The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

[AlexHansen]

Since we're talking about Japan, any fans of Noroi? It's well worth tracking down.

[domino harvey]

the Lost Boys (Joel Schumacher 1987) I don't think much of Schumacher as a director (though if Hell truly is being trapped with obnoxious people, St. Elmo's Fire is the greatest horror film of all time), so I was stunned at how virtuosic this ultra-stylish 80s vampire flick is. I expected another cheap-o teen cash-in but the results are rather bold for such a populist genre flick. The premise is decent, but it's the nightmarish dementia of some of the set pieces, like the fog-covered railroad tracks or a room filled with stuffed animal carcasses, that really sells this. On a side note, I can understand teenager Corey Haim having a giant Molly Ringwald poster, but why the beefcake Rob Lowe poster on his closet… or is that too obvious to even say?

High Spirits (Neil Jordan 1988) I've been going back lately and revisiting my childhood favorites and I've been pleasantly surprised at how many hold up-- my mom's esoteric tastes in what we should watch growing up may have played a larger part in my own off-kilter tastes as an adult than I realized. I doubt too many other kids were shown High Spirits on a regular basis, but watching it now I have to hand it to my mother-- only she would think a supernatural-tinged sex comedy was appropriate viewing for a six year old! To my adult sensibilities, the film's not without flaws (including a rather tedious first act hinged around Peter O'Toole's manic paycheck cashing), but once the ghostly elements come into play things get very entertaining indeed, with some fine set pieces (my favorite involves one of those antiquated woodcut play backdrops coming to life) and a silly optimism that helps things move along. It's one thing to be bold enough to present ghost sex (with in-her-prime Daryl Hannah, making her own unpopular followup career choice to match Jordan's post-Mona Lisa) as a feasible plot device, but that the rather dark ending works without feeling exploitative or mean-spirited (no pun intended) is really extraordinary.

[Mr Sausage]

Human Lanterns (Chung Sun, 1982): More HK insanity, although with more coherence than seems to be usual. The plot is your usual Kung Fu deal, where the former rival-in-love of a nobleman exacts a complicated revenge. What sets it apart is the same thing that makes it a horror: instead of the usual political machinations, his revenge involves capturing the women in the nobelman's life and flaying them, using the skin to fashion Chinese lanterns for the next lantern festival. The grand guignol excess and the sheer visual energy of the film is overwhelming. The camera restlessly careens around its beautiful sets, many of which are lit with intense blues, greens, and reds, like a comic book. For such a gruesome film, it is beautiful to look at, more so than it has any right to be. There is this one ravishing moment where the camera tracks the nobleman and his wife as they walk, only to catch them at the end of their walk in a tableaux where, at frame left, the wife's pink kimono is echoed by the pink flowers that form a crescent around her in the foreground, while her husband, at frame right, standing on top of a bridge near a waterfall, finds his blue outfit echoed by the blue water. It's so effortlessly composed and so delicately realized...and it's a toss-off! It's not even an important moment in the film. That sense of visual creativity never flags as the film careens through its plot, piling on outrageous details and visuals (the lantern maker steals his victims while wearing a big furry costume with a skull mask, and his chamber includes a gigantic, turning, grue-covered iron wheel that seems to serve no purpose; the second nobleman of the story outfits his bodyguards with brightly coloured fold-out fans as weapons). The fight scenes are similarly breathless, with the final one including a half-dozen people battling full speed across a clearing at night while the camera flies along with them in a curving tracking-shot that captures every movement. And, again, it's a toss-off, as the film doesn't stop to linger before moving quickly to the next creative set-up.

This is the one HK horror I'm planning for my list (so far). Not as balls-out insane as Boxer's Omen and Seventh Curse, but more carefully crafted and just as much fun.

[Cold Bishop]

I don't know that I'd vote for that, personally: I consider it's emphasis more on the kung-fu than the horror, but it's certainly one of Shaw's late masterpieces, at a point where they were just a few years away from closing. Surprisingly, unlike most of the Hong Kong exploitationeers, Sun Chung really didn't jump on the horror bandwagon; I think this, Revenge of the Corpse and the much earlier Cobra Girl (both of which I've yet to see) were pretty much it.

He did however make one of my personal favorite cult films: The Sexy Killer/The Drug Connection, a remake of Coffy (which itself was a remake of Hit Man, which itself was a remake of Get Carter). It may not have Pam Grier, but it beats the original for stylish craft and balls-to-the-walls action.

[YnEoS]

LoveHKFilm.com just did a Top 100 Hong Kong Films of the 80s reader poll, and a lot of good HK Horror was made in the 1980s. Here's just the horror entries from the list.

96. Human Lanterns (1982, Sun Chung)
92. The Boxer's Omen (1983, Kuei Chih-Hung)
90. Her Vengeance (1988, Nam Lai-Choi) *Rape Revenge
84. We're Going to Eat You (1980, Tsui Hark)
83. The Imp (1981, Dennis Yu)
78. The Seventh Curse (1986, Nam Lai-Choi)
55. The Happy Ghost (1984, Clifton Ko)
49. Dreadnaught (1981, Yuen Woo-Ping)
33. Spooky Encounters (1980, Sammo Hung)
11. Mr. Vampire (1985, Ricky Lau Koon-Wai)
4. A Chinese Ghost Story (1987, Ching Siu-Tung)

Some of these may be mashups of other genres too and not strictly horror.

[Mr Sausage]

I don't know that I'd vote for that, personally: I consider it's emphasis more on the kung-fu than the horror

I didn't actually watch it with this project in mind. Spurred on by MichaelB's recent mention of Chang Cheh's outrageous 5 Element Ninjas, I've been (re)watching a lot of martial arts films these past few days, and just threw in Human Lanterns because I remembered the title. Maybe because I watched it in the context of stuff like 36th Chamber of Shaolin and Five Fingers of Death, but Lantern's horror elements stood out all the more, and the Kung Fu element increasingly seemed like a way to advance the horror theme and keep the plot flowing than in itself the point or the main theme. I saw it as functional rather than central. Chao's horror chamber is the structural core of the movie (it's the first image of the movie; it's dislocated spatially from the rest of the sets, which are unified by the town setting; entering it starts the plot proper, and each subsequent entrance of it by another character causes the horrors to magnify; and it has to be destroyed in a grand apocalypse of fire, which even then fails to return the plot to unity--things remain broken).

