G is For Gothic Giallo

The golden age of giallo didn't last more than a few years from the late 60's to early 70's. But it was just the latest fad in Italian horror movies. Before all that we had gothic horror movies, as established by Mario Bava. That one used stark visuals on haunted castles, torture chambers and classical melodrama. They cashed in on the popularity of Hammer Horror films in the UK and  Roger Corman's Poe films in America at the same time. Besides Bava, there were plenty of other talented directors working on the subgenre as well. Let's take a look at a few.

Mill of the Stone Women (Il mulino delle donne di pietra, 1960)
Director: Giorgio Ferroni

Ferroni is someone that's a bit controversial in some circles due to his actions in WWII, but you can't say he wasn't a talented and effective filmmaker. This film is set in the Netherlands and in the similar art circles that Corman also sometimes depicted. A young art student travels to a Flemish village to see a windmill filled with stone sculptures of legendary women. He finds a mysterious woman and falls for her hard, but doesn't realize she harbors a horrible secret.

The ominous setting, with the gloomy Holland winter and ominous sound design from the mill's gearwork make the film's athmosphere of foreboding dread quite unique. Color photography wasn't that common this early, so that makes Ferroni's movie shine out compared to his contemporaries. It also emphasizes the meet of artistry and mad science also on display in the story.

 The major downside is the third act that gives a rather ludicrous explanation to all the murder and mayhem. The plot's romanticism also rings a bit hollow. Similar plot points were common in many contemporary movies, so it's a bit disappointing Ferroni couldn't top them in this one too.

★★★★

The Horrible Dr Hichock (L'orrible segreto del Dr. Hichcock, 1962)
Dir. Riccardo Freda

The Italian horror cinema owes a major debt to Hitchcock, of course, but still it's a bit much to use a misspelling of his name in a movie title or a major film villain. The titular doctor, played by Robert Flemyng, takes a new, young wife (Barbara Steele) to live with him in his vast old castle. Taking on the story of Bluebeard, the wife goes on to find out what happened to her predecessor and the doctor's deadly secrets.

 

This is another movie that takes a turn in the third act, but this time to be more outlandish and hysterical. It's a trick Italian horror movies tend to do perticularly well. Particularly as we've endured the uptight and very British manners of Flemyng for the first hour or so. This film was very taboo-breaking for its time since it's plot heavily circles around necrophilia. This started a sort of trend in Italian movies to try to up one another. Still, at this point everything was done mostly in good taste and avoiding explicit scenes of sex and violence.

Steele was one of the great leading women of the period, and she did admirable work here, too. The sets are lavish, gloomy and dark, as they should be, but otherwise this film seems to suffer a bit of lack of suspense being built until the final reveals.

★★★

The Whip and the Body (La frusta e il corpo, 1963)
Dir. Mario Bava

Our old buddy Bava again, with one of his filmograhy's most dark-toned movies. The movie is all dark moors, stormy seafronts, damp cellars and unlit torture chambers. Christopher Lee had a few days to shoot his role for the film, but he was put in good use. After all, in Hammer's Dracula films he usually didn't show up for too long.

He plays a cruel and ruthless nobleman that likes to whip girls. The puritans around him don't much care for him, so he soon winds up dead. Or does he? Something unexplained, perhaps a ghost, begins to haunt the mansion. At the same time his would-be bride (Delilah Lavi) seems to start to desperately pine for him and perhaps develop a relationship with the ghost. The increased scares and bodies beginning to pile up cause and investigation on the matter.

Bava was a filmmaker that used minimal elements to maximum effect, and this is a clear textbook study of that work. His use of minimal light in particular makes his film a lot more eye-popping than any of his contemporaries managed. Then again, his use of sound and music isn't quite as good, and his disregard for reasonable plot development may be a bit long-winded to follow. The name implies for more S&M but it's actually left mostly to our imagination.

