Laurel and Hardy - The Silent Years: 1927

Odd Pairings

Laurel and Hardy  - 
The Silent Years: 1927
Various directors for Hal Roach
USA 1927
Eureka Masters Of Cinema

We’ve always liked Laurel and Hardy in my house. When I was a kid growing up in the 1970s, the dynamic duo were on television regularly… until around the mid-1980s when legal wrangling from various studios and estates kept them off people’s TV sets for decades… but their shorts... their talkies... were on TV quite often before that and we used to watch them a lot. My dad even had a Super 8 projector in the loft with a few reels of Super 8 cut downs from their silent movies, which he used to say were possibly even funnier than their talkies. 

So it was a welcome surprise when Eureka Masters Of Cinema released some of those early silents, the surviving movies from 1927, on Blu Ray disc towards the end of 2024 as a double disc set called Laurel and Hardy  - The Silent Years: 1927. A perfect Christmas present for my dad and, over a number of weeks, we watched one a week in front of our family Friday night movie. The films included here are Lucky Dog, Duck Soup, Slipping Wives, Love ‘Em And Weep, Why Girls Love Sailors, With Love and Hisses, Sailors Beware, Do Detectives Think, Flying Elephants, Sugar Daddies, The Second Hundred Years, Call Of The Cuckoo, Putting Pants On Philip and The Battle Of The Century (which I think is one of the films that got remade by them as a talkie too). 

Now, I will have to say from the top, something that Eureka perhaps should have mentioned on their packaging and marketing… although it’s quite obvious why they didn’t. And that is that, for the most part, while it’s true that Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy both feature in every short movie on these discs… they are rarely paired together and sometimes don’t really even meet much in the course of these stories (which, of course, all amount to extended, epic sketches, running around 20 minutes each). So, it’s not quite, until the very last two films maybe (with small exceptions), the boys reach their full on ‘Laurel and Hardy’ alter egos, for sure. 

However, there is a lot of interest and entertainment to be had looking at the way these two actors evolved their characters and their on screen relationship together as the shorts went on. For instance, a lot of Stan Laurel’s trademarks such as the crying at the camera and the funny, legs akimbo jump he sometimes does are firmly there right from the get go, whatever character he’s playing. Similarly, Oliver Hardy’s facial expressions are very much the personae he inhabits more famously down the line, in most of these. And both of them, right from the get go, are constantly looking into the camera at the audience at appropriate moments and breaking the fourth wall… something else they used to do a lot in their double act. And there are a few times when they’re paired up and are brilliant together (Stan Laurel was obviously contributing to the content of these by this point) and you wonder why they are back in a different capacity in the next movie. 

So in Duck Soup, for example… which was a lost film for years and helps underline the importance of restorations and releases like this… the regular routine is almost there. And, again, in Do Detectives Think?, the two are partnered up in exactly the kind so of situations they would find themselves in as a phenomenon in their own right. And asides from their circumstances, The Second Hundred Years seems not far from what they would become either. Now, most people say it wasn’t until Putting Pants on Phillip as to where everything came together but, that seems a little less like the pairing than those I just mentioned… although I think we can all agree that The Battle Of The Century, with its extended custard pie fight, is where everything comes together nicely for them. So it’s a little of a shame that its the last film to come within the boundaries of the title of this particular collection… although Eureka have already just released an equally limited edition set of their silent shorts from 1928 (yeah, I’m saving that one for a Father’s Day* present… it’s currently hidden in a stack of blu rays). 

The set is sometimes funny, occasionally hilarious but almost always interesting. The restorations are all great and hard won with the only casualty, dammit, being a bridging sequence in The Battle Of The Century between the two main acts, which has been recreated by a few stills which promise more than they can deliver here, alas. And a shout out to fans of Abbott and Costello on that particular film. Look to Ollie’s left in the crowd of spectators at the boxing match and you will quite clearly see a young Lou Costello amongst the onlookers. We knew he was supposed to be in there and we thought we’d have a hard time spotting him but he’s using the same mannerisms for rowdy whistling he would use in his movies two decades later so, yeah, he’s easy to spot and it’s nice to see one half of one of the great double acts rubbing shoulders briefly with the greatest comedy double act of all time. 

And that’s me done, I think on this one. If you are a fan of comedy cinema then Laurel and Hardy - The Silent Years: 1927 is an absolutely essential purchase for your library. I’m really pleased to have had the opportunity to see these and I am looking forward to the next set immensely. 

 * RIP Brian Michael Cox 

Resident Evil (2026)

Permanent Residents

Resident Evil (2026)
Directed by Zach Cregger
Germany/United States/Czech Republic/Canada
Australia/New Zealand/France 2026
Columbia Pictures

So yet another new version of Resident Evil hits our screens, an adaptation (of sorts) of the successful series of video games which have been going since the 1990s. So this is, what, the 8th Resident Evil movie (counting only the live actions films and not the animated features... I need to see those, perhaps) and it’s also the second reboot, so to speak, since the last movie in the franchise, also a reboot, failed to gain any traction. 

So this one is the next film from the writer/director Zach Cregger, who had the huge horror hit Weapons last year (reviewed here). He’s apparently adapted another of his stand alone scripts into a Resident Evil movie, after getting the green light to be part of the franchise and, yeah, it kinda shows, in some ways, that it’s a rewrite of something else... but not to the detriment of the franchise, for sure. I’ve not had much experience of the video games but I know the movies and... well, none of the main characters seem to be in this. Not a problem though. 

I will say up front that I almost didn’t bother with this one because... surprise, surprise... the trailer put me off. Again. Does anybody in Hollywood know how to cut a trailer anymore. All I’ve seen for the last year are bad trailers which made me question whether I wanted to trek out for the movies or not. Better marketing people are definitely needed here.

Anyhow, I saw it and I’ll tell you now, I was rather pleasantly surprised. Even though I kind of hated the main character. He’s played by Austin Abrams who plays him quite similarly (as written, I would guess) to the horrible, drop-out character he played in Weapons so, yeah, I’m bringing baggage with me but, I at least overcame that hurdle. The actor does what he does well and, even though the character is not somebody I would want to hang out with, he does make things believable for the audience. 

Okay, so the film itself is not the action movie that the previous films were. It’s actually got a few elements in it which make it much closer to the experience of an audience member playing a video game and, I couldn’t quite work out if I liked this approach or not. But, it’s certainly effective so, what we have is a character who has absolutely no idea what is happening in Racoon City and its surrounding areas and, yup, we stay just with this character through the entire movie. Like you would if you were playing a game. It even switches to first person view in a couple of shots but... don’t remember that happening in the game I played (or tried to play, I was useless at the copy of Resident Evil 2 which was bundled with my old Playstation), to be honest. 

So he, and the audience, has no idea of what’s going on and... bullets are almost as much of a problem here as they were, quite deliberately, in the original game. I remember never having enough bullets when playing and you’d be forced to sneak around zombies (or actually organisms much more complex in this movie) and be constantly looking for more ammunition. Same thing here... the central character is always checking his shells and bullets and worrying about how he’s going to solve his next problem.

And the creatures in this are impressive. They are all mutations of some kind and make for some very surreal and grotesque encounters throughout the movie... bringing many a surprise and unexpected dilemma to challenge the protagonist as he goes to try and deliver his medical supplies (that’s the basic plot of the movie, by the way... a medical courier is trying to deliver something to the hospital in Racoon City but, by the time he gets there, things have already gone pear shaped).

Now, the director is not above resorting to many a horror movie cliché in this... so you get scenes of flickering lights meant to reveal and conceal, to keep the audience on edge. I even heard the old reliable ‘put a blatant heartbeat tempo’ on the score to ramp things up. So, yeah, it’s an exercise in jump scares too and... I can’t blame him for trying. Those don’t always work but the sheer inventiveness and gory creativity between each creature encountered more than makes up for this and sometimes work better as a jump scare in themselves. 

And I’m not sure I want to say much more abut Resident Evil (2026)... it’s not a film you are expecting if you only know the other seven movies but, it’s pretty effective and does feel much more like you’re being thrust into a ‘survival horror’ environment than those earlier movies too. It’s doing something right and I had a pretty good time with this one, I would say. I’ll definitely be picking this one up on Blu Ray when it comes out.

