Archive: Author: Admin

By Ben Bussey

Warning: spoilers, sideboob and man-ass ahead…

‘Sex sells.’ The old maxim has always rung true, and no doubt always will. However, back in the 1990s that time-honoured notion was taken to an altogether different level. The major movie studios had not yet developed that obsession with making everything PG-13/12A rated, so a great many of the decade’s biggest hits carried restrictive ratings, and in many cases these ratings were to do with sexual content. Quite why this was, who can say; no doubt there’s an argument in there that a certain President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky might have had something to do with it. Either way, this was the decade that saw Sharon Stone become one of the biggest stars in the world on the back of her leg-crossing, Michael Douglas-straddling turn in Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct, the massive box office success of which sparked a slew of similarly sweaty mainstream movies like Sliver, Body of Evidence, Disclosure and so on.

But, by the mid-90s, the age of the ‘erotic’ blockbuster seemed to be already drawing to a close. It was all too easy to mock the absurdity of the movies, and the narcissism of the stars; this was around the time when Dennis Pennis prompted TV viewers to piss themselves with laughter by asking Demi Moore whether, if it was not gratuitous and tastefully done, she would consider keeping her clothes on in a movie. Following the one-two punch of the much-derided Showgirls (1995) and Striptease (1996), Hollywood began to shy away from softcore, leaving it to crawl back to the direct-to-video market with the likes of the Poison Ivy series. Sure, Kubrick’s swansong Eyes Wide Shut came in 1999, which had at least a hint of mass appeal thanks to the presence of the not-yet-divorced Cruise and Kidman, but its art house alienation tactics never stood a chance of winning over a wider audience (and I’d wager we’ll be able to say much the same of Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac later this year). By my estimation, the real last gasp for 90s multiplex erotica came with the John McNaughton-directed film which hit UK cinemas on 15th May 1998. Not necessarily the kind of film we might have expected from the guy who made Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, it was a glossy, big budget thriller with a name cast, boasting a complex plot driven by multiple protagonists. It was also positively oozing with thick, hot sleaze from every pore on its leathery-suntanned skin.

The movie was Wild Things, and for a generation of hormonally charged adolescents (and many older viewers too no doubt), it made our hearts sing. Bad pun, I know. But this is the movie in which a short-shorts clad Denise Richards goes to Matt Dillon’s house to wash his car and asks him where his hose is, so forgive me for not being too concerned with subtlety or good taste here. Indeed, subtlety and taste were not all that high on Hollywood’s list of priorities in the 90s – if they never have been, really…

It all starts out like any story one might have seen recounted on Jerry Springer at the time. In the affluent Florida town of Blue Bay, scandal breaks out when respected school counsellor Sam Lombardo (Matt Dillon) is accused of rape by high school cheerleader Kelly Van Ryan (Denise Richards), daughter of the town’s richest and subsequently most powerful woman, Sandra Van Ryan (Theresa Russell). Whether or not he’s guilty, we don’t know; but it’s immediately apparent that, guilty or not, he’s screwed, given the filthy rich always have the best lawyers, and all he can afford is strip mall shyster Ken Bowden (Bill fuckin’ Murray). Things look even bleaker when a second schoolgirl, trailer trash tearaway Suzie Toller (Neve Campbell), comes forward and claims Lombardo raped her too. But of course, things are not quite as simple as they might initially seem, and it soon transpires there’s a twist in the tale. And then there’s a twist in that tale. And then a twist in that tale. And so it goes; but not content with getting very twisty-turny, Wild Things is also keen to get naughty… real freaky-naughty…

It is interesting to note how mainstream representations of sex have changed since the 90s. After almost a decade of non-stop horror remakes and torture films, violence in mainstream cinema has almost certainly grown more extreme, whereas sex has been brushed to the side somewhat. If we look at the sauciest mainstream films of recent years, more often than not they tend to be comedies – the ‘Frat Pack’/Apatow films, the Hangovers and so forth – wherein the desires, fetishes and hang-ups of the characters are typically the source of the humour. Failing that, it might be the in-your-face aggressive sexuality showcased in Spring Breakers and Piranha 3D, which ultimately leads the characters into a world of hurt. In short, nowadays we seem happy to point and laugh at the sex drive, or see people punished for acting on it. So few mainstream movies nowadays are comfortable wading deep into sex and simply revelling in it, unrepentantly, with no ironic detachment or underlying morality. Wild Things does this with the best of them. It’s out-and-out sleazy and doesn’t care who knows it, and that’s the principle reason it’s so much fun.

From the very beginning this film makes no bones whatsoever about being an in-your-face raunch-fest, with its persistent droning saxophones on the soundtrack, scantily clad cast forever glistening with sweat, and constant sexual references in almost every dialogue exchange. The subject is on everyone’s minds from start to finish, young and old alike; the high school girls lust openly after their hunky guidance counsellor, while he quietly lusts after them back; the detectives investigating the case are often little more than legally protected Peeping Toms. Every conversation invariably comes around, sooner or later, to the subject of who the people in question are fucking, and/or who they were fucking, and/or who they’d like to be fucking, and in the few instances in which the subject is not broached directly there’s either an innuendo or a blunt vulgarity to fill the void. To use an suitable innuendo of my own, there’s very little beating around the proverbial bush here. Hell, the very first words we hear out of Denise Richards’ perpetually pouty lips are “fuck off.”

