarier than one who would probably be staked on sight if he dared venture out in public?

It also bears way too much resemblance to the tv shows of the time. The music is a big factor here, sounding a lot like the themes from various ITV shows. Then there's the fact that the hippie characters are somewhat anachronistic for 1972; the slang and fashion is already years out of date, as even a nerd like me notices. Compare this to the youth culture portrayed in the films of Roger Corman at the time (who was influence majorly by Hammer for his Edgar Allan Poe adaptations) and this looks pretty sad by comparison.

On the other hand it's really good to see Lee & Cushing matching wits again, even if only at the beginning and the end. (The music makes their final confrontation all the more surreal in this respect.) It's also a major step up from Scars of Dracula in every important respect.

Despite major script issues, the young cast acquits themselves nicely for the most part. Chrisopher Neame isn't bad as Alucard (it's amusing that Van Helsing has to go to quite a bit of effort before he realises what the name spells backwards) though he's no Ralph Bates, and Stephanie Beacham is fine as Jessica. The rest of the cast is a bit anonymous, but nobody is as terrible as Dennis Waterman in Scars.

All in all this is a fun little movie. It's not as cringeworthy as I'd feared (apart from that party scene) but it's also not as "groovy" as I'd hoped.

Tomorrow we have the final appearance of Christopher Lee as Dracula and the penultimate Hammer Dracula. Click back on over for The Satanic Rites of Dracula!

Scars of Dracula (1970)

2010-06-28T12:25:00.001+12:00

We open with a slab in Dracula's castle on which rests his cape and powdered blood. Suddenly a squeaking rubber bat flutters into the room and drools a few drops of blood, which causes Dracula to regenerate. This marks the first time in the series that Dracula's resurrection has not been a direct continuation of the previous movie's finale. Unfortunately the lack of continuity, visual style, budget and common sense in this opening is carried over into the rest of the movie.

We then follow a man carrying the vampirised body of a young woman to the local inn, where the innkeeper stirs up the town into vigilante action. The women and children are all deposited in the church while all the men storm the castle and attempt to burn it to the ground. This accomplishes two things: 1/ it gives Dracula an excuse to not have many expensive things left later in the movie, and 2/ it royally pisses him off. When the men return to the church, they discover that all the women and children have been gruesomely killed by large rubber bats. The camera lingers over their mutilated faces as the men stoically grieve.

The movie then follows Paul, a young rogue who is caught in flagrante with the burgomaster's daughter and goes dashing about in a series of unfunny slapstick scenes, passing through his brother's girlfriend's birthday party for plot convenience, until he arrives at Dracula's castle (having been turned away at the inn). Despite being freaked out by Dracula and his hairy uncouth servant Klove (played by former Doctor Who Patrick Troughton and clearly not the same Klove from Dracula: Prince of Darkness), he elects to spend the night there. That night he is seduced by the young woman who had greeted him at the castle gates. Just as she is about to bit him (post-coitally - the first vampire nookie in one of these movies) Dracula barges in, knocks Paul out, and stabs the woman to death with a huge knife.

Yes you read that right - Dracula stabs someone, and despite being a vampire she dies.

The next morning Paul finds himself locked in with the corpse, so he makes a rope ladder out of torn curtains and climbs out the window into the room below. This turns out to be Dracula's sleeping chamber, which has no doors. Meanwhile in the room above, Klove cheerfully whistles as he dismembers the woman's corpse, tossing the pieces into an acid bath (or perhaps a holy water bath) where they dissolve.

Paul's brother Simon and his girlfriend Sarah go looking for Paul, and after meeting a hostile reaction at the inn they head to Dracula's castle. They spend the night, but are able to leave relatively unmolested as Klove has taken a fancy to Sarah. When Dracula discovers that they are gone, he punishes Klove by searing his back with a red-hot sword.

Simon resolves to go back to find Paul, leaving Sarah in the church under the protection of the priest, and manages to end up trapped in Dracula's sleeping chamber with Paul's impaled corpse. Dracula awakens, climbs up the wall (in a sequence taken directly from the original novel - I believe this was the first time it was ever filmed) and goes after Sarah, who has come to the castle after the priest was killed by a squeaking rubber bat.

Everybody converges on the room of the castle, where Klove is thrown over the battlements to his death by Dracula. It seems that Dracula is about to get the upper hand when suddenly he is struck by lightning, catches on fire, and plummets off the battlements himself.

If you haven't managed to work it out from the summary, this movie is absolutely dreadful. Christopher Lee gets more screen time and dialogue as Dracula than in any prior movie in the series, but Dracula is turned into a sadist who prefers stabbing and branding people to biting them. (He does get to bite two women over the course of the movie, and the sexual nature of these scenes are played up, but they are throwaway bits.) Most of the cast is pretty bad, especially Dennis Waterman as Simon. Patrick Troughton clearly has fun as Klove, and Lee injects a certain glee into his sadistic scenes, but this is easily the worst of the series so far.

Roy Ward Baker directs rather stolidly, with none of the style of Terence Fisher, Freddie Francis or even Peter Sadsy. The script is terrible, from the awful dialogue to the meandering nature of the plot, with too much to-ing and fro-ing. It was actually written by Anthony Hinds, under his usual John Elder pseudonym, who had written the previous two movies and is usually considered one of the real creative masterminds behind the company (as well as being the son of William Hinds - aka Will Hammer) but he had left the company by this stage and it's likely that his original script was monkeyed with.

Worst of all, it all looks so very cheap. All of Hammer's movies were low-budget affairs, but this is the first to lack the lush production design and cinematography that had distinguished their earlier gothic horror movies. Baker tries to compensate by piling on the gore, which has a certain camp charm, but it isn't enough.

That one brief sequence of Dracula climbing the walls is rather good, but it's the only part that suggests anyone involved had read Stoker's book. Despite some parts bearing a superficial resemblance to Jonathan Harker's visit to Castle Dracula in the novel, the character is further from his original conception than ever before.

I don't really have much positive to say about it. I really hope that the series doesn't continue to get worse. The title of the next movie gives me some hope, though. It seems that it will be a period movie of a different sort.

Tomorrow, the one I've been looking forward to most. Dracula: AD 1972

Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970)

2010-06-25T12:34:00.001+12:00

The first Dracula movie of the 1970s is officially #1 on my list of "Movies whose title I mistakenly expected to have no relevance to the movie."

Taste the Blood of Dracula starts with a sleazy salesman (Roy Kinnear, overacting as usual) stumbling across the final sequence of Dracula Has Risen from the Grave. Once Dracula is gruesomely vanquished, Kinnear gathers up his ring, his cape, his monogrammed clasp, and the red powder of his blood.

We then go to three decadent chaps who have a secret society dedicated to the pursuit of hedonism, which basically amounts to them going to an upscale brothel. They encounter a young man who with a snap of his fingers is able to lure away the prostitute chosen by the leader. This throws them all into a kerfuffle, especially when they discover that he is the disgraced Lord Courtley, who was disowned and disinherited after performing a Black Mass, who is actually being kept by the women working in the brothel.

Intrigued, the men approach Courtley and propose that he tutor them in decadence. He enthusiastically agrees, provided they are willing to pay for the privilege, and promptly takes them to Kinnear to buy Dracula's belongings. Kinnear is reluctant, but after they meet his exorbitant price he agrees to sell. Courtley then takes them to a church, sets it up with the accoutrements for a Black Mass, mingles his own blood with that of Dracula, and orders them to drink. They are unable to bring themselves to out of sheer revulsion. Courtley mocks them as fools and drains his own glass - whereupon he immediately collapses to the floor, choking and pleading for help. The three men beat him to death and flee the scene.

After they have gone, Dracula is reborn from within Courtley's body and sombrely intones that they will pay for destroying his servant.

This whole first half of the movie is all great stuff. The three "gentlemen" are utterly loathsome, especially their leader Hargood, who lords over his family like a tyrant. Amusingly the most reticent of the three, Paxton, is played by comedian Peter Sallis, now known as the voice of Wallace in the Wallace and Gromit stop-motion animations.

Courtley is played by Ralph Bates with enormous arrogance and significant charisma. He is the best thing about the entire movie, and if he were given more good roles he probably could have eclipsed Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee as Hammer's top star. Unfortunately this was not to be - but if his role in this movie had continued as originally intended, it might have worked out for him.

From what I've read Bates was originally supposed to be the villain of the movie, with Dracula only appearing in the opening sequence; when the American distributors objected to a Dracula movie without Dracula, Hammer pressured Christopher Lee into returning and replacing Bates in the second half of the movie. In my opinion this is to the movie's detriment. Lee is clearly bored with the whole thing, giving a far less compelling performance than in the previous three Hammer Dracula movies he appeared in. Part of this can be traced to his having just starred in Jess Franco's Count Dracula, where he finally got to play the role as written by Bram Stoker, a movie he apparently immensely enjoyed making (even though it was neither a critical and commercial success). I'll get to that movie in a few weeks, but suffice to say now that I believe that Lee's performance in Count Dracula is the definitive screen version of the character despite the movie's other flaws.

Anyway. The movie would have been better if Bates was in the whole thing instead of just the first half.

The second part of the movie deals with Dracula's revenge, as he uses the men's children to torment and kill them. Chief among these is Linda Hayden as Alice Harwood. Hayden had the face of a cherub and was very good at playing villains - her performance in Blood on Satan's Claw is unforgettable.

Despite Hayden's great performance, the second half of the movie is far less interesting than the first. It basically follows this formula: Dracula mesmerizes one of the men's kids; the kid kills their father; Dracula intones "The First," or "The Second," or "The Third." Meanwhile Paxton's son Paul (who is left curiously unmolested) gets furiously frustrated at the police's idiotic refusal to connect the murders and the disappearance of the kids - they cheerfully insist that they are all unconnected events. Dracula is eventually destroyed simply because Paul takes the Black Mass gear out of the church where he's staying, and he just dies.

The only connection to Bram Stoker's book is that Hammer finally gets Dracula to London. Too bad he doesn't really do much except for taking revenge for the murder of Courtley. It's not terribly characteristic of him to give a damn about one of his servants, so I guess he's finally getting sentimental in his old age.

This all sounds like I'm bashing the movie, but I'm really not. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with the second half - it's all very entertaining. It's just that the first half is so much stronger that it pales in comparison, and the ending is kind of weak. But it's no weaker than Dracula drowning in a moat. I wish there was some way to see it as it was originally written, but there you go.

This concludes the first week of my Hammer Dracula marathon. Tune in again on Monday for the next instalment - Scars of Dracula. Have a great weekend!

Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968)

2010-06-24T12:33:00.001+12:00

Apparently some time during Dracula: Prince of Darkness, the Count nipped out for a bite and stuffed his victim into a bell in a church, because this movie opens with a boy finding her. It drives him crazy, drives the priest to drink, and stops everyone going to church.

A year later, a Monsignor (complete with unnecessary voice-over) stops into town to see how things have been going since Dracula was vanquished. He's not pleased to find that the priest has said a quick mass to an empty church then nipped off to the pub to get plastered. It turns out that the congregation stay away because the shadow of Dracula's castle touches it, so the Monsignor drags the priest up the mountain to perform an exorcism. The priest, a sweaty coward, pikes out halfway up the mountain so the Monsignor goes on alone. As a thunderstorm rages, he chants some Latin and wedges an enormous crucifix though the door latch.

Meanwhile, the sweaty cowardly priest has managed to fall down a bank and hit his head on some ice - which just happens to contain the frozen body of Dracula. The ice cracks and the priest's blood trickles into Dracula's mouth. But when he gets back to the castle, he is royally pissed to find what's happened to his home.

Straight away the tone of this movie is very different to the earlier movies in this series. There's much more of an emphasis on the visual aspect of the movie, which isn't really a surprise because it's directed by the great cinematographer Freddie Francis (who was a genius to the end - his last movie was David Lynch's The Straight Story, which he shot when he was 82). Francis didn't pull a Mario Bava and shoot Dracula Has Risen from the Grave himself, but he did let Arthur Grant use the gear that had served him so well on The Innocents, allowing Grant to mimic some of Francis's trademark deep focus work. This movie always look good, but the scenes with Dracula all have a special edge with interesting lighting, filters and unusual camera placement.