One thing that struck me about Human Lanterns is that all of the men, heroes included, are self-centred jerks (all of the women by contrast are reasonable and sympathetic). I like such off-beat choices in HK genre films.

[Cold Bishop]

I don't think it's quite that singular. It may be far from the stuff that Chang Cheh or Liu Chia-Liang are famous for, but it's part of a sub-genre that was very popular in the late 70s: I call them "Swordplay & Intrigue" films, as they were a mixing of the wuxia pian with the mystery film, as well as the strangeness and Rube Goldberg-like gadgetry of pulp fiction. Sun Chung made quite a few of them, in my opinion, some of them better than this one (I'm particularly fond of To Kill a Mastermind). What Sun Chung did with this film was identify how closely these often echoed horror films, and decided to take it a step further. But, 1) He could have gone further, as the main focus is still on the swordplay and the standard plot of deceit and inevitable revenge. I don't know, I think dungeons and secret lairs are a strong enough part of the genre that I don't find it all that special; this film just happens to have one that's a lot more gruesome and macabre. 2) Tsui Hark did the same thing (identifying the horror aesthetic at the center of the mystery wuxia) three years earlier with The Butterfly Murders, and did it better. I, however, wouldn't call that a full-on horror film either.

Some of these may be mashups of other genres too and not strictly horror.

Indeed. In fact, The Imp is the only one there I would call horror in any "conventional" sense, meaning it actually tries to scare. The Boxers Omen and The Seventh Curse are recommended, but they're more insanely inventive than frightening. Her Vengeance is a very ultra-violent (if very effective) rape-revenge film that I wouldn't call horror at all; I think it has a closer relation to the Heroic Bloodshed films if anything, even if it is a Cat III classic. A Chinese Ghost Story is a great film, but it's as much a fantasy wuxia as a horror film. I wouldn't place Dreadnaught anywhere near the genre. Spooky Encounter is entertaining, but in it's mix of genre (Horror-Kung Fu-Comedy), horror gets the short straw. It looks like the The Happy Ghost is practically a kid's film. I was never won over by Mr. Vampire, but it's definitely more of a horror film than, say, Ghostbusters. We're Going to Eat You is also a horror-comedy, but much more grim, much more convincing (Hark was inspired by Italian cannibal films), and with some genuinely unsettling moments among all the anarchy (which does get a bit tiring).

Honestly, if I were going to recommend one horror-horror film from the period (as opposed to batshit-horror), I'd probably go with Patrick Tam's Love Massacre, starring Brigitte Lin. It's a Hong Kong slasher film (more accurately, a Hong Kong giallo), shot in the U.S, in a very minimalistic, almost abstract style. It makes a great double bill with Donald Cammell's White of the Eye as an example of the slasher-film-as-art-film. Actually, it probably wouldn't: it'd be a pretty bleak evening regardless of which film you watched first. Highly recommended.

[Mr Sausage]

What Sun Chung did with this film was identify how closely these often echoed horror films, and decided to take it a step further.

That he saw the horror elements submerged in the "sword-play and intrigue" genre and decided to bring them to the foreground is enough for me to consider it a horror without feeling like I'm stretching anything. There isn't a theme in the movie that you cannot also find in many other horror films, so it isn't so much a hybrid to me (like, say, Mr. Vampire or Spooky Encounters) as a demonstration that some stories that are essential to one mode of discourse can also be told just as effectively with another, one would think opposed, discourse.

Considering I'm going to be voting for stuff like Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, Katalin Varga, and L'annulaire, my choice to list Human Lanters seems positively uncontroversial. I hope other people check it out, tho', and give their own thoughts on where it stands in the genre.

Her Vengeance is a very ultra-violent (if very effective) rape-revenge film that I wouldn't call horror at all; I think it has a closer relation to the Heroic Bloodshed films if anything, even if it is a Cat III classic.

The rape-revenge film is another one of those stories essential to two different genres (horror films and martial arts films, the latter being exemplified in stuff like Lady Snow Blood). Have you seen Kiss of Death, the earlier Shaw Brothers rape-revenge film? How does it compare with Her Vengeance?

[masterofoneinchpunch]

... my choice to list Human Lanters seems positively uncontroversial. I hope other people check it out, tho', and give their own thoughts on where it stands in the genre.

Her Vengeance is a very ultra-violent (if very effective) rape-revenge film that I wouldn't call horror at all; I think it has a closer relation to the Heroic Bloodshed films if anything, even if it is a Cat III classic.

The rape-revenge film is another one of those stories essential to two different genres (horror films and martial arts films, the latter being exemplified in stuff like Lady Snow Blood). Have you seen Kiss of Death, the earlier Shaw Brothers rape-revenge film? How does it compare with Her Vengeance?

I like Human Lanterns. As a hybrid of martial arts and horror it is well done with both aspects. I don't find it a controversial pick here.

I have not seen Her Vengeance, but Kiss of Death I would consider a very standard female revenge/exploitation film with a couple of good performances from Lo Lieh (also effective in Human Lanterns) and Chen Ping. It has been awhile since I've seen it, but not too much stands out for me (unfortunately I feel the same way about many Ho Meng-Hua directed films) other than those awesome playing cards. I feel a more effective and depressing revenge flick is The Killer Snakes (1974), though like with Mr. Vampire real animals (mostly snakes) are killed in the film. Though it was a rather unpleasant experience and I'm not in the mood to rewatch it anytime soon.

Cold Bishop, since yesterday was Leslie Cheung Kwok-Wing's anniversary of his death, what did you think of Inner Senses? I would consider a psychological thriller first and then a ghost story. It's not a top 50 horror film, but for fans of Hong Kong ghost stories I feel it is worth watching.