Watching the opening titles and looking at the poster art above, it seems strange now that Denise Richards doesn’t get her name above the title. Wild Things was sold most heavily on her presence at the time, and it’s remembered best for it since. And yes, when I say ‘her presence’ I do of course mean her breasts. There’s barely a moment she appears onscreen without the camera slowly, almost imperceptibly dipping and drawing in to perv on her shapely form. All this in spite of the fact that, really, her actual nude scenes are quite brief. Factor in the absence of any nudity from Neve Campbell, and despite the overall tone of pure sleaze, Wild Things is in fact not a very explicit film at all. Few seem to remember that the film’s most full-on sex scene occurs quite early on, and involves Theresa Russell’s iron-fisted matriarch. The notorious, pivotal ménage à trois scene is in truth pretty tame, fading to black before they really get to business without that much skin on show beforehand; likewise Richards and Campbell’s Dillon-less love scene later. Contrast these with the lengthy, comparatively unflinching mattress mambo sequences in Basic Instinct and Body of Evidence, and Wild Things isn’t really much to write home about. But this was 1998. The internet hadn’t really taken off yet, and as such hardcore pornography had not yet achieved the omnipresence it now knows. Subsequently, for a mainstream movie to showcase a threesome – even a brief, inexplicit and, it must be said, rather awkward and unnatural one – was a considerably bigger deal than it might necessarily be today.

True story: one of my housemates at university had a VHS copy of Wild Things which, whenever I borrowed it, was perpetually stopped at this point in the tape. Not that I had borrowed the tape to, ahem, review that specific scene myself or anything…

One of the most important things to note about Wild Things, however, is its sincerity. It is this quality above all else that makes it a considerably more genuine piece of exploitation than the vast majority of the oh-so-knowing pseudo-exploitation/grindhouse we see so much of these days (not that I want to start rabbiting on about that again). The plot gets tangled up in twist after twist, and everything gets increasingly ridiculous as the running time drags on – at almost two hours, Wild Things is undeniably a little overlong – yet for the duration it is played almost entirely straight. Sure, they’re having some fun with it, but crucially they’re never making fun of it; not even Bill Murray, who, though cast primarily as the comic relief, plays his big courtroom drama scene straight enough to do Matlock proud.

However, no one comes off as taking it quite so seriously as Neve Campbell. As we’ve seen since the Scream series ended (I don’t count that fourth instalment – hell, I’d rather not count the third either), over the years she has retreated increasingly to smaller, more dramatic indie fare than the sort of mainstream stuff in which she made her name. Taking the comparatively edgy role of bisexual bad girl Suzie would seem to be intended as a step in that direction. But here’s the thing… Neve Campbell is awful in Wild Things. She really is. I hadn’t realised quite how bad she is in this film until revisiting it for this article. Every gesture, every movement, every attempt at a little quirk, the way she lifts her fist whenever threatened as though it’s her instinctive reaction – all of it comes off so painfully forced, it’s laughable. All that considered, it’s no surprise she looks even more uncomfortable in the pervy bits. However, the other thing is – for exploitation, that’s perfect. Historically, those appearing in exploitation films weren’t playing it for laughs the way most do today; there was no irony involved at all. They weren’t even conscious that what they were making was exploitation. They wanted to be taken seriously, and subsequently gave serious performances, and the fact that they failed miserably – hey presto, instant paracinema. So it is with Wild Things. But we can at least say that nothing Campbell does here is anywhere near as unconvincing as her English accent in The Glass Man. (Not that many people are likely to have seen that, as it still hasn’t had a wide release. To be honest, you’re not missing that much.)

Still, disregarding any concerns about how natural any of it is or how much celebrity skin is shown, Wild Things ensures that fans of hot lesbo action get their money’s worth. One area where the film does undeniably wimp out, however, is the relationship between Matt Dillon and Kevin Bacon’s characters. The big final revelation (wait, I’m wrong, I think there are at least two more revelations afterwards, it’s hard to keep up) that Lombardo and Detective Duquette are in fact in cahoots is easily the least credible of all the twists; unless, heaven forbid, the two of them might be into one another as well. Let’s face it, as soon as Dillon opens the shower door to be confronted with Bacon’s bacon (I know, I’m not the first and won’t be the last to make that joke), surely the first thing that crosses every viewer’s mind is that they must be lovers, particularly given that bisexuality and polyamory are central themes in the movie. That Wild Things stops short of showing this clearly indicates prejudices that still endure in popular culture: everyone likes a bit of girl-on-girl, but it’s no-way-José when it comes to guy-on-guy. Sad to say, I’m not sure things would be any different if they made the film today, even with the unflinching portrayal of gay sex on TV in the likes of True Blood and Game of Thrones. Let’s not forget, Brokeback Mountain might have got Ang Lee his first Oscar, but they wouldn’t let it have Best Picture. Not that Wild Things ever stood too great a chance of that particular accolade either, sad to say…

(Yes, I told you there’d be man-ass. If this bothers you, be aware that I could just as easily have posted a screenshot of Kevin Bacon’s cock from a few seconds later.)

So, was Wild Things the end of an era for the Hollywood sex film? Perhaps; perhaps not. Its overriding tone of unrepentant horniness may not be so prevalent in recent years, but its comparative under-emphasis on actual sex scenes and nudity might be seen as a precursor to the contemporary climate in which overtly sexual roles are frequently taken by actresses who refuse to appear naked on film (e.g. Jessica Alba in Sin City, Lindsay Lohan in I Know Who Killed Me). We should probably also note that Wild Things inspired a couple of direct-to-DVD sequels; while I haven’t seen these and have no plans to, their very existence underlines how much more comfortable the studios are with relegating smuttier material to the less discerning, less prestigious home market. Given this climate, I can’t deny a begrudging curiosity in how things progress with the Fifty Shades of Grey movie: if, as the rumour mill suggests, Universal succeed in luring a hitherto respectable cast and director for the inevitably dirty movie, and they do indeed make it as unflinchingly kinky as planned, the ramifications are interesting for mainstream sex films in the years ahead. But regardless of whether we see the return of shameless voyeurism and unapologetic sexploitation in big budget films, let us be thankful for films like Wild Things, and remind ourselves that we needn’t always be so shy about admitting what turns us on that we have to gloss over it with excessive irony. After all, as someone far more learned than myself once said, you can’t have an ironic wank.