The movie makes more out of religious iconography than usual, and is the only vampire movie I'm aware of where staking only works if you also pray over the body. This leads to a particularly spectacular scene near the end, much to the atheist hero's chagrin. It doesn't have a particularly coherent religious moral, though the "Dracula can't be killed by an atheist" idea hints at something pretty interesting.

The sexual aspect is pushed to the forefront even more than in previous movies, both in terms of Dracula himself and with the supporting characters. Barbara Ewing as Zena particularly makes a lot of her sexual appetite (as with Dracula: Prince of Darkness the movie edges into misogyny here) but the sexiest scene by far is Dracula's seduction of the seemingly-willing heroine Maria, played by Hammer regular Veronica Carlson.

In this scene, Diana opens her window and then lays back passively on her bed waiting for Dracula, baring her neck languidly. He enters and nuzzles her face with his before leaning in for the bite. As she moans, the camera cuts to her hand grasping a doll and then dropping it to the floor in a pretty blunt piece os symbolism.

There's an unforgivable moment early on when the priest first sees Dracula as a reflection in the water. The day-for-night scenes, although quite lovely in their way, look even less like night than most day-for-night photography so that it often seems that Dracula is wandering around in the sunlight. Although these are all visually striking moments, they seem to indicate that Freddie Francis was less conscientious a director than Terence Fisher, and cared much more about visual effect than thematic consistency.

One thing I found very interesting is the change in attitude towards the authority figures in the movie. The village priest directly causes the resurrection of Dracula through his own spinelessness; the Monsignor, though in many ways a sympathetic figure, manages to bring danger to his own home through his attempts to exorcise the evil, and is portrayed as being unduly inflexible. Even though the movie emphasises that religious belief is necessary to defeat Dracula, the young atheist hero is the one who ultimately prevails - with the eventual assistance of the priest, who defies Dracula (his own authority figure) in the final act.

The gruesomeness of the ending also worked for me. Dracula is staked by Paul, but as he is an atheist and therefore cannot pray over him, Dracula pulls the stake out of his own chest with much spurting of blood. Then in the finale, he is impaled upon the cross that had been used to seal his castle; the priest prays over him, and Dracula bleeds messily from his eyeballs before crumbling to dust.

So what we lose in thematic richness we gain in sex and violence. It would be nice if we could have both in the same movie.

Tomorrow: Taste the Blood of Dracula. Yum!

Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1965)

2010-06-23T13:10:00.000+12:00

We open with the final sequence of Dracula (1958), showing the spectacular demise of Count Dracula at the hands of Van Helsing. This sequence is enclosed in a smoky frame because the earlier movie was shot in a different aspect ratio - Dracula: Prince of Darkness was a rare Hammer movie to be shot in 'scope.

We then go to a funeral, where a young woman is being prepared to be staked through the heart before burial, over the impassioned protests of her mother. The proceedings are thrown into disarray when an imposing figure appears, bellowing for them to stop and firing a rifle into the air. This is Father Sandor, and he's furious that the body is being subjected to this indignity when everybody knows that Dracula has been destroyed for a good ten years and there is no evidence that the girl has been bitten by a vampire.

We then go to a tavern where two English couples are taking a holiday. It is quickly established that one of the couples (Alan and Helen - yeah I know) is very prim & proper while the other (Charles and Diana - yeah I know) is quite modern & forward. Father Sandor arrives and proceeds to warm his posterior (as he calls it) by the fire, hiking up his vestments at the back to allow full access to the heat while holding forth on this as one of the great pleasures of life. One couple of shocked, the other is charmed. Could their respective personalities be relevant to the movie that follows, do you think?

Against the advice of Sandor the couples decide to head to their next destination. He is particularly adamant that they should stay away from the castle, which does not even appear on the map. The coachman decides to throw them out of the coach before they reach their destination (along with their luggage), abandoning them within site of the castle. As we've already seen in Brides of Dracula, coachmen love nothing more than to abandon travellers in the worst possible spot.

While they are trying to figure out what to do next, a coach without a driver just happens to ride up to them. They mount the coach to drive it to the next town but - surprise - it takes them to the castle. The more staid of the couples (particualrly Helen, played by Hammer regular Barbara Shelley) think that the best response to this is to turn tail and run, but they end up going inside to find a table laid out for four guests. They then discover that their luggage has already been laid out in the bedrooms.

While they are pondering this, a pleasantly smiling, genially welcoming man arrives to greet them.

This is Klove, who informs them that although the master of the house is dead he had left instructions for hospitality to be granted to any weary traveller. Klove was surely Angus Scrimm's inspiration for his performance as The Tall Man in the Phantasm series.

This build-up has taken up almost the entire first half of the movie. This is in stark contrast to the 1958 Dracula, where writer Jimmy Sangster and director Terence Fisher (who are also behind this movie) brought us into the action at a tremendous pace.

Having pussyfooted around for long enough, the movie now makes its move. Klove lures Alan down into the cellar, knocks him out cold with the hilt of a knife, then strings him up by his ankles so that he hangs over what appears to be a sarcophagus.

Klove then brings out a small casket that you will probably guess contains Dracula's ashes, and sprinkles them into the sarcophagus. He then slits Alan's throat, and his blood gushes into the coffin where it revives the Count. You might notice that this ceremony bears some similarity to a number of old legends; Odin and Osiris come to mind. It's also a sort of inversion of the crucifixion of Jesus. I'll let you sort out the meaning of this symbolism for yourself.

So you can imagine the shock Helen receives when Klove takes her down to the cellar. Her husband hangs upside down and Dracula waits for her, and he says...

...well, he doesn't say anything. Dracula does not speak at all in this movie, supposedly because Christopher Lee thought that the dialogue he was given was so poor that he refused to say it.

He's still a sex god, though. Helen is soon in complete thrall to him, and later when he slices open his chest and pulls Diana down to drink his blood, the implications of oral sex are blatant.

It's hard to get a coherent reading on the sexual politics of Dracula: Prince of Darkness. Dracula still represents pure unbridled sexuality, and is still evil. However the characters who suffer the most (Alan and particularly Helen) are the most sexually repressed. Perhaps Charles and Diana fare better because they are more balanced. Helen's fate is particularly hideous, as she is held down, writhing and hissing, and staked by a roomful of men in a scene that suggests (perhaps unconsciously) a gang rape. This scene plays as quite uncomfortably misogynistic.

The movie also introduces, quite late in the day, a character called Ludwig, a fly-eating inmate of an insane asylum who first seems harmless but who turns out to be in Dracula's thrall. This character is obviously inspired by Renfield.

The movie ends in slightly baffling fashion, as Dracula fights Alan on the thin ice of the castle moat. Diana and Sandor figure out that a vampire cannot cross running water and start shooting the ice, creating cracks that trap him. He then slides into the water - and drowns. What the...?

Despite its slow start, Dracula: Prince of Darkness emerges as a fine sequel to Hammer's first Dracula. Andrew Kier as Father Sandor makes a fine substitute for Peter Cushing as Van Helsing. It's kind of a shame that Hammer didn't run two series in parallel, one with Dracula against various savants and one with Van Helsing against various villains, but I guess Cushing was already quite busy with their Frankenstein series.

The scene of Dracula's resurrection almost makes up for the relative lameness of his demise. The supporting cast is a little bland, except for the versatile Barbara Shelley as Helen, who is compelling whether playing prudish, terrified or wanton. Christopher Lee is still in fine form as Dracula, despite his late appearance and non-speaking role; he's always been a fine physical actor, and his hands are particularly expressive.

This was the final outing for Terence Fisher and Jimmy Sangster as director and writer, respectively, in this series, though both would continue to work for Hammer on other movies. The next movie in the series, Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (I guess that Dracula Has Risen from the Moat doesn't have the same ring), was written by Hammer bigwig Anthony Hinds under his John Elder pseudonym and directed by two-time Oscar-winning cinematographer Freddie Francis, who's probably best remembered now for shooting David Lynch's three least typical movies (The Elephant Man, Dune and The Straight Story).

More on that tomorrow!

Brides of Dracula (1960)

2010-06-22T12:27:00.001+12:00

An opening voice-over informs us that although Dracula may be dead, his disciples still live on to corrupt the world. Meanwhile, a young French woman named Marianne has come to Transylvania in order to take a teaching position. Her cowardly coachman abandons her during a stopover in a small village, and despite the warnings of the locals she accepts the invitation of the sinister Baroness Meinster to spend the night at her castle. It isn't long before she's discovered her son chained up in a secret part of the castle, and promptly sets him free. Before long he has killed his mother, and Marianne flees into the night. She is found by Professor Van Helsing, who has been summoned by the local priest.

Soon the new Baron Meinster is running amuck, with the aid of his mother's servant Greta. He kills a local girl, then (in a surprising turn of events) gets engaged to the impossibly naive Marianne. Meanwhile Van Helsing encoutered the vampiric Baroness Meinster, who is consumed by guilt. She confesses that she blames herself for the entire situation, which was apparently caused by her encouragement of (and participation in) his wild carousing. Van Helsing responds by driving a stake through her heart.

Meanwhile Marianne's roommate Gina expresses jealousy over her engagement. The Baron is apparently sympathetic, as he immediately turns up and bites her. David Peel plays the role of Baron Meinster with considerable glee, clearly relishing the chance to tear his way through the female population of Transylvania.

I don't want to spend too much time on this movie, simply because Dracula is not in it and is barely even mentioned. But it is a lot of fun, and as far as I'm aware it's the movie that first established the idea that Holy Water is acidic for vampires. It's also the second of three Hammer Dracula movies written (or in this case co-written) by Jimmy Sangster and directed by Terence Fisher.

Peter Cushing is once again wonderful as Van Helsing, and Freda Jackson is absolutely brilliant as the insane, cackling Greta. The scene where she reveals the Baroness Meinster to Marianne is possibly the movie's highlight.

The movie also features an interesting "cure" for vampirism when Van Helsing finds himself on the receiving end of Baron Meinster's fangs (it seems that the Baron swings both ways, as he seems to relish sucking on Van Helsing just as much as he did any of his female victims).

Interestingly, any ambiguity about vampirism that I detected in the previous movie is completely absent here. Baron Meinster is portrayed as pure evil, and as mentioned earlier it was his decadent lifestyle that apparently caused his vampirism in the first place.

There are a few oddities. Marianne is supposed to be a French visitor to Transylvania, and she has a strong French accent (presumably Yvonne Monlaur's actual voice). This serves to draw attention to the fact that the "Transylvanian" characters who all call each other Herr and Fräulein in fact all have British accents. Marianne is also disappointingly dense, failing to connect the murder of Baroness Meinster to her release of him from chains - to the point of quite cheerfully accepting his proposal of marriage scant hours after having first met him. Oops.

Also, what actually happened to the Brides of the title? Do we just presume that they died in the climactic fire? Not a lot of closure there.

It would be another five years before Hammer returned to Transylvania, next time with Christopher Lee returning but without Peter Cushing. Stay tuned for tomorrow's entry in my Hammer Dracula odyssey, Dracula: Prince of Darkness.

Dracula (1958)

2010-06-21T13:55:00.000+12:00

After an introduction that splatters a little blood onto a coffin, Jonathan Harker arrives at Count Dracula's castle in Klausenberg to begin his employment as a librarian. He is met first by a young woman who begs for his help and claims that Dracula is holding her prisoner, but then the genial Count himself arrives and gives Harker a warm welcome. After showing him around Dracula tells Harker to treat the house as if it were his own, but he has an unusual idea of what this means because he promptly locks Harker inside his bedroom.

Harker, who until now has seemed like the ultimate patsy, then sits down and starts writing in his diary that Dracula seems to have fallen for his ploy and that soon he will be able to bring his reign of terror to an end. He manages to escape from his room and encounters the young woman again, who pleads for his help once more but then bites him on the neck. In a moment that must have embarassed people with weak bladders in 1958, Dracula suddenly reappears.

