Santa Sangre

SANTA SANGRE
(1989)
Dir - Alejandro Jodorowsky
Overall: GREAT
 
Alejandro Jodorowsky is a filmmaker unlike other filmmakers.  In fact, he does not consider himself a filmmaker in the commercial sense, instead labeling himself an artist who happens to make movies when he has something to make.  He has stated that he puts his entire soul, his entire being into his films and feels depleted afterwards, at which point he needs to experience life more to find whatever ideas are out there to put on celluloid again.  Jodorowsky has also stated that he does not make movies from his intellect but from his unconscious, opening himself up to the moment and following the muse into whatever wild avenues it takes him.  He is a filmmaker, (or, we should say, an ARTIST), that is in tune with a type of boundless imagination that makes his work singular and stimulating.  No one makes movies like him, no one makes art like him, and because of that, we have a film like Santa Sangre that no one else could have delivered.

 

It is interesting to note that as textbook Jodorowsky as Santa Sangre is, he did not birth the script for it initially.  It was in fact brought to him by producer Claudio Argento who developed the story with screenwriter Roberto Leoni, the latter inspired by his time spent working in the library of a psychiatric hospital where he had first hand contact with those suffering from debilitating mental illness.  This may seem like a place of tragedy for such a concept to emerge, but Leoni discovered something unexpected and uplifting in his time spent there, coming across people who had violent thoughts yet were able to suppress them.  When Argento and Leoni then contacted and met with Jodorowsky, (who both wisely considered to be the best man for the job), something serendipitous occurred.  While working as a cartoonist from his long downtime between projects, (Santa Sangre would be his first movie in nearly a decade), Jodorowsky has claimed to have met the infamous Mexican serial killer Gregorio Cárdenas Hernández by chance, learning that the former murderer had become fully rehabilitated and was living as a free man with a family and a law degree.  Thus a spark was fired, and Jodorowsky was able to contribute his own concepts to Leoni's story, concepts which ran parallel in taking a sympathetic approach to someone committing heinous acts.

 

Jodorowsky: A man inspired.

Having worked with his famous brother Dario consistently, Argento was sticking with what he knew, wanting to make a movie where a lot of women were brutally murdered on screen.  He settled for only two, as well as a musclebound man in drag, but more on that later.  Despite Argento having more of an exploitative agenda, Leoni and Jodorowsky's collaborative finished screenplay offered up something that steered clear of mere misogynistic violence.  It instead went into psychological terrain while humanizing the perpetrator of such violence, which was ideally suited to Jodorowsky's penchant for exploring the unconscious and putting an endless stream of wacky and, (if need be), controversial images on screen.

 

In Santa Sangre, we get a Folk Catholic cult who worships an armless girl that was raped and murdered while baptizing themselves in a pool of sacred blood.  We get an elaborate funeral procession for an elephant which is ritualistically dumped into a quarry where hundreds of local scavengers excitingly rip apart the carcass for its meat.  We get an overweight, drunkard, adulterer, hypnotist knife-thrower who gets sulfuric acid poured on his genitals by his wife when caught in the act with a fully tattooed woman, at which point he slices off the arms of said wife before slitting his throat in full view of his now permanently traumatized son.  We get a handful of people with down syndrome who snort cocaine, dance with cross-dressing prostitutes, and then party with an overweight prostitute.  We get our main character providing the arms for his now armless mother, slipping into her wardrobe behind her and doing everything from performing, to crocheting, to playing the piano, to eating breakfast, to murdering women.  We get our main character dressing up as the Invisible Man in his thwarted attempts to create a potion to actually turn into the Invisible Man.  We get our main character burying his victims while delicately covering them with white paint.  We get our main character luring a male wrestler with fake tits who is supposed to be a woman into a solo performance before attacking him/her.  We get clowns and a dwarf who spontaneously show up whenever our main character manifests them.  We get a giant python that emerges out of our main character's pants when he is aroused.

 

We also get Axel Cristóbal Jodorowsky doing whatever the hell he is doing here.

As one could gather from such an assortment of head-scratching set pieces, there are even more to be found in Santa Sangre.  This is Jodorowsky's M.O. after all, his former cult films Fando y Lis, El Topo, and The Holy Mountain each littered with unforgettable images that are equal parts provocative, absurd, off-color, disturbing, insane, and hilarious.  Yet comparatively, Santa Sangre is a more straightforward movie in Jodorowsky's oeuvre up until this point, not counting his 1980 film Tusk which was made for children and had a noticeable lack of castration, blasphemy, gender ambiguous characters, murder, and nudity.  Narratively, we can easily follow Jodorowsky and Leoni's script and even guess the twist ending since the allusions to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and the improbability of many instances are readily apparent throughout.  In other words, it utilizes the "unreliable narrator" trope, almost exclusively showing us what our disturbed protagonist Fénix sees and experiences as opposed to what everyone that he actually encounters is experiencing.

 

As far as that disturbed protagonist is concerned, Fénix is portrayed by Jodorowsky's son Axel, the director's other sons Adán and Teo also appearing.  While Teo merely has a minor role as a pimp, Adán gets significant screen time as Fénix as a child, and both brothers look nearly identical to each other.  As opposed to almost every film which does not have the luxury of casting siblings as younger and older versions of the same character, Santa Sangre does, and it provides the movie with an eerie sense of believably that clashes wonderfully with how otherwise surreal and expressive the rest of it is.  Outrageous stuff may be happening in nearly every scene, but the casting makes it seem as if Jodorowsky was able to shoot the first act at one point in time, and then was able to wait about twenty years to shoot the rest.  Yet also consider that other characters from both timelines appear and seem to have not aged, which signifies to the audience that they may or many not exist in the "real" world and instead only in the tortured world of Fénix', something that proves to be all too true by the end.

 

A (bizarre) family affair.

