Mother of Tears (2007)

Dir: DARIO ARGENTO
Country: ITALY/USA

aka:
La terza madre
Mother of Tears: The Third Mother

The monumental capitulation to mediocrity that has beset the cinema of Dario Argento from 1990 onwards (with the honourable exception of Sleepless (2001)) remains one of the most perplexing chapters in horror history. Argento’s cinema has for the past twenty years been a creative wasteland. Part of the reason in my view was a steadily building sense of self awareness that appeared from Opera (1987) onward. I think Argento began to believe all of the ‘auteur’ nonsense hype of a number of under researched academic and critical pieces that sprang up in the 1990’s. Along with an awareness of this status came a self-consciousness within the films themselves. Where before Argento explored psychoanalytical concepts and gender issues (usually in a playful manner) as part of the plot dynamics of his films, in the 1990’s these theoretical paradigms began to take centre stage over the plot. This reached a ludicrous extremity in the utterly abysmal The Stendhal Syndrome (1996) in which Argento sought to use an obscure psychoanalytical device to cover up for the fact that the film was essentially a tawdry and grimy rape/revenge thriller with little redeeming value. The revisionist criticism this cinematic offal has received should not in any way convince you the film is any good. This is something scholars, academics and critics do very often - in a bid to be different (usually for the purposes of funding) they will attempt to reclaim those films which are lesser known or have been dismissed. With this in mind Mother of Tears will probably also experience a period of critical revisionism in the future, I wish whoever takes on the task all the luck in the world.

The Camp on Blood Island (1958)

Dir: VAL GUEST
Country: UK

The Camp on Blood Island is one of those Hammer obscurities that I’ve wanted to watch for a long time. Fortunately, and thanks to Sony Pictures, the film made its UK DVD debut in October (along with a rash of other Hammer films that were distributed by Columbia Pictures) and can now be enjoyed in an excellent presentation which retains the original Megascope aspect ratio of 2.35:1. One thing that Megascope does achieve is an impressive depth of field which in just a few shots gives us a sense of the large number of extras used by Hammer to populate their Japanese POW camp. The director Val Guest is able to use this broad compositional palette to powerful effect, emphasising both the isolation and hopelessness of the men, and in mounting several harrowing sequences which deal out death from a sobering distance. This is an expansive film which makes tremendous use of the Surrey countryside, and the studios at Bray, to concoct a heady tropical nightmare of imprisonment and desperation.

The Ten Most Overrated Horror Films of All Time



October is the month to wax lyrical about the horror genre, a time to celebrate a misunderstood and much maligned form of cultural and cinematic expression. In the total opposite spirit of Halloween I’m proud to present The Celluloid Highway’s guide to the most grossly overrated and over-appreciated horror films in cinema history. Those films which critics, academics, and fans have convinced us over many years are essential landmarks in the development of the genre. This article is partly inspired by a recent post celebrating the most influential horror films from the 1930’s to the 1980’s by Brian over at Cool Ass Cinema, and partly by my own review of Night of the Living Dead (1968). I was finally able to get my dissatisfaction with Romero’s over rated debut film out of my system, and in so doing discovered that my dislike of this sacred cow could be joined by numerous others. If you’re one of these mentally ill people who actually get upset when a film you like is criticised you may wish to avoid this article. Or it might help you just to repeat this mantra - To avoid fainting repeat….Its only a blog post, only a blog post, only a blog post…you get the drift.

DRACULA (Tod Browning, USA, 1931)



This version of Dracula, which features a side splitting performance by Hungarian ‘actor’ Bela Lugosi is a cinematic disaster. At no point does Tod Browning’s turgid direction escape the stiff and static theatricality of the play upon which the film was based. This is a film of immobile and stagnant tableaux, with a camera that lacks the courage to do anything other than stay motionless. It also lacks the valour to explore the manner in which Dracula deals death, and in one of horror cinema’s most unforgivable decisions has Dracula vanquished off screen. The concurrent Spanish language production directed by George Medford and featuring Carlos Villarias as the bloodsucker is far superior. The only people too emerge with credibility from this incredibly dull film is Karl Freund due to his expert lighting (and who was rewarded with the direction of The Mummy (1932)), production designers John Hoffman and Herman Rosse and actor Dwight Frye who provides some distraction as Renfield.

