Keri O'Shea

Blu-Ray Review: Female Prisoner Scorpion – The Complete Collection

Posted on August 3, 2016July 7, 2017 by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

Imagine a sequence of films, emanating from Japan over forty years ago, which melded – literally – riotously strong female characters with insurrection, violence, sexuality and even the odd dash of social commentary. ‘Women in prison’ films (for the most part) like no other, the Female Convict movies (or ‘Female Prisoner’, in the translation being used by Arrow) are completely unique in 70s cult cinema – a well-crafted, artistic foray into the genre which soon superseded it, with the various films looking one minute like an arthouse project, the next a pure exploitation venture, and the next, something Sergio Leone would have been proud to call his own. Ambitious, beautifully well-made – but only available piecemeal until now, in a handful of releases in the US and Europe over the past ten to fifteen years, give or take. Perhaps in part because lead actress Meiko Kaji has resurfaced in cult film consciousness via her influence on, and singing on (!) in Kill Bill (say what you like about Quentin Tarantino, but he has introduced a lot of people to interesting films via his own fandom and references in his work) and of course thanks to the efforts of Arrow, who have already released some of Meiko’s early work, such as Blind Woman’s Curse, an appetite has developed for these films to be released in one definitive version – which, with this four-film box set, Arrow have delivered.

Because of the extraordinary type of these movies, made during a frenetic period of activity between just 1972-74, I’m going to avoid a lengthy review of each. For one thing, with four films in all, this would turn into a fairly lengthy, probably tedious read. Instead, save for a quick discussion of the barest details of each movie, I’m going to explain why these films are more than worthy of your time, in the hopes that if you haven’t encountered these films, you will. Slight bias? You betcha. These films are an absolute feast.

The first film, Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion (1972) quickly introduces us to Matsu, sometimes Nami (Meiko), a notorious convict making an attempted escape alongside one companion – the only person in the prison she seems to not disregard or loathe completely. This attempt fails and Matsu is punished horribly, spending a large share of the film hogtied…and utterly, utterly silent, whatever is being done to her. The corrupt cop who fitted her up is still worried about the implacable Matsu, however, and wants her assassinated inside the prison. Matsu fights for survival, a victim of unprecedented brutality by the guards, still quietly driven by her own desire for revenge – and the circumstances which arise from her treatment allows a few changes to take place…

Made later the same year, Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 (1972) has many of the same plot devices, with Matsu now being openly referred to by her nickname – ‘Sasori’ (Scorpion) – and when we meet again, she has spent a whole year in isolation. She gets a short reprieve due to the arrival of an official who wishes to see all the inmates, and she of course takes her chances to escape again – though not before her rage and indignity is increased sevenfold by a ‘correctional’ rape. Alongside a new clutch of, in my opinion, a more fearsome group of convicts, including the incomparable Ôba, they and Sasori flee across and incredibly beautiful, if desolate landscape, back to civilisation – where the havoc of their lives and that which brought them to their current state turns out to be a deeply unsettling prospect for those they encounter, be they pursuing wardens, those once close to them, or members of the public.

Female Prisoner Scorpion: Beast Stable (1973) is the first film to differ from the ‘women in prison’ genre, turning instead into something of a yakuza thriller, with the renegade Sasori trying to live incognito, albeit that the opening scene rather blows her cover in a spectacularly grisly and almost comic way. This, our first protracted glimpse of life beyond the jailhouse walls, lacks the pace of the first two films, but the by-now characteristic flashes of ultraviolence and exploitation still link arms effectively with artistic shots and content. Another interesting aspect of the film is in its glimpses of urban sprawl and poverty, factors which eventually justify Nami’s ongoing and quenchless pursuit of vengeance for wrongs.

With the departure at this point of director Shunya Itô, I feel that the series could easily have wound to a close. However, there was one more part yet to come: Female Prisoner Scorpion #701: Grudge Song (1974). Here, the character of Sasori probably undergoes the biggest changes to date, saying more (which breaks a spell, of sorts) and committing a range of crimes which seem to show her as amoral or even immoral, rather than an agent of justice – which she has plausibly been until this point. Still, the symbolism is there for the asking, and the ongoing theme of police brutality is given free rein here. There are many strengths in the film, and so to an extent to call it the weakest of the four is not to damn it too much with faint praise. Considering the issues of a directorial swap mid-way through a series, this is still an accomplished movie which looks brilliant.

So, how to sum this set of films up…

Under the incredibly skilled hand of director Shunya Itô – who was at the helm for the first three of the films, before handing over to Yasuharu Hasebe for Grudge Song (himself a talented fella who had previously directed Meiko Kaji in the Stray Cat Rock films, though had a rather different style) – these movies are the very embodiment of the ‘broiling pot’ which encapsulates so many women in prison films, all frustrated sexuality, rivalry, high emotions and violence as an ever-present force. But – and with the greatest of respect to the many WIP films which have all of those elements and use them very well – it’s never, ever been handled in such a painterly, exploratory way as the Female Prisoner Scorpion films.

These films certainly use exploitation elements, and don’t shy away from what can be described in no other way than reprehensible plot lines – rape, beatings, psychological torment, humiliation – but these interludes are balanced against an almost delicate understanding of colour, camera angle, choreography and photography – particularly, I feel, in the first two films. And it all works together so seamlessly. For example, in the second film: a hijacked vehicle scene permits some catharsis for the women, straight after the passengers – men who had fought in World War II – have finished boasting of their rapes of Chinese women. The tables are turned, the men are being singularly tormented for the women’s pleasure, and yet ten seconds later, Sasori, simply looking out of the window as they pass through a tunnel, is transported into a dreamscape – one where primary colours light tableaux of the women’s initial crimes being performed, and act as foreshadowing, showing her internal life in a very different way than her largely mute, if still completely striking, performance (she actually speaks just a handful of words during this entire film, and none until almost the close, without missing a beat in terms of strong characterisation.)

These are, throughout, very physical women, demonic instead of demure, where scenes of their prostration (such as rape) make the men look endlessly like clowns and caricatures, but simply send the women inwards – where they wait, Sasori and the others, ready to explode into violence. Meiko Kaji is, throughout the first three films, almost otherworldly. Indeed, the trials this actress went through for the part (such as being drenched with freezing water in the second film – warm water would have created steam and destroyed the effect, see) combine with her taciturn, cold presence and make her seem more like a supernatural force than a woman. Yet for all her single-minded cruelty, it’s impossible (for me at least) not to like her a great deal, perhaps Grudge Song notwithstanding. It all works, perhaps also because of the expected fragility of such a petite young woman, particularly in the Japanese culture of the day.

And as for Japan, whilst the films don’t hammer home any political messages per se, you may be pleasantly surprised to pick up on some of the layers of symbolism therein: the Japanese flag becomes a dab of blood on occasions, or forms the backdrop to a hurled blade in the first movie; the women in the prison rose garden in the first film accidentally give themselves Geisha-painted lips as they discuss their frustrated sex drives; there are teasing references to Japanese kabuki theatre or traditional music throughout the films. So – this all leads us to one of the most iconic Japanese actresses ever to grace our screens, in a unique and strongly-drawn role, amongst a whole host of agents of feminine strength and cruelty, filmed by visually-creative artists who have made films sharp enough to accommodate a whole wealth of styles and subtle symbols, too.

