Hellish Flesh

(Brazil, 1977, 85 min.)

Starring José Mojica Marins, Luely Figueiró, Oswaldo De Souza, Lirio Bertelli, Helena Ramos.

Screenplay by Rubens Francisco Luchetti from a story by José Mojica Marins,

Directed by José Mojica Marins.

This is a movie about a scream. And I wish I meant that in the poetic, critically analytical way that it sounds, but, no, I’m being literal. The scream of one of the characters is featured in so many scenes, it practically deserves a cast credit of its own. That scream belongs to Dr. Jorge Medeiros (writer/director/producer Marins, best known for his Zé do Caixão (Coffin Joe) movies, about a weird sort of anti-hero who revels in the philosophy as well as the practice of evil). Dr. Medeiros is a scientist who dabbles in acid, the kind that makes things dissolve as opposed to the kind that just makes things look like they’re dissolving. One night he sees his wife Raquel (Figueiró) off to a concert she’s attending with their friend Oliver (De Souza), expressing his regret that he can’t take her himself, or for that matter that he can’t seem to take her anywhere, owing to his “experiences.” Raquel herself mentions that she’s gotten used to not seeing him much owing to the importance of his “experiences.” I have to admit I was beginning to wonder why they couldn’t ever share these “experiences,” but then I’m no expert on marriage.

It is revealed soon after that Raquel and Oliver are more than friends – much, much more. It was also revealed around this time that, as I had begun to suspect, the English subtitles were not translated by a native speaker. The “experiences” that kept being mentioned were in fact Jorge’s experiments, most of which seem to involve him putting his face as close as possible to his test tubes. This production error turned out to be somewhat par for the course as numerous typos appeared throughout, and, as with the “experiences,” the occasional flagrant mistranslation. This had the distracting effect of causing my brain to spontaneously make up its own Malapropian subtitles for the ones they got right, my favorite example being Raquel telling the police on the phone that, “There’s been an applesauce at my husband’s leg!”

Which brings us to what happens next. Raquel and Oliver have decided that they can’t stand the situation anymore, the situation being the two of them sneaking around behind the back of what appears to be a perfectly nice man, albeit one with Marins’ trademark creepy-ass affectations, including the long, curly fingernails he always sports. The two philanderers want to eliminate Jorge and live off his fortune, so they come up with a cunning plan. Well, a plan anyway. The whole thing seems to be that Raquel will go into Jorge’s leg- I mean, lab, and throw acid in his face while Oliver fixes them drinks. This doesn’t kill him immediately and he ends up thrashing around screaming at the top of his lungs. Raquel is quite put off by the noise, so Oliver puts down his caipirinha and goes to set the lab on fire, which is when Raquel calls the cops to report the applesauce. I mean- you know what I mean.

Problem for them is, Jorge is one tough bastard and despite the acid and the fire, he still doesn’t die. Raquel and Oliver decide to run off with what money is on hand, while Jorge undergoes facial reconstruction, which brings us a sequence that alternates shots of the two of them dining with footage of what appears to be genuine eye surgery, decidedly upping the ick factor. Jorge is now confined to wearing a mask to hide his injuries and yet he employs a policeman friend of his (Bertelli) not only to keep tabs on Raquel to make sure she’s safe but also to bring her whatever money she needs. And she needs a lot since Jorge’s survival means she isn’t inheriting anything and slacker Oliver is burning through what they stole like, well, like acid through the flesh of an unsuspecting scientist.

Yeah, that had to hurt. But just in case you weren’t able to figure that out for yourself, Marins drives the point home by having the memory of Jorge’s screams piped in to scene after scene after scene. He does use it to interesting effect in one moment late in the film, that is if I’m reading his intentions correctly, but much of the time it mostly serves as a reminder that Marins is rarely hesitant to lay it on as thick as frosting. But at least here it’s somewhat clearer as to what ends. Unlike the Coffin Joe films I’ve seen, which play like twisted carnival shows either repudiating or affirming Catholic belief depending on where you come in, Hellish Flesh, made with only touches of the hallucinatory vibe Marins loves to employ, is kind of like a telenovela version of an EC Comics horror story, narratives gruesome and lurid enough to blind more censorious types to the fact that what they were witnessing were morality plays. Not a perfect description of the brain-scrambling films that Marins makes, but damn close when to comes to Hellish Flesh.

Snack Bar

This would be the section of Plate O' Shrimp dedicated to short form critiques. In other words, all the thoughts I couldn't pad out into a full review. (Yet.)

Blast of Silence (1961, D: Allen Baron) Stark post-noir crime drama from 1961 about a moody expatriate New York hitman who returns home to carry out One Last Job™ and finds that being in his old stomping ground at Christmastime does a number on his head. Writer/director/star Allen Baron’s obvious labor of love may not be for all tastes – I can imagine the more lyrical aspects, particularly as delivered via a prevalent voiceover (written by Waldo Salt! (and delivered by Lionel Stander!)), rubbing some people the wrong way – but the sense of time and place is dead on and the tone is nicely raw. A must-see for devotees of curios, although it deserves a wider audience than that.

