Gamera VS Space Monster Viras

Anti-Viras

Gamera VS Space Monster Viras
(aka Gamera VS Viras aka Gamera
tai uchu kaijû Bairasu aka De
aka Destroy All Planets)
Japan 1965
Directed by Noriaki Yuasa
and Shigeo Tanaka  
Daiei/Arrow Films Blu Ray Zone B

Well this is an interesting one. Gamera Vs Space Monster Viras is the fourth film in the massive and quite brilliant Gamera - The Complete Collection Blu Ray boxed set put out by Arrow films last year. Now, I have to say that, as someone who’d never seen a Gamera movie before this release, I have been extremely impressed with the films in here so far. That being said, this one is not nearly as impressive as its three predecessors and, once you factor in that, like Toho’s Godzilla movie Destroy All Monsters from the same year (review coming soon), this was supposed to be the last in the sequence, due to declining box office returns, it’s not that surprising... the budget of this one was slashed to just a third of the previous film in the sequence, Giant Monster Dogfight: Gamera Vs Gyaos (reviewed by me here). Of course, the irony of this is that, in both the case of this film and of Toho’s Godzilla series, both their purported last hurrahs far exceeded box office expectations and they ended up revitalising and continuing the series in the case of each monster.

Now this one, according to the one page blurb in one of the booklets accompanying the set, is supposed to be the start of both a decline in the quality of the films (no surprises their given the budget) and also a shifting to the kids in the Gamera movies being the main human focus, as opposed to the adult characters who are more on the periphery of the action.

This one starts off with a spaceship about to come and enslave the Earth. However, the occupants see Gamera flying around in space with them (goodness knows how they know the giant turtle’s name... had to suspend my disbelief and sublimate my outrage at such a leap in known information by shouting at the screen here) and attack him. However, Gamera destroys them and this leads into the credits with the cutesy Gamera March song being sung. We then cut to a group consisting of the Boy Scouts Of America and two meddling kids in particular, played by Tôru Takatsuka and Carl Craig (due to a new distribution deal with American International Pictures, one of the kids in each picture would have to be caucasian). Shenanigans ensue as the two kids try out a prototype submarine and accidentally come across, not just their giant ‘friend of all children’ Gamera, but also a second spaceship which temporarily imprisons Gamera in it’s ‘super catch ray’.

And this is where things get a bit silly...

Already, the budget dictated that a lot of the film takes place in identical looking rooms on the spaceship to allow them to just slightly re-dress the sets (just like the Cube movies) but at this point in the narrative, the aliens scan Gamera with some kind of memory ray. And this is the main difference between the various cuts of the movies... how much of this memory ray you have to endure. This sequence goes on for a shortish time in the Japanese theatrical release, a very long time in the extended AIP TV version for the US markets and, maybe around 15 minutes (somewhere in between) in the Japanese Director’s cut, which is the version I chose to watch (the new Arrow edition gives you the choice by including all three versions). And, what the memory ray is looking for, is to find Gamera’s weaknesses from previous battles. So, yeah, just like a TV show bottle neck episode (which this kind of is, in movie form), this just means loads of footage from the previous films including, startlingly, the black and white footage from the first movie, which none of the aliens seem to blink at. Very strange.

And that’s not the strangest cost cutting exercise either because, when the two kids are captured and ‘beamed up’ to the spaceship, being used as ransom so Gamera doesn’t attack the alien spacecraft, a brainwashing machine is fired onto Gamera’s head and so he is under command of the aliens. And this is where it gets even sillier because they order him to attack various places (often culled footage from previous films) and, when he goes to attack Tokyo, blow me down if it isn’t in black and white again! Yep, they even use flashbacks from the first Gamera film and try and, somehow, pass it off as new footage. What the heck is going on here? What were they thinking? I mean, necessity is the mother of invention but I think invention’s mother kinda had a massive breakdown here and started rolling around on the floor in a humongous fit of mismatching film stock.

So the rest of the film is mostly the shenanigans on the spaceship as the kids try to escape and reverse the various alien devices with their meddling ways, including the polarity of the brain device stuck to Gamera’s head, which means he ends up attacking the aliens instead of the rest of the world.

However, as disappointing as a fair amount of the movie is, the franchise certainly doesn’t disappoint in terms of being absolutely weird and cool in some of its content. For example, the humans who have been taken over and are being used as extensions of the aliens sometimes lurk in the shadows of the ship so you can see all their eyes light up. It looks curiously unsettling and is quite effective. Think Village Of The Damned but much more overtly executed. And then, when the kids try to lasso one of the guys (a scene set up in the very early parts of the film, when one of the little tykes loses his hat), the alien/human hybrid just fires off his arm and the bloody stump forces the kids up against a wall before flying back to the host organism like a fleshy version of a Transformer. Similarly, when the big squid alien (one of many but who also takes the name of his race, Viras) is finally going to have to go after Gamera itself, a gesture from its tentacles ushers in the mass decapitation of it’s human slaves, new squid monsters pushing out from the neck stumps. Then, when all the monsters are roaming around, the main creature absorbs them all  one after the other to grow to giant monster heights in an effort to defeat Gamera.

So yeah, lots of cool and strange stuff like this means, frankly, Gamera Vs Space Monster Viras isn’t a dead loss and is still quite an entertaining, if not all that impressive, entry into the series. Nonetheless, in spite of the many flashbacks and cheapness of the production, it’s an entertaining enough film and I am looking forward to seeing where the series goes from here. This new box set is quite startlingly good and definitely one of the best things Arrow has put out so far, I reckon.

Gwendoline

Tawny Disposition

Gwendoline
aka The Perils Of Gwendoline
In The Land Of The Yik Yak
France 1984
Directed by Just Jaeckin
Severin Blue Ray Zone A (unrated)

Following the sad news a few days ago, of the death at the young age of 59, of actress/model Tawny Kitean, I decided to watch the recent Severin Blu Ray edition of the film which I first saw her in, back when I was in my teens in the heady days of VHS rental tapes in the 1980s. I remember catching sight of Gwendoline in the off licence one road over from where I still live (it's remained an off licence but, alas, it's no longer in the business of renting VHS tapes) and being drawn in by the cover showing a spiky warrior woman and I think there was some blurb that compared the movie to Barbarella, a film which I already loved. I don’t think the one I rented was the heavily cut down US release version of the time, which was re-titled The Perils Of Gwendoline In The Land Of The Yik Yak... the cover certainly was just called Gwendoline here in the UK and, revisiting it a few times over the years in its unrated cut, I’m pretty sure there’s nothing in that version which wasn’t in the UK rental release back in the VHS days. That being said, it would certainly have been a pan and scan version then so, a lot of the... well... ‘background kink’ might possibly have been either missing or very fleeting... but it still had all the famous scenes in tact.

So, yeah, in memory of what was probably Tawny’s most famous role (although I’m sure that a lot of people will also remember her for her appearances in 1980s hard rock videos), I thought I’d revisit this and I did so thinking that I must already have put a review of the film up on here at some point since I started NUTS4R2 but, yeah, it turns out I haven’t, so I’m rectifying that now.

Gwendoline is the last feature film (to date) directed by the famous filmmaker Just Jaeckin, whose first movie, Emmanuelle starring Sylvia Kristel, set the world on fire and probably did a lot for the prospect of respectable erotica in a commercial cinematic environment (he also did versions of The Story Of O and Lady Chatterly’s Lover but, I think they’re probably less famous to the majority of general public at large... whereas Emmanuelle started a whole cottage industry of sequels and copycat film series... such as the Emanualle series, where the name was spelled with a single M to avoid copyright issues). It’s based... and I can’t tell you how loosely or faithfully at this point because I’ve never read them... on the Sweet Gwendoline bondage comic strip of the late 1940s and onwards by John Willie, who also co-wrote the movie version with Jaeckin. Back in the days when the activity was just called ‘bondage’ and that word celebrated a number of sins and way before the term BDSM, first coined in 1969 but not, as far as I remember, that commonly used until the early 1990s, was dreamed up as a more descriptive but somehow more sterile moniker. And if you’re wondering, the strip and the film, like most BDSM literature which is almost always pitched, ironically, at odds with the majority of conscientious ‘players’ throughout the world, were quite a way from both SSC* and RACK** activities.

