Suspiria

Fever Witch

Suspiria
Italy 1977
Directed by Dario Argento
Synapse Blu Ray Zone A

My revisitation of the early works of Dario Argento for this blog continues with a welcome US 4K restoration, limited edition steelbook Blu Ray of Suspiria. This is the edition approved by the cinematographer, which I spent far too much money on but which is worth it for the absolute crystal clarity of the transfer (which is important with this film in particular), not to mention the beautiful front and back cover artwork on the tin itself, initially hidden behind an equally gorgeous cardboard slipcase featuring the original, iconic ballet dancer artwork from the first release poster. Asides from the booklet, when you delve into the tin you get three discs... one of the film itself with the option of different opening credits sequences (not to mention two different commentary tracks), another disc full of extras and, on a third disc, a CD containing the famous Goblin soundtrack for the film.

I don’t know how you’d describe Suspiria to someone who has never seen it before. And, when I say ‘seen’ I mean experienced it... this is not like watching any other movie you’ve looked at so try and make sure you see it in the best conditions you can. Dim the lights and maybe pour yourself a drink... and don’t blame the almost hypnagogic visuals on the alcohol you’re casually sipping as your jaw drops at the attractive visuals. I’ve heard the film described as a few things in various documentary films on director Dario Argento over the years and, the two best ones I can remember are ‘fever dream’ and ‘fairy tale’. These two descriptions combined fit the visual aesthetic and atmosphere of watching the movie perfectly well so I’m not going to try and come up with something which is any more appropriate here.

The film was co-written by Dario Argento and his then partner Daria Nicolodi (father and mother of Asia Argento) and it was partly inspired by Nicolodi’s recollections of her grandmother’s stories of having attended such an academy and then fleeing when she found out it was a front for the study of witchcraft. Another influence is Thomas De Quincey’s Suspiria De Profundis, which is often bundled together with his more well known Confessions Of An English Opium Eater... although it only relates to a couple of pages (from what I can remember, it’s a fair number of years since I read it) which outline the Three Mothers... the witches at the heart of Argento’s eventual trilogy of films Suspiria, Inferno and Mother Of Tears (aka The Third Mother).

The film is typical Argento and really establishes, more than any other, his similarity to the great Mario Bava in terms of the way he uses colour. It’s actually shot on Eastman colour but it was printed on one of the last surviving three strip technicolour machines in Italy. This allowed Argento and cinematographer Luciano Tovoli much more control over the bright colours used here for the release prints (I won’t call them primary colours as everyone else seems to because, frankly, colours like purple and green which are in the film in abundance aren’t primary colours at all... unless you count RGB as primary and... I don’t).

During some quite sinister music going up as the opening credits roll, the scene is set by some voice over narrative telling about how Suzy Bannion (played by Jessica Harper here) went to Freiberg to attend the dance academy there. As the credits finish we see her leaving an airport, which already shows us the kind of strong and often quite nonsensical use of bright colours which will become the glue that holds the movie together. There is a certain sense of calm as the camera tracks us out (a series of shots which include a couple of glimpses of Daria Nicolodi herself, who walks out of frame and leaves the film for good) and, when Suzy leaves through the sliding doors at the front, Argento’s almost obsessional preoccupation with showing the visual mechanics of things already gets a highlight here as we observe the mechanism of the sliding doors filling the screen in two shots. When Suzy gets outside, the iconic Goblin Suspiria theme kicks in as her scarf whips up in the wind and she is pitched into a chaotic world of rain which assails the senses of the audience as much as it gets in the face of the lead actress. Eventually she is picked up by a taxi driver (a character and actor who we will see again in the second film of the Three Mothers trilogy) and she is driven through the Black Forest... since most of the film is shot in places which aren’t where it actually takes place fictionally. There is a truly amazing piece of film stitched into this sequence with the majority of the bottom of the shot just black, depicting the side of the cab and all we can see in the top sliver of the screen still visible is the rain pounding and rebounding on the roof of the cab as it goes past various brightly lit buildings... the effect being that we get different coloured washes of bright rain hitting the cab in greens, yellows, purples and reds etc as it passes by. Just really gorgeous, visually sophisticated film-making here.