[Cold Bishop]

Have you seen Kiss of Death, the earlier Shaw Brothers rape-revenge film? How does it compare with Her Vengeance?

I've seen both, and I definitely prefer the later film. Kiss of Death is definitely an action thriller: Hong Kong cinema of the era was openly trying to imitate the "sophisticated" cinema of Japan at the time, and this was quite clearly one of their attempts at a Pinky Violence film. It's still a Hong Kong film, so it doesn't stray too far from kung-fu. And, like the roadshow hucksters of old, Shaw often excused their exploitation with a message, so we get an entire chunk of the film devoted to the dangers of STD. I think that's more of a Shaw Bros. and censorship issue, however; I really don't blame Ho Meng-Hua for the film's problems: I actually think the film is as watchable as it is precisely because of him, and it's definitely a handsome, stylish film. In fact, the first 15 minutes of the movie, a near wordless sequence covering not just the rape, but Chen Ping's trauma afterwards, is incredibly impressive, possibly better than anything in the remake. It actually reminds me of certain things Abel Ferrara did in Ms. 45, and had the film continued that way, it would be much more than an Exploitation curio.

I don't think Her Vengeance is nearly as stylishly put-together, but despite this (and perhaps owing to it) it's also much more effective. It doesn't have the groovy pop-art cool of the earlier film, but it's gloomier, grimier, murky approach probably serves the story better (and it's also what leads people to label it a horror film). It's also interesting to see the way Nam Lai-Choi both deviates and shuffles around the things from Ho Meng-Hua's film. He tweaks little things which to me make's his film much more effective and resonant. Chen Ping's rape in the first film seems to express a reactionary "crime run amok" outlook, as the group that rapes her is essentially a street gang on the prowl. In Her Vengeance, while the group turns out to be involved in crime, Nam treats the rape as "another boy's night out", and while I wouldn't call it a feminist film, I do feel it has a jaundiced eyes towards urban male behavior; Kiss of Death just seems to be jaundiced towards urban culture in general, particularly when it coincides with youth culture. Compare the way Chen Ping transforms into a bar hostess (a good girl gone bad), while Pauline Wong is already one prior to the rape.

The main improvement is the way the film treats the Lo Lieh/Lam Ching-Ying character. While Lo Lieh plays a "crippled", it essentially means he has a cane and sometimes a limp: he's still Lo Lieh, a very imposing presence and an expert at kung-fu. Nam goes the whole way, and makes Lam Ching-Ying a genuine cripple, putting his character in a wheelchair. You get the sense he connects with Pauline Wong's "damaged" woman because he's likewise seen by society as a "damaged" man. This is only enhanced by the fact that Nam makes their relationship completely "platonic", as they're uncle and niece in the remake, and also, by the end, makes them complete equals. It's also this friendship that to me goes a long way in separating it from a "Horror" film. The isolation of the female character is one of the most unsettling things about the rape-revenge film. Here, however, the female character actually has camaraderie in her quest for revenge. It's also this camaraderie that almost links it with the Heroic Bloodshed films; in fact, the film's neon-lit atmosphere, male-female bonding (as opposed to the usual male-bonding) and bleak outlook reminds me a lot of Alfred Cheung's On the Run, which is a full-on Bloodshed film. While the exploitative nature of both Ho and Nam's films rub up badly against the "crime doesn't pay" lip-service of the narrative, Nam's film is much more convincing in making us feel that Pauline Wong's character crosses the line in her quest for retribution. And while the film shows signs of kung-fu, especially in Lam Ching-Ying's impressive choreography, it's execution is much more messier and visceral. I don't want to give anything away, but if the final reel to Kiss of Death is essentially a kung-fu showdown, Her Vengeance's final reel seems to be inspired by Straw Dogs.

I don't know that I'd call either film great, and they both suffer from the sleaziness inherent to most rape-revenge films (far from a genre I like), but at least in Nam's film, there was a certain point that it sucked me in completely, something which can't be written off.

Cold Bishop, since yesterday was Leslie Cheung Kwok-Wing's anniversary of his death, what did you think of Inner Senses? I would consider a psychological thriller first and then a ghost story. It's not a top 50 horror film, but for fans of Hong Kong ghost stories I feel it is worth watching.

Never saw it. I pretty much tuned out to most Hong Kong cinema after the late 90s (as many did): Gen-X Cops was the film did it for me... although that didn't spare me the indignity of suffering through Twins Effect. It's only been recently that I've been getting back into the last decade's cinema, mainly their crime cinema (which doesn't begin and end with Johnnie To alone). Any other horror recommendations from the period?

[swo17]

Considering I'm going to be voting for stuff like...Katalin Varga

Woohoo! Glad you liked it.

[Mr Sausage]

Considering I'm going to be voting for stuff like...Katalin Varga

Woohoo! Glad you liked it.

Well thank you for the recommendation. Like Cold Bishop, I'm not a fan of the rape revenge film, so this may actually be the best one I've ever seen, not least because

Spoiler

you aren't shown the rape, but are allowed to slowly figure it out until the fact is revealed in a long monologue, more vivid and more frightening for coming totally from the victim's point of view while being shot as tho' it is being observed from the rapist's point of view, with the landscape blurring and shifting erratically as tho' the viewer's head were buzzing.

[masterofoneinchpunch]

... Never saw it. I pretty much tuned out to most Hong Kong cinema after the late 90s (as many did): Gen-X Cops was the film did it for me... although that didn't spare me the indignity of suffering through Twins Effect. It's only been recently that I've been getting back into the last decade's cinema, mainly their crime cinema (which doesn't begin and end with Johnnie To alone). Any other horror recommendations from the period?

Inner Senses is particularly creepy because there are parallels between the later death of Leslie Cheung and scenes in the movie.

I didn't particularly find Gen-X Cops or Twins Effect bad, but wait till you get to their sequels which make you appreciate the earlier films. I love the triad/cop films and I'm a huge Johnnie To fan. But since I concentrate more on those areas my horror knowledge of late HK is a bit weak. But I own quite a bit, well mostly 1990s, so when I go through them I'll post here.