The film itself is actually pretty good. Starting off with colourful butterflies from Jaeckin’s own collection against a black backdrop which house the credits, we hear Pierre Bachelet’s synthesiser heavy score, very much of it’s time but also, actually, a score which still kinda holds up (somebody put a CD out please) accompanying it before we are thrown onto the docks of Shanghai in a period which... looks like it’s supposed to be the 1940s but I could be wrong. Here we find a bunch of thieves who are raiding the crates as they come off a ship, wherein they discover Gwendoline, played by Tawny Kitean, packed in a crate. Gwendoline is a nun who has run away from the convent to find her father, a collector of rare butterflies. Her friend Beth, played by the quite wonderful, Doe-eyed Zabou Breitman (billed here just as Zabou), misses her by minutes and Gwendoline is sold to a slaver who runs the local saloon bar/strip club/gambling den. However, she is inadvertently rescued by the hero of the piece, Willard, played by Brent Huff.

After lots of bickering with Willard and upon learning about the death of her father, who had pursued a rare butterfly into the perilous land of the Yik Yak, Gwendoline and Beth strike a deal with the fearless hero and he reluctantly agrees to be their escort, where they spend lots of time walking around topless and getting captured by natives until they enter what I can only describe as the female, bondage paradise of the Yik Yak queen and her gladiator looking dominatrixes, who capture men for their pleasure (killing them after they’ve been force mated with them to propagate their species) and punishing transgressors of the rules with various deadly bondage contraptions.

And it looks fantastic. I remember not thinking much of the acting back in the 1980s... when I was not as used to watching badly looped dubs but, looking back on it now, Kitean, Brietman and Huff all do pretty well in this and they certainly have good chemistry. This is all the more evident and necessary for some of the risqué scenes they have. Such as the one where all three are separately chained in some tribe's hut awaiting their death sentence and Willard uses his words to make verbal love to Gwendoline, accidentally arousing Beth too. Or the scene where, after winning a gladiatorial style combat in disguise, Gwendoline sits astride the bound Willard and ‘mates’ with him while the Queen and her warriors look on.

The film also doesn’t shy away from violence in this... comical or otherwise (well, comic book would be a more appropriate way of saying that I guess, given the source material). There’s a fair amount of blood spillage (for the time in this kind of fantasy scenario) and women being impaled on, to be fair, wobbly looking spikes... not to mention the tendency of Willard’s trusty grappling hook to lodge fatally in a person's neck instead of where he’s aiming. There’s also a quite brilliant moment when Willard pulls a jailor’s head through his cell bars near the start of the movie and does so with such force that the guy's ears are left on the bars above where he falls. Another scene with the use of a straw and a stray rose thorn as a makeshift blow pipe is similarly spectacular although, the continuity error in the same set of scenes, where the bound Willard’s hat is kicked off him but is suddenly lodged on his head again in the long shot is... a bit of a shame.

Talking of bars with ears on them and such like... the director uses a lot of foreground objects, natural or man made, such as the window openings of a cabin or a rock overhang in the desert to separate the actors from each other or to frame them within their environment. There’s some lovely shot designs here and you can see why this director is as well respected as he is. Not to mention the quite dazzling and obviously expensive, elabourate costume and set design in the film. The story ends on a happy note (against all odds) and, yes, if you do like films such as Barbarella or some of the cinematic excursions of Alain Robbe-Grillet, then you might find that Gwendoline is worth a look. It’s certainly a fun film, for sure but, do yourself a favour and don’t watch the truncated, censored version which runs something like 20 minutes shorter (if memory serves). It’s a little like watching a TinTin cartoon come to life with all the exaggerated characters but with nudity and people being tied up added into the mix.

The cut down Yik Yak titled version is also included on the recent Severin Blu Ray (not that I want to watch that version) and the main film is given the full treatment by Severin, who deliver a good transfer from a good print and include a wealth of interviews with key people from the time. If Gwendoline is your thing (or tied up young damsels in peril, for that matter), then the Severin version is a good one to pick up. And that’s me done with my memories of this film and I hope Tawny rests in peace, wherever she has gone.

RIP Tawny Kitean
August 5th 1961 to May 7th 2021.

* Safe Sane and Consensual BDSM play.
** Risk Aware Consensual Kink BDSM play.

Morgiana

Top Cat

Morgiana
Czechoslovakia 1972
Directed by Juraj Herz
Second Sight DVD Region 2

Morgiana, directed by Juraj Herz, is a movie based on the novel Jessie and Morgiana by Alexander Grin although, since I’ve not read the novel, I can’t say how close it is to the original. Not that close I would suspect because, although the slightly jarring tonal shift of the last 20 minutes or so points to the possible reliance on the original narrative, there’s a really obvious difference which seems to imply the book and the film are two entirely different animals. That being that, while the book is about two sisters, Jessie and Morgiana... the film is about two twin sisters... the sweet but naive Klara and the evil, ill tempered Viktoria. Both these characters are played, quite skillfully, by the actress Iva Janzurová, who does a really wonderful job. In this version it’s Viktoria’s siamese cat which takes the name Morgiana. And, frankly, for a film titled after its feline character, the cat doesn’t really get a lot of significant screen time.

Okay, let’s talk about that cat for a second because I noticed that the majority of the shots in the first half an hour of the movie were all static, going into very minimal camera movement to follow the action when required... but not much motion at all. This is contrasted with the POV shots from the eyes of the cat, Morgiana. There are a few of these done with a distorting lens over the camera in the first half an hour (there are less appearances by the cat in the rest of the film) and that’s where the camera really takes of and goes into motion. Then, when the POV shots from the cat’s perspective drop off, there seems to be a little more movement in some of the ‘human only’ scenes as the film builds momentum. Which is a strange, mixed message of a choice, I thought and it thoroughly confused me. Especially when there are also scenes of the odd human using a similar kind of camera movement (with the camera higher from the ground, obviously) in the rest of the film... even going into a kind of psychedelic posterisation of the film stock during scenes in which the hallucinations of one of the sisters, Klara, are particularly intense. But, honestly, I couldn’t see much logic in the way things were shot here so... like I said... confused by the modus operandi which left me distracted for a while.

The director does make some good use of mirrors though, using them reflect each other and various characters throughout the film. Which is hard to do without catching the film crew but he seems to make this a rule of the film that many shots involving the sisters will make use of multiple mirrors, including some scenes where Iva Janzurová is playing both characters in the same shot. That actually hardly happens but the director does use a kind of split screen approach on the few times when it does but, also, he gets creative a couple of times and has one or other of them placed in the reflection of a mirror, which is a nice solution.

The films starts off strong with a pre-credits sequence involving lots of non-establishing shots taken far too close (and thus leaving the audience unsettled) of a funeral possession for the two sisters’ father. This is followed by a wonderful, animated credits sequence where a surrealist painting is tracked over by the camera with fades to black to throw the credits onto... and with Lubos Fiser’s relentless score pounding away all the while (the CD is worth a listen, by the way). We then get to the reading of the will, where both girls inherit property but Klara is much more favoured and Viktoria resents both this and the popularity of her bubbly sister with various men. And so she plots to kill her and procures a slow acting poison which makes the victim unwell and which takes four weeks to do its work. Kind of... I’m not going to reveal the final twist of this movie but that’s the basic plot set up for you.

And Iva Janzurová is absolutely brilliant in this. She plays Viktoria with a big black head of hair and Klara as a red head and the way she plays each contrasting character is quite effective. Although they have the same face, her characterisation of each is so different that I kept forgetting and thinking I was watching two different actors in the roles. Of course, my next big question was... well since the trick is so skillfully managed, why didn’t the director just use two different actresses and save himself all that time trying to work the camera so their faces would barely be seen on screen at the same time? I guess I’m not going to find the answer to that one anytime soon but, still, a quite extraordinary performance. I certainly didn’t like Viktoria one bit and... didn’t mind Klara as a character, despite the curse of the ‘stupidity of the rich’ which she seemed to have inherited as a manifest personality trait.

Toward the end of the movie, the film takes a bizarre viewpoint twist. Whereas before we have been with one or the other of the two sisters pretty much all the way through, the narrative breaks off to follow one of Klara’s suitors, a military man, as he spends time in a gambling house and then a brothel. Asides from showing his conviction that he is actually in love with Klara (he refuses the attentions of his ‘lady of the night’) it really doesn’t seem to have much purpose to it and serves only to bring him back into the narrative in time for the resolution to the story at the close of the film. Since it seems so out of place with the rest of the movie, I am forced to conclude that these scenes came directly from the novel and were thus included as a version of those. I might be wrong though... when I read the novel I’ll let you know (I couldn’t find a commercially released English translation for sale anywhere but, bizarrely, as I was looking for one, I came across a ‘free to download’ PDF of the full English translation so I guess it must be out of copyright, perhaps, since it was written in 1929).

