George A Romero’s 1977 Martin offers a remarkably ambiguous, playful, disturbing and original take on the vampire. It has just been released by Arrow Video as a two-disc collector’s edition, including the Italian cut of the film (believed to have been re-edited by Dario Argento and missing some scenes from the US version), which is reviewed below.
Format: DVD
Release date: 31 May 2010
Distributor: Mr Bongo Films
Director: Glauber Rocha
Writer: Glauber Rocha
Original title: O Dragão da Maldade contra o Santo Guerreiro
Cast: Mauricio do Valle, Odete Lara, Othon Bastos, Joffre Soares, Lorival Pariz
France/Brazil/West Germany 1969
100 mins
Antonio das Mortes, or O Dragão da Maldade contra o Santo Guerreiro (The Dragon of Evil against the Saint Warrior) is the final instalment in a trilogy of films by the self-appointed leader of the 60s Brazilian Cinema Novo movement, Glauber Rocha. Written as well as directed by Rocha, all three films centre around the figure of the cangaceiro, a holy bandit hero or mystic outlaw, which Rocha likens to Saint George the Dragon-Slayer. In contrast to the first two films, in Antonio das Mortes the central protagonist is not the saint, but the dragon; the ‘cangaceiro killer’ of the film’s title, Antonio das Mortes. The story follows Antonio as he is hired by a tyrannical landowner to kill Coriana, the last of the cangaceiros. Antonio and Coriana face each other in a machete duel and, after the fatal blow is struck, all-out chaos ensues.
‘A camera in the hand, and an idea in the head’ was how Rocha defined Cinema Novo, and it perfectly describes the poetical/political guerrilla filmmaking of Antonio das Mortes. The luxuries of classical narrative cinema are stripped clear. Everything is shot on location and in available light; the camera is largely hand-held, or fixed to a tripod to give a detached, blank perspective; the soundtrack fades roughly and abruptly in and out; and the effects (gun shots, knife wounds, etc) are purposefully cheap and hard to take seriously. Antonio das Mortes (and Cinema Novo more generally) is little concerned with fleshed-out characters and naturalistic drama, and occupies itself instead with the rapid flow of ideas, icons, and associations. The characters in the story aren’t really characters, but rather symbols or devices within the film’s dialectical economy. There are no personalities vying for our empathy, just archetypes and actions, the meaning (or host of meanings) of which we are left to interpret on our own.
The most striking thing about Antonio das Mortes is its tremendous energy and confidence. All of the performances (and ‘performances’ is definitely the right word) explode with intensity, certainty and enthusiasm; and this is the case as much in the chaotic crowd scenes, as in the tighter, more choreographed dialogue scenes. The direction from Rocha is excellent, retaining a tight and richly philosophical narrative, while giving his actors an immense amount of freedom. The pastiche mythology of Rocha’s script is inspiring, highly original stuff too. It would seem for example - given that we are encouraged to sympathise with Antonio’s position - that Antonio and Coriana, as characters, are not representatives of good and evil per say, but rather representatives of essential eternally opposed forces that govern the universe (male and female, rich and poor, strong and weak, light and dark, etc). The film has a strong folkloric quality that is redolent of Sergei Paradjanov’s The Legend of the Suram Fortress and it is stylistically just as impressive.
For all its intellectual and stylistic panache, however, Antonio das Mortes can also be slightly dense, esoteric and dry. The bulk of the exposition about cangaceiros and other character types is given in scrolling titles at the beginning of the film, and the audience is then expected to keep up, which it is often not easy to do. Similarly, there is constant reference to and comment on Brazilian politics of the 1960s, which will probably mean little to modern audiences. The way Rocha uses the drama purely as a means through which to expound his dialectical philosophy results in a film where there is no empathy, no great feeling, no appeal to the heart. This may not be the point of Antonio das Mortes, but compare the film to Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou, which does something similar. In Godard’s film - in the star personas of Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina - an old, human warmth manages to seep through the general fragmentation and pastiche. The actors are clearly performing, are clearly parts of Godard’s philosophical toolkit, and yet they retain their personality. They have a certain meaning (or host of meanings) in other words, and yet at the same time we love them; and thus the film affects us more deeply and on more levels. This maybe hints at the limitations of Cinema Novo as a cinema that thinks too much. Cinema is surely born out of more than just ‘a camera in the hand, and an idea in the head’? Surely it also requires a beating heart in the chest?