★★★ 1/2

Castle of Blood (Danza Macabra, 1964)
Dir. Antonio Margheriti, Sergio Corbucci

 A true Italian answer to Corman's Poe films, it also features a connecting opening scene that features the author himself. A rival author bets that he can spend the night at a haunted castle. While there, he enconters various lost souls and is forced to live out the ways they have perished within the castle's history. In the end, the ghosts demand a blood sacrifice themselves.

Margheriti's step to the scene also meant for the genre to take a step more to psychedelia.The film was shot in black and white, but makes the most out of strong contrasts with candle-lit scenes and visible cobwebs in almost every frame. The film's castle is built so as to have a mystery or a secret attached to each room, corridor or nook. 

Legendary western director Corbucci worked as the co-director, yet was not credited for it. Barbara Steele is on top form in here as well, playing a sad remnant of a love lost. It's as melodramatic as they come and the finale takes on for a bit too long, but still, it's one of the brightest spots of the genre.

★★★ 1/2

The Long Hair of Death (I lunghi capelli della morte, 1965)
Dir. Antonio Margheriti

A true historical epic, this one takes place in the 15th century, witch a lover scorned threatening to burn his would-be wife on the stake for witchcraft. Death follows the entire family, until one of the daughters is old enough and the situation is apt to get revenge on the lord. A nice idea is to have everything revolve around the same castle through time, but I guess it's for the cost-effectiveness to limiting sets.

Another Barbara Steele classic that sees her do a dual role. The story and music repeat one another a bit too much with the witch-hunt, paranoia and hauntings going on. The cast of actors is particularly good here, as they manage to find a nice balance between hysteric melodrama and small nuances.   

The morality tale on display here is very Catholic indeed, utilizing the iconygraphy of the Church and basically be about a post-generational vendetta. I think Michele Soavi was very influenced by this.

★★★

The Possessed (La donna del lago, 1966)
Dir. Luigi Bazzoni, Franco Rossellini

Shedding light on how the development from gotchicness to giallos came about, we have this slow-moving arthouse movie, shot in black and white. At this point, it feels a bit odd to have this kind of cinematography used in modern setting, though it does help to make the film's athmosphere.

The film is a murder mystery where Peter Baldwin's Bernard arrives for a seaside holiday in order to be able to write. Even as he had spent time therein before, he notices most of the locals give him the cold sholder and act weird. He finds out that Tilde, the chambermaid he had been in love with, had killed herself during the year. But is there something more to the case?

The film depicts the gloom and depression present in neo-realism, with surreal images of leavless trees and the cold embrace of the lake in question. The film doesn't have too strong a pull though, and it's mostly due to the uncharismatic lead turn by Baldwin. Nevertheless, it is a sense of styling that proves you don't need ghosts or spooky castles in order to have some good old-fashioned gothic dread.

★★★

B is for Bava

A director whose films frequently feature festive lighting, blood, death and religious undertones is particularly suited for Easter viewing. As it happens, many of legendary horror director Mario Bava's greatest works not only follow that formula, but are also among his most influental works, and have an English title that begins with B. Previously we have taken a look at his viking pictures and one of his classic giallos, but there's plenty of more aspects to the Great Master. So, let's take a look at Mario Bava films that begin with B.


Black Sunday (La maschera del demonio, 1960)

Bava was there from the beginning of Italian horror movies, having worked as a cinematographer and 2nd unit director on films like I vampiri and Caltiki. But even if it wasn't the first, the impact his proper directorial debut is had to overestimate. Bleak and shocking, Bava certainly pushed the envelope from the very beginning, thus creating a mutitude of subgenres himself. For while Black Sunday may be indebted to British horror movies of the time, it is unquestionably of Bava's twisted mind.

A witch is executed in Medieval times, but before her death, she curses the offspring of her inquisitors. 200 years later, archeologists find the tomb and accidentally set the evil of the witch back to the world of the living. There's also romance attached to the modern descendant of the witch, which is somewhat reminiscent of the Universal Horror classic The Mummy.

