Cast: Grazyna Dlugolecka, Jerzy Zelnik, Olgierd Łukaszewicz
Original title:Dzieje grzechu
Poland 1975
130 mins
Eve is traditionally the temptress, but in The Story of Sin, it is Ewa who is tempted when a handsome anthropologist, Lukasz, comes to stay as a lodger in her parents’ house. Already married, Lukasz is in the process of seeking a divorce – no easy task for a Catholic. In the meantime, a relationship begins between him and Ewa with, on her side, all the passion of first love… and all its obsessed desperation when Lukasz suddenly departs. Ewa leaves her job and family to go in search of him, a bold decision for a woman living around the turn of the century. As she and Lukasz are successively reunited and separated by a series of melodramatic events, Ewa’s downfall is assured by the predatory men she encounters on her travels.
Made the same year as The Beast (La Bête), with its fantasy sequences of bestiality, The Story of Sin has been subject to critical debate about whether it is art or soft-core pornography – the same debate that has surrounded the majority of director Walerian Borowczyk‘s features. Adapted from a novel by Stefan ?eromski, it has a period setting, complete with its costumes and manners. When the film departs from the expected tropes of the period piece, the effect is startling. Ewa and Lukasz meet each other with all the expected formality, so buttoned-up that a corset left carelessly on a bedpost intrigues Lukasz and mortifies Ewa. Just a couple of scenes later, Lukasz is groping Ewa in a public park. They begin writing ardent letters to each other, Ewa slipping her billets doux discreetly into Lukasz’s mailbox, only to lie stark naked in bed as she reads his replies. The film’s artistic credentials are boosted by Borowczyk’s virtuoso use of close-ups and point-of-view shots, which lend something of the unexpected to an otherwise slavish blow-by-blow, over-long enactment of the novel.
Most scenes in the film are permeated with sexual threat, from the lascivious artist (another lodger), to the priapic villain who propositions Ewa in a village tavern and, when she refuses, improbably pursues her across Europe. If every man lusts after Ewa (apart from her father and one homosexual character), it is not that she is irresistible: it is that they see Ewa, like all women, as nothing more than prey, which they have a god-given right, as men, to use for their pleasure. Even Lukasz may be a fly-by-night – it is Ewa who makes all the effort to find him, while he never seems to be around when she needs him most. There is just one scene in the film where male and female bodies, in lovemaking, appear equally vulnerable and desirable beneath the camera’s gaze. Yet even this image is severely compromised by the fact that Ewa is being forced: her partner, completely in love with her, doesn’t realise that another man has orchestrated the encounter against her will. All in all, The Story of Sin makes for uncomfortable viewing.
Cast: Pat Healy, Ethan Embry, Sara Paxton, David Koechner
USA 2013
92 mins
Director E. L. Katz’s Cheap Thrills is an incredibly timely and unexpectedly thrilling dark comedy which goes to places that you never expect. An astute and wicked journey, it’s shot with a keen eye for the absurd and the grotesque.
The script by David Chirchirillo and Trent Haaga centres on a family man named Craig (Pat Healy putting in an exceptional performance). On the day Craig finds an eviction notice on his front door, and is determined to ask for a raise at work in order to cover his family’s costs, he finds himself made redundant. Desolate and desperate, he goes to a bar to have a drink as he can’t bring himself to face his wife and their newborn child. By luck, he runs into his old friend Vince (Ethan Embry on top form). They are soon approached by a strange couple who buys them a round of drinks – Colin and Violet who are out celebrating Violet’s birthday. Over an increasingly strange night, the two will put Craig and Vince through a series of dares that will test the friends’ desperate need for money with progressively odder challenges.
Fitting snugly within the current social climate, Cheap Thrills acts as both social commentary and black comedy without ever becoming preachy. The tight set-up allows Katz to pile on the tension as the evening keeps taking ever stranger turns, and because the characters are so well defined, he’s able to elicit responses from the audience that otherwise would not be possible.
The opposing characters of Craig and Vince create a tension throughout the night that undoubtedly plays with the moral expectations of the audience: while the two start off as fairly wide archetypes, the script throws in hints throughout the film to suggest that the moral core of these characters might not be what the audience expects. Craig’s role as a failed author is reminiscent of James Mason’s hidden personality in Bigger Than Life; the blame may be attributed to the experimental drugs his character is given, there is the cruel suggestion that all the drugs have done is release some subconscious personality traits. Vince, on the other hand, might start the film of as typical alpha male but grows at the film goes along, becoming much more interesting.