And there’s not much more I can say about Morgiana. I found the acting and camerawork entrancing, the plot slim at best and the story mechanics to arrive at a solution that was less than expected (and I wondered why they had bothered with their two twist reveals at this point)... to be a little strained and perhaps a touch more ‘deux ex machina’ than I would have liked. I loved the music, though and enjoyed the film overall so, yeah, not my favourite of the five Czechoslovakian films I watched at the start of the year but certainly an interesting and entertaining one, for sure. Definitely worth a watch.

Blood Of Dracula's Castle

 

Blood Bank

Blood Of Dracula's Castle
USA 1969 Directed by Al Adamson
Severin Blu Ray Zone A

Okay, so the next film up in my mammoth exploration of the beautifully put together Severin box set, Al Adamson - The Masterpiece Collection, is... Blood Of Dracula’s Castle. And, it’s a surprising one because, after Psycho-A-Go-Go (reviewed here) and Five Bloody Graves (reviewed here), I was coming around to maybe thinking that Adamson wasn’t just a director of trash and was actually an unsung genius and, you know, as I go through this set more I may find that to be the case. However, this movie is truly an argument for the opposite conclusion.

It starts of nicely enough with Vicki Volante as an unnamed character driving her open topped car through roads cut into what looks like a half desert, half forest kind of environment, to the sound of a pretty simplistic pop song. However, she turns out to be a not so intelligent character when she discovers she’s not filled her car with enough petrol and it runs out, stranding her in the 'desert forest'. So she gets out and goes to try and find help, walking slap bang into... a thuggish brute called Mango, who works for Mr and Mrs Dracula... who lease a castle just nearby. She gets chained in their cellar, along with a bunch of other young ladies, so Dracula’s butler, played by John Carradine, can slowly syphon off their blood, day by day, to pour into wine glasses for Count Dracula (played by Alexander D'Arcy) and Countess Dracula (played by Paula Raymond) to sup from. So, yeah, they have their own little blood bank in their cellar.

Immediately following the abduction of the gal by Mango, we cut to a bunch of dolphins and the two main protagonists of the movie. Here we have Glen (played by Gene Otis Shane), who is a professional photographer taking shots of his model fiancé  Liz (played by Jennifer Bishop). There are a lot of shots of Seaworld while Glen takes pictures of Liz in various costumes and poses as she cavorts with sea lions and such like. The only reason I can think all of this padding is in here is because Seaworld must have been relatively cheap to hire and so they wanted to get some substantial footage shot there. Anyway, while they’re at Seaworld, Glen gets a message handed to him because, yes, you would get a stray telegram or post handed to you while you’re out visiting Seaworld, right? Um... okay, ignoring this new rumple, the message says that Glen’s Uncles Tom has died and left him his castle in his inheritance. So Glen and Liz decide to go off to visit the remote castle to live there (because, of course a model and photographer who are living in the city where their jobs are would want to go off to some remote spot hours away from civilisation and live there). However, they are a little worried because Uncle Tom’s castle has been rented to an old couple for the past 90 years (so Tom never lived there then?). You can see where this is heading, right? When they do get there a bit later in the ‘story’, the couple don’t look as old as they expect and, that’s because they’re really hundreds of years old vampires, of course.

Meanwhile, as they make their way through the same desert/forest roads that Mr. and Mrs. Dracula’s last victim took at the start of the movie, Dracula has arranged for ‘friend of the family’ Johnny, played by Robert Dix, to be 'released' from prison where he’s serving time for being a crazy, homicidal lunatic. There’s a cameo from director John 'Bud' Cardos as the prison guard under Dracula's pay who asks Johnny to hit him over the head to make his escape look realistic. Johnny does him one better, getting to like it after the first hit and then bashing his brains in with a rock as he smiles and laughs about it. It wouldn’t really need anything else to cement this character's reputation as a psycho with the audience but the writer and director then proceed to drive the message home by showing us his long trek through the desert, pursued by prison guards.

Even though, you know, Johnny needs to make good his get away and find his way back to the castle, he suddenly comes across, in the middle of nowhere and cavorting near a small waterfall, a bikini clad gal. Who, of course, he then drowns in the water. He then comes across another guy with a car and he smacks his brains in with another rock (a fine weapon of choice), loading him and his handy shotgun into the back seat to drive back to his mates, 'The Draculas'. However, on the way he comes across a hitchhiker who he shoots through the window with his shotgun, dumping him into the back seat with the other guy and switching clothes with one of them (in the most ridiculous and less than credible manner possible, while he is still driving). He then pushes the car off the cliff with the corpses in it, knowing the cops will find his clothes on one of the men and somehow assume it’s him and stop looking for him. Bizarrely, although I was pretty sure both guys in the car were dead, as the car goes over the cliff and rolls down the rocky terrain, one of them lets out a scream. Yeah, I really don’t know what’s going on here at this point. Robert Dix was pretty good in Five Bloody Graves but, honestly, though he tries his best in this one, he just doesn’t have any decent dialogue to work with and his forced, maniacal laugh isn’t quite what the doctor ordered to be honest.

Pretty soon after Glen and Liz arrive at the castle and stay for both dinner and the night (in a guest room) but, after refusing Dracula’s offer to buy the property, they know something’s up. The next day they go to investigate the ‘toucan’ they were told was responsible for all that screaming they heard in the night and find the chained up gals. They then get chained up themselves but are all left free as they are forced to wear robes and go up a hill while John Carradine and his employees burn Vicky Volante at the stake, as a sacrifice to the great moon God Lunar (I’m not making this up, by the way). But, when they get back to their dungeon they break free and Carradine, Johnny and the Draculas are killed. However, Liz is nabbed by Mungo who takes her up a cliff. Glen follows and, though it looks like they are doomed to a dumb demise due to Mungo’s brutish strength, Glen happens to find a nearby axe just handily laying around by one of the rocks and finishes the towering man servant off. End of story and, frankly, that ending came in none too soon.

It’s easy to trash this as just a really terribly made movie... and so I have. However, I will say that Adamson’s visual flair... or eye for hiring someone with visual flair... does come into its own in a few places. The cinematographer here was a young Lazlo Kovacks and it does show from time to time. Seriously, how did Adamson get to work with so many ‘A’ list, award winning professionals in his early movies? I guess everyone has to start somewhere.

So yeah, there are some nicely done shots with vertical split sections and they manage to get a lot of depth into some of the frames. The print is in terrible shape though but Severin have, as always, done their best with the materials they have to work with. They have also included another, extended TV version of the movie where someone, probably not Adamson, has added 7 or 8 minutes of werewolf sub plot. It’s hinted that Johnny goes more than a little crazy when it’s the full moon (although I honestly don’t see how he could get to be any more of a volatile nutter than he already is in this) and so I guess he goes 'full wolfman' in this cut. I was going to watch this version so I could give a more rounded view of it here but then found out that it’s been cropped into a 4:3 aspect ratio for television and, well, I’m sure fans of cinema will forgive me if I take a pass. I’m sure some of you, like me, get stabs of pain and deep anxiety when forced to watch a film in an incorrect aspect ratio. It’s not something I would wish on anyone so, I can live without those extra minutes of lycanthrope filled footage, to be honest.

And that’s that. I don’t know why Carradine is only playing the butler here when he already played Dracula twice for Universal in the 1940s but, it’s not so much of a missed opportunity when you see how awful this film is. I can’t recommend Blood Of Dracula’s Castle in any way, shape or form but I can certainly recommend the wonderful box set it comes as part of and, again, my compliments to Severin on this one.

Video Palace - In Search Of The Eyeless Man

VHS, Beta and Ota Keta

Video Palace - In Search
Of The Eyeless Man
Sourced by Dr. Maynard Wills
Tiller Press ISBN: 9781982156442

Video Palace - In Search Of The Eyeless Man is a spin off from the popular podcast Video Palace (which I reviewed here). It’s presumably put together by the show’s creators, who have invited a number of writers and luminaries from varying fields (such as actress/director Brea Grant) to take part in the project and who have all contributed a story which, for the most part, are iterations of the fictional antagonist of the podcast, the mysterious Eyeless Man. The gentleman in question being a lurking figure of dread whose ultimate goal of transforming people and allowing them access to other, presumably horror filled worlds of personal torment and suffering, is kept deliberately obscure and unexplained in terms of a tangible direction. This, of course, makes for good horror as the fear of the unknown, as we’re always told, is one of the scariest things going.

