Parapsycho

Remote Control

Parapsycho - 
Spektrum der Angst
West Germany/Austria 1975
Directed by Peter Patzak
Cinerama Filmgesellschaft MBH 

Warning: Big spoilers projected into your head.

Parapsycho - Spektrum der Angst is a bit of an unusual film. The DVD copy I have of this is in a 4:3 aspect ratio but I can’t tell whether this was actually originally made for television in its countries of origin, whether it’s an open matte transfer of a cinematic release or, as someone has suggested, due to the experimental nature of the film. The shots do seem pretty well composed for the frame though and, on that last statement, it’s not that experimental, it seems to me.

The film is one of those horror anthology films which used to be so popular at the tail end of the 1960s and early 1970s and starts out with all the titles and cast for each of the three segments being typed out on a teletype machine. It then goes on to say something about various paranormal aspects before leading into the next segment. The three segments are, as far as I could make out (the subtitling wasn’t 100% thought through), Reinkarnation, Metempsychose and Telepathie Hypnose.

The first film tells of a man who is trying to get home to his wife and child after a long journey from work but, on the way, he gets a longing to visit a chateau which he sees a picture of and then he stumbles across it by the side of the road. So he goes in to investigate and is mistaken for someone who wants to hire the chateau as a holiday retreat. Then a character played by the great Marisa Mell turns up and seems to somehow know the man (who is now suffering from some kind of amnesia)... she makes love to him but when he discovers she has the dead body of her freshly murdered husband in her car, he does a runner back to his wife and kids. He then discovers, the next day, that the woman has been dead for 35 years and that, quite possibly, he was also her accomplice and may also be a dead, wandering spirit who he and other people have mistaken for a living person. Possibly. The score in this section is all variations and riffs on a Beethoven piece (the name of which escapes me) and, to be honest, it doesn’t really help the visual content or feel of the the film. 

The second segment tells of a medical professor/pathologist played by William Berger, who is having an affair. His wife realises this and when she, he and their daughter are in the car, she starts speeding and drives it off the road trying to kill everyone... but she only succeeds in killing herself. After a while, though, the daughter starts seeing her mother and is taken to a mental hospital. Then Berger’s affair woman somehow sets a psychic link up with the daughter by overdosing on the same pills she is having for treatment, then kills herself by slashing her wrists. Then, however, Berger’s daughter is taken over by the spirit of his girlfriend and flings herself into her dad’s bed. Later, when the girlfriend is cut up during an autopsy, the daughter feels all of the cuts and evisceration of the process on the dead woman and dies herself from the shock. This one is interesting because real autopsy footage is used and inserted into that particular scene.

The third film sees a somewhat disturbed, evil guy played by Mathieu Carrière using sketches of a woman to psychically kidnap her when she’s supposed to be on her honeymoon with her new husband. His previous psychic mannequin woman has killed herself by jumping off a balcony. He sexes up his new acquisition by just running his hands over her naked body, which gives her an uncontrollable and powerful orgasm... yeah, don’t we all do this at some point? ‘-) and it’s hinted that the man is sexually impotent himself. He keeps her captive until she is rescued by an unlikely person... the guy’s mother. When he finds she has been freed from his apartment, he’s already onto the next girl, so he just uses the power of his mind to make honeymoon gal jump out of a window to her death also. Yep, evil definitely trumps good on this last segment, for sure. Innocents are killed... evil prospers, seems to be the underlying message of this last part. 

The film itself has a fairly low key atmosphere and there are some nice shot set ups on occasion. For instance, in the first segment, the man drives his car towards the camera with light bouncing off the windshield, obscuring his features and, when he parks at a point in close up, the camera moves around to frame the windshield in the middle of the screen. Where the guy’s head is, the reflection of a tree branch overhangs and the shadow of it in the windscreen means that only his face is visible against the rest of it. So, yeah, stuff like this is pretty well thought out, it seemed to me. 

The odd thing is that there is sex and nudity in each segment... in the first one it feels pretty shoehorned into the plot (although I’m really not complaining about a naked Marisa Mell, to be honest) and it seems almost to be part of the brief, so to speak, that all the women in the movie expose their bodies. Again, I’ve not got a problem with it but it did seem a little like overkill here at times. 

Although it’s firmly entrenched in the portmanteau horror movie style, to be honest it made me think more of a series of episodes of a British TV show such as Tales Of The Unexpected or Hammer House Of Horror (reviewed here) rather than anything put together for a cinema release. It just seems to have that kind of homespun quality about it, like the cast and crew are all doing their best trying to make something compelling for a fairly small budget and having to make do and mend. It doesn’t detract from it too much but it did feel like a somewhat diminished form of the art to me, as I was watching it... despite having some nice frame designs and some unusual pieces of interior design on the sets. 

