Love & Anarchy Advent Calendar

 

So, we had a Love & Anarchy Film Festival this year as well. I was taking it slow in covering it, but then I realized it was over two months ago. But perhaps by starting an Advent Calendar I can cover 24 movies that were seen at the festival. They had chosen a really good program, and kept the audience as safe as possible in these circumstances. Check back to this post on every day of December to catch up on reviews.

1. First Cow (USA, 2019)
Director: Kelly Reichardt

Kelly Reichardt is known for making slow, quiet and ponderous movies, so it's kind of a jump when the new one is basically a buddy comedy of two grifters in the Old West. It's the kind of western that follows on the footsteps of McCabe & Mrs Miller and the like, everything is grey, brown, dirty, flimsily built and wooden. There's no glory or romanticism involved, even if the framing story tells of a modern woman finding out about the history involved.

The movie is a good, multilayered depiction of the friendship between two underdogs, played by John Magaro and Orion Lee. It also has some critique of the American Dream and drive towards entrepreneurship, which proves impossible for even the skilled ones if enough odds are against them right from the start. That's why they have to resort to cheating, stealing milk from the prize cow to improve their cakes and thus bake sales. The film has a cold, unflinching look at nature, which is at the same time utterly ruthless and oddly comforting. we are all parts of the woods in the end.

★★★★

2. Wendy (USA, 2019)
Dir. Benh Zeitlin

 

The impressionistic director Benh Zeitlin with his crew has prepared his follow-up to Beasts of a Southern Wild for seven years. While that one saw wonder and childlike amazement in poor and devastated Southeast terriories, this one takes a jump toward even more fantastic storytelling. It's a reworking of the story of Peter Pan.

The film is again visually stunning, and the locations in the Pacific Islands with an active volcano are nothing short of breathtaking. This time around, Zeitling guides a larger cast of child actors, none of which are as strong to carry a movie as Quvenzhané Wallis was. It also seems that the long production period and kids growing up so fast has made it necessary to tell the story fragmented and disjointed. It may be argued that its due to the logic following children's playtimes, but it makes for a tedious thing to follow. There are some kind of cool reworkings of the Pan story set to a more modern backdrop, but some are basically terrible. Mostly anything to do with Captain Hook and his pirates. Beasts of a Southern Wild was not without its problems, but it had a more clear purpose, now it seems it's a bit too childish and dumbed down for adults and not exciting enough for kids, satisfying no one.

★★

3. Lost Boys (Finland/Thailand 2020)
Dirs. Joonas Neuvonen, Sadri Cetinkaya

 

The documentary film Reindeerspotting made waves a decade ago, and also became a big hit in Finland. The movie depicted a group of drug addicts from Lapland in their daily lives, fighting against their urges, boredom, and the system. From the profits of the film, the real-life buddy group got enough money to fly to Thailand for the winter. After a few months of pure hedonism, sex, drugs and all other vices, only the film's director Joonas Neuvonen returned home. Soon after, one of the group was missing and the first film's main character Jani was found dead in shady circumstances.

The sequel film is of Neuvonen's attempts to recollect, what went wrong and to try to find out what exactly happened to his friends. The material he had for this film were fragmented, some in pooor quality. The reason the film took a decade was that it needed multiple screenwriters, editors and even co-directors to make sense of all this. Considering this, the resulting film is a wonder, a docufiction that is both a horrifying psychedelic nightmare in the vein of Gaspar Noé and Nicolas Winding Refn. On the other hand, it is also a sad look at the dead end facing the first film's characters. They might get some fleeting moments of happiness late in their lives, but it's all a illusion and the ground is approaching fast. This time around, Neuvonen puts himself more to under the magnifying glass, emphasizes his own bad feelings about the case and maybe his own fractured psyche.

★★★★

4. Radioactive (UK, Hungary, China, France, USA 2019)
Dir. Marjane Satrapi

 

The author of Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi, hasn't had the most successful career as a film director. His previous film, Voices, flopped in the Stateside, so she has had to resort to having an easy-to-sell biography project made with funding from around the world as her next project. The film tells the life story of chemist Marie Curie, discoverer of Radioactive elements. As it is, Radioactive has many moments of visual intrigue and good acting, but it can't avoid all the major pratfalls of the biography genre.