Though I did just see Three… Extremes (2004: Fruit Chan/Park Chan-wook/Takashi Miike) and the Fruit Chan segment (I need to see the full length Dumplings still) is particularly creepy and disgusting. Might put you off of dumplings for a few days or life. The Miike segment was my favorite though omnibus films are often a mixed blessing for me.

[knives]

I thought that Dumplings was the weakest segment actually. Sort of bland and the big disturbing reveal was kind of meh and silly. Even that plot holes in the Park at least leave room for interesting discussion.

[masterofoneinchpunch]

I thought that Dumplings was the weakest segment actually. Sort of bland and the big disturbing reveal was kind of meh and silly. Even that plot holes in the Park at least leave room for interesting discussion.

I am wondering how the longer film plays out compared to the short, though several reviews at HKMDB have me suspecting that there is much more filler. I do think the movie affects those who think more about their food.

I thought the Park segment "Cut" could have been the strongest of the three if there was a better cohesiveness to it. And that ending ... I think the ending of "The Box" has the most potant post-picture palaver. Regardless the film would not be in my top 50.

Now on to Saam gaang.

[zedz]

I've seen both Dumplings but for the life of me can't remember the specifics of the differences, except that there was more of one of them (extra backstory etc.) Its big selling point for me is Doyle's magnificent photography, in quite a different vein from a lot of his work, and that made it the best of that collection for me. But then, I thought that the Miike was minor work from him (though nice and moody) and consider Park a terrible filmmaker in general.

[colinr0380]

Inspired by talk of a new Gunther von Hagens exhibition, I decided to revisit the horror film that used his technique of Plastination for its gruesome set pieces, Stefan Ruzowitzky's Anatomy.

Anatomy is kind of your standard teen slasher film, although it also fits into that early 2000s interest in undergound societies in educational organisations (with films like The Skulls) as a new medical student enrols in a prestigious unversity at which her father was a famous alumni, then finds that the institute has an rather possessive attitude towards the student body! Unfortunately the film is a little mundane (with our heroine at first being courted by the murderers and then fighting against the idea of being able to plastinate healthy, living individuals with impunity), and follows a well trodden path but it has some incredibly creepy scenes involving its central conceit, particularly the early one in which a young man wakes up on an operating table to find his arm having been half dissected and unable to move.

The film is also really helped along by the great performances from the cast including Franka Potente and Benno Fürmann (who in a nice twist followed up their antagonistic relationship in this film by being paired as the rather damaged and other-wordly tentative lovers in Tom Tykwer's The Princess and the Warrior the following year!), along with the very striking Anita Loos in the well-worn 'fiesty and sexual best friend who will obviously get murdered at some point' part! Loos also parlayed that character into the offical music video for the film, My Truth, which is perhaps one of the more weird mainstream music videos of recent times given its strange blending of S&M, punk and autopsy table imagery!

[domino harvey]

I, Madman (Tibor Takács 1989) A horror novel's events come to life as a fictional rogue steals assorted body parts to reform his own mangled face, borrowing said items from the close friends of the mousy woman reading said book. For good measure there's also a remnant from Moreau's island wandering around. For bad measure, there's everything in the film.

Mountaintop Motel Massacre (Jim McCullough 1986) I try going into films as blind as possible, so I (wrongly) thought this slasher film would be taking place in a ski-lodge or the equivalent. But there are a total of zero mountaintops at the Mountaintop Motel, which is instead situated in some backwoods Texas holler. The flick concerns a recent discharge from a mental hospital who inadvertently slashes her niece with a sickle (right as the little darling was having a tea party and conjuring The Dark Lord-- no, really), which causes the old gal to flip further and start murdering everyone she sees out of fear they'll send her back to the loony bin. I concede that the film has significant plot holes, even for a movie of this nature, but it also achieves something very, very few of the films I've watched for this project have accomplished: it portrays an unpleasant and unsettling environment, and in doing so thoroughly creeped me out. The motel's cabins are realistically dingy and sketch and that's even before we realize there's a secret tunnel system below connecting all of the domiciles. Which means at unfortunate moments throughout the film, this crazy woman will pop out from hidden trap doors in the locked cabins to slay the innocent. Even handled somewhat clumsily, there's something ingenious about the scene where two people leave a third alone in a locked bathroom, only to check on her two minutes later and find the sealed room empty save a huge bloody smear on the wall.

My Boyfriend's Back (Bob Balaban 1993) Admittedly this is a one-joke movie: high schooler comes back from the dead and no one he encounters acts like that's a big deal. But it's a joke that made me laugh a lot more than I expected. The arch quality that left Balaban's Parents so rudderless is used to much wiser effect here, though your enjoyment of the film will be directly relational to your ability to withstand moments like the Best Friend mildly chiding his zombie pal for eating a bully (played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman!) because "Colleges look at this kind of thing, you know." The underlying social commentary on race is obvious, but the film only uses that as an excuse to get away with such an audacious exercise in non-plussed drollness. And, in a post-Dead Alive world, the film gets further props for an original bit of body humor that I won't spoil except to say it concerns the Dreamgirl's creative quick fix for one of her paramour's decaying body parts.

Killer Klowns From Outer Space (Stephen Chiodo 1988) I saw both this and My Boyfriend's Back when I was younger and now that I've revisited, oh how memory can warp reality: The Balaban film was a lot better than I remembered, while this, sadly, was pretty lousy. Both films are (coincidentally) similarly audacious in premise, but Killer Klowns From Outer Space rests on its laurels, providing a few goofy cut-away sight gags interspersed with tortuous acting and script. It reminded me of an extended Are You Afraid of the Dark? episode: unnerving and memorable if seen as a child, unwatchably amateurish if plowed (or re-plowed) through as an adult. Still, if you've got an eight year old niece that needs some good ol' fashioned life scarring entertainment, you could do worse.

the Funhouse (Tobe Hooper 1981) Between this and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I assume Hooper's authorial signature is in producing some of the most grating characters in film history? God I hated virtually every second of this slow-moving geek show (no, that's probably the Hooper mark). That said, bonus points awarded for pairing the Bogdanovich-looking "teen" with the lissome young blonde.