By Oliver Longden

It is fair to say that time has not been kind to The Leopard Man. 70 years after its release it looks hokey, unevenly acted and has a twist ending that looms like a Titanic-sinking iceberg over the second half of the movie. Yet despite its flaws, or perhaps because the distance of history now lets us see them as historical curiosities, The Leopard Man retains a certain primitive power.

The Leopard Man is one of three films directed by Jacques Tourneur for creative producer Val Lewton at RKO pictures which are considered minor masterpieces of the B-movie form. The other two, Cat People and I Walked with Zombie (which also recently reached its 70th anniversary) are generally held to be superior to The Leopard Man, and it’s certainly fair to say that they have aged better than this movie. The Leopard Man concerns a leopard which escapes from captivity during a botched publicity stunt and a rash of murders which follow. They are thought to be the work of the escaped beast but Jerry Manning (Dennis O’Keefe), the promoter torn with guilt over his role in the failed publicity stunt, begins to suspect that other forces may be at work. He and his girlfriend, Kiki (Jean Brooks), the struggling cabaret entertainer who was with the leopard when it escaped, are sucked into the hunt for the animal. They are assisted in their attempt by Dr Galbraith, the man who runs the local museum in their New Mexico town. He takes on the role of all purpose man of science, a vital stock character in B-movie cinema.

The biggest weakness of The Leopard Man to modern eyes is that this a film ultimately about a serial killer, an antagonist supremely common in 21st century drama. Serial killers were little known in the 1940s and still less understood. Those of us raised on the real life crimes of John Wayne Gacy, Ed Gein and Fred West or their fictional counterparts have much more experience with fictional depictions of deranged murderers than anyone in 1943. Serial killers have become one of our quintessential bogeymen and have been extensively studied by criminologists and forensic psychologists. We take it for granted that there are those who, through a combination of disposition and childhood trauma, kill for pleasure or to fill some void inside themselves. When we see these individuals on screen we have a narrative all mapped out for them (wildly inaccurate though that narrative might be). In the Leopard Man the killer is ultimately revealed to have been driven mad by the first killing, the only one actually committed by the leopard. It got into his head somehow and drove him to act out homicidal urges. It feels a strange, unsatisfying conclusion for the film to reach because we have our own internalised folk myth of how serial killers are made and we know, or think we know, that people do not just go mad and start killing people apropos of nothing. This sense of crudeness, of a narrative structure still in development drains the film of some of its impact.

Despite these weaknesses I enjoyed watching The Leopard Man. Tourneur’s direction is skilled and the film looks a lot better than it has any right to, considering how cheaply it was made. The film climaxes with a mysterious religious procession through the town which manages to be eerie and evocative despite mainly being heard rather than seen. The mournful song of the procession is a funeral dirge which concentrates the mind on death. It’s a very effective technique. The lighting during the climax is splendid with the heroine encouraging the murderer to turn out the lights, claiming he will be better able to see the parade through the window, but knowing all the time that the darkness will trigger his murderous impulses. The acting is fair to good and the dialogue has that marvellous B-movie charm where people bark exposition at each other in well-mannered staccato bursts. The scene where Jerry explains to Kiki that his poor upbringing has left him believing he needs to show a hard exterior to the world takes only fractionally longer to unfold on screen than the reading of this sentence.

The killings themselves are not particularly graphic, even by the standards of 1940s cinema. The camera is concerned with the set up to the murders, the darkness and the terror which precedes the final act of homicide. The first victim we hear rather than see, killed on the wrong side of her own front door while her domineering mother and her younger brother struggle to open it. The second is killed in a graveyard; we know her fate is sealed as soon as she goes in to meet secretly with a boyfriend, a fatal error in any murder narrative. The final victim is killed in the street in a short sequence with heavy overtones of Jack the Ripper. All three scenes are shot through with a fatalistic quality but enlivened through judicious use of the infamous Lewton Bus technique, an incredibly common horror trope whereby a sudden scare that interrupts a tense scene is revealed to be from an innocuous source (such as a passing bus). Now it seems hackneyed, although still very much in use. Back in 1943 when it was brand new, it must have ramped the tension up to unbearable levels.

Perhaps the best scenes in The Leopard Man are early on when we are still feeling our way through the plot and being tossed the odd red herring. It opens with Kiki in her dressing room preparing to go out, talking with one of the matchbox girls. There is tension early on between Kiki and Clo-Clo, a vibrant and passionate flamenco dancer who is the star attraction of the club whom Kiki is scheming to upstage. When the leopard escapes it initially feels like just another complicating factor in the lives of the characters rather than the key event which will shape the film. Clo-Clo, superbly played by enigmatically monikered Mexican actress Margo, is the most interesting character in the film. She instinctively plays with a set of castanets as she walks and has an almost constant sense of motion even when standing still. She has some of the best moments in the first half of the film, particularly in her interactions with a fortune teller friend. These interactions are pregnant with doom: the fortune teller keeps seeing the same card – the death card – in her readings, and this repeating motif inculcates a potent sense of unease into the early stages of the film before the bodies have started to pile up. They also cleverly raise the possibility of a supernatural element to the film; another red herring, but one which adds to the complexity of the narrative. The female cast and characters are noticeably stronger than the male in The Leopard Man and are unusually prominent in the action, especially early in the film. It’s depressing that this still stands out as unusual, even seventy years after the film was made. Male characters still get about 70% of the screen time in Hollywood.

It’s harder to recommend The Leopard Man as essential viewing than either Cat People or I Walked With a Zombie, both of which have more psychological depth, but it is a neat example of what a B-movie can be when it chafes at the edges of its remit and understands that horrible events have greater power when they cut through an existing narrative. It’s also an interesting attempt to deal realistically with serial killers before they became the unstoppable pop culture phenomenon currently infesting every screen in sight.