The Arrow release is, as I have suggested, the definitive deal, containing all of the films in their entirety: the prints look good, though the third film retains a rather grainy veneer, and the audio is solid throughout. This all brings me, however, to a rare smattering of criticisms. Firstly – the main cover art for this is rather lacklustre. No personal disrespect intended towards the artist, but this isn’t the usual calibre for an Arrow release, neither clearly in keeping with the manga style to my eye (which I dislike actually, but would tie in with the films’ origins) nor showing the draftsmanship I’ve come to expect. It surely takes some doing to make Meiko Kaji look ugly. Sorry. However, I haven’t seen the fold-outs or other materials, so these may be another story altogether.

Then we come to the now obligatory plethora of extras on the discs, and I’ll be the first to admit my heart tends to sink when I get a review disc packed with ‘special features’ because for the most part, I find special features rather unnecessary and laboursome. Were I not reviewing the release, I’d very likely not watch them at all; a quick straw poll on Twitter shows that many people disagree with me, mind you, but this is my own proviso for what follows. So, here, we have the usual trailers and chapters, some interesting input, such as from the art director Tadayuki Kuwana and director Shunya Itô, but also something called ‘appreciations’, half an hour or so apiece, which mean fans/critics talking you back through the film you’ve just seen – something I can’t see the point of, honestly. It would have been amazing to have had some new footage with Meiko Kaji, but sadly this hasn’t come to pass; ultimately I would say that, of all the special features, it’s the archive extras which lend the greatest insight, which suggests to me that the rush to add one’s own extras to a remastered release may reflect more what viewers expect than what they want, and extras may now also be a key consideration to justify the purchase price, when the films chosen for release should justify that in and of themselves.

Happily, here, the films do justify it in spades, and I have no hesitation in recommending these movies. They really are extraordinary pieces of work and you will not find their like anywhere else.

Female Prisoner Scorpion: The Complete Collection will be released as a limited edition by Arrow Video on August 8th 2016.

Blu-ray Review: Return of the Killer Tomatoes (1988)

Posted on July 14, 2016December 5, 2016 by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

Well, here’s a blast from the past: if I remember correctly, and that’s a big ‘if’, Return of the Killer Tomatoes was one of the ragtag assemblage of films which seemed to play regularly on my dad’s illegal cable film channel back in the mid-to-late eighties. Between this film, Adventures in Babysitting, Howard the Duck and (spot the odd one out) Enemy Mine, I felt like I’d remember every word of this film when I got sent the screener for the recent Arrow re-release, so often was the film on in the background when I was a kid. Well, to cut a long story short, I didn’t – I’d forgotten vast swathes of it, and as far as I remembered, the word ‘tomatoes’ was even pronounced ‘tom-AH-toes’ in the title song, so before I really start worrying about my memory, I’d best talk about the film as it actually is.

And here’s the first thing I’d forgotten: the film-within-a-film framework which kicks things off, where a TV show called One Dollar Movie introduces the film alongside a very silly lottery for its viewers. Cue a FULL 80S beach scene, with lots of aimless bikini dancing to a ghetto blaster – wait, that’s the wrong film, so that’s exchanged, and then we’re into the intended film, which starts in a FULL 80S laboratory scene. You know an 80s laboratory – I’ve mentioned them at length before. Bright green liquids, pink and blue lighting, and a lab assistant who looks as if she’s dressed more to co-host on The Price is Right than work in STEM. Still – this, it seems, is illegal laboratory work, and the head of operations, Professor Gangreen, is performing gene-splicing experiments to transform tomatoes into humanoids – thus side-stepping the ban on all things tomato which has been in place since the Great Tomato War of some years hence. What does he hope to achieve by this? It’s not completely clear…something about taking over the world, probably. What we do discover is that Tara (Karen Mistal), the hot lab assistant, is actually crafted out of a tomato herself, and the Prof’s cruel treatment of her much-more tomatoey sibling, Fuzzy Tomato (FT for short) drives her to run away.

Tara seeks solace in the arms of her pizza delivery guy, Chad (Anthony Starke) on the grounds that he’s the only other person she knows. Any port in a storm – though, via a sequence of old newspaper front pages, we glean that Chad actually works for the old hero of the Tomato War, a man smart enough to thwart that threat but not to open a pizza restaurant, a foodstuff which relies quite heavily on tomatoes, all told. But can Chad, and his co-worker/roommate Matt (George Clooney!) help to stop the mad scientist and his machinations before the post-Tomato War peace is broken for good?

Return of the Killer Tomatoes was made some years after the 1970s prequel, and probably comes at the beginning of a sort of jaded, if well-intentioned self-awareness in genre film which we’re all too used to now. From the self-deprecating title song, to the handling on the back story, to the deliberate (and openly alluded to) filler in the form of clips from the first film, ROTKT knows it’s silly and makes this silliness part of the plot from the very beginning. It seems to be trying to emulate Airplane! in several respects, especially in terms of how very quickly the film cliches are thrown into the mix and in the amount of physical skits used, and although it’s not in the same league as the earlier, and more successful comedy, its attempts to channel that kind of humour carry it to a certain extent. That’s not to say it doesn’t overstay its welcome, though – for a film which promises killer tomatoes, there’s a lot of rather aimless human (or humanoid, at least) drama and that can be wearisome, and perhaps the earlier scenes in the laboratory, not least the film’s own title, promise a kind of madcap sci-fi movie that doesn’t really arrive. Part of the problem could be that Return of the Killer Tomatoes is possibly skewering a B-movie sci-fi tradition which could have been lost on the twentysomething target audience of the day who wouldn’t have known it very well, and for viewers now, with greater access to older films via DVD, Blu-ray and the internet, it’s not as lively as the films it parodies. Still, it’s got its moments, it never acts as though it’s better than it is, and it has sense enough to wrap things up after a reasonable duration. If nothing else, you can bask in the appearance of a youthful A-Lister George Clooney in a film about genetically-modified tomatoes – though to be fair to the guy, his filmography has always made it clear that he’s not afraid to take a punt in the dark. I hope we soon see Kevin Costner acknowledging his early appearances in Troma, in a similar vein…

As usual, this 80s time-capsule is a well-presented release from Arrow which comes with a modest array of special features, including an up-to-date interview with star Anthony Starke, some stills, a trailer and a TV spot.

Return of the Killer Tomatoes is available now from Arrow Films.

DVD Review: Captive (2015)

Posted on July 11, 2016 by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

Saw has a lot to answer for, doesn’t it? Since it appeared a little over a decade ago, it’s had a long-lasting and far-reaching impact on horror – for good, and for ill. Saw showed us that a horror story could be effective and gripping whilst being incredibly economical with characters and settings; by the by, and this is something that the team behind Saw can’t have predicted and shouldn’t be blamed for, it has convinced an army of low-budget filmmakers that they can do the same – that a horror story can unfold in a single room, with a small number of characters, and if Saw can do it – so can they! Here’s the rub – that confidence is often very, very misplaced. Which brings us to Captive (2015). Captive’s DVD release is proudly emblazoned with an (unattributed) cover quote which describes the film as a “cult gem in the same vein as Saw”. I don’t know who said that and I’d like to ask them a few things, but it would be more accurate to say that Captive is a brazen and mystifying attempt to re-frame Saw on a shoestring budget, and one which fails on every single score.