Paperhouse (Bernard Rose 1988) A singularly peculiar film. Like L'Annulaire, it's hard to figure what exactly It All Means, much less who the audience could possibly be for such an esoteric and majestic film. What could be cute or cheap-- sick little girl draws her dreams-- is instead simply enchanting. At some point during the film I stopped trying to figure out the specifics (a meaningless exercise) and accepted the film at the logic it presents as the scenario alternates between the hellish and the angelic. Besides the rather obvious praise the film merits on a visual level, I found the central child performances excellent, especially the lead girl, who gives a rather round portrayal of Anna: besides brave and warm, she's bratty and petulant and selfish-- but who wasn't at that age?

Man's Best Friend (John Lafia 1993) I know this ain't exactly High Art (in more ways than one) but I went in knowing that at the very least I was getting both Ally Sheedy and a killer dog, so this was a safe investment regardless of other factors. That said, despite some standard issue nineties horror dopiness this was an entertaining riff on the slasher pic with a dog taking the place of the madman. The most amusing variation of this idea finds the rote home stalking scene played out with dogs filling the roles of both pursuer and pursued. Like any good slasher with a gimmick, the film milks it by hitting pretty much every dog-related target you'd expect-- mailmen, paperboys, cats up trees, fire hydrants, junkyard chains, automobile brake lines, &c.

[colinr0380]

The motel's cabins are realistically dingy and sketch and that's even before we realize there's a secret tunnel system below connecting all of the domiciles. Which means at unfortunate moments throughout the film, this crazy woman will pop out from hidden trap doors in the locked cabins to slay the innocent. Even handled somewhat clumsily, there's something ingenious about the scene where two people leave a third alone in a locked bathroom, only to check on her two minutes later and find the sealed room empty save a huge bloody smear on the wall.

Now I know where Vacancy got its ideas from!

[zedz]

Paperhouse (Bernard Rose 1988) A singularly peculiar film. Like L'Annulaire, it's hard to figure what exactly It All Means, much less who the audience could possibly be for such an esoteric and majestic film. What could be cute or cheap-- sick little girl draws her dreams-- is instead simply enchanting. At some point during the film I stopped trying to figure out the specifics (a meaningless exercise) and accepted the film at the logic it presents as the scenario alternates between the hellish and the angelic. Besides the rather obvious praise the film merits on a visual level, I found the central child performances excellent, especially the lead girl, who gives a rather round portrayal of Anna: besides brave and warm, she's bratty and petulant and selfish-- but who wasn't at that age?

I do like this film, but I don't think I could vote for it as it hasn't got a tenth of the personal impact of the low-budget TV serialization of the novel from the 70s, Escape Into Night, which happily traumatized me (and a number of my schoolmates) at age 5. The series (as I recall after all those years) made a lot more of the slow-build set-up of the dream world and the discovery of its parameters,

Spoiler

with the rock monsters hissing "we're coming" in the dark in a tone we'd use for years to terrorize one another. And I can still feel the existential shivers that tiny me experienced when Marianne discovers that she couldn't erase what she'd drawn.

By comparison, the film seemed a bit rushed and hesitant (particularly about just where it's going with the father figure), but it has got at least one really great scare to add to its excellent premise and strong child performance.

Speaking of child performances, I watched Who Can Kill a Child? yesterday. Talk about slow builds. The film begins with a dubious cavalcade of real life atrocities, which offers special pleading for a political reading that the film doesn't really seem all that interested in yielding. In fact, trying to reconcile the two can only give you headaches.

Spoiler

The credits sequence does work quite well in the abstract, since it offers up a succinct political answer to the film's titular question: "All of us, so long as we don't have to look them in the eye as we pull the trigger." But then it leads into a film in which we're urging the protagonists to get over their squeamishness and mow the little bastards down already.

The film itself is beautifully executed, building tension with as little as possible, meaning that it's nearly a full hour before anything explicitly horrific happens, and even once the penny drops, the filmmakers continue to pace themselves and us, so that we have space to consider just what is going on (though the film wisely spends hardly any time on cause and effect) and try to figure out the best course of action for survival. As such, when the bad stuff does start to happen, Serrador can get maximum impact out of a rather modest bag of tricks (foremost among them being crowds of children gathering silently like crows in The Birds.)

Apart from The Birds, the film also owes a generous but not onerous debt to Night of the Living Dead, but the most interesting parallel might be with Don't Look Now, of which film it could be considered a radical, subversive remix. If you put the key components of that film into a blender and asked somebody to come up with the creepiest possible film with the results, it could well be Who Can Kill a Child?

The recent Eureka disc offers a crisp, superb transfer and a couple of decent contextualizing interviews.

Black Christmas - A damn fine stalk and slash film. Actually, it's more like the stalk and slash film, since it seems to originate a ridiculous number of genre tropes, good and bad. It does everything it says on the box, with more panache than you could reasonably expect , and quite frankly it renders redundant much of the genre that ensued, since few of them stray that far from the template and most of them can't summon the intensity or invention Bib Clark brings to the material here. That said, I doubt it's strong enough to claw its way into my top 50, but it'll be 'bubbling under'.

[antnield]

I do like this film, but I don't think I could vote for it as it hasn't got a tenth of the personal impact of the low-budget TV serialization of the novel from the 70s, Escape Into Night, which happily traumatized me (and a number of my schoolmates) at age 5. The series (as I recall after all those years) made a lot more of the slow-build set-up of the dream world and the discovery of its parameters,

Spoiler

with the rock monsters hissing "we're coming" in the dark in a tone we'd use for years to terrorize one another. And I can still feel the existential shivers that tiny me experienced when Marianne discovers that she couldn't erase what she'd drawn.

By comparison, the film seemed a bit rushed and hesitant (particularly about just where it's going with the father figure), but it has got at least one really great scare to add to its excellent premise and strong child performance.