Tales Of Halloween

Pumpkin Patch

Tales Of Halloween
Directed by Darren Lynn Bousman, Axelle Carolyn, 
Adam Gierasch, Andrew Kasch, Neil Marshall, 
Lucky McKee, Mike Mendez, Dave Parker, 
Ryan Schifrin, John Skipp and Paul Solet
USA 2015 
Arrow Films DVD Region 2

Well then... I finally got around to watching the elusive Tales For Halloween in time for this year’s Halloween posts. I say elusive because I bought this one a couple of years before the pandemic at FrightFest for a fiver but, every October when I try and watch it, it seems to have buried itself under a pile of movies and I never seem to be able to lay hands on it but, this year it managed to turn up when a pile of physical media overturned itself on top of me and so I put it to one side for the right time. 

And I have to say... for a portmanteau film, which are often hit and miss anyway, this one is pretty good. You have ten short movies by ten different directors (some of them very famous genre directors like Lucky McKee and Neil Marshall) and they all seem to take place on the same night, although in different towns.* You can tell it’s the same night because, on many of them, George Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead is playing on TV (although, in one of the clips, it seems to be Carnival Of Souls). 

And, contrary to what you would expect form a string of shorts put together, even the ones that are maybe not quite as good as the others are still quite watchable and immensely entertaining. So ten, not bad, movies. And to boot you have a radio DJ linking some (but not all, she’s definitely underused in this movie) of the segments played by none other than Adrienne Barbeau, delivering her full on, smoky radio voice, as she did when she played radio DJ Stevie Wayne in John Carpenter’s The Fog (reviewed here). So more or less an homage but, presumably not named as such due to copyright reasons, I would guess. 

Standouts for me would be Neil Marshall’s segment Bad Seed, where a carved pumpkin comes to life and starts eating people, because it’s really silly and, considering I don’t like slasher movies so much (unless they’re Italian), the Friday 31st segment directed by Mike Mendez, which features a cute, stop motion looking alien (it’s probably really CGI) looking for a trick or treat. 

Also, another nice thing is the use of various famous directors amongst the actors in the odd cameo. So along with people like Barbara Crampton and Lin Shaye you have the likes of Stuart Gordon, Mick Garris and John Landis coming along for the ride. Which is nice and perhaps shows what a close knit community the horror community is (the great Dr. Rebekah McKendry is also in this). 

Added to this, among a whole list of composers scoring the shorts, we have title music done by the great Lalo Schifrin. Now, as far as I’m concerned it’s not one of his best but I did notice that one of the directors is also a Schifrin so, I have to wonder if the title music was pulled in as a favour to someone. But I also loved a musical moment in the segment The Weak And The Wicked where a pocket watch brings us to a flashback of a memory in the same style as a Sergio Leone western... and the music suddenly gets all Morricone in tone. So, yeah, some nice things to be found in this selection, to be sure. 

And that’s me finally done with Tales From Halloween. A short review perhaps but a definite recommendation from me if you want something fun and frivolous to watch during this years ‘Halloween festivities’. I believe some people are still doing this stuff and certainly my local Tesco, with it’s gazillions of novelty horror items put out for the kids in October, seems to indicate that it’s still a thing. 

*Nope. Tag line on the poster says “One Night. One Town. Ten Chilling Stories.” so, I guess that didn’t quite come across to me because, well, all the stories should be overlapping with each other then, right?

Backrooms

Out On A Liminal

Backrooms
Directed by Kane Parsons
USA/Canada 2026 
A24

Warning: Mild spoilers.

Okay... so I finally caught up with this year’s successful horror(ish) movie Backrooms. It’s based on a viral and free youtube series, called The Backrooms, also written by Kane Parsons who, at the young age of 19, directed this feature film reboot (or possibly a continuation but focusing on different characters) and giving A24 what is, to date, their most successful movie. So I guess we’ll be seeing more of these... especially since it’s predicted that a trend in modern horror movie releases seem to be following this route of ‘liminal horror’... which I’m not 100% quite understanding but I think I get the vibe of it, right enough. 

The film stars the great Chiwetel Ejiofor as Clark who, honestly, is always a joy to watch but I found the American accent he’s putting on for this totally changed the way I responded to him. I dunno, I seemed to have less respect for him with that accent but, given the path the character takes by the end of the movie, perhaps that’s just as well. The film also stars Renate Reinsve as Mary, his psychiatrist and, the plot is as follows...

Set in 1990, Clark, who has been kicked out by his wife and now lives in his unsuccessful furniture store... Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire... is having problems not with just the lack of customers but, also, various power outages and manifestations within the store. Then, one night, he finds a part of a wall in a basement which one can just magically pass through into... the backroooms. A bizarre, somewhat minimal and extremely surreal, vast place which is very unsettling and, as we find out, can be very deadly to anyone who gets lost wandering its corridors. On another trip into the realm, Clark takes his cameraman employee said cameraman's girlfriend (who both work at the store), played by Finn Bennett and Lukita Maxwell, to document things so he can prove to his psychiatrist he’s not mad. None of them make it out of the place on this journey in and so, when he disappears, Mary goes looking for him herself and... also stumbles on to the portal... where she also finds herself wandering the backrooms. 

And... it’s genuinely terrifying. For me anyway. I’ve talked to at least one person who didn’t find it scary at all and I can certainly understand that... it’s not full on jump scares and so on. There is a small amount goriness though and the absolute suspense of waiting to see what’s lurking around the next corner is going to affect people differently. And even though I was onto the director’s old, clichéd trick of showing something terrible happening in the opening sequence so the audience can fill in the blanks and know, before the main protagonists do, that there is something to fear in this environment... it still worked for me and I was on the edge of my seat for most of the film. 

One of the unsettling things about it is the surreal nature of the objects and creatures populating these spaces. They have been created by a force which doesn’t quite get things right. It immediately, when Clark first grabs a chair which is fused into another, made me think of the great Andrei Tarkovsky’s adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, where the manifestation of the dead wife doesn’t have buttons on her replicated dress. In this movie it’s explained by the idea of describing a dog to someone who’s never seen one and then having them draw it. It’s pretty cool and I’m glad people are revisiting this kind of concept. 

And, when Mary finally finds Clark in the warren of backrooms... things take a turn and are ramped up quite a bit. It’s here that the film reaches the height of surrealism and ultimate nastiness, as we try to reframe the main protagonists and their relationship to reality. All leading to a conclusion which some people have found a little unsatisfying but I thought the film did land the ending quite well. So, nope, not everything... or anything for that matter... is explained at the end of the film but, if the writer/director had done that (and I don’t think he would want to or even knows what’s going on himself) then I don’t think you could get away with the inevitable sequel... which I’m sure this film will have. This is clearly going to start a franchise (plus be a figurehead for liminal horror for the future) and I can’t see that launching very successfully if everything were tied up in a neat little package by the end of the first film. You need something for the audience to come back to otherwise... well, otherwise they won’t. 

So that’s me done with what was, for me, a truly unsettling movie (I’m glad to say). Backrooms perhaps deserves all the fuss and box office breaking popularity its received and I’d give this one a hard recommend. 

Curse Of The Fly

Live And Let Fly

Curse Of The Fly
UK 1965 
Directed by Don Sharp 
20th Century Fox 
Shout Factory Blu Ray Zone B

Six years after Return Of The Fly (reviewed here), the British made their own follow on which, in terms of certain things, doesn’t really make sense and, also, was bound to be a bit of a disappointment. Although, as a film in its own right, I think it’s a much maligned and pretty good, old school ‘comfort horror’ myself.

Two big reasons that I suspect that this one bombed are as follows...

Let’s look at the poster for Curse Of The Fly because it says it all. The tagline reads, “Piece by piece... atom by atom... humans invisibly teleported through time and space - - Re-entering Earth as Half-human Monsters from the 4th Dimension!” Well okay then... if you take that very literally, space becomes just another dimension and so does time saved in travel, I guess. Half-human monsters are present but... yeah, this whole tagline is written in a pretty sensationalist style, it seems to me. This is not quite the film that people were getting.

