(1970)
Dir - Torgny Wickman
Overall: MEH
This Swedish mild erotic witchcraft film from sexploitation director Torgny Wickman is notable as an early foray into its chosen genres for its country, but it is too aloof to land anywhere. Sensuous Sorceress, (Skräcken har 1000 ögon, Fear Has 1,000 Eyes), is mostly set at an isolated farmhouse where Anita Sanders and her vicar husband Hans Wahlgren have relocated with Sanders' close friend and house servant Solveig Andersson, all of whom give sleepwalking performances that seem deliberate in creating a distant mood for some arbitrary occult escapades and naked seductions on the part of Andersson. She puts on a wig and pretends to be Sanders in order to grind naked on the latter's sleeping, disinterested, and clearly not erect husband, plays various gaslighting tricks on Sanders that she never becomes wise to, kills the family cat for no reason, burns an upside down cross on her flesh, and works her black magik with voodoo dolls to kill or injure whoever she feels like in any particular moment. Her diabolical plan does not seem to have any structure, and nobody on screen gets regularly excitable over what is going on, leading to a comatose-inducing watch and an orgy finale where everyone seems more bored than bewitched.
(1971)
Dir - Don Haldane
Overall: WOOF
The only, (barely, not really), horror film from Canadian director Don Haldane is the abysmally stagnant The Reincarnate, (The Dark Side), a movie that is void of atmosphere, thrills, or action, all to an aggressive extent. This is not to say that every genre work needs to have any share of intense set pieces to captivate, but when you have something that is exclusively and redundantly talky, any interesting philosophical discourse quickly dissolves into irritating background noise. Writer/producer Seeleg Lester's script concerns an alleged eight-thousand year old lawyer, (he was not always a lawyer), whose body is about to extinguish, prompting him to find someone worthy of his memories being transferred to, thus insuring his continued immortality. Of course there always has to be a catch though, and this one requires the sacrificing of a virgin in order to work, providing Jay Reynolds' protagonist with a dilemma that he seems more annoyed than morally struggling with. Characters endlessly repeat themselves as they try to sell each other on the fallacies of religion or the fact that centuries worth of knowledge being passed down is the only thing that can advance humankind, coming off as pompous bores that eventually just ware everyone else down to agree with them. It is no exaggeration to say that there is nothing else to the movie than that.
(1979)
Dir - Mario Sábato
Overall: MEH
While it does not conventionally belong in the horror camp, Mario Sábato's El poder de las tinieblas, (The Power of Darkness), has a drawn-out paranoia agenda, with references to Rosemary's Baby and the occult thrown in for good measure. It is still too laborious to recommend, feeling all of its ninety-minutes in an dilapidated urban setting of grey buildings and men dressed identically in flat overcoats. A commentary on the "National Reorganization Process" that Argentina underwent during the late 1970s into the 80s, it can also be looked at metaphorically from a psychological perspective, (What kind of power do those who "cannot see" have over those who are "searching for truth" and unable to convince anyone of their findings?). Such conclusions take considerable effort for the audience to come up with, likely on purpose due to Sábato's lethargic and challenging approach to the material which is based on a lone chapter in his father Ernesto's 1961 novel On Heroes and Tombs. The ending delivers some chilling visuals where Sergio Renán's increasingly obsessed and fraught protagonist finally comes face to face, (or so we are led to believe), with the clandestine organization that he is convinced exists, but the road to get there is full of inconsequential moments that never believably feed into his psychosis.
No comments:
Post a Comment