Now, the book is presented documentary style, just as the original podcast was, which used the proposal of the slowly forming narratives of each week’s episode being created by a central protagonist knowing each podcast he was cutting would be released on the Shudder horror channel that week. Indeed, there’s similar mention in one story, of the publishing house of this book, Tiller Press, by one of the characters in this tome. Central binding material is presented by Doctor Maynard Wills and, after, by his former student and fellow university Professor Daniel Carter... I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say, after the structural set up in the foreword by the fictional Carter, that the Professor will become victim to his own obsession and drop out of the narrative half way through. It’s expected and frankly alluded to very early on in the proceedings.

Now, you may remember, if you’ve been reading this blog with any regularity during the Christmas season, that I’ve not been getting on too well with written horror anthologies. I mean, sure, I love the obvious classics by Poe and Lovecraft but the various Christmas ghost story collections I’ve been reading have been a very hit and miss affair... as is the nature of anthologies but, honestly, it’s been mostly miss. So it’s kind of refreshing to reveal now that Video Palace - In Search Of The Eyeless Man, while naturally having both peaks and troughs in content, is actually a solid and fairly engaging read. Sure there are low points but even those are pretty decent and I was in no way let down by the book... my criticisms are minor and I was certainly entertained greatly by a few of the stories.

As I said, most of the stories focus on past and present iterations of ‘the eyeless man’ and, like Video Palace, they are mostly about accessing his presence to begin the descent into personal hell through various mediums... not just the urban legend of the ‘white tapes’ as in the podcast, although these VHS video cassette tapes (and even a U-Matic video of one... gosh it’s been decades since I used that format) certainly do appear in a number of the stories.

So we have writers like Owl Goingback, Graham Skipper, Brea Grant, Gordon B. White, Merrin J McCormick, Meirav Devash, Eddie McNamara, John Skipp, Ben Rock, Bob DeRosa, Rebekah McKendry, David Ian McKendry and Mary Phillips-Sandy describing all manner of access points into the lives of their characters, told mostly in first person (although not always) and with various variations covered such as musical entries, obscure channel television broadcasts, social media models (and a murderous follower), a student documentary film maker, a murderous internet meme doppelgänger, a sinister self care group and various other things with topics even going into the relationship between dreams and the quantum realm.

Probably my favourite of the main stories, which are all linked and book ended with inserts by either Wills or Carter, was the ‘interview’ transcript, A Conversation With Tamra by Mary Phillips-Sandy. This one is unique from all the others in that, unlike the linking inserts of Dr. Wills himself (who is renewing his interest in the pursuit of the eyeless man specifically because this fictional character heard the podcast), the interview is actually a direct sequel, of sorts, to the podcast in that it deals with what the main female lead character, Tamra Wulff, did next after her boyfriend Mark Cambria went 'missing'. Although, bearing in mind the nature of this kind of horror narrative, don’t expect any solutions to the ultimate mystery being discovered along the way, of course. That’s usually kind of the point on these sorts of narratives, building on the intrigue of the central premise and asking at least as many questions as they attempt to answer.

My one grouch about the whole book was the segment which was supposed to be a snapshot of a letter Dr. Wills left in is own handwriting. Sure, it’s hard to decipher but, alas, it’s definitely been printed in a ‘script font’ rather than the book designer using genuine handwriting and that does nothing to add to the authenticity of the rest of the framing devices, especially when such great care has been taken to ‘stick to the illusion of the search’, to to speak.

What I loved about this tome though is the fact that everything else did exactly that. The illusionists at work in the fictional form of Wills and Carter even leave the different writer’s spellings of the words that formed the ‘opening chant’ of Mark Cambria in the show, ‘Ota Keta’, because, well, how would anybody know how it’s actually spelled? And, of course, the variance in this small piece of connective tissue becomes another thing which ‘authenticates’ the fictional validity of the various stories... because if the writers all spelled everything exactly the same then a single guiding hand... other than the eyeless man, of course... could be detected by the unwary reader. In fact, the character Wills even makes reference that he’s left the different spellings unaltered, which is a nice touch.

Another nice touch is that each main story is prefaced by a note from the author(s) to Dr. Wills about their inclusion in his research project... so, yeah, there must be some section of the target audience who might actually fall for the illusion too, which is a nice thought. There’s even an email address included in the book for ‘would be contributors’ to leave their own encounters with the eyeless man, as Daniel Carter begins to follow his own obsessional research into the titular figure.

So yeah, that’s me done on this one. Video Palace - In Search Of The Eyeless Man is a welcome continuation of some of the ideas brought up in the serialised podcast Video Palace and I think if you liked the show then you’ll probably get something out of this. I would say it’s probably not a good jumping on point for many since it does include all the obvious spoilers of the events that unfolded in the podcast so, yeah, maybe go listen to that first. All in all though, a nicely put together and well paced anthology of horror tales which didn’t disappoint me the way some other collections have in the past few years and a welcome addition to the book shelf (or book stacks in my case, actually, it has to be said). Worth picking up, for sure.

Prey

Prey A Manger

Prey
UK 1977
Directed by Norman J. Warren
Indicator Ray Zone B

I’ve been wanting to see Norman J. Warren’s Prey for quite some time now. I did have a second hand DVD lined up to watch which I bought about ten years ago but, you know, having a thousand or so films in backlog and then having to write about them all means it can take some time to get to them and so, it’s yet another DVD which became redundant when Indicator brought out their excellent Blu Ray set Bloody Terror: The Shocking Cinema of Norman J Warren 1976-1987 a year or two ago. Honestly, I should stop buying limited edition Blu Rays because, by the time the next edition comes along, I still haven’t had a chance to watch the last one and I’ve become disillusioned with many boutique labels now bringing out so called ‘Limited Editions’, only to bring out a non-limited edition of the same product a few months later, well before anyone’s had time to watch the previous releases. Anyway... rant over on that one. Bottom line is, I finally got to watch Prey in what is probably the best restoration and transfer it’s ever going to get.

Which is fine because it’s a curious and quite strange film which, asides from the ending, doesn’t always do what you think it’s going to do. This might be, of course, because the schedule for the ten day shoot was so rushed that the writer was delivering the script on a day to day basis while it was being shot but, bearing that in mind, it doesn’t feel disjointed or unstructured or like there’s anything anybody would have wanted to rewrite at a later stage.

The film is about a predator who ends up spending time with two lesbian lovers who have a house in the country. And when I say predator... I don’t mean the usual sexual predator you might be thinking of. I’m talking more about the ‘alien hunter from another star system’ kind of predator. This one lands on Earth via the movie magic of ‘coloured lights flashing in through a window’ and later, this alien similarly disposes of a body with the similarly cheap technique of ‘lights somewhere in the bushes’. So, yeah, it’s an incredibly cheap film but what the production didn’t spend on effects like this is ploughed back into the ‘not so bad’ prosthetics and the practical gore effects, which are also pretty good.

Barry Stokes plays the alien... killing a couple in the woods when he lands and assuming the human form of the male. Due to the ‘fish out of water’ shenanigans usually reserved for comedies but used quite a bit here, surprisingly successfully, he ends up being called Anders Anderson as he gives his name twice and is mistaken. The two lesbian lovers (one of whom is actually bisexual, it turns out) are played by Glory Annen as Jessica and Sally Faulkner (from Vampyres, reviewed here) as Josephine.

The film plays out as a more serious form of romp as Anders tries to figure out the girls, is dressed by them in women’s clothing and is ‘affected’ by some champagne they give him. Meanwhile, and this is really strange, there seems to be a sub plot where Josephine has murdered a previous friend of Jessica’s (without her knowing, prior to finding bloody clothes and a flick knife in her lover’s chest) and there’s more than a lurking suspicion that one of them might have spent some time in the local madhouse. Or is Josephine just protecting Jessica and suppressing a deed that she herself committed and has forgotten? Hence the overly protective, older woman not wanting her to leave the house and grounds.

It’s an interesting premise but it never really resolves and, okay, perhaps this actually is a product of the ‘making it up as we go’ script writing on a daily basis but, I really enjoyed the off-kilter element it added to the story and it is useful in giving motivation to the actions of the characters and putting them into situations they wouldn’t normally get into... so I kind of like that it’s constantly hovering in the background.