The plot hardly needs describing, given the above, but I’ll give it a whirl: we start with a room full of dead bodies, though with a couple of people left alive who are communicating with a mysterious someone via mobile phone (sound familiar?). They’ve decided to disguise their voice so thoroughly you can barely make out what they’re saying, which could have put a crimp in the plot, but basically it’s something about the people who are left having to follow commands to kill one another, which perhaps clues you in to why there are so many corpses in this particular dimly-lit room. You know where we’re going from here – yes, back in time, where we see some folks in HAZMAT gear dragging the inmates into the room, where they duly wake up and start wondering why they’re there. Whoever has put them there wants them to work out why they’ve been chosen, as well as spicing things up by getting them to bump one another off from time to time.

Oh, and there’s another element to the plot, too: apparently this is set in the future, a future where people are still using analogue alarm clocks and wearing clothes which are utterly in keeping with the current times, but yeah, this is the future, and the inmates have a virus. A virus! This manifestly contributes no originality to the film as a whole, but allows some very limited SFX at least, because viruses in these films always justify contact lenses/colouring in the eyes during post-production.

I don’t honestly enjoy tearing a film to shreds: I’d much prefer to be able to find something good to say about a film if someone’s bothered to get it made in the first place, but I can honestly think of nothing complimentary to say about Captive other than that the cast seem to be genuinely trying to inject some life into the film – even to the point of near-parodic scenery-chewing – and might have got somewhere, had they been given a script which didn’t ask them to repeatedly yell “We have to get out of here!” and other such ‘no shit, Sherlock’ moments throughout. The camera-work is dire (laughably filming through a HAZMAT mask to represent the point-of-view of the mysterious experimenters; using a zoom shot which then goes out of focus), the actors are not adequately miked up (everything echoes throughout) and the editing is a series of clunky physical jerks which can’t hide the fact that this plot is far, far too thin for a feature-length, especially considering it’s already been done more than once, and properly.

Indie cinema can be superb. It can be a space for resilient and resourceful filmmakers to tell stories without any of the pressures of big studios who demand tried-and-tested cinematic conventions; it can be innovative, refreshing and life-affirming. Or, it can be a cheap and nasty waste of time stemming from incomprehensible motivation and, in the case of the horror genre, startlingly cynical laziness – and it seems director and writer Stephen Patrick Kenny has form in this respect. There is nothing about Captive I can possibly recommend to anyone who enjoys film.

Captive is available on DVD now.

Film Review: Model Hunger (2016)

Posted on July 9, 2016 by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

Most horror fans who have delved beyond the physical jerk-invoking shitfests being screened every Halloween will probably have an idea who Debbie Rochon is; add in a soft spot for low budget indie cinema, and chances are you’ll have seen more than a few offerings from her very extensive CV, especially if you’ve ever sat through a Troma movie or two. As of yet, however, despite many years in the business, she hasn’t been on the other side of the camera. Model Hunger (2016) is Rochon’s directorial debut, then – and it’s not more than a few frames before you can safely say that the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree…

In that rather Troma-esque, overblown but twee style, all over-pronounced lines and omnipresent musical score, we start off with a troupe (correct plural?) of cheerleaders at practice, working hard to conceal the fact that they’re all actually and as-standard in their twenties. At the end of their session, their head honcho sends them out to ‘raise more money than last year’ for their charity of choice. The neighbourhood they head to is not much cop: the first guy to open his door seems to be hard of hearing, ha ha, but then they try a door down the street and meet Ginny (Lynn Lowry).

At first Ginny seems sweet, if the rather unlikely ‘little old lady’ that she’s apparently meant to present: t’isn’t long, though, before we can hear her inner thoughts (a staple of this film) and they are none too complimentary to the young ladies sat in her lounge now laughing at her ‘favourite show’, one of the film’s most baffling inclusions and something which features throughout – a shopping channel show where scream queen Suzi Lorraine, wearing a fat suit, rails against the indignities heaped upon ‘real women’ and tries to sell plus size clothes via a glamorous model, or rather an obese man in drag – an obese man who continually eats, as does Suzi, obviously. Hmm. Anyway, come some internal monologue about the shallowness of youth and beauty, it’s then time for the girls to be drugged, kidnapped and very soon afterwards hacked up for chow. As all of this happens in the first few minutes, I think I’m safe on the spoilers front: the film very much shows its trump hand early, albeit it then making us wait for anything much else in terms of plot.

However, another familiar indie horror face is moving into the area – step up one Deb (Tiffany Shepis) and her husband Sal (Carmine Capobianco), who have just taken a house on the street. Debbie is depressed and, after a fashion, recuperating – mainly by calling her husband an asshole repeatedly, and having traumatic dreams of family, though beyond this, very little context for Deb’s character is offered – a waste, and the reason for something of an imbalance between the two female leads.

Where Shepis is kept on the down-low, with very little to do for large parts of the film, there’s an attempt made to position Lowry as many things all at once. Whilst Ginny as a character definitely has some entertainingly deranged, sneering moments, though some of this may be due to recalling her understated performance in arguably one of her best-known roles in Shivers, overall her role in Model Hunger is confused, alternating between dear old lady (both being called this by others, and calling herself such), then hey presto! She’s a bat-wielding maniac, and then also an increasingly irate mouthpiece for the indignities of the beauty industry. Oh, and she has a sexy lingerie scene too. These latter elements, I think, would all have been easier to believe if we weren’t first asked to see Ginnie as an infirm old dear, which, despite being nearly seventy in real life, she doesn’t appear to be, whatever chintz she’s given to wear here.

As for the press release’s feted showdown between Shepis and Lowry, this largely consists of Deb growing ever more suspicious of her prim-and-proper neighbour, especially when people seem to be forever going into Ginny’s house but never resurfacing, before later – much, much later – deciding to investigate. If the film has a central core, it seems to be Ginny, trying to come to terms with her former life as a model and the fact that her body shape was just slightly too curvy for the fashion of the day. This translates to a hatred of other women, it seems, though the cannibal element is never explained. Presumably we’re entitled, even invited to join the dots and see it as a literal representation of how adverse beauty norms chew us women up and spit us out, or something – and certainly, other reviewers have praised the film for its commentary on the ‘male gaze’ and ‘unrealistic body expectations’, maybe because they don’t feel confident to contradict it. Well, all I’ll say is that this is an effective a critique of Western beauty standards as Redneck Zombies is of the North/South divide in modern America. There’s a lot here I can’t buy, basically, something which comes from the risk indie horror takes when it pays lip service to a serious theme like body image.