Although Sara Paxton’s Violet is largely silent throughout the movie, letting the fast-talking, charmer with a glint in his eye Colin (played by David Koechner) dominate, she still manages to bring a depth to the character which builds throughout. Through gestures, looks and lines delivered with sly knowing, it’s obvious that Violet is as involved and in control as Colin – never an unwilling participant or forced audience member but both manipulator and thrill-seeker.
The dares within the film work well – rather than being gross and grotesque for the sake of shocking the audience, each one fits within the frame of the story in pushing our duo further into weird moral territory. There is a moment in the second act on which hangs a very delicate balance and it’s to the credit of the four leads that this climax works rather than playing out as cheap and sleazy.
Perhaps the greatest pleasure of the evening comes from watching the tight, taut script handled with such expertise by Katz. What could have been a straight thriller or just a mumble-core drama straddles a razor sharp line between satire, black comedy and thriller building up to a climax and a final image that will be impossible for the audience to get out of their heads.
An incredible achievement, Cheap Thrills is the sort of film that makes you want to applaud as soon as it ends – filled with great lines, terrific acting and the sort of cheap thrills you never thought you’d see , it is a must for anyone with a penchant for the darker side of cinema.
Writers: Dennis Paoli, William Norris, Stuart Gordon
Based on thestory by: H.P. Lovecraft
Cast: Jeffrey Combs, Bruce Abbott, Barbara Crampton, David Gale
USA 1985
86 mins
Being an impressionable teenager with a love of horror movies during the 80s was a glorious thing; VHS had revolutionized the consumption of and access to films, leading to an explosion of genre filmmaking that pushed the envelope in terms of graphic gore, nudity and outré laughs, which adolescents such as myself lapped up on a daily basis. While 70s horror had been brutish, nasty and, largely, grimly realistic, 80s horror, fittingly for a decade synonymous with gaudy excess, revelled in slapstick terror, outlandish amounts of adrenaline-fuelled, blood-splattered violence. The likes of The Evil Dead, The Return of the Living Dead, Basket Case, Bad Taste and Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator all injected an energy, dark wit and invention into the genre that the more conventional slashers of the era sorely lacked.
In addition to the DVD limited edition and two-disc Blu-ray steelbook, Re-Animator is also available to download from 19 May and via VOD from 26 May 2014.
Gordon’s movie also breathed new life, excuse the pun, into the work of H. P. Lovecraft. The director’s loose, successful adaptation of Lovecraft’s serialized short story from 1922, ‘Herbert West–Reanimator’, led to a subsequent raft of generally forgettable movies based on the novels and short stories of the American author, who died in poverty before posthumously coming to be regarded as a seminal figure in the evolution of horror fiction. Since Re-Animator’s release almost 30 (!) years ago, Gordon himself went on to direct four more Lovecraft adaptations (with varying degrees of success): From Beyond, Castle Freak, Dagon and Dreams in the Witch-House, the latter as part of Showtime’s Masters of Horror series.
Having revisited Re-Animator for the first time in many years, I’m glad to say that it still pushes all the right buttons and remains a hugely entertaining, frequently outrageous riot, from its scene-setting pre-credit sequence to its final shot of the lurid, green reagent being injected into a lifeless corpse. The gorgeous opening credits (kaleidoscopic neon diagrams of the human body) and Richard Band’s upbeat soundtrack, variously described as ‘inspired by’ or ‘ripped off from’ Bernard Herrmann’s score for Psycho, aligned with the cast’s fully committed performances and Gordon’s evident who-gives-a-shit sense of fun, make Re-Animator an absolute blast to watch. In a performance that made him a cast-iron fan favourite, Jeffrey Coombs memorably stars as Herbert West, the gifted, arrogant and driven medical student who has discovered a potion that can restore life to the recently deceased. As West’s Frankenstein-like experiments spiral out of control in ever more outrageous ways, Coombs is ably supported by Bruce Abbott as Dan, West’s straight-laced student colleague at the medical school they both attend; Barbara Crampton as Dan’s girlfriend Megan, daughter of the school’s dean; and the late David Gale as West’s vain nemesis, Dr Carl Hill.
Listen to Alex Fitch’s interview with Re-animator producer Brian Yuzna.
Gordon’s movie is a joyously anarchic experience, as funny as it is grisly. Dead cats, shotgun-blast victims, entrails, limbs with lives of their own and headless corpses wreak bloody havoc after being subjected to West’s reagent, the side effects of which make the reanimated dangerously violent. To say any more regarding the plot would spoil the fun for the uninitiated, but if decapitations, eviscerations and a censor-baiting sprinkling of reverse necrophilia are your thing, then Re-Animator is a film you really need to have in your collection. As with many other 80s horror movies, Re-Animator is also testament to the fact that CGI effects are a poor substitute for practical ones. The tangible, messy and ingenious effects on display here are far more entertaining to watch than any computer generated image ever could be.