This is a crucial element to psychological horror in general, providing images and scenes that disrupt the audience's expectations about how tangible reality works, throwing into question everything that we are seeing.  It is a surrealist tactic of course, and Jodorowsky being a surrealist knows how to offset the viewer as good if not better than most.  In Santa Sangre, he does this while treating his subjects with a level of compassion, and not just because it is his own offspring that we are seeing on screen.  Fénix is a tragic character across the board, one who was brought up in the circus life and treated brutally by both of his parents, (Guy Stockwell and Blanca Guerra, respectively), one who murdered the other before murdering himself all within eye-site of the young magician.  He is largely neglected by parents, painfully tattooed by his father in order to graduate and "become a man" and then beaten and made to worship the armless girl by his mother, a mother who has an open disdain for the father of her child and seems to only be sticking around due to said father's ability to hypnotize her.  Most of these dysfunctional family dynamics are deliberately left vague as the first act is more concerned with providing us with mere crucial plot points to get to the insinuating tragedy that sets Fénix off on his harrowing arc as a young man.

 

Providing some details is important, but providing ALL of the details as to how Fénix comes to such a fate is not a necessity.  After all, this is a feature-length movie, not a novel or a twelve-part miniseries.  Yet answering all of the "whys" is not something that Jodorowsky is interested in in the first place.  In the commentary track for Santa Sangre, journalist Alan Jones repeatedly tries to get the artist to open up in order to provide some rhyme and reason for any number of moments within the film.  Paraphrasing, Jodorowsky hilariously starts to fire back at him after awhile, saying things like "Why why why. Why?  Because I like it" or "Because that's what it is".  One could say that Jones should know better than in asking a surrealist to explain themselves, but he takes it in stride and after all, Jodorowsky himself went into considerable detail on his earlier commentary tracks for his other films, cluing us in on the specific symbolism that he utilized.  So it is not that ridiculous for Jones to question him as to the, well, ridiculousness of the work.  Of course sometimes though, the "whys" are not important, and in fact having the artist provide all of the justifications for things only robs the viewer of doing the work themselves.

 

And one has their work cut out for themselves here.

Also and as stated, Santa Sangre is a different experience than Fando y Lis, El Topo, and The Holy Mountain.  Jodorowsky said that up until this point, he had never dealt with human emotions in his films, thus Santa Sangre was his attempt to explore such things.  His earlier movies were more like challenging and symbolic acid trips, done, (by Jodorowsky's own admission), by a man who was ambitious with his own pretensions.  Various Eastern philosophical influences were at the crust of Fando y Lis, El Topo and The Holy Mountain, each movie dealing with spiritual enlightenment as their character's arcs had a forward momentum towards ascension.  We were not made to feel so much for the people on screen in these films; they instead served more of a symbolic purpose for the overall agenda to defy conventions and expand minds.

 

One must also remember that Jodorowsky is an absurdist as much as he is anything.  For almost a century now he has made it a point to say and do outrageous things to get people talking about him and his projects, and he does this while being a kooky goofball, no matter how eyebrow raising his statements are or how eyebrow raising his work is.  “Most directors make films with their eyes; I make films with my testicles," “I was raping Frank Herbert but with love," “God does not exist, God is not good. All that awaits us is the cat who will urinate on our grave," etc.  There is such an absurdist stream running through Santa Sangre that is unmistakable, which is to say that the movie is not accidentally funny simply because of its eccentric nature.  The moments that are impossible NOT to chuckle at are there by design.  This aligns it with Jodorowsky's agenda to explore human emotions, since laughter is one of the most pleasurable and universal emotions that we all experience.  “Life is a mixing of all kind of things: comedy and tragedy going together," another of his quotes that sums this up accordingly.

 

Comedy and tragedy, together indeed.

One can take a cynical look at the man and just write him off as a wacky eccentric, but there are way more quotes from him that affirm his optimism, his ambition, his belief in the power of art to change people and in effect change the world.  “Have a dream. Fight to do a dream. Don’t ask if it is possible to do something or if not possible. Try to do it!”, “Words don’t heal. Art heals!”, “Art gives to you a new conception of reality, opens your mind, opens your heart, opens your desire of action.”, etc.  So along with all of the absurdity is an agenda to create something uplifting, and in the case of Santa Sangre, Jodorowsky does this by presenting a scenario where a killer can be redeemed, where a killer can evoke sympathy even more than his victims, where a killer's tragedy can be alchemized into something beautiful.

 

Fénix is possessed by his mother's all-consuming spirit, broken off from reality and living in his own warped version of it where anything that arouses him and therefor challenges her must be brutally slain.  He provides his mother's hands, reaping her revenge or reaping what he perceives to be her revenge based on what he witnessed when he was a wee lad.  It is only through the one innocent person from his past entering his life again that he is able to break free.  The mute Alma is that person, portrayed as an adult by the actual hearing-impaired actor Sabrina Dennison.  She has likewise lived a troubled existence post her and Fénix's circus upbringing, being prostituted by her mother, the tattooed lady from all those years ago who provided the straw that broke the camel's back between Fénix' parent's dysfunction.  Once Alma is freed from her mother by Fénix murdering her in his possessed state, the two are eventually reunited, their union shattering the spell that his mother has had on him the whole time.

 

Whole lotta bird symbolism up in this movie.

 

After so much chaos and so much craziness, Santa Sangre ends as a lovely allegory of atonement.  When Fénix and Alma emerge from him being able to finally "kill" the influence of his mother and regain his own sense of self for the first time in his life, the police are waiting there to apprehend him.  Fénix will be captured and he will be punished for his crimes, a sense of justice will be attained.  Yet what does Fénix do when he is told to put up his hands in surrender?  He slowly looks at them in comprehension that at long last, yes, they are indeed HIS hands and not his mothers.  He smiles as he begins to lift them, content, at peace, and optimistic.  The story is over, the camera pulls back, the credits roll, and the audience is left dealing with a barrage of emotions, human emotions just as Jodorowsky intended to examine.