Your best bet, should you find yourself watching Model Hunger, is to leave any expectations of social commentary at the door. To focus on the positives: the SFX are practical, with plenty here for those who come out in a cold sweat at the thought of CGI; there’s some splatter, some flesh-eating, some recognisable indie movie faces, and that rough-and-ready feel which will be just as recognisable and familiar to plenty of viewers. Beyond that, however, like the body type being rejected over and over in the movie, this is all just a bit thin.

Model Hunger is available from July 12th 2016.

DVD Review: i-Lived (2015)

Posted on June 18, 2016 by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

‘Based on an idea by Franck Khalfoun’: these are surely words to warm the heart for many horror fans, albeit based on rather little. But his remake of Maniac in 2012 was stylish and redemptive, and his subsequent absence from what I’m reluctant to call ‘the scene’ has no doubt been noted. So here we are, several years later, with a new offering – i-Lived – a film he also directed and edited. So far, so good.

It’s very early indeed in the film that we’re able to work out that Khalfoun has a talent for representing rather unlikable young men on our screens: oh, I know that’s based on an unrepresentative sample, but if you can make Elijah Wood into a terrifying creep, then you’ve clearly got form. With that in mind, we meet Josh (comedian Jeremiah Watkins), a young man whose personality is an unpalatable blend of dude-bro, frustrated geek and infantile Gen-Xer: when him and his friends aren’t wondering aloud how they can bang hot bitches, Josh hosts an online video channel, where his focus is reviewing phone apps. He lives for his follower count: this rather gets in the way of him paying his rent, pleasing his parents (who paid a lot of money to see him through college) or holding down a relationship, but for Josh, that’s always a set of issues for the next day. Well, one day he reviews an app called ‘i-Lived’. It’s meant to be a motivational application which helps you towards your life goals – Josh chooses ‘getting a six pack’ so he can attract women – but it falls flat, so he pans it online and thinks no more about it. That is, until the app kicks back into life while he’s at a party and, in a roundabout way, gets him a girl he thinks is out of his league.

Based on that small victory, Josh decides to keep on following the app’s advice, getting what he wants in return for uploading video ‘proof’ of his progress to the app’s website. From a country mile you could probably guess that the app’s requests would get sinister, and this duly happens. Whilst finding time for irrelevant sex scenes with a character-free girlfriend because boobs still sell, the plot thickens…

Well, to an extent. I like the idea of linking supernatural goings-on to modern technology, really I do – Unfriended was better than I ever expected – but i-Lived really does fail in what it tries to do here, i.e. to bring us a very modern spin on a parable of greed, with all the otherworldly fallout you’d possibly expect. The film badly lacks polish, and no small part of the fault must be laid at the door of the script, which could have used a lot more crafting to really make these characters work. When you have a sequence consisting of nothing much more than ‘Calm down!’ ‘No, YOU calm down!’ then what you have on screen is wasted time. I also felt like I was having the plot spelled out to me very, very carefully in places – as if I’d been given a bunch of tranquilisers and then asked to land a plane. Genre fans don’t need this, they’ve seen a thousand horror films and they can fathom what’s going on without the letters being writ ten feet high (read also: the big reveal ‘hidden’ in the app’s name. For shame.)

Adding to that, there are some surprisingly clumsy oversights during the film which, in their way, also detract from any sense of dread which may have been allowed to build. One of the app’s instructions to Josh makes little grammatical sense (oh I know, it’s pedantry, but would you obey a malign entity which couldn’t even master the lingo? I bloody wouldn’t.) – Josh gets a new tattoo when the app tells him to ‘be a rebel’, but it’s clearly not a new tattoo; the lights keep going out as a kind of convenient and cost-effective short-cut for ‘bad things going on’, and the whole ‘just a dream’ shtick seems to be used several times to pad the film out, which is pretty unforgivable. Yes, the film warms up somewhat, but it’s rather too little too late to redeem a plot which comes across as cartoon strip, so the gusto of the last few minutes is wasted, even if they’re some of the most attractive scenes in the film.

I think that i-Lived sets out to weave a horror story from the way that, yeah, many people live and die by their online presence these days – possibly thinking that it wouldn’t be too much of a leap to link this phenomenon to something of more standard horror fare. Sadly, i-Lived isn’t the indictment of how we live now which it might have been, and nor is it quite the update to an age-old yarn which Khalfoun might’ve imagined or hoped. This is a shame. Khalfoun is clearly capable of good things, far better things than this, and so ultimately it’s still the success of Maniac which could draw me towards his upcoming Amityville project – but goodwill and good memories can only carry a director so far.

i-Lived will be available to download on 27th June 2016, and available to buy on DVD on 11th July. The i-Lived app, which syncs with the film, will also be available to buy from iTunes and Google.

DVD Review: Intruders (2015)

Posted on May 24, 2016 by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

Casting an eye over the upcoming cover art for Intruders, I found myself thinking two things: firstly, oh god, that Cabin in the Woods artwork has a lot to answer for, and secondly, hmm – there are a lot of household tools being showcased here; please don’t let this home invasion movie turn out to be yet another showreel for B&Q. Happily, although the odd trusty hammer does show up along the way, Intruders does rather different things with its subject matter overall and as such, raises itself high above the worst offenders of this sub-genre. In fact it often steps outside the sub-genre altogether, though without departing from ‘home’ as a source of horror, and this, too, is very much to its credit.

From the very first instance, our female lead, Anna (Beth Riesgraf) is depicted as a vulnerable, contested character – and hardly surprisingly is this the case, as she’s been nursing her terminally ill brother Conrad, whilst also battling with the double-whammy of severe agoraphobia. Whatever’s plagued them both in their lives, it’s clearly serious, and it leaves Anna wide open to additional trauma when her beloved brother’s expected, but still hard-hitting death occurs. Hey, and I should add that all of this happens before the opening credits roll.

For all this – a tour through torment which could have come off feeling brusque and insincere – I felt a lot of immediate sympathy for Anna. Whether the subtle style of acting which Riesgraf brings to these events, or else the unflinching portrayal of disease and death we’re shown (platitudes about Conrad ‘going to a better place’ are either not forthcoming at all or are rendered implausible) the film makes itself instantly engaging. You also can’t help but feel from the get-go that this environment, the white-picket fence homestead which is nonetheless cluttered and littered with the detritus of defiantly not coping for ten years, is a powder keg, and one which may explode in ways other than the instantly obvious (because the film’s promo materials are pretty obvious about the fact that someone’s coming in…)

Sure enough, expecting Anna to be at her brother’s funeral (clue: she ain’t) here come some guys looking to find the hard cash they’ve heard is hidden in the ramshackle property somewhere. And the film’s plus points continue with these new players: rather than some amalgamous, super-human whole, the intruders are also characters, from your more standard issue, nogoodnik hick through to a pair of brothers who seem to think better of the whole thing a few moments after getting through the door. I mean, how would anyone feel when faced with a woman who’s desperate not to escape? Some sense of a lull ensues as the film takes us through a few back stories, sure, and there are some weaker moments in the plot as Anna plays multiple games of hide-and-seek in order to showcase her insider knowledge of the old place, but all of this winds up feeling necessary as it all gives way to what feels like a very different film altogether. There are also lots of interesting developments of the sets being used – some of which reminded me of The Seasoning House in aspects – and the possible context of all these surprising spaces isn’t any more seemly, either, although not the same by any stretch.