Cast: Amy Seimetz, Joe Swanberg, AJ Bowen, Gene Jones
USA 2013
100 mins
Why would a Christian commune, dedicated to the creation of a Heaven on Earth in homage to the pacifist principles of Jesus Christ, require armed guards? As we discover during the creepy slow burn of Ti West‘s new thriller The Sacrament, the name of the game in Eden Parish is secrecy, which, as with all religious cults, is what keeps them powerful. Indoctrination, coercion, exploitation, deception and brainwashing are kind of helpful too. Patrick (Kentucker Audley), whose sister Caroline (Amy Seimetz), has fallen in with the cult, journeys to an undisclosed island on foreign soil to investigate her whereabouts and wellbeing, accompanied by Sam (AJ Bowen) and Jake (Joe Swanberg), two pals/colleagues from a major online multimedia news outlet.
The Sacrament is released on DVD in the UK on 7 July 2014.
Armed only with cameras, the three men are initially freaked out by the surly and burly machine-gun-toting guards who guide them into the compound. But as they explore the inner workings of the camp – populated with those like Caroline who lost their way in the world through various addictions and were guided back to what appears to be a clean and green life – it begins to seem like Eden Parish is not without merit.
Ahead of its UK release, The Sacrament opens in cinemas across Canada via VSC (Video Services Corp) and in the USA via Magnet Releasing on 6 June 2014.
The silver lining, however, is just that. Tranquility in the parish is only skin deep. As they slowly begin to notice an alarming number of aberrations, they fear for their own lives as well as those of the people who are not quite fitting in with the extremist views of the charismatic cult leader, Father (Gene Jones). In addition to being charming, persuasive and highly intelligent, Father, an oft-cool-shades-adorned fleshy orator with definite fascist undertones, is a downright creep – a skillfully malevolent manipulator and exploiter.
This is one chilling, scary-ass movie that grabs you very early in the proceedings and doesn’t let up, steadily mounting in its intensity until a climax that will have you begging for mercy. There are no cheap shocks and the violence is always muted, roiling just below the surface. I doubt Mr West is a student of the late, great Val Lewton (most young contemporary filmmakers have yet to make his acquaintance), but if he is, I would not be surprised, and if he isn’t, he should be, since he still has a few tricks to learn from a real master. (God knows, Scorsese, Friedkin and many other greats continue to acknowledge their debt to Lewton.) With this film and his previous effort, the fun and scary paranormal thriller The Innkeepers, West is proving to be a potential master of finding chills, thrills and evil in dark, yet unlikely corners, and, like Lewton, his genre indulgences are so much more than the simple, but effective, narrative coat hangers on which he drapes his explorations of humanity.
One element doesn’t quite hold up in the movie: there are inconsistencies with respect to the film within the film – the documentary that the trio is making on Eden Parish. Most of the time, the sheer force of West’s fine direction carries us along, but occasionally, we’re ripped out of the proceedings by some of the intrusive title cards that remind us we’re watching a finished product that’s already gone viral. It occasionally takes us a bit of time to get back into the otherwise riveting trajectory of the tale. It also suggests that someone will escape the evil, though in fairness, we’re never sure who and just how many are getting out.
This is a bit of a drag, because the movie has a kind of paranoia-infused 70s sensibility that suggests we might be cascading into a completely hope-bereft conclusion. That we’re treated to a tiny taste of hope so early and so consistently doesn’t quite fit the form. I even wondered if, at any point during the post-production process, West and his team tried to mute the film-within-the-film stuff, toss the title cards and use the actions of the characters and the more obvious doc-styled footage ‘naturally’ within the narrative, rather than the manner in which they are employed. Part of me thinks, based upon the coverage that appears on screen, that this might have been a worthy pursuit. Then again, I wasn’t sitting in the fucking edit suite, so what the fuck do I know? Maybe it was a consideration and didn’t work, but I do hate to think it wasn’t at least tried.
My only other quarrel with the picture is that it’s full of babes and there’s a fair bit of talk and suggestion of boink-o-rama activity in Eden Parish. No offence, but the issue of sex within the compound is brought up, and that we get nary a flash of said activity is a bit like introducing a loaded gun into a scene and not firing it. Let’s not forget the immortal nude harvest dance in the original 1970s The Wicker Man – totally creepy and hubba-hubba-sexy.
But, I digress.