Caged Women (Italy, 1982, D: Bruno Mattei) Mattei does WiP (one of at least two that he did, along with ‘83’s Women’s Prison Massacre). Laura Gemser (whose appeal I get but do not personally feel) is a reporter who goes undercover as an inmate to investigate abuse, butts heads with the domineering prisoner, ends up clashing with the sadistic matron, i.e. everything we’ve seen before. There is the expected nudity and nastiness, and yet the movie also props up my belief that Mattei made genuine attempts to inject social relevance into his films. Crassly exploitative as the whole thing is, Mattei strays into some surprisingly progressive territory, largely by virtue of the character of the prison doctor, who is also an inmate himself in the adjoining men’s facility for Kevorkian-ing his wife. I don’t know if Mattei, like Deodato, ever tried to justify his work in such a way, but he might have had a case to make if he had. Of course, this doesn’t change the fact that he was a terrible director and that segments of this film are over-the-top bad, a.k.a., terrific.

Closely Watched Trains (Czechoslovakia, 1966, D: Jiri Menzel) One could be forgiven for wondering why a movie that takes place in a territory technically occupied by Nazis has so few Nazis in it, but that’s kind of the point. A young man in a small Czech town takes a job at the train station because it affords him the prestige of a uniform without him actually having to do anything. This being a mere checkpoint along the arms route, the denizens are free to worry about other matters, which always seem to involve their libidos. The war does interfere here and there, but this is mostly a study of that uniquely Eastern European ennui, and a surprisingly funny one at that.

The Ghost of Mae Nak (Thailand, 2005, D: Mark Duffield) Serviceable, if unexceptional, Thai ghost story, written, directed and produced by people with decidedly non-Thai names, about a newlywed couple who buy a house only to be harassed by a (wait for it) freaky female ghost with long black hair. I think this was the first time I got any kind of good look at Bangkok, so that was cool. The lead actress was exceptionally cute, so that was cool too. One of the odder aspects of the whole thing is that a fairly somber tone is maintained throughout much of the story, which makes it strange that they seem to have chosen to play the somewhat graphic gore scenes for laughs. Worth a look if it’s within reach.

Le Doulos (France, 1962, D: Jean-Pierre Melville) Crime drama about assorted criminals and their assorted loyalties, with one played by Jean-Paul Belmondo in the center of it all who may or may not be a police informant. I found the whole thing kind of meandering, until a scene about two thirds of the way through when all of a sudden everything that’s come before begins to make sense. I also have to wonder if the Coens were somewhat inspired by this film when they were writing Miller’s Crossing. Not only do both films have a lot to do with the allegiances of criminals, but Le Doulos has a hat theme as well. We’re told at the beginning that the title is slang for both an informant and a kind of hat, plus one important scene has a shot of a hat rolling across a room. Possibly a coincidence, but it did strike me.

A Girl Cut in Two (France-Germany, 2007, D: Claude Chabrol) Having worked in a video store with a tremendous library, I managed to study pieces of a lot of different film movements and the entirety of, well, probably none. When it comes to the famed French New Wave, I wish to Christ I could get back some of the time I spent watching Godard’s more odious pieces so I could switch it with time spent watching the work of the director of this film, Claude Chabrol. And having said all of that, I’m not exactly basing that wish on this particular film. Ludivine Sagnier, the frequently naked co-star of Francois Ozon’s Swimming Pool, plays an up-and-coming TV personality who becomes torn between two men, one a middle-aged novelist and the other a young heir to a pharmaceutical empire. Both men hate each other for reasons we are never explicitly told. There’s obviously something being said here about arrested development – both men are basically kids at heart, only minus the innocence, the exact quality in her that makes each want to debase her in some way – but even with that potentially volatile subject, not to mention good performances and direction, it all feels rather weightless. Sagnier, keeping her clothes on this time, is a vibrant presence throughout. Speaking of famous nude people, Mathilda May, almost unrecognizable as the same woman who played Lifeforce’s space vampire, appears here as the novelist’s publicist, a vamp of a different sort.

Gore Whore (1994, D: Hugh Gallagher) Super cheap, super sleazy, badly acted, shot-on-video adaptation of Edith Wharton (one of those things isn’t true) about a dead prostitute (Audrey Street) who gets re-animated, steals the re-animating formula and then goes about murdering and re-animating a bunch of men by shooting the formula up their asses with a combination syringe/big black dildo. It took me two tries to get all the way through this, not because it’s boring – although it doesn’t really have anything going for it beyond the abundant filth and grue – and not because of the less-than-flattering descriptives listed above. Definitely not the latter, a fact made all too clear to me by the fact that around the same time I saw this I also re-watched Female Trouble, possibly my favorite John Waters, also super cheap, super sleazy and badly acted. But while Gore Whore has a certain energy to be admired, giving its all in light of where it falls on the cinema-of-limitations scale, and the cast are certainly game for the task, they simply don’t have the inherently gonzo personalities of the Waters stable. Having players like Divine, Mink Stole, David Lochary, Edith Massey, et al, it was as if Waters achieved a kind of cosmic confluence of camp the likes of which is unlikely to ever happen again. Try as hard as they might, there’s simply no way the makers of Gore Whore could have recreated magic like that, and it may be unfair of me to even make the comparison, but it was something that popped into my mind more than once while I watched it. At any rate, sleaze connoisseurs should definitely seek this out.