When Suzy finally reaches her destination and she tries to get in to the academy, she sees but - mostly due to the thunder storm - doesn’t hear the majority of the words of the anxiety filled student who then runs off while simultaneously locking out Suzy who, after a brief pause where an equally hysterical person on the door intercom won’t let her in, is forced to return to the taxi and seek accommodation elsewhere for the night. The mechanics of this sequence are purely so we can see her on a return journey through the Black Forest where she can witness the plight of the girl who fled the academy as a transition scene, it seems.

We then join that girl as she pitches up at a friends house, which is equally resplendent in its design using colourful, geometrical shapes and patterns and an almost surreal sense of architectural detail... which Argento obviously lingers on as much as he can. We then witness what is probably the most violent scene in the movie, with a double murder as some non-human creature stabs the girl repeatedly until a hole is carved through her torso... a hole through which we can see a close up of her beating heart which is also stabbed in gory detail. She is then simultaneously dropped through a stained glass window ceiling which shatters while a strip of wire which the murderer has stabbed into her body pulls tight and acts as a noose for her hanging, lifeless corpse. The punchline of the sequence comes as Argento moves his camera along the floor underneath her, so we can see how the carefully arranged and shaped blood puddle integrates with the patterned floor before we stumble across the body of her friend, who has been impaled and also had her head split open by large chunks of the falling, stained glass. This is probably the most violent set piece in the movie (at least in terms of credibility, to a certain extent) so if you happen to be squeamish and you can make it through this point of the opening ten minutes, you don’t need to worry about the rest of the film, where the violence is more felt than observed in detail... although the walking corpse of one of the characters with big pins stuck through the front of her eyeballs might unnerve some, I suppose.

The rest of the film deals with how Jessica Harper’s character integrates with the other students, including actresses Stefania Casini and Barbara Magnolfi... the teachers and directors of the school, played by legendary 1940s actresses Alida Valli and Joan Bennet... and how she tries to solve the problem of a dance academy where ‘things happen’ due to it being run by a coven of witches led by the long though dead witch Eleanor Markos. There’s even a brief cameo by a young Udo Kier which people will want to look out for, playing a psychologist who says the line... "Bad luck isn't brought by broken mirrors but by broken minds". Broken Mirrors, Broken Minds was also the name of a quite good book on Argento by Maitland McDonagh in the early 1990s but it’s presumably a reference here to the fact that an awful lot of the shots in this film use mirrors to highlight the characters in unusual ways.

Indeed, there’s an almost unbelievable shot set up where two characters are on opposite sections of the wide screen but because of the way the mirror in the first third of screen is angled against the wall in relation to the camera, they're also talking placed right next to each other when they’re simultaneously seen in the reflection. Broken mirrors might also be a reference to a bit of reflective glass which looks broken and which is being ‘polished’ as Suzy walks through one of the corridors. The plump woman who is polishing it is accompanied throughout the film by a young boy, dressed suspiciously like the young boy seen in the opening credits of Argento’s previous film Deep Red (reviewed by me here) and, as our heroine gets nearer, the piece is angled and the already sinister soundtrack gives us a sting as the blinding light hits Suzy and does... something... to her which causes her to be taken ill and essentially moved into the academy where the powers in charge can keep an eye on her under the guise of medical reasons (which involve feeding her wine and other food that keep her weak whenever she imbibes). The shot is a beauty, though, because as the light from the object bathes the camera, the lights on the rest of the shot are dimmed down, only to be brought up again as the piece angles away again. The first time you see this, however, you might not notice the artifice of having to coordinate the lighting to accommodate the effect of the shiny object in question.