Though Bava works in clichéd ancient tombs, cemetaries, gothic castle halls and fields in November, he has a sort of knack of making it all look spectacular and exciting, no matter how many movies you've seen the setting before. Bava certainly has a knack for gothicness, and I mostly prefer his historical horror to more modern endeavours. He also hads the means of using more violent visuals than his American and British counterparts dared, starting a sort of race with the bloody special effects in horror films.

The film's downside is than the actors are a bit stiff and some dialogue as spoken by them is simply atrocious, which takes away from the athmosphere of the movie. For a film as old as this, one can forgive this, but if this were in colore and on the style of later 60's movies, it would be a bigger fault. But otherwise it's a rich film that has visual delights on offer on almost every scene.

★★★★

Black Sabbath (I tre volti della paura, 1963)

In most other horror directors' work, doing an anthology horror would be a middling work, a small, cheap thing to do in between some more substantial movies. But Bava did things differently, and created parobably the best and most stylish anthology horror movie ever made. He might have also given the name for the first heavy metal band, but the truth on that is not within our grasp.

Bava goes for some Russian classics by adapting stories by Tolstoy, Chekhov and Gogol (albeit quite freely). The first is quite a risque giallo story of a woman being tormented by threatening phone calls, which has a strong lesbian subtext. The second is more gothic, which sees Boris Karloff (also the narrator of the film) as a fiend who returns undead after going out to slay a mythical monster. The last movie is the most colorful and the most obvious morality take, where greed over a dead woman's ring gets a woman haunted to madness.

The three films have each a particular athmosphere to them, each highlighting a particular strength in Bava's toolbox. While the film starts out very slow, almost tv episode-like, it gets going. And it gets scarier, too. The first film creates fears out of the unknown grudges of those closest to us, the second of natural powers beyond our grasp. And the final one has perhaos the most horrifying ghoul ever to put on film, as well as colorful lights and inventive angles used to the benefit of creating paranoia.

The film is classy enough horror in that the Karloff opening and ends with their Creepshow-like cackling feel a bit much and spoil the interest one might have for the classic litereture it is based on. And it doesn't hold particularly well as adaptation as these classics as well. But Bava does better characters and directing the actors than many other times in his career. he's truly firing on all cylinders here. Too bad he never got around of making the sequel, which would have seen an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's The Dunwich Horror with Christopher Lee.

★★★★

Blood and Black Lace (Sei donne per l'assassino, 1964)

Pioneering works of Bava were often indebted to either Hitchcock or Hammer horror films. But in the end he managed to find a subgenre totally Italian, and started the giallos with this film. A giallo as I understand one is a horror/suspense movie with a mystery with a race against time as a secret killer going around murdering people one by one. Bava usually had the victims be well-off models so he could have an excuse to have plenty of beautiful women, but also lavish interiors and colorful costumes. At the height of the suspense scene he often would pull out his favorite coloured lights.

Bava's favorite actor Cameron Mitchell plays a fashion-house owner, whose models are being offed one by one. There's foul play afoot and a plot concerning the lives of everyone in the house with a secret diary being a key piece of evidence everyone is looking for. So far, so Twin Peaks. It is both clearly a picture made in the 60's and utterly timeless, as a sense of style as strong as Bava's never goes out of fashion. The film has a musical score of jazzy easy listening which makes me think this has also been a major influence on Pedro Almódovar. 

Later giallo directors had various perks over this, such as Dario Argento having a stronger sense of inventiveness, creating a horror athmosphere and the use of architecture, Lucio Fulci had more nightmarish and surreal visuals, and Sergio Martino had better female characters and reasonable psychology in his movies. All of them upped the gore a lot from this point, which leaves Bava's pioneer work seemingly quite innocent in comparison. But it is a film anyone with a strong sense of cinema can appreciate, not just horror movie fans. Like with many of Bava's films, I would wish the characters were more interesting and less campily acted as a lot of the movie is spent on just them talking. That's the main reason why, as good as it is, it feels like a bit of a chore to sit through this.