Considering this is mostly done on a hand held camera (which I found out after, I didn’t notice and that says something about the skill of the crew and the distractions of the story, I think), it’s a nicely designed shoot. Some of the frame designs are quite beautiful and there are even some nice dissolves between static shots, which is not something you see done that often these days and, when done so well like here, gives a nice result.

There’s also a wild, extended slow motion sequence where Anders nearly drowns in a lake with really dirty water. It was apparently the first thing they shot and took two days out of the already short shoot, which seems somewhat disproportionate but it looks really good and that really isn’t clean water they’re in. It looks like they’re all taking an extended mud bath. Apparently, the lake was a local dump for all kinds of poisonous stuff so the cast had to be given shots to safely shoot the sequence. It works well though and, bizarrely, really just stops the film dead... but in a good way.

The gore effects are okay... a bit more aftermath than ‘of the moment’, which certainly wasn’t an issue with the director’s previous film Satan’s Slave (reviewed here)... but the prosthetics for those moments when Anders becomes some kind of panther man, are really well done, especially the red, slit eye contact lenses which occasionally manifest themselves (and blinded the actor whenever he had to wear them). There’s a remarkable shot of those eyes in close up where the slit, vertical pupil seems to dilate somehow... not sure how they did that back in 1977 but it’s surprisingly effective here.

And that’s mostly it for my comments on this one. Prey has an ending which you can see coming a mile off but, strangely, it still took me by surprise because I didn’t think the writers would bother to go there with it. They totally do and, although it gives it a ‘home grown’ kind of feel, I thoroughly enjoyed watching this one and will certainly look at it again someday (if I ever clear this backlog). Looking forward to watching the third film in this wonderful Indicator Blu Ray box set soon.

Time Trap

Temporal
Tantrum

Time Trap
USA  2017
Directed by Mark Dennis & Ben Foster
Pad Thai Pictures

Warning: Okay... I tried but no, I’m going to
have to have some slight spoilers in this one
to talk about the premise of the title. I haven’t
seen the trailer but I suspect most of what I
reveal here gets mentioned in that anyway.

Time Trap is a great little sci-fi movie I would probably never have bothered about if it hadn’t been for someone recommending it to me... so thanks very much to Lee, the coolest ticket seller at Enfield Town train station, for giving me the heads up on this one. This one took me completely by surprise because, due to the scant locations and settings, you could tell that this must have been made fairly cheaply and movies which take on ideas of temporal mechanics, as implied by the title, usually need some money pumped into them. However, the end half an hour is probably where most of the big money was spent and, despite this, the film looks great all the way through, just like a big Hollywood production. It takes on a big idea at a small scale but it works beautifully.

Starting on a shot from the interior of a van with a dirt aged window, Hopper (played by Andrew Wilson), accompanied by his dog, opens the van and finds a clue to what he is looking for. An illustrated notebook. He then finds a cave and, looking into the cave he can see the form of a cowboy at the back with a gun pulled on someone around the next corner. Except, the figure is unmoving. He puts this together with knowledge so far hidden from the audience and decides to go back to base to get properly equipped. He’s a professor and he doesn’t want his students to go on his hunt for answers this time around. So his two students grudgingly obey him and the professor goes back off alone to the van and the cave he has discovered. He ties a rope going down to the entrance of one exit and then goes back to the entrance he found earlier. And that’s the last we, or anyone else in the film for that matter, see of him until much later in the story, as he doesn’t return back to the others the next day.

Turns out Hopper was searching for a van full of hippies looking for The Fountain Of Youth in the local mountains, who went missing in the 1970s. The camper van he found was obviously theirs. What the students don’t know, though, is that the hippies were actually Hopper’s parents and young sister. However, the students and their friends... comprising Taylor (played by Reiley McClendon), Cara (Cassidy Gifford), Jackie (Brianne Howey), Veeves (Olivia Draguicevich) and Furby (Max Wright) set off to find Hopper. Most of them go down into the other entrance of the cave and they all get into trouble, especially when they find one of their number, who didn’t go down, dead in the cave. After a while they realise the situation they are in... they have kind of found the Fountain Of Youth (although this is merely an interpretation of the way time plays out in the cavern) and also an actual water source which heals people really well (even dead ones). However, the problem is, the Fountain Of Youth, in this iteration, gets that name from the way that a year outside the cavern goes by in just a few seconds inside the cave. They find this out when one of their number gets back out for half an hour to find a ravaged, post apocalyptic desert of a world with a giant triangular spaceship orbiting. However, to the people in the cavern, she’s only been gone a couple of seconds when she returns.

Worse, there are pre-historic guardians in the cavern, who pretty much want to kill any strangers and, also, a futuristic space guy who may or may not be after them, once one of them has accidentally alerted the beings on the spaceship of their presence ‘out of time’. Okay, that’s enough of the story because I really don’t want to spoil it.

The actors are all pretty good in this, especially since it’s the teenagers of various ages who are the focus of the main thrust of the story here. Good jobs done by all and the caverns are nicely lit and there’s some bright and colourful photography in some of the scenes. Also, the story doesn’t seem to make the huge time travel errors that a lot of studio films do. I thought it did for a minute there but then I realised I was thinking about the way time passes in this movie in the wrong way and realised the exact opposite of what I thought was happening would indeed happen. Yeah, I’m not getting any younger and my brain is easily confused these days.

Another thing I loved about the movie is that it set up, fairly early on, what I thought were two major cliché moments for later on and then completely went against my expectations by not revisiting either. One is the fact that the main protagonists of the film are all quite young and I’d thought they would have to be so, at some point later in the story, one or two of them could come face to face with their older selves. I’m delighted to say, this doesn’t happen.

Secondly, there’s a scene before the teens enter the cave when they do one of those group selfie things that they always seem to do in horror films these days, with the express purpose of revisiting the photo at the end of the movie so you can see how decimated or changed the ‘survivors’ have become in contrast to who they started out as. Again, it was refreshing to see that, not only doesn’t this happen, it wouldn’t actually have meant that much if it had. However, it does make me wonder why I had to waste a few seconds watching a bunch of teens take a selfie but, well, I guess that’s what people do nowadays.

And, yeah, I don’t want to say much more. The score was nice but, alas, unavailable on CD so it’s not like I’ll get to listen to it away from the picture and, the special effects, most of which come to light in the film’s last third, were pretty good too. Nothing too spectacular but certainly holding up next to what other low budget pictures are able to rustle up and the effects shots in this are fairly ambitious in places, it has to be said.

And that’s me done on Time Trap. It’s exactly the kind of high level science fiction concept you would expect to read in a 1950s short story and the directors, cast and crew pull it off surprisingly well. I would definitely buy this as a physical media purchase if I could just find someone willing to ship the DVD to the UK cheaply (which is proving problematic). Definitely one of those neat little movies which should have had more fanfare and marketing than it actually got, I think. 

The Falcon And The Winter Soldier

More Tease, Falcon

The Falcon And
The Winter Soldier
Air Date: March 19th - April 23rd 2021
Nine Episodes

Warning: This one has all the relevant
spoilers... you have been cautioned.

Okay, so the second of the post-Avengers: Endgame internet shows, following on from the very interesting WandaVision (reviewed here), is The Falcon And The Winter Soldier. Now, this is going to turn out to be a very short review, I think because... well, a) I mostly had no huge problems with it overall and b) it’s a very simple story with a little bit of character development in it but also a heck of a lot of action. So it would be fair to say, I think, that nothing much happens in this one.

It was pretty obvious from the announcement of the show that the intention of this series was pretty obvious. One, they needed to have the previously ‘at each others throats for the most part’ pairing of Sam Wilson (aka The Falcon) and Bucky Barnes (aka The Winter Soldier) go through a healing process and get some bonding there so the characters could be friends by the end of the last episode. And, yes, that indeed happened. The second thing which I thought was an obvious thing was, they would need to set up the events which happened in the comics for a while (and which I already thought had more than enough set up at the end of the aforementioned Avengers Endgame to require anything further but... here we are). Namely, they had to have The Falcon taking over the mantle of Captain America. And they tried to be oblique about it by having Wyatt Russell (son of Kurt) in there as the new Captain America but, yeah, pretty much everyone knew he was going to become U.S. Agent by the end of the show, right? The truth is, when Bucky brought Sam a new set of wings from Wakanda in the fifth episode, it was pretty obvious that when Sam did eventually open up the suitcase, that he’d find a new suit which is basically The Falcon painted up as the new Captain America.

