True Detective - Night Country

Native Tongue

True Detective - 
Night Country
Season 4
HBO 2024
6 episodes

Warning: Some spoilers

After a strong opening with a supernatural atmosphere where a herd of deer are startled, True Detective - Night Country, shows itself as being more of a reboot than a continuation at first, although there are some marked references going back to the characters in the first season of the show (reviewed by me here). The opening also has strong similarities to John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing (reviewed here) as the whole thing is set in the fictional town of Ennis in Alaska, when a research team all go suddenly missing, after a big fright glimpsed at the start of the story. Also, to lend itself to the definite supernatural shenanigans going on, the whole thing is set from mid December through to early January, in the part of the year where the whole town is forever night. So, yeah, you won’t be seeing much daylight in this show other than the occasional flashback. 

And that’s another thing which marks this show out from the predecessors… it’s not being told in a fractured time narrative in any way, although there is a sense of looking back to a prior case. 

Enter Police Detective Liz Danvers played by Jodie Foster. When she finds the tongue of an old murder victim in the research station while everyone is missing, she realises it links up with a case with her old partner, now working for a different branch. That doesn’t stop that ex-partner, Evangeline Navarro, played by Kali Reis, from joining the investigation to try and help figure out how the two cases are related. Helping Danvers is her newish young sidekick Detective Peter Prior, played by Finn Bennett. Also among the cast are two actors who feel like they’ve been a bit wasted here. The great Christopher Eccleston plays an outranking superior officer who is not really on board with Danvers investigation but, it’s more like a series of cameos (he doesn’t even appear in the last, slightly extended episode).

And then there’s also Fiona Shaw as a native to the area, Rose Aguineau. Now I think this actress is great, especially after seeing her as the authority figure in Killing Eve (reviewed here, here,  here and here) but, again she’s more of a cameo, ‘five minutes and you’re done’, presence in each episode. That being said, her character, who knows the history and folklore of the area, is at least a more significant person and is even the one who, at the end of the first episode… and with the help of the spirit of her dead husband… finds the frozen bodies of the dead scientists, half mutilated and naked in the snow. 

Well, not all dead because, when the cops are trying to remove the bodies from the ice, one of the guy’s arms cracks off and that’s when we find out there was one survivor… when he starts screaming at this. And asides from the occasional goriness (head shot squibs are getting much better), there is much more an emphasis on the supernatural as accepted by the majority of the population there (except Danvers, naturally, who has to be confronted by it several times before she starts to accept things), giving this season a very different, horror movie vibe. But it’s also shot through with, often black, humour… for instance, after a retort is made to Peter about the way he does everything for Danvers, he finds himself asking, “Who’s Mrs. Robinson?”

So there’s a slow creeping dread going on throughout the entire show and, juxtaposed with the more realistic procedural story which the characters are wrapped up in, it makes for an interesting mix. And it’s well acted, especially by Kali Reis but also, of course, by Foster. In fact, Danvers is a deliberately unlikeable character and so it took me a while before I could start warming to her, as Foster brings out the person beneath the surface as the story continues 

That being said, all of the detectives on the case seem to be missing the one obvious question, filled with mystery, which I picked up on from a screen saver at the research centre early on in the first episode. If this place is supposed to have a highly advanced research team, why the heck are they watching films on a DVD player rather than a Blu Ray player? It makes no sense!

The ending is… ambiguous. A, mostly, human intervention reason for the deaths of all the scientists is given but there’s also room left for unexplained elements which could have… and probably did… contribute to the deaths. Even the final fate of Evangeline Navarro is left open to interpretation… is she in the final shot with Danvers or did she kill herself and then rejoined Danvers as her spirit (as seems to happen a lot in Ennis, it seems… the dead rarely seem to be resting). And, yeah, overall I liked this season, written and directed by a new show runner. I think Night Country and the first season rank the highest in my experience of True Detective, for sure. 

But, of course, like everyone else, I’m wondering when the next cast will be coming along for a sixth season. Well… rumours are I’m going to have to wait ’til 2027 to see the next story so, yeah, I’ll keep my eye on that, for sure.

Mr. Vampire III

Frying Tonight

Mr. Vampire III
aka Ling wan sin sang
aka Mr. Supernatural
Directed by Ricky Lau
Hong Kong 1987
Golden Harvest/Eureka
Blu Ray Zone B


Well this one is pretty great but, before I get on with giving you a short flavour of this movie, I have to first give you a word of caution about Mr. Vampire III. As the second film presented in a box set entitled Hopping Mad - The Mr. Vampire Sequels, you might expect to see some of the trademark hopping vampires in this movie. But you don’t... there’s not even a single vampire that enters the story at any point here, let alone a hopping one. A warning might have been conscientiously provided by Eureka on the Blu Ray box, one might have thought.

While the main actor from the previous two films, Ching-Ying Lam, returns as a character with the same name, who may or may not be the Taoist priest from the first movie (the action returns to ancient times for this movie, preceding the action of the second film, which was set in the 1980s), there is little to connect the two stories.

Having said all that, this movie starts off pretty strong with a comedy action packed opening sequence which then dovetails into... lots more of the same. In fact, one of the strengths of this movie over the other two is that it’s almost non-stop action with just the odd pause to explain to the audience what’s going on and to set up the next scene... but without lingering too much on the story mechanics and, thankfully, without taking itself too seriously in that department.

Okay, so no vampires but the film starts with a wandering Taoist priest, played by Richard Ng, who is conning a family by pretending to exorcise their very real ghosts for money. He uses his own ghosts, who collaborate with him to get the money and then are ‘exorcised’ safely in a taoist prison (in this case an umbrella he carries around from town to town) once the con has been performed. However, almost as soon as this comedy action sequence is complete, the real ghosts who have been bothering the homeowner arrive, a whole clan of them, who kick the priest and his ghosts out. So they flee to the next town where...

They are temporarily mistaken for horse thieves by a group of people protected by the wise Taoist monk played by Ching-Ying Lam. It’s not long before the real band of horse thieves attack the village and are revealed as black magic sorcerers and demons. From that point on and for the rest of the film, it’s a battle of wits... but mostly a battle of cleverly choreographed kung fu style moves, as the comedy and action sequences land one after another and, with this many going on, at least a few should be pretty entertaining. And I’d have to say that, yeah, it worked for me. Despite the absence of the titular hopping vampire, this one was a fast and energetic blend of similar elements to the first film but, done much better and this one didn’t drag in the slightest.