Intruders effectively changes tack throughout, ending up a long way from where it starts and yeah, in some ways which won’t be to everyone’s tastes, but what the film does very effectively is to keep the victim/villain dynamic shifting. It does this within the confines of the characters we have in front of us, and also by reaching out beyond the narrative itself, calling into question the behaviour of people who aren’t participating in the events on screen. That’s no small thing. Even if some aspects of the ending are a little frilly (though thinking of a way to wrap this up were always going to be tricky) then what you can definitely say here is that the film is an interesting look at those messy human impulses which people have, but rationalise differently – be this the desire for money, the desire for vengeance, guilt, lust, or even to make the world a better place; it all goes way beyond your traditional invasion movie, kept me gripped, and deserves credit as such. Kudos also to the stylish photography and editing throughout the film, and a foreboding musical score which fits the bill very well indeed.

Intruders is available via Studiocanal on 6th June 2016.

DVD Review: Cherry Tree (2015)

Posted on May 7, 2016 by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

You’d think God and Satan wouldn’t have a great deal in common, what with being timeless adversaries and all, but they do: they each seem to have an unreasonable obsession with human fertility. One side thinks Onanism is a sin because it wants arses on pews and the other, well – most of Old Scratch’s plans for taking over the earth seem to involve getting women pregnant. It’s now something of an assumption, in horror cinema, that if you see a coven, there’ll be some edict about a ‘special child’ on its way soon after.

When you read the back story to Cherry Tree (2015), you won’t see much deviation from this. We’re told that, back in the day, the town of Orchard had a coven which believed that if a woman could bear a child to Satan, then they could use this to become all powerful. One witch tried to best Beelzebub at this time and the coven was destroyed – hence, a legend was born, a legend of the Orchard Coven and its association with a mysterious cherry tree…

After telling us this on-screen, kudos to the film for then getting a lesbian kiss into proceedings before much more than ten seconds of modern-day footage pass by. After snogging Sissy (Anna Walton), an old pal gets all embarrassed and beats a hasty retreat from the bar where they’d met – running smack bang into a horde of hood-wearing occultists, who spirit her away for some ritualistic goings-on near what we can assume is the self-same tree mentioned earlier. Unless there’s an orchard in Orchard, but that would probably be silly. Actually, we then segue to a classroom presentation about the legend of the tree, allowing us to combine these two different worlds in one fell swoop. Sissy has just become the hockey coach at this school; one member of the school hockey team is a troubled teen called Faith (Naomi Battrick – who in true cinematic tradition is more like twenty-five) and it soon becomes clear that this is our key character. Faith’s father is very ill, and when his prognosis worsens, she finds it very difficult to bear. Luckily, the soporific hockey mistress is there to be a shoulder to cry on, after a fashion at least. Faith is offered a deal, one which draws her in to a world of malign magic and – bingo! – pregnancy. Why aren’t women ever given anything else to do in demonology than have babies or trick other women into having them? #EverydaySexism

I am, after having watched (and slyly enjoyed) Cherry Tree, still not quite sure just how much we are supposed to take the film seriously; I’m not even really sure how seriously the writer and director are taking this: certainly, director David Keating also brought us Wake Wood, and certain similarities between the plots of both films can be gleaned, but it’s fair to say that the tone is rather different here, and it’s not a good idea to come to a viewing of the newer film expecting the atmospheres to be comparable. This is where I think the blurb will work against the film, as throwing around well-beloved titles like ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ as comparisons will, in my opinion, lead to disappointment. But, look, if you go in for lowest common denominator character and place names, then people will chuckle, rather than get a sense of dark forces at work, bringing all people and things together (‘Faith’? The ‘evil tree’ town called Orchard? And don’t get me started on that literal cherry-taking during the sex scene.) Cherry Tree also seems to be channeling Lord of Salem in some places, meaning that the film can sway from realistically-lit urban scenes to flashing unnatural lights during its occult shenanigans – again, whilst this can feel tonally odd, it perhaps underlines in my mind that this is an occult-lite take on the subject matter and that we’re meant to be diverted, but not necessarily ever scared. Of course, I could be way out on all of this, in which case I’ve seen humour where there isn’t any. That’s all rather worse as an outcome for the filmmakers, I guess…

And then, the film seems to court controversy in some areas, whilst covering its own back in others. Firstly, although the girls at the school are probably all well over the age of consent, they’re represented to us as fifteen year olds, so throwing the shower scene in there might raise an eyebrow – this sort of thing is a red rag to the BBFC bull, and speaking of them, what’s all this with having Anna Walton slitting her wrist on screen again, after all that furore about her doing the same thing in Soulmate? Perhaps it’s okay when it’s to do with raising Satan because this is less likely to be emulated by us weaker vessels, but the fact that they’ve used this very image in the press release, again, seems designed to cause a stir. But, after doing this, it then makes damn sure to declare that Faith is (just) over sixteen before anything sexual is permitted; it also excuses the old ‘pregnancy test which works the day after sex’ because occult. It’s pushing the envelope on one hand, and well aware of the limits on the other.

Ultimately, whatever the thinking behind what’s going on here, what you’ll get out of this film is entirely dependent on what you expect. If you’re hoping for a subtle, brooding folk horror then forget it, folks, you won’t be best pleased. However, if you accept this as pacy, piecemeal but entertaining occult schlock, then it’ll all wash over you nicely. Ultimately, Cherry Tree is far more comic book than grimoire.

Cherry Tree is available from Studiocanal now.

Horror in Short: Seize the Night (2015)

Posted on May 7, 2016 by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

Vampires vs. werewolves, in a film directed, produced, edited and starring the same person? Wait – a twelve-minute film? I have to say, my curiosity was piqued by just what Seize the Night would be able to achieve in that short time frame. As you might expect, there’s a lot of ambition involved here – though I would say that the film acts as a taster rather than a straightforward narrative, as the eagerness to get ideas on screen overstretches the constraints of this particular medium.

To quote a few sentences of the press release for context, ‘the plot revolves around renegade vampire assassin Eva (Emma Dark) who’s recently escaped from a secret bio-research compound and is hell bent on taking revenge against those who put her there, including a pack of werewolves led by alpha Tobias (Carey Thring), and a secret government faction known only as Cable 9.’