Happily, the performances from all the leads in The Sacrament are top of the line, and it’s to West’s undying credit that the picture features the finest use of extras and background performers I’ve seen in any recent movie. If, however, there is anything resembling justice, Jesus and/or the God of Abraham on Planet Hollywood, Gene Jones as Father deserves as many supporting actor accolades as it is possible to bestow upon someone, including an Oscar nomination. This is no chew-the-scenery nonsense that so many more established stars will barf up when they play a villain: Jones is malevolence-incarnate because his performance is brilliantly muted. The camera loves the guy, and it’s impossible to take your eyes off him whenever he’s on screen. This is not just the hallmark of any charismatic cult leader; he brings a depth of intelligence and understanding to the character that makes us (almost) like him. He also infuses the performance with an element of tragedy. Father is no mere manipulator, but rather, a man who has come to believe so strongly in his beliefs that he’s managed to convince even himself that his might is right. It’s that very element of self-faith and self-love that Jones steadfastly nails to a cross that shows us why such individuals are alternately on top of the world just as clearly as they’re on a fast track to destruction.
You might remember Gene Jones from the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men during the famous coin-toss scene, which, for me, was the performance in that movie that set the bar and proved the old adage: ‘There are no small parts…’ Here, though, West has given Gene Jones the role of a lifetime. I sincerely hope Jones’s work in The Sacrament is recognized, acknowledged and propulsive. The world needs more character actors of his caliber and I demand that he become as gloriously ubiquitous as Edward Arnold, Lionel Barrymore, Walter Huston, Charles Durning, Ned Beatty, Hume Cronyn, Paul Giamatti and every other great actor who more than propped up their fair share of pictures, but also created a myriad of living, breathing human beings who somehow, with their very appearance, gave their own work and that of everyone else a bit of that old silver screen immortality.
All in all, The Sacrament is a terrific little thriller and I’m looking forward to seeing it again. Maybe that will be enough to change my curmudgeonly nattering about the film-within-the-film elements and the lack of sex. Probably not, but it won’t matter. I like the picture – a lot!!!
‘All four of us don’t agree on anything ever, it’s really hard for us to say anything about ourselves.’ So says Tobi Vail, Bikini Kill’s drummer, in archive footage featured in The Punk Singer, a documentary by Sini Anderson about the band’s front woman, Kathleen Hanna. In the spirit of their politics, band members Hanna, Vail, Kathi Wilcox and Billy Karren did not toe the line. Angry about the condescending and sensationalist reporting of the band and the Riot Grrrl movement they spearheaded, they rarely gave interviews. It is therefore thrilling to hear them reflect on the period in Anderson’s affectionate, bordering on hagiographic, film.
As a young feminist performance poet, Hanna was advised by Kathy Acker to join a band instead. Bikini Kill were exciting, raw and radical, and in Hanna they had a front woman with a brilliant voice and flair for live performance. She kicked back against the aggressive male mosh pits of the punk scene by calling ‘girls to the front’, thus creating a safe space for women to enjoy themselves.
Sadly, the world outside their concerts was still not safe: abortion rights were being challenged and incidents of sexual harassment (as demonstrated by the Anita Hill case) were not being taken seriously. Riot Grrrl, a movement that embraced art, feminism and music, was born out of this unease. Hanna and Bikini Kill were among those who wrote a manifesto (‘We are not man-haters…’), started a fanzine of the same name, and declared it to be an open movement to women everywhere.
As Hanna recalls in the film, the outside world did not often grasp what the movement was about, and press reports about it often focused on Hanna’s past (she worked as a stripper to support herself through college, and comments she made about her father’s ‘inappropriate sexual behaviour’ were twisted into a lie that he had raped her). Interviewed by Anderson over several months, Hanna still appears weary of explaining herself on these matters, more than 20 years later.
But the real thrust of the film, and the question posed by Anderson at the beginning, is why did Hanna stop performing? After Bikini Kill disbanded in 1997, Hanna released a solo record under the name Julie Ruin, then in 1998 founded ‘feminist party band’ Le Tigre. They were successful, but in 2005 Hanna called it a day, telling everyone including her husband, Beastie Boys’ Adam Horovitz (she acknowledges the irony of her falling for someone who helped write the song ‘Girls’), that it was because she had nothing else to say.
This was not true. In the course of Anderson’s candid interviews with Hanna, the singer reveals it was because she was diagnosed with Lyme disease, a debilitating condition that one doctor describes as being like ‘if Superman meets Kryptonite’. It was undoubtedly a horrific period for Hanna and those around her and, perhaps because it remained undiagnosed for so long, one senses she still remains cowed by it today (in May she was forced to cancel a Julie Ruin tour because of the disease’s return, after a period of remission). A scene of her approaching a comeback gig hand-in-hand with her husband reveals a wide-eyed vulnerability that contrasts wildly with the early footage.