By Oliver Longden

April 2013 marks 70 years of Jack Tourneur’s psychological horror film I Walked With a Zombie. Underneath the layers of 1940s reserve and casual racism, there’s quite a charming little movie that probably deserves to be better remembered. Back in 1943, zombies weren’t the horde of shambling undead cannibals we know today: they were the product of voodoo magic, and rather than representing a distorted mirror to our own consumer culture as our current crop of zombies do, they sprang from a deep rooted fear of Afro-Caribbean culture. This earlier voodoo zombie has the primal fear of death about it but also has a concept of otherness; something not just dead, but foreign as well. It hints at powers that white men and women cannot access, and raises the possibility of the social order being reversed, of the voodoo priest becoming the master of white people instead of the other way around, something which would have a peculiar horror for white audiences in 1943. If these colonial anxieties seem quaint and distasteful today that’s because the world has moved on to a more explicitly post-colonial set of collective neuroses. I’m hopeful that one day zombies as a metaphor for mindless consumption will seem equally quaint to future critics.

In I Walked With a Zombie, a nurse named Betsy (played by Frances Dee) travels to the Caribbean to help look after Jessica, the wife of a plantation owner called Paul Holland (Tom Conway) who has been left profoundly mentally disabled after a serious injury. She finds her patient strange and unsettling, and at the same time finds herself drawn to the aloof master of the house. She meets his brother Wesley (James Ellison), a man on the verge of becoming an alcoholic, and Mrs Rand (Edith Barrett), the level-headed mother of family doctor. The family life is fractious and mystery surrounds the circumstances leading up to Jessica’s illness and her current state. As Betsy finds herself falling in love with Paul Holland, she decides to try and help cure his wife to make him happy. She hears that a local voodoo priest may be able to help Jessica and takes her to see him. She witnesses a voodoo ceremony but is shocked to find that Mrs Rand is involved in the voodoo rites. Gradually she begins to suspect Jessica may actually have died of her illness and been brought back as a zombie. In the final scenes Mrs Rand becomes hysterical and takes responsibility saying that she brought Jessica back. It is also revealed that Jessica was having an affair with her husband’s brother. The film ends in an orgy of melodrama with Wesley and Jessica dead and Betsy and Paul able to be together thanks to his wife’s final death.

The film never explicitly comes down on one side or the other on whether Jessica truly is a zombie, and this is one of the film’s great strengths, another being the performances of the supporting cast. While Tom Conway as the male lead is doing the classic distant unavailable thing that women in romance stories seem incapable of resisting, James Ellison is chewing the scenery as his unstable brother. Ellison’s performance reeks of danger and regret and it is clear to the audience that he is nursing some dark secret. Edith Barrett too is excellent; first appearing as the prim and proper woman of medicine it becomes steadily more obvious that she has been seduced by voodoo. Initially she takes a classic colonial line on voodoo, that she takes part in the ceremonies and uses the form of the religion to convince the local people to take their medicine, seeing it as a tool to help the ignorant savages. Over time it becomes clear that her relationship with voodoo is much more complex, that she has been sucked into using it as the local people use it.

There are some lovely set pieces in I Walked With A Zombie. The plot is foreshadowed when Betsy encounters a calypso singer outside a cafe who sings a song that hints of the dark secrets in the Holland family’s past. Calypso music had been introduced into the United States in the 1940s and here the singer (played by the brilliantly named Sir Lancelot) strikes a fine balance between the swinging rhythms of the music and the dark content of his song that makes the whole sequence surreal and unsettling. When Betsy decides to take Jessica to the voodoo priest there is a long sequence covering her approach to the houmfort where the voodoo worshippers gather. The journey is framed as a sequence of claustrophobic vignettes detailing the macabre experiences they have as they approach their destination. They walk through cane fields as dark and close as a forest and emerge to see a dead dog hanging from a tree. They pass strange voodoo accoutrements and have to pass the guard, a tall black man with staring eyes who may (or may not) be zombie himself. These sequences are shot on a sound stage rather than using externals which really adds to the sense of being trapped in an unfamiliar world. The voodoo sequences themselves are energetic and exciting all conducted to the wild beat of ritual drumming. Seeing the ladies throw themselves about and dance with the celebrant must have been shocking to 1940s eyes used to stultifying images of more decorous women.

If you strip away the voodoo and the colonial trappings, I Walked With a Zombie is a film about people going mad far away from home. It’s a film about how secrets and regrets can destroy a family and how superstition breeds in isolation. It’s a well made film, although not without its flaws. The lack of externals may add to the claustrophobia but it makes it very hard to believe in the island as a living, breathing place. It is a product of a more racist time and never regards the social iniquities displayed on screen as any kind of real problem. Betsy, the main protagonist is defined solely in terms of her relationship with men, cast as a lover to Paul and a kind of surrogate mother figure to his troubled brother. Despite these problems, this is a film with real psychological depth that artfully walks the tightrope between showing voodoo as real and showing it as base superstition. That we, the audience cannot say for certain whether voodoo is real or not allows us to better empathise with the characters grappling with that same issue. Finally, there is something refreshing about seeing a zombie movie that dates back to the old days before Romero redefined what it meant to be the walking dead.

By Kit Rathenar

John Carpenters Vampires (hereafter just “Vampires”, for simplicity’s sake) is a film I feel a little odd writing about. It’s a film that I absolutely love, but I’ve got the strangest feeling that if it could speak to me it would ask me “What the fuck are you doing here?” I don’t think it’s a film that I’m supposed to be the target market for. It’s definitely not, as it might itself point out if challenged, a chick movie. It’s also a movie that a lot of people have considered to be disposable, trashy, and deeply flawed. But regardless of the validity or not of such criticisms, I disagree wholeheartedly with anyone who thinks that this film isn’t worth seeing – or worth defending.