The Love-Ins (1967, D: Arthur Dreifuss) Hair-brained story about a college professor who quits his job and becomes a Timothy Leary-style hippie guru, preaching free love and LSD use. It seems to want to represent the viewpoints, and assorted pros and cons, of both the squares and the heads, but when you’re pretty much portraying everyone as a hypocritical, reactionary asshole, minus any kind of genuine context, what’s the point? (i.e. The main character is portrayed as a man of principle until its suddenly convenient for him to be an opportunistic creep.) However, the Alice in Wonderland dance number cum drug trip is a must see.

Mad Max (Australia, 1979, D: George Miller) The society-in-decline movie about out-of-control joy-riding criminals and barely-in-control cops that helped launch both a post-apocalyptic genre and Mel Gibson. I’m not an action movie fan in general, and I hate cars, but I can’t deny that this is some knuckle-biting stuff. In regard to the other genre it represents, the film certainly stands as an interesting contrast to so many revenge films of the ‘80s, both in what they have in common and what they don’t. It hits many of the familiar spots but takes the time to develop a real sense of the world of the film with them, as opposed to viewing them as mere stepping stones to the payback. And when you consider that...[SPOILER]...the incident that sends Max into full revenge mode doesn’t happen until way near the end, whereupon he rapidly and efficiently takes out the bad guys (including a comparatively unceremonious demise for the ringleader), it really does reveal the numerous Death Wish imitators for the exercises in masturbatory violence that they are.

My Winnipeg (Canada, 2007, D: Guy Maddin) Documentary (of sorts) about avant-garde filmmaker Maddin’s hometown is a typically bold mix of the real and the surreal, B&W and color, fact and fiction, stock footage and new footage (much of it made to look like stock footage), etc. Recreated moments from his family’s life are mixed with stories of places within the city from the same period that have long since fallen victim to bad decisions, resulting in a brew of nostalgia, anger and regret that manages, as does so much of the director’s work, to be wildly hallucinatory and eerily sedate at the same time. I know some people find Maddin’s films off-putting, but outside the setting of a (completely) fictional drama, they might find his aggressively poetic stylistics easier to take. Personally, I found it utterly beautiful and mesmerizing.

The Oracle (1985, D: Roberta Findlay) Young couple moves into a new apartment and the wife begins fooling with a planchette (ouija type of device) left behind by the woman who previously occupied the place. She begins to realize that a murdered man is using the device to tell her who killed him. Additionally, whoever tries to get rid of the planchette is offed by a demonic presence, which may or may not be connected to the dead man (not a mystery the movie bothers to deal with). Cheap production, amateurish acting, and at least one scene of unrepentant tawdriness, as is to be expected from any production helmed by a Findlay (Roberta alone in this case; Michael had already died by this point), but I quite enjoyed this. The story is surprisingly solid – indeed, some of the more eccentric plot points could have been used to good effect in an offbeat noir the likes of which Sam Fuller used to make – there’s some decent gore, good use (typical of the Findlays) of NYC locations, and the lead, Caroline Capers Powers, is very cute, with a kind of a young Jennifer Connelly thing going on. A good choice for cheapo night.

Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman (1947, D: Stuart Heisler) Susan Hayward plays a nightclub singer who gives up her job to marry her songwriter sweetheart (Lee Bowman) and have a child, only to have his career as a radio crooner take off while she devolves into alcoholism. This movie was the breakout vehicle for Hayward and even garnered her an Oscar nomination, for which she should have thanked her lucky stars, because the whole thing is really a lot of melodramatic piffle. Bowman was apparently not happy that so much attention was lavished on his co-star, and frankly, while he’s kind of wooden at times, he does come off a bit better even if only because his character is a lot more sympathetic. Best of all is Eddie Albert as Bowman’s songwriting partner who maintains his aw-shucks decency – and therefore his dignity as well – despite repeatedly being treated like a second banana in almost every situation. Marsha Hunt also has one really good scene as the talent scout who harbors feelings for Bowman. Not a bad movie, exactly, but be prepared to snigger when the movie wants you to sob.