 

It is one thing to just make a film where a bunch of insane things happen that run the gamut between shocking, sickening, strange, and silly.  There can be no rhyme or reason to such things and one can still get a reaction out of an audience by using them.  With Jodorowsky though, there is always a reason.  Whether it is with the endless tarot references in The Holy Mountain or the Judeo-Christian arc in El Topo, Jodorowsky is exploring the human experience and reaching for something grand.  He does it with shock tactics to be sure since his small filmography is loaded with more unforgettable, unusual, and taboo-breaking images than most movie-makers would deliver with dozens more works under their belts.  Yet when Jodorowsky finally does get around to making a film, he does not fuck around.  Santa Sangre hits us on a handful of levels, presenting a full journey of one man overcoming the trauma of his childhood.  The road to get there is full of abnormalities, full of images from a warped mind, (both Jodorowsky's warped mind and that of his protagonist Fénix), full of moments so ridiculous that we can giggle in perverse enjoyment over them.  The film is a thing of beauty though, a masterwork from a French-Chilean renaissance man with ambition to change the world, an ambition that we can all applaud.

 

No matter who's hands are applauding.

Suspiria

SUSPIRIA

(1977)

Dir - Dario Argento

Overall: GREAT

The finest Italian horror film of all time both defines many of the tropes of European genre cinema for its era while also forgoing thematic analysis.  Suspiria is not so much a movie that is "about" something as much as it is simply a movie for movie's sake.  It is a visceral experience that exists wholly within the realm of the cinematic, something where sound and visuals entwine in perfect harmony to create ninety-eight minutes of vibrant nightmare fuel.  There is a story going on in Suspiria of course, but as is the case with much Italian cinema from the 1970s, the story is in service to what it sounds and looks like.  Conventionally speaking, movies work the other way around, where a story is present and then decisions are made in how to tell that story.  For Dario Argento and his crew, this was likely no different in conception, but the results consistently eschew standard narrative immersion in place of a purely cinematic immersion.

 

This was Argento's sixth feature from behind the lens in nearly as many years, Dario having been born into the movie-making industry as his father was a producer and his mother a fashion designer.  Of course much has been said about how much of an Alfred Hitchcock fan Argento was and is, and one only needs to take a cursory glance at any of his film's to see the influence of the Master of Suspense.  So as a movie fan who came up in the industry, it makes sense that Argento's work is always designed in a way where things like logic and plot are secondary to the film's overall aesthetic.  These are movies made by someone who loves movies, crafting them in a way where they work as sensory experiences to be seen in glorious detail on a big screen and with a bitching sound system where the audio and the visuals hold sway.  There is no movie in Argento's filmography where this is more paramount, (and relentlessly so), than Suspiria.

 

"Relentless" being a key word.

After casting her as the co-lead in his previous film Deep Red, Argento and actor/screenwriter Daria Nicolodi became a couple and in turn collaborated on the follow-up.  It has been said that Nicolodi was responsible for pushing Argento into supernatural horror and away from the giallo which he had helped popularize and had much success with, and while there may be credence to this claim, Argento was at a point where a change in genre was welcome anyway.  After his Animal Trilogy of giallos opened his career, he had already tried to movie away from such material with the 1973 comedy The Five Days, a film that failed at the box office and quickly made him return to the giallo with his tail between his legs.  Thankfully he one-upped himself with that giallo, Deep Red being arguably the best of them and a high watermark for the filmmaker.  The stage was therefor set, either to continue staying in his lane with another black-gloved Italian slasher, or to try again and pivot into material that he had yet to cover.

 

Enter Nicolodi's influence where the resulting Suspiria combined her fascination with fairy tales and an alleged anecdote from her grandmother about fleeing a piano academy in fear of the teachers practicing witchcraft, all with Argento's interest in concepts found in Thomas De Quincey's 1845 essay Suspiria de Profundis, that of a European "Magic Triangle" intersection of Germany, France, and Switzerland where three Sorrows exist, ala the Greek fables of three Graces and three Fates.  These Sorrows would be "Mater Lacrymarum, Our Lady of Tears", "Mater Tenebrarum, Our Lady of Darkness", and "Mater Suspiriorum, Our Lady of Sighs", the latter being chosen as the big baddie in the film.

 

A big baddie who snores a lot apparently.

In contradiction to the idea that the narrative is an afterthought here, this may seem like a lot of material to be mined into a multilayered story about young coming-of-age women who face off against ancient evil forces that have been holding sway over a specific geographical location, causing mischief for centuries that could be attributed to all kinds of European turmoil.  While some of this may technically be what happens in Suspiria, you have to make leaps to these conclusions which Argento does not bother alluding to much.  The bare bones plot of Suzy Bannion arriving in a foreign country and uncovering a creepy mystery as to what her female dance instructors are up to is all there, but we are never given details as to any profound significance therein.  Instead, Argento hits us with style over substance right out of the gate, only letting up for a couple of necessary pauses so that the audience can catch their breath, settle their heart rate, and get some exposition until the next sensory explosion of primal colors and Goblin's wailing soundtrack hits again.

 

Suspiria is about those sensory explosions, and arguably ONLY about those sensory explosions.  This is in turn a master stroke because once again, we can look at the trope of European and specifically Italian genre movies from the day being more about set pieces than ironclad narrative cohesion.  People can watch Suspiria, the work of Lucio Fulci, some of the more ridiculous Spaghetti Westerns, or pick any giallo from the 1970s and they can laugh at how many plot points do not pass the icebox test.  Passing such a test is never the point though, and it is certainly not the point in Suspiria, but what works so well here is the type of otherworldly realm that it exists in.  By rooting the movie squarely in the supernatural, every outlandish and horrifying thing that happens needs no tangible explanation.  In fact if it had such an explanation, the nightmare illusion would be shattered, just like when you are having such a nightmare and realize that you are dreaming, at which point you wake up and the fun is all over.

 

And who would want to spoil this woman's fun?

Argento keeps that fun going throughout the movie, largely by throwing one inexplicable scene at us after the next.  We get yellow eyes and a hairy monster hand emerging from a window three stories up, a woman getting her still-beating heart stabbed on some type of scaffolding or balcony that is never shown to us, her friend screaming and banging on doors that no living soul answers as if she is the one being murdered, a blind man getting swooped down upon by some invisible force only for his trusted seeing-eye dog to lurch at him and rip his throat open, maggots descending from the ceiling and coming from a room-temperature attic where someone inexplicably was keeping raw meat, the main witch who is hidden throughout the whole film inexplicably deciding to sleep just on the other side of a flimsy sheet when the entire school is huddled together in the dance hall, a room brimful of wire, door handles placed at eye level, and of course impossible blue, red, or green color schemes nearly everywhere.