David Warwick
Format: Cinema
Release date: 23 July 2010
Venues: Nationwide
Distributor: Optimum Releasing
Director: Vincenzo Natali
Writers: Vincenzo Natali, Antoinette Terry Bryant, Doug Taylor
Cast: Adrien Brody, Sarah Polley, Delphine Chanéac, David Hewlett, Abigail Chu
Canada 2009
104 mins
While Vincenzo Natali’s four feature films have a few things in common - a single word title, small casts featuring David Hewlett and being situated in the environs of the fantasy/science fiction genre - they couldn’t be more different in terms of (high concept) plot. Cube features six characters with partial amnesia enclosed in a futuristic death trap. Cypher is a Philip K Dick-style spy thriller about shifting identities and corporate espionage. Nothing is a two-hander set in a house surrounded by an encroaching white void. His new film Splice is an update of the Frankenstein story through the lens of modern fears of genetic modification. Compared to Nothing, or even Cube, you’d think Splice would be an easy sell to the financiers. However, while the film has proved to be a reasonable box office and critical success in the US, Natali revealed in his video introduction at Sci-Fi London that getting funding for the movie was arduous until executive producer Guillermo del Toro came on board.
Having seen the film I can imagine why. The story is familiar enough: ambitious scientists Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley) decide to disregard their company’s instructions not to go rushing ahead with a gene-splicing project that has already yielded satisfactory results and end up creating a dangerous human-animal hybrid. Variants of the story have turned up in a number of films over the last quarter-century such as The Fly (1986), Species (1995) and Alien Resurrection (1997). Each of these have suggested that a creature with mixed human/non-human DNA will have a skewed sexuality, but as Splice adds elements of bestiality, incest and paedophilia to this, it is easy to see why any financier who initially read the script might have got cold feet. Of course, it is precisely these elements that make The Fly superior to the exploitative ‘T&A’ of a movie like Species and Splice an intriguing and relatively daring film. Perhaps it’s something to do with Canadian sensibilities - too much introspection on long winter nights - but Canadian cinema often presents some of the most fascinating explorations of human sexuality on screen, not only in the films of David Cronenberg, but also in those of Guy Maddin and Robert Lepage, and with Splice, Vincenzo Natali has added another notable genre film to that list.
In the TV mini-series Frankenstein: The True Story (1973), writer Christopher Isherwood was one of the first authors to suggest that if a human scientist tried to create augmented life, the creature might turn out to be handsome rather than horrific - visually, if not morally. In Splice, the creature starts off as a cute alien pet, but soon grows into a beautiful young woman (albeit with a prehensile tail and reptilian eyes). This creature, whose androgyny turns out to be important to the plot, becomes an object of desire for both its creators, one of whom is also a genetic parent, and the film explores some of the perverse possibilities of post-human relationships. This section of the film ultimately unbalances the whole project as the shifting attitudes and desires of the creature’s makers are dealt with a little too quickly while the final act is too similar to a dozen other movies.
In spite of its few shortcomings, the film has much to commend it and its ideas are adeptly fleshed out by an excellent cast. Sarah Polley is an idiosyncratic actress with a number of terrific SF/horror performances under her belt - Dawn of the Dead (2004), eXistenZ (1999), Last Night (1998) - and she is equally good here. Adrien Brody preceded Splice with the Dario Argento film Giallo (2009), which continued the director’s downward slide into DVD bargain bins, and while good actors often sleepwalk through genre films, Brody is well used here. His casting against type as an action hero in Predators (2010), not to mention his role in the underrated time travel film The Jacket (2005), shows that science fiction is a genre that suits his brooding demeanour and haunted looks.
While Splice was not the massive hit in the US that ‘geek’ websites predicted, it has the potential to move Natali out of his reputation as a niche director of speculative fiction. While Cube, for example, arrived a little too early to benefit from the success of the similarly themed Saw (2004) and its endless stream of sequels, Splice is intriguing and subversive enough to get the director the larger recognition he deserves. Natali is currently rumoured to be attached to adaptations of a couple of lauded but challenging science fiction classics - William Gibson’s Neuromancer and JG Ballard’s High Rise - and if anyone can tackle thought-provoking SF and do so on a relatively low budget, he’s certainly the man for the job.
Alex Fitch
Format: Blu-ray
Release date: 21 June 2010
Distributor: Eureka Entertainment
Director: Shôhei Imamura
Writer: Keiji Hasebe, Shôhei Imamura
Original title: Kamigami no Fukaki Yokubo
Cast: Rentarô Mikuni, Choichiro Kawarazaki, Kazuo Kitamura, Hideko Okiyama
Japan 1968
172 mins
Speaking in an interview in 1985 (first published in Positif and republished in the DVD booklet), Japanese director Shôhei Imamura presented himself as something of a dissident among his contemporaries. He criticised Ozu’s ‘aesthetic’ approach and Ôshima’s reliance on trends to dictate his films’ subject matter. For Imamura, cinema presented another possibility beyond visual or technical mastery: an opportunity to shoot the truth. The presentation and unravelling of human nature was his motivation, not stylistics: ‘If my films are messy, it is probably due to the fact that I don’t like too perfect a cinema’.
Profound Desires of the Gods (1968) is certainly a messy film. Three hours in length, with a shoot that took 12 months longer than expected, Imamura’s masterwork is a mysterious and meandering epic; interesting and insightful but equally bewildering and mystifying. Close-up shots are few and far between. For the first two hours, the film is primarily composed of static long shots, its human protagonists becoming distant bodies in a wide and sweeping landscape. The viewer is left, somewhat baffled, to unearth the complicated relationships between these figures: a strange assembly of frustrated men and wild banshee women, who inhabit a fictitious island, Furage, in the Okinawa region of Southern Japan (which was then under American administration).