★★★ 1/2

Bay of Blood (Ecologia del delitto, 1971)

Being ahead of the curve, Bava also managed to create one of the first films that can be classified as slashers. The film involves teenagers going out to a remote cottage to get slaughtered. But the reason why is some soap opera scheming about inheriting an estate that's not that unlike the plots of his giallo movies.

Bava's violence is a downward spiral of brutality where the cycle of violence can't be stopped once began. The scenes of kids getting brutally killed in bed with very phallic instruments has since become a cliché of the genre, but more nasty for the modern viewer might be the scenes depicting the brutal murders of the elderly characters. Some killings have obviously influenced the later works of the likes of Argento and Fulci.

The film is not visually one of the most captivating of Bava's films, even though he worked also as a cinematographer. Nevertheless, the claustrophobia of small cabins and the silent threat of the nature within is captured well enough. It's not as captivating as some of his more sophisticated movies and at times a bit boring. Nevertheless, it's a film worthy of respect due to everything new it brings to the table of the developing horror movie DNA.

★★★

Baron Blood (Gli orrori del castello di Norimberga, 1972)

The time had long since passed gothic horror when Bava gave his last knack at the genre. Two dopes are investigating a witch's curse and thus think they have resurrected the notorious Bloody Baron when people around them start to die. Bava is at his best visual tricks here, the film features more exciting scenes of a torchlit castle at night and a city under fog than a season of DuckTales.

There's a bit of a retread of ideas first presented at Black Sunday, but also rewriting and re-conseptualizing them. Nevertheless, compared to the previous film this can't help but to pale a little by comparison.

For fans of more classic horror, the film also has some cleverly graphic deaths in an iron maiden, a cool finale of a witch sabbath, and the make up on the Baron's face that surely was a precursor to Freddy Krueger. On the downsides, the script doesn't really hold together, the music is cheap and the acting is way too campy. The Bargain-store Vincent Price main villain is particularly annoying.

★★★

Stop! Motion Time!

As readers might know already, I'm a big animation buff. When the Oscar nominations for Best Animated Feature were announced, however, I realized that I had missed a lot of the year's crop, which is particularly a shame since the nominees include three stop motion pictures. That sort of animation is generally way more fun than CGI animation, since puppets tend to have more personality than ultra-slick computer models. Two of these stop-motioners have a spoooky horror theme, and one is just about your basic looting, plundering and causing a ruckus.

If you're curious about what I thought of Brave and Wreck-It-Ralph, you can read my reviews by clicking their titles in this sentence.

Frankenweenie
Director: Tim Burton

Tim Burton's latest film could be seen as an attempt to please his old fans, who have grown incresingly disappointed with his recent body of work. This attempt concerns updating his beloved short film he made in the 1980's to a feature film animation. The original Frankenweenie is pretty much perfect as such, and Burton tends to fall in the pitfalls of stretching the story in an artificial manner in this longer version. Still, at many points it does feel to have the creative energy and gentle satire on suburban America that Burton's good films in the 80's and 90's had. The heart of Frankenweenie, a story of love and friendship, has also remained intact.

Young Victor Frankenstein (Charlie Tahan) is a clear Mary Sue of Burton's youth, a creative boy that has few friends, and prefers staying indoors to film monster movies or do scientific experiments to going out to play. His best friend is the family dog Sparky, who is a curious mutt, and always ready for an adventure with his owner. Victor is eager to participate in the school's science fair, inspired by the new eccentric teacher Mr. Rzykruski (Martin Landau). Victor's dad (Martin Short) agrees, on the condition that Victor tries out sports, particularly baseball. On the day of Victor's game, Sparky escapes to follow his master to the field. When he runs out to catch the ball flying out to the street, the dog has a fatal run-in with a car.