Okay, let’s talk about those bright colours. All through the film the director borrows from Mario Bava’s lighting style and we are shown highly saturated reds, purples, greens, yellows and blues bathing various objects or people, sometimes simultaneously in the same shot. For instance there’s a shot of Suzy in bed with everything in the room lit normally except her friend who is bathed in green and apart from a table at the side and all the objects on it, which are bathed in red. A lot of this stuff goes on and you get things happening like, in a makeshift dormitory built with hanging white sheets after a maggot infestation renders a floor of the school temporarily unuseable, somebody turns the lights off and the whole room is bathed in red for no apparent reason. And the sheets are now showing the silhouettes of what is going on behind them as shadows against the red (one of the shadows in this scene is a deliberate foreshadowing of a confrontation scene near the end of the movie). Or, when a character turns a light off in a room to make it dark, instead of being in pitch blackness, everything is miraculously lit up in a neon green. And when a character later smashes into the glass doors of a cabinet, the interior of the cabinet lights up red against her for a brief second.

The colours make absolutely no sense in this film but they look amazing. I’ve heard it said that they are supposed to be symbolic of the internal psychological state of the characters but I’m not sure that level of synaesthetic response was truly what Argento was going for, to be honest... because if you try and follow along with the colours like this and assign them some meaning then you may find yourself coming up short. I would concede, however, that they do play a psychological role in the way they are used to affect the mental state of the audience when they watch it. But, like I said earlier... fever dream meets fairy tale and the film truly immerses you in an experience while you subconsciously watch the colours do their thing on an entirely different level to what would have been written in the script.

Also pushing that fairy tale analogy is the fact that Argento originally wanted to shoot the film with young, teen girls but was told that it would not be a good commercial decision to have a violent horror movie utilising 12 and 13 years olds. To get around that, he has the camera placed just a little lower than he might usually shoot (so the audience is, more often than not in this movie, looking slightly up at the other characters) and he also has made the sets rather looming in comparison to the actors, with door knobs much higher than they would be in real life, for example, so the women have to reach up to open the doors in the rooms. The script wasn’t rewritten either so the child like and naive attitudes of a lot of the characters isn’t down to the bad acting of the majority of the actors like it is in a lot of Argento’s films (although there is a small amount of that here) but because the women are all written as children, so to speak.

But it’s not just the colours and height of the doorknobs that make this a typically Argento horror film (his first horror film, in fact, after a successful string of gialli and one failed comedy). The shot designs are the usual exquisite and meticulous works of beauty you would expect from the director. Geometrical patterns collide with walls and rooms adorned with 'trompe l'oeil' effects disguising hidden rooms and recesses and camouflaged with designs reminiscent of (and perhaps even the same designs in some cases) of the works of M. C. Escher. Indeed, the academy is in a street called Escher Straße so clearly Argento was not above wearing some of his artistic influences on his sleeve.

Other Argento-isms include the strange looking use of foreground objects seen attached to the camera and moving as the camera moves, such as a glass of red wine of a tray here in two shots, which are just like the shots he used of some of the murder weapons in Four Flies On Grey Velvet (which I reviewed here). Then there’s the moment when some items are dropped out of a bag and where they have fallen they are arranged meticulously so the camera can concentrate on them as they are picked up (even though they seem to have no narrative significance in the film, from what I can remember). There’s also a literal peacock made of glass and beads, which is presumably a visual reference to his first feature film, The Bird With The Crystal Plumage (reviewed here), featured prominently in the final confrontation scene.

There’s a masterful, quite protracted scene comprising both static and moving camera shots where we know a character is going to be horribly killed but, as this blind character with his seeing eye dog are standing alone in the middle of a huge, deserted square (which Hitler used for his book burning rally in real life), we can feel the supernatural lurking in the shadows as we wait for the inevitably bloody denouement. When it does come it’s... well it’s surprising in terms of its origin is all I’m going to say about that one. Well, that and the fact that it’s quite brilliantly unexpected.