Umberto D. (Italy, 1952, D: Vittorio De Sica) Aging pensioner finds himself in dangerous debt to his landlady – a woman he once helped when she was down and out – and does everything he can to make sure that he and his dog do not become homeless. Another one of Italian neo-realist De Sica’s studies of the sort of abominable treatment the downtrodden sometimes received in post-WWII Italy, this heart-wrencher - which sort of utilizes the dog in the way many of these films use children - does offer an ending that, while not happy, is at least hopeful. The humanist empathy of the neo-realists was undeniable, but that doesn’t make their movies any easier to watch.

Venus in Furs (UK-Italy-Germany, D: Jess Franco) Jazz musician is (slightly) surprised when a woman whose murder he (sort of) witnessed and whose body he subsequently found washed up on shore in Istanbul turns up in Rio where he has relocated, very much alive and just as hostile to the idea of clothing as she was before. Plus there’s Klaus Kinski and strange deaths. The tape I was watching of this got all hinky two thirds of the way through so I had to stop and fix it, which is detrimental to the viewing of any Jess Franco movie. It’s really best to let them wash over you without a lot of critical thought. In fact, having his main character be a jazz musician is one of Franco’s most appropriate meta-ideas since his own modus operandi seems to be setting a theme and then just riffing on it for as long as he can sustain it, plus sex. If you like Franco, you’ll probably enjoy this. If not...

Phantom Lady

(1944, 87 min.)

Starring Ella Raines, Franchot Tone, Alan Curtis, Thomas Gomez, Elisha Cook, Jr., Fay Helm, Aurora Miranda (as Aurora), Andrew Tombes, Regis Toomey, Joseph Crehan.

Screenplay by Bernard C. Schoenfeld, from the novel by Cornell Woolrich, writing as William Irish.

Directed by Robert Siodmak.

As our story begins, New York architect Scott Henderson (Curtis) is out on the town and in a lousy mood, for reasons to which we are not yet privy. Dulling the pain in a bar with his ferment of choice, he impulsively invites the woman on the next stool (Helm) to come see a show with him. She seems an unlikely candidate to offer him much comfort, being rather perturbed herself, but he assures her he wants nothing more than company and wouldn’t it be a shame for the tickets to go to waste. She agrees, reluctantly, insisting on total anonymity as part of the deal.

They hit the theater where they see a Latin-themed review. Scott’s “date” is wearing a rather garish hat, which stands out all the more when the lead performer onstage, Monteiro (Miranda), turns out to be wearing the same one. The acid looks the singer shoots at Scott’s companion are rivaled only by the cheesy grin of the drummer in the band (Cook). After the show, Scott walks her back to the bar and they part company.

Scott heads home only to find a couple of police detectives in his apartment (Toomey and Crehan) along with their boss, Detective Burgess (the reliably watchable Gomez). Turns out that Scott’s wife was murdered while he was out, viciously strangled with one of his own ties. Scott admits that they had just had a terrible fight – and that the marriage was, for all intents and purposes, over – but that she was alive when he left. Despondent over the state of things, he had left the apartment resulting in his encounter with the mystery woman, who could verify his story if they would just ask her. Problem is he doesn’t know her name and, even worse, every single person who saw them together now claims he was alone. Looks like it’s time to send in housekeeping to make up a bunk on death row, unless, of course, Scott’s trusty assistant Carol Richman (Raines) can find the mystery woman and put him in the clear.

The above set-up is presented in fairly concise fashion, all the better for the focus of the film to shift to Carol, the actual lead character. She’s served up with equal succinctness – we know that she’s a small town girl transplanted to the big city because Henderson calls her “Kansas”; we know that she still has some of the small town girl in her by the way she fiddles with her stockings when she’s nervous – and that shorthand too turns out to be a mere springboard for what comes next, as the small town girl rather abruptly plunges into the darker sides of the big bad city in the interest of clearing her boss’s name.

Director Siodmak was one of that famed group of filmmakers that made the journey from Germany to Hollywood rather than stick around to see how the whole Nazi thing worked out. Here, working from a novel by suspense master Woolrich, penned under one of his pseudonyms, Siodmak creates an odd little noir that I can’t completely make up my mind about. Enjoyable as it is, long before Carol reaches any sort of definitive point in her quest to clear Scott, with the help of Scott’s best friend Jack Marlow (Tone) and Detective Burgess, who has come to rethink the case, the film drops a significant piece of the mystery in the audience’s lap. It allows Siodmak to dabble in similar psychological territory to other crime films of his native land, and yet also changes the nature of the intrigue in a such a way that…well, like I said, I can’t quite make up my mind about, although I suspect it probably worked a bit better on paper.

But either way it’s hardly a deal-breaker. The film does have a few logical bumps and indulges in some of the sort of hyper-stylistics to which fans of the genre are largely inured, but overall it succeeds, with clever details scattered here and there and some really effective sequences, including one in an elevated train station and one at a jazz jam session that is remarkably bald-faced in its sexual overtones. Anchoring it all is Raines, who gives a sweet and sexy performance as a woman with a singular focus (and who is actually more attractive when she’s just being herself than when she’s deliberately playing the vixen). Despite the obvious markers as to Carol’s origins, the film isn’t condescending about it, or about anything in regard to her really. Detective Burgess does acknowledge the danger of what she’s doing but doesn’t make a big production of it, more or less trusting her judgment. That she’s doing it for love may be one of the ultimate clichés, but in a genre that routinely paints women as either dangerously naïve or just plain dangerous, the film’s willingness to allow for the possibility that, as a grown woman, she may know exactly what she’s doing makes Phantom Lady seem almost liberated.