The broken Victor finds a new chance to bring his friend back to life, when he learns that electricity has a way of making dead tissue twitch. But his successful experiment rises interest in his science fair rivals, all who want to try it out on their pets long gone. The climax has Burton gleefully ripping off various monster movie clichés with glee, as the creatures wreck havok. The film turns from Edward Scissorhands -type outcast drama into more of a Mars Attacks! type of mischief-making comedy. Balancing these two approaches isn't always consistent.

Fortunately, Burton mellows out by the final scene, which is as charming as it was in the original film. The puppetry is magnificent, with the animals being super-cute and the humans emotive and like Burton's drawings having popped to life. As a contrast to Burton's previous animated features, there are no memorable, eye-popping song sequences, but the story wouldn't need any anyway. The old school -style slow, black-and-white storytelling works in this film's case, but it also drove audiences away from theatres. Kids these days. As it is, it's a nice little film reminding that Burton still carries some of that creative energy that raised him to the top of Hollywood in the first place. Let's hope he can still utilize it in his live action films as well.

★★★

Pirates! A Band of Misfits (a.k.a. The Pirates! In An Adventure with Scientists)
Director: Peter Lord

The latest feature from Aardman studios blends stop motion wax dolls and CGI backgrounds in a visual style that's epic and finely detailed and hand-crafted at the same time. It's got a silly sense of humor mixing non-sequiturs and the unexpected with good, tested british wit in the fashion of Monty Python. It's got chase scenes and exotic locales and The Clash and The Pogues on the soundtrack. Yet as a whole is somehow less than the sum of its parts.

Queen Victoria (Imelda Staunton) has declared a war against piracy, with plenty of the most notorious outlaws having already been captured. But there are still eager sea-farers out there. One such a motley crew is the band of misfits led by The Pirate Captain (Hugh Grant). They are a bit too nice to be plundering scallywags, but love the pirate lifestyle. With their antics, The Pirate Captain figures they could finally win the Pirate of the Year Award, given to the captain with the biggest booty. But seizing ships and stealing treasures doesn't seem to be his strongest skill.

Baby-talking to pets is.

When the crew runs into the young scientist Charles Darwin (David Tennant), they get informed that The Captain's parrot Polly is in fact the only remaining Dodo in the world. The prize for bringing such a zoological treasure to London would be huge. But the only problem is that London is Victoria's stronghold, and the pirates need to disguise themselves to not be caught.

While a lot of pieces in this one are at the right places, and it is funny and amusing enough, there's something vital missing in this film. As of now, it's amusing enough, if a fairly forgettable caper. It's a bit hard to grasp what's wrong with it. Perhaps the movie tries too hard to please all audiences. While the script is smart, it also lacks some sort of edginess all the best comedies have.

I also think that the personalities of the various pirates in the crew could have been played with a lot more. It's probably a joke stemming from the original children's book this is based on, to name all the characters in such a functionalist manner (i.e. "The Pirate with a Scarf", "The Surprisingly Curvaceous Pirate" or "The Pirate who likes Sunsets and Kittens"). But in the long run playing them all just for gags takes away from the audience's involvement in their escapades. It's a bad sign if no one gives a damn if they are going to cope or not. Also, the chase scenes aren't as elaborate as in, say, Wallace & Gromit, now just featuring too many characters screaming and spazzing out instead of rolling along, unexpectedly but with the determination of a speed train.

★★★

ParaNorman
Directors: Chris Butler, Sam Fell

I was wary of this children's horror fable beforehand, simply because it features zombies as the central horrors. I used to love zombies until they became the most overplayed and tiresome thing in popular culture and having them featured in a kid's movie was just another low in their road to irrelevance. But gladly, the central zombies here weren't either Romero-like man eaters or even fast-running video game monsters. These are good old-fashioned magic zombies, undead pilgrims rising from their graves due to a curse.