Vampire assassin, fighting werewolves…well, indeed, there is a deal of overlap between Seize the Night/Underworld and Eva/Selene and I hope it’s not an insult to say that the newer film wears this relationship very much on its sleeve; I mean, how could it not? There are similarities in terms of theme (duh), aesthetics, the closely-matching colour palette, lots of washed-out urban nightscapes and of course the goth-friendly garb worn by our protagonist. If you enjoyed the Underworld films then you will probably see this short, appreciate it, and wonder if it’s the calling card for a feature. It does some things on its own terms, mind, and if you can believe it – reminder, this is a twelve minute film – Seize the Night packs in a mention of a deadly virus and some killer covens too. Now, as ambitious as all of this is, I think I’d like to see the film slow down a tad, explore its ideas more and not feel that it has to do everything to show it could do anything. However, now that I’ve seen the film and read some other reviews, it appears that – as usual – I’m out on a limb here…

The urban sprawl is nicely shot throughout, and the film’s evocative soundtrack by Eric Elick is something very special. On board for the film’s short action sequence is none other than Roy Scammell, by the way, so Dark is clearly in good company. Overall, there’s a real eagerness for the subject matter being tackled here, an eagerness which sometimes trips over itself to get it all out there, but clearly Emma Dark loves what she’s doing and I hope to cast an eye over her other films sometime soon. In the meantime, the film is now available to view for free via Vimeo: you can check it out here.

‘An Insolent Ungodliness’: 45 Years of The Blood on Satan’s Claw

Posted on April 12, 2016 by Keri O'Shea

By Nia Edwards-Behi

I’ve already had the pleasure of writing at length about one of my all-time favourite films for this website’s anniversary retrospective series, when in 2012 I wrote about The Last House on the Left’s 40th anniversary. Time goes on and now I’m very excited to have the pleasure of commemorating 45 years of another of my set-in-stone favourites: Blood on Satan’s Claw. 45 years on from its release, it still stands proudly as one of the finest examples of the British ‘folk horror’ cycle alongside its infamous stablemate Witchfinder General and the one everyone’s seen, The Wicker Man.

There’s a history in Britain for committing great, incomprehensible violence toward individuals who were believed to associate with the devil, and this history has been mined in its horror cinema. In the ‘folk horror’ tradition, there’s broadly two sorts of film in which the recollection of this past appears. While films like The Wicker Man or Satan’s Slave use the invocation of this past Britain in a contemporary setting, often resulting in the triumph of archaic ritual in a contemporary setting, others are explicitly period-set, like Blood on Satan’s Claw, a past Britain providing a safe space to explore the nastier implications of devil worship, and often ending with the devil defeated, at least arbitrarily. Blood on Satan’s Claw is one of the finest examples of these films, in my opinion, primarily due to its wonderful atmosphere of creeping evil. The Judge aside, the film is primarily interested in the way the evil spreads in the village, rather than the quest to stamp it out – those villagers who begin in fear are discredited at almost every turn – or end up dead.

In rural 18th Century England, a farm worker, Ralph (Barry Andrews), uncovers a strange skull while ploughing a field. Soon, villagers begin to act strangely, starting with Rosalind (Tamara Ustinov), fiancée of the farm’s young master, Peter (Simon Williams). The discovery of the skull primarily seems to affect the village’s children, led by Angel Blake (Linda Hayden) – though some, such as Cathy Vespers (Wendy Padbury) remain good. Ralph insists that the local judge (Patrick Wymark) investigate the evil that seems to be taking over, but he remains sceptical until people begin dying. Once Peter convinces the Judge of the truth of the matter, he must return to the village to do battle with evil itself.

It almost goes without saying that Linda Hayden is an enormously important part of Blood on Satan’s Claw’s enduring appeal. While I’m about to embark on a verbose, over-wrought account of just how clever and interesting the film is, it’s really quite important to point out that Angel Blake is simply one of the best villains in British horror cinema, and that reflects on the film as a whole. Leon Hunt has described the character as ‘Lolita from Hell’, which sums her up perfectly. We barely glimpse Angel before she comes into contact with the claw which seemingly turns her evil, but there is enough suggestion that she’s always been a bit wayward – from her toying with Mark when we first meet her, and the Reverend’s assertion that her behaviour has seemed odd for quite some time. The sort of power Angel soon asserts over the other children – and indeed some of the adults – could easily have been rendered unconvincing, to the complete detriment of the film, if not for Hayden’s masterful performance. Although she is no doubt hugely exploited for her sex appeal and her burgeoning star persona, Hayden brings much more than seduction to the role of Angel, even if that is her main draw. Indeed, there are certain shots in the film – close-up on Angel’s face, as she seems to will wrong-doing to others – that seem to explicitly recall the most famous photo of the then very recent child-murderer Mary Bell. While I don’t want to claim that this must have been intentional, I’m certainly not the first to draw a line from Blood on Satan’s Claw to much more contemporary concerns.

As much as I adore the film, it’s fair to say that its somewhat troubled production shows in the finished product. Written by Robert Wynne-Simmons and directed by Piers Haggard for Tony Tenser’s Tigon Productions, Blood on Satan’s Claw was originally intended to be an anthology film. This is most evident when Rosalind and Peter’s plotline is seemingly forgotten about early on in the film, until Peter plays messenger near the film’s climax. It’s also evident that the production ran out of money – as seen in the film’s climactic showdown stretched out with slow-motion and then abruptly ending. Wynne-Simmons’ original script supposedly ended with an outright massacre, with the Judge forced to kill many villagers, including children, but the budgetary constraints result in a somewhat less spectacular climax to the film. Even so, the film manages to be extremely interesting, even in the face of creative and financial complications.

If there is to be an attempt at wiping out evil, the quest to do so naturally needs a figurehead. A lot of British horror films during the 50s and 60s would feature an obvious hero to save the day against some supernatural evil, even if the hero figure wasn’t always the most interesting part of the film. However, as with the horror genre as a whole, things were changing throughout the 1960s and indeed by the 1970s there were plentiful examples of heroes not always emerging triumphant. A prime example would be Witchfinder General, which, having positioned the witchfinder himself as evil rather than the so-called witches, finds its hero in noble soldier Richard Marshall (Ian Ogilvy). But, though heroic in his ostensible defeat of Hopkins, he pays dearly with his own sanity, and likely that of his traumatised fiancée too. It’s not clear who the hero might be in Blood on Satan’s Claw, in part due to the aforementioned changes in script during production. Many characters seem set-up to be the ‘hero’ of the film – there’s Ralph, the nice young man who loses the girl he loves to the demon and resists its influence to the end, or Peter, a man returning home to introduce his fiancée to his family. Arguably the film’s clearest hero-figure is sceptical authority figure The Judge, as he seems to destroy the demon at the film’s climax. However, the finality of his apparent success is very subtly undermined thanks to some crafty filmmaking. While the opening scene presents us with an uncanny close-up of an eye still in the socket of the strange skull unearthed by Ralph, so the film ends with a close-up of The Judge’s eye, surrounded by the flames of the fire that we assume is consuming the demon.

To further underline the film’s concluding ambiguity, we only need turn an ear to the soundtrack. Marc Wilkinson’s score is one of my absolute favourite things about the film, and it really manages to amp-up the impact of everything that happens on screen. There are two distinct leitmotifs that occur again and again in the film: the gentle pastoral melody that sounds like a folk song – but isn’t, according to its composer – and the chromatic scale that plays over it. When the film ends, on the still image of The Judge’s eye, that chromatic scale, which sounds a lot to me like a laugh, is still chuckling away, and indeed once the credits have finished rolling – and with the eye still on-screen – that scale is all that remains on the soundtrack. Wynne-Simmons has himself noted that he considered the demonic character to be more ‘alive’ than The Judge, who essentially represents an archaic sense of authority. For the sense of evil to transfer or persist to The Judge at the film’s close isn’t, I don’t think, too much of a leap.

