Tag Archives: Sergio Martino

Film4 FrightFest 2015 Review

Nina Forever-1
Nina Forever

16th Film4 FrightFest

27-31 August 2015

Vue West End,
Prince Charles Cinema, Phoenix, London

FrightFest website

This year again, Film4 FrightFest offered a brilliantly diverse programme that encompassed all aspects of horror and fantasy, with some great category-defying gems. Interestingly, female protagonists widely dominated the line-up, and many of them were appealingly diverse, complex and nuanced characters, ranging from troubled temptresses to tragic mothers, babysitters to scientists, confused teenagers to imperious mistresses.

One of the highlights was Ben Cresciman’s beautifully crafted psychological thriller Sun Choke, which was the most cinematographically and thematically accomplished of the festival. An ethereal, dreamlike, elliptical portrayal of a possibly psychotic young woman, it intelligently and chillingly explored the tortuous, ambivalent relationship she has with her domineering carer, played by the superb Barbara Crampton.

Sun Choke is available on the premium streaming video service Shudder from 9 March 2017.

Darkly erotic and intemperately stylish, Goddess of Love was also centred around a psychotic woman. Co-scripted by lead actress Alexis Kendra, it plunged into the delusional obsessiveness of an unstable woman as she increasingly loses her grip on reality after her lover leaves her. Sadly, the overly explanatory ending undermined the seductively unstable reality created until then.

For its part, Nina Forever offered a highly unusual take on female darkness. One of the great surprises of the festival, it was a bittersweet, melancholy and inventive tale of love, grief and the difficulty of getting rid of one’s ghosts. When morbidly inclined checkout girl Holly falls in love with the suicidal Rob, it seems like he may finally be able to put the death of his girlfriend Nina behind him. But Nina won’t go away so easily, and they have to deal with her very tangible, bloody, sardonic presence in their bed. Although the tone shifting between offbeat comedy and horrific drama is at times a little clumsy, it is a truly original, and very affecting film that treads a fresh path.

Not all female-led films were successful. After a compelling, unsettling first part, in which a new babysitter introduces chaos and sexual tension into the conventional suburban world of her charges, Emelie descended into an unconvincing and predictable thriller fodder about thwarted maternal desires. Also themed around maternity, Bruce McDonald’s Halloween tale Hellions, his follow-up to 2008’s Pontypool was equally disappointing. On Halloween, a teenager who has just found out she is pregnant must fight evil childlike monsters who come knocking on her door, demanding not sweets, but her unborn child. As she steps out into the strange light of a blood moon, the image is drained of colour and becomes startlingly artificial. This is not a bad thing in itself, but with a plot that jerks incoherently into varying directions, the visual effects that are meant to support it remain contrived and hollow.

Interestingly, Bernard Rose’s modern update of Frankenstein transferred the focus of the monster’s love and anguish from the male creator to the scientist mother figure, making explicit the maternal anxiety that had originally fed Mary Shelley’s novel. Extrapolating on the possibilities of modern technology while based on a close reading of the novel, the film is seen from the perspective of the inarticulate creature. Originally given perfect beauty, he falls from grace and is forced into desperate, squalid survival after a flaw in the procedure of its creation causes horrific disfigurement. A visually ravishing poetic take on the misunderstood hideous monster despite a somewhat bombastic ending.

The focus was also on the mother in New England ghost story We Are Still Here. An openly referential film that played like a cross between House by the Cemetery and The Fog, it stars Barbara Crampton as a grieving mother who moves to an old isolated house with her husband in a bid to get over her son’s death. Expressive and poignant, Crampton was ably seconded by Larry Fessenden, who was his usual brilliant self as one half of the hippie couple who try and help her to contact the spirit of her dead son. All slow-burn creepiness in the first part, culminating into a blood bath at the end, it was a well-crafted, enjoyably eerie tale that used its influences smartly.

After the emergence of Israeli horror in the last few years, the surprise geographical discovery this year was Georgia with Landmine Goes Click. One of the most divisive films of the festival, it set a trio of American tourists up for trouble in a remote Georgian mountain when one of the party accidentally steps on a mine. After apparently heading for a rape and revenge kind of story, it veers unexpectedly away to offer instead a scalpel-cold study of the terrible chain of causes and consequences that leads to the shocking, tragic ending. In a world dominated by betrayal, distrust and abusive power, the main characters are all guilty and provoke their own downfall through the cruel games they play with one another.

Among the documentaries, the fascinating story of Future Shock! The Story of 2000AD was more than worth a look while our friends at the Duke Mitchell Film Club presented the excellent Remake, Remix, Rip-Off, about low-budget Turkish remakes of Hollywood blockbusters in the 1960s-70s. This was followed by the Duke Mitchell Film Party, which proved as deliriously entertaining as last year’s extravaganza, with guests, among which Barbara Crampton, presenting clips of new work or hilariously dubious trailers.