Harker now finds himself in dire straits. Having been knocked unconscious and slept through most of the day, he heads downstairs shortly before sunset to deal to the Count and makes the mistake of staking the woman who has bitten him first. By the time Van Helsing arrives on the scene, Harker is already a vampire and has to be dealt with most harshly...

This entire opening sequence seems specifically designed to confound expectations. Instead of Jonathan Harker slowly coming to realise that Dracula is a vampire, he already knows this and is actually there to kill him. Instead of Harker barely escaping with his life, he is actually vampirised himself. And instead of this all being a slow build-up to horror, the entire sequence takes less than ten minutes and features a sudden appearance of Dracula looking as fearsome as he ever has in a movie.

Jimmy Sangster's script often doesn't make sense (e.g. why exactly does Dracula tell Harker to make himself at home if he's going to blatantly lock him up five seconds later? And why does Harker leave himself wide open to being bitten by someone he must already know is a vampire?) but director Terence Fisher keeps the pace brisk and the proceedings energetic. Christopher Lee plays Dracula first as informal and charming, and then as animalistic and terrifying. Peter Cushing's Van Helsing, far from the fussy old professor of earlier versions, is immediately presented as a no-nonsense man of action. And the movie's just getting started.

The rest of the story mixes and matches the characters from the novel in fairly random fashion. Now it is Lucy who is Harker's fiance; in this version Mina is Lucy's sister, and is married to Arthur Holmwood. Dr. Seward has only a small walk-on as Lucy's physician. The story is presented as a battle between Dracula and Van Helsing.

That opening sequence probably plays rather differently now than it did when the movie premiered 52 years ago. When Dracula bounds into the fray all red-eyes and snarls, it seemed to me that he was pissed off that his girlfriend was fooling around with the hired help. When he deals to Harker, it doesn't seem too unreasonable - after all Harker had just murdered that same girlfriend. There is no real hint that Dracula wanted anything more sinister from Harker than someone to organise his books.

Anyway, having staked Harker but failed to find Dracula, Van Helsing visits Harker's fiance Lucy to find that she is mysteriously ill. Although she seems too weak to stand, the moment she is alone in her bedroom Lucy leaps up, disposes of her crucifix, opens her bedroom windows, and lays back on her pillow where she starts panting in anticipation.

Do you think that she could be waiting for someone?

The rest of the movie features some familiar scenes as Lucy dies and is staked, at which turn Dracula sets his sights on Mina. She proves to be just as receptive as Lucy; soon she is clutching a fur collar tight around her neck and smiling like the cat that got the cream. Given that Arthur Holmwood is portrayed as being about as dynamic and sexy as a tin of spaghetti, it's little wonder that Dracula is able to charm his way into her affections.

It's interesting that the battle in this movie is between the sensual and seductive Dracula and the dynamic but almost asexual Van Helsing. This being a British movie made in 1958, of course it's the the stiff upper lip that gets the upper hand. When Dracula is vanquished (in an exciting scene that's surely the first incarnation of Van Helsing as action hero) the status quo is restored, but I doubt that Mina was entirely happy with the situation; she would probabyl have preferred to keep Dracula in the basement in perpetuity. (Yes, in the basement. All anyone needed to do was open the door and there was his coffin, not even hidden. I guess it didn't fit in the wardrobe.)

The story is simplified even more than usual. Despite appearances (and accents) the Holmwoods seem to live not too far from Castle Dracula, so the journey to England (and the race back to Transylvania) is completely omitted along with all trace of Dracula being an unwholesome foreign influence. Renfield is completely missing, along with Quincey Morris and any trace of Lucy being courted.

Lee is a magnetic presence, and though he bears no relationship here to the character as written by Stoker, it doesn't matter in the slightest. His comparatively short screen time is all put to excellent use, and every time he appears the movie catches fire. Cushing matches him as Van Helsing, and it's a shame that they would not play these characters together again for another fourteen years. More on that next week, when I get to the end of my Hammer Dracula marathon.

Tomorrow, Brides of Dracula. I almost considered leaving that one out as Dracula does not actually appear, but he's in the title so what the hell.

Dracula and sex

2010-06-16T13:28:00.000+12:00

It has become very common for Dracula to be regarded as a personification of the corruption of sexuality. This would probably have appalled Bram Stoker, but all the seeds of this are present in his original novel. There is a small element of the erotic even in F. W. Murnau's film Nosferatu, and Bela Lugosi played the role as a rather corny imitation of Rudolph Valentino. However, the first actor to really emphasise the sexuality of Dracula was Christopher Lee in the Hammer movie Dracula (later retitled Horror of Dracula).

Which is kind of curious, because Lee famously had clauses in his contracts exempting him from performing in any scene featuring strong sexuality.

Later Draculas went even further. Richard Matheson's script for the version starring Jack Palance introduced the idea that Dracula's passion for Mina Murray stemmed from her being the reincarnation of his lost love, an idea later poached by writer James V. Hart for the Francis Ford Coppola-directed Bram Stoker's Dracula. The 1979 version starring Frank Langella turned Dracula into a full-fledged romantic figure.

Frank Langella was actually my first Dracula. I had a monster movie magazine as a small child with pictures from this version, so his image was the first I associated with the character. When I eventually read the original book as a young teenager, it was a movie tie-in with pictures of Langella on the cover and in the middle of the book. It was later the first film version of Dracula that I rented on video.

To me Dracula is all about sex. It's one of the reasons why I love it. Of course, to me horror itself is largely about sex. It's not an uncommon view. Vincent Price considered himself to be a romantic actor.

Anyway, my next few posts on Dracula will be emphasising the sexier interpretations of the character.

Nadja (1994)

2010-06-15T12:56:00.000+12:00

After the death of Dracula at the hands of Dr. Van Helsing, his daughter Nadja and her companion Renfield show up to collect his body. Nadja, who hopes that her father's death has broken the curse on her, then sets her sights on bewitching Van Helsing's daughter-in-law Lucy. Van Helsing recruits his son Jim and Nadja's twin brother Edgar to hunt down Nadja and destroy her, though she still has a few tricks left up her sleeve.

Nadja is basically a remake of Dracula's Daughter, the 1936 sequel to the Bela Lugosi version of Dracula. The main changes involve the addition of twin brother Edgar, a much more reluctant vampire. But the movie isn't really about story but about style, atmosphere and mood. Firmly set in 1994, complete with a soundtrack by My Bloody Valentine and Portishead, it is shot in a combination of rather lovely 35mm black & white film and the distorted Fisher Price toy video camera known as Pixelvision.

Two of the main cast members, Elina Löwensohn as Nadja and Martin Donovan as Jim, are familiar from Hal Hartley movies of the period and Nadja shares a deadpan humour with his work.

The most inspired piece of casting is Peter Fonda, who plays Van Helsing as an aging acid casualty. Fonda is always a vapid actor, but that's completely appropriate to this role; in switching the character from the grey-haired fuddy-duddy of the earlier film into a long-haired hippie on a bicycle, it reinforces that though the "older generation" has changed it is always just as out of touch with youth, even when the "youth" in question is hundreds of years old. As with Dracula's Daughter Van Helsing has been arrested for the murder of Dracula, but as played by Fonda he seems seriously delusional and paranoid.

The rest of the cast is solid with the exception of Galaxie Craze as Lucy, who seems just as somnambulant before meeting Nadja as she is after falling under her vampiric spell. Susy Amis is particularly memorable as Edgar's nurse Cassandra, who turns out to be another of Van Helsing's children. David Lynch (who "presents" the movie, which is produced by his frequent collaborator Mary Sweeney) has a small role as a morgue attendant, but the movie owes little to his style.

Dracula himself appears in flashback, played by Bela Lugosi in stock footage from White Zombie. Lugosi is the iconic image of Dracula for most people, though I don't rate his performance (or the movie) at all. The images they've chosen are striking, in my opinion the best ever taken of Bela, though I suspect the main reason for them is simply that White Zombie is in the public domain while Lugosi's Dracula is not.

Writer/director Michael Almereyda seems completely unconcerned with coherence, and large patches of the movie are hard to figure out as the story leaps about (quite how someone on bail for murder manages to get from New York to Transylvania is glossed over). The overdone use of Pixelvision also obscures some scenes; sometimes this is striking, as with Nadja's psychic flashes of her father's death at the start, but more often it's annoying.

The lesbian aspect is played up somewhat; Dracula's Daughter was the first of many "vampire lesbian" movies. I'd like to say that it was more enlightened in its view of sexuality than the earlier movie, but despite almost sixty years of changing attitudes the movie still shows homosexuality as a predatory impulse to be "cured" or exterminated. It's also hard to see what the genuinely bewitching Elina Löwensohn sees in the uninteresting Galaxie Craze.

I found it hard to tell how much of the pretentious dialogue was intended to be a joke and how much was serious angst. I watched this movie probably half a dozen times when it was new, and though Fonda always amused me I think I took the posturing more seriously. Most of the "deep and meaningful" stuff basically amounts to a couple of wealthy goth kids whining that their privileged lives are unsatisfying. "The pain of fleeting joy" indeed.

Only sixteen years after it was made, Nadja has aged quite badly. Or maybe that's just me - it feels so much like a specific period in my life (and reminds me uncomfortably of a specific relationship). I can't say that I'd recommend it. It does make me want to revisit Poppy Z. Brite's vampire novel Lost Souls, which I was seriously obsessed with at the time, to see what I think of that now.

Here's the trailer.

Womb of Dracula

2010-06-14T13:58:00.001+12:00

Coming soon

2010-06-11T12:22:00.000+12:00

Today: no time. No time. No time.

Soon: an historical epic ghost story from Finland.

Dracula: the silent movie ballet.

Sherlock Holmes vs. Jack the Ripper double feature:

Dracula online comic

2010-06-10T12:43:00.000+12:00

I did say I would be checking out every version of Dracula. There's no getting out of it. I'm going to have to read the Mills & Boon Dracula books sooner or later. In the meantime...

I have found an online comic adaptation of the novel. It's well drawn and from what I've read so far, seems to be a very faithful adaptation. It's also a furry adaptation - meaning that the characters are all drawn as anthropomorphic animals. This is not one of my favourite things.

So far it's up to Chapter 10. Van Helsing has arrived to do what he can for Lucy. As far as I can tell it's taken six years to get this far, so at this rate it won't be finished until about 2017.

I now find myself wishing that there was a Muppet Dracula movie, probably starring Count von Count as Dracula, Kermit as Jonathan Harker, Piggy as Mina, Janice as Lucy, Gonzo as Renfield, Dr. Bunsen Honeydew as Dr. Seward, Fozzie Bear as Arthur Holmwood, Lew Zealand as Quincey Morris, and of course the Swedish Chef as Van Helsing.

Anno Dracula by Kim Newman (1992)

2010-06-09T12:30:00.000+12:00

"It still seems to me something of a disappointment that Stoker's villain, after all his meticulous planning and with five hundred years of scheming monstrousness under his cloak has no sooner arrived in Britain than he trips up and sows the seeds of his eventual undoing by an unlikely pursuit of the wife of a provincial solicitor."
- Kim Newman on the origins of Anno Dracula

The year is 1888. Having vanquished his persecutors Professor Abraham Van Helsing and Jonathan Harker, Count Dracula has wooed and married the Widow of Windsor and now rules the British Empire as Prince Consort and Lord Protector. Vampires now openly walk the streets and hold high government positions, and the legions of the undead are growing at a massive rate. Meanwhile in Whitechapel in London's East End, government secret agent Charles Beauregard has teamed up with Geneviève Dieudonné, a vampire physician (who is older even than Dracula) to solve a series of brutal murders inflicted on vampire prostitutes. The killer is popularly known as Silver Knife, but soon he will acquire a much more infamous nickname...