The World of Henry Orient

(1964, 106 min.)

Starring Peter Sellers, Tippy Walker, Merrie Spaeth, Angela Lansbury, Tom Bosley, Phyllis Thaxter, Bibi Osterwald, John Fiedler, Al Lewis, Peter Duchin.

Screenplay by Nora Johnson and Nunnally Johnson, based on the novel by Nora.

Directed by George Roy Hill.

Spaeth and Walker play Marion and Val, two private school girls in ‘60s New York who meet and form an instant bond over a shared vibrancy of imagination. Through three instances of coincidence, their adventures cause them to cross paths with Henry Orient (Sellers), a concert pianist and consummate bullshit artist. They tend to happen upon him when he’s with his married girlfriend Stella (Prentiss) as he engages in his ongoing attempts to get her to cast wide the doors, an unsuccessful venture owing to her irrational fear of being caught by her husband, who’s all the way in Connecticut.

Henry doesn’t know what to make of the two odd girls who keep popping up – how, after all, could they possibly have anything to do with his affair – but the two of them are quite taken with him. In fact, Val decides she’s in love with him, so they start a scrapbook about him. Oh, and they stalk him too. I should probably have put that one first.

All is fun and borderline felony, including an episode involving the girls telling a whopper of a story to a shopkeeper (Lewis) across the street from Henry’s building, until Val’s parents, who have been in Europe, return home. Father Frank (Bosley) is a decent sort, if rarely around, but mother Isabel (Lansbury, not in New England crimesolver mode so much as let’s-brainwash-my-son-into-assassinating-someone mode) is a real piece of work: stuck-up, nasty and not nearly as clever as she thinks she is, the latter illustrated best in a telling little exchange between Frank and Isabel about Val’s parentage. As soon as Isabel sticks her upturned nose into the proceedings, things…well, it’s not as if they were headed towards a fairytale ending anyway, even on the strength of the girls’ considerable will, but they do take a turn for the unfortunate.

Despite the title, the movie isn’t really about Henry at all. We’ve pretty much got his number early on – the smarm, the fake accent that slips away in moments of stress. He may even be a fake as an artist as well, but the movie’s viewpoint in that regard isn’t as easy to guess. At a concert that the girls attend, Henry plays a decidedly modernist piece – composed by Ken Lauber who also conducted the rest of the music written for the film by Elmer Bernstein – and we see a number of the audience members demonstrating visible displeasure (likely the same ilk we later see demanding their money back), but I found the piece to be quite intriguing and well-played, and given the looks on their faces, I’d say the girls agree with me. So there.

But as I said, it’s not about him; it’s about the girls and their families. Marian’s upper middle class existence isn’t idyllic but it’s pretty nice. Her father is out of the picture, having left and remarried, but she doesn’t seem terribly broken up about it, enjoying the life she leads with her mother (Thaxter) in the townhouse they share with one of the mother’s oldest friends, Boothy (Osterwald). Her greatest detriment seems to be the lack of companionship that Val fills. Val, on the other hand, is your classic girl of privilege and classic victim of same. She’s in therapy when such a thing still wasn’t talked about openly, not surprising given the expectations placed upon her, such as excelling in her music studies and raising herself, and the entire Henry Orient fixation can be viewed as a genuinely unique way of acting out, although in this case her mania ends up having a very interesting effect. Marian and Val’s Henry adventure, much of it shot beautifully on location, including a couple of passes by Alice and the gang, ends up affecting their elders’ lives – especially Isabel’s – in ways that couldn’t have been foreseen at the beginning, an insightful mirror image of the way that frivolous behavior of parents like Isabel can sometimes have unforeseen consequences on the lives of their children.

But the subtext, no matter how insightful, pales in comparison to the fun. It's curious to ponder that there was a time when a movie could so competently deal with adult topics while simultaneously capturing the essence of the best entertainment for kids. The girls’ eccentric precocity may be a bit much depending on your reaction to such a thing (i.e., Val’s habit of wearing a fur coat almost everywhere she goes) but Spaeth and Walker are quite enjoyable in what was the only major film appearance for both, guided by director Hill who would later film other duos who seem to be in it for the fun as much as anything else (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting). And while the assorted parents are all quite good for the dramatic stuff, the best comedic bits come from Prentiss and, of course, Sellers, whose ricochet back and forth between faux suavity and fearful bewilderment injects every scene he’s in with a giddiness to rival the schoolgirls. It’s unfortunate that this isn’t better known among the films in his canon.

Étoile

(Italy, 1988, 101 min.)