The film doesn’t tell of a triumphant or a tragic journey. It acknowledges Hanna’s huge achievements (not least in the superb soundtrack of back-to-back Hanna songs) but in the process of interviewing only committed admirers and close friends (Kim Gordon and Jennifer Baumgardner among them), and in providing no narration, balanced or otherwise, the film becomes a little over-referential. Perhaps Anderson did not feel it was the correct forum to challenge anything said by Hanna in her interviews, especially after Hanna points out how she feels people will always question a woman’s version of events. With its unprecedented access to Bikini Kill’s musical and artwork archive and pro-female approach (it is fanzine-like in style and very few men are interviewed, not even Karren), perhaps it isn’t. This is Kathleen Hanna: Herstory.
Based on the short story ‘Carmilla’ by: Sheridan Le Fanu
Cast: Tina Romero, Claudio Brook, Susana Kamini, David Silva, Tina French
Mexico 1978
74 mins
Electric Sheep is proud to present a rare screening of Alucarda at the amazing Masonic Temple, Andaz Hotel Liverpool Street, London, on Saturday 14 June, as part of the Magic and the Macabre weekend at the East End Film Festival. Acclaimed festival programmer and writer Kier-La Janisse, author of House of Psychotic Women (FAB Press), will introduce the screening.
Having produced Alejandro Jodorowsky’s incendiary first feature Fando y Lis (1968) as well as El topo (1970), Juan López Moctezuma went behind the camera in 1971 to make The Mansion of Madness (released in 1973), which was loosely based on an Edgar Allan Poe story. He followed it up with two vampire stories, Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary, shot in the USA with John Carradine in 1975, and Alucarda in 1978. Like Fernando Méndez and Carlos Enrique Taboada, Moctezuma was one of a handful of well-read Mexican directors who were interested in making horror films infused with cultural references and artistic ambitions. In Mexico, the genre was dominated at the time by populist lucha libre movies such as the Santo series, which pitched heroic costumed wrestlers against monsters, vampires and mummies. However, Chano Urueta’s take on Frankenstein, El monstruo resucitado (1953), and Méndez’s influential El vampiro (1957) had opened the way for a richer vein of horror, and the 50s and 60s were marked by a wave of delirious visions of terror that are still lauded for their visual beauty and atmospheric qualities.
Moctezuma was part of the Panique Theatre, which Jodorowsky had founded in Paris in 1962 with the Spanish playwright Fernando Arrabal (on whose play Fando y Lis was based) and the French artist Roland Topor. The name was a reference to the god Pan, and the movement (or anti-movement, as Arrabal would have it) was defined by a combination of terror and humour. Influenced by Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, Panique embraced disorder, madness and excess, the grotesque and the irrational, to create an anarchic celebration of life. From Artaud they also inherited the interest in a magical and ritualistic kind of theatrical spectacle, which used violent sensory assault to open up new perspectives in the audience.
Moctezuma implemented these ideas in The Mansion of Madness, in which the patients of an insane asylum are allowed to run free as their doctor adopts an Aleister Crowley-influenced approach to their treatment. Set in the similarly confined environment of a convent, Alucarda took the director’s interest in strange cults and rituals further. Alucarda’s birth opens the film, her wretched mother, having been impregnated by the devil, delivering the baby in a crypt surrounded by diabolical, horned, half-goat statues. To protect the newborn from her terrible father, she asks a bizarre-looking gypsy to take her daughter to the convent. Fifteen years later, Justine, a young, orphaned ingénue, arrives at the convent to find herself sharing a room with the raven-haired, black-clad, wild-eyed Alucarda.
Alucarda is clearly out of place in the convent and her holy abode has not been able to suppress the devil in her blood. She draws Justine into her world, taking her to the derelict crypt of her birth where she proposes they take a blood oath, so they can be friends forever, ‘even after death’. The ritual is performed in their room at night, which, this being the 70s, involves both of them being naked as the gargoyle-like gypsy from the opening scene magically appears to make cuts on their breasts from which they drink each other’s blood. They find themselves in the forest, where a ritual performed by witches ends in an orgy. Intercut with this are images of Sister Angélica, who welcomed Justine into the convent, praying intensely until her face becomes bloodied and she levitates, apparently able to conjure up some sort of power that strikes down the gypsy witch leading the ceremony.