And at it’s simplest, that is because in Vampires, I honestly believe that John Carpenter – quite possibly, entirely unwittingly – made one of the last great vampire movies before the entire genre collapsed around our ears. For the last decade or two, we’ve been seeing the seemingly unstoppable rise of a new breed of vampire. They’re well-groomed, handsome, charismatic, and sometimes they even sparkle in sunlight. They’re portrayed as romantic heroes, tragic tortured souls, and profound and meaningful creatures. They also lose fights to high school students, can be led around by the dick by any woman with a couple of superpowers and/or an insecurity complex, and are generally a bunch of all-round pussywhipped losers. These monstrous alpha predators, these terrors of the night, have been watered down and objectified so far that I remember Waterstones at one point having an entire section titled simply “Lady and the Vamp”. While any given instantiation may have redeeming features, taken en masse I am very sick of the modern, romanticised vampire archetype.

In 1998, though, just as the common domesticated vampire was starting to become a mainstream phenomenon (cough Buffy the Vampire Slayer cough), John Carpenter decided to toss out a nice straightforward little action-horror movie based on a pulp novel called “Vampire$” by one John Steakley. I’ve read the novel, and in honesty, thought it was pretty lacklustre – fortunately, Carpenter played a bit fast and loose with it when he filmed it. And the result is something that, flawed or not, is still uniquely special: a movie with the aesthetics and soul of a Western, the heart of a hard-boiled action movie, and the blood of Dracula pounding molten in its veins.

The background narrative of Vampires is simple. In a world where vampires are incontrovertibly real, the Catholic church runs secret teams of vampire slayers – hard-case fighters who operate in units that have more in common with a military black ops or mercenary team than any gang of high-school cuties – to try and keep the bloodsuckers under control. When Vampires opens, the first thing we see is one of these teams, led by Jack Crow (expertly played by James Woods in classic badass mode) taking on a nest of vampire “goons”, the lowest-ranking and least powerful type of vampire in this setting. These men go in armed and armoured to the teeth, with a priest at their back and years of experience on their side, and they still look nervous. They take down nine goons and it takes them an entire, gruelling day. This is a universe where, for a trained professional with all the right equipment, killing even a basic, entry-level vampire requires cursing, sweating, scrapping, risking your life and losing your dignity every single time. And this, for my money, is as it should be. These vampires aren’t pinups or glamour models; they’re ugly, grimy, vicious and above all, dangerous. They present a threat that even the experts here take seriously.

And that’s before we even meet a so-called “master” vampire. To be precise, the first and most powerful of all master vampires: Jan Valek, a six-hundred-year-old fallen priest who was accidentally transformed into a vampire when the Church tried to exorcise him and screwed it up. Played magnificently by Thomas Ian Griffith (whose training as a martial artist clearly stood him in brilliant stead when trying to capture the inhuman blend of grace and savagery he brings to the role; and all of it without any CGI trickery to make him look superhuman either, he just DOES it), Valek for me is one of the final few of a dying fictional breed, the last of the great vampire lords. He’s as bestial as the least of his followers, snarling more often than he speaks, fighting and killing with an animalistic grace and wantonness that alienate him from any possible claim to true humanity; yet he’s also ferociously intelligent and self-aware, with ambitions and motivations of his own and a mockingly (and justifiably) superior demeanour when he does deign to interact with humans in any other context than an instantly fatal one. He is everything that a true vampire, at least to my mind, should be – something that repels and attracts in equal measure, at once higher and lower than human. A truly loathsome predator with no redeeming empathic qualities whatsoever, and yet simultaneously a thrilling glimpse of something so exotic in its limitless power that it can’t help but be seductive to any mere mortal who’s ever discontentedly asked themselves “Is this really all there is to life?” To add to his classical vampiric credentials, he’s got the traditional Eastern European origins (Czech, in his case, not Transylvanian, but that’s fine with me) and wanders around in elegant head-to-toe black including a huge velvet coat that somehow miraculously sheds all known forms of dust despite the fact that he goes around burying himself in sand with it still on. He speaks with a husky, rasping accent distorted by massive razor-sharp fangs, and has nails like claws that frequently hover breath-catchingly close to other people’s eyeballs, lips, and throats. Yes, I’ll admit it – I wouldn’t touch Edward Cullen with someone else’s bargepole, but Jan Valek could give me one glance and I’d do anything he asked me to. And I do mean anything.

Y’see, when writers try to deliberately romanticise vampires for a postulated female audience, they all too often do it by taking out most of the traits I like about the archetype in the first place. Thus, for me, the joy of Vampires – a movie made with the female gaze clearly the furthest thing from its mind – is that in overlooking me as a potential demographic, it’s actually given me exactly what I wanted from the start. I want my vampires as they’re portrayed in the old films and novels: terrifying, bloodthirsty, unpredictable, inhuman, and dominatingly powerful to the verge of being flat-out unstoppable. That’s the archetype I’ve been in love with since I was way too young to be watching movies like this, and I will forever be grateful to John Carpenter for taking that archetype and turning it up until the knob fell off, right before everyone else started getting it quite so terribly wrong.

