MOVIEJOURNAL 2015 (PART FOUR)
What follows is a list of all the films I've watched this year, excluding films that I'd seen before. My 4-star rating system uses * to indicate shite to be avoided, *** to indicate films worth seeing and **** to indicate works of brilliance. Everything else gets a "meh"-like **.
Index
** Acción Mutante (Mutant Action)
** L'Assassino Ha Riservato Nove Poltrone (The Killer Reserved Nine Seats)
*** Blood Song [aka Dream Slayer]
** The China Syndrome
*** La Coda della Scorpione (The Scorpion's Tail) [aka The Case of the Scorpion's Tail]
*** Delirium [aka Psycho Puppet]
*** Eurocrime!: The Italian Cop and Gangster Films That Ruled the '70s
*** Exorcism [aka Demoniac]
** The Exorcist III: Cries and Shadows [aka Naked Exorcism]
*** Få Meg På, for Faen (Turn Me On, for Fuck's Sake)
*** Flavia, the Heretic [aka The Rebel Nun]
*** Force Majeure
** Full Circle [aka The Haunting of Julia]
*** Going Clear: Scientology & the Prison of Belief
*** Hercules
*** Hippocampus: M 21th
* Horsehead
**** The Human Centipede 3 (Final Sequence)
* Human Experiments [aka Women in Prison]
*** Jagten (The Hunt)
** Joe
*** Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee
** The Legend of Hell House
* Liebes Lager (Love Camp)
*** Mad Foxes
** Meteor
**** Michael
** New Kids: Nitro
* Nightdreams
*** Ninja III: The Domination
** La Notte dei Diavoli (Night of the Devils)
*** Le Orme (Footprints) [aka Footprints on the Moon]
*** Primal Rage
*** Quelli Che Contano (Those Who Count) [aka Cry of a Prostitute]
*** La Ragazza Che Sapeva Troppo (The Girl Who Knew Too Much) [aka The Evil Eye]
** Rundskop (Bullhead)
*** Les Salauds (Bastards)
*** The Secret Killer [aka Eyeball]
*** La Settima Donna (The Seventh Woman) [aka The Last House on the Beach]
*** Simon Killer
*** Steekspel (Tricked)
**** Terror
* Tetsuo: The Bullet Man
** Thanatomorphose
**** Through the Looking Glass
** Unhinged
** Violated Angels
** Welp (Cub)
All reviews
THANATOMORPHOSE (Canada 2012 / Éric Falardeau)
**
Unpleasant viewing - and not necessarily in a good way - as a skinny, naked sculptor with creative block and an abusive boyfriend comes to realise (eventually) that her body is rebelling against her, and she's beginning to decay. For some fucking reason, she never thinks to see a doctor as the bruises grow, her fingernails drop off, or even after cutting her head open on some broken glass. A friend does offer to take her to the hospital, but instead he allows this woman - by now starting to look and, presumably, stink like a zombie - to suck him off before he scarpers. Of course it's all meant to be a metaphor for the woman's state of mind, so we're supposed to allow things like that to slide. Moreover, it's a showcase for David Scherer's makeup effects: undeniably gruesome, though this being a modern horror production, all the blood is a boring, palatable black rather than a juicy, chilling red. It ends with a great transformation sequence though. With only the unnamed woman on screen most of the time, it's just as well there's very little dialogue, because none of the cast can deliver a line for shit.
LA RAGAZZA CHE SAPEVA TROPPO (The Girl Who Knew Too Much) [aka The Evil Eye] (Italy 1963 / Mario Bava)
***
Being from 1963, this is an unsurprisingly tame giallo, owing almost as much to Hollywood screwball comedies as to the murder mysteries that its central character, young American tourist Nora Davis, is addicted to reading. But echoes of the film's premise can be detected in Bava's own A Drop of Water (woman has to deal with a bed-bound corpse), Ercoli's Death Walks at Midnight (woman apparently witnesses a murder that actually happened a long time ago) and de Palma's Body Double (the suspiciously timely offer of a house-sitting gig). When Miss Davis learns that the local "Alphabet Murderer" has only got as far as victim C, she decides to unravel the mystery before she becomes victim D. An intermittent narrator emulates the writing style of her favourite novels, but comes across as really patronising, spelling out what we're perfectly capable of seeing for ourselves ("Nora is frightened"). The resolution of the story, on the other hand, is perhaps not spelled out enough, given how deviously clever it is (in part, anyway). Letícia Román is fun as Nora but lacks chemistry with romantic interest John Saxon.
NINJA III: THE DOMINATION (USA 1984 / Sam Firstenberg)
***
There's some amazing 80s cheese in this ninja-themed possession flick. After an action-packed opening quarter-hour, with an epic ninja vs cops fight on a golf course, we meet Christie, a post-Flashdance telecoms engineer and aerobics instructor. Oh, and she's psychic too, purely because that's a nice easy way of revealing other characters' backstories. She discovers the defeated ninja, which brings her to the attention to Billy, a hairy cop whose attempts to ask her out ought to get him disciplined for sexual harassment these days (though he'd still get away with it, because of the patriarchy, am I right?). Before long, the arcade game in Christie's apartment shoots lasers at her face and she becomes possessed by the dead ninja, going out at night to avenge his death. Yep, this is a film in which we're supposed to side with the girl who's killing innocent cops, which is unusual, but fun. It's also a film with some hideously literal pop songs: one about keeping fit during Christie's aerobics class, and another asking "Will you let me in?" when Billy's standing around wondering if he'll be getting a fuck. So bad it's good.
FÅ MEG PÅ, FOR FAEN (Turn Me On, for Fuck's Sake) (Norway 2011 / Jannicke Systad Jacobsen)
***
Turn Me On, for Fuck's Sake (not Turn Me On, Goddammit as the misleadingly coy English title would have it) is a whimsical comedy about Alma, a horny schoolgirl in an exceptionally boring part of rural Norway, who becomes the school outcast after telling her friends that a boy touched her thigh with his exposed cock at a party. On top of that, Alma's frumpy mother finds out about her phone sex addiction, and there's a weird elderly neighbour who watches everything they do. Given the ages of the characters, if not the actors, it feels a tad wrong watching what Alma gets up to, including the depictions of her fantasies - of which the knob-touch incident might or might not have been one - but we can probably put that down to Scandinavian liberalism. But as Alma negotiates her life, her relationships, and her active imagination, it's entertaining viewing, realistic enough to be touching whilst operating on a slightly heightened plain. Quite what its message is isn't clear, but hopefully it's not "If you get molested at a party, make sure you don't tell anyone", because that's how it could be read.
RUNDSKOP (Bullhead) (Belgium/Netherlands 2011 / Michaël R. Roskam)
**
Sometimes it's best not to go into a film completely blind, as you can spend half of it trying to figure out what sort of film it's going to be, especially with one as unnecessarily long and slow-moving as this. I spent the first half hour of Rundskop wondering if it was going to continue as farming drama, or turn into either a killer cattle creature feature or a contaminated meat horror. As it transpired, it's a macho, if dour thriller about Jacky, a young farmer who, having few qualms about his livestock being injected with illegal hormones, starts taking extra doses of his medically-prescribed testosterone, with ultimately violent results. This is set against a crime drama backdrop, as the local cops investigate the murder of a man who was connected with the hormone market; an incident that Jacky's childhood friend, a pair of comedy car mechanics and the local mafia are all caught up in. Unfortunately all this business is quite boring, with the more interesting part of the story - Jacky's obviously doomed, stalker-like pursuit of a woman he's always fancied - kept on the back burner until the film requires a dramatic ending.
LA NOTTE DEI DIAVOLI (Night of the Devils) (Italy/Spain 1972 / Giorgio Ferroni)
**
Tolstoy's story The Family of the Vourdalak formed the centerpiece of Mario Bava's 1963 horror anthology Three Faces of Fear, and in my opinion, all but ruined that otherwise fine film (though the general consensus is that it's the best segment). Nine years later, Giorgio Ferroni decided to make a feature-length version, updated to modern times. His film opens promisingly, with an early dream sequence containing full-frontal nudity and gruesome splatter. But then it flashes back to the events leading up to the dreamer's incarceration in a mental hospital, and all of a sudden we're near-enough back in Bava's olden-times world, as he takes shelter in a rural household that's never heard of television, and whose home even looks like the set from the earlier film. It's a full, tedious hour before we get more sex and violence, though the gore is worth the wait. Carlo Rambaldi's special makeup effects aren't what you'd call realistic, but they are agreeably horrible, with a protracted face melting and a finger chopping the highlights. It's unfortunate that the name of the love interest, Sdenka, is pronounced "Stinker" throughout.
THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE 3 (FINAL SEQUENCE) (Netherlands 2015 / Tom Six)
****
For no reason but the lolz, Dieter Laser and Laurence R Harvey from the first two Human Centipede films are respectively recast as Boss, the psychotic, cannibalistic warden of a failing prison in a swelteringly hot part of the USA, and Dwight, his slightly more humane adviser. When Boss's plan to castrate all his prisoners fails, Dwight - a fan of the Human Centipede franchise - suggests... well, you can guess the rest. Their performances, with Laser's often impenetrable German accent and Harvey's dodgy Texan accent, make for an awkward first half hour, but they soon settle into an amusing double act. When Dwight calls in director Tom Six to advise them on the medical accuracy of his concept, things suddenly become really, genuinely funny. While the movie never even attempts to reach the gross-out heights/depths of Human Centipede II, there's still plenty to make you gag as Boss, Dwight and Six figure out the technicalities of doing it "for real". This is an audaciously outrageous and hilarious black comedy, and second only to A Clockwork Orange in its satire of the dehumanisation inherent in the prison system.
EUROCRIME!: THE ITALIAN COP AND GANGSTER FILMS THAT RULED THE '70S (USA 2012 / Mike Malloy)
***
At 127 minutes, you'd think that this look at the poliziotteschi genre would have everything covered. But although it's packed with great clips from a cavalcade of films, it feels a little lacking. There are seven chapters, some notably less interesting than others, and most of which concentrate on contextualising the genre as a whole (albeit using individual films as exempla), rather than presenting a catalogue of key movies and spending a decent amount of time with each title. The documentary comes alive during the sections covering the production of the movies - the technical aspects, the stunts, the product placement - and it's good that a couple of Italian cinema's all-important dubbing artists are interviewed alongside the big names such as John Saxon, Enzo Castellari and Franco Nero. The interviews are of varying technical quality and it's a shame that this film wasn't made until after so many important characters were dead, though the deceased aren't the only people conspicuous by their absence. Eurocrime! is a very nice primer, though one with - I think - the wrong priorities.
THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS (USA 1976 / Jonas Middleton)
****
If you've ever wished that pornography had better stories, Through the Looking Glass might make you think again. Because this is one nightmarish fuckfest, concerning unhappily married Catherine, who sneaks off into her boudoir in the attic where a mirror makes all her best and worst fantasies come true. The film has four jaw-dropping set-pieces. In the first, Catherine is fingered by a demon painted green like Lou Ferrigno's Incredible Hulk, and what appears to be a standard vaginal close-up becomes truly gynaecological as the camera turns out to be a medical probe, travelling deep inside her in a single take. In the second, the mirror transports her to the Lewis Carroll-themed orgy that justifies the film's thieving title. Thirdly, Catherine fantasises that her younger self is being sexually abused by her father. And the fourth takes us to a terrifying vision of Hell, with ugly day-for-night photography searing the viewer's eyes. All the time, there's the risk that her underage daughter is also about to be seduced by the mirror. What this lacks in wank material, it more than makes up for in transgressive, disturbing weirdo horror.
SIMON KILLER (USA 2012 / Antonio Campos)
***
It's unusual for a film of any kind, least of all a serious drama, to have as its lead character someone so pathetic as Simon, the subject of this quiet but raunchy psychological portrait. Many men are guilty of being led by their dicks, and on top of that Simon is completely amoral, but what sets him apart is his lack of charisma, his lack of self-sufficiency, his lack of self-esteem, his lack of self-confidence and his lack of ambition. He's a New Yorker who, having split from his girlfriend and graduated from college, has turned up in Paris so that he can get away with bumming around doing nothing for a while. He spends all his money on a prostitute before inveigling his way into her home and coercing her into an illegal get-rich-quick scheme. And, inevitably, it comes to pass that she's just one of many women that he has used and will use again during his life. And all this is presented without any heroics. He's not going to get laddish audiences cheering on his misogynistic antics; he's not going to get female audiences to feel sorry for him and want to give him a hug. But he's kind of fascinating to get to know, nonetheless.