The diverse retrospective programme included Brian Clemens’s 1970 Hammer swashbuckling horror adventure Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter, Sergio Martino’s seductively perverse giallo Your Vice Is a Locker Room and Only I Have the Key, with the stunning Edwige Fenech, Clive Barker’s classic Hellraiser, Philip Ridley’s startling 1990 debut The Reflecting Skin and Uli Lommel’s 1970s serial murderer tale Tenderness of the Wolves.

Virginie Sélavy

The Battle of the Sexes: Sado-masochism in 1960s-70s cinema

Femina Ridens 1
The Frightened Woman

Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies – London

Instructor: Virginie Sélavy

Date: 12 March 2015

Time: 7-10pm

Venue: Horse Hospital

Address: Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 1JD

Prices: £10 advance / £8 concs / £11 on the door

Miskatonic website

In the 1960s-70s, the relaxation of censorship, together with women’s greater social assertiveness, led to the appearance of a substantial number of art and/or exploitative films that explored male/female relationships through sexual power games. A large sub-section, including Mario Bava’s The Whip and the Body (1963), Luis Buñuel’s Belle de jour (1967), Sergio Martino’s The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh (1971) and Vicente Aranda’s The Blood Spattered Bride delve into what are presented as women’s secret repressed desires and internal conflicts. Aside from his numerous Sade adaptations, Jess Franco also dreamily explored female characters who are both victims and tormentors in Venus in Furs (1969) and Succubus (1968). Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Woman in Chains (1968) and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Eden and After (1970) create hyper-aesthetic worlds of kinky abstract obsession while in Kôji Wakamatsu’s The Embryo Hunts in Secret (1966) and Pete Walker’s House of Whipcord (1974), the violence of amorous relationships takes on social and political connotations. Artist Niki de Saint Phalle made two unusual and fascinating contributions to this theme: not only did she co-direct her own semi-autobiographic perverse family fantasy, Daddy with Peter Whitehead (1973), but her art also appears in the fascinating Femina Ridens (Piero Schivazappa, 1968), which toys with expectations about dominant and submissive roles. The lecture will examine all these and more ramifications of the period’s unfettered sado-masochistic fantasies.

About the instructor:
Virginie Sélavy is the founder and editor of Electric Sheep, the online magazine for transgressive cinema. She has edited the collection of essays The End: An Electric Sheep Anthology, and has contributed to World Directory Cinema: Eastern Europe and written about Victorian London in Film Locations: Cities of the Imagination – London. Her work has appeared in various publications, including Sight&Sound, Rolling Stone France, Cineaste and Frieze.

About the Miskatonic Institute:
Named for the fictional university in H.P. Lovecraft’s literary mythos, The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies is a non-profit, community-based organization that started in Canada, founded by Kier-La Janisse in March of 2010. The school currently has branches in Montreal and London, with Miskatonic London operating under the co-direction of Kier-La Janisse and Electric Sheep Founder/Editor Virginie Sélavy.

All classes take place at the historic Horse Hospital, the heart of the city’s underground culture. Individual class tickets are £10 advance / £11 on the door / £8 concessions and will be available 30 days in advance of each class.

The next course dates are 9 April, 14 May, 11 June. For the full details of the courses please check the Miskatonic website. For all enquiries, please email Miskatonic.london@gmail.com.

All the Colours of the Dark + The Carpenters

all-the-colors-of-the-dark
All the Colours of the Dark

All the Colours of the Dark + talk & live music

Date: Wednesday 24 September 2014

Doors: 7pm

Venue: Horse Hospital

Address: Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 1JD

Price: £7 on the door/£5 advance

Horse Hospital website

Buy tickets

Electric Sheep and Strange Attractor present All the Colours of the Dark (Tutti i colori dei buoi, Dir Sergio Martino Italy/Spain 1972 88 mins) on Wednesday 24 September 2014 at the Horse Hospital as part of Scalarama.

Hallucinatory satanists infest swinging London in this hard-to-find psychedelic giallo from one of its boldest proponents, Sergio Martino (The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh, Torso, Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I have the Key). All the necessary ingredients are here, including giallo queen Edwige Fenech as the troubled victim of a psychopathic stalker, exotic West London locations and a psyched-out sitar heavy theme from Bruno Nicolai.

Read our review of the All the Colours of the Dark soundtrack.

PLUS

The Carpenters – Your favourite horror film themes played live by Filmbar 70’s Justin Harries and friends.

Buy tickets

Scalarama takes place from 1 to 30 September over 250 venues across the UK and Ireland. Among the 400 events already confirmed are screenings of Polyester in Odorama, The Last House on the Left on 35mm, Nekromantik, Daisies, Branded to Kill and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. For the full programme and to buy tickets, please visit the Scalarama website.

Watch the Scalarama 2014 trailer: