The Coming Of Sin

May The Horse Be With You

The Coming Of Sin
Spain 1978
Directed by José Ramón Larraz
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

The Coming Of Sin... also known as The Violation Of The Bitch, Sodomia, Vice Makes A Visit and a whole host of alternate titles depending in which countries it had some kind of cinematic or home release in various different versions (usually very cut in different ways depending on the whims of different censorship boards) is the third and final film in Arrow’s excellent, recent Blood Hunger - The Films Of José Larraz box set. It’s a movie I’ve seen stills and snippets from in various documentary shows over the years and, without remembering the title or director, it’s always eluded me. So it came as a bit of a surprise when Arrow announced it in a shiny new, totally uncut Blu Ray restoration for sale in the UK.

So I finally get to see it and... yeah, interesting film.

Briefly put, the film is set in Spain on the estate of a rich, single, English artist called Lorna, played by Patricia Granada. She is asked to ‘take in’ a new helper, a young gypsy girl called Triana, played by Lidia Zuazo, as her previous owners are returning to England for a bit. She agrees and from that moment, an erotic undercurrent takes hold of the film as Triana and Lorna develop a sapphic bond but Triana also suffers from horse infested dreams, possibly brought on by a man who wants her sexually. This includes the famous image of her naked in a cutaway of the back half of a horse which said horseman rides around in preparation for the horse to mount the sculpture and penetrate the woman inside.  And did I mention that this guy, called Chico and played by Rafael Machado, likes to ride everywhere around the vicinity of Lorna’s dwelling, naked on his horse? And I must say, he is kind of imposing in his terrifying reign of naked horsemanship, as he gallantly gallops nakedly about the Spanish landscape nuding everybody up!

Triana seems at first terrified of Chico, due to a prophecy from a gypsy palm reader and that seems totally justified when Chico tries to rape her in the forest. He gets brained with a rock for his trouble but the horse is fine. After this, Chico also becomes an object of fascination for Lorna and, although Triana is still very rude to him, he forms the last part of a ménage à trois between the three protagonists/antagonists and it’s a very Larraz kind of movie, it has to be said. At least, it seems to me, his concerns in this of a tension filled sexual relationship triangle is certainly something which similarly infuses the other films in this boxed set,  Whirlpool (reviewed here) and Vampires (reviewed here).

And it’s not hard to watch because, as somewhat sleazy as the subject matter is, Larraz manages to make it look absolutely beautiful, in his own unique way. Even from the opening which starts off with a series of shots of the estate which takes us in to show Lorna painting, the camera lingering on various paintings in her estate, we know we are in the hands of a filmmaker with a specific vision. It’s an almost claustrophobic series of establishing shots and visual introductions to the character in a film where Larraz really uses the shapes and textures filling the frame to create visual areas specifically for the people in shot. Such as a brilliant scene where Lorna strips off to rub lotion on her body before masturbating. Her back is to the left of camera but the rest of the shot is split into three vertical planes with the central plane being a full length mirror which shows us the front top of her body. There’s some nice stuff going on in this film visually and it’s one of the reasons why I quite like what I’ve seen of this director so far.

I also like the way Larraz uses silent visual metaphor to make a commentary on the internal, psychological state of the characters and the situations they find themselves in. Such as lingering on the expression of a person in a painting or, in an extended flamenco dance sequence, whittled down considerably in some versions of the film, where he uses it as a nod to the growing sexual desire between the two women. I loved the ending too... which also seems to be typical of the kind of darker story beats Larraz likes to explore cinematically. It almost made me forgive the horrible Spanish guitar music which serves as a soundtrack for the film a lot of the time... that’s really not a ‘sound’ I particularly enjoy.

Now, when the film started, I noticed a certain graininess about it and, it has to be said, this never really lets up during the course of the movie. However, after having watched one of the extras in which one of the people who worked on this does a comparison between this and pretty much every other home video version that’s been released before it... well, I really can’t complain. This is pretty much the best the movie has ever looked and, I suspect, is likely to look. So if you want to see this one, definitely get this Arrow edition.

And talking of extras, Arrow have done themselves proud again and, among the gems found on this release, there’s an interview with one of Larraz friends and sometimes co-worker Simon Birrell which is an absolutely fascinating insight into both the man and the world in which he inhabited in later life. Also, there’s a really wonderful short film written and directed by Birrell called His Last Request (aka El último deseo) included, which Larraz helped out on a little and, it has to be said, it’s well worth a watch. It’s a black and white silent movie with a fetishistic undercurrent and a wonderfully satisfying ending starring the great Jack Taylor, who genre fans may remember from some classic horror and exploitation films such as Dr. Jekyll VS The Werewolf, Female Vampire and The Ghost Galleon (the third of the Blind Dead movies).

And that’s about all I have to say on The Coming Of Sin. It’s another absolutely hypnotic and dream-like Larraz movie which I won’t forget about in a hurry and I would urge anybody interested in these kinds of movies (I understand they’re not for everyone) to invest in a copy of this wonderful Blu Ray set from Arrow while it’s still available. This one was absolutely money well spent.

Whirlpool

Whirly Gig!

Whirlpool (aka Perversion Flash)
Denmark/UK 1970 Directed by José Ramón Larraz
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Some spoilerage as to the end of the movie at the end of this review.

Whirlpool is one of a few films directed by José Ramón Larraz in the UK in the early 1970s, this one under the pseudonym J. R. Larrath. It’s also the first of three of his movies featured in the new Arrow Films Blood Hunger - The Film Of José Larraz boxed set which, just on the strength of this film alone (although its a wonderful set anyway) is worth purchasing before it goes completely out of print.

The film starts out as it goes on... fairly oppressively and without a huge amount of dialogue. A man out rowing a boat in a forest lake comes across a boot in his search which he seems to know more about than he should, if his body language is anything to go by. This whole opening credits section of him rowing the lake and then walking the forest is a nice set up but it also has some interesting and somewhat bizarre edits in it... which is not out of keeping with the rest of the film. For example, a long shot of this lead antagonist called Theo, played by a suitably bizarre looking individual called Karl Lanchbury, has an unexpected series of cuts on movement as he is walking... the POV darting around between long shot, medium shot and close up but from all the same angle as he walks through the densely textured wood.

Theo lives with his aunt, Sara, played by Pia Andersson. She also runs a photographer’s agency in London and when she visits her studio and sees new ‘just starting out and needing a career’ model Tulia, played by Vivian Neves, she offers her to stay at her house for a while so her nephew, who is a brilliant photographer, can take some shots of her and increase her chances of getting work.

However, this is not the first time that Auntie Sara and Theo, who is totally obsessed with his aunt, have done this kind of thing before. We know from early on that a former ‘visitor’,  Rhonda, played by Johanna Hegger, had a sexually charged ‘threesome’ relationship including Theo and his aunt before something ‘happened’ and necessitated the two of them to look for another girl to complete their ‘intimate games’. And, it’s a bit of a blast with loads of nudity and bisexual shenanigans but also permeated by both a thick atmosphere of dread and a somewhat dreamlike quality which never quite lets up.

It doesn’t take long for Sara and Theo to corrupt Tulia with their alcohol and wacky backy but Tulia is obsessed by the unseen presence created by the departure of Rhonda and there’s even a nice little dream sequence where Rhonda and Theo are having sex in his darkroom which is, of course, bathed in red for the duration, with the two characters literally making love in a ‘red light district’, so to speak. The scene ends with a double whammy as Tulia wakes up and is actually just pulled into another dream moment (I think, if I was reading the imagery right... or at least the aftermath of it).

And it’s an interesting film with various moving camera shots, some interesting compositions (especially in the interior shoots) and the odd Dutch angle or two thrown in for good measure. It slowly builds a picture of a mystery withheld... you know there’s something afoot when Tulia is forbidden to go into Theo’s darkroom (usually kept locked and with a door adorned with a poster for ‘Rasputin And His London Monks)... and an act of murder committed by, pretty much, the only male suspect in the film for any length of time. Things get even crazier when Tulia covertly enters Theo’s room and sees naked dolls nailed to the walls and, presumably, a wig and handbag belonging to the much missed Rhonda. And crazier still when Theo takes her and his drug dealer friend into the woods, where said friend rapes her and generally triggers her fight or flight reflex... although, once Theo drives the under dressed model back to the house after this distressing scene takes place, Tulia seems much more into having a threesome with Theo and his aunt, as much as she was in getting into Theo’s pants the night before, after a bizarrely long and protracted ‘strip poker’ sequence. So I wonder if the forest rape scene was improvised and then didn’t quite fit back into the final edit comfortably later because it’s not mentioned again. Although the reveal of the significance of a man playing a pipe would lend credence to the scene being in there from the beginning, to be fair.

It’s a film that feels oddly of its time while, simultaneously being somewhat out of step with those times but it’s all made watchable by the lurking sense that some kind of resolution is just around the corner.