But to compound that even further... there’s a big picture of a fly head on the poster and, let me tell you that asides from a quick glimpse of a photo from a previous film (and I’ll get to that later too), no flies are in any way present in this movie. So.... if you look at the word curse as meaning more of a legacy of bad luck you might just get away with it... but the audience was expecting a fly-man, thank you very much! 

Okay. so the film has two connecting tissues to the other movies. One is that it’s the next generation of the Delambre family working on a teleportation device between London, England and Montreal, the two main protagonists played by Brian Donlevy (the first movie Quatermass) and George Baker. So it’s the third generation of Delambres... but there are only six years passed between the films’ settings. Yeah, the Math’s doesn’t work out does it?

Plus... the ‘just escaped from a mental asylum’ love interest with a mysterious past, played by Carole Gray, marries the George Baker character within a week of meeting him, not knowing what she’s gotten herself into. By the way, no real revelation (unless I missed it again this time around) is made as to why she was in the asylum in the first place. All we know is that a detective is pursuing her. And as the rest of the story plays out... Baker’s first wife is still alive as a mismatched thing who unfortunately survived an earlier teleport experiment... but, hey, she can still play the piano pretty well! That’s about as much as I want to say about the story. 

Secondly, an ex detective consulted in his hospital bed is the character Inspector Charas, the helpful cop from the first movie. But, since none of the actors wanted to return for this film, he’s instead played here by Charles Carson, wearing handy sunglasses in the hopes that the audience won’t know the difference. But, again, three generations down... he still shouldn’t be looking quite this young. None of the figures are adding up!

However, all that aside... I really liked this film and I absolutely adore the opening credits. Panning in on the mental asylum, we see a window smash out with about three times the amount of glass coming towards the camera (which gives me pause to think that the film might originally have been a prospect to be shot in a 3D process). Then, the rest of the credits sequence comprises of beautifully shot scenes of Carole Gray running towards or past the camera in slow motion, wearing only a bra and panties (my mum identified the correct part of the decade this was made by the model of underwear said lady is wearing in this sequence, I’m proud to say). I love this opening and it’s backed up nicely with Bert Shefter’s quite pretty, piano dominant score for the movie. About which...

Sawtell and Shefter was often seen as a pairing on many genre soundtracks of the day. But the way they were utilised for The Fly franchise is interesting. The Fly (reviewed here) was scored by Paul Sawtell as a solo gig. Then, Return Of The Fly was scored by the familiar pairing of Sawtell and Shefter. And for Curse Of The Fly it’s Bert Shefter going solo. So... yeah... an interesting phenomenon. Can’t think of many composers who quite (even Newton Howard and Zimmer) ended up in this formation. 

And, like I said, I was fine with most of the rest of the movie and, once the initial disappointment about there being no giant fly/humans in it is overcome, it’s a pretty fun B-movie as far as I’m concerned. A fun B-movie with some absolutely breathtaking cinematography. And if you want to see another entertaining sight... this film has the great Burt Kwouk sporting a very out of place moustache. So, yeah, see it for that alone. 

My only other big problem with this is the stupidity of the movie making exactly the same mistake as many books and articles on The Fly franchise have in the past. When Charas is going through the Delambre file of the events of the very first film, he pulls out a photo of The Fly to show the detective. First of all, how would anyone have taken a photo of him like this in the first story when only his wife saw her husband in this state? But secondly... and much more alarmingly... the photo he takes out is not the fly as seen in that first movie (which is never seen without a lab coat) but the much larger headed fly from Return Of The Fly (a story which did not even involve Charas). So this makes absolutely no sense and is a really bad error, as far as I’m concerned.

And that’s me about done on Curse Of The Fly. Like I said, I really enjoyed revisiting it and am happy to watch again at some point in the future. A film perhaps better served with a title which sets up less expectations that it never satisfies but, even so, worth a watch as far as I’m concerned. 

Return Of The Fly

Flying Tonight

Return Of The Fly
USA 1959 
Directed by Edward Bernds 
20th Century Fox
Shout Factory Blu Ray Zone A

Warning: More spoilers buzzing around.

I don’t know why Return Of The Fly has such a bad rep because, I revisited again for this blog and, honestly, I think it’s a pretty well made monster B-movie. Yes, it has a completely different approach and execution to the slightly superior The Fly (reviewed here), from the year before but, it certainly works as a sequel (asides from one ridiculous continuity error which I’ll get to in a little while) and it mostly makes good sense. 

Now Vincent Price was disappointed that this wasn’t shot in colour as the first film was and, yeah, I’d like to have seen a colour version of this for sure but, I dunno, the black and white photography on this one looks pretty good to me and doesn’t detract from the overall atmosphere... if anything, adding to it and adhering more to the style of a B-movie creature feature of the time. Price, who was just about reinvented by this and a couple of other movies as the king of horror in the US, also objected to the screenplay which was reportedly a lot different to the one he signed on for by the time it reached the shooting stage but, yeah, like I said, it’s more of a throwback to something less edgy and more fun so, I dunno, it works pretty well for me. 

We start this one fifteen years after the events of the original movie, at the funeral of the leading lady character of that film, Helen. In attendance are both Vincent Price as François and the young son of Helen from the first movie, Philippe, who has grown up to be played by a young Brett Halsey, long before his days of saxophoning up young ladies’ undercarriages with his mesmerising musical prowess (yeah, I haven’t got to that movie yet but I have it in a pile to watch for the blog fairly soon, so I’ll get there). 

Philippe is a troubled student of similar electrical experimentation obsession as his father and he naturally wants ot follow in his father’s footsteps... or tarsus steps, I guess. So he and a very shady colleague called Alan, played by David Frankham, work with a reluctant François to replicate and improve on his father’s process. However, Alan is really an alias for a shady criminal who is going to steal the secrets to sell to the highest bidder. When a police guy comes after him... due to a bunny pattern being deliberately disintegrated but not yet integrated until the following day... he kills the policeman and teleports him and reintegrates him with a combination of the bunny... so we get a little bunny with human hands and feet and a big guy with bunny hands and feet... which manages to look both horrifying and utterly silly at the same time. 

Anyway, when Alan is finally discovered by Phillipe, Alan knocks him out and shuts him in the teleportation device with, you guessed it, a fly. So there you go, one big difference from this and the first one is that, in the first, the monster was created by a careless mistake while in this one, the monster is deliberately created as a purposeful act of evil. Anyway, things go badly for everyone and the resultant fly/man hybrid Phillipe goes on a rampage to find the criminal. Long story short, because the film does have some twists and turns (this is a very simplified summary), the villain is brought to justice and the two results of the teleportation mix up are sent through again, restoring Phillippe back to his former self (oh, please!). 

And I loved it. It’s a really entertaining monster movie and, it even has a big improvement on the original... at least I think so. The design of the creature (perhaps due to some gigantism problems they are having when they are first trying to perfect the teleport) is that it has a much larger, somewhat silly but satisfying fly head design and, bizarrely, this is usually also mistakenly used in lots of books and articles as being the design from the first movie. Even action figure designs (I’m going on to ebay as soon as I’ve done writing this review to try and get hold of one) tend to use the look of the creature from this sequel as a stand in for the original. 

If I had one fault with the film, other than the side lining of the romantic interest... played by Danielle De Metz making her debut in this, to just a few scenes here and there... it’s the one big continuity plot point that sticks out like a sore thumb to me. As in, the son goes back to his father’s laboratory to get his old notes but, as we all know from the first film, those notes were destroyed by his father when in his fly state... so there’s no way they could have survived but, here they are using them.

Other than that though... and with a shout out to Paul Sawtell and Bert Shefter’s wonderful score (they worked together a lot, although the first film was scored only by Sawtell), I’d say that, although Return Of The Fly is more linearly structured than that interesting first feature... dispensing with the mystery and going straight for the horror... it’s a really tight and entertaining follow up and I’d certainly defend it while recommending it to others. And now I’m off to ebay to look for the Mego action figure. 