NIGHTDREAMS (USA 1981 / Francis Delia)
*
Oddball porno consisting of fantasy vignettes in which a woman screws a variety of imaginary people in a variety of settings. So far, so ordinary, but most of the scenes have more than a touch of the macabre about them, with penetration by a pointy-nosed mask and a blow-job for Satan among the "highlights". Even a fairly ordinary spit-roast scene with two Middle Eastern men begins with a shisha pipe up her chuff, while a lesbian desert scene is soundtracked by a post-punk cover of "Ring of Fire". And then, um, there's the sequence in which she sucks off a dancing box of cereal, while a slice of toast plays a saxophone solo. Kudos for injecting some humour into proceedings, but who exactly is that bit for? There's also a wraparound story, in which the woman (Dorothy LeMay) is observed in clinical conditions by a male/female pair of bickering scientists. LeMay certainly gets through a lot of partners in the film, but her screen presence is neglible, and while a lot of effort has gone into making each scenario look and sound good, the content consists mainly of boring, repetitive penetration and fellatio close-ups.
MICHAEL (Austria 2011 / Markus Schleinzer)
****
A comedian friend once told me that the reason he enjoys a good paedo joke is that the very concept of paedophilia - that a grown man would want to put his knob in a small child - is so absurd that it's actually comical. It's probably not a popular opinion, but it's one that appears to be shared by Markus Schleinzer, the writer/director of this darkly humourous drama. The humour begins with Michael himself, a child abductor who's beautifully played by Michael Fuith as a nebbish, nerdy clean freak with a willfully boring home (prison-style basement notwithstanding) and a pot noodle diet to match. It continues with the young boy he's kidnapped, Wolfgang, played equally excellently by 11 year-old David Rauchenberger as a bratty ball of pent-up energy who's doing his best to put up with the horrible situation he's in. But from the viewer's point of view, it's a sitcom-like situation, as Michael finds himself having to be a reluctant father to Wolfgang, when all he wants to be is a sexual deviant. It's no wonder that this movie isn't very well known; "that funny child abuse film" can't have been the easiest sell.
LA SETTIMA DONNA (The Seventh Woman) [aka The Last House on the Beach] (Italy 1978 / Franco Prosperi)
***
A trio of bank robbers hide out in a beach house that's occupied by a group of schoolgirls and their teacher. Inevitably, the crims' idea of laying low involves terrorising their hostages, though for an Italian exploitation movie - and in particular for a home invasion flick - La Settima Donna is surprisingly restrained when it comes to depicting sexual violence. That said, those sequences are where the direction and editing come alive (the only sequences where they come alive, you might say), with Franco Prosperi employing slow motion, fast cuts, suspenseful music and repeated shots to convey the horror without actually showing anything too explicit. It's a bit perverse really; it seems to let us know that, although he wasn't feeling exploitative enough to put it on screen, rape is what gets Prosperi going, at least in film-making terms. The director also has fun playing with the stereotypical "sympathetic" criminal; played by Ray Lovelock, the good-looking one might be more intelligent and less violent than his thuggish accomplices, yet he's not above pinning down a nun when his mate wants to rape her. What a charmer.
JOE (USA 1970 / John G Avildsen)
**
This downbeat, pessimistic state-of-the-nation address takes us on a depressing (and poorly paced) journey up and down the class ladder, starting at the bottom with two junkies. After one (Susan Sarandon in her film debut) is hospitalised by an overdose, her wealthy father Bill inadvertently kills the other in a fight, and takes refuge in a bar where he meets working class bigot and gun nut Joe. Having just spent ten minutes railing against the "niggers", "nigger lovers", liberals (42% queer, apparently) and spoilt white kids, he sees Bill as a hero for what he's done, and they spend the rest of the movie bonding over their mutual hatred of young people, before both screwing and killing some dope-smoking hippies. A war on drugs, a chauvinistic attitude to women, and the idea that everyone else is to blame for everything... Joe surely represents Richard Nixon's USA (the Stars & Stripes title design says as much). While Joe throws his weight around like a horrible, violent drunk, clearly a blight on wider society, Bill represents the patriots who love him/Uncle Sam regardless, and will end up paying the price for it.
FORCE MAJEURE (Denmark/France/Sweden/Norway 2014 / Ruben Östlund)
***
A Scandinavian family on a skiing holiday survive a frightening incident; an event that is, sadly, spoilered by the poster art, though the excellent timing of it means it still comes as a shock. But while they survived it physically, the aftermath threatens to destroy the mum and dad's relationship, due to his instinctive running away while it was happening. Force Majeure is one of those films that makes me glad I'm not a parent, and therefore don't have to go on these awful, joyless, potentially marriage-destroying holidays. I suspect for some viewers, the story may be a little too close for comfort. Enjoyable though it is, it's a story that arguably struggles to fill its two-hour running time, and the last couple of scenes feel extraneous at best, trite at worst. It's shot in the observational style that's familiar from so many recent European dramas, and yet is still so effective: all coldly composed, mostly static long shots, in which characters heads are cropped out of frame if they dare to stand up. And typically for this form, the humour is as icy as the Alpine setting, not least in its repeated, ironic use of Vivaldi's "Summer".
THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE (UK 1973 / John Hough)
**
John Hough's second horror film, after 1971's fun Twins of Evil, does away with gothic heaving bosoms and gives us a more mature, far less entertaining ghost story set in the present day. An elderly millionaire sends two mediums and a paranomal investigator into a notorious haunted house, hoping that they'll discover the secret of eternal life. The investigator's wife tags along too, so that there's someone to whom he can explain things in layman's terms for the benefit of the audience, though despite being a skeptic and not believing in any of that spooky shit, as soon as the spooky shit happens he seems to know exactly the right words for it (eg "Premature retraction of ectoplasm, causing brief systemic shock"). Trouble is, the spooky shit isn't particularly disturbing for the viewer, aside from one spectacular demonstration of extreme poltergeist activity, which is enjoyably chaotic, as scenes with shaking tables, flying plates and toppling cupboards usually are. The performances are all a bit dry, though both of the women get a few sexy and seductive moments... but highlights such as that are slim pickings.
THE CHINA SYNDROME (USA 1978 / James Bridges)
**
Of-its-time nuclear power paranoia that manages to be both hysterical and surprisingly restrained: there's a lot of fuss and covering-up of an incident that had no casualties, and yet it never descends into full-on mushroom cloud propaganda. But it's also a film about television news, and I think that Oliver Stone slipped a reference to its opening moments into Natural Born Killers, acknowledging the similarities between the live interview scenes in the two movies. Jane Fonda stars as a journalist who's sick of covering quirky "out and about" stories for local TV, but stumbles across a scoop when the nuclear power plant she and her crew are being shown around has a glitch. The first act takes up about half the film, meaning that by the time the plot finally starts moving, I'd already lost interest. It doesn't help that Fonda's cameraman is played by Michael Douglas, so often a hard actor to warm to, and on particularly obnoxious form here. Jack Lemmon's got a key role though, and he's always watchable; he's at his stuttering, exasperated best here, and gets the best scene too, in a short but exciting car chase.
LE ORME (Footprints) [aka Footprints on the Moon] (Italy 1975 / Luigi Bazzoni)
***
A really unusual mystery drama, with Florinda Bolkan compelling as the intense Alice, a single Portuguese translator working in Rome, who finds that she's lost the last three days of her life. A clue takes her to a quiet island outside of Italy, where she's bewildered and disturbed to find that the locals all half-recognise her from earlier in the week. The strange title refers to a bleak old sci-fi movie that Alice has been haunted by ever since she watched as much of it as she could bear, and we're treated to occasional clips from it in dream sequences that initially seem like a playful indulgence for the director. But it all makes sense in the end, in a surprising and weirdly satisfying revelatory conclusion. Suitably enough, a dreamlike atmosphere pervades the entire film, and it looks nice too, as you'd expect from something lensed by Vittorio Storaro. So with Bolkan (star of Lizard in a Woman's Skin and Don't Torture a Duckling), Storaro (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage) and also child star Nicoletta Elmi (Who Saw Her Die?) all on board, this is an understated film with a good giallo heritage that's well worth a look.
FLAVIA, THE HERETIC [aka The Rebel Nun] (Italy/France 1974 / Gianfranco Mingozzi)
***
For a nunsploitation movie, Flavia, the Heretic has a surprisingly feminist message, about how women should be in charge of their own sexuality and shouldn't be subjugated by men. One such woman is Flavia herself, a middle-aged virgin and nun, whose worldview is turned upside-down after she witnesses a post-The Devils outbreak of sexual mass hysteria in the convent. She makes an abortive attempt to take off with a kind man but soon returns to the nunnery, where a randy elderly sister tries to convince her to succumb to carnal pleasures. Eventually, of course, Flavia does so, but being set around the Ottoman invasion of Italy, this is about more than just her sexploits, and the film has the sprawling feel of a historical epic despite its ordinary running time. That is to say, it's a bit on the slow and serious side, though there's plenty of disturbing imagery to enjoy along the way, as genitals are mutilated, errant nuns are tortured, blood pours from walls, and a naked woman hides inside a cow carcass during a cannibalistic orgy! Much of the time this is all beautifully shot, so it's a shame it's not a tad more exciting.
WELP (Cub) (Belgium 2014 / Jonas Govaerts)
**
This should work a lot better than it does. A pack of cub scouts, plus three none too responsible adults, go camping in some woodland that's rumoured to be the hunting ground of a young werewolf. And sure enough, some kind of child savage does show up, while secondary characters (a comically obese cop and a pair of anti-social brothers in shellsuits) get killed at night. But who's really responsible...? Although the last 15-20 minutes of Welp see the tone shift unexpectedly into Wolf Creek-style torture porn territory, with a particularly dark and unexpected ending, I think the movie's problem is that it allows its cartoonish older characters to dominate in a comedy-horror vein for far too long. Until the final minutes, there never seems to be any real threat to the few likeable characters (and absolutely none to the young campers), despite some creative traps and murders along the way. It's probably too glossy for its own good too, the Arriflex Alexa digital photography a long way from the grainy 16mm film of the best campsite slashers. There are some good ideas here, but they're fumbled at almost every turn.
HERCULES (Italy 1983 / Luigi Cozzi)
***
Luigi Cozzi returns to Starcrash territory with this insane time capsule of a special effects movie, an amusing, ambitious attempt to out-blockbuster the Superman movies on the cheap... which of course it didn't manage to do. But it goes in big, with an opening sequence depicting the very creation of the universe, before taking us to some kind of outer space version of Mount Olympus (complete with a bird bath television ripped off Jason and the Argonauts), where the story begins with Zeus sending a powerful light to Earth, and imbuing baby Hercules with superpowers. Having grown into Lou Ferrigno, one of the first things the adult Hercules does is punch a bear to death, but that's just one of about a hundred eye-popping incidents that take place over the course of this jaw-droppingly bizarre film. Storywise, it's episodic to the extent of feeling more like a Monty Pythonalike sketch movie than anything coherent, but with a cavalcade of dated FX taking the place of jokes. Hercules is so laughable and dumb that it's almost beyond criticism. Is it a good film? Hell no. Is it an entertaining watch? Absofuckinglutely.
LE DONK & SCOR-ZAY-ZEE (UK 2009 / Shane Meadows)
***
Improvised comedy quickie with Shane Meadows making a documentary about stroppy but talkative roadie Le Donk (Paddy Considine) as he heads up to Manchester to work on the Arctic Monkeys' summer 2007 all-dayers at Old Trafford cricket ground and, hopefully, get his rapper protege Scor-zay-zee a cheeky spot on the lineup. Also appearing is Olivia Coleman as Le Donk's ex, nine months pregnant and about to pop. Considine and Coleman are as brilliant as they always are, even if the former's adoption of a mild speech impediment seems like a cheap way to get laughs on top of his character's inherently comical Midlands accent. It's not entirely necessary, as he proves himself adept at coming up with a couple of very funny sex-based anecdotes to break up the awkward conversations and bad-tempered sniping. Meanwhile Scor-zay-zee himself is a genuinely talented MC, and it's a shame that so much of the music used in the film is wet, folky guitar shit rather than his hip-hop. This is a minor entry in Meadows' filmography, obviously, but a fun little diversion.
JAGTEN (The Hunt) (Denmark/Sweden 2012 / Thomas Vinterberg)
***
Mads Mikkelsen is great as Lucas, a single, slightly awkward kindergarten teacher whose honorable attempt to put some distance between himself and an overaffectionate child backfires when she naively accuses him of molesting her. Sometimes it feels as though Thomas Vinterberg's drama is trying to make some kind of unpleasant reactionary point, either about how abuse victims shouldn't always be believed, or about how women are at fault for putting children before men (Lucas's accusatory colleagues are all female), or about the easy availability of hardcore pornography, and it can feel a bit heavy-handed during these scenes. But the way the plot develops suggests we're supposed to take it at face value: this is simply the story of a person whose life is ruined because of a false accusation, and on that level it is powerful and moving. A really good bit of child acting can be a spectacular thing to watch, and Annika Wedderkopp, who plays the girl, is phenomenal, her innocent cheekiness giving way to a wholly convincing sadness as she realises what she's done.