So the film features the outcast 10-year-old Norman (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who can see the dead. His parents and older sister won't believe him and other kids at school make fun of him. One day, Norman meets Mr. Prenderghast (John Goodman), a hobo that claims he's his uncle, and that he has a ritual which protects the town of Blithe Hollow from an ancient curse. When the ritual fails and Prenderghast dies, it's up to Norman to save the village from an old evil going back to the times of the pilgrims. But Norman will learn that the best way to destroy wickedness is goodness and being nice.

The film has a nice array of characters, and the zombies in particular with their slacked jaws are suitably spooky-looking. The cast is filled with your basic small-town archetypes, with the more notable characters coming from the realm of the dead. However, the film somewhat lacks in suspense and athmosphere-creating. Anyone actually thinking this is better-crafted than Brave must be out of their mind. Even 10 seconds of a set up scene of that film's misty moors of Scotland is more exciting than this whole film.

This is by no means a bad movie, but it's Monster House meets The Frighteners stich is a bit worn-out. I do appreciate the early shout-out to Troll 2, though.

★★1/2

Night Visions Maximum Halloween 3012

Night Visions Maximum Halloween 3012. Even writing the name of the festival makes me tremble. It was very, very cool. I wrote several extensive reviews already for the Elitisti web magazine, so check those out if you happen to know Finnish. But since I hadn't the time or the resources to write about every single film I saw at that festival, I'll leave the scraps here. But never fret, for since the festival's quality this year was nothing short of brilliant, there were plenty of interesting new genre pieces to go here, too. This year at Night Visions saw a rise of thrillers that didn't quite fit the regular horror form the festival is known for, but won audiences over by their sheer inventiveness and quality.

Berberian Sound Studio (Great Britain, 2012)
Director: Peter Strickland

This Italian-shot Brit thriller had plenty of positive buzz surrounding it. And I was both disappointed and satisfied with the resulting film simultaneously. Director Strickland plays with the sort of mental breakdown story that horror fans know by heart from the films of classic directors from Polanski to Cronenberg. The difference here is that Strickland isn't twisting the screw of suspense as tightly as those two masters. But audio-visually his film is on par with those masterpieces.

The timid sound engineer Gilderoy (the sublime Toby Jones) is summoned to Italy to work on a movie he knows nothing about beforehand. The middle-aged man is still a real mama's boy, and pines for peace and nature. But his work requires him to stay at an artificial environment at all times, working with artificial sounds. To top all that, he finds the Italian film producers, led by Francesco (Cosimo Fusco) sleazy and unpleasant. The film he is working turns out to be a simple-minded torture-porn, all squishes, slashes, burning flesh and screaming young ladies. So Guilderoy's sanity slowly begins to crumble.

The film homages the old genre films made in the 70's. For fans of giallo and other violent Italian film, there are plenty of references to classics. But generally, the film resembles more artistic thrillers such as Blow Out or The Conversation, as the plot moves forward very slowly, and at first only tiny, almost insignificant little signals hint that something is very wrong.

The film tricks the viewer himself by mixing up timelines, fact and fiction and various layers of the story. These methods bring to mind Oliver Assayas's Irma Vep. Berberian is very confidently handled, and in a way that doesn't give any sense of catharsis or ending. This leaves the viewer hugely unsatisfied, which makes for the biggest flaw and the biggest strength of the film at the same time. Sometimes we need something to irk ourselves a little.

In the end technology destroys the nature-minded main character. He begins to infuse together with the very machines he works with. Mark Kermode compared the film to Videodrome. This comparison didn't cross my mind watching the film because there are so many more obvious (visual) inspirations. But that comparison is in fact perfectly apt. In both films, our subconscious, it's worst fears and greatest desires fuse together with an obsession to the means of a technology to create a hideous mutant.

Subsequent viewings may raise this film's score considerably in my mind. One thing is clear, the audio-visual strength on display here is so powerful, it is a pure waste of time to even attempt to watch this anywhere else than at a proper cinema.