The Fly

Come Fly With Me

The Fly
USA 1958 
Directed by Kurt Neumann 
20th Century Fox Blu Ray Zone A

On the occasional times I revisit the original The Fly, I always come away a little more impressed by it and this new Blu Ray upgrade, part of a five film set of The Fly movies, was no exception. It probably helps that it’s been quite a while now since I last saw it. And, giving in to the Mandela Effect which a lot of people share with me on this film... I’d forgotten that it’s a colour movie as opposed to a black and white picture (like the two direct sequels which were both in monochrome) and in a proper cinemascope aspect ratio to boot. 

As such, it does play the full cinemascope variation of the 20th Century Fox theme at the start (something which is often misused in more modern films) before switching into some wonderfully stark titles of graphic illustrations of mesh in red, with a fly in them, accompanied by Paul Sawtell’s wonderful score. 

And then we get to the wonderful start of the movie and you can tell right away that the structure of this is different from most of the other ‘monster movies’ out there form this time in sci-fi Hollywoodland. This may be in part due to one of the main writers of the screenplay being the great James Clavell, who wrote such best selling tomes as Shõgun, Noble House and King Rat. In fact, we don’t meet the main scientist protagonist of the film until a good 20 - 30 minutes into the movie. Instead we start off with a night watchman hearing Andre Delambre’s death by the sound of the hydraulic press coming down twice. He investigates to find Delambre’s wife Helen, played by Patricia Owens who gives a performance that does a lot of the heavy lifting for the film, fleeing the scene. Then he sees the body of the man with his head and arm crushed by the press, the very red blood effect dripping down the side of the machine in a piece of gory aftermath which I think must have been quite incongruous with a lot of horror/sci-fi cinema at the time. 

And then the mystery starts, as both Andre’s brother Françoise, played by the wonderful Vincent Price (who would return for the first sequel) and possibly quite the nicest Police Inspector on celluloid,  Inspector Charas, played wonderfully by Herbert Marshall, try and solve the mystery of why Helen is saying she murdered her husband but won’t give any details... putting her as the number one candidate for the hangman’s noose. It’s only after a good while that she decides to tell the two men exactly what happened and we see the majority of the rest of the film playing out in flashback.

So we have the great David Hedison (billed here early in his career as Al Hedison) playing scientist Andre Delambre, who has cracked (almost, with a few alterations after accidentally disintegrating the household cat), the secret of teleporting anything from one cabinet in one room to another in the next. The film depicts the happily married couple as the obsessed scientist perfects his new invention and then, just as everything goes right, we discover that, sometime off-screen (and again, this is unusual and works a treat), Andre has tried to teleport himself and a fly that zipped into the machine with him has merged atoms with him, resulting in the fly (which escapes and becomes the major focus of his wife and child, trying to catch it) having Andre’s head and an arm, while Andre himself is left with a fly’s head and arm. This looks great when you finally see the reveal but it’s also something I conceptually have a problem with... okay, I’ll get to that in a minute. 

But again, rather than show what happened straight away, Hedison plays the fly-bound Andre silently, with a black towel over his head and pointing and rapping a desk to communicate with his wife... so the mystery element is kept in tact for a good part of the film and it works really well. And, of course, when Helen finally pulls that towel off, just like the unmasking of The Phantom Of The Opera in the 1925 version of that film, Helen lets out an iconic scream... iconic because, as she keeps on screaming, we see her from Andre’s point of view and it’s a fly’s eye view, with her screaming countenance replicated many times over the widescreen frame. Wow... this must have looked amazing in cinemas, for sure... it’s no wonder the film was such a box office hit. A box office sensation that, sadly, the director didn’t live to experience, since he died the week before it opened. 

Then, as Andre arranges for his wife to head press him to death, the film catches up to the start but, this isn’t the final iconic moment of the movie. In a much re-quoted scene, his brother and the Inspector only finally believe Helen’s story when they see the little fly caught in a spider’s web, with Andre’s arm and head, as it calls out “Help me! Help me!” as it’s about to get eaten by a spider. Apparently the scene was shot over twenty times because the two actors, Price and Marshall, were laughing so much at the scene that they couldn’t look each other in the eye.

And then comes the second of two problems I have with the movie. There’s no way their dodgy, hastily concocted explanation for the incidents in the film would be believed in a court of law but, here we are at the end with everyone free and living happily ever after. Apparently Clavell had written a much better ending where Helen kills herself after she has given her explanation but, this was sadly discarded. 

And my only other problem is... yes, we see the fly part of Andre trying to take over in his brain as he fights himself to hold on to his humanity (which looks quite ridiculous in a Doctor Strangelove kind of way) but, since his head is also on a fly, how in heck is his human brain also part of this fly head? I mean, I’m probably looking for verisimilitude where it doesn’t exist here but, the science doesn’t hold up here (yes, I know that’s a ridiculous statement about a film about a human fly but, it’s my blog, let me alone). 

And that’s me done with the absolute classic that is The Fly. A really great and somewhat different B movie which was given the budget and release of an A picture... definitely catch this one if you’ve never seen it before. And I guess I’ll at least be watching the next two films in the original series next... not sure if I want to bother with the two modern era versions again as yet.

Challenge The Devil

Deviling Up

Challenge The Devil
aka Katarsis
Italy 1963
Directed by Giuseppe Veggezzi   
Severin Films Blue Ray Zone A/B
From The Eurocrypt Of
Christopher Lee Volume 1

Okay, so... this is going to be a hard one to write up. 

Challenge The Devil is the second film presented in Severin’s first, wonderful The Eurocrypt Of Christopher Lee Blu Ray boxed set and, although the film clocks in at only 79 minutes, it honestly felt like maybe 4 hours. I mean, this was a hard one to watch and I’m used to some of the slower and less comprehensible European gothic pieces from this era (and a couple of the ones I’m thinking of are in this boxed edition, as it happens). I’m not 100% sure how to approach writing this one so I’m just going to throw the meagre plot in, such as it is... and then relate the behind the scenes story of how the movie came to be transformed from being what was probably a bit of a mess to being, frankly, even more of a mess.

Okay, so the film starts off well enough with some interesting cinematography where, whoever is behind this part of the film, is using strong architectural lines to pull the eye into the shot rather well. And it does well to detract from the sparse plot, where a man who is deemed to be a black mailer is shot by two thugs, escaping into a church with his wounds to find a priest, Father Guardiano, played by Ulderico Sciaretta. There’s a pretty nice shot in amongst these scenes where the man is lying in bed reflected in a mirror, with Guardiano looking down to the mirror and talking to him. These clever shot choices do not remain in the movie for long, however... 

The man explains his blackmail material has been stolen by his gal for more nefarious purposes so, after patching him up, Guardiano goes to find the lady at a night club and explain why she should return the materials. So then we are in the nightclub and we then see no less than three acts play out, more or less in their entirety, stopping the film dead, each of which having pretty much nothing to do with the story in any way, shape or form. These include “Argentinian singing sensation Sonia” who is clearly miming along to a dubbed recording of one of her, presumably ‘hit’, records. Either that or the small band accompanying her on stage have hidden the female backing vocal group in the toilets of this small venue and maybe left the door open.

Then Guardiano finds the girl and relates his back story of how he came to be a priest. And at this point, he tells of the time he was an animalistic hooligan in a gang who got trapped in a castle where the devil, a relatively brief appearance by Christopher Lee, challenged them with the task of finding a lady in the castle before sunrise. The rest of the film is a flashback of this as they stumble around to imagined... or at least far from convincing... dangers and then escape in the end to lead better lives. We then return briefly as the girl hands the papers over, moved by Guardiano’s truly boring story, to do the right thing. What the heck?

Okay, as soon as we entered the flashback stage, my Al Adamson style patch job radar instinct kicked in. This was either two films spliced together or, more likely (as turned out to be the case), somebody trying to rescue the shoddy original movie and make it more commercially viable (and failing quite badly at it, I have to say). 

It turns out (in one of Severin’s thorough extras) that director Veggezzi was trying to break into the movie business. This was his only film and he gave up after his experiences with this. He shot a ninety minute movie full of careful consideration to body language and the movements of people but with a lot of improvisation. This shows in the final product, as there’s not much dialogue, the actors all move in heightened and bizarrely over the top ways (this is a movie which is totally over acted but, honestly, after hearing about the creation of the film, I can’t blame the actors for doing what they were told) and often look, at times, like they are trying to figure out just what to do with themselves in some of the scenes. 