UNHINGED (USA 1982 / Don Gronquist)
**
It's as if someone watched Friday the 13th and thought it contained too little Crazy Ralph and too many victims. Unhinged's plot gets rolling when a car containing a trio of young women crashes into a ditch, three whole miles from the nearest town, and they're rescued and put up by a spooky posh woman with a weird, invalid mother. They're so posh, in fact, that the girls find it hard to understand what they say, given that they use long words like "imply" and "burden". They, on the other hand, speak in a dreary Oregon drawl that makes everything they say sound like the most boring thing in the world. The spooky posh woman spends most of her time warning the lead girl, Terry, about how dangerous the woods outside are, and eventually one of Terry's friends ventures into the woods (to cut a mile off the impossibly long walk to town) and gets killed in a scene that's poor by the standards of most slashers, but in a movie like this is essential to bring you out of your stupor. It's rare to find a film as competently made as this with such universally bad acting, but if you stick with it, the gory, disturbing ending is pretty good.
HIPPOCAMPUS: M 21TH (Germany/Italy 2014 / Alexander Fennert)
***
Like a modern-day, less classy take on Borowczyk's Immoral Tales, this is an art/porn/horror anthology, cataloguing a litany of extreme sexual perversions. Each short film is scored by a recognisably famous piece of classical music, and - for example - you'll never again be able to watch an advert that uses Bach's "Cello Suite No.1 (Prelude)" without picturing an artist rolling around on canvas with his naked muse, using a mixture of her blood and shit to paint his latest work. Elsewhere, an explicit necrophilia sequence to Beethoven's "Midnight Sonata" almost comes close to the high standards set by Jorg Buttergeit, while a scene of a woman bathing in worms and cockroaches is only really brought alive by the bombast of Ravel's superior "Bolero". The first scene features BDSM, cannibalism and incest (to the tune of Rossini's "Thieving Magpie") and the last one is a playful bit of pervy balloon popping to a Tchaikovsky concerto, but perhaps the standout is the Mozart-scored sequence that makes the most extreme sexual violence imaginable almost artistically justifiable. Almost.
MAD FOXES (Spain/Switzerland 1981 / Paul Grau)
***
There's tonnes of ironic entertainment to be had out of this badly-made thriller effort. It's a back-and-forth revenge story, with Hal, a serial shagger and owner of a sweet sports car that matches his white, go-faster-striped tank top (basically he's a prick, but we're supposed to admire him) killing one of the Nazi biker gang who threatens him, so they rape his girlfriend of the day, so he gets his karate friends to attack them, so they kill his family, so he starts killing them in return. The Nazi biker gang seen to be utterly ineffective, permanently drunk, useless riders, and besides, their bikes aren't exactly mean machines of the Harley Davidson ilk. Plus their swastika armbands have serious continuity issues (for legal reasons!). But once their apparent leader is offed early on, all bets are off in this hilariously shoddy movie that switches between mind-bogglingly mundane exposition scenes and thoroughly extreme violence, with lots of gratuitous sex along the way. You get the impression that one take was always enough for director Paul Grau, given the plentiful mistakes and woeful fight choreography that made it to the screen.
LIEBES LAGER (Love Camp) (Italy 1976 / Lorenzo Gicca Palli)
*
As if Italian Naziploitaion films weren't already bizarre enough, this concentration camp movie goes and adds overt comedy to the usual mix of fascist iconography, soft porn and violence. And it doesn't do so particularly well, with a tonally confusing script that reminds us how despicable the camp regimes were, with prisoners suffering serious and unnecessary sexually abuse one minute, while in the next we're expected to laugh at an officer who sneaks pervy looks up their skirts. Actually, that bit is quite amusing, as is the executioner who's obsessed with the physics of the noose. And of course you don't get to see serious and unnecessary sexual abuse without getting to see the ladies' tits and muffs too, so erm, hooray for that? Liebes Lager certainly delivers on the T&A front, and builds towards a farce-like second half in which the inmates' dorms are turned into a profitable brothel by the guards, complete with a comedy homosexual costume designer and, erm, women being forced into prostitution against their will. The girl-power ending might be reminiscent of Carry On Girls, but I know which film I'd rather watch again.
NEW KIDS: NITRO (Netherlands 2011 / Steffen Haars & Flip van der Kuil)
**
Diminishing returns, unfortunately, on movie number two for the Dutch comedy troupe. Whereas New Kids: Turbo eventually found some jokes beyond its antiheroes calling everyone "cunt" over and over again, Nitro mainly relies on that repeated witticism, with lots of added uses of "homo" for "variety". Once again the plot is mainly focused on a lethal rivalry between our loser friends and their counterparts in a similarly lousy neighbouring town, but this time a crashed meteorite is turning people into zombies as an added bonus. Too many characters and ideas follow the same narrative arc that they did in the first film, even to the extent that Rikkert has a virtually identical love interest. Yes, of course that's the joke, but it's an obvious and lazy one. Fortunately, there's still enough of a don't-give-a-fuck attitude to offence, reality and intelligence to raise some decent laughs. But there's less social satire, while the visual gags are mostly repeats. I have to side with the boy at the start who criticises the guys for a lack of new ideas, rather than the overenthusiastic audience member we see at the beginning and end of the movie.
HUMAN EXPERIMENTS (USA 1979 / Gregory Goodell)
*
Human Experiments is an attention-grabbing, chilling title for what turns out to be a dull plodder that stands little chance of disturbing anyone. It begins well though, with our heroine Rachel being an interesting, intelligently-drawn character. She's a travelling nightclub musician, playing her songs and having to deal with the unwanted advances of hick-town men, unscrupulous promoters and cockroach-infested motel rooms. Unfortunately she's soon wrongly convicted of a massacre (as you are) and sent to jail, and that's where Rachel becomes just another women-in-prison movie inmate. Cue the obligatory nudity, predatory bulldyke, and screwfaced wardens, though there's some (badly handled) mystery regarding a couple of the prisoners who seem to be mentally deficient for some reason. We don't find out why until much later on, when the film pulls out an unexpected sequence of psychological horror, but it's too silly and far-fetched to have any effect. The ending is muddled, as if the director couldn't decide between ending on a downbeat or an upbeat note, and so attempts to do both.
DELIRIUM [aka Psycho Puppet] (USA 1979 / Peter Maris)
***
A cheap and cheerful police procedural that begins when a young woman is found impaled on a spear by her flatmate. At first this seems like nothing more than the work of yet another traumatised Vietnam veteran turned serial killer, but the likeable pair of detectives who are investigating become suspicious of the flatmate's boss. And sure enough, he turns out to be part of a conspiracy whose motives are fuzzy, but they apparently entail protecting "innocent" murdering soldiers who've become homicidal through no fault of their own. Unlike your average crime thriller, Delirium raises the stakes a bit by taking a leaf out of the slasher genre's book and showing its murders in gory detail, though there aren't that many of them. And although a lot of the action takes place around the detectives' desks, they're fun guys to spend time with, making the movie a breeze to watch, right up to its bargain basement attempt at a shoot 'em up finalé. UK viewers will get an unintended laugh every time the theme tune from long-running quiz show Mastermind is used to score a tense moment.
METEOR (USA 1979 / Ronald Neame)
**
As if all the outer space special effects and scenes set in a manned space probe weren't enough, 1979's flop blockbuster Meteor begins its expensive production with an utterly irrelevant yacht race, purely as an interesting way to introduce Sean Connery's character. He is Paul Bradley, a retired astrophysicist who's summoned back to NASA when Earth is threatened by a five mile wide meteor, as well as the smaller rocks that precede it. The first act is pretty dry - all white men talking in board rooms - but eventually the script mines a seam of Cold War humour, bordering on Dr Strangelove territory. Eventually the impacts commence, in scenes that fail on a disaster movie level due to not focusing on the victims. Towards the end, Bradley and his colleagues are on the receiving end of a meteor strike (cue a lengthy, laughable montage of library footage of explosions and controlled demolitions), but because the screenplay hasn't followed the genre's conventions, there's no one to root for, and no one to hate. Kudos, I guess, for getting the punchline "Fuck the Dodgers" into a PG-rated movie!
STEEKSPEL (Tricked) (Netherlands 2012 / Paul Verhoeven)
***
Spoiler alert: someone gets tricked. If you weren't watching during the opening credits, you'd be extremely unlikely to guess that this entertainingly wicked comedy drama was directed by Paul Verhoeven. It's a far cry from the Hollywood blockbusters he's known for, and well removed from his Dutch filmography too. For it's basically a round-the-kitchen-table sitcom about a middle-aged man's home and work troubles, as his extramarital affairs risk being exposed and his company faces bankruptcy as he turns 50. It's all nicely cast, well performed, and the trademark glint in Verhoeven's eye is definitely present in another of his movies that, essentially, revolves around sex (though don't go expecting the excesses of Basic Instinct or Showgirls!). Tricked might be Verhoeven's lowest-profile film, but it shouldn't be dismissed as one of his lesser efforts. It is slight though: running just under an hour, it was one of two separate films made from similar scripts as part of an award-winning crowd-sourcing experiment, the other being Stephan Brenninkmeijer's Lotgenoten (Counterparts).
THE EXORCIST III: CRIES AND SHADOWS [aka Naked Exorcism] (Italy 1975 / Angelo Pannacciò & Franco Lo Cascio)
**
Although released in various territories as Naked Exorcism, Return of the Exorcist, and even The Exorcist III(!), the original Italian title of this exploitation horror doesn't mention exorcism, and nor does the dialogue until the last 20 minutes. But when you see the exorcist's costume as he arrives at the possessed boy's house, or indeed when you see what the boy looks like, tied to his bed in the opening moments, there's no doubt what film this is cashing in on. Unfortunately, it's not a very good cash-in, as you'll quickly realise when faced with the way the camera stumbles through St Peter's Square at the very start, with shots of the growling victim artlessly spliced in every so often. The film does offer a lot of joyless nudity, as the demon doing the possession seems to take the form of a naked middle-aged temptress, and scenes of orgies, lesbianism and nunsploitation come and go without explanation. If you're expecting makeup and mechanical effects and an exciting climax on a par with The Exorcist, you'll be disappointed, but the exorcism scene itself is weird and nightmarish enough to achieve its desired effect.
ACCIÓN MUTANTE (Mutant Action) (Spain/France 1992 / Álex de la Iglesia)
**
Well, someone watched Delicatessen too many times. With its steampunk aesthetic and cast of extreme oddball antiheroes, Acción Mutante sails a little close to Jean-Pierre Jeunet's unbearably twee style at first. Initially it's about a terrorist group of disabled men (although being set in a dystopian, interplanetary future, they look more like comic book aliens than anything else), as they prepare to storm an apparently Almodóvar-themed wedding (Pedro produced this film) and kidnap the bride. But by the halfway point, after a fun slasher-style development, most of the group are dead, which is a good thing because there was barely a likeable character among them. This means, though, that we're left with a standard kidnap comedy that happens to be set on another planet populated by irritating weirdos. I'm sure it's a lot more fun if you're into sci-fi comic book stuff, but I found the film a bit too pleased with its quirky self. That said, there are several good gore gags, a handful of actual jokes, and a very funny and unusual suggestion of what to do when one of a pair of conjoined twins snuffs it.
FULL CIRCLE [aka The Haunting of Julia] (UK/Canada 1976 / Richard Loncraine)
**
Not your usual ghost or haunted house movie, Full Circle / The Haunting of Julia is more concerned with sadness than scares; Julia (Mia Farrow, who gives up on attempting an English accent very early on) was partly responsible for her daughter's accidental death, and leaving her husband and buying a huge old house isn't doing anything to cheer her up. And then a séance results in Julia becoming determined to investigate the "presence" that was supposedly detected by the medium (future EastEnders star Anna Wing in a dotty turn). It's a nice idea, but the script doesn't seem to have the confidence to keep things purely psychological, and so throws in a spooky "accidental" (or is it...?) death every few minutes. They certainly liven up the proceedings, but even these PG-level kills don't really fit what is otherwise a genteel, Sunday night TV kind of supernatural drama. (It even co-stars Tom Conti, for fuck's sake, on unusually likeable form as Julia's "cool" friend.) The sombre atmosphere is handled well, so there's no need for fireworks, but even still, the whole thing's a little undercooked.