There is, as I said, some nice cinematography too, with a shot of Tulia looks down stairs towards camera to where the darkroom would be, full of twisted shadows bouncing off the bannisters, giving it an almost Caligari feel to it. In the scene mentioned earlier, where she discover’s Theo’s room, everything is in deep shadows and mainly it’s just the girl and anything the director wants to highlight peaking out through the light in the shot... an almost colour film version of a chiaroscuro vision. Or how about a nice shot of Sara and Tulia’s naked bodies on a bed in repose shown in reflection on a small mirror on the wall to the right of the bed before the camera pans around towards the left of the scene to show us the same content from an alternate angle without cutting the shot.

There are also some terrible things too... such as some bizarrely awful timing where Theo repeatedly slaps Tulia around the face near the end of the movie but the two actors can’t get their timing right so every time he hits her on one side of her face, she throws her head into the slap rather than the recoil sending it the other way. I’m surprised the director left this shot in the movie, to be honest but, I guess these two really couldn’t get their physical performance together here. Also, there’s a piece of source music from the film’s composer, the always listenable Stelvio Cipriani, which is supposed to be background for an English pub but which is so psychedelic and out of place that the whole scene feels fake. Maybe if the director had buried it more and toned it down in the mix he might have got away with it but, as it is, it’s way too ‘in your face’ for the context required.

That being said, Cipriani’s score is, of course, one of the great things about the movie. Its mostly low key and often very sinister... which is in keeping with the astonishingly downright creepy look of the actor Karl Lanchbury. It’s got a kind of ‘dark baroque’ edge to the thing, sometimes punctuated by stabbing harpsichord and, in one sequence, what sounds like piano strings being scraped with something. There’s also a recurring music box jingle which sounds very similar to Ennio Morricone’s watch chimes from For A Few Dollars More dotted about the score. You get the feel that this is going to reveal a dark heart to the mystery and somehow be connected to the naked, children’s dolls which Tulia finds nailed to the wall but... this whole idea seems to peter out unanswered by the end of the movie. Cipirani’s score for this was released on CD by Digitmovies a number of years ago and is worth picking up.

The end of the movie is fairly strong, actually, with the thing that is being threatened to happen throughout the entire movie coming to pass which, in this case and given that the director sets up a chase scene at the eleventh hour, is quite surprising. It also dovetails onto a wonderful final, static shot of a photograph earlier in the film, where a shot of a character silently screaming is held for a while as a sort of comment on what you’ve just seen. The European cut of the movie, which is not included on this release as... with much apologies from Arrow (all they could find of it surviving was a very dodgy looking pan and scan VHS bootleg of the film)... had a ‘don’t worry, he won’t get away with it’ soundtrack of the police entering off screen and reassuring the audience but this would have really undercut the effectiveness of the ending here where, indeed, the villains of the piece really do get away with things.

Arrow’s new Blu Ray is a truly superb restoration and there’s a comparison featurette which shows you the difference in deleted shots and the order in which certain scenes play out differently between the pristine, US cut transferred for this release and the dodgy, bootleg version of the European cut which shows exactly why they didn’t try and release this version. Other extras include a great little interview with Kim Newman about the early British films of Larraz as well as a commentary by Tim Lucas (which I haven’t got around to listening to yet). There’s also a 1972 interview from Michael Parkinson’s old interview show with Vivian Neves which kind of concentrates on questions about her status as an adult model and taking her clothes off which, frankly, is quite uncomfortable to watch now but it would have been perfectly acceptable and run of the mill for audiences like myself at the time.

And that’s all I have to say, at present, about Arrow’s stonkingly good presentation of Whirlpool... other than I really enjoyed the film and the dreamlike atmosphere it creates. The Blood Hunger boxed set is definitely one to get your hands on if you are interested in these quite obscure gems from the early 1970s and I’m looking forward to exploring the other two films in the set sometime soon.

Vampyres

Rising Vamp


Vampyres (aka Daughters Of Dracula) UK 1975
Directed by José Ramón Larraz
Showing as part of the 6th May 2012 
Classic Horror Campaign double bill

Okay. Round two.

So after the interesting but, to my mind, mostly dull charms of Blood Of The Vampire (reviewed here), the second part of this particular Classic Horror Campaign  double bill was Vampyres (aka Daughters Of Dracula), which was much more to my taste but which also asks more questions than it answers in terms of the storyline.