Starring Jennifer Connelly, Gary McCleery, Charles Durning, Laurent Terzieff, Olimpia Carlisi, Mario Marozzi, Donald Hodson.

Screenplay by Peter Del Monte, Franco Ferrini and Sandro Petraglia, from a story by Del Monte and Petraglia.

Directed by Peter Del Monte.

McCleery is Jason, a young American acting as an aide for his rich, clock-collecting uncle (Durning) as they attend a series of auctions in Europe. (While the film’s title is French, the setting is clearly supposed to be Germanic, although it was actually filmed in Italy. The architects of the European Union would be so…well, probably confused, like the rest of us.) Clocks aren’t really Jason’s idea of fun, but the trip picks up when he meets Claire (Connelly, lovely, as always, though she still hadn’t quite grown into her looks by this point), a ballet student who has come to enroll in a prestigious school, with hopes of someday fulfilling her dream of dancing Swan Lake.

The school appears to be run by a mysterious man, Balakin (Terzieff). When he’s not commiserating with his small crew of oddballs, he spends his time lurking in a theater adjacent to the school, staring forlornly at the stage. At one point, Claire, thrown by a case of butterflies when her name is called for audition, sneaks away and finds the abandoned theater. She steps out on the stage and proceeds to dance her culottes off, much to the astonishment of Balakin, whose spark seems to come back upon seeing her. (And I defy you not to think of Suspiria during these scenes. Especially now that I’ve brought it up.)

Jason and Claire explore the town together and everything seems to be going quite well, until a mysterious bunch of flowers sent to her room but addressed to someone else spooks her enough that she decides to go back home to the US. Jason is bummed and a little perplexed, all the more so when he spies Claire sitting by a pond watching the swans. His delight soon turns to mystification, as she claims not only not to know him but also to be a completely different person than he thinks she is.

The above mention of Suspiria is wholly appropriate, as this often comes off as if director/co-writer Del Monte were seeing what it might be like to make an Argento film minus the violence. (There is a little bit near the end, including a somewhat amusing instance of Durning dismembering a public pay phone.) But the movie also conjures up the same sort of aloofness that Argento often does, which adds to the air of mystery but also makes you wonder what the point of the whole thing is, a feeling reinforced by the movie’s waffling tone as to the exact nature of the forces driving events. It also retains Argento’s penchant for building up to the finale only to pull out something goofy, although in this case the filmmakers did seem to rein things in owing to a realization of their own limitations, and you have to respect that.

An odd, enigmatic story that will likely frustrate most, and since it’s never gotten a video release in this country, only curio and/or Connelly fans (and Durning completists) are likely to go the extra mile to find it on the gray market.


Go back to Plate O' Shrimp

Don’t Torture a Duckling

(Italy, 1972, 104 min.)

Starring Tomas Milian, Barbara Bouchet, Florinda Bolkan, Marc Porel, Georges Wilson, Irene Papas, Antonello Campodifiori, Ugo D’Alessio, Virgilio Gazzolo, Vito Passeri, Rosalia Maggio, Andrea Aureli, Linda Sini, Franco Balducci.

Screenplay by Lucio Fulci, Robert Gianviti and Gianfranco Clerici, from a story by Fulci and Gianviti.

Directed by Lucio Fulci.

Firstly, no ducklings were tortured to make this movie. This being Italian horror, it can’t hurt to clarify.

The film opens with some of the leisure activities of the small Italian mountain town of Accendura that probably don’t make it onto the Community Bulletin Board. A young woman, Maciara (Bolkan, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion), is doing a little digging. She’s thought by many of the superstitious townsfolk to be a witch and it couldn’t possibly help her case that what she’s digging up are the bones of a child. Meanwhile, a bunch of young boys watch the arrival by car of some prostitutes, who are taken to an out-of-the-way house by a couple of the village men. Giuseppe (Passeri), another local pariah, is also on the scene, but is not only denied any peeping opportunities, he’s also razzed by the boys. A little later in another part of town, one of those same boys, Michele (uncredited, as are all the kid actors), is at work with his mother (Maggio). She plays housekeeper for a young woman named Patrizia (doe-eyed Bouchet, Sex With a Smile) whose father was a native before striking it rich and moving away. Patrizia is holed up in Dad’s house, an uncharacteristically modern design for the area, after fleeing a drug scandal in Milan. Michele is sent to her room to bring her a pitcher of juice and finds her laid out completely starkers. (The first glimpse we get of her is her breasts through one of those perpetually-tilting-water doohickeys.) Her willingness to display her nude body to a barely pubescent boy, along with at least one other similarly inappropriate scene in the course of the movie, makes her claim to having retired her hashpipe somewhat dubious.