The clear lesbian undertones of the film come from Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’, on which Alucarda is very loosely based (the other literary reference is obviously Bram Stoker’s Dracula), but Moctezuma and his team of writers have made the story their own. The friendship between Alucarda and Justine has the devouring intensity of first love, but in the enclosed, all-female convent/hothouse, the girls’ repressed desires translate into demonic possession. The figure of Sister Angélica adds an interesting twist, turning the story into a spiritual lesbian love triangle. Her attachment to Justine is as dubiously excessive as Alucarda’s and is sublimated into a frighteningly exalted religious practice. The love triangle is complicated by Alucarda’s satanic nature and Sister Angélica’s self-sacrificial (‘angelic’) Christian figure, meaning that there is a lot more at stake than Justine’s affection: demonic Alucarda and holy Sister Angélica are battling over nothing less than Justine’s soul (the character is named after Sade’s unfortunate heroine, whose virtue is repeatedly assaulted by one group of perverted tormentors after another).
Alucarda has been seen as anticlerical, yet the depiction of religion comes across as very ambivalent, confused even. For a start, the convent is a very unusual religious edifice, a womb-like cave carved inside the rock. The nuns are dressed in off-white, red-stained robes and tight-fitting bonnets that make them look like mummies. Initially, there are intimations that Alucarda may be an adept of a natural religion, a religion of life opposed to the Catholic worship of death. The witches’ orgy contrasts with a later display of self-flagellation among the half-naked nuns and priests. An early, sumptuously sinister, almost painterly sermon takes place against the backdrop of a multitude of crucified Christs, creating an oppressive, macabre atmosphere. This is echoed in a later scene where Alucarda and Justine, naked, are tied to crosses for an exorcism ceremony. The dark, rich colours, the high camera angle and the cruelty of the ritual again conjure a memorable vision of religious maleficence.
And yet, Dr Oszek, who interrupts the exorcism and calls the officiating priest barbaric, is soon confronted with a gruesome supernatural phenomenon that destroys his scientific certainties and validates the priest’s beliefs. In one of the film’s most striking scenes, an undead (and again naked) Justine comes out of a blood-filled coffin to attack the devoted Sister Angélica. Alucarda proves a worthy daughter to her father when she unleashes hell upon the convent, stopped only by the body of the Christic Sister Angélica carried cross-like by the other nuns. All in all, you could say the Christian characters come out of this looking fairly reasonable in the circumstances.
The truth is that Moctezuma seems much more interested in extreme rituals of all kinds than in putting across an anticlerical message. The devil here appears in the form of Pan, as seen in the statues in the crypt and later in the goat’s head that presides over the orgiastic celebration in the forest, which clearly ties in with the ideas underlying Panique Theatre. The same actor, Claudio Brook (a Buñuel regular), plays both Dr Oszek and the gypsy, so that reason’s representative is also our mischievous guide into the occult and spiritual world, further undermining the rational standpoint. The many rituals, whether Christian or satanic, the orgy and the flagellation, the blood oath and the exorcism, are all marked by excess and strangeness, violence and beauty. The contrast between the beliefs that inform them is not what matters here; rather, the overall effect of their juxtaposition as grotesque and startling spectacles may well be designed to shock the audience into a new mode of perception.
As part of our exploration of ground-breaking Polish director Walerian Borowczyk, we look at his career as a board game in our comic strip review.
As part of Kinoteka, ‘Walerian Borowczyk: The Listening Eye’, an exhibition of preliminary studies for his animated shorts Les Jeux des Anges (1964), Le dictionnaire de Joachim (1965) and The Theatre of Mr and Mrs Kabal (1967) as well as his unique wooden sound sculptures is on at the ICA’s Fox Reading Room from 20 May – 6 July 2014.
Cast: Julianne Moore, Mia Wasikowska, Olivia Williams, Sarah Gadon, John Cusack, Robert Pattinson
Canada, USA 2014
112 mins
You can say what you want about Maps to the Stars, as long you don’t mention the word ‘satire’. At least not in the presence of director David Cronenberg or his screenwriter Bruce Wagner, who spent most of their time in Cannes denying the fact that the narrative could be seen as such. A pitch-black family drama of sorts, yes. Cronenberg’s very own Divine Comedy, maybe. A haunting, terrifying version of life in LA, if you like. But a ‘Tinseltown satire’, NO. ‘It is not a satire of Hollywood,’ Cronenberg stresses in more than one interview, ‘it’s reality.’ And Wagner adds: ‘I’ve given you the lay of the land as I see it, saw it, and lived it.’
If so, then the truth is that Wagner has seen a lot – by anyone’s standards. Julianne Moore plays Havana, a fading yet feisty ageing actress, who is desperate to make her big comeback but instead is increasingly haunted by the ghost of her mother, a celebrated child actress who became a classic Hollywood star. To her good fortune, Havana is inclined to think, she meets Agatha (Mia Wasikowska), whom she employs as her new PA. Branded with burn scars on her hands and arms, Agatha, however, has her very own agenda. The daughter of a smug self-help guru (John Cusack) and demanding mother (Olivia Williams), who managed her kids’ careers but otherwise cared little for their well-being, Agatha left home for rehab after causing a fire that put her and her little brother Benjie (Evan Bird) – a child star ruined by fame – in life-threatening danger. Now back in the hood, Agatha lives out her inner demons and romantic fantasies in a weird imaginary game with limousine chauffeur Jerome (Robert Pattinson), who, in turn, is seduced by Havana. Unsurprisingly, things get pretty messy from here on.