Lam and Ng are great as their respective Taoist monk characters and they make a great pairing here. Unfortunately the music is played for the comedy again, rather than supporting the comedy already inherent and, although there is a credited composer, Chin-Yung Shing, I also noticed in the credits that the use of an entity called the Cavendish Music Library was tapped so, I’m going to have to assume that some of this very broad comedy scoring was just needle dropped in (I hope).

And that’s really all I need to say about Mr. Vampire III, I think. The acting is not subtle (apart from Lam and Ng, I would say) and the basic story is not going to tax anyone or give them much they wouldn’t expect... except maybe the partially deep fried ghost who comes out of hot oil and attacks Ng, looking like a deep fried version of The Oily Maniac (reviewed here). But the film works in spite of all this and I had a good time with it. I’m quite looking forward to the next one now.

The Man From The Diogenes Club

 

Action Guru

The Man From
The Diogenes Club
by Kim Newman
Titan Publishing
ISBN 9781781165744

A quick word to the wise about another absolute belter of a classic from Kim Newman, The Man From The Diogenes Club. Those new to Newman should at least recognise The Diogenes Club from its appearances in Sir Arthur Conan Doyles Sherlock Holmes stories, forever associated with his even smarter brother Mycroft Holmes. In the literary world of Mr. Newman, however, the gentleman’s club has been co-opted as the establishment where the more-secret-than-top-secret British intelligence service is run, especially... as in this case... where cases of unusual or supernatural phenomena are concerned.

The Diogenes Club features quite heavily in Newman’s Anno Dracula books too (reviews of those treasures coming very soon to this blog) but this manifestation, while sharing many of the same people, seems to operate in a slightly alternate universe to the Anno Dracula books. Which would explain why characters from those books are mentioned (and even turn up to help) throughout this collection of short stories about Richard Jeperson, the titular man from the Diogenes club. Sometimes this can get a little confusing, for sure...

For instance, in one of the stories in this tome, which has a kind of ‘brand new team of superheroes sent in to rescue the old team’ vibe, none other than the vampire Geneviève Dieudonné turns up to lend her talents. I’m guessing this isn’t the Anno Dracula version of Geneviève or there would be a lot more overt vampires in the text throughout this collection... it may be the Warhammer series version of Geneviève (also written by Newman) or someone else completely, I have no idea. But it was nice she gets an elaborate shout out in this tome.

Now, for these stories we have the central character of Richard Jeperson who Newman freely admits to being inspired by such 1960s TV fayre as The Avengers and Jason King and, yeah, certainly this has the feel of those in places. For me though... and there’s absolutely nothing to back this up... I reckon Jeperson is possibly inspired by Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius character... with a hefty dose of Sapphire and Steel thrown into the mix. Joining Jeperson for most (but not all) of the stories are the enigmatic Vanessa and, as we see recruited in the first story (although it’s not chronologically the first in this collection), a transferred copper called Fred Regent.

Although one or two tales seem chronologically misplaced (perhaps it’s writing order rather than story order, so to speak), they cover Jeperson’s exploits going from the 1950s (in a flashback from a story which starts off in the 1980s) right through to the 21st Century. And the stories are all fantastic, not a bad one among them as the writer tells tales involving such things as killer robots, living snowmen, a Soho Golem and even a killer TV soap opera, of all things. And being as it’s Mr. Newman, there are all kinds of cultural references littered throughout the stories. One of my favourite tales in the book is the second story, Moon Moon Moon - “It’s all trilogies these days. I blame Johnny Tolkien.” - which involves a bunch of killings which lead to a plot to stop the first moon landing by Armstrong and Co and even features small guest appearances by such notables as Cyrano De Bergerac, Baron Munchaussen, the Selenites, the Cybermen, Captain Haddock and even the Cat Women On The Moon.

The Soho Golem story is another corker, set in the seedy underbelly of London’s Soho and involving all manner of strippers and mob connections. And another firm favourite with me is the last tale, Swellhead, which involves a much older Jeperson in the age of the internet as he investigates, along with a team including the titular Swellhead of the story, Mr. Sewell Head, an underground lair beneath the ice where his coat, the exact same one he is also wearing at the same time as being brought said coat, is found riddled with bullet holes and some of his blood. Is it a time travel thing or is there something even more sinister going on? Either way, Mr. Newman gets away with working one of the best lines from the movie version of Barbarella into the mouth of his main character. He also finds a version of the novel 2001 - A Space Odyssey except, this one is co-authored by both Arthur C. Clark and Ray Bradbury so, yeah, there’s definitely something up.

Other thing I love about these stories is how Newman can just throw in a quick, cultural reference to place the story in a certain time zone by shorthand, rather than trumpet the exact decade each time. So, for instance, in a railway waiting room in the story The Man Who Got Off The Ghost Train, there’s a copy of Guy N. Smith’s The Sucking Pit waiting to be read. I was also very pleased with Newman’s correct usage of the expression ‘imp of the perverse’, after the Poe story. Seems to me I’ve seen that regularly mis-used over the years but Newman obviously totally ‘gets it’ and uses the term admirably. And, in the story which takes place on the sets of a TV soap opera, I was delighted by the term ‘To Darrin’ someone, meaning to replace an actor a long way into a run with someone so like him the audience doesn’t notice... named after the real life occurrence when Dick York, who played Darrin in Bewitched, was replaced after 170 episodes by Dick Sergeant for the remaining 84... with scarcely anyone in the audience noticing. This particular story also introduces a similar variant concept, ‘To Who’ someone... but I’ll let you figure out what that one is.

At the end of the day, I had an absolutely fantastic time with Kim Newman’s The Man From The Diogenes Club and, as usual with this writer, it’s a hard recommend all the way. Certainly add this to your reading list if you’ve not already done so.

Ghost Shark

 

The Phantom
Men Eats

Ghost Shark
USA 2013 Directed by G. E. Furst
Active Entertainment Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Slight spoilers prowling the depths.