Through all of this we also get scenes of someone with filthy hands crafting and stabbing small wax figures, from which the plot’s engine gets going. One of the boys disappears, and when his parents (Aureli and Balducci) get a ransom call, an assortment of policemen both local and from the city (Campodifiori, D’Alessio and Gazzolo) intervene. The money is planted and staked out. When someone comes to grab it, they grab him instead. It turns out to be Giuseppe. He leads them to where the body is buried, but swears that the boy was already dead when he found him and that he was only trying to take advantage of the situation with the ransom call. When another boy is found strangled and drowned while he’s in custody, they believe him.

Assisting the police in their investigation is a man named Andrea Martelli (Milian, Sonny and Jed, Bandits in Milan). Typically for Italian genre cinema, he’s a reporter, and even more typically, he manages to insert himself into the case with only the flimsiest of resistance from the authorities, allowing him to follow his own leads (and agenda). He goes to interview the local priest, young, fresh-faced Don Alberto (Porel, The Sicilian Clan), who lives with his mother (Papas) and deaf-mute sister. He runs a soccer program for the local youth and therefore knew both victims, but spends most of his time with Martelli decrying modern permissiveness, boasting of his accomplishment in barring the local newsstand from carrying any smut. (Although we have already seen small hints of the effect such repression might have on the town’s youth.) He does, however, suggest that things have been odd ever since Patrizia showed up. Additional mysterious happenings cast further suspicion on the party girl, but also on Maciara, and the townsfolk are getting tired of waiting for the police to deliver justice.

This is one of at least three gialli (a certain type of Italian murder mystery) that director Fulci made, the others being the earlier Lizard with a Woman’s Skin, which also featured Bolkan and which I’ve never seen, and the later New York Ripper, which ranks up there as one of the nastier, sleazier entries in the genre. Duckling is tame compared to Ripper, but they do have at least two things in common. One is creative location work. Ripper made good use of 1980s New York, including the Times Square area, which, fittingly enough, was one of the only places in this country you could see a Fulci film at the time, while Duckling is lent an old world air by having been filmed in the actual town of Monte Sant’Angelo. The discovery of the second body is nicely effective owing to the lead up of a traditionally dressed woman making her way through the winding paths of the town. (The other thing the two films have in common is that each has a completely weird plot point involving a Donald Duck doll, but it would be too involved and spoiler-rich to explain them and they don’t make a whole lot of sense even if you’ve seen the movies.)

But one of the more interesting things about Duckling is what it doesn’t have in common with most Fulci movies. They’re all pretty much a bunch of FX set pieces – tours de force of latex and Karo syrup – strung together by threadbare narratives, but one of the set pieces here effectively illustrates the subtext of the entire piece, the clash of modern sensibilities with stubborn traditionalism. The scene, the most brutal in the film, is one of vigilante retribution fueled by entrenched superstition, but modern pop music emanates from a nearby radio throughout, achieving something similar to, if far less whimsical than, the famous ear scene in Reservoir Dogs. It is far easier to imagine Signor Lucio asking, “How deep a wound could a chain to the flesh make?” than “How can we best illustrate the conflict of cultures?” but regardless he manages to accomplish both.

Of additional interest is the way this sequence ends. Despite having gruesomely killed off I-don’t-know-how-many characters over the course of his career, Fulci rarely imbued these deaths with any real tragedy. Al Cliver may cradle Auretta Gay’s body in Zombi 2, but his demeanor being less heartfelt grief than “Well, this sucks” kind of undercuts any deeper pathos. Fulci avoids this trap at the end of the sequence from Duckling by having it take place at the side of a road. With no actual characters there to react and only the oblivious passing motorists to remind us of the outside world at all, Fulci achieves a sense of the forlorn not only unusual in his own work, but not especially common in the bulk of the horror genre.

These two points taken together could mark this sequence as an artistic highpoint for the director. Which is appropriate since the film that houses it is an interesting bit of suspense that, while it may not appeal as much to fans of Fulci’s hardcore gore work, shows that he could tell a decent story when he tried, although the resolution will probably be obvious to those familiar with films of this ilk, even those who don’t catch the occasional telegraphed hint.

Back to Plate O' Shrimp

Eaten Alive

(1976, 96 min.)

Starring Neville Brand, Marilyn Burns, Robert Englund, William Finley, Kyle Richards, Crystin Sinclaire, Roberta Collins, Betty Cole, Janus Blythe, with Stuart Whitman, Carolyn Jones, and Mel Ferrer.

Written by Alvin L. Fast and Mardi Rustam; adapted for the screen by Kim Henkel.

Directed by Tobe Hooper.

In a backwoods Texas town, working girl Clara (Collins) is having a crisis of conscience over her new position at Miss Hattie’s House, specifically the position that client Buck (future horror staple Englund) wants her to get into. Buck raises hell and Miss Hattie herself (Jones, who, with all due respect to the ravages of time, look all kinds of different from the woman who played the lithe Morticia Addams) rushes in to placate the assfreak and kicks Clara out. On the advice of housekeeper Ruby (Cole) – and with a stern warning not to reveal where she’s coming from – she goes down the road a bit to the Starlight Hotel. There, mumbly caretaker Judd (Brand) checks her in, but no sooner has she signed the register than he somehow divines where she’s come from and attacks her, ultimately running her through several times with a pitchfork. This whole opening bit is somewhat slapdash (a sign of the proceedings to come) and mainly serves to introduce Buck, who will show up again later, and Judd, along with the fact that the latter has some kind of misfire in his head and, more to the film’s selling point, a big fucking croc that he keeps fenced off in the hotel’s side yard.