The thing which most of Argento’s films of this period have is also present here. That being the memory of an ‘escaped detail’ of something the main protagonist knows is there but can’t quite put their finger on until the end of the movie. In The Bird With The Crystal Plumage it was the struggle for the knife in the gallery. In The Cat O’ Nine Tails it was something Karl Malden’s character heard in passing. In Four Flies On Grey Velvet it was the masked killer, to an extent, and much later the mystery of the images of the four flies pulled from a dead woman’s retinas. In Deep Red it was Hemming’s niggling thought that there was something wrong with one of the paintings in the flat where he discovered the corpse of the woman he tried to save at the start of the film. In Suspiria, the thing haunting Suzy Bannion’s character are the fragments of the conversation she heard through the thunder storm as the girl who fled the academy at the start was talking to somebody just inside the door... primarily the words ‘secret’ and ‘iris’. In terms of this particular character in this particular film, you’ll be glad to know that she works out the significance of these words just when she needs to in order to move the narrative forward, quite near the end of the movie.

And that’s me done on Suspiria for now. I am curious about the new version hitting the UK in November although the audacity of someone trying to remake this masterpiece is something I find to be extraordinary. Suspiria is a truly beautiful film which is elevated greatly by its heightened colour schemes and unnerving musical score by Goblin, which Argento used to play at the actors on set to get them on edge (remember that most of these kinds of Italian movies are not shot with live sound and are dubbed into various languages for respective country's releases... so on set noise was not unusual). If you’re into horror films and you’ve not seen Argento’s Suspiria then you really need to fix that because it’s one of the most expressionistic and unique horror movies you’ll ever see, I suspect. Certainly nothing in the last 41 years of the genre since its release has come along to challenge it. Definitely a movie to be experienced, rather than watched and the limited Synapse US Zone A Blu Ray edition is pretty much the best I’ve ever seen it looking. Not much more to say on this one... an essential purchase for any fan of the horror film and... I’ll leave it at that.

The Theatre Bizarre

They Ate Her

The Theatre Bizarre
USA/France/Canada 2011
Directed by Douglas Buck, Buddy Giovinazzo, David Gregory, Karim Hussain, Jeremy Kasten, Tom Savini, Richard Stanley
Blu Ray Zone B (Germany)

Warning: Yeah, you know what? This review is going to have some minor spoilers in it otherwise... well, otherwise I won’t have too much I can talk about.

The Theatre Bizarre is a film I ordered from a different country because I’d heard enough about it that I wanted to see it on a crisp Blu Ray transfer and, in the UK, it only seems to be around on DVD. Well, mission accomplished in terms of the transfer but, alas, it’s really not the film I was hoping it would be. The real trouble with anthology movies is that they tend to be quite hit and miss in the effectiveness of their stories, especially when they are traditionally, just like this one, put together by different directors. I’d have to say of this one that, on the whole, I found it more miss than hit and pretty much weak tea when it came to delivering on the shocks and scares normally associated with a horror movie. Likewise, it’s title leads to expectations of something truly unusual and, while it does have a few moments which I’ll highlight in a little while... again, there wasn’t exactly an abundance of bizarre imagery or story content available.

The film opens quite strongly with some nice credits leading into the first excerpt of a framing story by Jeremy Kasten. A lady doing frantic sketches and artworks of the titular theatre across the street from her window feels the call of the place and goes to the rundown and, seemingly closed, theatre. She gains entry and is greeted by a strange kind of mannequin puppet which, even from the start, is somebody who you can tell is Udo Kier. He’s got a fake head which looks like a rough, claymation impression of him and he mechanically introduces a series of mannequins, as the lady takes her seat and watches... each mannequin leading onto a segment of the film telling their story.

The first story, The Mother Of Toads, is directed by the great director Richard Stanley (Hardware, Dust Devil) and horror and giallo fans would probably twig right away that the clue as to the style of this segment is in the title. Yeah, that’s right. This whole segment is a little homage to the horror films of Dario Argento and Mario Bava and involves a man’s quest when he is offered a chance to go and view a copy of the infamous Necronomicon at the house of a lady whom his girlfriend buys some earrings from on a market stall. Anyone familiar with the writings of H. P. Lovecraft and his Cthulhu mythos will, of course, recognise the Necronomicon as a notorious fictional book within his writings... an evil book which has been referenced by many, many artists, writers, movie makers and musicians over the years.