Explanations are gradually pieced together through snatched conversations and an elderly island inhabitant who acts as narrator through a series of folkloric songs. The lyrics tell the creation story of the island, which was formed through an incestuous sexual relationship between a divine brother and sister, whose actions incurred the wrath of the ruling god. The viewer slowly realises that this ancient myth is playing out for real within the dysfunctional Futori family, the ‘oldest on the island’. Mocked and vilified by the other islanders, this strange clan is locked in a spiral of penance and shame for their incestuous behaviour. The guilt and the role held by women find similarities with Genesis (and snakes are a recurrent symbol in the film); the male god was innocent until he decided that he needed a female to complete himself, but the woman acts as a temptress and symbol of sexual desire, resulting in the fall of man. Indeed, the two female characters (daughter and granddaughter of the Futori family) possess a feral sexuality that brings out uncontrollable, savage desire among the leading men. In Profound Desires of the Gods, sex is a primitive and unstoppable force that motivates humankind. Imamura was fascinated by anthropology and seemed to view humankind more in terms of zoological social structures than in terms of intellectual progression. Speaking in the same 1985 interview, he stated: ‘I am convinced…that despite successive external influences, the basic human qualities of a society will never change.’
So, the fate of Furage is bound up in the Futoris’ actions, and as an engineer arrives from mainland Japan to aid the island’s nascent sugar cane industry, it becomes increasingly clear that this dynasty holds the key to change. The grandson is chosen as the engineer’s assistant but the other family members either refuse or are unable to comply. The Futoris deter the engineer from bringing change by sabotage and seduction. The resulting, sometimes farcical, tussle between the rational plans of the engineer and the animalistic chaos of the Futoris stands as an allegory for the Westernisation and modernisation of traditional Japan. There is one particularly great scene where the engineer stands, sun-dazed and exhausted on the seashore, mumbling deliriously about Coca Cola. And while that may sound a little unsubtle, Imamura does not present a simplistic view about whether a traditional or commercial society is better; indeed, the primitive superstitions that cast a shadow over the lives of the islanders are presented as restrictive and destructive. As the battle between capitalism and traditional society strengthens and the love story between brother and sister deepens, the film begins to pick up pace, building to a tense climax: a welcome crescendo after several sprawling hours!
Profound Desires of the Gods is a complex film: sometimes infuriating in its mess but consistently magical in its strangeness. And, oddly, for a filmmaker so studiously disinterested in aesthetics, it is also very beautiful. Shot in an otherworldly palette of peaches, browns, turquoises, burnt oranges and tropical greens, the natural world of Japan provides a suitably extraordinary backdrop to this lavish, melodramatic epic.
Eleanor McKeown
Format: Cinema
Release date: 4 June 2010
Venues: Cineworld Haymarket, Curzon Soho, Odeon Covent Garden (London) + nationwide
Distributor: Icon
Director: Michael Winterbottom
Writers: John Curran, Michael Winterbottom
Based on the novel by: Jim Thompson
Cast: Casey Affleck, Kate Hudson, Jessica Alba
USA 2010
109 mins
That filmmakers should be drawn again and again to the work of American crime novelist Jim Thompson is not surprising. Thompson’s dark gems are tightly written, brutally compelling and as psychologically complex as they are morally ambivalent. It would be great then if those directors made the effort to read Thompson properly, if they did not oversimplify and often entirely miss the point of the novels. Indeed it is rather frustrating that, with a few exceptions, Thompson’s remarkable body of work should have led to so many disappointing offerings, and Michael Winterbottom’s new adaptation of The Killer inside Me is a particularly deplorable entry into the canon.
The British director’s film, co-scripted by John Curran, is the second screen version of what is often considered one of Thompson’s finest works (the first was Burt Kennedy’s 1976 film, with Stacey Keach in the lead). It stars Casey Affleck as Lou Ford, the outwardly sweet-natured but dim-witted Deputy Sheriff of a small Texas town, who under his Southern good manners hides a frightening intelligence and psychopathic impulses. When naí¯ve rich boy Elmer (Jay R Ferguson) falls for Joyce (Jessica Alba), a prostitute who has set up shop on the edge of town, his father, local big shot Chester Conway (Ned Beatty), asks Lou to move her on. But Lou instead gets involved with Joyce and decides to use the situation to seek revenge for past misdeeds. His plan does not quite work out and Lou increasingly struggles to keep control of events, a situation that is further complicated by his relationship to girlfriend Amy (Kate Hudson).