LES SALAUDS (Bastards) (France/Germany 2013 / Claire Denis)
***
Bastards is definitely one of ponderous director Claire Denis's better and more accessible films, with a fairly strong thriller narrative delivered in a way that's only occasionally hard to follow. If you make it past the somewhat oblique first half hour, you ought to be hooked. It's a film that begins with a suicide, a bereaved wife, and her underage daughter who's been hospitalised with severe vaginal injuries. Into this scenario comes the dead man's brother, who's been away at sea and has missed out on all the drama that's led up to this, and his efforts to help the mother and daughter lead him to cynically exploit a neighbour's loneliness, while discovering the disturbing world of financial corruption, sexual exploitation, and corn cob dildos that caused all the trouble. As you'd expect from Denis, it's a slow and very moody film, very light on laughs... unless those corn cobs are supposed to be ridiculous rather than horrifying (probably a bit of both; it's hard to tell). The ending is handled particularly well, with a death, a sleazy video, and a haunting Tindersticks song.
L'ASSASSINO HA RISERVATO NOVE POLTRONE (The Killer Reserved Nine Seats) (Italy 1974 / Giuseppe Bennati)
**
This murder mystery with a slasher-style structure begins as nine frenemies arrive at a disused theatre for a night of... well, it's not clear really. It's not a theatrical event or a party or anything; an evening of sitting around bickering seems to be all that's on the cards. But when the venue's owner narrowly avoids being killed by a sabotaged beam, accusations are thrown around, and every so often someone's killed by a creepy-masked killer. With so many characters, many played by actresses who look to be in their mid-20s no matter who they're playing, it can be hard to remember who's related to whom, who's supposed to be shagging whom, who's not supposed to be, who used to be, and all the rest of it. But the film's main problem is that it veers just a bit on the boring side, with its slow pace and humourless script. It also feels a bit - appropriately enough - stagebound, being entirely set inside the theatre, frequently in the auditorium at that, with all the uncinematic scope of a drawing room drama. Notable mainly for a couple of brutal slayings of nude women, one quick and the other nasty and drawn-out.
LA CODA DELLA SCORPIONE (The Scorpion's Tail) [aka The Case of the Scorpion's Tail] (Italy/Spain 1971 / Sergio Martino)
***
Opening with effortlessly cool music by Bruno Nicolai, Sergio Martino's second giallo (following The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh) is a must-see primarily for its graphic violence, as the black-clad killer slices their way through the cast list in a plot that's full of surprise deaths. Just like Strange Vice, Scorpion's Tail crosses borders, beginning in London as an unfaithful wife is told that she's richer by $1m, which she goes to collect in Greece, which is where things get messy... although not before one of her exes dies an apparently random attack that only makes sense on a rewatch. In a similarly confusing bit of intrigue, we're clearly supposed to be shocked later on when the identity of a flight attendant's lover is revealed, but he's someone we haven't seen in about an hour, and he's not the most memorable looking bloke. And at the end, the killer delivers their confession with their back to the camera, as if it hadn't actually been written at the time of filming. So it's not the tightest storytelling, but it features giallo regulars George Hilton and Anita Strindberg, a ton of J&B product placement, and plenty of gory stabbings.
VIOLATED ANGELS (Japan 1967 / Kôji Wakamatsu)
**
An unsurprisingly controversial Japanese film based on a real 1966 massacre in America. As if its topical nature wasn't enough to raise accusations of exploitation, it begins with four female nurses spying on another two who are nude and writhing around in bed together. When a man - possibly a peeping tom - is spotted outside their dorm, they invite him in for a better look, at which point his evident misogyny steps up a gear and he shoots one of the nurses, before quietly holding the rest of them hostage. They all react differently, but nothing stems the flood of naked breasts being filmed in prurient close-up for much of the running time. The other thing we get a lot of are lengthy, static long shots of the scene, as the nurses sob and fear for their lives as their attacker tortures and rapes them. It's extremely unpleasant, but it always feels as though there's some sort of intellectual and/or artistic point being made. I'm not convinced there is; the film's driving force seems to be little more than hard-to-watch misanthropy. Challenging, hypnotic and unusual, it's is worth a look, but you might not want to revisit it.
BLOOD SONG [aka Dream Slayer] (USA 1982 / Alan J Levi)
***
If it's 1982, then it must be a slasher movie. Except, despite its trappings - a small town, a high schooler, an escaped psycho - Blood Song dares to do something a bit different. It focuses on just one potential victim, Marion (crippled leg; chaste relationship with boyfriend; lives with her borderline abusive father), and separately on the escaped psycho, Paul Foley (reacted to seeing his family slaughtered by playing a little ditty on his flute; picks up hitchhikers and murders them; trademark flute motif plays whenever he seems to be near). And Marion, having once received a blood transfusion from Foley, obviously has a psychic connection to him, and so witnesses his killings in her mind's eye. Foley somehow gets wind of this and tracks her down, remarkably easily in fact, leading to the final confrontation between them. Marion's relatively believable for a Final Girl character, and her relationships are well defined and nicely written, but everything else about the story seems completely ludicrous. Fortunately there's an injection of psychological horror in the final scenes that makes it all fall neatly into place.
TETSUO: THE BULLET MAN (Japan 2009 / Shinya Tsukamoto)
*
Shinya Tsukamoto resurrects his Tetsuo franchise after 17 years, but he shouldn't have bothered. It's a really ugly looking film, with almost all the colour digitally drained out of it, as if he was only half sure about making another black & white movie like the original. And it stars possibly the worst actor I've ever seen in a lead role: Eric Bossick, playing Anthony, a father who inexplicably starts to transform into a "human weapon" who shoots bullets out of his body when his young son is murdered. The dialogue - when it's not just Anthony and his wife singing "Hush, Little Baby" over and over again - is awkward, clunky and expositional: "I can't be late today, it's my first presentation as head of technology at the company", Anthony tells his wife late in the film. Meanwhile the Japanese actors are for some reason required to deliver their lines in heavily accented English ("Welcome to your new rife"). The action is as fast as ever, but it's not as impressive on digital as it was on film, while the transformation effects are less than spectacular. The end credits are literally the best bit, thanks to an excellent Nine Inch Nails theme tune.
THE SECRET KILLER [aka Eyeball] (Italy/Spain 1975 / Umberto Lenzi)
***
There are a few moments of clunky plotting in Umberto Lenzi's violent, slasher-style giallo, not to mention an impressively nonsensical original title in Red Cats in a Glass Maze, but it's well paced and a lot of fun to watch. A group of US holidaymakers are in Barcelona, but it's not long before they start to be picked off one-by-one, by a killer in a red rain poncho (such as those distributed to all the tourists by the tour bus driver) who stabs their left eyes out. Heading up the vacationers is Mark, who secretly suspects that his unstable and cuckolded wife has come to Spain to frame him, and his secretary/bit-on-the-side who accuses Mark of having killed a girl back in America a year earlier. There are lots of other characters, but they're all nicely introduced at the top, in an easily digestible fashion, and there's some good Catalonian travelogue stuff and totally gratuitous nudity along the way. It doesn't quite keep you guessing until the end - the viewer will probably be a couple of steps ahead of the verge-of-retirement police inspector - but the climactic moments manage to be shockingly grisly anyway.
QUELLI CHE CONTANO (Those Who Count) [aka Cry of a Prostitute] (Italy 1976 / Andrea Bianchi)
***
Gangster thriller starring Henry Silva as Tony Aniante (a name that always sounds a bit too rhythmically close to "Olly olly oxen free" whenever anyone says it), a hitman who gets caught between warring mafia families. It's not the most enthralling storyline, although there are several chilling moments in which loyalties are brutally severed in the name of getting the job done. (Did Aniante notice the knife throwing assassins outside the window? It's left nicely ambiguous.) But you're not watching a film called Cry of a Prostitute for its story, and it certainly delivers on violence, gore and a horrible amorality. When Aniante tells the titular seductress that he doesn't like "easy lays", he then demonstrates it by pushing her face into a pig's carcass and violently raping her up the wrong'un. Later he rapes her again, after smacking her face around with his belt. And this is the hero... I think. Maybe there aren't supposed to be any heroes. My hero is the woman who, following a violent shootout in her front yard, introduces a gangster's head to the circular saw. Silva is stunningly wooden, but everyone else gets well stuck in.
TERROR (UK 1978 / Norman J Warren)
****
After a cunningly-presented prologue concerning 17th century witchcraft, Terror turns out to be a cheerful, London-based horror B-movie about a group of friends in the film/TV/advertising industries, although half of the actresses are currently between jobs and working in a strip club. A screening party and a mesmerism demonstration at a supposedly cursed house ends in tragedy when one of the women is viciously knifed to death in the woods, and suspicion falls upon one of others, a descendent of the 17th century witch, who was earlier hypnotised and ended up swinging a sword around the place. With only that one kill scene in the film's first hour (notwithstanding the prologue, which features a tasty decapitation), it does threaten to drag, but the final half hour really ups the ante, with lots of supernatural mayhem and more slasher-style deaths. David McGillivray's screenplay is full of humour - one of the locations, for example, is the set of a bottom-of-the barrel soft porn flick - and that keeps things interesting during the story lulls. Loads of fun.
HORSEHEAD (France 2014 / Romain Basset)
*
Psychology student Jessica returns to her parents' home ahead of her insane grandmother's funeral, but sleeping in the room next door to the corpse only intensifies the bloody nightmares she's already been having about a creature with a horse's head and a big fuck-off spear. Plus now, her aging mother (Catriona MacColl) is turning up in the dreams, and inadvertently revealing dark secrets about her past. About Jessica's mother's past, that is. Not anything that particularly affects Jessica herself (it's not as if they even like each other), and that's one of the film's biggest failings. Another is that these frequent dream sequences are set largely in context-free black rooms, and are unoriginal and repetitive when it comes to the attempts to scare. The film also suffers from an awful sound mix on the dialogue track, and a performance by Murray Head (as Jessica's stepdad) that's more daytime soap opera than New French Extremity. Even MacColl, veteran of Fulci's splatteriest movies, seems a bit off, not least in her visible discomfort over a couple of mild sex scenes, though she seems more at ease with the climactic horror.
GOING CLEAR: SCIENTOLOGY & THE PRISON OF BELIEF (USA 2015 / Alex Gibney)
***
You may think Scientology's bad guy is its founder, L Ron Hubbard, the dodgy sci-fi writer who realised there was money to be made from exploiting the gullible and self-obsessed. Hearing about his bizarre scriptures, and the way that they're slowly revealed to followers, never gets old (though South Park did it more efficiently). But almost halfway through this long documentary, it becomes obvious that the real villain is the "Church"'s current head, David Miscavige, and his slick and entirely untrustworthy voice. Under his leadership, according to this film, the Church has indulged in slave labour, blackmail, assault and even unpaid, forced prostitution in the case of one of Tom Cruise's ex-girlfriends. Unsurprisingly, no current members are interviewed, but plenty of former members are, the most well-known being the Oscar-winning writer/director Paul Haggis, and the most senior being Mike Rinder, until now best known for his run-in with reporter John Sweeney on a 2007 edition of Panorama. Quite shocking, but with a tendency to over-illustrate; yes, we know what the Moon looks like, thanks.
EXORCISM [aka Demoniac] (Belgium/France/Spain 1975 / Jesús Franco)
***
This is sleazy as fuck, though while Jesús Franco's typically shoddy, amateurish direction in part adds to the sleaze factor, it also stops it from being quite as powerful as it could've been under a better director. It's about a group of female performance artists who put on Black Mass torture/bondage shows for bourgeois audiences, sometimes as theatre, other times to deliberately incite orgies for swingers. But a defrocked priest turned journalist, Mathis Vogel, gets wind of these Black Masses and takes it upon himself to "exorcise" (ie rape and kill) the women involved. The fact that Vogel is played by the director does nothing to mitigate the ick factor, as you might expect, with the 45 year-old Franco casting himself in a role that requires him to paw at and mount a succession of naked young women. There's one particularly gruesome murder, in which a girl is graphically disembowelled, though exploitation value is provided more by nudity than gore. The inevitable homicide investigation is dull, but a dreamlike atmosphere and some really good music gives the whole thing a heady, dangerous, underground charm.
PRIMAL RAGE (Italy 1988 / Vittorio Rambaldi)
***
I hope you like the power-pop song "Say the Word" by the Facade Band (whoever they are), because you're going to hear a lot of it in this Umberto Lenzi-scripted college campus horror, in which a pair of student journalists investigate a controversial bit of vivisection. One bite from an insane primate later, one of the reporters has turned psychotically violent. He infects his date, and she infects her three would-be rapists, and that trio go on the rampage through a Halloween party full of unusual and creative costumes. Shot by Franco Prosperi collaborator Antonio Climati, Primal Rage looks and feels a lot like Prosperi's amazing Wild Beasts, though this is more Mild Beasts, a somewhat stifled, restrained production that never fulfills its potential to be an over-the-top Dèmoni clone. That said, when the time comes for our heroes to dispatch the villains, the hoped-for violence and gore finally comes into play... so it's a shame that there are so few of them. Ultimately it's a movie about a killer plague which doesn't have the budget to allow for more than a handful of victims, and that's frustrating.