★★★ 1/2

Tulpa (Italy, 2012)
Director: Federico Zampaglione

From one tribute to old Italian horror cinema to the other. Whereas Berberian attempts to say something about old movies and their technology, Tulpa is more pure regurgitation. It has the same inherent sadism than the films of the likes of Lucio Fulci, and the same obsessions with sexual perversions, laced with violence. But story-wise it fumbles up even worse.

Lisa Boeri (Claudia Gerini) is a tough-as-nails business woman by day. At night she likes to head off to an underground sex club to bang masked strangers. But it appears that a mysterious black-gloved stranger is following the club patrons home, and murdering them in the most brutal fashions. Ever-growing worry of her own survival starts to ruin Lisa's daily businesses, and she attempts to find out the identity of the killer before she gets offed too.

The film has at times a very odd, dreamlike quality, best presented by the creepy thin butler of the club (Nuot Arquint). This is contrasted by the very violent, pitch-black humour and sadism-laced murders. the best among them is a young lady's horrible merry-go-round trip around a ball of barbed wire. Even the strongest violence does have a surreal quality and doesn't feel like sheer torture-porn.

But the film loses steam as it goes along. The final act is a mess, with nothing remaining to hold the audience's interest in the mystery.

The film had it's first screenings at this year's FrightFest and Sitges festivals. After those screenings, the film was reported to be ludicrously bad, with its hokey dialogue and inexplicable plot-holes. After a frantic re-cut, the movie is mostly just dull. I probably would have greeted the stupider and sillier version more warmly.

★★

The Seasoning House (Great Britain, 2011)
Director: Paul Hyett

A feminist thriller from the Balkan war would seem to fit Love & Anarchy or Artisokka better than Night Visions. Still, the resulting film was still one of the most suspenseful of this year's lineup. The film is the feature debut of special effects wizard Paul Hyett, and very surprisingly it relies more on stark characterizations, moods and athmosphere than buckets of gore or any supernatural scares. The film is very realistic in all its violence, which makes it all the more scary.

In 1996, soldiers have locked the young ladies of a occupied village into a house where they come to rape them. The captive girls are kept under strict order by the house's master Viktor (Kevin Howarth), so as to please their clientele. But there is one girl that Viktor has spared form sexual violence, the deaf and mute Angel (Rosie Day). Viktor hasn't got anything good in store for her either, he just likes to torment her and keep her in fear as to when he will violently pop her cherry. But Angel has got an ace up her sleeve, she is small enough to fit into the ventilation shafts and crawlspaces of the house.

Much of the time the silent Angel goes around offering to help her fellow captives however she can. They are tortured, tied to beds and brutalized on a constant basis. As Viktor and the visiting soldiers get more and more ruthless and brutal, she makes up her mind to have her bloody vengeance on the lot.

Hyett utilizes the blueprints and the cross-cut of the house rather brilliantly. The viewer follows Angel through wall-busting transitional shots. The character moves from being a victim to being a vengeful, unreachable ghost to become hunted like an animal. Hyett's cynical and gray-scaled photography is hopless and cynical. The film piles up ghastly things so thickly and often that the viewer becomes numb to its horrors before the end. But the film is still very close of becoming a future classic. The only thing stopping it is that a film this harsh and brutal isn't one anyone would want to return to.

★★★ 1/2

Shogun Assassin (Japan/USA 1972/1980)
Directors: Kazuo Koike, Robert Houston

Roger Corman's film releasing company bought the rights to Kazuo Koike's classic Japanese samurai/ninja series Lone Wolf & Cub in the late 70's. Producers David Weisman and Robert Houston realized a super-violent serial hinging so tightly in Japan's history, and so purposefully repeating itself, wouldn't be a success in the west. So they had a bright idea to cut the first two films of the series into a new one, thus giving the film more of a dramatic ark and making it resemble a revenge western more. The film was also laced with modern synthesizer music and English dubbing. Against all odds, the end result was quite good, and became a classic among gore-hungry action fans.