This story of deceit and death is the occasion for scenes of extreme violence, which has already generated heated controversy. There are two particularly grisly murder scenes, in which the women are subjected to extended brutality and degradation. The issue here is not the graphic violence per se, but its presentation and context. There is a tremendous sense of indulgence in the beautifully shot murder scenes, and the copious amount of gratuitous sex adds to the sensational aspect of the film and the objectification of the women. The characterisation of the main female characters is indeed spectacularly reductive: always seen half-naked and in bed, they are both stunningly gorgeous and like rough sex… This, coupled with the fact that they only appear in scenes of sex or violence, gives the film a rather nasty whiff of unredeemed misogyny.
Winterbottom has said in interviews that he wanted to be ‘faithful’ to the source novel, and this has served to justify the violent excesses of the film. He is most probably not misogynistic, but his incredibly unsophisticated literal approach is particularly unsuited to capturing a novel as ambiguous as The Killer inside Me: Winterbottom scrupulously follows to the letter a book that actually requires reading between the lines (could literalness be one of Winterbottom’s defining directorial traits? Real migrants in In This World, real sex in 9 Songs…). Crucially, the film fails to coherently convey the fact that Lou is an unreliable narrator and that what he tells us might not be true, something that would help explain the characterisation of the women and distance the film from his view of them. This is particularly important in the murder of the second woman. In the book, Lou teases the reader, making us wait for the full narrative, possibly because what he has done has triggered strong emotions in him, possibly because he likes to play games, probably for both reasons and more. That section is a key moment in the book: it explores hidden nuances in the main characters, reveals the complexity of Lou’s psychology and of his relationship to Amy, and confirms that the reality described by Lou is a fictional construct. This, if translated into the screen version in some form, would have given a much better understanding of the violence and made it far less dubious.
This is something that Alain Corneau and his co-scriptwriter, Oulipo novelist George Perec, successfully managed to do in Série noire, their adaptation of Thompson’s A Hell of a Woman (1979), which, like The Killer inside Me, features an unreliable, murderous narrator. The brilliant opening sequence shows Patrick Dewaere’s Franck Poupart role-playing in the middle of a wasteland, shadow-boxing in the rain before dancing to Duke Ellington while holding his small radio, entirely in a world of his own creation. This prepares us for Poupart’s endless re-positioning of himself and his constant reconstruction of an unsatisfactory reality, and most disturbingly of all, for his remarkable ability to actually believe in his warped version of events.
Paradoxically, by relocating the story to a drab Parisian suburb, and making Poupart a hopeless door-to-door salesman, Corneau and Perec convey more of Thompson’s spirit than Winterbottom’s ‘faithful’ version. They understood one crucial thing: Thompson’s psychotic men are losers and misfits who are uncomfortable in the confines of their insular, petty-minded surroundings. Winterbottom does not get it: he channels Thompson’s savage view of humanity through memories of glamorous Hollywood noir cinema; the women look like stars, not like provincial beauties; the cars are desirable curvy objects straight out of 50s advertising; the cinematography is as flawless and slick as the women. But his noir pastiche completely misses the seedy side of the evil described by Thompson, the mediocrity of the hypocrisy, decay, immorality and viciousness, the small-town-ness of it all, present even in the most disturbing acts of malevolence.
This profound understanding of Thompson’s world makes Corneau’s Série noire one of the best adaptations of the novelist’s work on screen by far. The other exceptionally good Thompson adaptation happens to be another French film: Bertrand Tavernier’s Coup de torchon (1981) takes one of Thompson’s most accomplished novels, Pop. 1280, and transposes it to colonial Africa, a setting that not only perfectly suits, but also intensifies, the climate of corruption of the original novel and its uncompromising vision of the rotting human soul. Clearly, Tavernier and his co-scriptwriter Jean Aurenche, like Corneau and Perec before them, had made the effort to read the book closely. Shame Winterbottom’s literary sensibilities are not quite as developed.
Virginie Sélavy
Format: Cinema
Release date: 25 June 2010
Venues: tbc
Distributor: Soda Pictures
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Writer: Francis Ford Coppola
Cast: Vincent Gallo, Maribel Verdíº, Alden Ehrenreich, Klaus Maria Brandauer
USA/Italy/Spain/Argentina 2009
127 mins
Tetro, Francis Ford Coppola’s first original screenplay in 30 years, has been hailed by some as a return to form. Although it is not in the same class as the four films he made in the 1970s (The Conversation [1970], The Godfather Parts 1 and 2 [1972-1974] and Apocalypse Now [1979] all regularly feature in all-time greatest film lists), it is reminiscent of some of his more interesting work from the following decade, particularly Rumble Fish, The Outsiders (both 1983) and One from the Heart (1982). Like the former, it is beautifully shot in high-contrast black and white.
Although Coppola’s writing credits are impressive - deservedly winning an Oscar for the brilliant Patton (Franklin J Schaffner, 1970) and co-writing The Godfather - it is the script that proves to be Tetro‘s flaw. It is an over-egged Freudian/Oedipal melodrama about an artistic Italian-American family, the Tetrocinis, and the effects of its dominating patriarch (Klaus Maria Brandauer grandly stating, ‘There’s only room for one genius in this family’), which has had everyone drawing comparisons with the Coppola clan (although who is supposed to represent Carmine, Francis, Sophia or Nic Cage is not exactly clear).