When I set out to watch Ghost Shark I thought to myself two things... one was “This has got to be a fun movie if it has a phantom shark in it, right?” and the other was... “No matter how bad this is, it can’t be as badly a made wasted opportunity as Shark Exorcist, surely?” Well, having now watched it I’d have to say a resounding “no” to the former and a “yeah, pretty much” to the latter. Although, as you can probably figure out from my review of Shark Exorcist (right here), that wouldn’t be hard for any film crew who at least can figure out which direction to point the camera in.

Now Ghost Shark is not as bad a movie as it clearly could have been... the production values are way better than Shark Exorcist although, the special effects in this are still quite cheap looking. However, the first half an hour of the film... which sets up the death of a great white shark at the hands of some fishermen... okay, fisherpeople... that then gets accidentally resurrected in a mystical cave and metes out swift justice to its killers... is just a deadly dull affair. The film does kind of pick up after that, though, when the central bunch of teenagers investigate and try to rid the waters of the Ghost Shark but, by then, it’s a little too late to really save the film.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again... how do you mess up a great concept like the deadly, ghostly apparition of a shark by being this dull with the writing. Some of the outrageous deaths (I’ll get to that in a minute) certainly provide a little comedy but the blandness and lack of humour in all the central characters really kinda kills the movie stone dead, in all honesty. These are not the kinds of people... teenagers and adults alike... who I would be choosing to spend any time with and so, obviously, I’m not in a position where I can be rooting for any of them to survive the movie.

Now the premise is way better than the rest of the film and the deaths are comically creative because of that. The titular phantom predator is attracted to water... any body of water... and so a lot of comedy ensues as the various bodies of water it inhabits get sillier and sillier. The film starts to liven up at a pool party when the shark suddenly jumps up and grabs one of the teens, flying away into the heavens. A few seconds later, the kid’s head lands and spikes itself on the neck of a bottle one of the others is drinking from. Then there’s stuff like a plumber being pulled into the pipes he’s working on by the shark, a lawn water slide where a kid gets swallowed and a sexy car wash with bikini clad girls working the hoses as they are all grabbed by the shark, one girl being pulled down into her bucket. In one instance, a guy unintentionally drinks a cup of water he’s just filled from a dispenser and the shark must have been in it because it bursts out of the man’s body, splitting him in two.

Of course, once you know it can attack anything, you know what to expect when any of the main protagonists are put in a place near water. So an accidental fire at a museum starts the sprinklers going and everyone inside is immediately in peril. Or the climax of the movie when the teens are trying to ‘exorcise’ the shark by blowing up a cave (no, I’m not going to bother to explain this hastily cobbled together plot, if you really want to know then watch the movie... but there are better films you could be watching) it suddenly starts raining so, you know, the ghost shark can obviously swim through the rain. Unfortunately, there seems to be no rhyme or reason as to the way the violence manifests. When one of the heroines is pulled down into the depths of her bath by the shark, she is suddenly ejected with a just a minor scratch on her leg (even though we’d just seen the bath fill with blood). No idea what’s going on there.

And, of course, the other thing about these hollow but pleasantly silly deaths is the special effects are not that great and the CGI is not looking good. There’s some deliberately hasty editing involved too... if you know what I mean.

The scoring by someone called Andrew Morgan Smith is somewhat lacking, I felt. Not necessarily in composition but in terms of its presence in the mix. The style of it is strange because he does seem to be homaging John Williams’ score to the first two Jaws movies throughout but, not the actual two note shark motif... more the kind of beach-town Americana which was dotted about those scores. However, maybe it’s a smaller orchestra or, yeah, just too mixed into the background because, like the film itself, it almost but never quite makes it. Everything feels cheap and somewhat lacklustre so, I guess, in a way it’s the perfect score for this kind of film. Sometimes a really great score can absolutely save and re-pace a movie and make it something much more interesting than it initially was. Alas, that’s not the case with Ghost Shark.

And that’s pretty much my final word on the matter. The people behind the camera occasionally have moments where they really try to make something interesting... for example, a shot focusing on the reflection of a character in a lamp... but it never really jells as a whole and I think both shark and bad movie enthusiasts are going to find the film lacking in any real entertainment value. Sad to say. Nice idea, terrible execution. Glad I bought a cheap second hand copy but the changing, lenticular cover on the front of the Blu Ray is much more entertaining than the film itself.

The Night House

 

The House By
The Symmetry

The Night House
USA/UK 2020
Directed by David Bruckner
Walt Disney

Warning: Some mild spoilers.

The Night House is an interesting film and I almost had a really great time with it. I say almost because, like the plot development of the dream world depicted in certain moments in the film, it’s very much a game of two halves. I’ll get to that in a while but let me tell you some of the plot set up and the good stuff first.

Well, for starters, it’s got one of my favourite modern actresses playing the lead protagonist, Rebecca Hall (from amazing movies like The Awakening, reviewed here and Professor Marston And The Wonder Women, reviewed here) as Beth. And she really is fantastic in this (isn’t she always, even in lesser movies like Iron Man 2). The film starts when she returns to her lake house, after her husband’s funeral. Her husband, who designed and built the house, has shot himself in a boat in the lake with no inclination that he had suicidal tendencies and Beth, a local school teacher, is left to deal with her grief. There are a few other characters in the film such as her best friend Claire, played by Sarah Goldberg... but the majority of the film is just Beth dealing with her grief and then being caught up in weird events when she is regularly awoken by a presence she believes is her dead husband.

And all that stuff is great. There are a few good jump scares to it although, admittedly, when it does try this one too many times too often, such as a shot following Beth dozing off while laying on Claire’s knee (I don’t think it was supposed to be a reference to Éric Rohmer), the scares do start getting more predictable and, therefore, not scary, it has to be said. But the moody atmosphere is kept going throughout and I’m pleased to say, in terms of the supernatural occurrences in the film, the movie delivers the goods and doesn’t cop out when it comes to escalating the degrees and machinations of the antagonistic phenomena.