But what makes me so convinced that Vampires wasn’t made with a female audience in mind? Mostly the fact that it’s one of the most unrelentingly testosterone-driven movies I’ve ever seen. There’s a universal surfeit of gravelly voices, weapon porn, marginalisation of female character roles (to the extent that LITERALLY every woman in the movie apart from the vampires is a hooker because that’s the capacity in which they were manoeuvred into the plot in the first place), and heartfelt male bonding exchanges with the appropriate leavening of violent scuffling. Like a good vintage Western or war movie, Vampires is permeated throughout with this combat-oriented, hypermasculine aura that allows it to get away with levels of intimacy between the male cast members that simply wouldn’t fly in a less stringently macho environment. One only has to look at Jack Crow’s relationship with his friend and only surviving teammate, Montoya (Daniel Baldwin, playing the role with a low-key yet sympathetic world-weariness). These two ultra-hardass characters, when interacting with each other, do everything but brush stray hair out of each other’s faces. Softened voices, affectionate asides, gentle touches, a near-telepathic ability to follow each other’s thoughts; and when they do quarrel, they’ll instantly join forces to get rid of anyone who dares to try and stop them before going straight back to their argument. They’re more married than most married couples I’ve ever seen while still both being portrayed as heterosexual, and while friendships like this are a revered tradition in “guys'” movies, it’s much harder to play them straight (if you’ll pardon the pun) in any movie that’s aimed outside of a very heteronormative and predominantly male audience. And while there is a male/female romance subplot in Vampires, that clearly isn’t consciously aimed at any passing women either because it’s neither sentimental, overt, nor superfluous to the main plot. The slow, painfully inevitable process by which Montoya falls for Katrina is all played out in a muted minor key, a plangent chord on a steel guitar rather than the sudden obnoxious blast of violins and accompanying bluebirds that it would’ve been if it was meant to placate a hypothetical viewer’s girlfriend. And once again, I love it all the more for that.

But even leaving aside this level of analysis, there’s so much more about this movie that I could praise. I love that it dips into the sinister, darkly glamorous mythology of movie-style Catholicism, and thereby underpins its storyline with just enough sense of history to give it some three-dimensionality. The idea that Valek has been hunting for six hundred years for the Black Cross of Berziers, with the goal of completing his own exorcism and transforming himself into a monster that can walk in sunlight, adds a sudden lurch of scale and perspective to the movie that makes it feel bigger and older and darker than it has any right to. Indeed, Carpenter handles the religious/supernatural element of Vampires with a smooth, unsqueamish assurance throughout, simply putting it in matter-of-factly whenever it needs to be there. The narrative never pauses for one of those aggravating “but surely this can’t really happen!” moments, and so the viewer’s disbelief remains comfortably suspended alongside that of the characters. And I love, too, that this straightforward portrayal of the supernatural sits alongside an equally straight-up handling of the more mundane elements. Everything here is simply what it is, take it or leave it: from the violence and gore and the scrambling desperation of combat, to the drunken sexual energy of a roadhouse party filled with fighters and whores, to the no-excuses-no-apologies way that the heroes will simply get the fuck on with what needs doing and never give up, never go down, never bottle out. This movie runs on blood, testosterone, desert light and pure human grit, and that makes it more beautiful and believable to me than any supposedly “relatable”, watered-down vampire flick could ever be.

It wouldn’t be fair to end this little writeup without mentioning that this movie scores hugely with me in two final areas: cinematography and soundtrack. The camerawork in Vampires is just to my tastes, being relaxed, smooth, and not obsessed with closeups in the middle of fight scenes. The recurring use of red filters to give the daylight scenes a dusty, bloodstained look is a beautifully evocative touch (and also, arguably, a trial run for the massive overkill of the same technique that Carpenter would employ a couple of years later in the much-maligned Ghosts of Mars). The soundtrack, meanwhile, is of Carpenter’s own scoring – I’ve always admired him as a composer as much as a director – and is loaded with Western and blues motifs, deep, languid bass grooves and mournful guitars, capturing the perfect blend of badassery and moody sentiment to fit the look and feel of the film. I can watch Vampires when I’m blind drunk with my brain completely switched off, and enjoy it as pure aesthetic and spectacle; I can watch it with my whole mind and heart engaged, and be as caught up in the excitement, action, and my affection for the characters as I was the first time I saw it. And I can go back to it every damn time I’ve been pissed off by yet another – to directly quote Jack Crow – pole-smoking fashion victim who’s just been offered up as the next big thing in vampire folklore, and remember why I loved vampires in general in the first damn place. If you ask me to list my top ten movies of all time, Vampires will always be in there. Heck, most of the time it’s in the top five.

So cheers, John Carpenter, from the girl at the back of the theatre who you probably didn’t even know you were making this film for. Thank you very, very much.

By Oliver Longden

The Crazies is 40, but should anyone care? It is usually considered one of George A. Romero’s lesser works, partly because it has had less of a solid legacy than his iconic zombie films, and partly because everyone always forgets about the real rubbish like Survival of the Dead, alongside which The Crazies looks pretty damn good. Although The Crazies lacks the genre-creating cache of Night of the Living Dead and doesn’t have the hipster credentials of films of like Martin, it was still considered iconic enough to be fed into the remake meat-grinder in 2010. While it is definitely a flawed film, it is a flawed film with something to say about madness, sanity, and the thin line that divides them. The remake, by comparison, has something to say about avoiding crazy people who want to eat your face. I think the 1973 original still has an important message, even if it doesn’t always say it was well as you might wish.

In some ways the plot of The Crazies is the prototypical zombie movie plot. A government experiment, a deadly bioweapon, is released into an area and the army moves in to try and contain the disaster. (The 80s classic Return of the Living Dead makes use of precisely this set up and owes a great deal of its structure to The Crazies.) The bioweapon is a virus that causes a brain mutation which drives people mad and ultimately kills them. Some people become crazed killers and others become empty shells staring blankly into space. We see the action unfolding from two perspectives: that of the army (and their attendant scientists), and that of a small group of people trapped in the middle of the action. As the small group of survivors tries to escape from the army cordon we witness their mental deterioration.