Set in Buenos Aires, the film centres on two brothers: a world-weary, beaten beatnik writer (Vincent Gallo in the title role) and his innocent younger brother Bennie (Alden Ehrenreich symbolically dressed in a pure white seaman’s uniform at the outset), who tries to discover why the talented brother he had grown up idolising is hiding from his family in Argentina and seems to have given up on his dream of becoming a writer.
As we meet Tetro’s quirky group of friends, a scene of an angry girlfriend cutting up Armani suits and smashing guitars sent worrying messages that we might be entering that same cliché-ridden ‘life among those passionate Latins and artists’ world presented to us by that other fading star of the 1970s, Woody Allen, in Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008). Luckily, such scenes do not dominate Tetro. What we have instead is an old-fashioned soapy plot that is somehow just too melodramatic to be engaging. And although Pedro Almodí³var has proved time and again that such a mix of stylish filmmaking and melodrama can work in the 21st century, Coppola is less successful with the blend here. Mostly because the film demands that we take the overblown drama seriously.
However, in most other aspects the film proves its worth. The performances are strong throughout. Vincent Gallo rises to operatic intensity to deliver a perfect hammy Dean/Brando impression that outshines both Matt Dillon and Mickey Rourke in Coppola’s SE Hinton adaptations. Maribel Verdíº somehow holds the film together despite being a modern woman stuck in a 50s melodrama, and Alden Ehrenreich is a revelation - a C Thomas Howell for the 2010s (if one is needed).
As the drama moves from the mildly preposterous - Bennie discovering his brother’s magnum opus in a suitcase and finding that it was written in a secret code that can be read using a mirror - to full-blown ballet sequences, Coppola, who has never been known for subtlety, piles on the heavy metaphors. He might not be using the entire Vietnam War to show the corruption of the human soul here but costumes (dark glasses, leather jackets, plaster casts) and scenery (towering glaciers, glaring headlights) are all used ‘poetically’ to show the emotional and psychological depth of the characters.
Although the times when a film being ‘personal’ was seen as a sign of quality and of a ‘true artist at work’ are long gone, Coppola’s authorship here transcends the obvious autobiographical aspects. Visually, so much is borrowed that it could be argued that Coppola is more ‘pasticheur’ than ‘auteur’ but what shines through as personal is the director’s deep love of cinema. It is a film that seems more cinematic than his other works (if that is possible). Coppola himself credits the influence of Elia Kazan, whose blend of stylish location-based realism with the theatrical (as in Baby Doll [1956] and On the Waterfront [1954]) is certainly apparent in Tetro. This belief in the power of filmmaking and love of cinema (an excerpt of Powell and Pressburger’s Tales of Hoffman [1954] is even included in the film) stands to remind us of why Coppola, along with Spielberg, Bogdanovic and Scorsese, earned the collective moniker ‘the movie-brat generation’.
Tetro may be pretentious and bombastic but there is also much to enjoy. It is a beautiful film - the contribution of cinematographer Mihai Malamaire is every bit as vital as Vittore Storare’s work on One from the Heart and Apocalypse Now. And Tetro stands as proof that Coppola, with an almost stationary camera and nothing more technical than light on film, can still achieve a more stunning visual experience than the 3D CGI of Avatar.
Paul Huckerby
Format: DVD + Blu-ray
Release date: 24 May 2010
Distributor: Arrow Video
Director: Lucio Fulci
Writers: Lucio Fulci, Dardano Sacchetti
Original title: Paura nella cità dei morti viventi
Cast: Christopher George, Catriona MacColl, Carlo De Mejo, Antonella Interlenghi
Italy 1980
93 mins
You’d be forgiven for assuming Lucio Zombie Flesh Eaters Fulci’s 1980 City of the Living Dead would be another Dawn of the Dead clone, but Romero’s zombies could never teleport or leap from walls like ninjas, and I don’t remember them having the power to make people cry blood. The atypical ghouls are not the focus of the action, either, just one of many manifestations of evil that are summoned by the suicide of a Christopher Lee-lookalike priest in the Lovecraftily-named town of Dunwich.
If you’ve seen The Omen, you’ll be familiar with the amorphous ‘dark powers’ at work. This free form horror appeals to Fulci’s screw-the-story-in-favour-of-tenuously-strung-together-set-pieces approach. He’d already given us The Beyond by then and would go on to paint himself into his own haunted world in Cat in the Brain (the Curb Your Enthusiasm of Euro-horror), but City of the Living Dead is surely the best of all; heads are drilled through, brains ripped out, storms of maggots burst into homes, guts are puked up literally and endlessly; all this to a Fabio Frizzi soundtrack that challenges Goblin in the zombie-prog stakes.