A rip-roaring adventure story set in a nightmare version of Victorian London, Anno Dracula is an absolute delight. Newman includes more fictional vampires than you can shake a stick at, from John Polidori's Lord Ruthven (installed as Prime Minister) to Martin Cuda (the main character from George Romero's film Martin). He also mixes in plenty of other fictional characters and real-life persons, some of whom are now vampires and some of whom are not. There's even an appearence of a Chinese hopping vampire - without question the most frightening character in the whole book.

One character who is notable in his absence is Dracula himself. He appears exactly twice: first in a flashback to show exactly when the story of Anno Dracula deviated from that of Bram Stoker's original, and once right at the end when we actually get to see what Dracula's court looks like. But despite his absence, Dracula's presence is felt on almost every page. This seems appropriate to me, both in terms of the character (Dracula was off-page for most of Stoker's novel) and royalty in general (Queen Victoria's influence spread everywhere in Britain, but she did not exactly wander the streets).

As exciting as it is to see a vampire version of Inspector Lestrade interacting with Sir Charles Warren while Sherlock Holmes is locked up in a concentration camp (which were actually invented by the British during the Boer War a few years later), the real anchor of the novel is Geneviève Dieudonné. Her character is crucial to Newman's treatment of vampires, as she is portrayed as being completely sympathetic. She's full of meaningful contradictions, and not just because she is ancient but with the face of a teenager; Geneviève is ahead of her time despite her advanced age, a vampire who is striving to preserve life.

Vampires in this world are not necessarily monsters to be destroyed, but are as varied and as complex as any of "the warm". There is even prejudice within their ranks as elders lord it over new-borns, Geneviève describes Dracula's bloodline as "corrupt", and everyone looks down the noses at the "murgatroyds" (named after a play-within-the-story by Gilbert & Sullivan, and led by Anne Rice's Lestat, these fashion-conscious vampires swan around in goth regalia and are basically Newman's mockery of people who really, really want to be vampires in "real life").

The killer is also a telling character. In another book he would be a heroic vampire hunter - and indeed, in another book he was a heroic vampire hunter, for he is Dr. Jack Seward, one of the main characters in Stoker's novel. Dr. Seward was driven insane by Dracula's machinations, particularly his turning of Seward's unrequited love Lucy and her subsequent destruction. Seward is a classic serial killer, driven by a sexual desire that he denies; when he eventually encounters Mary Kelly (the real-life Ripper's final and most gruesomely mutilated victim) and it turns out that she was turned by Lucy herself, he finally loses what little sanity he had managed to hang on to. Dr. Seward is a tragic figure, but Newman does not diminish the plight of his victims; the Ripper's victims are in situations as desperate as any real-life Whitechapel prostitute.

This is a fabulous book and can be enjoyed in a number of different ways. If you don't have the encyclopaedic knowledge to spot all of the many real and fictional characters Newman namechecks, you should still be dragged along by the gripping story, the gaslit atmosphere, and the engaging characters. The good news (for me) is that Kim Newman has written two further Anno Dracula novels: The Bloody Red Baron, set during WWI, and Dracula Cha-Cha-Cha, set in 1959 Italy, as well as a half-dozen short stories and novellas set in the same world. He's been at work on a final novel in the sequence, Johnny Alucard, for over ten years and hopefully will finish it one day.

Nosferatu (1922)

2010-06-08T13:42:00.001+12:00

The first film version of Dracula was made in 1922, twenty five years after the publication of the novel and ten years after Bram Stoker's death. As far as I can ascertain, it was the first movie to ever feature a vampire. The production company did not acquire the rights to adapt the novel, and so changed all the characters' names. The movie was almost lost forever after Stoker's widow sued, but fortunately some prints survived the court's destruction order.
The story follows Stoker's novel reasonably faithfully for the first two-thirds. However, this only covers the very first part of the novel - Thomas Hutter (Jonathan Harker in the novel) travels to Transylvania to sell a property to Count Orlock (Dracula), and runs afoul of the vampire's machinations. The vampire then travels to Hutter's home town, the fictional German city of Wisborg (London in the novel).

Nosferatu then departs sharply from the original text. The vampire brings to Wisborg rats that carry the plague; this combined with his own blood-drinking proclivities lead to many deaths. Hutter's employer Knock (loosely based on the novel's Renfield) is driven insane by Orlock's influence. Meanwhile, Hutter's wife Ellen (equivalent to the novel's character Mina, who was engaged to Harker) has uncovered the secret to killing the fiend: a woman who is pure of heart must delay him with her blood, so that he loses track of the break of day.

This is an amazing movie. Obviously like most silents the storytelling seems alien by modern standards, the acting seems over-done, and the special effects have a hand-made quality; but the movie is stuffed with memorable and creepy images, Orlock is one of the most grotesque of all screen vampires, and the level of imagination is high. The influence of Nosferatu on subsequent vampire movies cannot be overstated; you will notice throughout scenes that have been imitated many times since.

This version of Dracula almost completely erases the sexual undertones of the character. He is portrayed as the personification of disease, with a rodent visage to match the rats he brings with him to spread the Black Death. There is a sexual element to Orlock, especially in his obsession with Ellen, but there aren't many people who would consider him to be erotic. This is also the first version of Dracula (and I believe, the first vampire of any sort) that can be destroyed by the sun. There is no mention of the vampire being bothered by crucifixes or other religious symbols, or by silver or garlic, and there is no hint of destruction with a stake. Orlock is not seen to shapeshift (though there is the hint of a werewolf in an early scene) but great importance is given to his shadow, which some subsequent vampire movies would make more of.

Most of the supporting characters are absent, e.g. Dr. Seward, Quincey Jones and Arthur Holmwood. Van Helsing (here renamed Bulwer) has a very small supporting role, and is mostly shown teaching his students about carnivorous plants and likening them to vampires. Hutter/Harker is portrayed as a buffoon; the main conflict is between Orlock and Ellen.

The movie is long since in the public domain, so free downloads are everywhere (for example here. If you're going to watch it for the first time, I'd recommend the the 2007 F. W. Murnau-Stiftung restored version, which looks amazingly sharp and restores the original tinting as well as some missing scenes. If you live in NZ, this is available on the Umbrella dvd that your local library or rental store must have; elsewhere it's available from Image in the US and Eureka Masters of Cinema in the UK.

Dracula by Bram Stoker

2010-06-04T13:16:00.000+12:00

Have you ever read Dracula? What was your reaction to it?

I first read it some years ago, and my reaction was "My god! Why has nobody ever made a movie out of this book?" Which probably seems strange to anyone who hasn't read it, as the amount of movies featuring a vampire named Count Dracula is truly enormous, but very few of them resemble the book.

I'm hardly alone in this opinion. In his interviews with Peter Bogdanovich (I think in the 1960s) Orson Welles spoke of wanting to make a film of Dracula on the grounds that none of the best parts of the book had ever been filmed. Starting with the most iconic film version, the 1931 Universal one with Bela Lugosi, the movies have tended to be based more on the hugely simplified 1924 stage adaptation. Other movie versions, such as the Hammer version from 1958, have deviated from the novel specifically to catch the audience off guard.

I can think of exactly three honest attempts to adapt the novel faithfully and none of these is completely satisfactory as adaptation or even just as a movie. One is a cheapskate international production directed by a sleaze-meister; one is a po-faced BBC "classic literature"-style version; and one is a big-budget all-star romp. I'll deal with each of these individually in later posts.

My mission is to examine every version of Dracula. Every movie adaptation, sequel, rip-off and parody. Every novel sequel and alternate version. If possible, every radio adaptation and if I can manage it, every video game. If I can find them, every comic book version. The Complete Dracula.

I am fully aware that this project will likely take longer than the rest of my life, especially as more versions of Dracula are being produced all the time. But with any luck, my consumption of so much Dracula product will turn me undead so that after life I'll have all the time in the world.

Anyway, if you haven't read Dracula by Bram Stoker I would heartily recommend it. Your local library has it; your local bookstore probably has it; Project Gutenberg has it; the Internet Archive has a scan of the first edition; there are very few books that are easier to come by than Dracula.

If you've already read it, here is a radio adaptation by the Mercury Theatre On the Air from 1938, directed by a young Orson Welles (who also stars as both Dracula and as Dr. Seward). It sounds fully 72 years old, but it's an energetic version.

(This does not by any means signal the end of my series on ghost stories. I'm nowhere near finished those, but I've been champing at the bit to get into this Dracula series. Besides, it seems like a good idea to diversify a bit.)

The Signal-Man by Charles Dickens

2010-06-03T12:41:00.002+12:00

Charles Dickens wrote a number of ghost stories, often as part of the English tradition of ghost stories for Christmas. The best known is A Christmas Carol, one of his more sentimental stories, but others were more in the vein of scary stories. The Signal-Man was written in 1966, and was inspired in part by a train crash Dickens was involved in and partly by other train crashes he had read about.

This is another example of the ghost that leaves a warning. The story involves a signalman who repeatedly hears his bell ring when it does not actually ring, then sees and hears a ghost, each time as a premonition of a train accident.

You can read the story here. It's only about five thousand words.

This is a very traditional sort of ghost story, with the narrator happening upon the signalman while out for a stroll, and the signalman telling the narrator his story. I am fond of stories within which people tell stories.

Because I'm wayyyyy too visually-oriented, here's a link to the well-done BBC adaptation from their old annual series A Ghost Story for Christmas, starring the late great Denholm Elliott in the title role.

This version was released on dvd by the BFI a few years back, but like a lot of BFI discs (e.g. Ghostwatch) it's now frustratingly out of print and sells for exorbitant prices online. Aro Street Video has a copy if you live in Wellington; it also contains a good reading of the original story.

Below (2002)

2010-06-02T12:06:00.000+12:00

In 1943, an American submarine receives an order to pick up adrift survivors. There turns out to be three of them, a British nurse and two sailors, fugitives from a . The men complain about the "bad luck" of a woman aboard. Soon, while they are being tracked by a German warship, strange things start happening, such as a Benny Goodman record turning on by itself while they are maintaining silence. Is it sabotage, or is it a ghost?

(It's a ghost.)

Below started life as a script co-written by Darren Aronofsky (Pi, Requiem for a Dream), who planned to direct. The reins were eventually handed to David Twohy (Pitch Black), who re-wrote Aronofsky's script. I would have rather seen the earlier version, but this is still a fun movie. It doesn't do quite enough with its claustrophobic setting (and the depth charge scenes are obviously not a patch on similar scenes in Das Boot, which just about gave me a heart attack) but it's an effective ghost story.

As far as I'm aware, this is the only haunted submarine movie to date. H. P. Lovecraft's short story The Temple was set on a U-boat in 1920, but it's so long since I read it that I don't even remember whether it was any good or not (and I'm pretty sure that there were no ghosts in it anyway). It's such a great idea that it now seems strange to me that nobody had thought of it before; surely there must be other stories with this theme, if not other films.

What we're dealing with here is a vengeful ghost. I won't say who the ghost is or why it is vengeful, but you'll probably figure it out pretty quickly if you watch the movie. The ghost itself is handled quite well; it's always ducking around a corner, or just a flash of a reflection in a porthole. There were maybe a couple too many loud noise "Boo!" moments, but I can deal with that when the rest of the movie is surprisingly low-key and subtle. I haven't seen any of Twohy's other movies, but I gather that they are action-oriented; this is not. In fact, it's probably the only movie I have ever seen where an explosion that kills multiple characters happens completely off-screen: we only see the build-up to it and the (incredibly creepy) aftermath.

It also contains one of the best "mirror moments" I've seen. You know those scenes? They happen a lot in supernatural movies: someone looks in a mirror and what they see isn't quite right.

There are some definite down-sides. I know next to nothing about the military & navy (hate war, hate most war movies) but even I spotted some of the no doubt rampant anachronisms, which I won't bother listing. The submarine is not mined enough for claustrophobia. There are too many cheap jump scares - the subtle creep-out moments are far more effective. The story is too predictable. Too many of the crew are interchangeable grunts. It should have been scarier - it's creepy throughout but never terrifying.