So, yeah, no surprises in this but the writing is good and, it turns out, Anthony Mackie (The Falcon) and Sebastian Stan (The Winter Soldier), both reprising their roles from various Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, actually have good chemistry and it’s quite fun to watch the cynical ‘partnership’ evolve over the course of the six episodes. The story features both cameos and more substantial roles from regular characters/actors in the movies, such as Don Cheadle as War Machine, Daniel Brühl as Baron Zemo and Emily VanCamp as Sharon Carter (niece of Agent Peggy Carter). There’s also a few of the female warrior women from Wakanda in the mix, in one of the few surprising moments in the show.

And it’s straight forward action fodder for sure but, it works really well, is pacey and often feels like there’s more at stake than there probably actually is. One bizarre change, however, is the transformation of the comic book character Karl Morgenthau, aka Flag Smasher, into a woman... Karli Morgenthau, played by the wonderful Erin Kellyman (who played the young girl who started the rebellion against the Empire in Star Wars - Solo... reviewed here), who leads a group of terrorists known as the ‘flag smashers’. Her presence brings one of the few attempts at tonal colour in the show as The Falcon wrestles with the idea of bringing down and stopping a perceived ‘terrorist’ whose ideals he believes in, while obviously not approving of her ‘murder everyone’ methods.

Actually, if there’s one criticism I could level at the show, if I really felt the need, it might be that it was just too much emphasis on action throughout and not enough talk but, honestly, Marvel does this stuff so well at the moment that I honestly didn’t mind it. One of the things which did make me concerned was the idea that Sharon Carter is ‘the powerbroker’ and, at the end when she is welcomed back to the US government, it’s made quite clear in a post credit scene that she’s definitely the villain of the piece, ready to sell the secrets of the US Government to the highest bidder. Which is a bit of a turnaround for the character, I believe... unless of course, she’s a Skrull version of her character. That’s something which is an alley the writers could definitely go down after the scenes pertinent to that little subplot in Spider-Man Far From Home (reviewed here) and WandaVision.

One of the things which is a shame is the inclusion of Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Valentina Allegra de Fontaine. Her character has a very strong, ‘non-introduction’ in this when she first contacts the person she will recreate as U.S. Agent. There’s not much information given to the audience (nor the other characters) about who she is and the reason is, I believe... coronavirus. Yep. Turns out, from what I can understand, this character was supposed to be a call back to her first appearance in the new Black Widow movie (out soon at cinemas, maybe) but, of course, because of the pandemic, the release of the movie was severely delayed so it turns out this is our ‘by proxy’ introduction to her character. So, yeah, I guess that character doesn’t die in the upcoming movie then.

Another grumble might be why, with the subplot of the first black Super Soldier from the Second World War, that they didn’t get Chris Evans back to do a cameo in the last episode but, well, I guess that would have put a lot more strain on the budget. As it is, in The Falcon And The Winter Soldier... well... all I will say is that Baron Zemo has all the best scenes here. I also liked composer Henry Jackman revisiting thematic elements from his score to Captain America - The Winter Soldier (reviewed here) for some of these sequences involving characters from that movie.

And that’s that for The Falcon And The Winter Soldier. Like I said, a short review for a short series which did the job it needed to do and, yeah, we’re already hearing that there will be a fourth Captain America movie headed up by Anthony Mackie as Cap (please change his costume... the new one doesn’t work guys... it just looks clunky) and Sebastian Stan as The Winter Soldier. Yeah, that could probably work well but... I think having a Captain America who doesn’t have the benefit of the Super Soldier serum is a bit of a stretch of the imagination, even for Marvel comics fans, to be honest. We shall see, I guess.

Scored to Death 1 and 2

Scorey Movies

Scored To Death
Conversations With Some Of
Horror’s Greatest Composers
by J. Blake Fichera
Silman-James Press ISBN: 978-1935247142

Scored To Death 2
More Conversations With Some
Of Horror’s Greatest Composers
by J. Blake Fichera
Silman-James Press ISBN: 978-1935247234

Just a quick shout out of two books my friend Dr. Rob gifted me for both Christmas and my birthday recently. Anyone who has been reading any of my reviews with any regularity over the years has probably picked up on the fact by now that I love movie scores. I listen to them all the time and, funnily enough, the guy who gave me these two tomes is the only person I know in real life, who has the same kind of passion and dedication to them as I do although, curiously, he doesn’t listen to a lot of horror scores, it has to be said. Which is the subject of these two tremendous tomes by J. Blake Fichera...

Basically, what Fichera’s done here (and also apparently on some podcasts of the same title, which I really need to catch up with some day when time is not my enemy) is to take some key film score composers who are still with us (or were when he started out on each of these two projects) and interview them with a special emphasis, for the most part, on their contributions to the horror genre.

The first volume collects interviews with Nathan Barr, Charles Bernstein, Joseph Bishara, Simon Boswell, John Carpenter, Jay Chattaway, Fabio Frizzi, Jeff Grace, Mairizio Guarini, Tom Hajdu (of Tomandandy), Alan Howarth, Harry Manfredini, Claudio Simonetti and Christopher Young. The second volume comprises interviews with Michael Abels, Richard Band, Holly Amber Church, Charles Clouser, Robert Cobert, Disasterpeace, Koji Endo, Brad Fiedel, John Harrison, Kenji Kawai, Joseph LoDuca, John Massari, Bear McCreary, Rob, Donald Rubenstein and Craig Safan. Of those two lists, I have at least one score from the majority of them listed (some of them, many shiny discs... I’ve even been to concerts by some of the guys) so there’s a lot of familiarity with their work and styles for the most part but, even when the interview was with a composer I hadn’t experienced myself, I found the answers they gave to Fichera’s questions very interesting and I especially liked the back story provided by many of the composers about how they came to find their calling of writing music and how the film scoring side started for them.

Even certain questions which were duplicated, more or less, through various chapters, were interesting because you get to get a feel for how each different composer (of very different ages in some cases) correlate with their answers or, indeed, contradict each other as their processes differ. Some of them, for example, find the script a helpful start but many of them would rather not read the script and compose from what the director actually managed to get worked up into the rough cut. Although many composers, as I expected, hated the more common practice these days of providing a temp track with the cut (where a film would be cut to found music from other sources which, because of using these tracks to support the rough cut, brings the danger of the director loving the temp score... perhaps the most famous example of this would be Stanley Kubrick rejecting Alex North’s score for 2001 - A Space Odyssey and licencing the music on the temp instead), there are actually a couple of people in these books who welcome the inclusion of the temp track as an aid to a communication of the emotional feel of the pieces they need to compose. Of course, the worst thing I hear sometimes when I listen to a score is actually hearing the temp track kinda bleeding through into the composer's own music, because you can recognise the structure of the cue and realise straight away what track from another film was probably there in its place when the rough cut was assembled. You can often tell when a composer has been asked to imitate something fairly well known.

And of course, the composers won’t always jell with various readers. A couple of composers came across as a little naive to me, for example and another one or two came over, it seemed to me at least, at just the wrong side of pretentious. I suspect that all comes down to the baggage and life experiences a reader brings with them as much as anything actually on the printed pages here though and it really is to be expected. Sometimes they get it a little wrong too. Without naming names, for example, one composer quoted a very famous film composer saying that they weren’t, because of their period, as experimental as he and always did things with a big orchestra when in fact, the composer he was referencing was as much known for his smaller, unusual groupings of instruments and spirit of experimentation as the composer pointing the finger here (probably more so).

It’s not a surprise that my favourite composer, Bernard Herrmann, comes up a lot on almost everyone’s favourites or most influential, although I wish people wouldn’t keep thinking that movies like Psycho are horror films (nor William’s Jaws, nor Shore’s Silence Of The Lambs for that matter)... it’s like one day, everybody in movie appreciation land just woke up and forgot the genre of thriller ever existed.

Overall though, these two tomes are both entertaining and illuminating and it’s great hearing about experimental instruments, the odd score I’ve not heard and the odd film I’ve not seen (I watched the phenomenal Under The Silver Lake, reviewed here and grabbed Disasterpeace’s score for said film on CD as soon as I found out about them from this book... um... yeah, actually this book is another one of those which is turning out to have an expensive afterlife affair with my wallet). It’s good that the almighty Ligeti was referenced as one of those composers who, inadvertently because it certainly wasn’t his intent, invented and influenced the vocabulary of horror film scoring and is still regarded highly by many composers today (who also list Penderecki, obviously, as an influence on the genre). I was also delighted and bemused to find that composer Kenji Kawai, who wrote the scores for the original Ringu and some of its sequels and spin offs, lists Burt Bacharach as one of his primary influences.