While no Sea World, the Starlight does manage to attract its share of families, two on this particular day. Family number one consists of Roy (Finley), Faye (Burns, also the heroine of director Hooper’s previous Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and they must have had a pretty good working relationship for her to agree to be brutalized by freaks in two consecutive movies), daughter Angie (Richards), and dog Snoopy. From the second you see him you know what Snoopy’s fate is going to be, and sure enough he’s in the croc’s belly before the rest of the family has even entered the hotel. The entire family is understandably upset, with Roy and Angie competing for most hysterical. (She’s eight; his excuse is unclear.) After a near nervous breakdown, Roy runs downstairs to avenge Snoopy’s death only to follow him down the croc’s gullet with no small assistance from Judd.

Family number two is on a quest. Father Harvey (Ferrer) and daughter Libby (Sinclaire) are looking for a runaway second daughter, and wouldn’t you know it, it’s Clara. Upon being questioned, Judd mutters something about Miss Hattie’s, conveniently omitting that Clara had been there and was last seen traveling the croc’s gums one way to Digestionville, so Harvey and Libby go off to talk to Sheriff Martin (Whitman). Meanwhile, Judd attacks Faye, tying her to one of the beds while Angie retreats to the crawlspace under the house, which, while disgusting, does manage to make her safer than anyone else in this odd exercise in mania.

Hooper’s surprise success with the original TCM landed him this slightly larger budgeted gig, which wasn't nearly as well received. It’s not hard to see why. For one thing, the full-blown lunacy is pretty much right on display from the gitgo, as opposed to TCM in which it crept up on the audience like an odd figure approaching across a flatland. Secondly, the easily discernible subtext of TCM, former slaughterhouse workers driven out of work and into the depth of madness as symbols of dehumanization through hyper-industrialization, is replaced here by a hodgepodge of odd quirks. Judd rails against what goes on at Hattie’s but we then learn that he used to go there to watch. He scarfs down pain medicine after being shot only to reveal a moment later that the "wounded" leg is made of wood. What appears to be a Nazi flag can be glimpsed among his belongings. At one point, he stands staring wistfully into space as the radio plays a song about a man on the run. None of this coheres. And if there are any unifying clues to be found in his dialogue, I can’t tell you what they are. Amongst assorted mumblings about following rules and the dirty activity at Hattie’s, there’s a bunch of stuff that, even after seeing this at least three times, I still can’t quite figure out. Lastly, not to take away anything from Brand’s frenzied performance, he’s just no match singlehandedly for TCM’s mad parody of a family.

But leaving aside comparisons to its immediate predecessor, Eaten Alive deserves to be seen by more people (and may, in fact, have been given how many times it's been released under different titles), because, for all it shortcomings, it does have a persistently bizarre aura. It helps if you think of it as a comparatively well-filmed version of a stage production (which it sometimes resembles, backhanded compliment that that is), with the hotel as one gigantic set, and modern theatrical trappings to boot: Roy’s strange meltdown; the seemingly unnecessary wig that Faye wears and pulls off halfway through; Judd drifting slowly around the main room turning the lights on and off and rearranging papers while the music from his radio floats about him. Much of this could easily be imagined occurring in, say, a piece by Pinter or some other modernist. There’s even one sequence set in a bar in which a nervous cowboy ogles Buck’s girlfriend until he’s harassed by one of Buck’s fellow pool players. This bit doesn’t seem to have anything to do with anything, and could reasonably be assumed to be filler, if it weren’t for the fact that the cowboy oddly resembles a young Judd. It doesn’t really make any sense, and yet I can’t fully discount it either.

If we are to take anything from Judd’s madness it seems most likely to be the danger of a certain type of insularity, all too sickeningly familiar these days, an existence led within an echo chamber of bad ideas, with little or no counterbalance making its way inside whether by design or indifference (the sheriff and the mutedly contemptuous Miss Hattie both have one thing in common with a number of the other characters: no one seems particularly concerned that this man keeps a giant man-eating reptile on his property). What happens in the film has virtually no rhyme or reason, but then neither does its main character, and the result suggests a world in which chaos is the status quo. The finale, set to the avant noise score co-written by Hooper with Wayne Bell that runs throughout the film, is a culmination of histrionics and subsequently only feels slightly madder than the rest of it. It does, however, lead up to one of the film’s most clear-cut moments…and it’s in service of a joke. Turns out, despite Judd’s assertions, that ol’ croc won’t eat just anything.

Go back to Plate O' Shrimp