The best performance by far was Olivia Williams as the nurse, brilliant as always. Zach Galifianakis is endearing as the beardy guy who reads pulp horror stories to the crew. The rest are, ehh, ok. I'm sure I'd seen some of them in other movies, but none were memorable enough to register.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that Below was a wasted opportunity, because I enjoyed it quite a bit, but I hope that it inspires other filmmakers to say "I've got a much better idea for a haunted submarine movie!"

The Hitch-Hiker by Lucille Fletcher

2010-06-01T12:55:00.000+12:00

Here we have one of the most enduring ghosts of the 20th century: the vanishing hitch-hiker. This particular ghost has turned up in a good number of stories and urban legends. Usually it involves a hitch-hiker being picked up and then mysteriously disappearing from the moving vehicle.

This variation is a hitch-hiker who is never picked up, but who recurs outside of the car. The story was written by Lucille Fletcher as a radio play; it was performed at least three times in three different series, each time with Orson Welles in the lead.

The play features a ghost that is either warning or threatening the narrator, which is a standard trope for ghost stories. It also features another common trope - but you should listen to the play to hear what this is, rather than having me spoil the end for you.

Here is the second version, from the classic series Suspense. It's not quite as good as the Mercury Summer Theatre version from 1946, which was also directed by Welles. I could not find that version online, but I have it somewhere.

Welles and Fletcher were both absolute masters of the radio medium in their day. Welles was infamous for his 1938 War of the Worlds adaptation, which convinced some people that an alien invasion was actually in progress. Fletcher's best known work, Sorry Wrong Number, was one of the best radio suspense plays ever written. The Hitch-Hiker is an old-fashioned radio play, but it's still good fun.

It was later adapted as an episode of The Twilight Zone, but I have not seen that episode.

A Chinese Ghost Story (1987)

2010-05-27T12:59:00.006+12:00

I don't know much about the Chinese ghost story tradition, but I do know that there are not a lot of straight-up Chinese horror movies. Ghost movies from China & Hong Kong tend to blend elements of fantasy, kung-fu, romance and comedy.

Of these movies, my favourite is A Chinese Ghost Story, produced by Tsui Hark and directed by Ching Siu-tung. It tells the story of a hapless tax collector (Leslie Cheung) who takes shelter in a deserted temple, where he falls in love with a woman who turns out to be a ghost.

The movie involves an evil Tree Demon, a vengeful Taoist priest, Sam Raimi-style camerawork from the point of view of an extremely long tongue, the most comically unthreatening zombies of all time, a song & dance interlude about the power of the Tao, plenty of slapstick comedy, and a surprisingly moving ending. Small children might find parts of it frightening, but the emphasis is on slapstick comedy and romance.

This tradition of combining kung-fu with horror movies seems to date specifically to the 1974 movie Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires, which attempts to marry the British Hammer Dracula movies with the Hong Kong Shaw Brothers kung-fu movies; it was co-directed by Hammer veteran Roy Ward Baker and Shaw veteran Chang Cheh, and co-starred Peter Cushing with many kung-fu stars. This movie featured both vampires from the Western tradition and hopping vampires from Chinese folklore. But the cycle properly begins with director/star Sammo Hung's 1980 movie Encounters of the Spooky Kind, which places a far greater emphasis on action and comedy.

A Chinese Ghost Story strikes me as being superior to these earlier movies simply because it integrates the disparate elements with more confidence. The movie slips from being potentially spooky to laugh-out-loud funny with apparent ease, and even manages to get serious in its final act without a jarring shift in tone. The performances of Leslie Cheung as the tax inspector, Joey Wang as the ghost and the great Wu Ma as the priest certaily help here.

I really need to learn more about Chinese mythology before I can speak about movies like this with any authority. All I can say for the moment is that this is a tremendously fun movie that I've watched many times.

Ghostly music

2010-05-26T13:51:00.001+12:00

I'm a big fan of songs that tell stories, so obviously I've been trying to find songs which tell ghost stories.

Here are two.

First up, (Ghost) Riders In the Sky. I always loved this is a kid - I think it was the Vaughan Munroe version. This one is by Johnny Cash & Willie Nelson.

Next up is Warren Zevon's immortal ballad, Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner. I've always loved Zevon's dark humour.

Neither of these songs is particularly chilling. I wanted to use something by Alice Cooper, but I couldn't actually think of any ghost stories he's told.

Can anyone recommend a really good ghost song?

What is a ghost story anyway? - part 2

2010-05-25T13:44:00.000+12:00

When I posted about The Willows by Algernon Blackwood, Sonia asked on Facebook:

So what was the rationale for including this (and by extension Lovecraft, right? Maybe?) in a ghost discussion? It seems like this kind of story works in such a different way, on such different sources of fear, from "ghost as spirit of specific dead person" stories. Although The Shining walks a funny line between these two modes.

That's a damned good question.

Part of the point of this series is an attempt to find the boundaries of what is and what is not a ghost story. I'm interested in the divisions of genre, especially when they are blurred. The ghost story seems to me to be a good place to explore this.

I think that most people would regard a ghost as being the spirit of a dead person (or sometimes other animal) that is still able to interact with the living. Even here it's possible to blur the boundaries. For example how do you seperate a ghost from other undead such as zombie or a vampire? Post-Night of the Living Dead we usually think of zombies as being kind of the opposite of a ghost: a body that still moves around without a spirit. However, there are plenty of examples of zombies that retain their original memories and seek vengeance and/or to be put to rest, in much the same manner as a ghost.

So is it their physical nature that separates them? But what about those cases where a ghost still has a physical form, such as in the Ju-on movies, where ghosts can stab people or break their necks?

I think that a ghost has to be seperate from the physical body, though it can still have a physical form of sorts. If it is a reanimated corpse, rather than a ghost it is something else.

Except, of course, that ghosts in fiction have been known to possess the bodies of the living and/or of the dead. So if a ghost were to possess its own physical body and keep walking around, would it still be a ghost or would it now be a zombie or a ghoul?

What about the concept of a "residual haunting" - the idea that a ghost, rather than being a sentient being, is in some way a recording of past events? This idea was exploited in Nigel Kneale's teleplay The Stone Tape (to be discussed here in mroe detail soon), where a team of experimenters happen across just such a recording and want to know if they can wipe it and record something new. Could a ghost just be a paranormal video recording?

In the case of The Willows, we never actually discover what the mysterious force surrounding the willows actually is. The characters hypothosise that it could be a different form of life that has evolved completely seperately from the life that we know about, which only intersects with our reality at certain points. Could this be an explanation for a ghost? It seems to be the spirit of a living person, but in fact it is something else. (In this case, the story comes from a book called Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood and the author describes his mysterious entities as "ghosts" even though they are seldom actually spirits of the dead.)

In another story I've looked at, Ghostwatch, what at first seems to be the spirit of a living person turns out to be merely the latest layer of "skin" covering some kind of demonic presence that has haunted the area since at least the stone age. Could a ghost be something that merely assumes human form for its own purposes, stealing the identity of someone who is dead?

In the novel The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, there is no mention of the ghosts being any specific people. It is the house itself that is the problem.

Perhaps the meaning of "ghost story" has changed over the years. It might have used to mean any kind of spooky supernatural story, with this term being supplanted by "horror story" in recent times.

I don't have any answers, just a lot of questions. If anyone else has any theories, I'd love to hear them.

The Whip and the Body (1963)

2010-05-21T13:39:00.000+12:00

Here's an example of two kinds of ghost story that I like a lot: the returning lover, and the "ambiguous ghost". It's also an Italian movie, and I'm all about Italian horror movies. It's co-written and directed by Mario Bava, probably the greatest of all Italian horror movie directors, and it features top horror star Christopher Lee. To top it all off, it was a very controversial movie in its day and was cut to shreds in most countries when it was first released, to the point where it was apparently incomprehensible.

If released now, it would probably be rated PG.

The Whip and The Body is Gothic horror in all senses. It's a period movie (though as with many of these things, the period it is set in is ambiguous) and it features a crumbling old castle, secret passages, doomed love, unsympathetic characters, delirium, suicide, murder, and unmotivated coloured lighting.

The story involves the return of Kurt (Christopher Lee) to the family home and the disruption this causes. Kurt's former lover Nevenka (played by stunning Israeli actress Daliah Lavi) is now married to his brother, who is in love with another woman, Katia. The housekeeper, Giorgia (Bava regular Harriet White Medin), is still grieving the loss of her daughter, who had committed suicide after being seduced then abandoned by Kurt. Of course, Kurt's return awakens old passions in Nevenka, and the thoroughly hissable Kurt revels in the chaos he is causing.

So far, so whatever. But what made this movie so controversial (and still makes is quite unusual) is that Kurt and Nevenka's relationship is openly sadomasochistic. A good four years before Luis Buñuel's brilliant Belle de Jour, The Whip and the Body features a woman with vivid masochistic fantasies as its protagonist and puts the viewer within her viewpoint.

As a movie of its time, it is not terribly sympathetic to its sadomasochistic couple even as it mines them for prurient interest. Kurt is portrayed as a vile and utterly self-absorbed villain, and Nevenka is shown to be mentally ill. Tony Kendall as Nevenka's husband and Ida Galli as his unrequited love interest are probably supposed to be the audience identification figures, but Dahlia Lavi and Christopher Lee dominate the movie, with performances far more memorable than any of the supporting cast, so that despite their obvious defects we are far more interested in them.

But then again Heathcliffe and Cathy were not terribly sympathetic either, and people just love Wuthering Heights (which was definitely an influence on this movie), so audience sympathy is obviously a tricky thing.

Before long, Kurt is murdered and the movie becomes a combination of whodunnit (far too easily guessed) and romantic ghost story, as the shade of Kurt seems to visit Nevenka in the night, filling her with a combination of terror and desire. Is that the sound of his horse-whip, or is it just the trees lashing against the castle walls?

Incidentally, Lee apparently has a clause written into his contracts that he will not be required to perform scenes of a sexual nature or even to kiss on the lips. (Which hasn't stopped directors like Jess Franco from some creative editing to put him into outrageous scenes.) Either this clause was not present in his Whip and the Body contract or he chose to ignore it, as his scenes with Lavi are about as steamy as you could get at the time.

As usual, Bava's mastery of the camera turns the movie into a visual feast. As well as co-writing (with Ernesto Gastaldi, master of kinky Italian horror) and directing he is the uncredited cinematographer and the camera operator, and he also executed the matte paintings and other special effects.

This almost makes up for the slightly cheesy score by Carlo Rustichelli, which sounds like something out of a soap opera. Others (such as Bava's biographer Tim Lucas) praise Rustichelli to the skies, but compared to other Italian genre composers like Ennio Morricone, Bruno Nicolai and Riz Ortolani, he doesn't sound interesting to me.

There are several notable plot holes in the movie, and I didn't find the ending terrinly satisfying. The biggest problem, however, is that Christopher Lee did not dub his own voice on the English-language track. (Everyone except for Lee voiced their own role on the Italian-langue track.) Lee has a particularly commanding voice, so this is a real pity.

It's also not really the best introduction to Italian horror or to the films of Mario Bava. There are actually two other Bava ghost stories that I like more (the mind-bending, if dreadfully titled, Kill Baby Kill! and the utterly terrfying "Drop of Water" segment of the anthology film Black Sabbath), both of which I intend to get to later in this series, but when Kate visited me recently, she saw the dvd cover of this movie and wondered what the hell I had been watching (and it does indeed look lurid, as demonstated below) so I thought I would do this now.

The Willows by Algernon Blackwood

2010-05-20T16:59:00.006+12:00

Algernon Blackwood was a peculiar writer who believed very strongly in psychic forces and was obsessed with the relationship between human civilisation and the natural world. "The Willows" is one of his best-known works, as well as one of his first. First published in 1907, it was acclaimed by H.P. Lovecraft as his favourite "weird tale".