Also, Rebecca Hall really does carry the movie for a lot of the time. In her interactions with the occasional character that crops up, such as a woman she finds her husband may have had an affair with (it’s more complicated than that), Beth is written as a very sharp, stand offish, confrontational and smart woman and, yeah, that’s tailor made for an intelligent actress like Hall, for sure. And great swathes of the movie are just her on her own with barely any dialogue, so you need someone like her in this kind of movie.

The film is loaded with beautiful shot compositions too. The director uses very clear vertical sections and splits to delineate different areas of the house and even uses a shot I’d seen done in a new movie a few weeks before, where Beth’s head is small in the shot and framed within a rectangle of a grid of windows, as we look in at her from outside the house. It turns out, the symmetry of the compositions and the camera movements around those little vertical splits are very much a part of the story and there is a really neat trick where the director uses the negative shape of a column (think of the old candlestick illusion of the two faces in profile), which looks like a man’s face, to surprise the audience when the face made out of the negative space looks around at Beth. Unfortunately, the director seems so pleased with this shot that he repeats the trick a fair few times after that and it loses its impact very quickly.

The real problem is the bizarre mix of over sharing the various mysteries of the house... it’s ‘backwards’ twin house, some kind of occult rituals, Beth’s back story containing a ‘dead for four minutes’ experience, a book on Caerdroia (a term for a Welsh turf maze which I think is supposed to be a metaphor for the construction of the house itself) and various ghost women running to the lake... and giving the audience too many elements to process without really explaining the relevance of a lot of them. Now I know the ‘secret’ at the heart of the mystery, for example, I am still left scratching my head about the relevance of a lot of the plot elements found in the movie. It feels, by the last reel, vaguely unsatisfying and like the writers just let it all go and spoiled all that good build up. I must confess that, once I’d realised the film was over, I said to myself that I must read the novel this film is obviously based on to find out the real significance of all the occult jigsaw puzzle pieces scattered throughout... only to find out that it’s not even based on a book and is an original screenplay. So, yeah, I really didn’t understand how a lot of these things fit in and I’m not usually that slow on the uptake in most movies.

So, what else can I say about The Night House other than it has a gorgeous score by Ben Lovett which I wish had gotten a proper CD release? If you’re a big Rebecca Hall fan then definitely take a look at this one as she’s always an interesting actress to watch. If you’re a horror fan... I suspect this wasn’t made with you in mind because it’s not going to scare you much, I would think. If you’re not normally a watcher of the genre, then you may get something out of this one and it’s probably a good, light introduction to the supernatural, if you have a hankering to try out something like that. I probably won’t be watching this one again anytime soon and I just wish someone would tap Rebecca Hall to make a proper sequel to The Awakening at some point in the near future, to be honest.

Lucifer's Women/Doctor Dracula

Svengali VS Dracula

Lucifer’s Women
USA 1974 Directed by Paul Aratow

Doctor Dracula
USA 1978 Directed by
Al Adamson & Paul Aratow
Rafael Films/AIP/Vinegar Syndrome Blu Ray Zone A

Warning: Yeah, this one has spoilers
if you’re worried about that kind of stuff.

This is another one of those stories where a film was made, Lucifer’s Women... and then, four years later, Al Adamson was asked to direct a whole load of new scenes and recut it with bits of the original picture, making and releasing what amounts to a completely different movie with kind of ‘guest highlights’ from the first version. In many cases the originals were often better than Adamson’s, admittedly enthusiastic effort to turn them into completely different films and, yeah, this one is no exception.

Lucifer’s Women is a case of the original being thought lost until the wonderful Vinegar Syndrome label managed to release an uncut, fully restored version of it to Blu Ray a couple of years ago. I’m really glad they did because, otherwise, the Adamson excerpts would have been all that remained of what is actually a pretty good movie. I’ll review the original first.

Lucifer’s Women is a real gem... a kind of marriage of an occult plot mixed with soft core pornography. This one stars Larry Hankin as an academic writer who has published a book about Svengali, only to have been helped by the ‘Bleeding Rose’ society in the form of his publisher, a black psychic, to become possessed by the spirit of Svengali himself. So Hankin is Svengali, who is also, on occasion, fighting a battle with his former self to control his host body.

The film starts strongly with one of his magic shows (there are at least two magic acts by him in the film) where he levitates a woman and cuts off her clothing so she’s floating topless. I don’t know what night clubs he plays but we never got magic shows like this on television in the UK in the seventies.

Anyway, his publisher wants him to procure a specific girl, Trilby, played by the wonderful Jane Brunel-Cohen. She is one of a number of strippers who work in a night club run by obnoxious pimp Roland, played by Paul Thomas (oh yeah, I’ll get to him in a minute). Svengali’s task is to bring the girl to his publisher Sir Stephen (played by Norman Pierce) in seven days’ time... because she has a pure, psychically charged soul she is not aware of... and hypnotically manipulate her while having sex in a black magic ritual with Sir Stephen so that she first kills Stephen on the stroke of midnight at the point of orgasm... and then kills herself so that his soul can be reborn in her body.

However, complicating things is the fact that Svengali’s body’s former personality is falling in love with Trilby. Shenanigans ensue and the film has a wonderful, laid back charm of its own as another girl also falls prey to Sir Stephen and his occultist friends, while Trilby and her fellow stripper and room mate indulge in lesbian sex ripped straight from the pages of an underground comic book she is reading. Finally, there's a threesome with their boss Roland... who is later put in a trance by Svengali and accidentally gets run over because of it.

There’s a bizarre double ending too, where Svengali’s former personality rescues the girl and everyone else dies... but, as they run off, another Svengali and all his friends are suddenly alive again, watching and laughing from the grounds of their big house. It’s a little like the end of Fellini’s Eight And A Half in tone, rather than a conclusion from which you are meant to gain any insight from, I think.

But, I found myself thoroughly entertained as it’s a nice little movie including an interesting score which has a kind of mild atonalism with creepy but charming synthesiser overlays on top of it in some sections. And some interesting personalities... despite what one of his co-stars says of him in the extras, Larry Hankin is a tremendous Svengali. He has hypnotic, expressive eyes and a kind of laid back attitude which really works for him and the movie. Jane Brunel-Cohen is absolutely amazing too, giving off ‘young Margot Kidder’ vibes and channeling that same kind of ‘naive innocent energy’. I can’t believe that her only other credit, apart from archival footage from this used in Adamson’s Doctor Dracula, was as a masseuse in Freebie And The Bean. This woman should have gone on to be a huge star, if there was any justice in the world.