 

Even the opening where Jessica Harper leaves the Munich-Riem Airport and ventures into a pitch-black stormy night, we are already presented with vibrant colors intruding upon an otherwise actual location.  Also, the rude cab driver that she frantically flags down seems off to say the least, a man who refuses to help her with her luggage, has no idea where she insists on going at first, and then ignores her questions throughout their ride, only coldly staring at her when he has to.  All the while, the Black Forest in Freiburg, Germany is ominously shown outside like a series of prison walls, engulfing the cab while Goblin's score does half if not more than half of the mood setting until and during our first yet not last hilariously heightened murder sequence.

 

Imagine driving through here on any night while listening to any part of Goblin's soundtrack and NOT shitting your pants.

Which of course brings us to Goblin, the Italian prog band that collaborates with Argento for the second time here.  Whereas their previous score for Deep Red was full of catchy and stylish rock tunes done in a conventional band setting, their Suspiria score is a beast like no other.  Argento said to have worked closely with the group in concocting it, the music being finished before filming even began and apparently played on set at high volume to induce the correct atmosphere for the cast.  To say that this movie has the best soundtrack out of any in the horror genre is something that can barely be debated.  John Carpenter does a bang-up job in Halloween, Bernard Herrmann composed the most instantly recognizable sting during the shower scene in Psycho, (equal to John William's Jaws theme of course), but what Goblin does here is singular.  No horror movie is as naked without its music than Suspiria is, to the point where it is impossible to imagine the outlandish visuals without the equally outlandish sounds.

 

Music is often problematic in movies, dictating emotions to the audience that undercut a level of verisimilitude that would otherwise be achieved if we witnessed the drama unfolding on screen in a sober context.  Yet again, because Suspiria is not going for verisimilitude in the slightest, it only makes sense for the soundtrack to be as all encompassing as it is.  This is NOT a sober film.  This is a film to be swallowed up by.  At regular intervals, Argento gives us a break from Goblin's uncanny mixture of eerie synthesizers, tribal drums, "Witch!" screams, wailing vocals, unintelligible whispered gibberish, and all kinds of avant-garde noise, but the cacophony of sound always comes back, hounding us into a stupor where the creep-factor is intoxicating.  It often times seems as if the characters are hearing the same pummeling noises that we are, which would only make sense in a universe where rooms change to primal colors, and dogs, maggots, hairy arms, and wire rooms attack at a moment's notice.

 

Warning: men in picture are far more terrifying than they look.

As stated, this is style over substance, more overtly than even usual for Dario Argento who has made a career out of such tactics.  It is amazing to see what he accomplishes here at the peak of his powers and with a significant budget at his disposal.  Just compare it to any of his films from the last several decades to see the difference merely in the presentation.  When stuck with limited shooting schedules and funds, Argento regular forgoes flashy camera setups and ingenious shot construction out of necessity, let alone indulging in any kind of wild set or costume designs.  That is why his later movies often feature heightened performances instead, perhaps to compensate for the lack of visual flair since his scripts are routinely threadbare enough that other components require exaggeration to give his films SOMETHING to elevate them.  While Alida Valli chomps at the scenery a bit in Suspiria as the cold and butch dance instructor, and the English dubbing in these movies always renders the performances jarring at best, unintentionally silly at worst, most of the portrayals come off as level-headed.  This provides the necessary contrast to how exaggerated the film looks and sounds.  If EVERYTHING was cranked up to eleven, it would come off as ridiculous instead of ridiculous AND atmospheric.

 

Suspiria therefor represents Argento at his best, in a transitional phase where he had the clout and success behind him to take a chance with the financial backing to capture lightning in a bottle.  Every frame of the movie is visually stunning; even the "normal" ones where characters are merely sitting around are done so in loudly decorated rooms where the wallpaper and set design is as eye-catching as any of the bright red blood splatter.  Shit, even when shooting outside in broad daylight at the BMW Headquarters for a young and dashing Udo Kier cameo, Argento stages elaborate camera angles, some way high up looking down at the characters as if they are insect-size, some low angle closeups, zooms, and reflection images, including one where the director can be seen watching the acting unfold.  Yet just like the lack of who, why, what, and where all syncing up perfectly under a microscope, the film's imperfections enhance the unique, strange, and surreal nature of what we are watching and hearing.  There are other genre films the indulge in nightmare logic with elaborate camera set ups, over the top death sequences, and memorable music, but none of them are as masterfully aligned as Suspiria.  Argento himself would never top it, (never come close in fact), but considering that no one else has either, it would be asinine to expect him to.

 

Go right ahead Mr. Argento, you have earned the right to make Dracula 3D.

1990s Italian Horror Part Six

METAMORPHOSIS
(1990)
Dir - George Eastman
Overall: MEH

The second of only two directorial efforts from actor George Eastman/Luigi Montefiori, Metamorphosis, (Regenerator, Re-Animator 2), is your typical shot-in-America/Italian conglomerate of better and more professionally done genre offerings. Namely, this one takes a little bit of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, David Cronenberg's The Fly, Ken Russell's Altered States, and a dash of Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator into a cliche-ridden plot where a dashing university scientist is hellbent on completing his genetics-tweaking experiments no matter how many of his crotchety superiors try to shut him down.  Everyone on screen takes the material seriously, giving it a sincere tone that of course jives awkwardly with the minuscule budget and how dopey the material is.  This is the type of story that by the turn of the 90s should have been played for laughs, but there is no intentional humor to be found.  There are a handful of "bad movie" chuckles scattered around though, and the final set piece where the culmination of Gene LeBrock's transformation is finally unveiled is so embarrassingly stupid that it needs to be seen to be believed.