In his career, spanning almost 40 years since his 1975 debut featureShivers, Cronenberg has never before shot an entire film in LA and, quite aptly, finally arrives only to expose it to the bone before burning it all down to ashes. What’s more, Maps to the Stars exploits its blatantly Lynch-inspired plot of switching reality for fantasy, yourself for someone else, and losing all sense of truth to a point where delusion (and in Havana’s case, hysteria) thrives, terror rules, and nothing is sacred.
In both counts, the film sees Cronenberg at his weirdest, wittiest and most horrifying in years, crafting a highly charged, cynical nightmare about today’s fucked-up Hollywood society, with the suitable feel of a mystery ghost story. And yet, as fitting, seductive and gruesome as it is, Maps to the Stars somewhat feels at odds with the director’s insistence that the film is anything but a satirical apocalypse. But luckily, as in real life, the truth lies in the details and it is the ambiguity that makes the experience worthwhile.
Walerian Borowczyk’s medieval tragedy fools audiences into expecting one of the erotic films for which the director later became infamous. In the opening sequence of Blanche, the title character is seen emerging, completely naked, from her bath. The camera’s lascivious eye sets the scene for a tale of forbidden desire, but Blanche herself is as pure as her name (French for ‘white’). For the rest of the film she always appears, nun-like, in long gowns and modest caps that hide all but her hands and face. Young, beautiful, and married to an elderly baron, Blanche must flee the attentions of other men, starting with Bartolomeo, the notorious young page of a visiting king.
With its elegant costumes and set design, Blanche could be described as a historical drama, but the film’s sophistication exceeds conventional models. Borowczyk’s background in fine arts allows him to bring an additional layer of authenticity to the film by drawing on the representational style of the Middle Ages. Shots, composition and framing pay homage to medieval landscape and religious painting. Windows, doors and alcoves dramatically divide interior shots. Exterior long shots emphasise the harmonious juxtaposition of hilltop, pasture and road, with grazing animals and passing cavalcades reduced to minute decorative detail. The film also employs an animal symbolism characteristic of the period. The king arrives with a monkey on his shoulder, a disquieting emblem of insinuating, irrepressible sexuality that has free run of the castle, hiding away only to pop up unexpectedly throughout the film. In contrast, Blanche’s gentle, vulnerable innocence is mirrored by the caged white dove in her bedroom. Tempering the film’s loyalty to a medieval aesthetic, Borowczyk introduces self-reflexive techniques, such as disorientating point-of-view shots, which situate the film within a current of modern cinematic experimentation.
Daniel Bird, who is responsible for the restoration of Borowczyk’s films, says that Blanche (1972) inspired Terry Gilliam’s vision of the Middle Ages in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975). I would suggest that Blanche itself appears to have been inspired by Jacques Demy’s Peau d’â;ne (Donkey Skin, 1970), a camp fairy tale about a princess (Catherine Deneuve) who must run away from home when her father decides he wants to marry her. The baron in Blanche is played by Michel Simon, who made his name in 1930s French poetic realist films like Boudu sauvé; des eaux (Boudu Saved from Drowning), L’Atalante and Le quai des brumes (Port of Shadows). He was in his late seventies when he appeared in Blanche opposite Ligia Branice, Borowczyk’s wife; as the baron is old enough to be her father, an early shot of him kissing Blanche on the mouth appears incestuous, echoing the theme of Demy’s film. Jacques Perrin, the young actor who played Prince Charming in Peau d’â;ne, reappears in Blanche as Bartolomeo, another role in which he ultimately defends the heroine’s honour.
The baron justly describes his wife as ‘a saintly woman, above all suspicion’, but halfway through the film he suddenly loses his trust in her. As he becomes irrationally hostile towards Blanche, we may assume that the old man is suffering from dementia. His condition seems to infect the film’s narrative, which loses its grip on the thread of logical coherence. Still, Borowczyk has woven such a mesmerising tapestry that the audience can’t help but continue to watch as it slowly, senselessly unravels.