And then there’s Paul Thomas. Starring in almost 400 adult movies and directing almost 500 of them to date, Paul Thomas is a porn star who also had a mainstream movie career around the same time, for a bit... you may recognise him as playing Peter in the movie version of Jesus Christ Superstar. And he gives a hilarious, 20 minute interview about his time on the film (one of his last mainstream movies) and his career in general. In one story he talks about the threesome involving Jane Brunel-Cohen and how she didn’t want his ‘hard cock’ touching her because she wasn’t a porn actress. He says that usually, on one of his porn shoots, the crew has to keep taking breaks to enable the lead male actor to be able to achieve and maintain his erection again for the next shot... which is a hard thing to do, apparently. Here, it was the exact opposite situation... he was so enamoured of the actress that he kept getting an erection and, since it was an R rated movie, they couldn’t afford to have his penis getting into the shots... so they kept having to take breaks to try and get his erection to cease and desist while piecing together the scene. It’s a great extra and worth a watch almost as much as the film.

And then there’s Doctor Dracula. Okay, so Adamson has a new, animated title sequence more in keeping with many of his other movies of this time. He grafts a completely new story onto it involving psychiatrist Dr. Gregorio (played by Geoffrey Land) who kills a lady at the start by biting her on the neck... as he’s really Dracula. The film uses bits of the Lucifer’s Women footage as a background canvass for Dracula’s efforts to stop the Bleeding Rose Society, now headed up by John Carradine in a number of spliced in scenes trying to look like they all belong with the original movie.

It’s about what you’d expect from one of Adamson’s more ‘hands on’ cut and paste jobs and some of the scenes kind of make sense and others don’t. Adamson’s characters are all played by completely different actors in fresh roles (including his wife Regina Carrol, giving some bad line readings in this) but he did manage to get Larry Hankin back for a few new scenes in an effort to integrate the two films together more credibly... including a scene where Hankin crosses two candles in an effort to kill Dracula, but dies instead.

The bizarre thing is... although Adamson adds scenes of women undressing and having baths... you never see any nudity in this cut of the movie. This includes all the footage recycled from the original film, where the sex and nudity has been completely excised from this ‘lowlights’ version. This must have made for some bizarre jumps in logic for people who hadn’t seen Lucifer’s Women. For example, when asked about the nature of what she does, Trilby talks about it just being a job and, unless you had seen the original cut where you see she works as a stripper in a night club, you might have been scratching your head at this point wondering what the heck they are talking about.

Similarly, the character of Roland is barely glimpsed in one brief scene from the start in this one... he’s been taken out almost completely. So when Svengali confesses in a throw away line to Trilby later that he’s killed him, the audience must have found it strange, to say the least, that this character had killed someone... especially since it’s someone they don’t know about. Cutting these scenes back into a completely different movie sure makes for a lot of problems here, that’s for sure. Not to mention the  comic moments of a night club audience watching a magic show then cutting to a close up of people like John Carradine, who are also suddenly supposed to be part of the same audience. Stuff like this kept me smiling, for sure but, not necessarily for the right reasons.

I found it interesting that both directors used posters in character's bedrooms from famous films but that, neither shot made it into each other’s version. In Lucifer’s Women, Trilby has a Sands Of Iwo Jima poster in her apartment. In Doctor Dracula, random female victim number ‘whatever’ has a poster for Cassavetes’ A Woman Under The Influence in her house. So we have one director acknowledging his admiration for classic Hollywood and Adamson showing his support of the contemporary independent scene. Good stuff.

At the end of Doctor Dracula, the film finishes with the cult all deceased and then, when Dracula gets into a car with one of his victim’s daughters (played by Susie Ewing), she blows the car up with a remote device in her hand, killing them both. Being as this is Adamson, I immediately recognised the shot of the car blowing up as featuring in at least one of his other movies. I’m not sure if it was recycled for this one or whether this was the first use of the footage but, I guess it doesn’t really matter.

And that’s me done on these two. I had a really good time with Lucifer’s Women and would recommend it... not such a good time at all with the Adamson, recalibrated Doctor Dracula version but at least it’s interesting to see how that director would take the material and reshape it, although I’d probably say steer clear of that version. Either way, Vinegar Syndrome’s welcome Blu Ray release of the 'two on one' edition is pretty good and worth the admission price, as far as I’m concerned. So thanks to them for their ‘Half Way To Black Friday’ sale, where I picked up a few of their titles.

Mephista

Demon-strative Women

Mephista
by Maurice Limat
Black Coat Press
ISBN: 9781612274348

Warning: Some spoilers.

I believe Maurice Limat wrote over 500 novellas. And, so far, this omnibus edition is the only one that I can find in an English translation. Limat wrote thirteen Mephista novellas starting in 1969 and this edition, put together by the always wonderful Black Coat Press, collects together the first three of these, each novella coming in at around 80 pages each (fourteen novellas if you count the last one he wrote, sold to a different publisher, where the names of the characters were hastily changed once the well had dried up).

I wanted to read the Mephista stories because... well, that wonderfully devilish name coupled with that new cover, which depicts her as a Barbara Steele type character (in fact, Limat name checks Steele and a few other femme fatale actresses over the course of these books) is obviously too tempting for most men to resist. Actually though, I suspect one of the central characters who is a semi regular in the novels, that of the horror film and TV actress Edwige Hossegor, is quite possibly based on popular giallo and sex comedy actress Edwige Feneche, although I can find absolutely no evidence to support my theory... asides from the fact that, far from the Steele like creature depicted on the cover of this edition, I think the portrayal of both her and Olga Mervil (a character who is a younger look alike and who is introduced as the latest incarnation of Mephista from the second novel onwards) on the original French editions of these novels do bear a certain resemblance to Feneche. Or maybe I’m just imagining it?

Either way, as I started reading I found out that these are also a series of spin offs of another Maurice Limat character who he had been writing on and off called Teddy Verano. Starting off in more or less straight detective stories, Verano eventually became known (by reputation to the other characters in the various books) as the ‘ghost detective’ because he began to specialise in cases which involved the supernatural... of which, of course, the Mephista stories are a prime example of.