Okay so... even on the first shoot, Veggezzi apparently didn’t do all of it himself. After one of the actresses rejected his romantic advances, the director responded by trying to kill himself, throwing himself out of a hotel window.... although he survived (he couldn’t even do that right, I guess) and spent some time recovering. Then the small production company bankrolling the film went under. The film was sold to another company and Veggezzi did not have access to it anymore. The other company retained one of the actors (Ulderico Sciaretta) then added the completely tonally different, framing ‘story’ and tried to release it like that. I don’t think the film was a success. 

The director, embittered by his experience, turned his back on the world of film, joined a kind of super communist party, cut down a sacred tree on a pilgrimage site with his drunken friends one night (yeah, they got the wrong tree)... and then lived out his days writing poetry, being ultra political and making some... not too impressive, I have to say... sculptures. He then got killed when he was hit by a car in his town one night, decades later. 

I never heard of him before but he managed to make a really dull film, I would say. Berto Pisano’s replacement score is interesting sometimes but, often not sitting well with some of the visuals, I’d have to say (at times it sounds like a kind of bastard love child of Italian jazz and Dave Brubeck’s Take Five, playing through a scene with no consideration for what is actually going on and destroying the atmosphere). Some of the ‘fish out of water’ actors in this are kinda interesting at times, such as the constantly laughing George Ardisson but, yeah, that’s about it. All in all I’m glad I saw this one and am grateful that Severin have managed to restore it for their Blu Ray set. Whether it was worth doing is arguable but I’m sure it must have its fans somewhere. I wouldn’t count myself as one of them and I think I would mostly warn people off of this one... I certainly wouldn’t recommend it anyone I know. 

Zeder

Pop K-Zones

Zeder
aka Revenge Of The Dead
Italy 1983 Directed by Pupi Avati
88 Films Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Gets into spoiler territory for the last shot of the movie.

Wow... Zeder is far more restrained and atmospheric than I would expect from any other Italian horror film which springs to mind from the same decade as this. It’s written and directed by Pupi Avati, best known in this country for his celebrated giallo The House With Laughing Windows (yeah, can’t remember if I liked that one or not but it’s in one of the Blu Ray upgrade piles for me to revisit for the blog at some point in the future) and it’s got, to my mind, a surprisingly Western attitude in the way it’s been shot and edited. 

This one starts off with an extended prologue set in 1956, where a young girl is being used by researchers to find the once dead guy who is sometimes getting up and rising from a hidden burial ground to kill the occasional person. In the process, the little girl is ferociously attacked by the object of the researchers’ desire and she has to have a leg amputated. 

We then switch to the present day and a young couple, Stefano (played by Gabriele Lavia, who has been in at least three Argento movies at this point) and Alessandra (played by Anne Canovas). On their first year of a wedding anniversary, Allessandra gifts Stefano a present of an old, electric typewriter... Stefano being a budding novelist working on his third novel (even though the first two have not found a publisher). Then, as he is trying it out, he finds the remains of two letters on the remnants of the old typewriter ribbon, written by one Paulo Zeder and talking about overcoming the barriers of death and about the mysterious K-Zones which can be found dotted around the planet. Basically, areas of anti-time are found two metres below the Earth in certain places which allow for a return from death. Zeder has donated his own body to the research and hidden it. 

Realising that this is an excellent idea for his third novel, Stefano and the reluctant Alessandra begin to investigate and end up stumbling into a conspiracy of an interested party who seem to be working hand in hand with the police and who also are acting out of their research, funded by a private investor and made possible by special order of the church and involving the secret archives in Vatican City. This all culminates in a bunch of researchers who cross paths with Stefano and, via mysterious bloody deaths and secret passages etc, all end up in the grounds of a long abandoned hotel and its K-Zone in the grounds. 

And yeah... it feels like a somewhat suppressed Italian horror film of the period... RAI TV seem to have put money into it so I suspect the reduced opportunities for gore and the more subtle approach might indicate it was originally made with an Italian TV broadcast in mind but instead given a theatrical release. That’s my guess. 

So what you have here is a strange hybrid. A bunch of familiar Italian faces embroiled in a conspiracy theory which is somewhat like a procedural in a giallo or a polizei with a score by the great Riz Ortolani which definitely (and I suspect quite deliberately) goes into the kind of Goblin-like territory found in a lot of the Italian horrors of this period. But, as I said, it’s quite restrained in the way it’s doing things... with a definite slow burn kind of atmosphere and, to my mind, this makes it much more watchable (though perhaps not as fun) as a lot of its contemporaries. 

Similarly, Lavia and Canovas seem a lot stronger and subtler in their performances here than in other films I could name, which all adds to the atmosphere that the government and some religious order are collaborating to find out just what is going on and, it is hinted, making sure the knowledge is in the hands of only a few. Because, of course, who wants a cure for death on an already overpopulated planet. 

Now, I can’t imagine being as gripped and enthralled as I was by a second watch of this one (although I will certainly try in a decade or so) as much as, say, a film by Fulci or Argento... but for the first watch, I was certainly on the edge of my seat for some of it and intrigued to see how the premise was going to be revealed. There was the occasional jump scare in the movie too... one of the most effective of which kinda made no sense. I mean, why would a bunch of pigeons come to be found and released from inside a closed coffin? But it’s fine, the quality of the rest of the film excuses these little indulgences. 

The end of Zeder was something which I found was nicely ambiguous too. Although it supports the underlying premise of the film in no uncertain terms, it also manages to be nicely vague in its tone. I mean, that last shot... is Stefano screaming in pain because of something which is happening to him behind his back or is he voicing the repercussions of what he, himself, has brought about? It is, perhaps, an unsettling moment when looked back in contemplation... which is a nice description of the film itself, I think. I’ve been ummming and ahhing about whether I should pick this one up for years and now that I have, I wish I’d seen this one sooner. It’s an untypical entry into the Italian horror genre... at least compared to many of the ones I’ve seen. 

Munster, Go Home!

Ill Manors

Munster, Go Home!
Directed by Earl Bellamy
USA 1966
Universal Zone B Blu Ray

A week or two before filming began on Munster, Go Home!,  the first (and last) film to feature the majority of the original cast of The Munsters in colour, said cast found out that the show they had been so successful with for the last three years had been cancelled, trounced soundly in the ratings by Batman. But the producers went ahead with the movie hoping this would either gain interest from another studio picking up the show or, who knows, even carry it on as a series of feature films. Alas, the film flopped and so that was the end, for a while, of The Munsters. 

And, although this movie has been on British TV a number of times over the years, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before now (although I have got the soundtrack CD somewhere). 

And it’s… honestly not that great a film and, I think I can almost put my finger on why but, I’ll get to that in a minute. But first, that cast…

So returning form the original show we have Fred Gwynne as the Frankenstein’s monster-like Herman Munster, Yvonne De Carlo as his vampiric wife Lily Munster, Al Lewis as the Dracula based Grandpa Munster and Butch Patrick as son Eddie Munster. And… um… Debbie Watson as the glamorous Marilyn Munster. Yeah, that’s right, regular Marilyn Pat Priest was effectively fired from the role because Universal wanted to try and build up Watson as a new star. I don’t think it worked out for either of them.

Rounding out the cast, which is set in England after Herman inherits the Munster estate in England and becomes Lord Munster, are the great Terry Thomas, Hermione Gingold and John Carradine. 

And there are all kinds of high comedy shenanigans, first on the ship over to England and then in the English village... where Marilyn gets a love interest in a rival family, a counterfeiting operation is discovered in the cellars of the house and Herman has to dodge the assassination attempts of a family member and come first in a drag race (driving his coffin turned into a car Drag-u-la! Hmm.).

And it’s not great. To show Terry Thomas is a relative of Herman, they have him throwing Herman-like Tantrums and acting quite childishly and… yeah… I got the feeling that the Americans almost but, not quite, knew what Thomas was about. It certainly doesn’t sit well when he breaks into this stuff and kinda lowers the tone of the movie, I felt. 