Arrow Video have a geek-centric attitude, heroically commissioning video nasty-style box art, with a logo animation straight outta the VHS rental days. Even without all the fanboy-friendly extras (interviews, commentaries, etc), City of the Living Dead would be a great release; the transfer quality is a far cry from the bootleg I picked up at some pikey market so long ago. The crispness thankfully doesn’t ruin the special effects; it just makes the gore more sickening than ever, hooray!
Format: DVD
Release date: 7 June 2010
Distributor: Optimum
Director: Lucio Fulci
Writers: Lucio Fulci, Roberto Gianviti, José Luis Martínez Mollá, André Tranché
Original title: Una lucertola con la pelle di donna
Cast: Florinda Bolkan, Stanley Baker, Silvia Monti, Jean Sorel, Anita Strindberg
Italy/Spain/France 1971
104 mins
This month also sees the release of a less well-known Fulci movie: A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin is a well put together Rosemary’s Baby-ish mystery, which is a pleasant surprise, kinda like discovering that your favourite black metal band started out doing garage rock. Prudish Carol (Florinda Bolkan) is fascinated yet revolted by her sleazy neighbour, Julia (Anita Strindberg), and her swingin’ orgiastic love-ins. In a nightmare, she is seduced by Julia, then kills her. When Julia turns up murdered in exactly the way it happened in Carol’s dream… it’s time to tick the Hitchcockian boxes and play ‘spot the giallo cliché’! Doorknob-jiggling chase sequences, cod-psychology and hunchbacked red herrings; all on cue.
What sets A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin apart from other Italian formula thrillers is its hallucinatory dream sequences (I like the one with the Toho-style goose monster) and its acid-soaked hippy happenings, lent authenticity by an Ennio Morricone (!) score that modulates druggily enough to have been phoned in from a crack den. The film also looks great, with a babe-heavy cast and Carnaby St wardrobe, and that film stock that makes everything warm and groovy. The blood looks like red paint, but that never hurt HG Lewis. A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin doesn’t approach the bloodiness of City of the Living Dead, but Lucio the Butcher does rear his dripping entrails… always when you least expect it.
This one is an Optimum release, and the only special features you get are a grainy trailer that makes it look like it’s going to be The Trip, and the option to watch in Italian.
To gore hounds considering one of these, I recommend City of the Living Dead. If you’re a Fulci fan wanting to check out his early work, then A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin will show you what he’s capable of when he’s not being gory and/or confusing. Each offers a glimpse into the bottomless Gothic toolkit of a horror master.
Doc Horror
Listen to the podcast of Alex Fitch’s interview with Dario Argento + Goblin Q&A at the Supersonic music festival in Birmingham.
Format: DVD
Release date: 10 May 2010
Distributor: Icon
Directors: Banjong Pisanthanakun, Paween Purikitpanya, Yongyoot Thongkongtoon, Parkpoom Wongpoom
Writers: Banjong Pisanthanakun, Paween Purikitpanya, Yongyoot Thongkongtoon, Parkpoom Wongpoom
Original title: See prang
Cast: Laila Boonyasak, Maneerat Kham-uan, Kantapat Permpoonpatcharasuk, Apinya Sakuljaroensuk
Thailand 2008
111 mins
As with most horror anthologies, Phobia (or 4bia to give the film its alternative, gimmicky title) is a mixed bag. A quartet of ghost stories from Thailand that vary in stylistic tricks and genre clichés, they are united by the impression they give of being extended 10-minute shorts hastily jammed together with no particular format. Some of the stories are linked by references to other characters but there’s no common theme or central thread, and the title itself is misleading: this isn’t an exploration of different phobias, just a straightforward play on people’s understandable and natural fear of ghosts.
The first segment, Happiness, is throwaway. A lonely woman is trapped in her apartment thanks to a broken leg and begins a text conversation with an admirer from beyond the grave. With little dialogue and the girl constantly flipping up her mobile to check for messages, it seems to have been written by the cut-throat producers from the Orange ads and proves why interacting with technology just doesn’t make for good cinema, no matter how much the phone companies want it to happen.
This is followed by Tit for Tat, a jittery, flashy attempt to create a mythological villain in the style of Japan’s Ring or Death Note. The rushed story sees a school kid take revenge on a gang of bullies by invoking some sort of devilish spirit from a book, the gimmick being that whoever looks at the page is instantly killed. This results in some splattery deaths that would be vastly improved if director Paween Purikitpanya stopped his pop video editing and filter changes to give the characters some room to breathe. Tension is sacrificed for gore, perhaps to cram in the thrills lacking from Happiness, and it quickly descends into muddy and unnecessary computer effects that only prove why all successful horror movies employ the ‘less is more’ approach.
The second half is a vast improvement with In the Middle being the anthology’s stand-out, not because it’s particularly scary but because it keeps a tight, coherent plot, revolving around a group of lads on a camping holiday who are haunted by a friend after he’s drowned. It’s the most post-modern of the collection with the guys talking about twists in movies and ghost stories while being trapped in one themselves. Like Scream it’s self-referential, director Parkpoom Wongpoom even gives away the ending to his own film Shutter, and the humour is engaging until it reveals a neat little shock of its own.