Rosamund Pike carries the film as headstrong Curie. As Satrapi tends to do with her comics work, she also intercuts the story with asides that show consequences of the discoveries, both good (radiation treatments) and bad (the Chernobyl accident). Those asides however reveal the film's limited budget, even if it's stretched admirably to fit these parts. The major problem is, however, that like most scientists, the life story by itself isn't really that captivating, and showing of all the various awards and stuff seems like reading from a Wikipedia page. The center is the relationship between Marie and Pierre (Sam Riley), but it lacks tension since Pierre is doing his best to share credits and help Marie as much as he can. The adventures in World War I with her daughter, shrugged off in the film's last 20 minutes, would have been more interesting to follow than focusing on the early parts.

★★

5. Nomadland (USA, Germany 2020)
Dir. Chloé Zhao

Director Zhao once again finds a way to make a western that's relevant to the themes for today. And she does it with a docufiction style, having plenty of people with the nomad lifestyle essentially play themselves. It's a touching film about the inability to find one's place in the world, but for once, not through the eyes of a teen or a young adult, but an actual adult, magnificently portrayed by Frances McDormand.

McDormand's Fern is tossed out after the closure of a major factory and an entire town's livelyhood. She does meaningless part-time work for Amazon and lives in her trailer, traveling the Great Plains of USA.  On her way, she tries developing relationships, but everything seems fleeting and avoid her grasp. The film has an anti-capitalist sting, but I feel the film could have had more brutally honest things to say about Amazon's worker practices, which were only alluded to here. It may be due to the realities of releasing such a melancholic film for adults, one can't rule out Amazon by biting the hand that may feed you. It's a shame Zhao herself seems to accept the odd job here and there, since she's moving on to the MCU. I think certain rising talents could produce incredible movies elsewhere, whereas with Marvel they'll probably do something reasonably entertaining but forgettable. But that's late-stage capitalism for you. It maximises profits, not art.

★★★★ 1/2

6. Dogs Don't Wear Pants (Koirat eivät käytä housuja, Finland, Latvia 2019)
Dir. J-P Valkeapää

 

I had actually seen this last year in festival screenings, but since then this movie has become a bit notorious abroad, so it warrants a mention. It's a sort of dark comedy of a man (Pekka Streng) struggling with grief finding a new lease in life with kinky sex and especially with a blossoming relationship with a dominatrix (Krista Kosonen).

Valkeapää is perhaps the most gifted visualist of the new generation of Finnish filmmakers. Here he has some shades of neon noir or the films of the likes of Noé and Friedkin, but manages to do something unique and undoubtedly his. It's a considerable step up of his previous work that had clearer pastiches. It's not as rough and kinky as one might expect, but it's also no surprise that some things get taken a bit far. The key of the movie is in its central triangle drama of sorts with a father being drawn into a sexy underworld, but his daughter also needing him in her struggles.

★★★★

7. My Octopus Teacher (South Africa 2020)
Dirs. Pippa Ehrlich, James Reed

Filmmaker Craig Forster recalls an unusual encounter with an octopus in an underwater kelp forest. Octopi are as intelligent as house cats, so the fil m goes out its way to show how they too can act as personally, gracefully and smartly as any pet, with footage to support it. I'm usually wary of films that make of animal behaviour to be to human-like, and there are some interpretations here that near the line. As it is however, is a reminder that we have incredible species around the world that have their own emotions, and we just can't go on destroying the landscapes in which they live in.  

★★★

Z is for Zombies

Happy Halloween! It used to be a tradition at this blog to each year take a look at a particular movie monster and talk about movies where they appeared. I never got to do the Zombie one, partly because everyone knows which ones are the good ones. George Romero's Dead Trilogy, Return of the Living Dead, 28 Days Later, Shaun of the Dead and the like. I would've liked to do top 10 more obscure zombie pictures, but never had the time to do enough research. But now I can talk about Italian zombies!

Most of the best Italian zombie movies use the walking dead pretty sparingly, as in Lucio Fulci's The Beyond. But that's not to say Romero's Dawn of the Dead wasn't really popular, and a major influence that showed how to do effective thrills on limited resources. Italians never really bothered with the light social commentary (we have Demons movies for that), they just liked the zombies as a cheap way of showing blood and gore. So, let's take a look.