The first of the books, Mephista, deals with a demonic entity murdering admirers of Edwige Hossegor whenever she goes into a coma. It’s probably the best of the three and is quite intriguing although, the ‘solution’ to the mystery is a little over the top, as is the case in the other novellas. The revelation in this case being where it’s discovered by Teddy that an evil mastermind has invented a mental photomachine which can find anyone on the planet wherever they are, borrow their soul (Edwige’s on-screen character Mephista) while sending them into a temporary coma and imbuing a large clay figure with an obedient variant of that soul so it becomes indistinguishable from the real thing. That thing being the demonic spirit of Mephista. Since the villain is obsessed with the actress but in no way enamoured or in love with her, I couldn’t quite picture the motivation of why the character was doing all this but, by the end of the novel, he is put in a mental asylum and Edwige returns to her film set.

The second novella reprinted here, Mephista VS Mephista, deals with Hossegor’s replacement when the psychic sensitivity of the actress means she needs to take a break from filming horror films. Enter Olga Mervil, an aspiring and starving actress who signs a pact with Satan to become ‘the new Mephista’ and, in real life, that’s exactly what she becomes, the living spirit of Mephista, getting ready to seal the deal on her new found fame and celebrity by sacrificing her innocent, virginal best friend in a blood sacrifice ritual. A ritual which Teddy stops but with an uncertain ending where it’s not known if Olga burned up in the fire which engulfed the secret ceremony... or escaped.

In the third novella, Mephista And The Scarlet Clown, it becomes clear she did indeed escape but has joined a travelling carnival of sideshow freaks, her hideously burned face kept hidden behind a mask in her new guise as she, like the rest of the deadly circus, await the scarlet clown’s promise that his photographs of the faces of fresh corpses, if taken at the right time, will mean his living flesh masks of the dying can re-transform the troupe into ‘beautiful people’ once more.

Yeah, okay, so the stories aren’t all that far fetched when compared to quite a lot of pulps but the mixture of grim detective, ultra modern movie and TV studio technology coupled with some big leaps into the realm of supernatural, do give them a vaguely ridiculous feel. Also, though, a very entertaining feel too and, I have to say, I thoroughly enjoyed these and would dearly like to read the others in the series.

That being said, they do have their problems in terms of the English translation aspect. I don’t know who Michael Shreve is but I’m guessing that English is not his first language. Asides from words being missed out of sentences fairly often, he sometimes uses completely wrong words on occasion. For example, when a man’s flat is burnt up by the clay robot version of Mephista self destructing in order to escape capture, he more than once says the tenant can no longer stay in the house because the fire rendered it inhabitable. I think he must mean uninhabitable, right? Another bizarre error is when he translates one of the popular actresses of the day as being Rachel Welch. Yeah, I think you mean Raquel sir?

In spite of this, the Mephista collection is a really nice, pulpy read and I just wish I could read the rest of them in English. I’m guessing, though, that’s not on the cards because one of the supplemental sections of the book actually gives short summaries of the events of the other 10/11 stories in the series so, yeah, it’s a shame that Black Coat don’t seem to be in a hurry to put out any more of them, to be honest. I would dearly love to read both those and various other Teddy Verano adventures so, well... who knows? Maybe some other enterprising publisher will release English translations of these some day.

Willy’s Wonderland

Willy Make It
Through The Night

Willy's Wonderland
USA 2021 Directed by Kevin Lewis
Signature Media

Warning: Some basic plot set up spoilers reside within.

It took me a while to get into Nicolas Cage as an actor. I never used to like him much until the film Wild At Heart was released into cinemas back in 1990 and he was absolutely perfect in it. So I’ve kept an eye on him, off and on and, certainly in the last ten or fifteen years, he’s really done some outstanding work and I have a lot of respect for him now.

Willy’s Wonderland is basically what happens if you take Cage, remove any lines of dialogue from his character and... drop him into a similar scenario as The Banana Splits Movie (reviewed here) to have him fighting off cute looking animatronic characters with evil intentions. Of course, that sounds like a crazy scenario right there so, yeah, obviously, this is perfectly suited for the actor.

And it’s a wild ride.

The back story is that, years ago a cadre of serial killers who owned the local themed kids restaurant, Willy’s Wonderland, started killing off the odd guest and, when the police figured out what they were up to, instead of being taken alive, they all killed themselves in a black magic suicide ritual which embedded their spirits into the various animatronic animals in the restaurant (such as Willy Weasel). However, they went on killing and the local people in the small village where this film is set did a deal whereby the characters wouldn’t leave the shut down restaurant and kill everyone in the village as long as the townsfolk would lock the odd ‘customer’ in there with them to feed their lust for killing. So, every now and again, they spike the tires of a passing car and feed the occupants some story to get them to stay the night in Willy’s Wonderland... where a violent death by cute animatronic critter awaits them.

That’s the basic plot set up (revealed over the course of the movie in flashbacks) and the film starts off with one of those sequences which shows a family of three ‘experiencing’ Willy’s Wonderland for themselves, so the audience knows how dangerous it is when Nicolas Cage’s unnamed character, just referred to as ‘The Janitor’ on the end credits, is left in charge of Willy’s for the evening. There’s also something else the set up shows but, it’s a little surprise reveal for later in the movie and I’m not going to spoil that for you here.

So Cage has his car spiked and is talked into staying the night in the restaurant, cleaning the place up for a grand re-opening in return for the owner paying the local mechanic to repair his car. And then he’s locked in for the night with the animatronics and the fun begins. However, there’s also a local bunch of teenagers, lead by Liv (played by Emily Tosta) who want the constant slaughter to stop and so they are trying to a) burn the place down and b) get ‘the janitor’ out before he’s killed. The trouble is... the janitor doesn’t want to come out. He just wants to finish cleaning and if he has to battle and dispose of the animatronics to do it, he will.