Index
** Acción Mutante (Mutant Action)
** L'Assassino Ha Riservato Nove Poltrone (The Killer Reserved Nine Seats)
*** Blood Song [aka Dream Slayer]
** The China Syndrome
*** La Coda della Scorpione (The Scorpion's Tail) [aka The Case of the Scorpion's Tail]
*** Delirium [aka Psycho Puppet]
*** Eurocrime!: The Italian Cop and Gangster Films That Ruled the '70s
*** Exorcism [aka Demoniac]
** The Exorcist III: Cries and Shadows [aka Naked Exorcism]
*** Få Meg På, for Faen (Turn Me On, for Fuck's Sake)
*** Flavia, the Heretic [aka The Rebel Nun]
*** Force Majeure
** Full Circle [aka The Haunting of Julia]
*** Going Clear: Scientology & the Prison of Belief
*** Hercules
*** Hippocampus: M 21th
* Horsehead
**** The Human Centipede 3 (Final Sequence)
* Human Experiments [aka Women in Prison]
*** Jagten (The Hunt)
** Joe
*** Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee
** The Legend of Hell House
* Liebes Lager (Love Camp)
*** Mad Foxes
** Meteor
**** Michael
** New Kids: Nitro
* Nightdreams
*** Ninja III: The Domination
** La Notte dei Diavoli (Night of the Devils)
*** Le Orme (Footprints) [aka Footprints on the Moon]
*** Primal Rage
*** Quelli Che Contano (Those Who Count) [aka Cry of a Prostitute]
*** La Ragazza Che Sapeva Troppo (The Girl Who Knew Too Much) [aka The Evil Eye]
** Rundskop (Bullhead)
*** Les Salauds (Bastards)
*** The Secret Killer [aka Eyeball]
*** La Settima Donna (The Seventh Woman) [aka The Last House on the Beach]
*** Simon Killer
*** Steekspel (Tricked)
**** Terror
* Tetsuo: The Bullet Man
** Thanatomorphose
**** Through the Looking Glass
** Unhinged
** Violated Angels
** Welp (Cub)
All reviews
THANATOMORPHOSE (Canada 2012 / Éric Falardeau)
**
Unpleasant viewing - and not necessarily in a good way - as a skinny, naked sculptor with creative block and an abusive boyfriend comes to realise (eventually) that her body is rebelling against her, and she's beginning to decay. For some fucking reason, she never thinks to see a doctor as the bruises grow, her fingernails drop off, or even after cutting her head open on some broken glass. A friend does offer to take her to the hospital, but instead he allows this woman - by now starting to look and, presumably, stink like a zombie - to suck him off before he scarpers. Of course it's all meant to be a metaphor for the woman's state of mind, so we're supposed to allow things like that to slide. Moreover, it's a showcase for David Scherer's makeup effects: undeniably gruesome, though this being a modern horror production, all the blood is a boring, palatable black rather than a juicy, chilling red. It ends with a great transformation sequence though. With only the unnamed woman on screen most of the time, it's just as well there's very little dialogue, because none of the cast can deliver a line for shit.
LA RAGAZZA CHE SAPEVA TROPPO (The Girl Who Knew Too Much) [aka The Evil Eye] (Italy 1963 / Mario Bava)
***
Being from 1963, this is an unsurprisingly tame giallo, owing almost as much to Hollywood screwball comedies as to the murder mysteries that its central character, young American tourist Nora Davis, is addicted to reading. But echoes of the film's premise can be detected in Bava's own A Drop of Water (woman has to deal with a bed-bound corpse), Ercoli's Death Walks at Midnight (woman apparently witnesses a murder that actually happened a long time ago) and de Palma's Body Double (the suspiciously timely offer of a house-sitting gig). When Miss Davis learns that the local "Alphabet Murderer" has only got as far as victim C, she decides to unravel the mystery before she becomes victim D. An intermittent narrator emulates the writing style of her favourite novels, but comes across as really patronising, spelling out what we're perfectly capable of seeing for ourselves ("Nora is frightened"). The resolution of the story, on the other hand, is perhaps not spelled out enough, given how deviously clever it is (in part, anyway). Letícia Román is fun as Nora but lacks chemistry with romantic interest John Saxon.
NINJA III: THE DOMINATION (USA 1984 / Sam Firstenberg)
***
There's some amazing 80s cheese in this ninja-themed possession flick. After an action-packed opening quarter-hour, with an epic ninja vs cops fight on a golf course, we meet Christie, a post-Flashdance telecoms engineer and aerobics instructor. Oh, and she's psychic too, purely because that's a nice easy way of revealing other characters' backstories. She discovers the defeated ninja, which brings her to the attention to Billy, a hairy cop whose attempts to ask her out ought to get him disciplined for sexual harassment these days (though he'd still get away with it, because of the patriarchy, am I right?). Before long, the arcade game in Christie's apartment shoots lasers at her face and she becomes possessed by the dead ninja, going out at night to avenge his death. Yep, this is a film in which we're supposed to side with the girl who's killing innocent cops, which is unusual, but fun. It's also a film with some hideously literal pop songs: one about keeping fit during Christie's aerobics class, and another asking "Will you let me in?" when Billy's standing around wondering if he'll be getting a fuck. So bad it's good.
FÅ MEG PÅ, FOR FAEN (Turn Me On, for Fuck's Sake) (Norway 2011 / Jannicke Systad Jacobsen)
***
Turn Me On, for Fuck's Sake (not Turn Me On, Goddammit as the misleadingly coy English title would have it) is a whimsical comedy about Alma, a horny schoolgirl in an exceptionally boring part of rural Norway, who becomes the school outcast after telling her friends that a boy touched her thigh with his exposed cock at a party. On top of that, Alma's frumpy mother finds out about her phone sex addiction, and there's a weird elderly neighbour who watches everything they do. Given the ages of the characters, if not the actors, it feels a tad wrong watching what Alma gets up to, including the depictions of her fantasies - of which the knob-touch incident might or might not have been one - but we can probably put that down to Scandinavian liberalism. But as Alma negotiates her life, her relationships, and her active imagination, it's entertaining viewing, realistic enough to be touching whilst operating on a slightly heightened plain. Quite what its message is isn't clear, but hopefully it's not "If you get molested at a party, make sure you don't tell anyone", because that's how it could be read.
RUNDSKOP (Bullhead) (Belgium/Netherlands 2011 / Michaël R. Roskam)
**
Sometimes it's best not to go into a film completely blind, as you can spend half of it trying to figure out what sort of film it's going to be, especially with one as unnecessarily long and slow-moving as this. I spent the first half hour of Rundskop wondering if it was going to continue as farming drama, or turn into either a killer cattle creature feature or a contaminated meat horror. As it transpired, it's a macho, if dour thriller about Jacky, a young farmer who, having few qualms about his livestock being injected with illegal hormones, starts taking extra doses of his medically-prescribed testosterone, with ultimately violent results. This is set against a crime drama backdrop, as the local cops investigate the murder of a man who was connected with the hormone market; an incident that Jacky's childhood friend, a pair of comedy car mechanics and the local mafia are all caught up in. Unfortunately all this business is quite boring, with the more interesting part of the story - Jacky's obviously doomed, stalker-like pursuit of a woman he's always fancied - kept on the back burner until the film requires a dramatic ending.
LA NOTTE DEI DIAVOLI (Night of the Devils) (Italy/Spain 1972 / Giorgio Ferroni)
**
Tolstoy's story The Family of the Vourdalak formed the centerpiece of Mario Bava's 1963 horror anthology Three Faces of Fear, and in my opinion, all but ruined that otherwise fine film (though the general consensus is that it's the best segment). Nine years later, Giorgio Ferroni decided to make a feature-length version, updated to modern times. His film opens promisingly, with an early dream sequence containing full-frontal nudity and gruesome splatter. But then it flashes back to the events leading up to the dreamer's incarceration in a mental hospital, and all of a sudden we're near-enough back in Bava's olden-times world, as he takes shelter in a rural household that's never heard of television, and whose home even looks like the set from the earlier film. It's a full, tedious hour before we get more sex and violence, though the gore is worth the wait. Carlo Rambaldi's special makeup effects aren't what you'd call realistic, but they are agreeably horrible, with a protracted face melting and a finger chopping the highlights. It's unfortunate that the name of the love interest, Sdenka, is pronounced "Stinker" throughout.
THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE 3 (FINAL SEQUENCE) (Netherlands 2015 / Tom Six)
****
For no reason but the lolz, Dieter Laser and Laurence R Harvey from the first two Human Centipede films are respectively recast as Boss, the psychotic, cannibalistic warden of a failing prison in a swelteringly hot part of the USA, and Dwight, his slightly more humane adviser. When Boss's plan to castrate all his prisoners fails, Dwight - a fan of the Human Centipede franchise - suggests... well, you can guess the rest. Their performances, with Laser's often impenetrable German accent and Harvey's dodgy Texan accent, make for an awkward first half hour, but they soon settle into an amusing double act. When Dwight calls in director Tom Six to advise them on the medical accuracy of his concept, things suddenly become really, genuinely funny. While the movie never even attempts to reach the gross-out heights/depths of Human Centipede II, there's still plenty to make you gag as Boss, Dwight and Six figure out the technicalities of doing it "for real". This is an audaciously outrageous and hilarious black comedy, and second only to A Clockwork Orange in its satire of the dehumanisation inherent in the prison system.
EUROCRIME!: THE ITALIAN COP AND GANGSTER FILMS THAT RULED THE '70S (USA 2012 / Mike Malloy)
***
At 127 minutes, you'd think that this look at the poliziotteschi genre would have everything covered. But although it's packed with great clips from a cavalcade of films, it feels a little lacking. There are seven chapters, some notably less interesting than others, and most of which concentrate on contextualising the genre as a whole (albeit using individual films as exempla), rather than presenting a catalogue of key movies and spending a decent amount of time with each title. The documentary comes alive during the sections covering the production of the movies - the technical aspects, the stunts, the product placement - and it's good that a couple of Italian cinema's all-important dubbing artists are interviewed alongside the big names such as John Saxon, Enzo Castellari and Franco Nero. The interviews are of varying technical quality and it's a shame that this film wasn't made until after so many important characters were dead, though the deceased aren't the only people conspicuous by their absence. Eurocrime! is a very nice primer, though one with - I think - the wrong priorities.
THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS (USA 1976 / Jonas Middleton)
****
If you've ever wished that pornography had better stories, Through the Looking Glass might make you think again. Because this is one nightmarish fuckfest, concerning unhappily married Catherine, who sneaks off into her boudoir in the attic where a mirror makes all her best and worst fantasies come true. The film has four jaw-dropping set-pieces. In the first, Catherine is fingered by a demon painted green like Lou Ferrigno's Incredible Hulk, and what appears to be a standard vaginal close-up becomes truly gynaecological as the camera turns out to be a medical probe, travelling deep inside her in a single take. In the second, the mirror transports her to the Lewis Carroll-themed orgy that justifies the film's thieving title. Thirdly, Catherine fantasises that her younger self is being sexually abused by her father. And the fourth takes us to a terrifying vision of Hell, with ugly day-for-night photography searing the viewer's eyes. All the time, there's the risk that her underage daughter is also about to be seduced by the mirror. What this lacks in wank material, it more than makes up for in transgressive, disturbing weirdo horror.
SIMON KILLER (USA 2012 / Antonio Campos)
***
It's unusual for a film of any kind, least of all a serious drama, to have as its lead character someone so pathetic as Simon, the subject of this quiet but raunchy psychological portrait. Many men are guilty of being led by their dicks, and on top of that Simon is completely amoral, but what sets him apart is his lack of charisma, his lack of self-sufficiency, his lack of self-esteem, his lack of self-confidence and his lack of ambition. He's a New Yorker who, having split from his girlfriend and graduated from college, has turned up in Paris so that he can get away with bumming around doing nothing for a while. He spends all his money on a prostitute before inveigling his way into her home and coercing her into an illegal get-rich-quick scheme. And, inevitably, it comes to pass that she's just one of many women that he has used and will use again during his life. And all this is presented without any heroics. He's not going to get laddish audiences cheering on his misogynistic antics; he's not going to get female audiences to feel sorry for him and want to give him a hug. But he's kind of fascinating to get to know, nonetheless.