Probably the worst part of the second volume, for me, was when one of my absolute favourite contemporary score composers, I won’t name him here, talked about a certain common practice as to how modern film and TV composers write scores these days and his approach seemed to me to be very disheartening and disappointing. In fact, I could almost picture Herrmann and Morricone spinning in their graves about what he said here. That was a real eye opener.

All in all, though, if you are someone who has an active interest in either horror films, film scores or that wonderful place where both those things come together to make art, then Scored To Death Volumes 1 and 2 by J. Blake Fichera are definitely worth your time and money. And, of course, if you have the scores, then you can play one or two of them after reading each chapter, which is a nice thing to do of an evening, for sure. Definitely pick these two up.

The Mummy's Tomb

Tomb It May Concern

The Mummy's Tomb
USA 1942 Directed by Harold Young
Universal Blu Ray Zone B

I think people tend to forget this when looking back on The Mummy’s Tomb but, this was a really brave movie on the part of Universal pictures at the time... especially in terms of the way you build a franchise. I’ll get to that in a minute. Alas, this is also the film where all of the continuity between the movies in The Mummy franchise is completely shot to hell and makes constant ridicule of the series much easier too.

This film calls back the two leading men from the last film... Dick Foran as Stephen Banning and Wallace Ford as Babe Hanson. However, the film is set 30 years since the events of The Mummy’s Hand (reviewed here) and so Foran is seen in ‘aged make up’ at the start of the picture, telling his son John Banning (played by John Hubbard, who was only two years younger than Foran in real life) and John’s fiancé Isobel (played by the gorgeous Elyse Knox)... and also Stephen’s sister Jane (played by Mary Gordon, who was Mrs. Hudson in the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes film series)... all about his last adventure. Truth be told, even in his old make up, Dick Foran looks a little younger than the guy playing his son.

So what we have here, for the first ten minutes of the movie (and it’s only an hour long B-feature), is Foran narrating a series of no less than six sets of clips and highlights montages, replaying the salient points of the last movie. Interestingly, the footage used does not include the hand painted ‘dark eyes’ used in the last movie and Tom Tyler’s eyes are clearly visible in the shots of him in wrappings. After it’s over, Foran looks to the ‘aged’ photo of his leading lady from the last movie, who has apparently passed away in the intervening years.

Meanwhile, George Zucco, playing the high priest in the last movie, is also back as an aged version of his character who tells his new successor, Turhan Bey (played by Mehemet Bey), that the bullets only went into his arm! Kharis, the mummy, is also somehow back, not having perished in the flames that engulfed him in the last movie and looking... well, just a little bit singed really. Audiences might find this new version of Kharis hard to take because, as we are reminded from the flashback clips, he was played by Tom Tyler (of The Adventures Of Captain Marvel and The Phantom fame) in the previous movie but, from here on, Lon Chaney Jr dons the bandages for this and the next two sequels. The trouble is, Lon Chaney Jr is a heck of a lot pudgier than the slim, bandaged form of Tyler and, yeah, it really shows. Has this mummy been swigging beers for the last thirty years?

Even so, the new Kharis has a mission of revenge and Turhan Bay relocates to be the new caretaker of Mapleton Cemetery, in the same home town as Stephen Banning and his family. Here, Bey starts to carry out ‘Kharis destiny’ of revenge on the people and family of those who defiled his tomb. Once again, using the nine Tana leaves to animate him each night, we watch as the leading man from the last movie is strangled to death by Kharis. Seriously, how brave is that for a 1942 movie playing with audience expectations? Then, to attend his funeral, Babe is recalled to town but he’s too late to stop Banning’s sister escaping the same fate. Then, after giving various people the dope on the threat of Kharis, Babe is also killed off in a similar fashion. Wow... the two leading men from the last movie killed within the first 25 mins or so of the film that you thought they were going to be the heroes of. These days this would be known as a ‘passing the torch movie’, where one generation of characters hands over the franchise to the next generation of actors. Here, though, it’s only two years since these characters debuted so... yeah, I do think this is quite something in terms of a way of giving a franchise new legs (like the modern GI Joe movies). I don’t know if any other film franchises were doing anything similar at the time (comments below if you know of any) but I find this incredibly interesting and gutsy.

As a stand alone movie, it’s not bad. Lots is made of the shadows cast on walls by Kharis as he goes about his business and, I’m pretty sure the scene where Kharis kidnaps Isobel (because Bey fancies her himself and wants to do unspeakable things to her) is an homage, of sorts, to the 1922 German Expressionist movie, Nosferatu - A Symphony Of Horror, where similar use of the shadows of the monster’s hand creeping over the sleeping form of the leading lady is used.

The film ends predictably with bullets and fire, much like the last movie but, if you can handle the bizarre lapses in common sense, you will probably find that this is one of the more watchable films of the Universal Mummy franchise, although not as good as the previous entry in the series. Stock and re-recorded music abounds via Hans J. Salter, Frank Skinner, Heinz Roemheld and Charles Previn... which is just as well considering the strength of their scoring on The Mummy’s Hand flashbacks in the first ten minutes. Musical continuity is, at least, maintained therefore.

Of course the biggest problem is... the last movie was set in 1940. This film is set 30 years later in... 1942. Which makes no sense. There’s even a reference to John Banning getting drafted into the war so... what the heck is going on? What were the screenwriters thinking? Whenever I compare a new series of cinema movies which have really awful continuity between pictures, such as all of the X-Men films, I always invoke The Mummy series of the 1940s as something equally as terrible in this area. And, as I review the next two films in this franchise, you’ll see that the writers tend to compound these ‘errors’ in each one, not just in terms of time but even, in one case of outstanding inexplicableness, in location. Well, I’ll keep all that ‘under wraps’ until the next Mummy review and unbandage these things for you when I get to them.

However, if you can ignore the unbelievable stupidity of the continuity then, I think you’ll find that The Mummy’s Tomb is a real gem of a movie. Admittedly an unpolished gem but, all the same, the direction they went in to kill off the leads from the previous film when you least expect it is a real eye opener and you have to applaud them for their thinking here, at least. Always happy to give this one a watch.

Under The Silver Lake

Owl In Hand

Under The Silver Lake
USA 2017 Directed by David Robert Mitchell
Vendian Entertainment

Sometimes you come across a great movie in the least expected way. Now, I loved It Follows (reviewed here) and for a while I was waiting for a couple of things to happen... one was a sequel to this outstanding horror movie (I still can’t believe they’ve not turned it into a franchise yet) and also, to see whatever the next film by the writer/director of It Follows, David Robert Mitchell, happened to be. After a while I gave up on either option though and, I have to say, Under The Silver Lake didn’t even come onto my radar until a day or two ago (at time of writing).

You see, I love movie scores and the composer of the score to It Follows, a guy called Disasterpeace, also scored this movie. However, it wasn’t until I was reading the second volume of J. Blake Fichera’s Scored To Death books, which features interviews with a whole bunch of horror movie composers, that I realised both the director and composer had worked on another film together after that. So I immediately had to take a look at it and, around about 20 minutes in, I had to pause the movie so I could order the last cheap copy of the soundtrack CD on Ebay, because I already liked the music so much.

Now Under The Silver Lake is not a 'horror movie' but it’s a significant puzzle of a movie. I might liken it to the works of British director Peter Greenaway in some ways, not in terms of the visual or audio style but in terms of the mystery at the heart of the story and the... well, the resolution or lack of, as such. I would perhaps best describe this as a paranoid conspiracy movie set in modern times and highlighting contemporary themes and attitudes but viewed through a 1940s film noir sensibility.

Also, if you’re heavily into movies, you will find an awful lot of references to various works in film history from homages to Marilyn Monroe’s scenes from her unfinished movie Something’s Got To Give through to various Hitchcock thrillers and so on. Certainly, the hook of the movie is something which borrows liberally from a more formulaic style of movie making. Now, I’m determined not to spoil the film with any key revelations here because, more than most films, it trades on the sense of intrigue set up by the characters and situations which play out in some truly brain twisting ways on screen.