But the worst thing about this one, I think, is that the story and even some of the gags are not badly performed… but they seem to be executed in a way that is just a little over the top and written for a TV audience, it seemed to me. It’s almost like extra pauses have been given between the jokes to wait for the canned laughter to kick in (which is why I’d probably hate the show if I were ever to revisit it in so called adulthood… I hate laughter tracks). So things seem a little mistimed and just a little too broad for a big screen environment, as far as I'm concerned. 

All that being said, Jack Marshall’s score is serviceable (although, good luck if you are waiting for him to make really good use of the main theme tune arrangement which used to open the show), the colours are often beautiful - Grandpa’s lab in greens and reds gets ‘full on Bava’, for example - and there’s enough going on to hold the interest. Plus my mum really liked it and so I can’t judge it too badly, as I bought it to watch with her in mind. It just wasn’t really for me, in the end… although I’m sure I would have loved it if I’d seen it as a kid. 

There’s even a nice metatextual nod in a scene where Herman and Grandpa need to raise help and Herman yells out, “Car 54 Where Are You?”. Of course, Fred Gwynne and Al Lewis were the stars of the show Car 54 Where Are You? prior to starring in The Munsters, so, yeah, that would have meant more to audiences at the time I suspect (though I pointed at the screen when Herman shouted this).

All in all, Munster, Go Home! is something of a novelty movie and, though I could see myself sitting through it again in another decade or so, it’s not really one I’d recommend to many people whose age is in double digits. Which might possibly have been the point although, I suspect this one was aimed directly at a teenage audience. This one didn’t quite do it for me.

Castle Of The Living Dead

Villainous Preserve

Castle Of The Living Dead
aka Il castello dei morti vivi
Directed by Warren Kiefer & Luciano Ricci
Italy/France 1964 Severin Blu Ray Zone A

Castle Of The Living Dead has, it seems, a troubled production history. Warren Kiefer was definitely involved to some extent but the film may, or may not, have had a few directors and also, apparently, involved future director Michael Reeves in the crew in some capacity. There has been some rumours that this is one of the many films that Mario Bava helped out on with the special effects but, again, nothing has actually been confirmed and the scene on which he is supposed to have worked doesn’t seem to appear in the movie. Also, the dialogue was not recorded on paper so, when the various actors had to do the dubbing of their lines afterwards, as many films of this nature in Italian cinema are shot without sound, they had to more or less remember or make up what they had been saying. 

However, for all that, the film was quite a joy to watch and it’s an interesting gothic thriller, set just after the Napoleonic wars, when Napoleon was in prison. I thought I’d seen this one already but it turns out I hadn’t so, I was very happy to give this one a play. The film is shot in a crisp black and white (as evidenced by Severin’s masterful restoration/transfer of this thing) and concerns a travelling troupe of performers who are invited to Count Drago’s castle to give a private performance. The two main actors in this troupe, one a very recent recruit after some conflict at the start of the film, are Philippe Leroy as Eric, who was so brilliant in movies like Without Knowing Anything About Her (reviewed here) and who has a fairly good screen presence for a main, male protagonist... and Gaia Germani as Laura. 

Count Drago, as played by Christopher Lee (this is one of the films in the magnificent Blu Ray box set put out from Severin Films... The Eurocrypt Of Christopher Lee Volume 1), is a mad scientist with requisite henchman to do his bidding. He has invented a formula which, when introduced into a live subject either by injection or in a spiked drink, brings instant paralysis and rigidity... an advanced, instant embalming fluid which preserves the subject instantly and forever. This is wonderfully demonstrated, not just by the collection of frozen human beings in the Count’s own collection but, also in a wonderful scene where a cat licks up Laura’s spilled drink and instantly freezes... that is to say, the shot is held in a freeze frame and then goes about cutting to and from Laura’s reaction to save on any unnecessary special effects. 

The film then becomes a kind of cat and mouse game around the castle, as the troupe try and avoid death at the hands of Drago but also try to stay out of trouble with the local law enforcement, in the guise of a very young, almost his first feature film role, Donald Sutherland. Sutherland actually has three roles in this film... Sgt. Paul/The Witch and The Old Man. Frankly, I only spotted him as the Sergeant and again in drag several times as the old witch but, I guess he might have been an old man in the opening sequence and I somehow missed him in a crowd. I’m guessing it’s no coincidence that writer/director Warren Kiefer’s last name is the same forename as Sutherland’s famous acting son? 

The actors in this are all turning in a pretty decent performance, with Lee in excellent form (although the black make up around the eyes looks a little fake while succeeding in changing the look of his face somewhat) and with Sutherland hamming it up good, I would say. I’m assuming his role here somehow landed him a part in his next feature, Dr. Terror’s House Of Horrors (reviewed by me here). Since Christopher Lee is also in that movie, one wonders if Sutherland and Lee got on so well in this one that Lee perhaps recommended he be included in that little gem also?

And it’s a bit of a romp but has a very chilled atmosphere... a bit like one of Roger Corman’s Poe cycle of films... and it’s all shot in a beautiful castle and grounds called Castello Orsini-Odescalchi (where Tom Cruise would later marry Katie Holmes, apparently) and in a wonderful set of grounds called The Park Of Monsters in Bomarzo. These grounds include big statues and architectural features such as a main walkway in the shape of a screaming face with the mouth as the opening. I recognised this last architectural feature straight away as being included on the cover photograph of the 1995 Michael Nyman album Noises, Sounds and Sweet Airs. That being said, because of the skilful way in which the film has been cut together, the fact that the grounds were mostly shot somewhere else was a surprise to me, as it looks like they are in the same location in this and that the park dovetails straight into the castle. 

 And all this with a fairly typical, creaky old gothic style score by Italian maestro Angelo Francesco Lavagnino. I actually already had this score on a nice CD issue from Digitmovies from some years ago but, if you missed that release, Severin include the score on a separate CD as an extra feature in this boxed edition. Which is always a big draw for me on sets like this (although I wish the majority of the scores Severin decide to include weren’t already ones that have already been issued). 

All in all, this movie really wouldn’t set anyone on fire but, I think it holds its own and has a fascinating kind of DNA shared with those old 1960s Corman flicks and, also, maybe, a kind of specific Gold Key comics atmosphere to the whole thing (which I can’t really explain in words that would necessarily make sense to anybody else but, yeah, that means something to me). By that I mean, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that people go out of their way to see Castle Of The Living Dead but, boxed up with others in a similar vein (such as Crypt Of The Vampire, which I reviewed in an old DVD edition here years ago), it’s certainly an interesting addition and, certainly, one of the hidden gems of the box. 

Woodlands Dark And Days Bewitched

Singular Rural

Woodlands Dark 
And Days Bewitched
USA 2021
Directed by Kier-La Janisse
Severin Films Blu Ray Zone A/B/C

Just a little shout out to a newish (at time of viewing/writing, I'm still not all the way through the box) three and a quarter hour folk horror documentary called Woodlands Dark And Days Bewitched. I watched this as part of a project I believe it kickstarted, as the first disc in Severin’s humongous, ‘pricey but worth it’ Blu Ray box, All The Haunts Be Ours - A Compendium Of Folk Horror (although you can also purchase the documentary feature from them as a stand alone edition). The film is written and directed by Kier-La Janisse and I’ve enthused about her on a number of occasions on this blog, most notably in my reviews of a documentary movie made about her called Celluloid Horror (reviewed here) and also the absolutely brilliant, essential, part reference text and part autobiographical tome which she wrote partially as a reaction to that title, called House Of Psychotic Women (which I reviewed here). 

The documentary originally started life with the director wanting to make a short, accompanying featurette on folk horror to accompany Severin’s Blu Ray release of Blood On Satan’s Claw from a few years ago but, as she started researching and putting it together, she realised that there was more to the topic than just a select set of UK folk horror references and the featurette project was dropped in favour of a full and, breezily paced but actually somewhat essential documentary feature. You can just tell by some of the things the great lady has chosen to throw at this that many researchers are going to be taking elements of this for their own books, articles and documentaries for many years to come.