Yesterday's Enemy (1959)

Dir: VAL GUEST
Country: UK

The underappreciated and adult World War Two drama Yesterday’s Enemy was Hammer Film Productions’ fourth serious look at a conflict that had only concluded fourteen years before. It followed on the heels of The Steel Bayonet (1957), the hysterical and racist The Camp on Blood Island (1958) and the taut but highly compromised Ten Seconds to Hell (1959). Val Guest contributed direction to a Hammer film for the eighth occasion, illustrating that in the 1950’s at least he was the British companies most prolific director. The material was particularly suited to Guest’s gritty and realistic talents, and is shot in sumptuous monochrome by the brilliant Arthur Grant. Guest is perhaps more well remembered for The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) and Quatermass 2 (1957), but I’ve always felt his talents were better suited for a film such as Yesterday’s Enemy. The film was shot in Megascope, and whilst this creates a certain distance between the audience and the events of the film, it gives the film an expansive quality that highlights the suffocating climate of the Burmese jungle. If you’re looking for protracted battle sequences you will be disappointed. This is an intelligent character driven film, with a plot that revolves around two major moral decisions.

La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo Film

Author: MIKEL J. KOVEN
Publisher: SCARECROW PRESS
Publication Date: 28th October 2006

Despite ever greater prominence in the age of DVD popular Italian cinema from the 1960’s, 70’s, and 80’s has still received relatively sparse coverage in the literary world. With the continued rise in the study of cult film (and its acceptability within academic circles) this is an oversight that needs redressing. Aside from a handful of articles (one particularly important one is Leon Hunt’s A (sadistic) Night at the Opera: Notes on the Italian Horror Film from a 1992 edition of Velvet Light Trap) gialli have mostly found themselves discussed as part of auteur driven studies of the most visible directors of the form. But I have long believed that this durable cycle of films is deserving of a multitude of critical approaches, and to file them away as part of some half assed fan worship auteur nonsense does them a great disservice. Mikel J. Koven’s study is important for a variety of reasons. It represents the first occasion that gialli have been treated to a book length study in the English language and Koven’s thesis concerns itself as much with the audience of these films as it does with the formal properties that make the films so distinctive in the first place.

The Mysterians (1957)

Dir: ISHIRO HONDA
Country: JAPAN

aka:

Chikyû Bôeigun
Defence Force of the Earth
Earth Defense Force

Released originally in Japan under the title Chikyû Bôeigun in 1957, Ishirô Honda’s second major foray into science fiction after the success of Gojira (1954) was picked up for distribution in the United States by MGM and released in 1959 under the title The Mysterians. No doubt the abominated bastardisation that Gojira experienced when released under the title Godzilla, King of Monsters! (1956) prompted US distributors to keep a keen eye on the development of Japanese science-fiction/monster movies, even if ham fisted dubbing and subtitle translation reduced the enjoyment and power of the films. The Mysterians was particularly fitting for US distribution because it is an invasion narrative, and it fed nicely into the fears and anxieties of the day. If Gojira borrowed numerous plot elements from King Kong (1933), then the major influence on The Mysterians is War of the Worlds (1953). What is most distinctive now is the wonderfully expansive use of Tohoscope, which gives the film an epic grandeur, some impressive model work, and the rich colour cinematography of Hajime Koizumi. The combination of these stylistic elements gives the film a look that would be repeated for many years in numerous Japanese monster movies. In this respect The Mysterians holds a significant position in the influence of Japanese science-fiction, a position that is somewhat underappreciated in the west.