You've got just one week zedz if you wish to revisit.

[Mr Sausage]

Re: Black Christmas: I originally watched this one alone, at night, and those phone calls put me on such a nervous edge that I flinched every time a character went to pick up the phone. Hats off to whoever performed them, they were truly disturbing.

[Mr Sausage]

Giallos, Part 1:

I'm going to give a rundown of the more notable non-Bava/Argento movies in this subgenre. This is such a huge sub-genre (with so many hard-to-find entries) that I won't even attempt to be comprehensive. Think of this more as a representative selection of a much wider field, with most of the noteworthy directors and titles touched on, as well as a few lesser known but brilliant specimens. Unlike my previous guides, I'll put the recommended titles in red. DVD editions here.


All the Colours of the Dark (Sergio Martino, 1972): Martino was a prolific genre director in the Italian industry, and this is one of five giallos he made in the early-to-mid seventies. It also has perhaps the most evocative title of any horror film ever made. Unlike most Italian genre films with great titles, tho', this one is actually very good, one of the best of the non-Argento/Bava giallos. The movie cultivates an atmosphere of waking delirium in which you're quite prepared for just about anything to happen. Uncharacteristically for Martino, the film is alive with complex roaming camera shots and beautiful compositions. Even the dialogue scenes, often a drag in Italian genre movies, are blocked with an eye to keeping things from becoming static. It's also genuinely suspenseful, with one particularly well done sequence where the heroine is trapped on the top landing of her apartment, hoping that the elevator reaches her before the killer makes his way up the flight of stairs. The plot is on the loonier side, and it doesn't always make perfect sense, a common failing of this sub-genre. The movie is really worth watching for its style. This one will make my list.

Black Belly of the Tarantula (Paolo Cavara, 1971): One of the many Bird with the Crystal Plumage imitators that sprung up in the early seventies. This one leans more toward the poliziotteschi (police procedural) genre of Italian films, with Giancarlo Gianni playing a weary cop pursuing a killer who likes to paralyze his victims with an acupuncture needle to the spine before mutilating them. It's a fairly solid film, even tho' I correctly guessed who the killer was the moment that person walked onscreen. The movie numbers among the many decent but unremarkable giallos from the period--worth watching, satisfying, but not memorable.

The Case of the Scorpian's Tail (Sergio Martino, 1971): Another Bird with the Crystal Plumage imitator, only it replaces the perversity and insanity underlying Bird's mystery with plain greed. A woman inherits a million dollars after her estranged husband dies in an accident, and a bunch of characters crawl out of the woodwork looking to get their hands on it, including a black-clad, knife-wielding maniac. A lot of gory deaths follow, with very little suspense and not much attention to the details of the mystery (you really begin to appreciate Argento's detail fetishism as you go on in this subgenre). The real problem with the movie is that it can't seem to stick to a central character for very long, something that kills the incentive to invest in anyone. Overwhelmingly, it strikes you that the makers of most giallos just lack passion for the material, the very thing that's needed to make these movies interesting. This is why Argento's giallos are so successful: you feel that the material delights him, and that imaginative delight in the details becomes infectious.

Don't Torture a Duckling (Lucio Fulci, 1972): One of a number of highly esteemed giallos that I'm not overly fond of. It has a solid first act and a great final reveal, but beyond that it's pretty usual. It's often praised for examining the bigotry and false moralism of small towns and how those things spill into vigilantism ala Lang's Fury. Except the movie doesn't do any actual examining. You get no sense that Fulci understands the workings of small towns: there are next no scenes of villagers riling themselves up, being manipulated by petty fears and group-think; just a scene or two of the police chief worrying about the possibility, and a single vicious scene of vigilante justice. The movie drops in its ideas as pre-packaged generalizations and lets the audience's familiarity with them from other areas do the rest of the work while the film moves on to more exploitative territory. The movie also includes a truly disgusting scene where the twenty-something female lodger sexually abuses one of the pre-teen boys for no reason at all except that the movie needed a red herring (and only for her to become the heroine later on!). Far from being a bad giallo, but not good enough to be at the top of the heap. A lot of people love this one, tho', so you owe it a view, if only to decide for yourself.

The Fifth Cord (Luigi Bazzoni, 1971): Of the three Bazzoni giallos I've seen, this is the most straight forward and generic. Franco Nero is a newspaper reporter whose friends are inexplicably murdered one after another following a New Years party. Bazzoni's interest in memory is present, with Nero occasionally replaying the events of the party in his mind; but these moments are perfunctory and echo Argento's (more effective) fascination with memory in Bird With the Crystal Plumage more than anything in Bazzoni's other giallos. Missing is the way memory intersects with dream and fantasy, creating epistemological dilemmas for the characters. Bazzoni seems less interested in the creations of and solutions to mysteries than Argento, so the material doesn't quite spring to life, even if it is never less than competent, and not infrequently masterful. That said, as with Bazzoni's other films, he and Storaro have created a visually arresting movie, full of ominous, saturated colours, chiaroscuro lighting, geometric but disorienting architecture, and sweeping, fluid camera movements. Even if it does lack the thematic weight of Bazzoni's other giallos, it is every bit as visually beautiful and stimulating, enough so that it earns a spot among the best of this sub-genre. Not at the very top, but high enough to be essential viewing.

Forbidden Photos of a Woman Above Suspicion (Luciano Ercoli, 1970): Because the giallo is a hybrid sub-genre, you find that some examples will favour one particular informing-genre to the point of blurring into it and almost ceasing to be a giallo. This one is more a domestic thriller than a murder mystery. A man corners our heroine, threatens her with the possibility of sexual assault, but promptly leaves after mentioning that her husband is a murderer. He then begins to blackmail her with evidence that may or may not implicate her husband. Not a bad thriller, actually, despite suffering from the same lethargic pace and lack of urgency that characterizes a lot of giallos. It also makes way too much use of that infuriating plot device where the men react to the heroine's pleas that she's in trouble by making concerned faces at each other and muttering the equivalent of 'there, there, dear, don't you worry your pretty little head about it. You're just imagining it all!' The ending is pretty ludicrous, too.