It has to be said that The Mother Of Toads is easily the best segment of the entire movie and it has some beautiful camerawork such as an amazing shot of the canopy of trees of a forest reflected in a car windscreen from above, following the director’s little homage to the famous ‘road approach’ in Stanley Kubrik’s The Shining. There are also some beautiful, Bava-esque lighting juxtapositions of block colours, perhaps in slightly cooler tones, in certain scenes.

The sequence is not a masterpiece but it’s a great contribution to the film and ends up with a naked toad woman, mucus sex and aggressive toad murders. I kinda wished they’d saved this segment until the end of the picture because at least then it would have gone out with a high. Lucio Fulci enthusiasts might like to know that this segment also features a performance by Catriona MacColl.

Following another part of the framing story, where Udo’s mannequin starts to look less artificial and a little more... um... Udoish, we have the second story, I Love You. This one is filmed with a more clinically neutral palette but with big set pieces of goriness to offset that. It’s really a very disappointing story of a guy and a girl breaking up because she is leaving him and having an affair and... yeah... nothing new here and just a little tedious, I thought. It does, however, have the epic line... “Your penis and my vagina never really liked each other.”... which brought a smile to the face.

Between the second and third segments, Udo’s ‘host’ gets his real eyes.

We then have Wet Dreams, directed by and starring make up and special effects guru Tom Savini, who has been a famous genre fixture both behind and in front of the camera since the mid 1970s. This is the second strongest of the stand alone segments in the movie and involves the story of an abusive man who keeps having bad dreams and drifting from one dream to another. There’s a brilliant dream in this where his naked wife, who he is approaching to have sex, suddenly unleashes these beetle-like pincers from her vagina and bites his cock off. When he ‘wakes up’ to his normal routine, this is also revealed to be a dream as his wife serves him his cock for breakfast. So... it’s an old plot of dreams running like Russian dolls until the final twist. The final twist in these kinds of stories usually involves the person dreaming doing something absolutely terrifying to somebody before discovering that they had actually woken up for real but the end of Savini’s segment has a slightly different kind of reveal. Not necessarily a better one but.... at least it’s different.

The fourth stand alone tale is called The Accident and kind of deals with the loss of innocence of a child as she witnesses death up close for the first time. Alas, there seem to be no horror tropes in this one at all and absolutely no reveal of an ending either. It just kind of drifts along with, I thought, nothing to say.

The fifth story is called Vision Stains and involves a serial killing woman who is going around slowly penetrating people’s eyeballs with her syringe and extracting what she believes to be some kind of spiritual essence from her victims... which she injects right into herself soon after to see what she can learn. Or something like that... the reasons are pretty much the ravings of a deranged mind, to be sure. There are an awful lot of close up shots of people’s eyeballs being penetrated by the syringe in this story. The segment finishes when she kills a pregnant mother, extracts from the fetus inside her and then injects the essence of the baby into her own eyeballs. However, the baby then gets in her head and induces the woman to stab her own eyes out with a screwdriver. She then wanders the earth as a... well... as a blind serial killer, I guess.

The last story in the selection is called Sweets and it’s a very colourful look at a break up of a couple who are very much into eating sweets of all kinds. However, the woman who is leaving her boyfriend has an ulterior motive and... I wish I could say that her intent was fresh and original but, no, the ending of this story has been done to death before, it seemed to me so... yeah, not the strongest story you could have ended on.