A Nightmare on Elm Street Poster Gallery

A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, 1984) - German poster

A Nightmare on Elm Street #2 - US poster

A Nightmare on Elm Street #3 - Japanese poster

The Vault of Horror (1973)

Dir: ROY WARD BAKER
Country: UK/USA

After the commercial success of Tales from the Crypt (1972) there was a certain inevitability about Milton Subotsky and Max J. Rosenberg’s decision to once again return to the black humour and irony of EC Comics’ gore soaked pages. The stories of Al Feldstein and William M. Gaines were particularly suited to Amicus’ method of production, even if Amicus were never able to fully realise the viscera. Unfortunately The Vault of Horror is too light and inconsequential a follow up to Tales from the Crypt, and in all honesty is probably the companies weakest anthology. In the space of just a year what seemed exciting and interesting had degenerated into tiredness and datedness. The names on the marquee which included Tom Baker, Terry Thomas, Daniel Massey, Curt Jurgens, and Edward Judd represent the weakest casting to date for an Amicus anthology. Though scraping below the surface we do get dependable turns from Denholm Elliot, Anna Massey, Glynis Johns and Dawn Addams. The film opens with a series of establishing shots of Westminster, The Thames, and The Houses of Parliament as if too emphasis the films British credentials.. The only surprise in the film is that the ‘Vault’ itself is situated in the sub-basement of a non-descript tower block. Once our exclusively male incumbents have seated themselves they began to tell each other about the recurring dreams they have been experiencing. The only successful aspect of this extremely weak bridging narrative is the occasional inspirational shot from Roy Ward Baker.

Harlequin (1980)

Dir: SIMON WINCER
Country: AUSTRALIA

aka:
Dark Forces

One of the wonderful side effects of Australian New Wave films of the 1970’s such as Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) was the birth of what has become known as Ozploitation. Two of the major figures in the production of low budget genre pictures in 70’s and 80’s Australia were producer Anthony I. Ginnane and screen writer Everett De Roche. Between them they worked on Patrick (1978), Thirst (1978), Long Weekend (1978), Harlequin (1980), The Survivor (1981), Road Games (1981) and Razorback (1984). These are some of the most accomplished genre pictures ever produced in Australia, and still to this day remain the most well known. Of this selection of titles Harlequin is perhaps the most obscure, an obscurity which is undeserving because there are a lot of positive aspects to the film. The film is anchored by a brilliantly enigmatic turn by Robert Powell as the mysterious magician Gregory Wolfe. Powell also took the lead in the Ginnane produced adaptation of James Herbert’s The Survivor. The De Roche screenplay is a modern reinterpretation of the Rasputin narrative, and De Roche does little to hide the historical parallels, and in fact plays them up on numerous occasions. Much of the tension derives from the fact that we are never entirely sure if Wolfe possesses genuine psychic and supernatural abilities or whether he is just an accomplished con artist. This tension is important because the film chooses to explore most of its ideas through dialogue rather than action.

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Dir: GEORGE A. ROMERO
Country: USA

In a tribute to utter pointlessness I present yet another review of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. I’ll get all those predictable words like seminal, legendary, and landmark out of the way now. No review of this film would be the same without them. Unfortunately I don’t believe that Romero’s film is seminal, legendary or a landmark, but that is probably besides the point. Three other adjectives do spring to mind though - amateurish, crude, and rudimentary. I’m not one to herd the sacred cows of the horror genre into the slaughterhouse just for the sake of it, but neither am I party to the sort of unthinking and mindless worship of a film on the say so of a bunch of ex hippy critics and academics who were around at the time of the films release. Histories are written retrospectively and its rarely mentioned for example that Night of the Living Dead was not a major success when it was first released. Instead the film languished for three or four years before it became a success on the Midnite Movie circuit. One version of history will have you believe that Romero’s film distilled all the anxieties of the day and was a white hot rebuke to mainstream American culture up there with Easy Rider (1969). The fact is all these qualities were drawn out of the film retrospectively. Therefore the much lauded allegorical dimension of the film was only appreciated when the time had passed. However Romero did have an effective metaphor for consumerism in his depiction of a zombie horde stripped of the mystique of voodoo.