And that’s me done with Parapsycho - Spektrum der Angst... I’m glad I saw it (relatively cheaply) and I think people who revel in things like the old BBC seasonal Winter ghost stories and entertainments of that ilk might find themselves occupied by it. I can’t say I’d especially recommend it to many of the people I know, though.

Five Dolls For An August Moon (5 Bambole Per La Luna D'agosto)

Mario Haste,
Repent At Leisure

Five Dolls For An August Moon 
(5 Bambole Per La Luna D'agosto)
1970 Italy
Directed by Mario Bava
Kino Classics BluRay Region A

I think it was actor Cameron Mitchell, on a TV interview he did many decades ago, who said of his experiences of working with Mario Bava, that Bava was such a consummate director and cinematographer that you could pause any one of his movies at any place in the running time and you will find yourself with a beautiful, perfectly composed photograph. And, whenever I look at the work of this particular director, who is a favourite of mine in terms of the body of his work taken as a whole, I have to conclude that Mitchell was absolutely right.

I hadn’t watched Five Dolls For An August Moon in quite a while and, since it’s my favourite of Bava’s films, I treated myself to the remastered US Blu Ray of the movie to watch it again, since the colours and compositions in his works are always so great and are well worth the upgrade.

This movie, which is technically a giallo, also has my favourite “giallo babe” Edwige Fenech in it. Now she’s eye candy enough on her own but to put her in a movie directed by the man whose strong sense of colour and perfect compositions could almost make him the person the term “eye candy” was named after, is like putting an extra layer of icing on the most beautifully baked cake. This film is a truly scrumptious visual, and also audio, treat.

The basic story of this film is pretty much a free and uncredited adaptation of Agatha Christie’s novel Ten Little Niggers from 1939. Because the title of the novel took its name from a British nursery rhyme which had a different US equivalent as Ten Little Indians, the American edition from the same year was changed to the last line of that country’s equivalent verse, And Then There Were None. Due to the obvious, historically blind, enthusiastic political correctness of later years, the original title was rarely used after that (although it was still being used in some countries as late as the 1980s) and the second title was used most frequently on publications... and the title was even changed to Ten Little Indians on occasion.

There are a number of movie adaptations of this book under various titles, some credited as such and some not, but this one is rarely included in lists of these, for some reason. Bava’s own later movie Bay Of Blood (aka Twitch Of The Death Nerve) was also a variant of this story, in some ways.

The plot revolves around guests on a remote island retreat being murdered off one by one by a person unknown and, because they are cut off from the mainland, they have to survive until the police finally figure out they’re in trouble and turn up at the island. It’s a simple enough story and it’s very minimal... this version having the object of the killers desire, or so it seems at first, to be a new plastic formula which some of the guests are willing to pay millions of dollars for (and this movie version was in 1970, don’t forget, when the prospect of a million dollars seemed an even more monstrously insane sum of money than it does now).

Of course, the simplicity of the storyline is something that really plays with Bava’s strength as a cinematographer and general all round wizard of the visual side of movie making. To be honest, when the characters start talking to each other, it’s much less interesting than seeing them go about their shenanigans without speaking but, fortunately, vast tracts of this movie are dialogue free and it allows you to concentrate on the sheer beauty of Bava’s compositional eye and his deep saturated colour palette... you enjoy the frames on their own terms.

Added to this is an absolutely tremendous score by Piero Umiliani which is one big, jazzy acid trip of a soundtrack and is easily one of the best, arguably the greatest, Italian chill-out scores ever conceived for a movie. Seriously, if I was stranded alone on an island somewhere and I had only ten records I could take with me, the expanded edition of this score put out by Cinevox a few years ago is definitely one of them (the earlier Cinevox album had a much nicer cover but the expanded and remastered edition is, as far as i know, the only one that contains the Italian rock vocal version of the main song from the end credits). I believe it was Tim Lucas, writer of the gorgeous and exhaustive tome Mario Bava: All The Colours Of The Dark, who likened this movie to being the feature length equivalent of a pop video and, I have to say, I agree with this conclusion whole heartedly. You can just put this movie on for the toe tapping and groovy notes, accompanied by Bava’s stock-in-trade compositional perfection, and you are almost guaranteed to have a good time with it. Just don’t be necessarily into watching this for the journey of the story which, in itself, is kinda dull in comparison. There’s even a point in the movie where a character turns on a radio and the diegetic source music is yet another riff from Umiliani’s score... they obviously knew what they had here.

I can’t recommend this movie enough to anyone who’s into cinematic composition, lighting, jazzy music and, of course, Edwige Fenech dancing and shaking her way half naked to Umiliani’s notes. Seriously, every cinephile should have at least a few Mario Bava movies in his or her library and Five Dolls For An August Moon, with its easy atmosphere and gorgeous colour palette, is a definite must watch movie for lovers of the art of cinematography. The newish US Blu Ray edition is a gorgeous transfer and I’m amazed there’s been no Blu Ray (or even DVD release) in the UK as yet. It’s a crime to miss out on this one.