Actually, one of the key things about what makes this movie so watchable is Cage’s character. He seems to have no real motivation for staying and barely listens or communicates with anyone other than on his own terms. Also, he has gazillions of cans of his favourite drink (Punch) from his car and every hour or so his watch alarm will go off and he will stop for a break and to finish up another can of Punch. And I mean anytime! He can be in the middle of battling a mechanical antagonist or saving the life of somebody but, as soon as his watch alarm goes off again, he just stops whatever he’s doing and goes off to drink and kick back by playing the wonderful Willy’s Wonderland pinball machine which they’ve made for the film. Damn... we need one of those in real life. I’m disappointed you can’t download an app of the table.

Anyway, the film is beautifully shot and has the usual ‘bug nuts crazy’ kind of intensity that Cage brings to his roles when he’s allowed. Most of the kids are there just to be animatronic fodder but that’s okay. There’s a little bit of blood but there’s a whole lot of oil spray and grease laden machine innards to take the place of the red stuff for the action scenes and it all seems to work well, with Cage obsessively changing into another new Willy’s Wonderland T-shirt every time he gets spattered. Actually, I’ve since read that the character Cage plays is supposed to be slightly autistic and I guess that makes a kind of sense because, there’s no other explanation for the frequent drink breaks... but it’s not actually made clear in the body of the movie that this is the case.

And it’s a nice film. The pacing is just right and there’s the occasional Easter egg such as, when one animatronic is violently decommissioned by the janitor, you can just make out the same sound effect as the Millennium Falcon hyperdrive malfunction from the Star Wars films mixed into the background. So, lots of violence plus some nice performances from a lot of the actors (especially Cage, Tosta and Beth Grant as the local sheriff). It also does that nice thing of taking a happy tune... “It’s your Birthday and we want you to have fun”, sung by the animatronics in this case... and pitching it against the dark, violent and sinister scenes to enhance the unsettling nature of the film in its deliberate juxtaposition.

So, yeah, if you’re an admirer of Cage movies like Mum and Dad (reviewed here), The Colour Out Of Space (reviewed here) and Mandy (reviewed here), then Willy’s Wonderland should give you your next best fix of similar craziness. I loved this movie and this certainly won’t be the last time I watch it. And it would make a really great double bill with The Banana Splits Movie too so, yeah, get watching.

Host

Zoom With A View

Host
UK 2020 Directed by Rob Savage
ShudderHouse

Warning: This review hosts spoilers.

You know I may be getting a little jaded because this film is far from original in it’s ideas and intentions but then again, there’s not much new left in the world and I have to admire the writers Gemma Hurley, Rob Savage and Jed Shepherd... and the director (again, Savage) for conceiving, shooting and releasing a film in a totally socially distanced manner during the first six months of the Coronavirus lockdown. Also for taking an old fashioned dash of horror film movie making which, obviously, we’ve all seen before... and telling it through new technology which has become one of the communication tools of the lockdown, the Zoom meeting. And, yeah, it’s a movie about some people ‘holding a seance’ over Zoom. An obvious idea but, if done right, it can still be quite effective. Spoiler... it’s done quite well.

And, yes, we’ve seen a few movies set on computer laptops now, for sure. I think the best one I’ve seen before this was actually not a horror film but a murder mystery movie called Searching (reviewed here) and the strength of that particular film was, the twist ending would have been so obvious if it were not for the fact that telling it through the technology like they did meant they could distract you to the point where the 'reveal' genuinely takes you by surprise. Now, Host (one of a gazillion movies already called Host, The Host, Hosts or The Hosts... why they do this I’ll never know), doesn’t have that kind of surprise element involved in it but, that’s okay, it’s a horror movie and they’re not especially going for surprises here anyway, I think.

What we do have... and I think this will annoy some viewers (especially those as old as me), is a bunch of old clichés reshot through the lens of a new format... and that’s perfectly fine for a horror film. That kind of story really depends, not on the originality of the piece but whether the timing of the jump scares, in this case, are well enough done. Now, I know it’s a well put together movie because, for once, even though I was pretty sure I knew what was going to happen in the final moments... and I was right... the final shot still made me jump out of my skin. Which is a very welcome result as far as I’m concerned.

Okay, so lets look at some of the moments that detractors might think of as weaknesses...

 Well, the whole film is set and shot in a zoom meeting utilising special effects, presumably added with craftily downgraded CGI afterwards. Now I’m not familiar with Zoom myself but I’ve heard that when you talk in it, your screen blows up for everyone to fill the whole frame? Well that, of course, gives the film makers an ideal opportunity of one of the mainstays of a certain type of modern horror movie, preventing you seeing what’s going on in the other places the call is taking place while one person is dominating the screen. It even means that, while I’m sure the film must be edited to death and different takes mixed together on the main zoom screen, you can easily cover your tracks by cutting away from things when you don’t like the end of a person’s performance.

Those performances here, by the way, of the seven main actresses and the lone male... Haley Bishop, Jemma Moore, Emma Louise Webb, Radina Drandova. Caroline Ward, Alan Emrys, Jinny Lofthouse and the amazing Seylan Baxter... are all absolutely brilliant. They’re the kind of performances you tend to get when the director is relying on no musical scoring and a POV style of shooting but, clearly, you need good actors for that kind of thing and that’s exactly what he gets here. I loved the fact, also, that the actors were all using their own first names for their characters.

Anyway, back to the clichés... well there are some obvious things the writers just want you to notice right from the start, which they deliberately call attention to. You have the character who obviously lives very near to one of the others, who talks to the other through a window, establishing that, at some point in the film, one of those two characters is obviously going to go to the other person’s apartment to see just what is going on. There’s also another character who has a Zoom background movie of herself walking to the fridge to get a drink and... you just know that’s going to be used later as a blocking device to stop you seeing what’s really going on and then jump scaring you. Yep... check. You have the one character who leaves the call way early so you immediately assume that, when they come back later, they’re there as both an unbelieving witness to the devastation wrought by the evil spirit... who quite clearly and literally acts just the way the spiritualist who has opened up the channel to the spirit world said it might act if disrespected... and also to be quickly convinced otherwise when the demonic entity in question pays a quick visit on that channel too.