John Carpenter Poster Gallery

This weeks poster gallery celebrates the filmography of John Carpenter. Carpenter is a filmmaker that I have a love/hate relationship with. This isn’t that surprising really because he emerged at a time in the 1970’s when the concept of the ‘auteur’ had great prominence in the American cultural landscape. I say it isn’t surprising because most of the directors that emerged in the era of ‘New Hollywood’ were repugnant and arrogant individuals with a bloated sense of their own importance. Carpenter is by no means as bad as pond life like William Friedkin or that most vulgar of imbeciles Francis Ford Coppola, but like these ’men’ he began to believe the hype. This moment of self awareness which I date at around 1983 and the production of Christine saw his films drop markedly in quality. It is no exaggeration to say, that with the exception of They Live (1988), Carpenter hasn’t produced a decent film since The Thing (1982). The films following this bleak and unforgiving Antarctic masterpiece have been mild distractions - empty headed entertainments devoid of the tensions in his earlier films. From 1974 to 1982 Carpenter went on an incredible run, and perhaps only David Cronenberg could challenge his brilliance at this time. The evidence of these earlier films, the films I consider to be Phase 1 of Carpenters career, leads to much head scratching when watching the films of Phase 2 (1983 onwards). In those earlier efforts, most notably Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) and Halloween (1978) Carpenter possessed a revisionist attitude to genre, one which was able to transplant familiar stories into an unfamiliar and extremely violent contemporary world. For those films from 1974 to 1982 Carpenter holds a legendary position on The Celluloid Highway, the rest of his films are merely pot holes. But that’s enough about Carpenter….lets have a look at these posters!

Dark Star (1974) - US Poster

Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970)

Dir: JOSEPH SARGENT
Country: USA

The Day the World Changed Hands
The Forbin Project

Uncertainties and fears about technological progression and the role of science in modernity has long been a preoccupation of science-fiction and horror narratives. In the 1970’s these ‘Revolt of Technology’ tales reached a higher level of visibility thanks chiefly to the neurotic machinations of HAL 9000 aboard the space station Discovery in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Although Kubrick pushed the boundaries of cinematic form and spectacle, the strongest sensation within his film was a deep pessimism and paranoia about mankind’s relationship to sentient technology. This was adapted perfectly to the 1970’s and became the clinical and logical flip side to the primal and instinctual ‘Revolt of Nature’ films which were also achieving prominence. Both of these sub-strata of horror and science-fiction were informed by the pervasive atmosphere of paranoia which smothered much of American production post Watergate. The fault often lay with venerated institutions - the military, scientific research, the government and even the media. The resolutions were often unsatisfactory and closure never fully achieved. The first major production to absorb the thematic impetus of 2001 was Universal Pictures’ Colossus: The Forbin Project. Interestingly the source material - a novel called Colossus by British sci-fi writer D. F. Jones pre-dated 2001 and appeared in 1966, and was the first part of a trilogy. The remaining two books remain unrealised by cinema, which on the strength of this film is something of a shame.

Coming Attractions - The Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977) / She Wolf of London (1946)

Revolver (1973)