 

NOTTE PROFONDA

(1991)

Dir - Fabio Salerno

Overall: MEH

 

After cranking out home movies for a decade, Italian DIY filmmaker Fabio Salerno made his only feature-length one Notte profonda, (Deep Night), since his follow-up and final work L'altra dimensione was merely three shorts cobbled together.  This is a commendable zero dollar production, if only in a practical sense.  Shot on 16 mm in what looks like a single apartment, Salerno pulls off some nifty special effects like a claymation key dissolving, a guy's face melting, another face appearing out of a wall, people getting dragged across the floor by a noose, and various bold colors to help illuminate things in proper otherworldly Mario Bava fashion.  The story's grasp does not come anywhere near matching the non-existent budget or Salerno's modest talents from behind the lens, plus the nightmarish set pieces are few and far between, which makes all sixty-eight minutes feel much longer.  Still, Salerno gets an A for effort and with proper financing and an experienced director, something could have been made out of such a story where a comic book artist coming across a tiny pyramid that unlocks a demon dimension, (or something).

 

CREATURES FROM THE ABYSS
(1994)
Dir - Alvaro Passeri
Overall: WOOF
 
Special effects man-turned director Alvaro Passeri takes his first stab behind the lens with the hare-brained monster romp Creatures from the Abyss, (Plankton).  Filmed in Miami, Florida with a cast of nobodies who are dubbed as terribly as you would imagine, it has some bikini babes, an insufferable mimbo, and a nerd (because he wears glasses and makes accurate scientific guesses since his character read the script), who come across an abandoned yacht with human possessing sea creatures or something.  These unlikable saps do intelligent things like willingly split up, taste stuff in jars that are in a lab, get excited about selling all of the presumed drugs that are on board, eat the weird fish that they find, and plan to throw orgies on the ghost ship instead of being concerned with why it is a ghost ship in the first place.  It takes until the forty-two minute mark until we get a hilariously stupid aquatic critter attack, and being made by a guy whose career was in visual effects work, the results here are on par with James Nguyen's Birdemic.  Thankfully, we eventually get a memorable sex scene where the horny scumbag turns into a slimy fish monster in mid-orgasmic thrust.  There are other bizarre details like a flirty female computer voice that seems to run various high-tech bathroom appliances as if it is under the influence of poltergeists, but the tone is all over the place, the dialog is atrocious, and the plot is stupid enough to constitute as a hate crime.

1990s Italian Horror Part Five

THE CRAWLERS

(1991)

Dir - Fabrizio Laurenti/Joe D'Amato

Overall: WOOF

Filmed in the same Utah town as Claudio Fragasso's infamous Troll 2 and serving as yet another unofficial Italian/American installment to a series of films that have nothing to do with each other, The Crawlers, (Troll 3, Creepers, Contamination .7), is a killer tree movie that meanders around too much to keep its schlock straight.  A town is besieged by radioactive foliage, but of course the schlubby police force is too lazy to get out of their chairs to deal with it, let alone believe it is even happening.  At least that is our first assumption since Vince O'Neil's fluffy sheriff also tells a bunch of young adults that they must be on drugs when they rush in to report a dead body.  As it turns out, he is probably in on the toxic waste dumping conspiracy, either that or the script is too hackneyed to understand what a cop's bare minimum duties are.  Chalk it up to an Italians-doing-American thing then.  The ADR dubbing is distractingly bad at best, (Though when is it not?), and close to nothing exciting happens until about an hour in when some tree roots stab through the stupid sheriff's fat stupid face.  Everywhere else, it is just meandering drama, dim-witted characters, and a plot that tries and fails to make the unexciting exciting.

L'ALTRA DIMENSIONE

(1992)

Dir - Fabio Salerno

Overall: MEH

The final full-length of sorts from underground filmmaker Fabio Salerno was L'Altra dimensione, (The Other Dimension); an anthology of three shorts whose only narrative through-line is that they each focus on a loser with an unhealthy attachment to a woman, to say the least.  "Delirium" features a guy who decides that the only way to cure his depression after his girlfriend dumps him is to drug her and rape her, the second "Mortal Instinct" has someone who gets his female obsession to live with him by way of occult magic, and the third and longest "Eros and Thanatos" features another hopeless romantic who feels that the best course of action after his girlfriend's suicide is to eat her corpse over several days.  All shot on grainy Super 8 film with non actors in presumably the apartments of Salerno and his friends, this is textbook, no budget DIY movie-making.  The visuals are mostly as ugly as the subject matter, but Salerno pulls off some garish make-up effects and even some bold color gels to enhance the dreary nightmare vibe that he is going for.  It is still bottom-barrel stuff that is horrendously slow and difficult to stay invested in, but the low-key tone is appreciated, plus it makes for some fringe exploitation that is not good, but is at least singular.

 

MOZART È UN ASSASSINO

(1999)

Dir - Sergio Martino

Overall: MEH

The to-date final giallo from Sergio Martino, Mozart è un assassino, (Mozart Is a Murderer), goes through all of the motifs of a clandestine masked killer making threatening phone calls and leaving deliberate clues, pointing at red herrings left and right along the way.  On the one hand, the made-for-TV presentation neuters the sleaze since there is no nudity and the bloodshed is less egregious than what was allowed in the genre's heyday, but we still have exploitative elements like sex scenes, drug dealing, and pedophilia, so it is hardly a PG-rated affair.  Despite the late 90s low-budget aesthetic which is not conducive to the more flashy cinematic style that Martino had used when he made his most famous giallos, he and Francesco Contaldo's script still manages to keep the momentum going for the first two acts.  After a couple of bodies pile up and detective Enzo Decaro gets taken off the case and his therapist girlfriend Daniela Scarlatti finds out that she is pregnant, the pacing lulls and leads way to a far-fetched finish where the killer manages to easily do away with a slew of armed guards yet has a clumsy time finishing off one last would-be female victim.