Zombie Flesh Eaters (Zombi 2, 1979)
Director: Lucio Fulci

The grandaddy and best pure zombie flick Italians managed to do was marketed as a straight-up sequel to Dawn of the Dead (also known as Zombi). Fulci had the idea of doing a horror movie set on a remote island even before the premier of DotD, but relented in adding New York scenes in the beginning and end that can be seen of tying to Romero's film. One thing to note is that Italian films seem to have a better tie to the origins of zombie mythology in the voodoo culture... but use it mostly just to have insensitive depiction of natives and their savage ways. Zombi 2 is not the worst in this regard, it came later with movies that cashed in both the Cannibal movie craze and zombies, such as Zombi Apocalypse (a.k.a. Dr Butcher, M.D.)

Fulci's film is a rollicking good adventure, starring an adventure seeker named Peter West (Ian McCulloch) and a spunky reporter Anne Bowles (Tisa Farrow), who embark on a dangerous mission after investigating a mysterious boat in New York's harbor. Fulci had an excellent eye for set-pieces and planty of them linger on in your memory forever after seeing them, even if they are only tangentially related to the plot. The best among them are an incredible fight between and underwater zombie and (a real) shark, and a woman's eye being slowly pulled towards a sharp wood splinter (eat your heart out, Un chien Andalus).

 

While the zombies in Romero's movie were just cartoonish actors facepainted blue, here they are actually very creepy looking, wormy and worn-down corpses. I think the scene of the dead rising from their gravces is exceptionally creepy, with Fabio Frizzi's incredible score creating the necessary chills. Fulci's best skills are as a visualist, and this film started something of a golden age on his filmography (which we will take a closer look at soon enough).

★★★★

Zombie Flesh Eaters 2 (Zombi 3, 1988)
Dirs. Lucio Fulci, Bruno Mattei, Claudio Fragasso

A lot of unrelated films were sold as "Zombi 3" during the 1980's, but by the end of the decade, the aged Fulci was also lured to do an actual sequel. But the collaboration with the screenwriter Claudio Fragasso didn't work out that well. Due to creative differences, Fulci was let go and Fragasso finished the film with his regular collaborator, Bruno Mattei. Fulci later called the movie as made by "a bunch of idiots".

I think Fragasso was trying to do a more ambitious version of his previous movie, Zombie Creeping Flesh (more on which below) and he needed Fulci's visual eye to achieve this. The end result is actually pretty okay entertainment, even if it's pretty easy to spot the visually nice and athmospheric scenes as being done by Fulci, and the cheaper shots by the Mattei/Fragasso team. Tonally they can't even keep up with what the zombies can do, whether they can run, wield machetes or even speak... at... a.. very.. slow... rate...

A deadly virus gets loose from a research center and the military is employed to stop the spreading throughout Pacific Islands. There's also a group of rich dorks on a holiday that are on the way of the zombies. There's a lot of characters to follow, but never mind, most of them are zombie food anyway. There are some very memorable scenes, as one sees a zombie head fly out of a refrigerator and another a zombie baby burst out of its mother's belly, like a scene from Alien. The entire film is hosted by a radio DJ, who, in the end, is revealed to be a zombie himself. SURPRISE?

There are two other movies that are usually told to be official Zombie Sequels, After Death (1989) and Killing Birds (1988). Both are cheap, cheesy and not terribly exciting in any way, though the first one has a voodoo cult and ninja-looking masked zombies, and the latter some zombie birds attacking people in the vein of Hitchcock (although so does Zombie 3). So that's enough of them at this point.

★★★
 

Zombie Creeping Flesh  a.k.a. Hell of the Living Dead (Virus, 1980)
Dirs. Bruno Mattei, Claudio Fragasso

 

This cheapo Virus movie presents something Mattei always excelled at; marrying two very unrelated movies. As a deadly zombie virus takes over a military research center, most of the movie follows a group of soldiers of fortune travelling around Papua New Guinea. The film used mondo movie footage from Akira Ide's movie called L'isola dei canibali, and stole the score from Dawn of the Dead and Buio Omega. It's so shameless one has to give the edge out to it when compared to the more sleek Zombi 3.

But for a film made on such a shoe string budget, it had some ambitious gore scenes such as tearing out a woman's tongue and then grabbing the brain through the mouth with eyes bulging out. Also rare for a Mattei film, the plot moves along surprisingly briskly and keeps surprising the viewer. Of course, most of it is driven by the characters acting like total jerks or making the dumbest decisions the entire time. 

 One has to love Fragasso's ear for dialogue:
"Up your ass. Lt. Mike London, Shit Creek. The year is now."