We see a lot of madness in The Crazies, and it isn’t clear just how much is the result of the virus, and how much is the result of the situation. Right from the start we are shown that the army is woefully under-prepared for the disaster and hobbled by layers of bureaucracy that seem to make decisions almost for themselves. A key scientist is flown inside the quarantine zone despite his insistence that he will be more use in his lab, only to find out that the commander agrees but can’t allow him to leave because that would violate quarantine. As the attempts to control the townspeople turn into a bloodbath, the small group of people attempting to escape the corral start to fall apart, but are they infected or are they just reacting to appalling stress? The horror is wound tighter by the fact that there is no clear definition for when someone has succumbed. Unlike a zombie film (with which The Crazies is doomed to be endlessly compared) there is no digital line beyond which you are lost, nor is there a clear set of behaviours that define those afflicted. While zombies are single minded cannibals, these are horribly damaged people who may attempt murder, regress to childhood, rant and rave, or lapse in mutism. Worse still, they may return to lucidity for a time, armed with the terrible knowledge of their own degradation.

Another theme that occurs in The Crazies is the idea that the military will always end up oppressing anyone they come into contact with, and that this is as much a product of incompetence as it is ideology. The soldiers are very much the bad guys despite the fact that their aim of controlling the spread of the infection is entirely laudable. By virtue of their faceless uniforms, their monolithic bureaucracy and their endemic paranoia, they automatically become an adversarial presence in the town almost as soon as they have arrived. Rather than the well-oiled machine we are often presented with in American depictions of the military, we get to see a confused and divided agency riven with its own internal power struggles, and reacting aggressively because it doesn’t know how to do anything else. As we have witnessed the appalling failures of the military in Afghanistan and Iraq in the aftermath of those conflicts, this depiction of soldiers and their role in mediating conflict seems extremely relevant even 40 years later, which is colossally depressing.

It’s not all good news, however. The film has some quite serious problems, which may explain why it was never seen as an important Romero film and why it never had the impact it deserves. The soldiers, dressed in white hazard suits and gasmasks, all look exactly the same. While an army of faceless troopers ought to be extremely sinister, the fact that they look like they’re wearing bin bags does a great deal to mute their menace. There are also some real pacing issues caused by the cast being just the wrong size. It’s too big to tell a taut, psychologically harrowing narrative focused on a few individuals, and too small to do the full ensemble cast disaster movie. In addition, the middle third of the movie drags; the civilians are busy running here and there without much direction, and the army characters are repeatedly getting irritated with each other and indulging in testy exchanges with their superiors. It’s crying out for another group to focus on who can act as a bridge between the two main plot lines. This pacing issue isn’t helped by the very small budget. This causes a lot of the action to be quite repetitive because all the action sequences are shot with six people wearing bin bags as the antagonists. There are a number of night sequences where it is painfully obvious that there isn’t enough lighting to make more than a small area visible, which hugely reduces the scope for innovation. A bigger budget would have allowed for more variety in the action. The addition of a car chase and a few explosions would have helped enormously.

While far from a perfect movie The Crazies has some excellent moments, and the question of how you judge madness and sanity is an ongoing concern. The new edition of the DSM, the handbook which clinicians use to diagnose mental illness, is due out in May, and there are strong concerns that it may increase the risks of medicalizing normal human experiences. This difficulty is well explored in The Crazies with the effects of stress, trauma and pre-existing personality traits all combining to make it difficult to say for certain which characters are definitely infected. There is no shortage of good ideas in The Crazies and it seems a shame that it hasn’t been plagarised as heavily as some of Romero’s other works. I would love to see a really large scale disaster movie/horror crossover and I’ve got my fingers crossed that the troubled production of World War Z will finally scratch that itch and demonstrate the viability of the unique approach to horror proposed by The Crazies.

By Stephanie Scaife

I’d just like to start by saying that I fucking hate Valentine’s Day. This isn’t because I’m bitter but because I hate the marketing, the blatant fleecing all in the name of romance, the pink love hearts and special displays in stores hawking their finest selection of Nicholas Sparks books, Jennifer Aniston DVD box sets and other such things that just make me want to barf. I hate the assumption that we want nothing more than fluffy wish fulfilment, the sort of saccharine Hollywood nonsense that assumes its viewer will shed a tear into their cheap glass of chardonnay whilst secretly wishing their significant other was actually Channing Tatum. Not to mention the pressure of the socialised norm that being in a monogamous romantic relationship is such a good thing to begin with.

All of this is fucking bullshit of course and it’s not aided by the idea, oft lamented on these here pages at BAH, that chicks don’t dig horror flicks and that men must be forced to watch them alone. Well, consider this crazy concept… what if gender and sexuality have nothing to do with whether or not someone likes something? What if it’s all to do with individual taste, and having the world dictate to us what we should and shouldn’t like based on whether or not we have a vagina is complete and utter nonsense? With that in mind what I’m all about this Valentine’s Day are the unconventional romances, the ones that seem grounded in an actual, tangible sense of reality that we can all relate to no matter how fantastical or out of this world the premise, because believe it or not horror films can be just as cockle warming, and less nauseating, than your standard romantic fare. So here are my top ten suggestions (in no particular order) if you want some genuine warm and fuzzies this Valentine’s Day…

An American Werewolf in London (1981)

Let’s face it, if you don’t have a crush on Jenny Agutter after watching this movie then there’s probably something wrong with you. An American Werewolf in London is my all time favourite horror film, but it’s also pretty damned romantic too, making it the perfect choice for Valentine’s Day. David (David Naughton) and Alex’s (Agutter) liaison is passionate but ultimately doomed, you know because he’s a werewolf who kills people, so it keeps things nicely in perspective. The lesson here – don’t bring strange American men home from work unless you’re prepared to cause mass havoc in Piccadilly Circus and get your heart broken into tiny little pieces.

Jack & Diane (2012)

Bradley Rust Gray’s coming-of-age lesbian werewolf film is both odd and endearing. Hot young upstarts Riley Keough and Juno Temple star as Jack and Diane respectively, two teenage girls who meet during a long hot New York summer and instantly fall madly and dangerously in love. Jack is a street wise baby dyke and Diane is the naive innocent, whose sexual awakening breeds bizarre and destructive visions of werewolf transformations, conveyed using beautiful stop-motion sequences rendered by the Quay brothers. Jack & Diane wonderfully captures the visceral and honest nature of first love, its fickleness and all of the ups and downs that come with those pent up hormones finally having a sexual outlet. There’s also a great cameo from Kylie Minogue as a butch tattoo artist.