1980s Italian Horror Part Fourteen

NOTHING UNDERNEATH

(1985)

Dir - Carlo Vanzina

Overall: MEH

 

Interestingly, the writer/director team of Enrico and Carlo Vanzina deliberately stylized Nothing Underneath, (Sotto il vestito niente, Pele nua, Où est passée Jessica, Modelmordene, The Last Shot, Mannekiinimurhaaja), as a Brian de Palma-esque giallo, which was a genre that de Palma himself adapted a handful of times across the Atlantic.  Bringing it back to home base, the film takes place in Milan, concerns a pair of psychically connected siblings, has plenty of T&A, and revolves around the fashion industry where a guy witnesses his sister being murdered via supernatural mental images and then travels to discover the killer.  Donald Pleasence also shows up to eat spaghetti at a Wendy's and talk in an Italian accent as the head police inspector, so he at least interjects some life into an otherwise pedestrian offering.  The movie was originally to be an adaptation of Paolo Pietroni's novel of the same name, (with famed filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni of all people at the helm), but it eventually fell into the Vanzina brother's hands, with screenwriter Franco Ferrini allegedly reconfiguring the script from scratch.  In any event, it disguises its exploitative nature to a point, but all of the elements are merely competently rehashed, so it has little going for it in the end.

 

TOO BEAUTIFUL TO DIE

(1988)

Dir - Dario Piana

Overall: MEH

The full-length debut from TV commercial director Dario Piana, Too Beautiful to Die, (Sotto il vestito niente II), lumped itself in with Carlo Vanzina's 1985's erotic thriller Nothing Underneath, but like many Italian films which were haphazardly thrown into a franchise after the fact, (and in this case, a franchise that does not exist), it bares little resemblance to Vanzina's aforementioned giallo.  It still revolves around the fashion industry and has a police inspector trying to track down the killer, but countless other Euro slashers adhered to a similar jumping off point going all the way back to Mario Bava's Blood and Black Lace.  The details here are lazily fleshed out, as if Piana and his co-screenwriters were just going on autopilot and throwing in whatever merely serviceable plot nonsense they could in order to tie together one slow montage after the other.  On that note, the film is plenty stylish, featuring wet models in Max Max/Rollerball gear doing heaven knows what while the bad guy goes around slicing people up with a nifty medieval-styled device.  Nudity, some steamy saxophone music, flashy colors, and dark warehouses provide the alluring scenery, (also a guy plays an Atari-styled porno game on his computer at one point), but the story is instantly forgettable, the dubbing of course sucks, and the kill scenes are both lame and infrequent.

ARABELLA BLACK ANGEL

(1989)

Dir - Stelvio Massi

Overall: WOOF

To sum up what kind of giallo Stelvio Massi/Max Steel's Arabella Black Angel, (Arabella l'angelo nero), is, a woman willingly goes into a castle with S&M practitioners having sex, she gets yelled at for not charging money like the rest of them do, then a cop bends her over her car and asks her "Didn't anyone ever tell you its illegal to be a whore in this country?', followed by said cop raping her on said car.  Oh, and he rapes her again within the next ten minutes and then gets killed.  The proceeding hour and some change of this gutter-level Euro-sleaze continues in a similar vein where naked women cry while being degraded in some capacity, and then someone keeps easily stabbing people to death with a pair of scissors.  Sometimes the nakedness and the fornication is consensual, but the murder, (and particularly the genital mutilation), naturally never is.  Who any of these people are and why they are all either assholes or emotionally and physically battered women does not seem to be of any importance.  Going through the debauchery motions in the laziest manner possible does seem to be of importance.  Massi had a steady body of exploitation on his resume at this point and had also been a cinematographer on a hefty amount of equally-to-less gaudy movies, but this would be a bottom-barrel entry on anyone's filmography.

1980s Italian Horror Part Thirteen

THE SCORPION WITH TWO TAILS

(1982)

Dir - Sergio Martino

Overall: WOOF

Possibly the worst directorial effort from Sergio Martino, The Scorpion with Two Tails, (Assassinio al cimitero etrusco, Murder in the Etruscan Cemetery), was his final entry in supernatural horror, though he continued to work prolifically in other genres for the next several decades.  Perhaps partially inspired by Raiders of the Lost Arc which offered up a slew of similar temple/lost treasure adventures on both sides of the Atlantic, this France/Italian co-production was initially set to be an eight-part television serial yet was mercifully cut down to a still grueling ninety-eight minutes.  Lucio Fulci collaborator Fabio Frizzi delivers some hooky if incessant music, screenwriters Dardano Sacchetti and Ernesto Gastaldi had plenty of similar credits on their resume, plus Euro-trash regulars Claudio Cassinelli, Paolo Malco, and John Saxon, (in a minor capacity), are all present.  Even with such sure-fire personnel and arguably Italy's second best giallo filmmaker Martino behind the lens, the results are snore-inducing crap.  People get murdered by having their heads turned around backwards, maggots show up a lot, there is a well-decorated tomb, Elvire Audray's millionaire dad has a side hustle selling heroin, and characters that never make an impression just prattle on with each other until we reach some kind of conclusion involving a double-cross.

 

DAGGER EYES

(1982)

Dir - Carlo Vanzina

Overall: MEH

The sibling duo of Enrico and Carlo Vanzina channeled Jean-Jacques Beineix's 1981 cinéma du look thriller Diva with their own ambitious giallo variant Dagger Eyes, (Mystère, Murder Near Perfect).  Broken up into chapters and scoring Bond girl Carole Bouquet in the lead as a high-end, femme fatale lady of the evening, it adheres to long established film noir tropes as much as it does "black gloved killers with inventive means of murdering people" ones.  The dialog is snappy and most of the characters glide through things with a cool-as-a-cucumber charm that bypasses the type of melodramatic silliness that most Euro exploitation adheres to.  Even the disco-heavy score by Armando Trovajoli is less tacky than it should be, helping to enhance a smooth and erotic tale of double-crossing characters who adhere to their own rules.  Things are more interesting in the first act where we spend a significant amount of time with Bouquet and her classy call girl lifestyle, but the rudimentary plot runs out of momentum even before we reach a rushed and disappointing finale.  Apparently, the Vanzina brothers wanted to shoot a more downtrodden ending, but producers insisted on an uplifting one which is handled in a clumsy manner at best.