NIGHTDREAMS (USA 1981 / Francis Delia)
*
Oddball porno consisting of fantasy vignettes in which a woman screws a variety of imaginary people in a variety of settings. So far, so ordinary, but most of the scenes have more than a touch of the macabre about them, with penetration by a pointy-nosed mask and a blow-job for Satan among the "highlights". Even a fairly ordinary spit-roast scene with two Middle Eastern men begins with a shisha pipe up her chuff, while a lesbian desert scene is soundtracked by a post-punk cover of "Ring of Fire". And then, um, there's the sequence in which she sucks off a dancing box of cereal, while a slice of toast plays a saxophone solo. Kudos for injecting some humour into proceedings, but who exactly is that bit for? There's also a wraparound story, in which the woman (Dorothy LeMay) is observed in clinical conditions by a male/female pair of bickering scientists. LeMay certainly gets through a lot of partners in the film, but her screen presence is neglible, and while a lot of effort has gone into making each scenario look and sound good, the content consists mainly of boring, repetitive penetration and fellatio close-ups.
MICHAEL (Austria 2011 / Markus Schleinzer)
****
A comedian friend once told me that the reason he enjoys a good paedo joke is that the very concept of paedophilia - that a grown man would want to put his knob in a small child - is so absurd that it's actually comical. It's probably not a popular opinion, but it's one that appears to be shared by Markus Schleinzer, the writer/director of this darkly humourous drama. The humour begins with Michael himself, a child abductor who's beautifully played by Michael Fuith as a nebbish, nerdy clean freak with a willfully boring home (prison-style basement notwithstanding) and a pot noodle diet to match. It continues with the young boy he's kidnapped, Wolfgang, played equally excellently by 11 year-old David Rauchenberger as a bratty ball of pent-up energy who's doing his best to put up with the horrible situation he's in. But from the viewer's point of view, it's a sitcom-like situation, as Michael finds himself having to be a reluctant father to Wolfgang, when all he wants to be is a sexual deviant. It's no wonder that this movie isn't very well known; "that funny child abuse film" can't have been the easiest sell.
LA SETTIMA DONNA (The Seventh Woman) [aka The Last House on the Beach] (Italy 1978 / Franco Prosperi)
***
A trio of bank robbers hide out in a beach house that's occupied by a group of schoolgirls and their teacher. Inevitably, the crims' idea of laying low involves terrorising their hostages, though for an Italian exploitation movie - and in particular for a home invasion flick - La Settima Donna is surprisingly restrained when it comes to depicting sexual violence. That said, those sequences are where the direction and editing come alive (the only sequences where they come alive, you might say), with Franco Prosperi employing slow motion, fast cuts, suspenseful music and repeated shots to convey the horror without actually showing anything too explicit. It's a bit perverse really; it seems to let us know that, although he wasn't feeling exploitative enough to put it on screen, rape is what gets Prosperi going, at least in film-making terms. The director also has fun playing with the stereotypical "sympathetic" criminal; played by Ray Lovelock, the good-looking one might be more intelligent and less violent than his thuggish accomplices, yet he's not above pinning down a nun when his mate wants to rape her. What a charmer.
JOE (USA 1970 / John G Avildsen)
**
This downbeat, pessimistic state-of-the-nation address takes us on a depressing (and poorly paced) journey up and down the class ladder, starting at the bottom with two junkies. After one (Susan Sarandon in her film debut) is hospitalised by an overdose, her wealthy father Bill inadvertently kills the other in a fight, and takes refuge in a bar where he meets working class bigot and gun nut Joe. Having just spent ten minutes railing against the "niggers", "nigger lovers", liberals (42% queer, apparently) and spoilt white kids, he sees Bill as a hero for what he's done, and they spend the rest of the movie bonding over their mutual hatred of young people, before both screwing and killing some dope-smoking hippies. A war on drugs, a chauvinistic attitude to women, and the idea that everyone else is to blame for everything... Joe surely represents Richard Nixon's USA (the Stars & Stripes title design says as much). While Joe throws his weight around like a horrible, violent drunk, clearly a blight on wider society, Bill represents the patriots who love him/Uncle Sam regardless, and will end up paying the price for it.
FORCE MAJEURE (Denmark/France/Sweden/Norway 2014 / Ruben Östlund)
***
A Scandinavian family on a skiing holiday survive a frightening incident; an event that is, sadly, spoilered by the poster art, though the excellent timing of it means it still comes as a shock. But while they survived it physically, the aftermath threatens to destroy the mum and dad's relationship, due to his instinctive running away while it was happening. Force Majeure is one of those films that makes me glad I'm not a parent, and therefore don't have to go on these awful, joyless, potentially marriage-destroying holidays. I suspect for some viewers, the story may be a little too close for comfort. Enjoyable though it is, it's a story that arguably struggles to fill its two-hour running time, and the last couple of scenes feel extraneous at best, trite at worst. It's shot in the observational style that's familiar from so many recent European dramas, and yet is still so effective: all coldly composed, mostly static long shots, in which characters heads are cropped out of frame if they dare to stand up. And typically for this form, the humour is as icy as the Alpine setting, not least in its repeated, ironic use of Vivaldi's "Summer".
THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE (UK 1973 / John Hough)
**
John Hough's second horror film, after 1971's fun Twins of Evil, does away with gothic heaving bosoms and gives us a more mature, far less entertaining ghost story set in the present day. An elderly millionaire sends two mediums and a paranomal investigator into a notorious haunted house, hoping that they'll discover the secret of eternal life. The investigator's wife tags along too, so that there's someone to whom he can explain things in layman's terms for the benefit of the audience, though despite being a skeptic and not believing in any of that spooky shit, as soon as the spooky shit happens he seems to know exactly the right words for it (eg "Premature retraction of ectoplasm, causing brief systemic shock"). Trouble is, the spooky shit isn't particularly disturbing for the viewer, aside from one spectacular demonstration of extreme poltergeist activity, which is enjoyably chaotic, as scenes with shaking tables, flying plates and toppling cupboards usually are. The performances are all a bit dry, though both of the women get a few sexy and seductive moments... but highlights such as that are slim pickings.
THE CHINA SYNDROME (USA 1978 / James Bridges)
**
Of-its-time nuclear power paranoia that manages to be both hysterical and surprisingly restrained: there's a lot of fuss and covering-up of an incident that had no casualties, and yet it never descends into full-on mushroom cloud propaganda. But it's also a film about television news, and I think that Oliver Stone slipped a reference to its opening moments into Natural Born Killers, acknowledging the similarities between the live interview scenes in the two movies. Jane Fonda stars as a journalist who's sick of covering quirky "out and about" stories for local TV, but stumbles across a scoop when the nuclear power plant she and her crew are being shown around has a glitch. The first act takes up about half the film, meaning that by the time the plot finally starts moving, I'd already lost interest. It doesn't help that Fonda's cameraman is played by Michael Douglas, so often a hard actor to warm to, and on particularly obnoxious form here. Jack Lemmon's got a key role though, and he's always watchable; he's at his stuttering, exasperated best here, and gets the best scene too, in a short but exciting car chase.
LE ORME (Footprints) [aka Footprints on the Moon] (Italy 1975 / Luigi Bazzoni)
***
A really unusual mystery drama, with Florinda Bolkan compelling as the intense Alice, a single Portuguese translator working in Rome, who finds that she's lost the last three days of her life. A clue takes her to a quiet island outside of Italy, where she's bewildered and disturbed to find that the locals all half-recognise her from earlier in the week. The strange title refers to a bleak old sci-fi movie that Alice has been haunted by ever since she watched as much of it as she could bear, and we're treated to occasional clips from it in dream sequences that initially seem like a playful indulgence for the director. But it all makes sense in the end, in a surprising and weirdly satisfying revelatory conclusion. Suitably enough, a dreamlike atmosphere pervades the entire film, and it looks nice too, as you'd expect from something lensed by Vittorio Storaro. So with Bolkan (star of Lizard in a Woman's Skin and Don't Torture a Duckling), Storaro (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage) and also child star Nicoletta Elmi (Who Saw Her Die?) all on board, this is an understated film with a good giallo heritage that's well worth a look.
FLAVIA, THE HERETIC [aka The Rebel Nun] (Italy/France 1974 / Gianfranco Mingozzi)
***
For a nunsploitation movie, Flavia, the Heretic has a surprisingly feminist message, about how women should be in charge of their own sexuality and shouldn't be subjugated by men. One such woman is Flavia herself, a middle-aged virgin and nun, whose worldview is turned upside-down after she witnesses a post-The Devils outbreak of sexual mass hysteria in the convent. She makes an abortive attempt to take off with a kind man but soon returns to the nunnery, where a randy elderly sister tries to convince her to succumb to carnal pleasures. Eventually, of course, Flavia does so, but being set around the Ottoman invasion of Italy, this is about more than just her sexploits, and the film has the sprawling feel of a historical epic despite its ordinary running time. That is to say, it's a bit on the slow and serious side, though there's plenty of disturbing imagery to enjoy along the way, as genitals are mutilated, errant nuns are tortured, blood pours from walls, and a naked woman hides inside a cow carcass during a cannibalistic orgy! Much of the time this is all beautifully shot, so it's a shame it's not a tad more exciting.
WELP (Cub) (Belgium 2014 / Jonas Govaerts)
**
This should work a lot better than it does. A pack of cub scouts, plus three none too responsible adults, go camping in some woodland that's rumoured to be the hunting ground of a young werewolf. And sure enough, some kind of child savage does show up, while secondary characters (a comically obese cop and a pair of anti-social brothers in shellsuits) get killed at night. But who's really responsible...? Although the last 15-20 minutes of Welp see the tone shift unexpectedly into Wolf Creek-style torture porn territory, with a particularly dark and unexpected ending, I think the movie's problem is that it allows its cartoonish older characters to dominate in a comedy-horror vein for far too long. Until the final minutes, there never seems to be any real threat to the few likeable characters (and absolutely none to the young campers), despite some creative traps and murders along the way. It's probably too glossy for its own good too, the Arriflex Alexa digital photography a long way from the grainy 16mm film of the best campsite slashers. There are some good ideas here, but they're fumbled at almost every turn.
HERCULES (Italy 1983 / Luigi Cozzi)
***
Luigi Cozzi returns to Starcrash territory with this insane time capsule of a special effects movie, an amusing, ambitious attempt to out-blockbuster the Superman movies on the cheap... which of course it didn't manage to do. But it goes in big, with an opening sequence depicting the very creation of the universe, before taking us to some kind of outer space version of Mount Olympus (complete with a bird bath television ripped off Jason and the Argonauts), where the story begins with Zeus sending a powerful light to Earth, and imbuing baby Hercules with superpowers. Having grown into Lou Ferrigno, one of the first things the adult Hercules does is punch a bear to death, but that's just one of about a hundred eye-popping incidents that take place over the course of this jaw-droppingly bizarre film. Storywise, it's episodic to the extent of feeling more like a Monty Pythonalike sketch movie than anything coherent, but with a cavalcade of dated FX taking the place of jokes. Hercules is so laughable and dumb that it's almost beyond criticism. Is it a good film? Hell no. Is it an entertaining watch? Absofuckinglutely.
LE DONK & SCOR-ZAY-ZEE (UK 2009 / Shane Meadows)
***
Improvised comedy quickie with Shane Meadows making a documentary about stroppy but talkative roadie Le Donk (Paddy Considine) as he heads up to Manchester to work on the Arctic Monkeys' summer 2007 all-dayers at Old Trafford cricket ground and, hopefully, get his rapper protege Scor-zay-zee a cheeky spot on the lineup. Also appearing is Olivia Coleman as Le Donk's ex, nine months pregnant and about to pop. Considine and Coleman are as brilliant as they always are, even if the former's adoption of a mild speech impediment seems like a cheap way to get laughs on top of his character's inherently comical Midlands accent. It's not entirely necessary, as he proves himself adept at coming up with a couple of very funny sex-based anecdotes to break up the awkward conversations and bad-tempered sniping. Meanwhile Scor-zay-zee himself is a genuinely talented MC, and it's a shame that so much of the music used in the film is wet, folky guitar shit rather than his hip-hop. This is a minor entry in Meadows' filmography, obviously, but a fun little diversion.
JAGTEN (The Hunt) (Denmark/Sweden 2012 / Thomas Vinterberg)
***
Mads Mikkelsen is great as Lucas, a single, slightly awkward kindergarten teacher whose honorable attempt to put some distance between himself and an overaffectionate child backfires when she naively accuses him of molesting her. Sometimes it feels as though Thomas Vinterberg's drama is trying to make some kind of unpleasant reactionary point, either about how abuse victims shouldn't always be believed, or about how women are at fault for putting children before men (Lucas's accusatory colleagues are all female), or about the easy availability of hardcore pornography, and it can feel a bit heavy-handed during these scenes. But the way the plot develops suggests we're supposed to take it at face value: this is simply the story of a person whose life is ruined because of a false accusation, and on that level it is powerful and moving. A really good bit of child acting can be a spectacular thing to watch, and Annika Wedderkopp, who plays the girl, is phenomenal, her innocent cheekiness giving way to a wholly convincing sadness as she realises what she's done.