★★★ 1/2

Burial Ground (Le notti del terrore, 1981)
Dir. Andrea Bianchi

For my money, however, the silliest of Italian cash-grab zombie pictures is this one, which tries to match Fulci's zombies in their creepiness, but just ends up having worm-faced mummy guys crawl out of flower beds and slowly stumble to grab the nearest overacter screaming their lungs out. Burial Ground is something of a morality take, as a swinger's weekend of debauchery in a secluded mansion takes a violent turn.

There's some very fucked up things going on in the family, particularly with the 12-year-old Michael (Peter Bark) who doesn't want to die a virgin so he tries to achieve his long-time dream and nail his own mother before the zombies get to him. It's one of the Italian films that uses the legendary Etruscan people as a source of ancient terrors, but neglects to include much of actual Etruscan culture to go with it. Nevertheless, we get a healthy amount of zombie monks, too.

It's a great film to watch during boozy nights with friends, as the actors themselves seem to be quite relaxed as well. I love how when cast member become zombies, they seem to be quite happy with the development.

★ or ★★★★★

D is for Demons! Demons!

Last month I missed out on doing any posts about Italian genre cinema, but October gives us the perfect time to catch up. And unholy monsters from hell gives us a perfectly seasonal adversaries to base a blog post on. In the late 80's, demons started to get the spotlight zombies used to have with a couple of fresh-faced directors.

Demons (Démoni, 1985)
Director: Lamberto Bava

The son of Mario Bava, Lamberto, started out as a assistant director in his father's films, but got to start his own directing career from the late 1970's onward. In the early 80's he was a ward of Dario Argento, who produced and co-wrote this 4th-wall-breaking movie to him. The artist also known as John Old Jr. considers this to be his best movie and probably is not wrong there.

Shot in Berlin, a group of different people have won a ticket to a film premiere in a brand new movie theatre. The showing is to be a horror movie that has effects never before seen on the big screen. The event soon turns to a nightmare as it turns out the group is trapped inside the theatre and blood-hungry demons start slaughtering them one by one. 

The film can't be said to be entirely serious. It has a sense of irony of having one of the cinema-goers be a blind man. Also the main theme from the soundtrack is probably the craziest composition Goblin's Claudio Simonetti ever did. But the film has a good eye for set pieces, a decent budget that paid for a lot of really expensive effects and a willingness to forget about certain details, such as the plot, in order to get going. The younger Bava never could quite match his old man's style, but still he was gifted as a creator of suspense and putting unique visions on screen. Not to mention gore, that comes bountifully. It was not actually a preference of Bava himself, so I expect Argento had his fingers in the game.

If there's a downside to this coked-up fever dream it's that Demons basically work too much like zombies, in that they can turn people into one of their own kind. That's why the apocalyptic ending seems way too familiar from plenty of zombie movies, Italian or otherwise, that show the disease spread to the entire world. But that was the 1980's when people had a common fear of an illness bringing about the end of the world.

★★★★

Demons 2 (Dèmoni 2... l'incubo ritorna, 1986)
Dir. Lamberto Bava

Like the Die Hard films, it seemed the Demons movies also were going to be set on bigger and bigger settings. This one sees an entire high-rise become a battlefield when Demons attack! This time they won't step out of the movie screen, but come from your TV sets standing in the most sacred places of your own homes.

The film has a new set of stock characters with their flimsy character arcs, or just colorful deaths. It feels the script is even more haphazard than the first one as a lot of set-up is just forgotten along the way. It's not bad, but it all just feels so uninspired. Almost all good ideas of the movie were already done in the first one.

There's still some points of interest in this. Fans of architecture in Italian films may get a kick on how the film moves between different apartments. It's critiques of modern living and entertainment are also somewhat similar to the mayhem seen in Gremlins 2 four years later, but it doesn't really go far enough into these to reach the same dizzying heights.
 

★★ 

The Church (La chiesa, 1989)
Dir. Michele Soavi

 Along the way, Argento had a falling out with Bava, opting rather to work with his own second unit director, Michele Soavi. The man also called last great giallo director had debuted with Stage Fright.  Reportedly, Soavi thought the Demons films to be "pizza shlock" and wanted to make a more sophisticated horror movie rather than a continuation. Still, his second film was sold to some audiences as Demons 3, as well as his next movie The Sect as Demons 4.

The Church is interesting in just how Catholic it is. Past bloodletting done in the name of the Church comes to haunt modern librarians and priests trying to work in a building built on the blood of innocents. In Italy in particular, it seems a lot of the most bitter agnostic attacks against the power of religion came from horror movies, which is probably why they were seen so subversive back in the day.