There’s another scene in the film in which the music plays a very key role, and it’s perhaps the film’s most effective, memorable and troubling scene: the rape and murder of Cathy Vespers. Cathy, played by Wendy Padbury, is the film’s ‘good girl’ – she’s religious, cares for her family and is giddy about the burgeoning romance between her and Ralph. She is sweetness embodied, but her sweetness does not save her. While in the American horror tradition that would emerge later in the decade the virginal Cathy would undoubtedly be the survivor of the film, in Blood on Satan’s Claw her downfall is a troubling conflation of sex and violence. Horror, by now, is perhaps one of the most obvious arenas which sees sex and violence frequently combined, but what stands out in Blood on Satan’s Claw is the sheer joyfulness of a scene of a most heinous act. Unlike the earlier murder of Cathy’s brother Mark, Cathy’s death is ritualistic and painfully drawn out – we sense she’s in real danger much earlier than she does, and even when she does she’s truly helpless. What makes the sequence really effective is the children’s glee in the act, and the complicity it invites in the viewer. The music in the scene turns triumphant and celebratory, and plays a great role in inviting viewer complicity with the mood. I’m not trying to suggest that the scene invites the viewer to replicate the feelings of enjoyment of the girl’s rape and murder; rather, the scene is precisely all the more disturbing because of its depiction of the act as a happy one for the children – it’s the moment their ecstatic nihilism (to borrow from Leon Hunt) is at its most profound. The scene best brings together all of the more serious aspects of the film, which is perhaps put best and most concisely by Wynne-Simmons himself, when he describes the film as being about “the inherent evil of children and the overt sexuality of evil”.

For me, it’s impossible to consider the depiction of sex or violence in a film like this without considering the representation of gender. Although Linda Hayden’s sex appeal is exploited as much as her acting talents, Angel Blake is arguably a strong female character, in that she is at least an incredibly memorable villain (and only slightly undermined by the fact that the arguably ‘male’ devil is using her as a vessel for destruction). The representations of women might not have been wholly progressive, but films such as Blood on Satan’s Claw do offer a degree of subversion. The sheer number of significant female characters important – in addition to Angel and Cathy, Margaret (Michelle Dotrice) is a vital part of the picture, and Rosalind is at least as memorable as several of the male characters, even if her appearance is brief.

It would be unfair to simply think of the representation of women in these films: as I’ve touched upon, the heroic male should normally save the day, but the representation of masculinity is much more nuanced. When considering Blood on Satan’s Claw alongside its stablemates, it’s worth noting a certain degree of impotency in would-be heroes of many of these films. Specifically, though, consider Ralph: he is unable to save Cathy, searching fruitlessly for her as she’s attacked and killed, and he then fails in his attempt at saving Margaret as some sort of recompense. He then finds himself afflicted with the devil’s skin, attempts to avoid his fate by cowering in the seemingly doomed attic, and would surely have fallen foul of Angel’s merry band of devils had The Judge not intervened. Similarly, Peter is rendered mostly useless in the film, right from the very beginning, emasculated by his aunt and The Judge, losing his fiancée, chopping off his own hand in a fit of bedevilment and from then on reduced to more or less standing around for the rest of the film. Indeed, The Judge is the only powerful male character in the film – other figures of authority throughout the film either undermined or light relief – and even his victory is rendered somewhat futile through the implication of his own evil. Even if Ralph and the surviving children are freed from the devil’s control in that moment, what awaits them at the hands of The Judge?

Like many of its genre-mates of the period, there is an element of generational conflict apparent in Blood on Satan’s Claw. Seemingly reflecting the social changes of the era, these films frequently represent an over-bearing older generation forcing a rebellion from children. Peter Hutchings has written about the youth of the filmmakers at this time – most famously, of course, the tragic Michael Reeves, only 24 when he made Witchfinder General, and indeed younger when he made The Sorcerers, a film much more overtly about generational conflict. Piers Haggard was only 31 when he directed Blood on Satan’s Claw, while writer Wynne-Simmons had only just left university. For Hutchings, these films were evidence of dissatisfaction amongst young filmmakers with traditional forms of horror, which he also associates with the changes that occurred in American horror around the same time. He identifies a particular sense of patriarchy within the British horror tradition, which makes this rebellion, of sorts, all the more marked in Britain. While the most obvious evidence of this sense of generational conflict in Blood on Satan’s Claw is in the children, early on there is quite a distinctly overbearing sense of tradition established quite apart from any satanic influence.

When Peter brings Rosalind home to his aunt and The Judge, they out-right reject their union. Rosalind is horribly treated by them, and when her screaming starts their immediate response to simply lock her up – she is only a farmer’s daughter, after all – rather than try and help her. This assault from an older generation on the young is clear here – as Aunt Banham tries to slap some sense into Rosalind, so too The Judge physically restrains and strikes Peter, who just wants to help his fiancée. What’s curious in Blood on Satan’s Claw is that it’s actually not only children and young people who are being swayed by the devil – there are some very elderly people in Angel’s cohort too. Perhaps there’s a suggestion then that once we reach a certain age, those in the prime of their lives start treating us as juvenile and impressionable once again.

But, ultimately, is all of this giving Blood on Satan’s Claw more credit than it deserves? I don’t think it is, even if the finished film is a bit of a narrative mess. I can only imagine what an effective film it could have been given the right budget and the right time and space to develop it as initially envisioned by both Wynne-Simmons and Haggard. What the film might lack in story-telling though it more than makes up for in sheer atmosphere. Even with the wonky special effects and all the ‘that it be’ dialogue, the film still manages to be effectively creepy. After 45 years it’s a film that still retains its power to disturb and with it comes a pleasing sense of devilish anarchy.

DVD Review: Craze (1974)

Posted on April 8, 2016 by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

Crazed acolytes! That’s always a good start to a film, be in a golden oldie or a modern piece of cinema – and that’s just how we get going in Craze, a lesser-known horror movie from the oeuvre of British director Freddie Francis (a man with a distinguished filmography to his name, including many classics from Hammer and Amicus). The opening reels show us a group of people gathered in a darkened basement, offering fealty to an entity called Chiku – an African deity rather than good Ol’ Scratch then, but in the great scheme of things, it doesn’t seem to matter greatly. We’re immediately shown robes, boobs and blood; this could be any malign deity, anywhere. And at the head of proceedings is a man by the name of Neal Mottram.

The film feels incredibly British from the outset as, when the ritual is ended, Mottram (Jack Palance) has a cigarette and does a spot of tidying up. It’s important to keep up appearances, see, as by day he’s a somewhat dodgy antiques seller, aided and abetted by a younger assistant, Ronnie (Martin Potter). The arrival of an irate ex-Priestess, demanding to take the idol of Chiku away with her, barely makes an impression on Mottram and after a struggle she is soon dispatched – for good – on the prongs of Chiku’s weapon. This, to Mottram, is the reason for a sudden change in his fortunes. The following day, as he begins to empty an antique desk ready for sale, he uncovers a hidden drawer which is full of gold coins, thus ending his money worries – problems we are led to gather have been going on for some time. He reasons that this must be because of the sacrifice which fate saw him make to Chiku; by the same logic, then, he decides he has to continue worshipping Chiku in this same grisly manner.