What I will say is that the lead protagonist Sam, is played by Andrew Garfield, who is nicely seen holding a Spider-Man comic in one scene (a role which he played in two previous films and will be reprising at the end of the year...assuming the post-pandemic cinema release schedules remain unchanged). He meets a girl by the swimming pool in his apartment building one night while he’s fulfilling the same role as the James Stewart character in Hitchcock’s Rear Window (a poster among many old movies posters up in his apartment) and becomes obsessed with her... more so when, the next day, Sarah (played by Riley Keough) disappears and may, or may not, have been burned to death in a car along with a missing billionaire.

From this point on, the film becomes an intriguing and very strangely shot fairground ride as Sam tries to find out what has happened to Sarah, as the film details his adventures which involve secret symbols, secret codes, a local comic book guy who produces a fanzine style comic book of the neighbourhood called “Under The Silver Lake”, a mythical naked lady Night Owl serial killer and...lots of other stuff which I won’t mention here.

The film is very well shot with slow zooms and camera movements on long shots which suck you into the movie in the way that lots of old movies used to but, few modern ones seldom do... at least using this particular aesthetic. There are even some nice, black and white animated segments which play out pieces of the comic book whenever somebody reads it.

The Hitchcock references continue with a shot of his grave stone in one sequence, a Vertigo shot where the camera is zoomed/pulled (you know, the one Spielberg later used in Jaws) and this goes for a lot of the music too, which I suspect is influenced in some of the scenes here by the great Bernard Herrmann. Indeed, a wordless and extended sequence where Sam follows three girls across town with just music is absolutely a stand in for the scene near the start of Vertigo where James Stewart follows Kim Novak’s character and Disasterpeace’s score in this sequence certainly gives off the same kind of vibe. Which is nice (and, as I said, had me reaching for ebay).

And that’s it... I’ve gone as far as I can without giving things away. The film is definitely ‘not safe for work’ as they say, in that there’s a lot of female nudity (absolutely not complaining about this) and even a couple of extremely gory scenes too, perhaps made more shocking because they aren’t occurring in a horror movie but something which is using the syntax of historic movies from a time where such violence would not be shown on screen (we’re talking almost Cronenbergian levels here, in a couple of scenes). And it’s a great movie. The ending gives us some sense of awkward resolution while, at the same time, probably leaving us with more questions than we might like. In that way, I suspect it’s a little like Ben Wheatley’s Kill List, which is another film which I believe won’t reward multiple viewings with anything like a clue as to what certain aspects of the movie were about (and which is all the richer for it). Still, I was totally captivated by Under The Silver Lake in the very best way and I would certainly recommend it to anyone with a love of cinema and an appreciation for the history of the art. And I’ll just leave it at that. 

Five Bloody Graves

Yaqui Doodle Dandies

Five Bloody Graves
(aka Five Bloody Days To Tombstone)
Directed by Al Adamson
USA 1969 IIP/Severin Blu Ray Zone A

Warning: Some very slight spoilers here.

It’s ‘Cowboys and Indians’ time again for Al Adamson, as he follows in his father’s directing footsteps to produce this luridly titled Western, written by the main male lead Robert Dix as ex-lawman Ben Thompson. Now, in a ten minute extra which includes an interview with Dix (it must have been made shortly before he died in 2018), I learned that Ben Thompson was an actual person and a bit of a notorious one at that. Dix said that, because he wasn’t as well known as some of the Western legends, he wanted to write something which would highlight this character. That being said, when I looked at an article on Thompson’s life in preparation for this review, the short episode depicted by this movie has no resemblance to anything that actually happened (including the back story about what happened to the character’s wife) and so it would be fairly safe to say, I think, that this is a highly fictionalised account at best.

Also, just for the record, the title of this movie, Five Bloody Graves, is a bit questionable too. There are plenty of deaths here (way more than five) and the last shot of the film includes... um... four graves. So, yeah, not sure where that title comes from but, still, it sounds pretty good to me.

Anyway, once again Adamson surprises me because... it’s not a bad Western in some ways. Although, perhaps unsurprisingly, it also has it’s problems but, I know Adamson was always proud of what he could do for the incredibly low budgets he was working with so, yeah, this is pretty good for the money. A low budget western but it has some very nice things in it to counter the terrible stuff.

This film deals with a Yaqui called Sartago, who once shot Ben Thompson’s wife on their wedding day. So Ben wanders the land looking for the Yaquis in the hopes he can get his revenge and, along the way, makes friends and enemies of various characters played by people like Vicki Volante, future director John 'Bud' Cardos (in two roles), Scott Brady, Jim Davis, Paula Raymond, Julie Edwards and Darlene Lucht. There’s even a role for the director’s famous father, Victor Adamson, playing a supporting character... I didn’t know what he looked like but I recognised him straight away as bearing a striking family resemblance.* Al Adamson also makes a quick uncredited cameo near the start of the film as one of the Yaqui’s trying to kill Thompson but, true to form, his character doesn’t survive more than a few minutes of the movie.

It also features John Carradine as a preacher who is a very strange character in that he’s very Christian but is not above sneaking a peek at a lady as she undresses nor, indeed, saving everybody’s lives when he pulls a derringer from behind his bible and kills the current threat. A decidedly ambiguous character who, like a lot of people in Al Adamson movies (I’m starting to discover), is not cut and dried when it comes to first impressions.

Another addition to the cast is Gene Raymond as the voice of death. I quite liked Dix’s somewhat poetic writing here and, although you never see the character of death, he gives a voice over commentary as he is the constant companion of Ben Thompson, riding on his (invisible) pale horse beside him wherever he goes.

Well... I say you never see death but, on the print which carries the Five Bloody Graves title, the opening animated credits sequence, which is pretty good for the low budget, features various skulls on a cartoon of the rocky canyons and the skeleton of death riding that very same pale horse. The music on the credits, however, sounds more like a 1940s horror movie and... after a while I realised why (I’ll get there in a minute, okay?).

Once again the cinematography here is by a young Vilmos Zsigmond and, it really shows. There’s some nice stuff done with double mirrors (Adamson seems to like using mirrors, I’ve noticed), a shot of Thompson approaching the camera from under a stationary horse and a truly spectacular series of shots where one cowboy is chasing another on his horse which does some amazing things with the way its focused and, frankly, just keeping up with these riders is an art in itself, I suspect. He also does that thing which I think is kinda ahead of its time, where he uses the camera pan to search for and then pick out a detail like a Yaqui standing on the edge of a cliff in the distance. That being said, there’s also a scene where he uses rack focusing on two characters facing the camera, changing from one to the other when each speaks, which is a bit excessive and was getting on my nerves a little, to be fair.

There’s a lot of bad stuff here too. For example, when a cowboy finds a squaw staked out and left for the ants, he rips her clothes off and then rapes her. After he’s raped her it cuts back to her and we see she is still wearing the clothes she had on when the cowboy found her... this is followed by a long shot of him throwing her clothes back on her body (now naked once more) before he puts two bullets in her. So, yeah... continuity, probably caused by a rearrangement of elements in the edit, is not good here.

And then there’s the music. There are a couple of scenes where I was watching the cowboys battle the Yaquis and, on the soundtrack, was the music they use for News At Ten, here in the UK. I was just waiting for the Big Ben chimes to go off at the end of each Indian raid. Apparently the piece of music is called "The Awakening" by John Pearson and that tipped me off why I didn’t see a composer’s name at the start. This movie is scored entirely by needle dropped library music and, it shows. It needn’t show but, honestly, whoever was running this music in didn’t know much about how you fit image to score, it seems to me. The music here is fine to listen to but has been used so inappropriately, with slow leisurely scenes where nothing is happening suddenly invaded by fast, jazzy action music for no apparent reason, for example, that it really harms the film in places because it’s so laughable. I understand the technique of trying to actually add pacing with the music (something Elmer Bernstein excelled at with his score for The Magnificent Seven)... but it kinda falls flat here, it has to be said. So, yeah, there’s that.

Other than that though... the actors are mostly pretty good in this one (especially Dix himself) and, while Five Bloody Graves is not a spectacular, or even great, entry into the Western genre... it’s not a bad watch and one wonders what Adamson might have been able to do with a bigger budget and a more leisurely work pace. I did find this one entertaining and I could easily watch it again. It’s a bit like a road movie infused into the American Western and it’s really not an odd fit at all.

*a very good friend advised me to tone down my
description of Al Adamson’s singularly arresting features. ;-)