And that’s about it. By the end of the film, the twist of the framing segment is revealed but, alas, if you’ve being paying attention to what’s going on in it then I’m afraid it’s not something you wont see coming a mile off. Which is a shame because I really wanted to be surprised by this movie and I even watched it late one night, on my own in the darkness, to add to the atmosphere. Not too much to say about this one though and I would have to say that, while The Theatre Bizarre does demonstrate some artistry and skill in certain places, it’s ultimately not the most interesting film I’ve seen in a while and I genuinely felt the scripting was weak in a lot of places. The directors did their best but the source material does not really seem enough to work with. Okay as a palette cleanser, perhaps, in an all nighter with some more serious or unsettling movies on either side of it... this could be the movie you stick on to have a little break but, as a stand alone experience, it doesn’t get much of a thumbs up from me, I’m afraid.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne

Jekyll Finger Of Fate

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne
(aka Docteur Jekyll et les Femmes)
France/West Germany 1981
Directed by  Walerian Borowczyk
Arrow Blu Ray/DVD Dual Format Edition

I’m still not sure where I stand with Walerian Borowczyk. His cinema is rich and sumptuous in terms of its visual manifestation and, sometimes like here, its audio presentation. However, I find I react very differently to his movies... sometimes they’re a bit of a miss with me, other times a big hit. Or, like this one, the film is a combination of both with the sheer brilliance of some of the visual and aural distractions not always quite enough to keep me entertained for the full running time.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne is the film which won Borowczyk the 'Best Feature Film Director' prize at the Sitges Film Festival for 1981 but I, myself, found the first half an hour or so of the movie, which is the set up for the shenanigans which occur throughout the rest of the story, much more enthralling and generally noteworthy than the rest of the feature. I was given this movie by a couple of friends as a Birthday present in January and it came with the cautionary tale that, back in the 1980s, the father of one of the two who gave it to me had bought this in the UK in an early VHS tape edition. However, the gentleman in question was so unimpressed by the content of the film that he took it back for a refund. I can kind of understand where he was coming from in some ways... especially if the film frame was chopped up into a 4 by 3 aspect ratio, as was the norm for video tapes back then. I can kinda sympathise.

What is in no doubt, however, is that the people behind the scenes at Arrow have done a beautiful job at the restoration and transfer of this print, even making the Blu Ray and DVD multiregion, something which the company has not done in the past (see my review of Borowczyk’s Immoral Tales here) but which I personally see as a huge step forward for fans of art versus commerce, no matter what the copyright holder sees as the overruling factor in such situations. So good for them, is all I can say.

After a brief but striking title sequence which mixes bursts of credits appearing and disappearing at speed and mixed with sketches of old London in blue, each accompanied by eerie stabs of electronic, musical tone provided by composer Bernard Parmegiani (possibly needle dropped), we are hit up with a quote from Robert Louis Stevenson’s original story The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde before going into the film properly. The story then starts with the night time streets of London shot in a similar blue lighting which seems to indicate the outside world of the house in which the majority of the movie is set. Here we witness the near murder of a child which interpenetrates the story later on as one of the principal characters is a police investigator.

The setting of the film is an engagement party for Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne and the majority of the interiors seem to be made up of the absolute opposite of the exterior scenes in terms of colour, with lots of warm yellows and oranges seen in contrast to the treacherous night time settings of old London Town. There are also some great flash forwards during the main narrative in the early part of the film which come with similar stabs of atonal electronic music as we heard in the main title sequence and which are similar, in fashion, to the sudden blink and you’ll miss them rushes forwards and backwards in a lot of director Nicholas Roeg’s work. The way Borowczyk handles this is enhanced not only by the intrusive contrast of the score onto the previously musical bereft scene but also, of course, by using scenes often bathed in the blue lighting scheme of the earliest sequences of the movie in stark juxtaposition... so much so, in fact, that for a little while I actually thought one or two of the characters were flashing back to a back story element, rather than flashing forward to incidents seen later in the film.

Early shots within the house are particularly interesting as the guests such as Jess Franco favourite Howard Vernon and the always delightfully over the top Patrick Magee are welcomed into the home of Dr. Jekyll, played by the always watchable Udo Kier, and his beautiful fiancee, Miss Osbourne, played by the truly stunning Marina Pierro. What he does is to use the natural framing of a house with a lot of vertical interiors and then uses certain areas which also have a strong horizontal dominance... splitting the shots up into squares and rectangles and pitching the characters into these sections to add a certain dynamism to the frame. At one point it gets so predominant I kept being reminded of a checkerboard. Later in the movie, the horizontal splits aren’t so prominent but the verticals still dominate the action and make for an interesting look to the frames as they are edited together.