Dir: SERGIO SOLLIMA
Country: ITALY/FRANCE/WEST GERMANY

aka:
Blood in the Streets
In the Name of Love

To date The Celluloid Highway has yet to travel down the road of the Poliziotteschi, but I’m happy to correct that now with one of the major films of that sub-genre. It is instructive to note the different attitude that popular Italian culture has with the concept of genre. Genre as it is applied to cinema is largely speaking a Hollywood construct that aids in the marketing and differentiation of its product. Popular Italian forms of cinematic entertainment have a much more fluid relationship with each other. In the case of Poliziotteschi and Gialli for example we find a great deal of cross pollination and a mutual cynicism about both behaviour in a capitalist system, and the authorities that govern the system. The Italians prefer to use the term filone, viewing these films as popular cycles rather than discreet self contained genres. This may seem a peripheral point, but it requires the scholar to adjust one’s thinking when it comes approaching these films. These films were seen as cycles within popular cinema, and narrative rules and conventions of form are far more open to the interpretative imagination of a filmmaker. So whilst American cinema was undergoing a period of generic revisionism in the late 1960’s and 1970’s, this was always an inbuilt quality of these Italian film cycles.

Hammer Frankenstein Films Poster Gallery

"Let's let our friend here rest in peace... while he can. " - The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)

The Curse of Frankenstein (Terence Fisher, 1957) - French poster

L'enfance nue (1968)

Dir: MAURICE PIALAT
Country: FRANCE

aka:
Naked Childhood

For the last five or six years I’ve been on/off collecting a series of DVD’s released by Eureka under their ‘Masters of Cinema’ imprint. In many ways this label is the nearest we have in the UK to the Criterion Collection, and they offer a wide range of world and art cinema in the best possible transfers. Between 2008 and 2010 ‘Masters of Cinema’ released a number of films by French filmmaker Maurice Pialat. I had steadfastly avoided these because I’d never heard of the man, but recently I took a punt on his 1968 debut feature film L’enfance nue (translates as Naked Childhood) and was very glad that I did. Pialat had directed the short film L’Amour Existe (1960), a dour and depressing travelogue through the working class suburbs of Paris, but little in that film (which is included on the Masters of Cinema DVD) could prepare one for the piercing naturalism of the startling L’enfance nue.

[REC] (2007)

Dir: JAUME BALAGUERO & PACO PLAZA
Country: SPAIN

The history of Spanish horror is littered with compromise and censorship. In the 1960’s an all too brief liberalism towards the genre opened the way for filmmakers such as Jess Franco, Paul Naschy, Amando de Ossorio and Eloy de la Iglesia to explore the creative potentialities of horror, but this golden period wasn’t to last long. Horror came under increasing scrutiny from the imperious eye of the state, to an extent that the history of Spanish horror cannot be written without an awareness of the political culture of the times. This has given Spanish horror an allegorical dimension that has never really left it, a political and social consciousness that has endured up until the present day. [REC] is an excellent example of a horror film distilling social and political anxieties, but one which uses the signifiers of the zombie and reality television in order to give it trans-national appeal.

Kill, Baby...Kill! (1966)

Dir: MARIO BAVA
Country: ITALY

aka:
Operazione Paura
Curse of the Dead
Operation Fear
Curse of the Living Dead

This sumptuous and extravagant slice of supernatural period gothic horror is among Italian filmmaker Mario Bava’s greatest achievements. The dreadfully titled Kill, Baby…Kill! was Bava’s third descent into the phantasmagorical and supernatural realm of the gothic following his debut Black Sunday (aka Mask of Satan, 1960) and ‘The Wurdalak’ segment of his portmanteau Black Sabbath (1963). His proficiency in conjuring an appropriate visual treatment for this period was illustrated amply in those earlier efforts, but in Kill, Baby…Kill! Bava and regular photographic collaborator Antonio Rinaldi take this a step further, bathing a mysterious and isolated rural Italian village in a weird and highly effective palette of colours. The film opens in media res with a distinctive and inexplicable suicide, and the briefest of appearances of a child who will haunt the film. This is typical of the brand of restricted narration employed by Romano Migliorini, Roberto Natale and Mario Bava in their screenplay. This enigmatic and inscrutable quality is maintained throughout. This of course is a complimentary way of saying that the film doesn’t make a lot of sense and has a slapdash approach to story and plot construction - Bava like many Italian directors prefers to tell his stories in visual terms, and few in the industry pulled it off with such style.