 
Soavi digs a hole for himself by having a too good, brutal and savage prologue set in the Crusades. The opening scene reads like something out of the catalogue of Paul Verhoeven, another critic of the violence done by institutions. But after the opening, the film lulls in athmosphere a bit too long. The Church itself with its dark corridors and ominous statues is a very nice environment, but after enough camera drives and crash zooms where scarcely nothing happens makes the audience groan for the movie to roll along. At this point Soavi wasn't that skillful in building up tensions, part of the reason being that his characters are always so paper-thin as to be boring to follow.

The film's music is an odd cocktail of Goblin, Keith Emerson and some Philip Glass compositions that seem to be taken straight out of Koyaanisqatsi. It's a good measuring stick on how Soavi has problems establishing a clear thoroughline for the film. Visually, though, it's very striking with magnificent effects work by Sergio Stivaletti. The gore and creature scenes in particular are nasty and memorable, so the film has plenty to offer for fans of Soavi's style, even if the film as a whole somewhat creaks at the seams.

★★★
 

Cemetary Man (DellaMorte DellAmore, 1994)
Dir. Michele Soavi

Since we are covering double D's, I have to throw in also Soavi's probably most popular and unique movie. Loosely based on the fumetti comic Dylan Dog, Dellamorte Dellamore is a kind of unique little gem in the horror comedy genre, a sort of match between the general skewed worldview and sense of humor of Danger: Diabolik and the hysterical antics of Evil Dead 2.

Rupert Everett plays a lonely but cynical cemetary groundskeeper Francesco Dellamorte who has a surprising amount tof work on his hands. The cemetary turns the dead back to life after three days so he has to make sure the zombies stay underground. But the lovelorn young man can't help to fall for either widows or corpses of  young women, which is harder to combine with his line of work.

The film has a autumny visuals where it's all shades of brown and grey, down to earth, which contrasts nicely the cartoony aspects of the story and performances on screen. The film has a episodic nature, where it does resemble the comic books it is adapting. Likewise in the amount of sex and violence on screen, although to contemporaries like Braindead, the film seems downright tame.

Not only about the duality of love and death, the film also depicts the longing to escape a small town and its repetitive cycles. Dellamorte goes through the same loops every night, but refuses to learn or to move on. His mute partner Gnaghi (François Hadji-Lazaro) fares better, and genuinely falls in love, albeit to a severed head. The movie, as outrageous a premise as it has and dry humor, is actually in favor of enjoying life and seeing as much of it as one can.

★★★★

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.

★★★

I don't like drugs (but the drugs like movies)

Happy 4/20! I don't do drugs (though I'm still far from being a winner), but plenty of filmmakers either have, or have been inspired by drug-usage to create some perplexing visions. I take a look at four cult films that vary, whether their portrayal of drugs is the cause of, or solution to life's bigger problems.

Reefer Madness, a.k.a. Tell Your Children (USA, 1936)
Director: Louis J. Gasnier

The original anti-drug "educational" film gained a huge cult following in the following decades. Potheads from all over the world, and of all times gathering around to giggle at the stern image this film gives about their culture. There has also been a colorized version of the film which has the added interest in having different-colored pot smoke to come out of different characters, all relying on their mood.

At a local high school, Dr. Carroll (Joseph Forte) narrates a tale to a PTA meeting of how easily the youth can be corrupted. Drug pushers Mae (Thelma White) and Jack (Carleton Young) lure high school students to drop by at Mae's to smoke some "reefer cigarettes". This drug-smoking has various horrifying effects on the teens. One leaves the apartment intoxicated with his car and runs over a pedestrian. A girl is almost raped at a wild drug party. Sex-crazed potheads battle over girls, which causes a gun to go off. Won't somebody please think of the children!

The film is definitely a C-grade product of its time, with which I mean it moves along with a glacier's speed, the acting is hammy and the entire ordeal repetitive and quite boring. The funniest parts involve the straight-out finger pointing, hammering home the message to speak to the kids about the dangers of drugs. Which, of course have been wildly exaggerated and their portrayal hardly based on any empirical evidence. Yet still, you'd probably have to be stoned to enjoy this properly.