Many of the shots, especially in the second half of the movie, seem to be smaller frames surrounded by contrasting darkness or black at the extremes of the screen... giving one a sense, almost, that various sequences have been sculpted out of light and whittled away by a master craftsmen until they are teased out of the surroundings. Of course, since we’re talking about Walerian Borowczyk here, I don’t think the metaphor is inappropriate for a true artist of cinema such as he.

Alas, that’s all the enthusiasm I can muster for this because once Hyde makes an appearance, played with a real sense of chaos by actor Gérard Zalcberg, the film becomes a chase/romp around the house in a situation where anyone else would have maybe got the police properly involved and sharpish. Hyde is threatening and totally unsympathetic but his actions and movements seem choreographed in such a way that he seems more like one of Borowczyk’s early cartoon characters in his shorts (reviewed by me here) rather than a manifestation of the evils of the id out of control. This kind of takes away from the feel for him as a flesh and blood human character and, for me, eked out any sense of caring what happened for the remainder of the film... which seemed a little dull in comparison to the strong opening of the movie.

That being said, there are lots of good things about The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne and my brain certainly didn’t come away from this empty headed, so to speak, not withstanding the decreasing mental acuity of your less than humble reviewer. Arrow have done a bang up job of getting lesser known works by major artists released in as uncut a form as our stupid moral guardians will allow and are to be congratulated on this and many others of their releases, which it is a privilege to own in such wonderful prints and transfers. Not exactly my favourite Borowczyk movie, for sure, but certainly a interesting gem, boosted by a number of those little extras which Arrow tend to adorn these unmissable releases with. So if you're a Borowczyk fan, this is another essential purchase, I think. Probably the best international release this film has ever received and certainly a long way away from those days of early and considerably overpriced VHS tapes of yesteryear.

Celluloid Horror

Scare Necessities

Celluloid Horror
2004 Canada
Directed by Ashley Fester
DVD Region 0

Celluloid Horror is a documentary feature film which focuses on troubled but transformed soul Kier-La Janisse’s crusade to get a legitimate horror film festival up and running in Canada. Tirelessly dogging her goal and mining her passion for film, specifically movies which, arguably, fall into the horror and exploitation categories, into a much loved and well attended event which ran for several years.

I first became aware of the existence of this documentary about Janisse from the introduction to her book, House Of Psychotic Women. I read that earlier in the year and was pleasantly surprised by what a knowledgable and entertaining read it was... there’s a reason why I called it, pretty much, the best book on the exploitation and horror genre in film I’d ever read and, if you want to read my review of that book, you can click here. 

Although this film has less of the “case history” of Janisse in it, one of the things which helped make the book so unique and fascinating in its approach, I was pleased to see some of the real life “characters” of her past, such as “Warren Oates Dad” and “George C. Scott Dad” making brief appearances in the documentary, so I could put some faces to names. The film certainly lets you get an alternate flavour of the woman and her tireless energy in making quite daunting things happen for her creation, the Cine Muerte festival. It’s a pretty entertaining piece and it seems to be less angled at painting a specific bias or promoting a hidden agenda in its focus... which is unusual for a documentary, to be honest. The only real pitch it seems to be going for is all out fun and the promotion, vicariously through the lady in question, of the legitimacy of horror and exploitation cinema as a serious artistic pursuit in and of itself. Hey, no argument from me on that one. Preaching to the converted.