Writers: Anthony Greville-Bell, Stanley Mann, John Kohn
Cast: Vincent Price, Diana Rigg, Ian Hendry, Milo O’Shea
UK 1973
104 mins
Theatre of Blood is almost the last horror film Vincent Price made in the 1970s. Price was famous for a rather broad style of acting, and his last few 70s horror roles reflect that – the Dr Phibes films are high camp, and Madhouse (1974) casts him as a hammy old horror star. Theatre of Blood, Price’s favourite of his horror roles, has him play a Shakespearean actor, Edward Lionheart, out for revenge on the critics who gave him bad reviews. He murders them using methods taken from the Shakespeare plays he performed in his final season (although it’s unclear who Lionheart would have played in Cymbeline, a play without a lead male role).
Price’s star turn walks the line between humour and pathos extremely well. Like most of Price’s best parts, Lionheart is all flawed nobility, and gives the actor plenty of scope for his well-practised head-tilting, eye-rolling mannerisms. It is the culmination of the onscreen persona he had cultivated since at least The House on Haunted Hill (1959). Price is backed by a peerless supporting cast of British character actors, which includes his future wife Coral Browne, with Arthur Lowe, Harry Andrews and Robert Coote particularly good. Diana Rigg plays Lionheart’s adoring daughter (a rather under-written part) and the reliably unlikable Ian Hendry is the leader of the critics.
Comedy horror is difficult to pull off, and Theatre of Blood plays the horror mostly straight. The early murders are authentically nasty, especially the first, in which Michael Hordern is stabbed by meths drinkers. The later killings become more elaborate and outlandish, most famously in the Titus Andronicus sequence, but the gory effects still pack a visceral punch that is absent from most Vincent Price films.
The comedy is rather underplayed, and is best when it isn’t obtrusive. The funniest moment comes when the stunt doubles for Price and Hendry indulge in some preposterously athletic fencing. There are also nice little character moments among the critics, played to perfection by comedy veterans like Robert Morley and Arthur Lowe. Price’s disguises are funny, especially the Olivier-baiting false nose he wears as Richard III. Other attempts at humour, such as the slightly jarring presence of Eric Sykes as a detective, are less successful.
The director, Douglas Hickox, had done comedy before (Entertaining Mr Sloane, 1970, a film that isn’t screamingly funny), but made Theatre of Blood just after the depressing crime thriller Sitting Target (1972). His next film was Brannigan (1975), a John Wayne action movie. Theatre of Blood certainly feels like a film made by a director happier with violence than comedy.
In spite of its advantages, though, the film doesn’t quite work. The unrealistic elements – comical names, plodding detectives – don’t fit with the brutality of the killings. While deaths plucked from Shakespeare’s plays are a worthy follow-up to Phibes’s Biblical killings, the derelict, grimy London of Theatre of Blood is light years away from Phibes’s art deco dreamland. The film also feels a bit too long – one or two of the critics could have been jettisoned. Shaving 15 minutes from the run time would have made this much stronger.
Still, it’s interestingly positioned at the end of an era. The film makes it clear that Lionheart isn’t a bad actor; he’s just an unfashionable one. At the Critics’ Circle awards, his old-school barnstorming is ignored in favour of a younger method actor (‘a twitching, mumbling boy’). 1973, the year of Theatre of Blood, saw the National Theatre move from the traditional Old Vic to Denys Lasdun’s modernist South Bank complex, just downriver from where the critics meet in the film. Director and businessman Peter Hall took over from actor-manager Laurence Olivier as its artistic director that same year, cementing a general shift in influence from star performers to directors. It’s hard to imagine Edward Lionheart taking too kindly to modern-dress Shakespeare or social realist readings of Hamlet.
And, of course, the same thing was happening in horror films at the same time. Star-vehicle horror of the kind that had kept Price in art and cookery books died out in the 1970s. We tend to think of 1960s horror in terms of its actors; 70s horror belongs to directors like George Romero and Wes Craven. 1973 saw the release of classic new-style horrors like Don’t Look Now and The Exorcist alongside some of the last Hammer Gothics and Amicus portmanteau films. The writing was on the wall.
It’s tempting to see Lionheart’s refusal to bow to changing times as reflecting Price’s own attitude. Better to go out howling defiance than to go on like Hammer and Amicus did, churning out the same old stuff and hoping the audiences would come back. But perhaps that’s reading too much into a film in which a man is forced to eat his own poodles.
Arrow’s Blu-ray release upgrades the film’s image in impressive fashion without losing its grimy ambience. The extras are a bit light compared to some of their releases. The best is a commentary by the League of Gentlemen, who know a thing or two about mixing horror and comedy (although Mark Gatiss should note that Tutte Lemkow was, in fact, a man). If it isn’t quite the classic it could have been, there are still pleasures enough to make Theatre of Blood well worth watching.
Richard Bancroft
A Deviant View of Cinema – Film, DVD & Book Reviews