The small boy Daigorō (Akihiro Tomikawa) narrates the story of how his father became a wandering ronin, a samurai without a master, home or honor. The executioner Ōgami Ittō (Tomisaburo Wakayama) is the right hand of the shogun of the Yagyu clan. The cruel, power-hungry shogun brings hundreds of prisoners of war for him to kill, but at the same time becomes fearful of his servant's skills and brutality. He orders his ninja assassins to kill Ōgami  but they only manage to murder his wife. The furious Ōgami makes his infant son Daigorō choose between life and death. Since the boy chooses the way of the sword, Ōgami doesn't gain straight revenge on his former master which would be suicidal. Instead, he sets off to walk around Japan and live by accepting the odd assassination job. The shogun's pursuing henchmen he can off one by one if he has to. And he is totally able to, too.

The cinema hasn't really seen a protagonist as bad-ass as Wakayama before or since. The stoic, chubby man appears to be always carrying grudges, yet can have surprising scenes of tenderness and care when taking care of his son. At the same time he suffers no remorse in cutting his enemies into tiny pieces and letting blood flow like geysers  The comically overblown amounts of splatter and inventive fight scenes make the film exciting. But the real value is in the surprisingly poetic, quiet scenes just before the slaughter. The film thus shares something with the films of Sergio Leone.

In the end, like in a true serial, Ōgami's exploits have no proper end. The wandering knight and his son just wander on to new adventures, on their never-ending walk to hell.

★★★★

Seeding of A Ghost (Zhong gui, Hong Kong 1983)
Director: Chuan Yang

At first glance, this year's final film of the festival didn't seem to be as insane and hilarious as previous Night Visions closers. But this Shaw Brothers horror classic gets crazier and crazier as it goes on, to the point where the oddity is so mind-blowing one has trouble keeping up with all its twists and turns. The early screening after a night of staying awake might be to blame. But more probably it's the fact that this film is so sprawling with ideas that the viewer has no time to recover until the next one comes from out of nowhere.

Why hello there! Am I delirious or is this really happening?

A regular Hong Kong taxi driver Anthony Fang (Norman Chu) hits a man while driving in a dark and gloomy street. He is relieved to see the man survived, but then the victim reveals himself to be an evil sorceror and promises that Anthony is cursed from there on. Anthony shrugs this off since he has a beautiful young wife (Mi Tien) to go home to. But soon, she grows ever more restless and embarks on a relationship with the card shark Fong (Norman Tsui). Coming home from her lover, she ventures into a dangerous neighborhood and is raped and murdered by hoodlums.

The broken Anthony seeks the evil sorceror to help him. The wizard promises to bring her back to life, but swears to use dark forces with will fare badly on the man already jinxed with bad luck. Anthony doesn't care. So, the wife is brought back as a supernatural zombie, but she's not particularly happy about it. The evil magic zombie starts to have her revenge on everyone who irked her, as well as their whole families, her former lover first and foremost. The resulting havoc destroys everything it comes across.

While the first half of the film is sold on ridiculous soft porn sex scenes, and stupidly melodramtic romance, the real fun begins when black magic comes properly into the picture. The resulting fight between the forces of good and evil are nothing short of spectacular, and feature a lot of actually quite good effects work. Blood and guts are pumped out ridiculous amounts. The film also develops the then-popular themes of body horror by featuring plenty of odd mutilations and human body parts turning into bloody, monstrous appendixes.

The film plays a lot on the presumed fairy take ending of love and goodness triumphing over hate and vengeance. But the film packs a mean punch, and its final scene in particular is deliciously wicked. I am not an expert on Chinese folklore, but I would have to say, if this represents it, the country is a lot more insane than I ever imagined.

★ or ★★★★★

So that was that. I hear the theater itself is calling me to return again and again. It's saying... I've always been at Night Visions.