UNHINGED (USA 1982 / Don Gronquist)
**
It's as if someone watched Friday the 13th and thought it contained too little Crazy Ralph and too many victims. Unhinged's plot gets rolling when a car containing a trio of young women crashes into a ditch, three whole miles from the nearest town, and they're rescued and put up by a spooky posh woman with a weird, invalid mother. They're so posh, in fact, that the girls find it hard to understand what they say, given that they use long words like "imply" and "burden". They, on the other hand, speak in a dreary Oregon drawl that makes everything they say sound like the most boring thing in the world. The spooky posh woman spends most of her time warning the lead girl, Terry, about how dangerous the woods outside are, and eventually one of Terry's friends ventures into the woods (to cut a mile off the impossibly long walk to town) and gets killed in a scene that's poor by the standards of most slashers, but in a movie like this is essential to bring you out of your stupor. It's rare to find a film as competently made as this with such universally bad acting, but if you stick with it, the gory, disturbing ending is pretty good.
HIPPOCAMPUS: M 21TH (Germany/Italy 2014 / Alexander Fennert)
***
Like a modern-day, less classy take on Borowczyk's Immoral Tales, this is an art/porn/horror anthology, cataloguing a litany of extreme sexual perversions. Each short film is scored by a recognisably famous piece of classical music, and - for example - you'll never again be able to watch an advert that uses Bach's "Cello Suite No.1 (Prelude)" without picturing an artist rolling around on canvas with his naked muse, using a mixture of her blood and shit to paint his latest work. Elsewhere, an explicit necrophilia sequence to Beethoven's "Midnight Sonata" almost comes close to the high standards set by Jorg Buttergeit, while a scene of a woman bathing in worms and cockroaches is only really brought alive by the bombast of Ravel's superior "Bolero". The first scene features BDSM, cannibalism and incest (to the tune of Rossini's "Thieving Magpie") and the last one is a playful bit of pervy balloon popping to a Tchaikovsky concerto, but perhaps the standout is the Mozart-scored sequence that makes the most extreme sexual violence imaginable almost artistically justifiable. Almost.
MAD FOXES (Spain/Switzerland 1981 / Paul Grau)
***
There's tonnes of ironic entertainment to be had out of this badly-made thriller effort. It's a back-and-forth revenge story, with Hal, a serial shagger and owner of a sweet sports car that matches his white, go-faster-striped tank top (basically he's a prick, but we're supposed to admire him) killing one of the Nazi biker gang who threatens him, so they rape his girlfriend of the day, so he gets his karate friends to attack them, so they kill his family, so he starts killing them in return. The Nazi biker gang seen to be utterly ineffective, permanently drunk, useless riders, and besides, their bikes aren't exactly mean machines of the Harley Davidson ilk. Plus their swastika armbands have serious continuity issues (for legal reasons!). But once their apparent leader is offed early on, all bets are off in this hilariously shoddy movie that switches between mind-bogglingly mundane exposition scenes and thoroughly extreme violence, with lots of gratuitous sex along the way. You get the impression that one take was always enough for director Paul Grau, given the plentiful mistakes and woeful fight choreography that made it to the screen.
LIEBES LAGER (Love Camp) (Italy 1976 / Lorenzo Gicca Palli)
*
As if Italian Naziploitaion films weren't already bizarre enough, this concentration camp movie goes and adds overt comedy to the usual mix of fascist iconography, soft porn and violence. And it doesn't do so particularly well, with a tonally confusing script that reminds us how despicable the camp regimes were, with prisoners suffering serious and unnecessary sexually abuse one minute, while in the next we're expected to laugh at an officer who sneaks pervy looks up their skirts. Actually, that bit is quite amusing, as is the executioner who's obsessed with the physics of the noose. And of course you don't get to see serious and unnecessary sexual abuse without getting to see the ladies' tits and muffs too, so erm, hooray for that? Liebes Lager certainly delivers on the T&A front, and builds towards a farce-like second half in which the inmates' dorms are turned into a profitable brothel by the guards, complete with a comedy homosexual costume designer and, erm, women being forced into prostitution against their will. The girl-power ending might be reminiscent of Carry On Girls, but I know which film I'd rather watch again.
NEW KIDS: NITRO (Netherlands 2011 / Steffen Haars & Flip van der Kuil)
**
Diminishing returns, unfortunately, on movie number two for the Dutch comedy troupe. Whereas New Kids: Turbo eventually found some jokes beyond its antiheroes calling everyone "cunt" over and over again, Nitro mainly relies on that repeated witticism, with lots of added uses of "homo" for "variety". Once again the plot is mainly focused on a lethal rivalry between our loser friends and their counterparts in a similarly lousy neighbouring town, but this time a crashed meteorite is turning people into zombies as an added bonus. Too many characters and ideas follow the same narrative arc that they did in the first film, even to the extent that Rikkert has a virtually identical love interest. Yes, of course that's the joke, but it's an obvious and lazy one. Fortunately, there's still enough of a don't-give-a-fuck attitude to offence, reality and intelligence to raise some decent laughs. But there's less social satire, while the visual gags are mostly repeats. I have to side with the boy at the start who criticises the guys for a lack of new ideas, rather than the overenthusiastic audience member we see at the beginning and end of the movie.
HUMAN EXPERIMENTS (USA 1979 / Gregory Goodell)
*
Human Experiments is an attention-grabbing, chilling title for what turns out to be a dull plodder that stands little chance of disturbing anyone. It begins well though, with our heroine Rachel being an interesting, intelligently-drawn character. She's a travelling nightclub musician, playing her songs and having to deal with the unwanted advances of hick-town men, unscrupulous promoters and cockroach-infested motel rooms. Unfortunately she's soon wrongly convicted of a massacre (as you are) and sent to jail, and that's where Rachel becomes just another women-in-prison movie inmate. Cue the obligatory nudity, predatory bulldyke, and screwfaced wardens, though there's some (badly handled) mystery regarding a couple of the prisoners who seem to be mentally deficient for some reason. We don't find out why until much later on, when the film pulls out an unexpected sequence of psychological horror, but it's too silly and far-fetched to have any effect. The ending is muddled, as if the director couldn't decide between ending on a downbeat or an upbeat note, and so attempts to do both.
DELIRIUM [aka Psycho Puppet] (USA 1979 / Peter Maris)
***
A cheap and cheerful police procedural that begins when a young woman is found impaled on a spear by her flatmate. At first this seems like nothing more than the work of yet another traumatised Vietnam veteran turned serial killer, but the likeable pair of detectives who are investigating become suspicious of the flatmate's boss. And sure enough, he turns out to be part of a conspiracy whose motives are fuzzy, but they apparently entail protecting "innocent" murdering soldiers who've become homicidal through no fault of their own. Unlike your average crime thriller, Delirium raises the stakes a bit by taking a leaf out of the slasher genre's book and showing its murders in gory detail, though there aren't that many of them. And although a lot of the action takes place around the detectives' desks, they're fun guys to spend time with, making the movie a breeze to watch, right up to its bargain basement attempt at a shoot 'em up finalé. UK viewers will get an unintended laugh every time the theme tune from long-running quiz show Mastermind is used to score a tense moment.
METEOR (USA 1979 / Ronald Neame)
**
As if all the outer space special effects and scenes set in a manned space probe weren't enough, 1979's flop blockbuster Meteor begins its expensive production with an utterly irrelevant yacht race, purely as an interesting way to introduce Sean Connery's character. He is Paul Bradley, a retired astrophysicist who's summoned back to NASA when Earth is threatened by a five mile wide meteor, as well as the smaller rocks that precede it. The first act is pretty dry - all white men talking in board rooms - but eventually the script mines a seam of Cold War humour, bordering on Dr Strangelove territory. Eventually the impacts commence, in scenes that fail on a disaster movie level due to not focusing on the victims. Towards the end, Bradley and his colleagues are on the receiving end of a meteor strike (cue a lengthy, laughable montage of library footage of explosions and controlled demolitions), but because the screenplay hasn't followed the genre's conventions, there's no one to root for, and no one to hate. Kudos, I guess, for getting the punchline "Fuck the Dodgers" into a PG-rated movie!
STEEKSPEL (Tricked) (Netherlands 2012 / Paul Verhoeven)
***
Spoiler alert: someone gets tricked. If you weren't watching during the opening credits, you'd be extremely unlikely to guess that this entertainingly wicked comedy drama was directed by Paul Verhoeven. It's a far cry from the Hollywood blockbusters he's known for, and well removed from his Dutch filmography too. For it's basically a round-the-kitchen-table sitcom about a middle-aged man's home and work troubles, as his extramarital affairs risk being exposed and his company faces bankruptcy as he turns 50. It's all nicely cast, well performed, and the trademark glint in Verhoeven's eye is definitely present in another of his movies that, essentially, revolves around sex (though don't go expecting the excesses of Basic Instinct or Showgirls!). Tricked might be Verhoeven's lowest-profile film, but it shouldn't be dismissed as one of his lesser efforts. It is slight though: running just under an hour, it was one of two separate films made from similar scripts as part of an award-winning crowd-sourcing experiment, the other being Stephan Brenninkmeijer's Lotgenoten (Counterparts).
THE EXORCIST III: CRIES AND SHADOWS [aka Naked Exorcism] (Italy 1975 / Angelo Pannacciò & Franco Lo Cascio)
**
Although released in various territories as Naked Exorcism, Return of the Exorcist, and even The Exorcist III(!), the original Italian title of this exploitation horror doesn't mention exorcism, and nor does the dialogue until the last 20 minutes. But when you see the exorcist's costume as he arrives at the possessed boy's house, or indeed when you see what the boy looks like, tied to his bed in the opening moments, there's no doubt what film this is cashing in on. Unfortunately, it's not a very good cash-in, as you'll quickly realise when faced with the way the camera stumbles through St Peter's Square at the very start, with shots of the growling victim artlessly spliced in every so often. The film does offer a lot of joyless nudity, as the demon doing the possession seems to take the form of a naked middle-aged temptress, and scenes of orgies, lesbianism and nunsploitation come and go without explanation. If you're expecting makeup and mechanical effects and an exciting climax on a par with The Exorcist, you'll be disappointed, but the exorcism scene itself is weird and nightmarish enough to achieve its desired effect.
ACCIÓN MUTANTE (Mutant Action) (Spain/France 1992 / Álex de la Iglesia)
**
Well, someone watched Delicatessen too many times. With its steampunk aesthetic and cast of extreme oddball antiheroes, Acción Mutante sails a little close to Jean-Pierre Jeunet's unbearably twee style at first. Initially it's about a terrorist group of disabled men (although being set in a dystopian, interplanetary future, they look more like comic book aliens than anything else), as they prepare to storm an apparently Almodóvar-themed wedding (Pedro produced this film) and kidnap the bride. But by the halfway point, after a fun slasher-style development, most of the group are dead, which is a good thing because there was barely a likeable character among them. This means, though, that we're left with a standard kidnap comedy that happens to be set on another planet populated by irritating weirdos. I'm sure it's a lot more fun if you're into sci-fi comic book stuff, but I found the film a bit too pleased with its quirky self. That said, there are several good gore gags, a handful of actual jokes, and a very funny and unusual suggestion of what to do when one of a pair of conjoined twins snuffs it.
FULL CIRCLE [aka The Haunting of Julia] (UK/Canada 1976 / Richard Loncraine)
**
Not your usual ghost or haunted house movie, Full Circle / The Haunting of Julia is more concerned with sadness than scares; Julia (Mia Farrow, who gives up on attempting an English accent very early on) was partly responsible for her daughter's accidental death, and leaving her husband and buying a huge old house isn't doing anything to cheer her up. And then a séance results in Julia becoming determined to investigate the "presence" that was supposedly detected by the medium (future EastEnders star Anna Wing in a dotty turn). It's a nice idea, but the script doesn't seem to have the confidence to keep things purely psychological, and so throws in a spooky "accidental" (or is it...?) death every few minutes. They certainly liven up the proceedings, but even these PG-level kills don't really fit what is otherwise a genteel, Sunday night TV kind of supernatural drama. (It even co-stars Tom Conti, for fuck's sake, on unusually likeable form as Julia's "cool" friend.) The sombre atmosphere is handled well, so there's no need for fireworks, but even still, the whole thing's a little undercooked.