Strangely enough... and due to something that the animator of the title sequence let slip (the same animator who directed Borley Rectory, reviewed here and who animated many interesting sequences for this movie), I’m not sure this is as complete a coincidence as I originally thought when I watched this... the opening titles took me straight back to my childhood by using a slower cover version of the same rhyme set as song of the famous verse that used to open the old kid’s UK TV show Magpie in the 1970s. So that was a nice touchstone for me, so to speak. The film opens with voices of various of the people interviewed here trying to define folk horror and what it is to them, before the structure of the piece reveals itself and we go on to six chapters. 

Chapter one is entitled The Holy Trinity and it looks at a famous group of films which, yeah okay, certainly seem to define folk horror to many although, if you know me and are a regular reader here, you’ll probably figure out that only one of those three would make it through my simple definition of what belongs in the horror genre. Those three are Witchfinder General, Blood On Satan’s Claw (reviewed here) and the original version of The Wicker Man. I especially liked the connection made in this segment between the cult of youths in Blood On Satan’s Claw and what it was saying about the British establishment at the time the movie was made, with its built in critique of ‘the youth of today’. 

The second chapter, Who Is This Who Is Coming? Signposts of British Folk Horror, takes a more in depth look at the various manifestations of the British offerings over the years, with a nice emphasis on the ghost stories of M. R. James (who seems to be having a revival of late, at least in terms of the 1970s BBC adaptations of the annual Christmas Ghost Stories he used to write at his university) and, of course, the continuing influence of Nigel Kneale, particularly in reference to such works as his third and fourth Quatermass serials and shows such as Beasts. They’ve even got a nice couple of clips from the Doctor Who story The Daemons (which I reviewed here).

Chapter 3, We Don’t Go Back- Paganism and Witchcraft looks at various movies documenting witchcraft over the years while Chapter 4, Call Me From The Valley - American Folk Horror, looks at US colonial history, native American Indians, backwoods people and aspects of the Southern Gothic... not to mention the way in which some of the tales of H. P. Lovecraft dovetail into folk traditions.

The fifth chapter, All The Haunts Be Ours - Folk Horror Around The World looks at various internationally produced folk horror films and their legacy, including such countries as Australia, Poland, Guatemala, France, Norway, Russia, Sweden, Japan, Italy, Venezuela and Brazil and, I’m glad to say a few of my favourites like Onibaba, Kuroneko, Kwaidan and the Yokai Monster myths were included, as the director tries to demonstrate (and rightly so, as far as I’m concerned) how the genre is actually existing in a much wider geographic space than the casual observer may at first imagine. The movie then ends with a sixth chapter called Folk Horror Revival which highlights some of the more recent entries that have taken up the same themes, such as The VVitch and Midsommar. 

Ultimately, this is a really fun and informed movie. There are a range of interviewees including two of my favourites, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Jonathan Rigby... along with a whole host of people such as familiar names and faces like Jasper Sharp, Samm Deighan and Kat Ellinger, plus some not so expected but very welcome people such as Alice Lowe. She even utilises famous actors Linda Hayden and Ian Ogilvy to read various bits of verse in voice over during certain sequences of the film. 

And as we’re treated to a range of historical facts and the way the various movies highlighted draw from some of them, some interesting themes and definitions start to come to light... although, I have to disagree a little with the guy who says folk horror is not a genre at all. As far as I’m concerned it’s a very specific sub-genre but, then again, I may be accused of looking at things in a more black and white manner than many. 

What stuck with me, though, are themes like... it’s often an outsider coming into a small or rural community and discovering or finding themselves at odds with an established belief system and that it’s often about a clash between ‘the old ways’ and modern technology (with modern technology usually crumbling in defeat against the long standing traditions). And, especially summed up with the question... “What if the old ways were right?”... something I think the character Edward Woodward played in The Wicker Man may have certainly had a strong opinion about. There’s also a nice observation that the reasons a lot (not all) of folk horror succeeds in unsettling the viewer is because they’re more about tapping the fear of what you don’t see but what’s suggested, quite often.

So yeah, I think Woodlands Dark And Days Bewitched is a splendid documentary, actually. I thoroughly enjoyed it and I think some people will be unfamiliar with a lot of the films and books included here and come out of this thing with a long list. I’ve heard there have been some complaints as to what’s not included but, come on people, this kind of exploration is never going to have time to include everything and, yeah, you’re getting three and a quarter hours of collective knowledge right here in the form of an entertaining presentation, all bound together with a nice score by Jim Williams, which is also included on a CD in Severin’s All The Haunts Be Ours box. I think Kier-La Janisse did a wonderful job with this one and, like I said, I suspect it will be getting a lot of shout outs for years to come. So if you’re at all into the idea of exploring this topic, this is the baseline film from which you should start... and I’m looking forward to exploring the specific films included in this boxed edition (many of which I haven’t seen, as it happens). So yeah, well done to Kier-La and also much thanks to Severin for enabling projects like this one... a great service to the arts, for sure.

One last tip before I finish though... it always pays to read the t-shirts of some of the people being interviewed on these things. My world is a richer place now that I know there was a 14th Wine and Film Festival in one country... this sounds like a great idea. 

Borley Rectory

Wraith No More

Borley Rectory
UK 2017 Directed by Ashley Thorpe
Carrion Film Blu Ray Zone B

Borley Rectory burned down the same night in 1939 that my mother was born, so it’s always had a kind of special place in our hearts in this family. And here’s yet another movie about the place once named “the most haunted house in England”. This one’s a pretty good one though, as it happens. It’s not a full on drama and it’s something a little more than a documentary... so a docu-drama maybe? I’m not 100% sure what to call this thing, to be honest (and I don’t care). 

What singles this one out from many others, apart from being presented only in black and white (and resident shades and spectres of grey), is that the live action dramatisations are combined with a heck of a lot of animation. Indeed every frame is an animation with the live footage inserted and then worked over with various layers of animated detail to make a fairly unique viewing experience. It’s a little like the old technique that Peter Greenaway used for Prospero’s Books but with less obfuscation to the clarity of the message and, given it monochromatic status, it doesn’t threaten to overpower the audience while still throwing a lot at the frames. 

The documentary, for that is how I shall now refer to it from hereon, is narrated by the late Julian Sands, who would go on to play one of the real life characters in this in a later film based on this ghostly riddled piece of real estate (there have been so many made). Joining him are a fairly large cast for a relatively small scale project like this but the main two cast members were the only ones I recognised. The film stars Reece Shearsmith as newspaper man V.C Wall and the great film historian Jonathan Rigby as ‘ghost hunter’ Harry Price. I have to say, I’m used to seeing Rigby pop up in various physical media documentaries over the years but he’s always good to see live too, especially when he’s actually doing some acting, such as when he hosted and starred in the stage read through of Vampirella a few years ago (reviewed by me here).

The acting style from both these fine craftsmen and, pretty much the rest of the cast, is a bit over the top... quite deliberately I would think. Everyone gives this just a little more flamboyance with a stylised performance which I would expect is something which needed to happen to be able to match the quiet ferocity of the animated material going on all around them (and indeed, over them... I don’t think it quite gets to rotoscoping, at least not as far as I am familiar with it as a technique... but there might be some of that going on in here). So it’s a good call and, as far as I’m concerned, makes for an enjoyable series of performances throughout the film’s short, 73 minute running time. 

And it’s very well done, managing to create and maintain an atmosphere comprising lurking, sinister spirits who seem to be constantly watching this or that tenant of the property through various stages of the house’s history. I saw it, due to circumstances of who I was watching it with, in a fairly well lit room on a fairly large TV so it didn’t quite hit all the scares and fog the mind completely but, I imagine that if I’d seen this under slightly less well lit conditions or, ideally, at a cinema, then more of the scare moments would have landed better. 

The animated miasma of creepiness is done particularly well and with obvious relish, as little details which either illustrate or riff on the narrative commentary are brought in as needed. There was a nice visual allusion to the work of director Dziga Vertov fairly early on in the piece which was a cool moment, I thought. Similarly, the writing is pretty good and also pays respect to various works which, perhaps inarguably, were possibly influenced or inspired by the much publicised ghostly phenomena that surrounded the place. For instance, there’s a nice reference to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting Of Hill House, not just name checked at the end of the piece but also in terms of some of the lines, such as referring to the various spectres as those who “walk alone.” Indeed, it immediately made me think of Julie Harris delivering the line in the original 1963 adaptation, The Haunting (which I reviewed here). 