Midnight Son (2011)

Okay so I know that we harp on about this one a lot at BAH, but it really is that good. Jacob (Zak Kilberg) works the nightshift as a security guard and spends his days avoiding daylight; he has a rare skin condition and finds being out in the sun almost unbearable. As his condition gradually worsens he finds his only sustenance in consuming human blood, but is he a vampire or just a troubled young man? Redemption of sorts presents itself in the form of Mary (Maya Parish), a young bartender, with whom Jacob falls madly in love. A bloody and miserablist romance that is ultimately sweet and tender, not to mention a vampire film that succeeds in that rarely attained feat, originality.

Kaboom (2010)

In the loosest possible terms Kaboom is a science fiction film, I guess, although really it’s kind of difficult to label, a bit like the central character’s sexual preferences. It has elements of comedy, noir, conspiracy thriller and apocalyptic cinema all rolled into one. The sexuality of the characters is fluid and changeable; main protagonist Smith (Thomas Dekker) refers to himself as “undecided” and is seen openly engaging in and enjoying sex with both men and women, to the detriment of nobody. It’s seen as normal and is matter of fact, not chaotic or subversive. Kaboom could be described as post-New Queer Cinema – the anger has been replaced with an utterly bonkers sense of irreverence. There’s almost no consideration for narrative structure or characterisation. To enjoy this film is to not think about it too much and to just go along for the ride. It’s genuinely refreshing to see a film where gender and sexuality are at the forefront for all the right reasons, not just to create drama or play into misconceptions and genre stereotypes.

Let the Right One In (2008)

Although considered to be a vampire film, Let the Right One In is more accurately about the friendship and quasi-romantic relationship that develops between Eli (Lina Leandersson) and Oskar (Kare Hedebrant), two twelve year olds on the cusp of adolescence. Although in the case of Eli, our young vampire who will forever be on the cusp, it serves to heighten the loneliness and confusion felt at such a difficult age. A far more innocent film than the others on my list, this is none the less affecting in the urgency and desperation of their relationship. Where their individual lives are almost unbearably painful they seek refuge together, their blind willingness to do anything for each other regardless of the consequences results in what can only be described as being equally as horrifying as it is touching. A truly beautiful film that is both haunting and profound.

Near Dark (1987)

Yep, another vampire flick, and despite the bleak sun bleached deserts and rough terrains of Kathryn Bigelow’s classic horror film, it’s also got a lot to do with love and the loss of innocence. Caleb (Adrian Pasdar) falls madly and instantaneously in love with Mae (Jenny Wright) – isn’t that always the way with movies? – only to find out that she’s a vampire and her little love bite means he will become one too after he makes his first kill. Thus forcing Caleb to choose between the woman he loves and his family, a tough decision when all he really wanted was to get his leg over.

May (2002)

So you’re single and you’ve got nobody to spend your Valentine’s Day with? How about you take a leaf out of May’s (Angela Bettis) book and start crafting the ideal lover from your favourite parts of the otherwise unsatisfactory people who come into your life? Sounds a little extreme, but when that lazy eye of May’s is finally straightened out and she feels beautiful enough to embark on a romantic relationship, all those dreams fall flat when she quickly comes to realise that the world is full of assholes. As creepy as her patchwork monster is, at least it’ll never let her down. Aw, and some say that romance is dead…

Don’t Look Now (1973)

Nic Roeg’s classic horror Don’t Look Now has perhaps one of the most honest portrayals of sex and marriage ever committed to film. Laura (Julie Christie) and John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) are grieving the tragic death of their young daughter when they travel to Venice; once there they slowly start to rebuild their fragile relationship. In one now infamous scene the couple have sex; this is intercut with them getting ready to go out. It’s such a simple scene but it captures the intimacy of a couple who have been together and have loved each other for years rediscovering their relationship and their sexuality once the veil of grief has lifted ever so slightly and they are able to start to function again as a couple. In so many films sex is put on a pedestal where what we’re given very rarely actually resembles any sort of reality, so it’s refreshing here to see a couple who so obviously know each other and love each other and sex is shown for what it so often is in real life; it’s passionate and founded in familiarity, the earth doesn’t have to move and the planets don’t have to realign, it’s just about a simple connection between two people. Not to mention that despite being an accurate portrayal of grief and love, Don’t Look Now is a genuinely terrifying film.

Switchblade Romance AKA Haute Tension(2003)

Unrequited love, sigh, a difficult topic to tackle at the best of times so why not just soak it in extreme amounts of blood and gore? That’s exactly what Alexandre Aja did with Switchblade Romance (Haute Tension) and it works pretty darn well, so long as you ignore the plot holes. That aside, it’s unlikely any Valentine’s Day won’t be improved by this slice of Gallic ultra violence. Not that the film isn’t also sort of romantic, being that when Alex (Maïwenn) is abducted by a crazed murderer, Marie (Cécile de France) goes to pretty extreme lengths to save the object of her affections.

Thirst (2009)

Yes… I know, more vampires. But as we all know, vampires = sex and there’s a lot of this going on in Park Chan-wook’s frankly bizarre film about Sang-hyun (Song Kang-ho), a Catholic priest who becomes a vampire and begins an illicit love affair with his friend’s wife, Tae-ju (Ok-bin Kim). The priest is a good man who takes his vow of chastity very seriously, so when his new found taste for blood opens his mind to the world of carnal desires things get a little crazy. Sang and Tae develop and obsessive relationship and become so deeply entwined with one another that their present becomes all that exists rendering the outside world irrelevant to our pair of star crossed lovers. Of course, everything ends rather badly for all concerned but isn’t that what romance is all about?