Last Fright is the most technically accomplished of the bunch, a slow-burning chiller that doesn’t rely on ropey effects, just old-fashioned storytelling. It follows an air stewardess looking after the sole passenger on a plane who she inadvertently kills due to a food allergy. She must then make the return journey with the body, which, of course, comes back to haunt her. Thunderstorms and sheer panic evoke William Shatner’s desperate passenger in the classic Twilight Zone episode ‘Nightmare at 20000 Feet’ but Last Fright‘s slow start sums up the issue with Phobia as a whole; that at half an hour, each story stretches its concept thinly - except for Tit for Tat, which feels like a feature film stripped of its characterisation - and put together it’s a lengthy exercise, but one that does showcase Wongpoom’s skill as an accomplished horror director.
Richard Badley
Format: DVD
Release date: 26 February 2007
Distributor: Optimum
Director: Stephen Frears
Writer: Donald E Westlake
Based on the novel by: Jim Thompson
Cast: Anjelica Huston, John Cusack, Annette Bening
USA 1990
110 mins
At the start of The Grifters, small-time scam artist Roy Dillon (John Cusack) walks into a bar, intending to make some easy money by switching a $20 bill for a $10 spot when ordering a bottle of beer; however, the bartender has seen this trick before, and punishes Roy by punching him in the gut with a baseball bat, causing a near-fatal injury that results in hospitalisation. In most American movies, a swift trip to the emergency room, and the recuperation that follows, would prompt the central protagonist to reconsider his personal and professional values, but The Grifters is an adaptation of a 1963 novel by Jim Thompson, arguably the most nihilistic of the second generation of noir writers, and Roy is a typical Thompson anti-hero, hurriedly checking out of the hospital to get back to his routine. However, the presence in his life of two strong-willed women causes complications; his mother Lilly (Anjelica Houston) works for a powerful bookmaker, placing last-minute bets at the track to lower the odds on long shots while skimming off the top for her retirement plan; his girlfriend Myra (Annette Bening) is a former long-con operator, reduced to paying her rent with sexual favours. Both women fiercely compete for Roy’s loyalty; Lilly offers him the most motherly advice she can muster after a life on the grift, warning her son that ‘you don’t stand still, you go up or down’, while Myra becomes infuriated with his lack of interest in her ideas for relieving big-time tycoons of their immense wealth via stock market fraud. Roy tries to sever ties with both women, a sensible decision that makes him a strangely sympathetic individual amid the author’s rogues’ gallery of morally bankrupt bottom feeders.
As befits someone who is keen to conceal his past but has no specific plans for the future, Roy’s life is a carefully constructed facade; he resides in a low-rent hotel room with ‘cornball clown pictures’ on the wall, engaging in friendly banter with the manager of the establishment and meaningless sex with Myra, while maintaining a legitimate job as a matchbox salesman. His scams are ‘small-time stuff’ and he insists that he can walk away from the life whenever he wants; within the context of the criminal underworld, Roy is something of a working stiff, a competent ‘mechanic’ with a stable life and some superficial human relationships. The character of Roy Dillon is perhaps Thompson’s most semi-autobiographical creation; the summer before he wrote The Grifters, the author was hospitalised with a severe stomach condition and nearly died from bleeding ulcers, and Thompson even used the name ‘Dillon’ as a pseudonym when he joined the communist party. The resentful relationship between Roy and Lilly suggests that their inability to trust others stems from an unpleasant childhood, and was possibly inspired by Thompson’s upbringing; his father was a sheriff, but was forced to leave amid rumours of embezzlement; the Thompson family relocated and he worked as a bellhop in Texas hotels, where he witnessed the petty crime, alcohol abuse and confidence games that would feature in his ‘fiction’, often supplementing his meagre wages by procuring heroin and marijuana for the unsavoury guests.
While Roy is smart enough to take advantage of easy marks such as a group of soldiers on a train, he is not sufficiently ruthless to entirely evade the predatory advances of Lilly or Myra, and Cusack engages in a series of hard-boiled exchanges with his co-stars that are appropriately at odds with the puppy dog features of an actor who had just graduated from such teen movies as The Sure Thing (1985) and Say Anything (1989). Lilly is only 14 years older than her son, and the Oedipal tension between them is palpable, while Myra is also older and more experienced, but her perky ‘good-time girl’ persona belies an extensive working knowledge of the ‘long con’ and a contacts book that includes Lilly’s employer Bobo Justus (Pat Hingle), a suave mobster who dishes out personal concern and professional cruelty in equal measure. For all his insistence on independence, Roy is trapped by the duelling personalities of Lilly and Myra, and this is emphasised in an early sequence that segues into split screen to introduce the three characters, thereby setting up a twisted love triangle that will inevitably end in tragedy.