It is the first story in the collection Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood, and yet it is not what most people think of as a ghost story. It is precisely because of this that I have chosen to discuss it here. There are no unquiet dead spirits in "The Willows"; instead it involves a confrontation between two ordinary people and an otherworldly force that they do not comprehend. The "ghosts" are unexplained, being portrayed as something that is so alien to our ordinary reality that we could not possibly comprehend it. This was clearly an influence on Lovecraft, whose own fiction often revolved around similar themes.

"The Willows" is about two men (both unnamed - the narrator and his travelling companion who is only referred to as "the Swede") who are on the most recent of many travels together, this time canoeing down the Danube while it floods. When night falls they take shelter on a river bank which they have been told has never been visited by people before because of superstitious dread.

Throughout the story, Blackwood characterises the natural elements as being sinister, threatening and even personified. The river, the wind, and especially the willows on the banks seem hostile to them as intruders. But it is when the narrator awakes in the middle of the night and leaves the tent that things really start to happen, and he sees something he can't quite believe:

I stared, trying to force every atom of vision from my eyes. For a long time I thought they must every moment disappear and resolve themselves into the movements of the branches and prove to be an optical illusion. I searched everywhere for a proof of reality, when all the while I understood quite well that the standard of reality had changed.

(You'll have to read the story to find out what he actually sees. That's how I roll.)

Blackwood does a far better job than Lovecraft of showing a rational person's mind bend from seeing something that should not be possible. Lovecraft's narrators tended to just say that they could not describe what they saw lest they go mad; Blackwood's attempts to describe it, plainly fails, tries to deny it, mocks his companion for believing the evidence of his own senses and insisting that something incomprehensible is in fact happening, and generally loses control in quite a believable fashion. His companion (described as "the accurate Swede" in the story's clumsiest piece of writing) has a far stronger grip on things, but he also cannot keep his composure in the long run.

This is not a story that will satisfy anyone who wants everything neatly explained and tied up at the end, but I thought it was a terrific ghost story, and despite some dated stylistic elements, in terms of content it could quite easily be taken as a contemporary story. Given that it was published a mere ten years after Bram Stoker's Dracula, a horror story that could only have been written in an earlier era, this is quite an accomplishment.

I need to dig out the collection of ghost stories by the real master of the genre, M.R. James, that's somewhere in my boxes of books. But tomorrow it's back to the movies and off to Italy for one of the most perverse ghost movies of the 1960s.

The Changeling (1980)

2010-05-17T12:03:00.011+12:00

I was recommended to see this by a friend who claimed that it was so scary, when watching it by himself he actually had to turn it off.

I did not watch it by myself.

The Changeling is one of those ghost stories where someone has a terrible family tragedy, then finds themselves living in a haunted house. The haunting is unrelated to the tragedy, but the fact of it seems to have drawn the ghost to the bereaved person.

This is a good movie, highlighted by a strong performance from George C. Scott in the central role. He plays a character whose reaction to a haunting is not to run screaming into the night, but to try to do something about it. When he hears the strange noises and witnesses the strange phenomena, he does not write it off as impossible, but rather he assumes there is a ghost and goes out of his way to find out what it wants to try to lay it to rest.

As I'm sure everybody knows, a changeling is a creature that is left in the place of a real child which has been spirited away by beasties. It's sometimes used to describe non-supernatural child swapping as well, and it's the latter definition that's appropriate here. (This is a supernatural ghost story, but there are no other kinds of beasties except in a metaphorical sense.)

I did not find this movie as gibberingly terrifying as my friend, who will remain nameless. Part of this might have been simply because I was watching it in good company, but I also think that it was quite clear from early on that the ghost was not actually a threat. Compared to a vengeful ghosts in movies like Ring and Candyman, this one is gentle.

The movie followed genre lines to the point of being somewhat predictable, but I didn't mind. It was well shot and spooky, featured an effective score, and was nicely acted by a very capable cast. I didn't think it was as exemplary as its reputation suggested (it had been talked up in reliable horror movie tomes such as Stephen King's Danse Macabre and Kim Newman's Nightmare Movies) but it was solid and entertaining.

Out of the handful of stories I've looked at so far, this was probably the most traditional ghost story. The ghost is of a specific person; the protagonist is trying to put right something that was terribly wrong; there are guilty family secrets and an unpunished murder; sinister characters start to tell the protagonist something, but stop after letting something slip that they shouldn't have; there are plenty of knockings, objects moving by themselves, and mysteriously shattering pieces of glass, etc.

According to wikipedia the story was based on true events. Aren't they always?

Tomorrow, The Willows.

What is a ghost story, anyway?

2010-05-14T12:06:00.009+12:00

I thought I would be getting to the bottom of this question by now.

Does a ghost story have to involve the spirit of a dead person (or other animal) returning to haunt the living? That would seem to rule out The Haunting of Hill House as a ghost story.

Is a ghost story always a horror story? That would seem to rule out Ghostbusters as a ghost story.

I have just acquired a book called Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood. In his introduction, Blackwood says:

To be known as the "ghost man" is almost a derogatory classification, and here at last I may perhaps refute it. My interest in psychic matters has always beenthe interest in questions of extended or expanded consciousness. If a ghost is seen, what is it interests me less than what sees it?

If you're enjoying this series of posts on ghost stories, why not join me in reading a ghost story over the weekend? I'm choosing one which stretches the definition.

"The Willows" by Algernon Blackwood was the favourite horror story of H.P. Lovecraft. It is also the first story in the aforementioned collection.

Here is a link to download the story - it's in the public domain so this is completely legal. This link allows you to download it in several different formats to read, or on mp3 to listen to it read aloud - in my opinion a terrific way to experience ghost stories.

I'll discuss the story on Monday. It would be really fabulous if someone read or listened and joined in the discussion.

Poltergeist (1982)

2010-05-13T12:17:00.008+12:00

"So I'll watch Poltergeist," I thought. "It's rated PG, it's written & produced by Steven Spielberg, it's kiddie horror. There's no violence, nobody dies, it's a ghost story. Should be good for a laugh."

Holy shit. This movie seems specifically designed to cause nightmares. Did I forget that Spielberg previously directed Duel and Jaws? Did I disregard that director Tobe Hooper was best known for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre? I'd seen it before, but obviously I forgot about the clown, the tree, the scene where the guy looks into the mirror and sees...

I'll backtrack. I didn't forget about any of these things at all, but Poltergeist is certainly more relentless than I remember it being. The story involves a bland '80s American family living in a boring house in a cookie-cutter suburb, whose lives are invaded by ghosts that first create a little fun, then maliciously target their children, especially their five-year-old daughter.

Spielberg touches abound throughout the movie (there was considerable controversy about how much of the movie was really directed by Hooper) from the lovable family dog to the huge amounts of then-impressive special effects to the general "sitcom-America" setting. There's also a heavy dose of the sadism that was particularly prevalent in his movies of the '80s, including his propensity to do horrible (though non-lethal) things to kids, and of course his usual complete lack of sexuality.

It seems to be a 'message' movie to a certain extent: the parents voted for Reagan (or at least read books about him) and smoke dope around their kids, the dad is a real estate agent, and they are perfect examples of '80s consumers. There is a definite sense that they are being punished for all of this. I'm all in favour of ghosts that torment Right-voting capitalists, though your mileage may vary. It also seems relevant that the kid-snatching ghosts come out of the television.

It's a contemporary ghost story in more ways than one. One interesting thing about it is that the haunted house is actually very new. According to the back-story, the house was built five years earlier and this is the first family that have lived there. There is an explanation for where the ghosts are coming from, but it's very unusual to set a ghost story in a house without some kind of Terrible Past. Even Hill House, a mere 80 years old, has plenty of nastiness in its relatively short history.

Speaking of that Shirley Jackson story, Poltergeist is yet another descendant, as it features a team of supernatural detectives getting out of their depth. But those characters are here played mostly for laughs.

All of this is secondary to the fact that this is the movie where that scary-looking tree outside your window, and that incredibly creepy clown doll that you really wish your aunt hadn't given to you, really are trying to kill you. The movie seems to be saying "Hey kids, you know how your parents said that all those things you're scared of are really harmless? Well, they were lying. Good luck sleeping tonight!"

So we get a scene where the father insists that the horrible gnarled tree right outside the children's window is actually wise and benevolent and looking after them - immediately followed by a scene where this same tree crashes in through the window and tries to eat a ten-year-old boy. This kid (played by Oliver Robins) does the best job of looking terrified that I think I've ever seen in a kid actor, and he does it a lot throughout the movie. Heather O'Rourke, who plays the 5-year daughter Carol Anne, is much more relaxed; even when things get really extreme, she seems more anxious than afraid.

There's a lot of black comedy throughout, from the death of the budgie right at the start to the EC comics gruesomeness towards the end. For a PG movie, this sure has a lot of disgusting images.

I should probably hate Poltergeist in a lot of ways, not least because the trend of big-budget thrill-ride effects-driven jokey-gruesome Boo!-horror movies can be traced directly to it. But I don't. It's a lot of fun. It's the fun of a rollercoaster, and none of the scares cut very deep. It won't stay with you for long. Unless, of course, you have a big scary tree outside of your bedroom window, in which case you're on your own.

Candyman (1992)

2010-05-12T12:18:00.005+12:00

The opening credits show aerial footage of Chicago accompanied by a hypnotic score by Philip Glass; once they are finished, the first thing we see in Candyman is bees. Lots of bees, in close up. Then we hear the Voice. Deep, dark and resonant, it whispers seductively.

"They say that I will shed innocent blood. What is blood for, if not for shedding? With my hook for a hand, I will split you from your groin to your gullet. I have come for you..."

Not exactly love poetry, but in the voice of Tony Todd that's exactly what it sounds like. Todd plays the title character in Candyman, and though he has very little screen time he dominates the entire movie. His physical presence is majestic, but it is that voice that you remember.

The story centres on Virginia Madsen as Helen, a graduate student studying urban legends. She hears about a particularly gruesome one centered in Cabrini Green, a notorious real-life housing project, involving a spirit who appears when you say his name into a mirror five times. She sets out to find the truth behind the legend, which leads to her running foul of a particularly brutal local gang. But an urban legend needs people to believe to give it power, and soon Helen finds that there are scarier things than tough kids wielding meathooks.

Candyman is often described as a slasher movie, and it certainly spills more blood than most Friday the 13th sequels, but to me it's a ghost story through and through. The Candyman is not out for revenge, although his backstory gives him plenty to be vengeful about. He is more of a romantic figure. "Be my victim," he says to Helen, but he says it seductively, hypnotically. (And in fact director Bernard Rose would hypnotise Virginia Madsen before playing each of these scenes, and she does appear to be in some kind of altered state in these moments.) Helen's investigation threatens his very existence, as it could take away his mystique, which is his very power. But he does not merely want to take her life - he wants her to surrender to him completely.

"Why do you want to live? If you would learn just a little from me, you would not beg to live. I am rumor. It is a blessed condition, believe me. To be whispered about at street corners. To live in other people's dreams, but not to have to be. Do you understand?"

This is an unusually intelligent and beautiful horror movie. The elegant cinematography by Anthony B Richmond and the score by Philip Glass blend perfectly with the combination of urban fairy tale and realistic horror put together by writer/director Bernard Rose. The movie is based on a short story by Clive Barker, called "The Forbidden", and in my opinion this is one of the rare examples of a film adaptation being superior to its literary source. Rose's decision to set the movie in Chicago (instead of Liverpool) and to add the socio-economic & racial/class elements was a master stroke, as was his interpolation of real urban legends. The method of summoning Candyman is borrowed from mythology put together by American street kids, in particular the legend of Bloody Mary; there's a brilliant account of these here.

There's also a strong element of ambiguity to the movie, and it's certainly possible to claim that the supernatural elements may all be in the main character's head. I counted exactly one instance where this interpretation does not quite work, and even that could be explained away without a lot of effort. Virginia Madsen has probably never been better than she is in this movie, which puts us in her head for almost the entire running time; she carries the movie, and as much as Tony Todd elevates things when he appears, the movie wouldn't work without her.