La Donna del Lago aka Possessed (Luigi Bazzoni and Franco Rossellini, 1965): A cold and spare giallo in which dreams, memories, fantasies, and reality begin to blur. More an existential quest than a thriller, it does not attempt to elicit thrills with scenes of suspense and violent murder, but slowly chill you with its stark atmosphere and increasingly slippery hold on reality. The influence of Antonioni's 60's films is apparent in the detached emotions of the lead and the way the movie uses genre tropes at the surface level in order explore deeper and more unsettling themes. A strange, slow, symbolic movie, far removed, stylistically, from the giallos Bava and his imitators made during the period. Really fantastic. This one will make my list.

Nude...You Die! aka The Miniskirt Murders (Antonio Marghereti, 1968): A surprisingly good early giallo set in an all girls school somewhere in the country. It's very sixties in a charming kind of way (bubbly score, bouncy outfits), and more interested in providing a bit of fun than unsettling anyone, so there's much light humour and little blood. Unusually for this sub-genre, it has a good sense of pace and a plot that not only makes perfect sense but has a surprising final twist. Worth watching, especially for its stylish opening sequence.

Le Orme aka Footprints (Luigi Bazzoni, 1975): This movie lies on the limits of what can be considered a giallo. Like a musical without any music numbers, this is a giallo without a murder mystery or murder set-pieces; and yet it has all the necessary structural and thematic elements to be in this sub-genre. It is an astonishingly stylish movie, too. Bazzoni and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro lend the story such a rich visual sense, with muted, glowing colours and deliberately paced gliding camera movements. The movie is so visually alive, yet poised and graceful, without the outrageousness or gaudiness that the giallo usually adopts as its visual style. The lingering unease of this movie is drawn directly from the great beauty of the images, which are not warm or inviting, but alienating and isolating. The images, however ravishing, are stark, and the colour palette is cold, even when using greens and yellows. The very deliberateness and preciseness of the compositions, tracking shots, and pace put you at a remove from the characters and the mystery and place you in a more thoughtful space. The movie's pristine beauty alone is enough to recommend it, but it has more to offer. Like La Donna del Lago, this is a quest for memory and identity done amidst the slowly crumbling boundaries of dream, memory, fantasy, and reality. I don't think it is quite as thematically rich as its predecessor, but its visual style so heightens its thematic apparatus that when you watch it, it's hard not to feel that there are untold subtle riches hidden within, even when afterwards you feel so much is slipping through your fingers. Highly, highly recommended. List worthy.

The Perfume of the Lady in Black (Francesco Barilli, 1974): Stylish and visually inventive thriller whose increasing sense of delirium prevents it from totally cohering. It's hard to describe the plot since there isn't a unifying narrative so much as an episodic series of small, yet increasingly disturbing events that happen to the main character. The mystery is whether or not these events are connected, if the malice they suggest is real or imagined. Meanwhile, the film leaves you to question whether the heroine's visual hallucinations are dreams, memories, or fantasies. The questions raised are more or less answered, yet the movie feels as tho' it never quite comes together. Normally a giallo's failure to cohere, narratively, doesn't bother me, and may even add to its delirious atmosphere. Here, the movie is so visually coordinated and its symbols so skilfully organized that you can't help expecting it to resolve coherently. Perhaps that's why its failure to congeal feels slightly unsatisfactory: its confidence in its own techniques prepares you for a coherent whole that it fails to deliver. What you get is a strange, delirious, alienating atmosphere full of menace and suggestion that the movie isn't quite willing to pay off. And its ending, while memorable and effective, is unnecessary. One of the most interesting giallos ever made. Recommended, even if it comes up just short of making my list.

Pieces (Juan Piquer Simón, 1982): A late addition to the cycle that tries to make up for its well-worn narrative by upping the trash quotient. It's amazing how ridiculous this movie is. A third of the way through, the heroine is attacked out of nowhere by a random kung fu wielding Asian man who I guess was just hiding in an alley. He throws a bunch of kicks and screams some kiai's before the girl's boyfriend knocks him out. Turns out he's the local professor of Chinese, and he explains his baffling behaviour by muttering "must've eaten some bad chop suey" before walking off, the incident never to be mentioned again. I'm not joking, and oddly enough neither is the movie. If you care about the plot, local University girls are being murdered and their body parts stolen. This one enters so-bad-it's-good territory. A riot, especially if seen with friends.

The Psychic aka Seven Notes in Black (Lucio Fulci, 1977): A later entry in the cycle and Fulci's first giallo since Don't Torture a Duckling. A woman experiences a vision full of cryptic symbols that seem to show someone being murdered and then walled up somewhere while a strange seven note theme plays over and over. She then discovers not only that the room in her vision is located in her new husband's long unused villa, but that a skeleton is hidden in the walls. I'm a bit torn on this one. It's put together with some competence, a rarity for Fulci, and for the most part everything makes sense (tho' I did get kind of tired with the laborious way Fulci underlines every moment where the heroine encounters a symbol from her vision). My real problem with it is

Spoiler

that the movie robs itself of any narrative momentum by focussing on an isolated murder that happened several years ago and which seems in no danger of being repeated. So the second act is boring because there is nothing at stake: no impending murders, no active killer, nothing to give the mystery any urgency. That keeps it from being a great giallo. As well--and I'm not sure if this is very poor or very clever writing--the heroine's vision doesn't predict events, it creates them. She never could've encountered half the items in her vision if her vision hadn't made her aware of their significance beforehand.

Plus the third act just reveals the second to have been nothing but an improbable series of coincidences, to the point that it starts to be humorous. One of the better examples of this sub-genre, but it also stops short of being List worthy. Give it a try, tho'.