And it’s things like this and the fact that almost every character has a door open in the background so you can see into another part of their apartment, adding a lot of depth to the rooms they are Zooming from... so things can happen at the periphery of the call if you happen to be watching the right part of the screen, that might all seem a bit obvious to the average horror afficionado. And, alright, they are but... still, I have to admire what the director, working under the restrictions of shooting remotely on an actual zoom call, was going for. Especially when, you know, some of those tired old clichés of jump scares really work.

And that’s the case here. If you think the writers and director are just raiding old ghost story and possession ideas then, okay fine, they are. But that’s what pretty much all horror writers and directors do. Some do it really well, though and get away with it. I’ve also seen a number of them over the last ten years which, for one reason or another, nowhere nearly nailed it as well as this lot did so... yeah... I don’t really care. When it works it works. So... original, no. Scary... not really but those jump moments really do get you and I’m assuming that this means I was feeling a certain amount of tension already in some of the sequences. Entertaining... heck, yes. This is another nice little horror movie from somebody who obviously knows their business. I liked this one quite a lot. If you can find the right movie called Host (there’s even more than one movie called this released this year, for goodness sake) and you are a fan of horror movies... and perhaps more so if you are not and are not especially familiar with the tropes of the genre... then this one is really worth checking out sometime. Also, it’s very short at 57 minutes so, you know, easily time to fit it into your day. Give it a go.

The Quiet Ones

Sugar Free Quiet

The Quiet Ones
2014 USA/UK
Directed by John Pogue
Playing at UK cinemas now.

The Quiet Ones is the latest British horror movie from the company who bought up, and have been trying to resurrect, the brand name recognition of Hammer Studios, best known worldwide for their cheesy but influential and, often, ‘rollicking good fun’ films in the horror genre. The new version of Hammer have either put together or distributed a number of productions over the past few years but inevitably, as with all film companies, their product has been a bit hit and miss, at least for this particular audience member.

The Quiet Ones is one of their more self aware and smarter movies of recent years and, although the last 25 minutes or so of the movie stray into the “decidedly cheesy” area of the genre, this does at least harken back to their days from their 20th Century incarnation and, overall, I’d have to say that this movie definitely falls into their ‘hit’ camp.

The film purports to be a true story (which I don’t think it is) of events which took place in Oxford in 1974, even going so far as to show still photographs of the original participants in the events to get people thinking over the end credits... which is good showmanship, to say the least.

The story follows a small cell of people conducting an ‘experiment’. They consist of a Professor, played by Jared Harris (son of Richard Harris) and some volunteer students, headed up by new cameraman Brian, played by Sam Claflin, who is called in to continue documenting their work after the last cameraman got cold feet (aka got scared off by spooky events). Their research, which they continue as a kind of outlaw band, moving to a new and, frankly, scary location after their funding is cut, involves the study and hopeful cure of a ‘possessed’ young lady called Jane Harper (played by Olivia Cooke). It is the Professor’s belief that the various, terrifying manifestations which plague the characters and which come from a malevolent child spirit called Evie are, in fact, nothing more than Jane Harper’s externalisation of her own personal trauma. The theory is to force her to manifest the ghost-like shenanigans to a point where the externalisation of these things can be yanked from Jane’s body, thus curing her.

Yeah, okay, it’s a shaky theory but, you know... go with it. We all know there’s something much less internal to Jane going on, right? It’s an interesting entry hook into a story of thumps, knocks, bruises, bites, fire, strange ectoplasmic manifestations and all the other things a good ghost story/demonic possession movie needs to start scaring the pants off the audience. And... up to a point, it’s quite successful in evoking that gold mine, pants free environment in your local dodgyplex.

One of the reasons that this is so successful, in fact, is because the film attempts something that a couple of horror movies have attempted in the last few years, usually unsuccessfully. That is, they try to maintain a “have your cake and eat it” approach to combining standard third person storytelling and mixing it up with “found footage” style first person shooting. Normally this really doesn’t work but, with a movie such as this, which makes no pretension at being a “found footage movie”, the two different techniques being utilised, when cut together, succeed admirably where most others fail. When used properly like this, and knowing how far to push the “camera eye” footage before they need to ground it in the external context again, it adds an extra kick to the film and definitely an extra appreciation of the scares which the production team cook up for us. Yes, this does use every tried and true, hackneyed technique in ‘horror movie syntax 101’ to achieve its purpose, of scaring you silly at certain points, but its done just right and with such a deft hand in most places that, when it does go a little wrong and into full cheesy mode for the over-the-top end set pieces, you can kind of forgive it that indulgence... especially when it fits in with the classic old Hammer modus operandi so neatly.

The film has a curious double ending, before the credits roll, and one almost brings to mind the very last shot of Hammer’s runaway smash version of The Woman In Black (reviewed here). I don’t want to spoil it but it leads very nicely into a second ending which is, in some ways, a little more uncomfortable and which references something which has been used as a shot transition, punctuation mark throughout the movie... that of a hand clapping against another, used as an impromptu human clapperboard. I won’t tell you the context of the last time this is used, because I really don’t want to give anything away, but it does make a nice little coda to the film, at least in terms of the cinematic language used throughout, and the consequences of the arrival to that particular scenario is something you are left to ponder at the end of the film. A haunting aftermath, so to speak.

The performances are all pretty cool, which I would expect from somebody like Jared Harris but which extends to the entire main cast in terms of excellence. Also nice is the evocation of the style of the time with the make-up, hair style and clothing which lend the film a certain air of authenticity for any claims that it’s based on a true story, by layering it with a sheen of yesteryear... which gives it a certain charming historical credence, so to speak. It certainly reminded me of my childhood, in some ways.

The music, too, does its bit. And I’m not talking about the song choice for certain scenes but of the underscore... which manages to walk that common but effective modern day horror music tightrope of sound design metamorphosing into something which operates on an almost subliminal level, walloping into atonal shifts of all the colours of the dark when required. Good stuff and I look forward to picking up the soundtrack CD if there is one.

All in all, The Quiet Ones does get a bit ridiculous in the end but, it’s carried across with such style and conviction by the time it reaches its denouement, that you can certainly have a good time with this one if horror movies are your thing. Definitely one of the better horror movies of recent years... not the best but certainly beyond the competent and into something a lot more effective than much of the lesser product on the market. I’ll certainly be watching this one again when it comes out on Blu-Ray.