But all these elements of romance, social significance and aesthetic beauty do not stop Candyman from being a particularly savage and frightening horror movie. Many characters within the movie tell ghost stories of their own, some of which are dramatised, and most of them are extremely gruesome. The movie supposedly had to be heavily cut to avoid an NC-17 rating in the US; I don't know if we got the uncut version over here, because it's hard to imagine it being much bloodier. And of course for all that he is majestic, awe-inspiring and even sexy, Candyman himself is quite terrifying each time he appears.

I recommend Candyman without reservation to anyone who likes horror movies.

Ghostwatch (1992)

2010-05-11T12:23:00.009+12:00

I've covered a book and a movie, so it's time to cover a tv show. Ghostwatch is a seldom-seen one-off show broadcast by the BBC in 1992. It was so controversial that they pledged to not repeat or release it for at least ten years, even though its viewing figures broke records, and to this day it has still never been repeated. A dvd was put out on the 10th anniversary in 2002 - by the British Film Institute rather than by the BBC - but this is now out of print and selling for outrageous prices on the internet. As far as I am aware, the show was never played outside of the UK.

Ghostwatch aired as part of a series of one-off plays. It is a fake documentary, presented by real British celebrities playing themselves, in which a television documentary team goes to a house where a particularly nasty haunting has been happening for years, in an attempt to prove once and for all that the supernatural really exists. Legendary presenter & interviewer Michael Parkinson hosts the show from the studio, trying to be earnest but clearly skeptical; former Blue Peter presented Sarah Green is in the house, with the family; Red Dwarf star Craig Charles is outside the house, unable to hide his sarcastic contempt for people who believe in ghosts; and Green's husband, bland presenter Mike Smith, looks after the viewer call-in phones.

The show is a slow burn, playing nicely between Parkinson's good-natured "I can't believe I'm doing this" cynicism and Green's cheerful but slightly worried enthusiasm. There is also a British parapsychologist in the studio, and a video link to an American skeptic. There are phone call-ins from audience members (some of them apparently genuine, some definitely staged) and Craig Charles gets some disquieting interview footage with residents.

Then all hell starts to break loose, and by all accounts people all over the UK believed that they were watching a real-life horror story unfolding right before their eyes. The parallels with Orson Welles's infamous radio adaptation of War of the Worlds are obvious: despite being presented in a drama slot, with a scriptwriter's credit right at the start, and a "starring" rather than "presented by" credit for Michael Parkinson, people were so sucked in by the story and by the professionalism of the actors that they thought it was all real. And when people started calling in claiming that the poltergeist activity was leaping off the screen and into their homes, no amount of amused mockery by Parkinson could persuade the audience that it wasn't real.

This is bravura stuff. The script by Stephen Volk (who did not impress me with his work on Gothic or The Kiss) strikes just the right balance between the skepticism and the gullibility of different characters. The introduction of an element of genuine fraud at one point is a master-stroke, faking out the audience brilliantly. Director Lesley Manning does a terrific job of making it all look like it's really happening live, though it was not actually all shot in one go. Parkinson's genial, reassuring presence in the studio actually makes the scary bits more effective, and Green's children's show demeanour make her the perfect person to be right in the thick of it; when she gets worried, so do we.

The backstory of the ghost contains the kind of button-pushing guaranteed to worry a British audience, especially elements of baby-killing, animal mutilation and paedophilia. The appearences of the ghost itself are superbly managed and almost always completely ambiguous.

The storyline, of an investigative team into the supernatural getting more than they bargained for, obviously harkens back to The Haunting of Hill House. Similar ground was also covered by the BBC in their production of Nigel Kneale's teleplay The Stone Tape, which I will be tackling soon. the Steven Spielberg/Tobe Hooper movie Poltergeist (also coming soon to this blog) is another obvious reference point.

Here is the blog of Dr. Lin Pascoe, the fictional parapsychologist featured in the show.

Next up in this series, a ghost story that is not usually regarded as such, containing a whole lot more gore and violence than everything so far combined, and its link to the urban legends of Miami street kids. In the meantime, stay away from mirrors...

The Fog (1980)

2010-05-07T12:15:00.006+12:00

The Fog was writer/director John Carpenter & writer/producer Debra Hill's follow-up to their incredibly successful 1978 movie Halloween. For this movie they decided on a complete change of pace, going for a spooky and completely non-violent ghost story. However, during post-production they decided that this approach was not successful and went back to add more violent scenes (as Carpenter would also later do with Halloween II). The result is a patchy movie with lots of great atmospheric scenes punctuated by violent climaxes.

For all its problems - and it has many - The Fog is one of my favourite horror movies. It starts with John Houseman telling a ghost story to some children, sitting around a camp fire. It has an excellent cast including Jamie Lee Curtis, Janet Leigh, Nancy Loomis, Hal Hartley and Adrienne Barbeau. Most of the characters are named after people Carpenter had worked with on his earlier movies, like Dan O'Bannon and Tommy Lee Wallace.

Mostly because of those reshoots, the ghosts in The Fog are not content to loom menacingly and say "Boo!" They are armed with swords, hooks and other such weapons, and they clearly relish using them. They are also plenty gruesome to look at: they are supposed to be the spirits of drowned lepers, and they are decayed, green, maggot-ridden and generally disgusting. Makeup effects guru Rob Bottin (who later did his best work on another Carpenter movie, The Thing) does a great job here and also gets to play ghost leader Blake.

One of my all-time favourite horror movie setpieces comes early in the movie, when three drunken fishermen find themselves confronted with a ghostly galleon pulling up next to their boat. It's the scene where I think the atmospheric stuff and the violent stuff meshes best.

As with Halloween, the movie features female characters who were gutsier and more independent than was usual at the time, especially in genre movies. Together with Sigourney Weaver in Alien this helped to make American horror movies into a genre where a strong female lead was the rule rather than the exception, to the point where it was identified as a cliché known as the Final Girl (first named as such by Carol J. Clover in her fascinating book Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film). Strong female leads are still rare in Hollywood, and horror movies are still a common exception.

John Carpenter provides the score himself, as he usually does in his own movies, and it's one of his best, based around a haunting piano melody. The photography by Dean Cundey (also a long-time associate of Carpenter) is excellent; I'd say that these are the two elements that most strongly contribute to the movie's success, though committed performances by the strong cast (especially Barbeau & Hartley) certainly help.

Barbeau is Carpenter's best heroine ever, a solo mum running a radio station and a lighthouse on her own and capably fending off both unwelcome suitors and marauding ghosts. Holbrook lends weight to what would otherwise be dull exposition scenes, his hushed tones turning them into spooky moments in their own right.

If you're not too worried by awkward shifts in tone and uneven plotting, I'd highly recommend The Fog. Just don't make the mistake of picking up the 2005 remake, which I was unable to get through without wanting to use the dvd as a frisbee (I lasted about fifteen minutes). Horrible, horrible stuff. Also, don't confuse it with James Herbert's novel of the same title, a full-strength gore-fest that has nothing in common with this movie.

There is a book of The Fog, which I've spent quite some time looking for. It's written by Dennis Etchison, one of the best horror writers of the last 50 years, and is apparently based on the earlier, pre-reshoot version of the movie. Etchison apparently managed to make the story tie up more neatly than the movie does, and this novelisation has a very high reputation. He has a gift for atmosphere and dread that seems to be perfect for this story.

Here's the trailer. I wanted to post the opening scene, where Houseman tells the story, but it's been taken down.

Guess I also need to put in an image so that I have a thumbnail for Facebook. Tempted as I am to use a sexy photo of Ms. Barbeau, I'm going for this one instead.

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

2010-05-06T12:16:00.014+12:00

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

I can't think of a better way to kick off my tribute to ghost stories. This is quite possibly the best opening paragraph of any horror novel, and the book that follows is certainly in the running for the best ghost story ever written. It tells the story of a team of investigators who head to Hill House, the site of several notorious deaths, as they attempt to scientifically prove the existence of the supernatural. It may not surprise you to learn that things do not go well for them.

The story is centered around the character of Nell, a shy and lonely woman who seems to have some fairly serious psychiatric problems. The book is ambiguous as to which of the supernatural phenomena are real and which are in Nell's head or possibly even created by her, but this in no way detracts from the horror. The Haunting of Hill House is, quite simply, one of the most terrifying books I have ever read.

It's not a long story, but very few really first-rate horror stories are longer than a couple of hundred pages. Brevity is the soul of horror in many ways; Jackson never allows the reader to become comfortable in the surroundings she paints for us. And the surroundings are the thing here; as that opening paragraph implies we're not dealing with the ghost of someone in particular, but with a Bad Place.

The Haunting of Hill House has been very influential on books by other horror writers, probably most notably on Stephen King's early novel The Shining. In my opinion, none of these imitators has ever equalled it.

It has been filmed twice. The first film version, 1963's The Haunting, was directed by Robert Wise, who was very much paying tribute to one of his mentors, producer Val Lewton. Lewton's movies are known for taking penny-dreadful titles like Cat People and I Walked With a Zombie and crafting smart and elegant suspense stories from them. Wise's version of The Haunting is nastier than most of Lewton's work, largely thanks to its fidelity to Jackson's story, but it still falls within the subtle horror category that Lewton exemplified.

There was a second adaptation in 1999; I have not seen it and plan to continue avoiding it. I don't want to sully this tribute to Jackson's story by talking about it further.

If you're feeling brave, give this book a go. If you're feeling slightly less brave, the first film adaptation is an acceptable substitute, but you really should go for the full-strangth original.

Ghost stories

2010-05-05T13:25:00.006+12:00

I don't know the reason for this, but I've always found ghost stories to be the scariest kind of horror stories, in film and in literature. Perhaps it's because (despite my essentially aetheistic nature) I suspect that there may be some truth to the idea of ghosts, or at least that they seem less unlikely than other horror story monsters like vampires, werewolves, and towering unspeakable monstrosities with squids for heads.

For the next few weeks, I want to turn this blog into a tribute to some of my favourite ghost stories. English ghost stories are traditional and Japanese ghost stories have been big in recent times, but there are great ghost stories from all over the world.

Just to kick things off, here is a link to an excellent adaptation of one of my favourite ever ghost stories, Oh Whistle and I'll Come To You My Lad by M.R. James, as adapted for the BBC by writer/director Jonathan Miller and starring Michael Hordern. It's old and low-budget, but I think it's still pretty damned good. For best results, turn off the lights.

Review: Jean Grae & Talib Kweli, San Fran Bathhouse, 8 April 2010

2010-04-08T12:27:00.006+12:00

Edit: YouTube of Jean's crack-up moment added at the very bottom, courtesy of DJ Sticky Fingaz.

I went with Morgue to see Jean Grae & Talib Kweli live at San Fran Bathhouse last night. They are both New York rappers, which seems to be a real thing in Wellington at the moment (having already been to excellent shows by RZA and Raekwon in the last couple of months and with DJ Premier apparently on his way). Kweli is I guess a backpack rapper, with usually much more socially positive & iltellectually interesting lyrics than usual, which is probably why he doesn't sell, though he does command respect from some of the top-selling American rappers.

If skills sold, truth be told
I'd probably be, lyrically, Talib Kweli
- Jay-Z, "Moment of Clarity"

Jean Grae, meanwhile, is just plain one of the best MCs alive. Her lyrics are sharp and focused, and her flow is excellent (she's sometimes criticised for sounding monotonous, but last night proved she has real range). Unfortunately her records don't sell very well at all, largely because she refuses to sex up her act, but also because her lyrics are far more intense than anything that will sell to a hip-pop crowd, often focusing on subjects like bad relationships, abortion, and vicious lyrical beat-downs.

I wasn't feeling too great when I went to this gig. I'd been awake half the night with breathing issues (asthma & a persistent cold) and I needed a cup of coffee to revive myself before going in. I was tired, sore and grumpy.

So it's a mark of how great the show was when, at about midnight on a Weednesday night, Kweli started chanting "Jump! Jump! Jump!" and I found myself almost involuntarily pogoing to the beat while pumping my fist into the air. That's one thing I've been loving about the live hip-hop gigs we've been getting lately: the crowd isn't too "cool" to be obvious about enjoying themselves, and it's infectious. I'm sure we all looked totally ridiculous, but who cares? It was so much fun.