Screenwriter Donald E Westlake found the source novel ‘too gloomy’ and initially declined the assignment, only for director Stephen Frears to convince him to reconsider by suggesting that they emphasise the survival instincts of Lilly, and pare down Thompson’s already sparse prose by excising a sub-plot concerning Roy’s affair with Carol, the nurse who aids his recovery. Frears also took liberties with the period trappings of the source material, acknowledging both the noir era of Thompson’s fiction and the author’s very modern approach to character and genre; the 1940s dresses, 1950s architecture, 1970s automobiles, 1980s suits serve to create an ambiguous time frame, although one that remains grounded in reality, unlike Michael Oblowitz’s later adaptation of This World, Then the Fireworks (1997), which aimed for pastiche but regrettably lurched into parody. Thompson admitted to being as influenced by the movies as he was by the previous generation of crime writers, and Frears includes numerous nods to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), from the ‘mother complex’ of the male protagonist to the Arizona motel sequence, while the closing elevator descent into ‘hell’ recalls the more overtly satanic noir of Alan Parker’s Angel Heart (1987).
The Grifters was released around the same time as two other Thompson adaptations, Maggie Greenwald’s The Kill Off (1989) and James Foley’s After Dark, My Sweet (1990). However, the marketing muscle of Miramax and the much publicised presence of Martin Scorsese as executive producer and narrator ensured that The Grifters received greater critical attention and achieved modest box office success, also earning four Oscar nominations. Oliver Stapleton’s sun-drenched cinematography, the star casting, and the suggestion that Roy may be redeemable, probably lent this particular Thompson adaptation a degree of mainstream accessibility, but Frears utilises his attractive actors to envision the author’s characters at their most unpleasant and untrustworthy; ‘I was hoping we could play it straight with one another,’ Lilly says to Roy in their penultimate encounter. ‘I guess not,’ replies Roy, although his wavering loyalty from Myra to Lilly suggests that he is looking for an honest relationship. In this respect, he lacks the ruthlessness that Thompson’s world view demands of even those who are ‘strictly short-con’, and Roy’s fate is sealed by such sentimental indecision. In terms of its treatment of Thompson’s man-in-the-middle, The Grifters is a splendidly cynical adaptation of a stone-cold literary classic.
John Berra
Format: Region 1 DVD
Release date: 26 March 2002
Distributor: Artisan Home Entertainment
Director: James Foley
Writers: Robert Redlin, James Foley
Based on the novel by: Jim Thompson
Cast: Jason Patric, Rachel Ward, Bruce Dern
USA 1990
114 mins
A sun-drenched film noir set in the Palm Springs desert, After Dark, My Sweet drips with tension and a brooding sensuality as two desperate people, a disgraced ex-cop and a struggling widow, ensnare a vulnerable and disturbed drifter in their scheme to kidnap a wealthy family’s son for ransom. Based on the 1955 novel by Jim Thompson and directed by James Foley, the film captures the sinister, yet morally ambiguous tone of the author’s pulp fiction.
Jason Patric, then a teen heartthrob who had last appeared in The Lost Boys, stars alongside 80s pin-up Rachel Ward, who spends much of the film dressed in a pair of cut-off jean shorts, showing off her impossibly long legs. Patric plays ex-boxer ‘Kid’ Collins, who is on the run from a mental institution when he meets Ward’s Fay in an empty bar. Black and white flashbacks to his vicious final bout hint at the reason for his confinement, and it’s easy to assume that too many beatings have made the boxer dim-witted. He even shuffles along as if he’s still in the ring, itching for a fight.
Given a menial job by Fay, and a home in a trailer parked on her land, Kid is soon introduced to Uncle Bud, played by Bruce Dern at his sleaziest, with long white hair and a procession of Hawaii shirts. Blinded by his attraction to Fay, and despite her half-hearted warning to stay away, Kid finds himself entangled in their plot to kidnap the town’s wealthiest son. Kid is soon set up as the kidnapper, and the fall guy.
But Kid Collins has something in common with Thompson’s other leading men: seemingly slow and underestimated by everyone, he’s darkly clever, and deeply disturbed. Kid’s smouldering blue eyes are the only hint that he’s not as slow as he seems, although he does warn Fay and Uncle Bud (to little avail) not to treat him like he’s stupid. It’s only as the film builds to its taut, near-perfect conclusion that he reveals himself for what he truly is - a frighteningly intelligent man who has one last shot at making something of his meaningless life.
It’s an impressive performance by Patric, and the sexual tension between Kid and Fay is certainly palpable (although the sex scenes show little of the violence that marks Thompson’s work - an issue that’s already causing controversy around the release of The Killer inside Me). There’s no denying Rachel Ward’s sex appeal, but it’s a shame that she isn’t a better actress - good at playing drunk, she over-acts in the melodramatic moments when the kidnapping of the young, lonely and neglected boy starts to go horribly wrong.
Despite its minor flaws, Foley’s film is a lean, compelling thriller whose fluid tracking shots and rusty brown and gold hues have aged surprisingly well in the 20 years since its release, while Patric, whose career never quite took off, is still a heartthrob.
Sarah Cronin