Now I’d seen this movie years ago when a friend leant me the old VHS copy and I remember thinking... yeah, okay. Not terrible but not really a great film. But I couldn’t really remember it and my tastes have mellowed over the years. Also, if that tape was not in its original aspect ratio I would have probably “felt” the way it had been tampered with in terms of shot flow and design in a negative manner. I’m usually pretty sensitive to that kind of stuff.

This time around I really loved it but, while it is technically a British vampire movie, in that it was made with British money and is set and shot over here, I really wouldn’t go as far to count this as a British movie.

True, the acting in it is very "British", that is to say, the dialogue is very colloquial to our country while, at the same time, also being quite bad (in this case) and somewhat stilted in the acting style. Everything is delivered in a very proper but also very stiff manner which seems almost at an odds with the nature of the characters being portrayed. Why I say it’s not really a British movie is because of two reasons...

One is that the director, José Ramón Larraz, is Spanish... and one can see just by looking at the content of this movie that no British director would have turned this story in, in quite this manner (ironically, if the actors had been speaking Spanish and I’d been relying on subtitles, I probably wouldn’t have noticed the incredibly bad acting that goes on by the majority of the cast in this movie). The film deals with two female vampires who get picked up hitchhiking every night and lure their “good samaritans” back to their little stately home so they can have sex with them and kill them so they can drink their fill of life preserving blood (although that in itself is an impractical thing in that a fresh corpse a night would certainly have provoked more ballyhoo with the local police).

And that’s where my second point comes in. The film deals with two bisexual vampires who spend a lot of time naked and “getting it on” with both their victims and each other in fairly, for the time, graphic detail which most British directors then would have certainly shied away from. These are nothing less than “stylishly seventies” blood orgies... which are a bit of a rarity even now in this country (the film was somewhat cut on it’s initial cinema release and some of it’s subsequent home viewing editions over here) but the most interesting influence on this one must surely be that... well... I reckon the director may have been a bit of a Jean Rollin fan.

Jean Rollin, a French director, made badly acted, barely coherent but always sexy and surrealistically beautiful lesbian vampire movies. A lot of these are quite stunning, despite their obvious shortcomings in some areas, but one recurring piece of imagery which finds its way into a lot of Rollin’s movies (and literature) is that of always having two (sometimes twin) vampire girls/women who often drive the plot in some way. Now, to be fair, the two vampire girls are usually quite sweet an innocent in their outlook.... yeah, they can feast on peoples flesh, have loads of lesbian sex or practice sadistic tortures on each other, but for some reason they are always imbued with a certain sense of girlish naivete. Now Larraz doesn’t go that far in this movie... these vamps are definitely not, in any way, innocent... but he does take the theme of two vampire girls and puts them in a small scale setting where the action is always played out in a... well, let’s say cosy, space. This is no globe-trotting location movie like the large, visual orchestral symphony of a James Bond movie, for example. Like Jean Rollin’s own movies, this is a chamber concerto when it comes to the confines of its setting and, consequently, there’s not really a lot of variance over what goes on in the movie once the idea has been set up.

Once the visual ingredients are all laid out, the movie revels in its own “funky seventies” decadence for a while before coming to an abrupt end. Along the way there are some questions which hint at darker things but which never get answered. For instance, the movie starts with the two girls who become the vampires being shot to death mid-sexy romp by an unseen killer... but this in no way explains their vampire origins... or does it? The man who becomes their main and constant human snack bar throughout the course of the film (and surprisingly, he’s the only main human character who actually survives to the end of the movie) checks into a hotel in the area in which this film is set and one of the hotel clerks seems to recognise him from many years before... although the ages don’t match up. Hmmmm... are they setting this guy up to be the main vampire?

Well, the answer is... no. Not a bit of it. He seems just as confused as everybody else who ends up becoming bloody food for these female sexpots... which makes me wonder if there wasn’t a story change somewhere along the line and little moments which had already been shot to signify something else were just jettisoned later in the production as the story reshaped itself in to something else... due to either inventiveness, dried up funding or an inability to capture what was initially wanted. I guess I’ll never know if that’s what happened... but one of those things seems likely to me.

Not that this makes much difference. Vampyres is a really neat little “horror” film and, although the visual design and atmosphere are not a patch on what French lesbian vampire auteur Jean Rollin could create, this little movie certainly holds it’s own in the entertainment stakes and has a certain hypnotic spell all it’s own. I can imagine giving this one a spin when I’m next in need of a little mindless but sexy “vamping up”. Highly recommended for any fans of 70s euro-horror... and for fans of bare, heaving bosoms dripping with blood, of course.