We arrived just before nine, and surprisingly things had already kicked off. There were two MCs and a DJ on stage; I don't know what time they started, but we only saw about 3 songs, which varied from being kind of poor to pretty great. Next up was what seemed to be 2/3 of Electric Wire Hustle, with a Kiwi MC I didn't recognise instead of the drummer. This was pretty cool, with the MC laying down some quite good freestyles over songs like Perception. He mentioned H-Town a few times, which was a bit mystifying. (Hamilton? Hawera? Hokianga? Hutt Valley?) I still wish that Mara TK had an on-stage presence to match his voice (and beard!); dude can really sing, but tends to come across as shy, though he definitely seems more confident than the first time I saw them at Te Papa.

After they were done, Jean Grae came on. Given her albums and her image on this poster:

...it was pretty surprising that she came out with her hair done up and wearing a nice dress, backed up by DJ Chaps wearing a shirt & tie and with the (really good) soul singer MeLa Machinko on backing vocals, and started doing really RnB sounding stuff. It even turned out that she's got a really sweet singing voice. It all sounded like love songs - but then we noticed the lyrics, which were completely cynical. But it was still a real surprise to see her performing in this mode.

Jean's between-songs banter was hilarious, and she maintained an antagonistic (but still friendly) attitude towards the crowd, telling us off for being lazy, saying that people in the front row who weren't prepared to go hard should "move the fuck back" and even complaining that there were "too many dudes" at the show. At one point she completely lost it, laughing so hard at a young woman who was apparently dancing really hard-out in the front row that she had to stop a song and start again. And of course, if completely blew my mind when she rocked the theme song from The Muppet Show.

Eventually she said "We're gonna leave the stage until you motherfuckers know how to act" - and they did! Ominous music played over an empty stage for a good five minutes, until suddenly all three of them burst back on wearing caps and hoodies. From that moment on the beats were raw and the raps were fierce. Morgue said that it was a shame her set wasn't longer, because we were just getting used to this new style when she flipped it.

It turned out that this dichotomy was a result of her upcoming album, Cake or Death; the first half was the cake and now we were getting the death. Much as I enjoyed the first half - and I really, really did - the second half was what I actually came to see. Much as I like Talib Kweli, what I really wanted was to see Jean Grae cut loose, and she did.

She finished her set with a surprisingly positive song, asking everyone in the room who was living their dream to put their hands in the air. That's something else I like about her: after all the negativity and black humour, when she's upbeat it sounds all the more sincere. Then suddenly, without delay, Talib Kweli was on the stage. He was hard to miss - he's very tall. DJ Chaps stayed on for Kweli's set, and Jean and MeLa Machinko also stuck around.

For some reason Kweli's first couple of songs felt a bit flat, perhaps just because Jean really is a hard act to follow, but then he seemed to come right. He certainly did not lack for energy. He roared through his set, jumping from new to old material, previewing some stuff from his next album (a reformation of his old group Reflection Eternal, with DJ Hi-Tek - he mock-told-off anyone who had already downloaded a leaked version), doing stuff from mixtapes, from Black Star, even throwing in a bit of KRS-One's "Sound of the Police" at one point. (Not too surprising given the number of quotes & references he throws into his songs, most famously quoting one of Rakim's dopest lyrics from "Follow the Leader" for the chorus of "Eternalists".)

At one point the music stopped and he started rapping a capella. After a couple of bars everyone started clapping in time, and he stopped and told us off, saying he was “laying down some fly shit” and that we should just listen and clap at the end. Amazingly, everyone did quiet down. He’d do a couple of lines (it was socially conscious and anti-war kind of stuff) and people would cheer, and he’d kinda frown and motion for everyone to be quiet and then keep going, then everyone would cheer again, and he’d hush us again... it was pretty weird. But a good weird, and yeah it was some fly shit.

Kweli actually did an encore, quite a lengthy one, in which "just one more song" kept turning into two or three. It was almost one by the time it was all over. He expressed surprise at how much the tickets had cost ("Seventy dollars? SEVENTY DOLLARS?! That's New Zealand dollars, but still!") but still asked us to buy t-shirts ("Because we want more of your money") and mixtapes (except it turned out that the DJ had forgotten to bring them).

It was a great night. And it's not the last of this sort of thing. There were posters up saying that DJ Premier (from Gang Starr, also did heaps with Nas, Biggie, M.O.P., and – bizarrely – Christina Aguilera) is coming soon. Apparently there is one guy who has managed to make contacts with the NY hip-hop scene and is bringing all these guys over.

Here's the obligatory YouTube link, which shows Talib & Jean performing "Get By", the song that probably got the biggest reaction last night simply because it's his biggest hit. It's not that great of a clip and it does not capture at all the excitement of actually being there. (And obviously it is not from last night's show.)

Edit: here's the crack-up mentioned above. Choice.

Edit again: thanks to Anna for providing me with the names of the singer & DJ in a comment.

Alien Raiders (2008)

2010-03-18T13:08:00.000+13:00

I was recommended to see the sf/horror movie Alien Raiders by a friend who said that it is much better than the title suggests. I found it to be a mildly diverting way to spend 82 minutes, so I guess he was right.

The main thing I liked about this movie is that it assumed that anyone who is renting something called Alien Raiders already knows the rules of the genre and doesn't want to get bogged down with pointless exposition. The movie sets up the characters and the situation with remarkable efficiency, using shorthand to set everything up. The downside of this is that it means the movie is generic enough that nothing really needs to be explained because nothing new or original is going on. It's basically yet another rip-off of Alien and The Thing.

Everything about the movie is at least competent. The acting, the dialogue, the camerawork, the special effects - everything is good enough. The monsters are admirably kept off-screen as much as possible, so we never get much of a chance to complain about how cheap they are. There's no outright cheating in the plotting, and the coincidences (e.g. the heroine's stepfather just happening to be an ace hostage negotiator) don't become too annoying.

The best thing about the whole movie, in my opinion, was the performance of Bonita Friedericy in a key role as a junkie who has critical information about the aliens. She has a great dry delivery of her smart-arse dialogue that works perfectly. The rest of the characters are standard cliché types: the quiet kid who discovers he has backbone, the cowardly overweight boss, the tough black guy, the tough guy with a sad past, etc.

All in all, if you're the kind of person who would rent a movie called Alien Raiders then you'll probably be happy with this one. Personally I need this kind of movie to have something a little more: some social or political commentary, or some witty dialogue, or at least for the story to not be totally predictable.

Alien Raiders should be how good most of these movies are, but most sf/horror I've seen is worse. My disillusionment with the horror genre in general continues - I am no longer content for a horror movie to just be "good enough".

Mr. Arkadin - the boat scene

2010-03-17T00:09:00.000+13:00

In my haste to get the first post up on my new blog, I neglected to mention the astonishing scene that really solidified my obsession with this movie. In a movie filled with arresting images, the boat scene is the one that’s always haunted me.

There are spoilers in this post, so if you haven’t seen Mr. Arkadin/Confidential Report and intend to, you might not want to read further.

The scene involved Mily (Patricia Medina) on Arkadin’s boat, drunkenly taunting him with the information she has learned about his past. In a way this is exposition, as it includes more background on Arkadin than any other scene in the movie, but it’s much more than that. The camera is in constant motion, and looking closely so is the set. The room sways dramatically in all directions, and Mily is thrown around the room, bracing herself against the wall. Meanwhile Arkadin himself is solidly anchored, dominating the scene.

Every time I watch this scene I find it disorienting and disturbing. There is an air of menace about it that goes beyond Mily’s dawning realisation that Arkadin is not going to allow her to walk away with the information she has gathered about him. Arkadin’s bizarre make-up really makes him look like an avatar of Poseidon, the Greek god of the sea and of earthquakes, which makes sense given the rocking of the room, the ocean-bound location of the scene, and the fact that after the scene is concluded Arkadin is going to drown Mily (Welles’s version of the movie was supposed to open with her naked body washed up on the beach, a shot that is missing from most versions and placed directly after this scene in others).

In addition, the scene is shot in a sexually charged manner, highlighting Mily’s voluptuous figure and Arkadin’s domination of her. In context, she has managed to get a job on his boat as an “entertainer” as a way of getting more information about him; there is no doubt that her entertaining is not limited to singing and dancing. What exactly happens between the end of this scene and the discovery of Mily’s body? It’s one of many mysteries implicit in Mr. Arkadin.

Unfortunately, this scene doesn't seem to be on Youtube or I would link to it.

Mr. Arkadin (1955)

2010-03-16T22:59:00.001+13:00

The movie Mr. Arkadin has fascinated me for years. Written & directed by and starring Orson Welles, it is strangely elusive even while watching it. I've seen four different versions of the movie, including the "comprehensive version" assembled over fifty years after its original release, listened to the radio shows that inspired it, and browsed the English translation of the French novelization of the original script, and it still remains a rumour, a ghost.

In some versions, Arkadin opens with a short piece of narration about a plane that was discovered to be flying without a pilot. This is appropriate, as Welles was fired during post-production and it was completely re-edited without his involvement; no Welles-approved version of the movie exists. I'll never know how Welles would have put the movie together, so I have to piece it together in my mind.

The story is fairly standard for a noir-ish thriller: smuggler and general scoundrel Guy Van Stratten is hired by a tycoon to investigate his past, under the pretext of having amnesia; of course, the tycoon's old associates start turning up dead. What makes it interesting are the particulars, and also the structure: in most versions, the movie is mostly told in an elaborate series of flashbacks as the now-desperate Van Stratten tries to extricate himself from the situation.

While on the one hand Arkadin is one of Welles's more commercial directorial efforts - in most respects it's a straight thriller - it is experimental in a number of ways, especially in how it keeps audience identification at arm's length. There seems to be a deliberate effort to make the male leads as unsympathetic as possible; Arkadin is distant and sinister, while Van Stratten is a charmless jerk, and both are shown using and discarding people thoughtlessly. The visuals and the performances are also highly stylised. But it's also very pulpy, and at times almost feels like an artfully-made exploitation flick.

Welles himself is terrible in the movie, wearing a particularly ridiculous fake nose and beard. And yet, with the themes of masks and hidden identities crowding every corner, his ham acting and obvious make-up seem to work in the movie's favour. Robert Arden has taken a lot of knocks as Van Stratten, but I suspect he's exactly as Welles wanted. Paola Mori was capably dubbed by Billie Whitelaw, which isn't as obvious as it might have been since the whole movie is post-synchronised (with Welles himself dubbing half a dozen major characters). The best performance, in my opinion, is by Patricia Medina as Mily; she provides the closest thing the movie has to a human centre.

A good part of the movie is made up of Van Stratten visiting and interviewing a slew of bizarre characters, played by an interesting cast including Michael Redgrave, Akim Tamiroff and Katina Paxinou. Arkadin's character is assembled from bits of hearsay and stories, as well as what's implicit in the things that they don't quite say. This structure is dimilar to that of Citizen Kane, but in Arkadin the approach is deliberately more subjective. In the end, particularly as we don't have Welles's final version, he remains something of an enigma.

I have to wonder if I would find it as compelling if it had been finished to Welles's satisfaction. There is an uneasy sense throughout the movie that everything adds up to less than the sum of its parts, much as there is a sense that if we knew just a little more Arkadin himself would turns out to be less omnipotent and more ordinary. But there's always hope that there is a solution, a good one, hidden somewhere in the fabric of the movie. I'll keep looking until I find it.

...in with the new!

2010-03-13T15:42:00.001+13:00

I'd like to say "Thank you so much" to my good friend David Ritchie, who hosted my old blog for so long and put up with all my guff. You rock, man.

I'm off to Foxton for the weekend (baby cousin's wedding) and when I return next week, this blog will start in earnest. Whatever that means.

Right now I'm excited about going to see 11 & 12 at the Festival of the Arts tonight. Yay!