So, yeah, a short shout out of a review for Borley Rectory but it’s definitely one I would recommend to those interested in such things and, yeah, certainly one of the better movies about the place. The Blu Ray edition comes with a raft of extras concerning the film and the events it’s based on and, while I haven’t watched these as yet and usually skip most of the extras on these things (seriously, who has the time these days, much as I prefer to have them) I have left the disc out before removing the covers and disc for a space saving filing exercise, so I can sit down and work my way through these at some point soon, because they seem really interesting. Certainly, I can’t recommend the physical release of this one enough. Definitely worth a look if you are into other worldly delights. 

The Limey

Stamp Of Approval

The Limey
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
USA 1999 
LionsGate Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: There will be some spoilers...

“Do you even understand half the s**t this guy's saying?” 
“No, but I know what he means.”
From The Limey

It’s taken me a good long while to upgrade to a Blu Ray copy of The Limey and quite a long time since I last revisited it. I’m surprised to learn only now that it was a bit of a flop on its initial release but... well, it didn’t seem like a flop to my friends and I at the time. I remember liking this one so much I went back to the cinema a good few times to re-watch it over and over. 

It’s certainly Soderbergh’s best movie (and he’s done a number of good ones, for sure) and it’s an absolute masterpiece. And a timeless one at that... even though I remembered almost all of it on this re-watch, the film still holds up as a vital piece of modern cinema and, with the way it’s edited, it really shouldn’t... but it all just works so well.

The story is mostly linear but presented in a non-linear fashion in terms of its stylistic flourishes and tells a small story about Wilson, played by the incomparable Terence Stamp. He’s just got out from his third or fourth stretch in prison (at her majesty’s pleasure, so to speak) and finds out his daughter, who has been living in LA with a famous record producer called Valentine, played by a wonderful Peter Fonda, has died in what looks like a car crash. Except, Wilson feels it in his bones that it isn’t an accident... so he flies out to LA to do a bit of ‘revenge detecting’ to see if he can uncover the truth about his daughter’s tragic demise. 

Along the way he’s aided by Ed, played by the always watchable Luis Guzmán... and his daughter’s initially suspicious friend played by the great Lesley Ann Warren. And he’s abetted and almost hindered by Valentine’s right hand man, played by Barry Newman (Petrocelli himself ladies and gentleman) and his team of assassins including, among others, one played by none other than Joe Dallesandro (or Little Joe as he’s known in Lou Reed’s song Walk On The Wild Side). 

And it’s portrayed as almost a revenge thriller but it’s not quite that and, more a reflection on the relationships between a father and a daughter and how the rituals and grooves of that can be found to impact each others lives in unexpected ways (at least that’s what I get out of it). 

The film is told, as I said, mostly in a linear way but many conversations and scenes take place over a number of different moments from the past, present and future of the characters scrambled up within the same set of moments, as the voices play out. Especially when each new character is introduced... like a visual anchor point. And sometimes it’s used very cleverly, when a sound bite from a conversation may be cut onto a visual of that conversation but without actually matching up to that specific segment. For instance, when Stamp is talking and it cuts away from him with his voice continuing the conversation and when it cuts back to him, it’s still carrying on but his mouth is not moving because he’s at a pause in the conversation visually. 

It’s actually very reminiscent... and I suspect this was ever present in Soderbergh’s mind when this was being edited... of the cinema of Nicolas Roeg, where he would often suddenly jump cut to the past or present with an audio flourish and then back to where the story beat was, to give an insight into the present of a character by given the context of where they would end up or where they came from (he even did it in his TV episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, if memory serves, suddenly jump cutting to Mata Hari’s bloody death years after the time of the episode before cutting back to the present story, to add insight and drum a message home). 

Soderbergh does this all through the movie in an even more frenetic manner, it seems to me, fracturing the narrative but, inexplicably... and this is the strength of the film... making it so it’s absolutely understandable as a single narrative piece and is not about to lose the audience. Like an impression of a tale drifting like the sea over the perception of the viewer and crashing into them with a traditional understanding of the jigsaw pieces they are being presented with (I’ve deliberately left that quote from the movie at the top because I think it’s a very good comment on the visual mechanics of the movie too, in a possibly non-deliberate, metatextual manner). The director even cuts in excerpts all the way through from the Ken Loach film Poor Cow, to show a much younger Terence Stamp, standing in for this character here.

A good example of how the director makes this work is a specific, long shot of Stamp walking along a building in the middle distance. It’s obviously done in a single take but, as he walks from left to right, the scene lasts a couple of minutes because it’s cross cut with past, present and future moments... the walk itself is the future when Stamp starts it, left of screen but, becomes the present time when he reaches the right of screen. And it probably shouldn’t work but it so does... even though it’s technically quite a sophisticated visual syntax the director is pushing on the audience.

And everyone in this is absolutely terrific. I can’t fault a single one of the actors in this but, with a special emphasis on the absolutely electrical performance given by Terence Stamp as Wilson. What he does in this is wonderful. He explains himself in the simplest terms and, most of the Americans in this are completely confused by his cockney rhyming slang and way of putting over his points... but his silent performance, the way his expressions are used to underline his experiences, shows the intelligent man underneath. 

And although a lot of Stamp’s performance is meditative, exploring the silent, inner dialogue... writer Lem Dobbs’ dialogue in this movie is absolutely brilliant. When Stamp is explaining to the American authorities about why he didn’t kill a ‘screw’ when he saw him in a park after he got out of ‘the nick’, it might seem a trifle at first... but it’s also a good bit of foreshadowing so, keep your ears open for that bit. Another bit of absolute genius is when Stamp is explaining about the relationship with his daughter when, at various points in their life, she would grab the phone and threaten to ‘shop him’ to the police rather than him getting caught and put in prison for a serious crime again. This particular reminiscence takes on a tragic note by the conclusion of the movie. 

Perhaps my favourite Stampism in this is a nice little throwaway line which... I’m sure must have gone over most of the US audience’s heads because, I just don’t think they have this old expression over there. When Lesley Ann Warren’s character offers to give Valentine’s phone number to Wilson, he pointedly say, “Oh, I’ve got his number!” Which, in certain areas of England and London, is an expression for having someone ‘pegged’ and having the advantage over them because you’ve got them completely figured out.

And even Peter Fonda gets some interesting dialogue when, as he tries to sum up the dreamlike 1960s he eventually concludes... “It was just ‘66 and ‘67. That’s all it was.”

Again, the direction on this is brilliant too, including some of the stuff shot and edited as written in Dobs screenplay. When a beaten up Stamp returns to a warehouse in an earlier part of the film, the one he’s just got thrown out of... and pulls a gun from the back of his jeans (a gun plus ammo he’s bought from some kids in a playground, which is a nice comment on gun culture in the US) we see him go into the warehouse to extract bloody revenge and hear it... but the camera stays outside before the last surviving gang member comes running out past the camera and Stamp walks up to the camera screaming at him with the oft quoted bit of dialogue... “Tell him I’m f**king coming!!!!!!!!”. It’s a wonderful moment in a film absolutely full of wonderful moments which amount, incrementally, to more than just the sum of its parts.

Yeah, okay. I think that’s me pretty much done on The Limey. If you haven’t seen it and are a cinephile of any persuasion, you probably should get tuned in to this one. One slight caveat though is that the Lionsgate UK Blu Ray does not include the original DVD commentary track, which is a shame because the commentary between Soderbergh and Dobbs was a bit of an art piece itself, with different parts of the commentary scrambled up and juxtaposed sometimes in a non-sequitur manner, to match the way the movie itself is edited. So, a shame it’s not on there but, if you’re not bothered about the, truly wonderful, commentary then, yeah, this ‘extras free’ Blu Ray is a nice transfer of an absolute masterpiece of a film. Fantastic stuff.