The film struck a cord with me because of the naivety of Janisse when she started trying to get films for the very first festival, in regards to the kind of money involved. I myself had been looking into getting into programming screenings a few years ago but a seminar on just how to do it left my face white with the amount of money in different kinds of licences you have to pay out just to get one film screened... and that’s assuming you can even get in contact with the various rights holders. When I looked at the amount of time I would have to put in and the various other factors involved in that particular route to regular screenings, I realised there just wasn’t enough flexibility in my day-to-day existence for me to fit it in around my work life. Fortunately for Janisse, it looks like she was in a position at the time where she could just about drop stuff in her life to pursue these passions... but that’s not to say it was in any way easy, far from it. You have to admire her tenacity in her pursuit and there are several stories highlighted in the film which show her importance within the realm in which she has chosen to plough her love for film into something which can be beneficial for her audience... even if it means taking a loss on it. There’s an interesting anecdote about French vampire surrealist Jean Rollin, for example, and the long journey to getting even a willing participant such as him to turn up as a guest at the festival.

Also, she was one of the people championing The Isle, a great movie I was trying to push to people’s attention back around about the start of the millennium (I believe the UK DVD is still sliced to buggery by the BBFC, so grab a Hong Kong edition if possible). I didn’t realise she was actively involved with getting it screened in Canada but that gives her even more brownie points in my little black book, as far as I’m concerned. More importantly, she got the ban lifted on Jörg Buttgereit’s Nekromantik in Canada, by being quite shrewd and challenging the censors at an appeal level by spotting their deliberate agenda based ommissions from their own case against lifting the ban and using it against them. So.... one smart cookie.

Also, between her excellent book House Of Psychotic Women and this documentary, it’s even made me kind of interested in seeing the Nekromantik films too... something I wasn’t all that bothered with until now... so that’s kind of interesting (luckily for me, Arrow Films are releasing an uncut blu ray in the UK this year... so I shouldn’t have too long to wait).

The documentary is really well put together and uses a lot of clips from genre films to either illustrate, decorate or, occasionally, push a point someone is making, and this is all well and good. Some of the footage is not footage which is certified over here in the UK actually (and I’m thinking of an animal killing from Cannibal Holocaust) so that’s all really interesting. And, of course, you also get to see the audience reactions a little bit when she screens some of these films at Cine Muerte... which is kinda fun.

And talking of fun, I think my favourite bit is the footage when she manages to get Udo Kier over for a week. He’s a cool guy and it’s just brilliant when, because subtitled prints haven’t arrived in some cases, Udo, Kier-La and a bunch of her friends “live dub” some of the films for the audience as they are watching the film. There’s some footage of them all trying to dub the excellent giallo Black Belly Of The Tarantula, for instance, and Kier-La is just trying to keep a straight face while saying her lines and just failing hilariously throughout. This is brilliant stuff. And to top it off, at the end of Udo’s week, they present him with an award in the form of a giant sized bottle of J&B whiskey with the inscription “For Lifetime Achievement In Eurotrash - Udo Kier”. I’m sure lots of my readers are regular J&B spotters, as they always turned up in a lot of gialli, police thrillers and various other Italian exploitation films throughout the 1960s and 1970s... so the form of the award is totally appropriate. They go on to confirm that Udo drank the bottle full of whiskey that night... which is another thing that cements his cool, wild man reputation, for me.

So that’s it for this one. A cool documentary which tends to use the music of Goblin quite a lot, specifically the main themes from Suspiria and Deep Red (aka Profondo Rosso), which is kinda puzzling actually because I don’t remember director Dario Argento even getting a mention in this movie... but still, a really entertaining piece and one that gives you a nice look at the bubbly enthusiasm of Kier-La Janisse, which is not how I’d imagined her when I read her truly excellent book House Of Psychotic Women (again, that book reviewed here). Definitely worth a watch and there are some nice extras on the DVD, including a segment of the film which was heavily truncated in the documentary itself, restored as a lengthy segment, and the full interview with Kier-La Janisse and Udo Kier on a talk show... not to mention a whole load of exciting photos and things of that ilk. Definitely worth a look if you can get your hands on a copy. See Celluloid Horror if you are into scary, gory movies and exploitation but, absolutely, definitely, make sure you read Janisse’s excellent autobiographical genre study House Of Psychotic Women too... both these things are well worth your time.