★★

Mystery of the Leaping Fish (USA, 1916)
Directors: Christy Cabane, John Emerson

Of course, American attitude over drugs hasn't always been as stern. In the early 20th century you could buy even hard drugs at a pharmacist's. A hilarious relic of this time is this short film, starring Douglas Fairbanks himself. Also appearing is Lupe Velez, best remembered from wanting to have a suicide that would give the press a field time and then dying with her head on the toilet. This comedy features the coke-fiend private detective Coke Ennyday (really!), who actually gets plenty of help to solving a case from chasing the horse. Regular cocaine ingestion also helps his crippling depression.

The Leaping Fish of the title refers to a sort of surfboard / blow-up toy.

There are several quite perplexing visions throughout the film. Ennyday is a sort of an inventor, having several odd inventions in his home, such as a clock on his wall, that tells him when it's time to shoot dope. Money launderers iron out a whole mountain dollar bills. Ennyday's car has the same chess-pattern as his costume. Surfers lie on silly-looking blow-up fish dolls. The movie does run out of steam after a while, which makes it good it's only 25 minutes long. The end twist is a bit dumb, but it gives Fairbanks a chance to really parody his image as a clean-cut hero.

As if taking this role wasn't enough by itself.

The film was co-written by Tod Browning and D.W. Griffith of all people, which makes one ponder how much of their own films were directed under the influence.

★★★ 1/2

Side note: These two older movies are public domain by now, so they can be legally watched all over the internet by now.

Liquid Sky (USA, 1982)
Director: Slava Tsukerman

Aesthetically beautiful, but somewhat incomprehensible plot-wise, this psychedelic epic has truly earned its cult-movie status. Pity it seems director Tsukerman had to return to his home planet in the vastness of space soon after this was finished. This product is truly one of a kind. The film has clearly inspired Gaspar Noe on his work.

Frames tell a lot more about this film than words ever could.

Checking out what it's supposed to be about, microscopic aliens arrive on Earth on a flying dinner plate to seek for the chemical construction that makes heroin. Spying out the hedonistic life of a New York penthouse, the aliens realize that sexual pheromones are a lot more potent drug. A German scientist and an androgynous model follow the aliens and their ordeals nearby.

But all that nonsense is irrelevant. This is a steamy, sweaty film for a hot summer night. It's a vibrant, vivid, colorful piece of art that awakens emotions on a larger scale. It's a twisted, dark and sometimes nightmarish movie. The film's synthesizer soundtrack is perhaps even more iconic than the movie itself. The whole ordeal taps into New York City subculture of the times, when punk aesthetics were swept away in the wake of New Wave, and the hedonism and self-centerdness of the 80s was truly setting in. And before the discovery of AIDS, when coke-fiends were banging each other without a care in the world.

Now, since I watched it drunk, the film might have taken place in my fever dreams at least a bit. that's why I hesitate to give it the full ★★★★★ score. But when I get a chance to see it again, it may rise to new heights.

★★★★

Blue Sunshine (USA, 1978)
Director: Jeff Lieberman

For an even more sinister look at the drug-usage, this sci-fi thriller is fearful of the loss of control connected to drug usage. So much so that it warns the threat to be so vast as to be able to cross even a long period of time. Even worse than acid flashbacks, the users of the form of LSD known as Blue Sunshine, lose their minds years after having taken the drug. They lose their hair and grow an urge to murder. And murder just anyone in their vicinity, family member, random stranger or authority figure. Jerry Zipkin (Zalman King) is falsely accused of a mass murder at a party. On the run, he must gather evidence of the secret behind Blue Sunshine to clear his name and save the life of a presidential candidate.

A plot ripped straight from the headlines!

It's another drug film that's definitely a product of its time. The paranoia and cynicism of the 70s saw that the carefree 60s had caused a lot of dangers to the modern world. These threats would blossom when erstwhile hippies have grown adult and risen to the position where they rule the world. Seedy discos, corrupt politicians and untrustworthy former friends occupy the modern world.

And nobody still thinks of the children!

The film is quite offbeat and bald mass murderers that cross their eyes when flipping out, look quite silly. Still, everything is played out with a straight face, which works better for the threatening athmosphere than a tongue-in-cheek approach would. The film is unevenly paced, with long stretches of time running on empty, and with important scenes, like the climax, taking place in a flick of the wrist. It's a deliberate exercise in tricking the audience's exceptions, but still it causes the film to be quite uneven in interest at times as well. But it's still well worth a check if you fear for the acid flashbacks to come.

★★★ 1/2

Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I hear a bell toll.