LES SALAUDS (Bastards) (France/Germany 2013 / Claire Denis)
***
Bastards is definitely one of ponderous director Claire Denis's better and more accessible films, with a fairly strong thriller narrative delivered in a way that's only occasionally hard to follow. If you make it past the somewhat oblique first half hour, you ought to be hooked. It's a film that begins with a suicide, a bereaved wife, and her underage daughter who's been hospitalised with severe vaginal injuries. Into this scenario comes the dead man's brother, who's been away at sea and has missed out on all the drama that's led up to this, and his efforts to help the mother and daughter lead him to cynically exploit a neighbour's loneliness, while discovering the disturbing world of financial corruption, sexual exploitation, and corn cob dildos that caused all the trouble. As you'd expect from Denis, it's a slow and very moody film, very light on laughs... unless those corn cobs are supposed to be ridiculous rather than horrifying (probably a bit of both; it's hard to tell). The ending is handled particularly well, with a death, a sleazy video, and a haunting Tindersticks song.
L'ASSASSINO HA RISERVATO NOVE POLTRONE (The Killer Reserved Nine Seats) (Italy 1974 / Giuseppe Bennati)
**
This murder mystery with a slasher-style structure begins as nine frenemies arrive at a disused theatre for a night of... well, it's not clear really. It's not a theatrical event or a party or anything; an evening of sitting around bickering seems to be all that's on the cards. But when the venue's owner narrowly avoids being killed by a sabotaged beam, accusations are thrown around, and every so often someone's killed by a creepy-masked killer. With so many characters, many played by actresses who look to be in their mid-20s no matter who they're playing, it can be hard to remember who's related to whom, who's supposed to be shagging whom, who's not supposed to be, who used to be, and all the rest of it. But the film's main problem is that it veers just a bit on the boring side, with its slow pace and humourless script. It also feels a bit - appropriately enough - stagebound, being entirely set inside the theatre, frequently in the auditorium at that, with all the uncinematic scope of a drawing room drama. Notable mainly for a couple of brutal slayings of nude women, one quick and the other nasty and drawn-out.
LA CODA DELLA SCORPIONE (The Scorpion's Tail) [aka The Case of the Scorpion's Tail] (Italy/Spain 1971 / Sergio Martino)
***
Opening with effortlessly cool music by Bruno Nicolai, Sergio Martino's second giallo (following The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh) is a must-see primarily for its graphic violence, as the black-clad killer slices their way through the cast list in a plot that's full of surprise deaths. Just like Strange Vice, Scorpion's Tail crosses borders, beginning in London as an unfaithful wife is told that she's richer by $1m, which she goes to collect in Greece, which is where things get messy... although not before one of her exes dies an apparently random attack that only makes sense on a rewatch. In a similarly confusing bit of intrigue, we're clearly supposed to be shocked later on when the identity of a flight attendant's lover is revealed, but he's someone we haven't seen in about an hour, and he's not the most memorable looking bloke. And at the end, the killer delivers their confession with their back to the camera, as if it hadn't actually been written at the time of filming. So it's not the tightest storytelling, but it features giallo regulars George Hilton and Anita Strindberg, a ton of J&B product placement, and plenty of gory stabbings.
VIOLATED ANGELS (Japan 1967 / Kôji Wakamatsu)
**
An unsurprisingly controversial Japanese film based on a real 1966 massacre in America. As if its topical nature wasn't enough to raise accusations of exploitation, it begins with four female nurses spying on another two who are nude and writhing around in bed together. When a man - possibly a peeping tom - is spotted outside their dorm, they invite him in for a better look, at which point his evident misogyny steps up a gear and he shoots one of the nurses, before quietly holding the rest of them hostage. They all react differently, but nothing stems the flood of naked breasts being filmed in prurient close-up for much of the running time. The other thing we get a lot of are lengthy, static long shots of the scene, as the nurses sob and fear for their lives as their attacker tortures and rapes them. It's extremely unpleasant, but it always feels as though there's some sort of intellectual and/or artistic point being made. I'm not convinced there is; the film's driving force seems to be little more than hard-to-watch misanthropy. Challenging, hypnotic and unusual, it's is worth a look, but you might not want to revisit it.
BLOOD SONG [aka Dream Slayer] (USA 1982 / Alan J Levi)
***
If it's 1982, then it must be a slasher movie. Except, despite its trappings - a small town, a high schooler, an escaped psycho - Blood Song dares to do something a bit different. It focuses on just one potential victim, Marion (crippled leg; chaste relationship with boyfriend; lives with her borderline abusive father), and separately on the escaped psycho, Paul Foley (reacted to seeing his family slaughtered by playing a little ditty on his flute; picks up hitchhikers and murders them; trademark flute motif plays whenever he seems to be near). And Marion, having once received a blood transfusion from Foley, obviously has a psychic connection to him, and so witnesses his killings in her mind's eye. Foley somehow gets wind of this and tracks her down, remarkably easily in fact, leading to the final confrontation between them. Marion's relatively believable for a Final Girl character, and her relationships are well defined and nicely written, but everything else about the story seems completely ludicrous. Fortunately there's an injection of psychological horror in the final scenes that makes it all fall neatly into place.
TETSUO: THE BULLET MAN (Japan 2009 / Shinya Tsukamoto)
*
Shinya Tsukamoto resurrects his Tetsuo franchise after 17 years, but he shouldn't have bothered. It's a really ugly looking film, with almost all the colour digitally drained out of it, as if he was only half sure about making another black & white movie like the original. And it stars possibly the worst actor I've ever seen in a lead role: Eric Bossick, playing Anthony, a father who inexplicably starts to transform into a "human weapon" who shoots bullets out of his body when his young son is murdered. The dialogue - when it's not just Anthony and his wife singing "Hush, Little Baby" over and over again - is awkward, clunky and expositional: "I can't be late today, it's my first presentation as head of technology at the company", Anthony tells his wife late in the film. Meanwhile the Japanese actors are for some reason required to deliver their lines in heavily accented English ("Welcome to your new rife"). The action is as fast as ever, but it's not as impressive on digital as it was on film, while the transformation effects are less than spectacular. The end credits are literally the best bit, thanks to an excellent Nine Inch Nails theme tune.
THE SECRET KILLER [aka Eyeball] (Italy/Spain 1975 / Umberto Lenzi)
***
There are a few moments of clunky plotting in Umberto Lenzi's violent, slasher-style giallo, not to mention an impressively nonsensical original title in Red Cats in a Glass Maze, but it's well paced and a lot of fun to watch. A group of US holidaymakers are in Barcelona, but it's not long before they start to be picked off one-by-one, by a killer in a red rain poncho (such as those distributed to all the tourists by the tour bus driver) who stabs their left eyes out. Heading up the vacationers is Mark, who secretly suspects that his unstable and cuckolded wife has come to Spain to frame him, and his secretary/bit-on-the-side who accuses Mark of having killed a girl back in America a year earlier. There are lots of other characters, but they're all nicely introduced at the top, in an easily digestible fashion, and there's some good Catalonian travelogue stuff and totally gratuitous nudity along the way. It doesn't quite keep you guessing until the end - the viewer will probably be a couple of steps ahead of the verge-of-retirement police inspector - but the climactic moments manage to be shockingly grisly anyway.
QUELLI CHE CONTANO (Those Who Count) [aka Cry of a Prostitute] (Italy 1976 / Andrea Bianchi)
***
Gangster thriller starring Henry Silva as Tony Aniante (a name that always sounds a bit too rhythmically close to "Olly olly oxen free" whenever anyone says it), a hitman who gets caught between warring mafia families. It's not the most enthralling storyline, although there are several chilling moments in which loyalties are brutally severed in the name of getting the job done. (Did Aniante notice the knife throwing assassins outside the window? It's left nicely ambiguous.) But you're not watching a film called Cry of a Prostitute for its story, and it certainly delivers on violence, gore and a horrible amorality. When Aniante tells the titular seductress that he doesn't like "easy lays", he then demonstrates it by pushing her face into a pig's carcass and violently raping her up the wrong'un. Later he rapes her again, after smacking her face around with his belt. And this is the hero... I think. Maybe there aren't supposed to be any heroes. My hero is the woman who, following a violent shootout in her front yard, introduces a gangster's head to the circular saw. Silva is stunningly wooden, but everyone else gets well stuck in.
TERROR (UK 1978 / Norman J Warren)
****
After a cunningly-presented prologue concerning 17th century witchcraft, Terror turns out to be a cheerful, London-based horror B-movie about a group of friends in the film/TV/advertising industries, although half of the actresses are currently between jobs and working in a strip club. A screening party and a mesmerism demonstration at a supposedly cursed house ends in tragedy when one of the women is viciously knifed to death in the woods, and suspicion falls upon one of others, a descendent of the 17th century witch, who was earlier hypnotised and ended up swinging a sword around the place. With only that one kill scene in the film's first hour (notwithstanding the prologue, which features a tasty decapitation), it does threaten to drag, but the final half hour really ups the ante, with lots of supernatural mayhem and more slasher-style deaths. David McGillivray's screenplay is full of humour - one of the locations, for example, is the set of a bottom-of-the barrel soft porn flick - and that keeps things interesting during the story lulls. Loads of fun.
HORSEHEAD (France 2014 / Romain Basset)
*
Psychology student Jessica returns to her parents' home ahead of her insane grandmother's funeral, but sleeping in the room next door to the corpse only intensifies the bloody nightmares she's already been having about a creature with a horse's head and a big fuck-off spear. Plus now, her aging mother (Catriona MacColl) is turning up in the dreams, and inadvertently revealing dark secrets about her past. About Jessica's mother's past, that is. Not anything that particularly affects Jessica herself (it's not as if they even like each other), and that's one of the film's biggest failings. Another is that these frequent dream sequences are set largely in context-free black rooms, and are unoriginal and repetitive when it comes to the attempts to scare. The film also suffers from an awful sound mix on the dialogue track, and a performance by Murray Head (as Jessica's stepdad) that's more daytime soap opera than New French Extremity. Even MacColl, veteran of Fulci's splatteriest movies, seems a bit off, not least in her visible discomfort over a couple of mild sex scenes, though she seems more at ease with the climactic horror.
GOING CLEAR: SCIENTOLOGY & THE PRISON OF BELIEF (USA 2015 / Alex Gibney)
***
You may think Scientology's bad guy is its founder, L Ron Hubbard, the dodgy sci-fi writer who realised there was money to be made from exploiting the gullible and self-obsessed. Hearing about his bizarre scriptures, and the way that they're slowly revealed to followers, never gets old (though South Park did it more efficiently). But almost halfway through this long documentary, it becomes obvious that the real villain is the "Church"'s current head, David Miscavige, and his slick and entirely untrustworthy voice. Under his leadership, according to this film, the Church has indulged in slave labour, blackmail, assault and even unpaid, forced prostitution in the case of one of Tom Cruise's ex-girlfriends. Unsurprisingly, no current members are interviewed, but plenty of former members are, the most well-known being the Oscar-winning writer/director Paul Haggis, and the most senior being Mike Rinder, until now best known for his run-in with reporter John Sweeney on a 2007 edition of Panorama. Quite shocking, but with a tendency to over-illustrate; yes, we know what the Moon looks like, thanks.
EXORCISM [aka Demoniac] (Belgium/France/Spain 1975 / Jesús Franco)
***
This is sleazy as fuck, though while Jesús Franco's typically shoddy, amateurish direction in part adds to the sleaze factor, it also stops it from being quite as powerful as it could've been under a better director. It's about a group of female performance artists who put on Black Mass torture/bondage shows for bourgeois audiences, sometimes as theatre, other times to deliberately incite orgies for swingers. But a defrocked priest turned journalist, Mathis Vogel, gets wind of these Black Masses and takes it upon himself to "exorcise" (ie rape and kill) the women involved. The fact that Vogel is played by the director does nothing to mitigate the ick factor, as you might expect, with the 45 year-old Franco casting himself in a role that requires him to paw at and mount a succession of naked young women. There's one particularly gruesome murder, in which a girl is graphically disembowelled, though exploitation value is provided more by nudity than gore. The inevitable homicide investigation is dull, but a dreamlike atmosphere and some really good music gives the whole thing a heady, dangerous, underground charm.
PRIMAL RAGE (Italy 1988 / Vittorio Rambaldi)
***
I hope you like the power-pop song "Say the Word" by the Facade Band (whoever they are), because you're going to hear a lot of it in this Umberto Lenzi-scripted college campus horror, in which a pair of student journalists investigate a controversial bit of vivisection. One bite from an insane primate later, one of the reporters has turned psychotically violent. He infects his date, and she infects her three would-be rapists, and that trio go on the rampage through a Halloween party full of unusual and creative costumes. Shot by Franco Prosperi collaborator Antonio Climati, Primal Rage looks and feels a lot like Prosperi's amazing Wild Beasts, though this is more Mild Beasts, a somewhat stifled, restrained production that never fulfills its potential to be an over-the-top Dèmoni clone. That said, when the time comes for our heroes to dispatch the villains, the hoped-for violence and gore finally comes into play... so it's a shame that there are so few of them. Ultimately it's a movie about a killer plague which doesn't have the budget to allow for more than a handful of victims, and that's frustrating.