A Short Night of Glass Dolls (Aldo Lado, 1971): A giallo distinguished by its novel structural device: the lead is in a state resembling death, and as he is wheeled through hospitals and morgues as the bureaucratic system deals with his body, he must piece together the memories that explain how he ended up here. This is a more overtly political film than is usual for the sub-genre. The film is set in Communist Prague (just to make that clear, the movie includes a bizarre light-hearted jaunt through the old Jewish cemetery by two frolicking lovers), and the whole thing has an air of corruption, conspiracy, and repression hanging over it. The tone becomes increasingly sombre and fatalistic as things unfold until the plot transforms into a waking nightmare wherein the discourse of power is likened to a grotesque bacchanalian orgy of the old and the ugly. Oddly effective and novel giallo, even if it is somewhat loose with the investigative elements. Confidently directed.

The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh aka Blade of the Ripper (Sergio Martino, 1971): Martino's first giallo, and he shows a facility with the genre that isn't there in most of his subsequent films. It doesn't quite match the stylistic heights of his later All the Colours of the Dark, still his best giallo, but it sustains its visual inventiveness more than usual, showing a lively camera and compositional sense and an energetic mis-en-scene. There are a couple of very good suspense scenes. Tho' there are some last minute plot twists out of left field, the story is sadly straight-forward, and the titular vice possessed by Mrs Wardh ends up being perfectly irrelevant to the plot. Indeed, the main flaw with the film is that it doesn't really follow up on the intensity of the perversions it suggests. Was poised to be a more interesting psycho-sexual thriller than it ended up being, but it's still a solid giallo, with a few remarkable moments that put it above the entries on this list that are merely competent.

Torso aka The Bodies Bear Traces of Carnal Violence (Sergio Martino, 1973): This one has a pretty high reputation among horror fans. That reputation, however, rests almost entirely on the final twenty or so minutes, in which the heroine plays a sometimes unbearably tense cat-and-mouse game with the killer inside a country-house. Apart from that, the movie is undistinguished. It's not visually interesting, the murder scenes are perfunctory, and while the movie tries to liven things up by having pretty much every female character take her clothes off at some point, even that gets boring (and kind of sleazy). I had no idea who the killer was when unmasked; I actually had to skim back through the movie to remind myself. Despite several Argento-ish flashbacks showing some cryptic event in the killer's past that explains his actions, the movie goes on to provide a second, more banal motive that makes the other motive redundant and those flashbacks irrelevant. Not one of the better giallos.

What Have You Done to Solange? (Massimo Dallamano, 1972): A competently made giallo that flirts with a whole host of transgressive themes, including the corruption of minors, clergical abuses, inappropriate teacher/student relationships, illicit abortion, and murder as a substitute for sex (the murderer kills his female victims by stabbing them in the genitals, something the film wisely chooses not to linger on). Despite the perversity lying under the surface, the movie is much more concerned with the slow unravelling of its mystery than in the actions of its killer, which get only perfunctory depictions. As a result the movie avoids much of the sleaze common to this subgenre. Unfortunately, while the mystery is absorbing, the narrative has little urgency or suspense, and once again, I had no idea who the killer was when his identity was revealed. One of the better examples of the sub-genre, but the ending didn't sit well with me:

Spoiler

It's troublesome how matter-of-factly the film concludes that an abortion is so heinous, the experience could only drive someone mad.

Who Saw Her Die? (Aldo Lado, 1972): Ennio Morricone's strange and haunting music is the highlight of this story of a man desperately trying to uncover who killed his ten-year-old daughter. Composed almost entirely of a-tonal, a-rhythmic chanting from a children's choir, the score resembles nothing less than a sinister and unbalanced Catholic mass. The film itself is handled with confidence and surprising sensitivity. Aldo Lado, based on the two films of his I've seen, is an above average director in this sub-genre, with an impressive, low-key visual sense (the way he uses long, tightly held close-ups of Anita Strindberg's impassive face to suggest the extent of her grief is masterful). But it's Ennio Morricone's score that really lifts this giallo above the merely competent ones surrounding it and brings out all of the sadness and pain hiding at its centre. A very good giallo.

Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (Sergio Martino, 1972): I don't know why, but Italian genre movies sometimes have these absurdly specific titles. This is Martino's least straightforward giallo. Rather than seeming original, however, it comes across more like an ill-assembled conglomeration of different genre films. While the first act is a straight-forward giallo, the second switches gears and becomes a tale of bedroom intrigue before again turning around in the third act to become a tale of plain intrigue with everyone plotting against each other. Overlying all of this is a loose adaptation of Poe's The Black Cat. It really is an oddly structured movie. While Martino can be stylish--and this movie has some good moments--he's never willing to sustain that stylishness in his films, with the notable exception of the superb All the Colours of the Dark. For all its oddness, Vice just isn't that interesting, either from an aesthetic or a narrative stand-point. Edwige Fenech is positively adorable, tho', in her ear-length haircut, and she gets to seduce Anita Strindberg, which does a lot to liven the second act.

[swo17]

I've seen precious few giallos (thanks for the recommendations, Sausage) but would heartily recommend one proto-giallo, and another, um, neo-giallo I guess--Siodmak's The Spiral Staircase, which I believe has already been mentioned a few times in this thread, and a film from just a few years ago, Amer, for which there is some discussion here.

[colinr0380]

You've got to love Torso, if only for its trailer! ("Now from Carlo Ponti, the man who brought you War and Peace and Dr Zhivago, comes a totally new motion picture experience...Torso! It saturates the screen with terror!")

And I second Who Saw Her Die? which is one of those seminal 'creepy Venice' films along with Don't Look Now, and is also one of those films about trying to deal with grief by running headlong into a much worse situation. George Lazenby is really good in the main role too. This might also be the best time to praise Nicoletta Elmi, who play's Lazenby's murdered daughter in this film - after a brief appearance as one of the girls in Death In Venice (overlooked by Bogarde in favour of Tadzio!) she had quite a few important roles as a child actress in 70s Italian horror cinema, from A Bay of Blood and Footprints through to Deep Red and one of the creepy mute children in Flesh For Frankenstein. Plus one of the Italian films inspired by The Exorcist, The Night Child. One of her final roles was all grown up as the usher in Demons.