 

RATMAN

(1988)

Dir - Giuliano Carnimeo

Overall: MEH

 

The penultimate film from director Giuliano Carnimeo, Ratman, (Quella villa in fondo al parco), is a typical exploitation snooze-fest, one that is punctuated by some nasty kills and peppered with a cornball synth musical score by Stefano Mainetti.  This was one of only three movies to feature two-foot, four-inch tall Dominican actor Nelson de la Rosa, who would more famously show up as Marlon Brando's prop lackey in the infamous The Island of Dr. Moreau from 1996.  As the title creature who was created by Pepito Guerra's scientist by crossing rodent semen with a monkey because dumb, Rosa makes few appearance, squeaking, leaping, and clawing away at hapless individuals who cross his path.  There is a little T&A to appease sleaze aficionados and Euro-horror fans will recognize a few of the faces that are on board, but Carnimeo's direction is lifeless and Roberto Girometti's cinematography leaves just as much to de desired.  The first two acts are sluggish enough with Janet Ågren going into morgues only to try and convince the police that the dead ratman victims are not her sister, but it eventually settles into a just as lackluster slasher framework where Eva Grimaldi tries to fend off her tiny mutant attacker.  At least the final closing credit tag is a fun and campy note to go out on.

1980s Umberto Lenzi Part Three

HITCHER IN THE DARK

(1989)

Overall: WOOF

A combination of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, The Collector, plus some other stuff, Hitcher in the Dark, (Paura nel buio), throws a lot of unpleasant cliches into a blender and serves them up equally unpleasantly.  One of five feature length movies from director Umberto Lenzi that was released in 1989, this one concerns an odious trust fund brat with disgusting mommy issues who drives around the Florida coast in his rich daddy's RV, picking up female hitchhikers, being an asshole to them, smacking them around, and then murdering them when they either talk back too much, try to escape, have too many sexual partners in their past, or fail to look enough like his mother who he wants to have sex with.  Playing such a heartthrob is baby-faced Joe Balogh, who has has all of the charisma of someone that you want to endlessly punch in the mouth.  So in other words, he is a terrible villain, yet not terrible in the way that makes him the last bit captivating.  Josie Bissett of all people got her break here, but any fans of Melrose Place would be wise to skip such an abysmal affair, unless you want to watch her pose naked while drugged and barely try to get away from a murderous, rapist scumbag for ninety-odd minutes.

 

THE HOUSE OF WITCHCRAFT

(1989)

Overall: MEH

In 1989, both Lucio Fulci and Umberto Lenzi delivered two films each as part of a television series Le case maledette, (Doomed Houses, The Houses of Doom), all of which were apparently shelved due to their violence level not being on par with TV audience acceptability.  The House of Witchcraft, (La casa del sortilegio), was the third in production order, shot within four weeks like the other installments and similarly set in an ominous abode where supernatural things are taking place.  In this instance, said house is one that Andy J. Forest's character has dreams about, where a wicked old witch is running around murdering people; a witch played by Maria Cuman Quasimodo who looks like a live action version of a Halloween decoration.  The framework is dull, sticking to characters prattling on with cliched dialog exchanges that are not even necessary in order for the audience to follow what is going on.  Also, it may as well be a slasher movie due to how predictable all of the victim's murders are, plus the fact that Quasimodo simply comes at everyone with a knife after sometimes subtly tricking them with occult magical powers.  Lenzi's direction seems uninspired, even with some wind, lighting, fog, severed heads in a cauldron, a spontaneous snow storm in a basement, and a maggot-covered grim reaper thrown in to break up a chatty and stock plot.

HOUSE OF LOST SOULS

(1989)

Overall: MEH

With a premise that could not be less unique, (a bunch of young people driving through the country and then have to stop at an abandoned hotel full of ghosts because of a blocked highway), Umberto Lenzi's second television film of 1989 House of Lost Souls, (La casa delle anime erranti), goes through the motions as much as any of the other entries in the Le case maledette, (Doomed Houses, The Houses of Doom), series, let alone any low-budget Italian genre export in general.  Goblin's Claudio Simonetti delivers a typically snappy keyboard score, characters unnecessarily put themselves in harm's way of the supernatural like a bunch of idiots who have never seen a horror movie, cars fail to start, hysterical women get smacked around and gaslit by men, there is a creepy little kid, heads get chopped off in a manner that is actually relevant to the malevolent specter's backstory, and the set pieces are merely a random assortment of "scary" things on paper that seem to have been plucked out of a hat.  Its formulaic nature can either be seen as lazy and safe or lazy and safe and ergo fun for Euro-trash fans that return to such films with their expectations in proper check.  Plus, at least Lenzi keeps the pace up as to not make it an insulting cliche-fest, though cliche-fest it certainly still is.

1980s Umberto Lenzi Part Two

GHOSTHOUSE
(1988)
Overall: MEH

Whereas foreign producers had attached the "La Casa" title onto Sam Raimi's first two Evil Dead films for non-American markets, Ghosthouse, (La casa 3 - Ghosthouse), was the first actual Italian movie to get the moniker, even though it was an Italian movie shot in Massachusetts.  Written and directed by Umberto Lenzi as a typical, (and most of all, nonsensical), haunted house yarn, it has many of the hallmarks of low-budget Euro-horror from the 1970s and 80s.  This includes a memorable and persistent score that leans heavy on a genuinely disturbing, gibberish nursery rhyme ditty, laughably incompetent performances, bizarre set pieces, and a story line that makes no attempts at having any logical footing.  Though the middle act drags, things start off strong where a creepy kid and her creepy clown doll inexplicably, (maybe?), manifest some kind of slasher demon that murders her father, turns light bulbs into pulsating balloons, and shatters a mirror that sends shards of glass into her mother's eyeballs.  Boatloads more head-scratching moments occur, and characters make asinine decisions, inexplicably turn up at different locations that the editing never bothers to explain, and come to conclusions that they would only arrive at because they read the script.  So yes; wacky and hilariously stupid Italian nonsense.

 

NIGHTMARE BEACH

(1989)

Dir - Umberto Lenzi/Harry Kirkpatrick

Overall: MEH

 

A deliciously dated, sleazy, and stupid Miami Beach slasher movie, Nightmare Beach, (Welcome to Spring Break), was embarrassing enough for initial director Umberto Lenzi to ask for both his services and name to be removed from the finished product.  Accounts vary as to how much Lenzi was ultimately involved in the production, with some saying that he co-directed it with screenwriter Harry Kirkpatrick, (James Justice), and Lenzi himself insisting that he backed out early and only stayed on as a technical consultant.  In any event, there are some delightful hallmarks of 80s Euro-crap cinema on display, including horrendous acting, laughable dialog, the same two heavy metal songs played upwards of ninety billion times, John Saxton of course playing a cop, a derivative script that is loaded with cliches, and plenty of naked boobs, male chauvinism, and tasteless kill scenes.  Though the opening sequence sets up a vengeance-seeking biker from beyond the grave, (the only scene in the movie that is played without any jacked up music or in-your-face schlock), it quickly becomes apparent who the actual masked killer is, making the final reveal land with an unintended and pathetic whimper.  On that note, the film is accidentally amusing at times and plenty trashy for fans of such doofiness.

LE PORTE DELL'INFERNO
(1989)
Overall: MEH

Sluggish and repetitive, Umberto Lenzi's Le porte dell'inferno, (The Hell's Gate), goes through a small handful of hackneyed motions while sticking all of its characters in a cave so that they can painstakingly stand next to each other delivering slight variations of the same dialog for ninety minutes.  The script by Lenzi and wife Olga Pehar, (who also co-penned the same year's Hitcher in the Dark), throws together a poorly explained experiment where a man is trying to beat the world record of how many days he can live in a cave or something, all with resurrected, occult-practicing monks who start picking off everybody without showing their faces until the last six minutes.  While the finale is fun in an illogically silly sense, it is also foreseeable and hardly constitutes as a worthy payoff for the lackluster boredom that came before it.  Lenzi seems powerless to build up any tension within such a scenario, simply letting the characters complain, argue, and grow more despaired as they find themselves trapped underground where every attempt at escape proves fruitless, and it takes far too long for everyone to even be properly convinced that supernatural shenanigans are afoot.  We also have one of the slowest and least exciting spider deaths in cinema history, for anyone keeping track.

1980s Umberto Lenzi Part One

EATEN ALIVE!

(1980)

Overall: MEH

 

Off-putting disco music, terrible dubbing, swiped footage, real on-screen animal murder, gratuitous torture, rape, flesh-eating, and nudity, plus a Jim Jones styled villain, Eaten Alive!, (Mangiati vivi!) is Umberto Lenzi's first of two cannibal craze cash grabs that he made in the early 1980s.  Deliberately tasteless since how could a movie like this NOT be, it borrows some of its nastiness from Lenzi's own Man from the Deep River, as well as Ruggero Deodato's Last Cannibal World and Sergio Martin's Slave of the Cannibal God, all of which are seminal enough works in the sub-genre.  Which is not to say that this one fails to carve out its own sleazy niche amongst its peers.  Recognizable character actor Ivan Rassimov has the naturally fiendish charisma to pull-off the Bible-quoting psycho who rallies his followers together through a mind control concoction of snake venom and hackneyed screenwriting.  The plot is hardly worth paying attention to, (ignorant white people venture into dangerous tribal territory and then try to escape, the end), but Lenzi pulls no punches with a barrage of awful set pieces that are there for pure icky shock value.  These movies are an acquired taste more than most, but fans of ugly jungle exploitation will be both delighted and not surprised by what they encounter here.

 

NIGHTMARE CITY

(1980)

Overall: MEH

The 1980s were ripe with zombie films and Italy alone produced a fare share of them, with Umberto Lenzi's Nightmare City, (Incubo sulla città contaminata, City of the Walking Dead), being one of the first to get the decade's ball rolling.  No more or less nonsensical and ridiculous than any of the other ones, it at least tweaks the zombies themselves who are not reanimated corpses but mutated humans that have to feast on human blood in order to maintain their radiation-ravaged form.  The rate at which they take over the populous is absurdly quick, with a plane full of them easily overpowering a barrage of armed military personnel, at which point they render both the city and countryside barren in a manner of hours.  It is pure nonsense that is "enhanced" by horrendous makeup effects that look as if they were applied within thirty seconds per actor and cost about seventy-five cents to produce.  The movie has a number of fun set pieces though, including the aforementioned showdown in an open airfield, a news studio segue where an unplugged TV set immediately turns into a grenade when thrown, and a finale on top of a roller coaster that results in a gloriously unconvincing prop dummy falling to its death.  The film is also full of charisma-less characters and predominantly bounces between various, monotonous subplots that merely get in the way of the unintentionally funny moments, but at least the silly stuff is fun.

 

CANNIBAL FEROX

(1981)

Overall: MEH

 

A companion piece to the previous year's Eaten Alive!, Cannibal Ferox, (Make Them Die Slowly, Woman from Deep River), may confuse people to think that they are watching the exact same movie within the opening few minutes, which once again is set to lousy disco music as the credits play over an urban landscape.  We are then quickly treated to the most gratuitous use of the word "shitface" before we switch to the jungles of Columbia to meet a crop of obnoxious, stupid, and awful characters who come face to face with naked tribe people that go all munchy/gentile mutilation on them.  As "same shit, different cannibal movie" as it all is, credit can be awarded to Umberto Lenzi's screenplay, which offers up an ironic angle in that the character played by Lorraine De Selle is venturing on such a trek to prove her thesis that man-eating-man action is merely a racist myth.  That goes about as well as one would expect as we witness Giovanni Lombardo Radice being one hellova lunatic scumbag who provokes the locals into slicing and biting back at him, plus there is on-screen animal mutilation because of course.  Hey, at least the non-disco music is kind of awesome and no one gets too raped this time!