And the film is grisly, at certain moments, though many of the worst excesses are implied rather than shown. For instance, in an early scene where Mottram kills, we don’t actually see a great deal, but it still feels rather unpleasant, even from the decidedly low-key footage we get of a panicked scream and later, a burned female hand. After a punchy beginning, however, the film settles into something far more sedate: really speaking, it is Palance’s performance which carries the film through what feels like a long lull in the middle, although of course as the majority of the film is at this pace, it’s the way in which it’s bookended with stronger fare which deviates, not the other way around. Palance feels like an odd choice in a British film to an extent (though he had worked with Francis previously via Amicus) but this is far from the only occasion when an American actor has been shoehorned into a British production, as I understand happened on this project: fact is, however he came to be cast, he makes rather a good bastard, and kept me engaged throughout. Smiling wryly through a number of convoluted plans and watertight alibis, Mottram is good fun, and when the script calls for something more unhinged, Palance can certainly do that too. Any scenery-chewing is entirely in keeping with the character, in my opinion…

After all, it’s left rather more abstract as to whether Mottram is really under the thrall of a mysterious god, or simply takes his change in fortunes as a sign that Chiku is a real supernatural force and begins killing accordingly. I don’t feel that this chicken/egg aspect derails the film per se, but I also feel like a bigger budget and more time spent might have led to the coven we see at the beginning resurfacing and maybe spelling it out for us a bit more – I can’t help but feel like this was the original intention. It’s rather odd really – and when that force of nature Diana Dors (as the character Dollie Newman) recounts stories of covens meeting in the woods, and fire, and blood rites and so on, it’s hard not to feel somewhat cheated that none of this made it to camera!

Still, cop-out or otherwise, there is plenty here to entertain. Fans of 70s British horror could do far worse pick this up, and not just for the reasons I’ve already given: this film is an interesting roll-call of British acting talent, with even a young David Warbeck popping up as a police officer, and as you might expect, all the glories of 70s Britain are present and correct (nightclubs and bars in horror films are a special source of enjoyment, I always find). Certainly, if you enjoy Freddie Francis’s work elsewhere in the horror canon, then why not add to that with this modest offering? Yes, it’s weak in places, and lacks pace in others, but it’s still modestly enjoyable, and I’m not sorry I gave it an hour and a half of my time.

Nucleus Films have tried hard to bring us a complete version of this rarity, meaning some short, unavoidable minor dips in quality: entirely reasonable, given how hard they’ve worked to put this together in the first place. The release is chaptered, has a trailer, and an enjoyable Freddie Francis trailer reel is included too.

Craze (1974) was released by Nucleus Films on 4th April 2016.

Ilsa vs. Elsa: Two Nazisploitation Movies and Their Leading Ladies

Posted on April 7, 2016 by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

Why did Nazisploitation movies enjoy such a brief, if lurid moment in the sun during the European cinema of the 1970s? Perhaps the old adage ‘history is written by the winners’ applies as much to the arts as it does to other aspects of society; certainly, there has never been any great number of either exploitation, art-house or anywhere-in-between Western films based around the atrocities of the Soviets during WWII, though the subsequent Cold War did at least feed into a wealth of paranoid American sci-fi (a topic for another post, mind you). There are various reasons that this may be the case, above and beyond the fact that the Russians fought alongside the Allies at this time. It could be that, having come through the trials of the Second World War, exploitation cinema simply relished the opportunity to mock the defeated Nazis – at a safe distance, and after enough years had elapsed for it to be possible to deal with this subject matter without calling to mind the very real history upon which it was all based. By the 1970s, or indeed 1969 when Love Camp 7 appeared, the war wasn’t a fresh wound – though it still remained fresh enough to be vivid, so mingled with the mockery there may have been some chances to work through the trauma, even if in a rather indirect (and often salacious) way.

Of course though, there are lots of other reasons for the rise of Nazisploitation: in a nutshell, the Nazis afford a wealth of imitable aesthetics, smart uniforms and – far more so in the fictional universe, actually – an array of tall, attractive, nubile players to wear, then shed said uniforms. The Nazis allow so many possibilities for filmmakers simply because they were hyperbole and farce writ large: also, their half-baked racial policies begot a number of sexual policies which themselves provide fertile ground for directors looking to turn a buck. When any regime runs love camps, let alone a regime as notorious as National Socialism, it may be hard to resist filming a version of that. Sex, violence, torment – far and away enough elements to work with, right there. And then, there are the ladies…

I don’t pretend that this feature will be a rundown of all the main Nazi lead roles played by women, but as a number of Nazisploitation films approach or pass their fortieth birthdays, I can’t help but compare a couple of films made at very nearly the same time. Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS was made in 1974; the far less-known Elsa: Fraulein SS (also known as Fraulein Devil, Captive Women 4, Fraulein SS and – confusingly as hell – Fraulein Kitty) followed quickly in its footsteps, appearing in 1977. Now, whilst the righteously notorious Salon Kitty (1976) bears close analysis all of its own, and many of the films which followed in Ilsa’s exceptional wake follow a very similar format to Ilsa (with the lead actress of Elsa, Malisa Longo, even appearing in a bit-part in Salon Kitty, just to show how much cross-pollination was going on), Ilsa and Elsa are interesting representatives of the features of the genre overall. This is both because Elsa shows just how far Ilsa had an impact within the remits of that genre, and also because the director of the later film, Frenchman Patrice Rhomm, re-framed some key ideas for his own spin on the story. Elsa feels like the end point in a continuum, encompassing elements of both Ilsa and Kitty.

In any case, there are lots of points of comparison. Both Ilsa and Elsa are high-ranking military, selected by their superiors for various special operations. The war effort needs them: each film is set at around the time when Hitler’s glorious ‘Thousand Year Reich’ looks to be on its uppers, and desperate times require desperate measures, with each woman taking on top-secret roles. For Ilsa (the incomparable Dyanne Thorne) this means overseeing a medical facility where various crude experimentation is intended to find solutions to help the Reich; prisoners-of-war are brought to her for the purpose. She has her own pet project, though, and that is to see whether her own hypothesis – that women can withstand pain better than men – is true. If it is, Ilsa intends to use this evidence to show that women could be used for the front line. Which is vaguely egalitarian, I suppose. As for Elsa, she also works with enemies of the Reich: however, she selects her number from Nazi party members, whose families have in some way betrayed the cause. Her nubile young women have something else to prove, although the perils of the front line are also important.

Colonel Elsa Ackermann is somewhere between Ilsa and Kitty in that she is also charged with special duties pertaining to the SS, but she is to perform these via recruiting girls and running a kind of ‘pleasure train’ (yeah, you heard). In order to console men broken by the pressures of warfare, see, girls will be provided: the train where they will be held will be luxurious, the girls carefully chosen for their beauty – and each room will be bugged to within an inch of its life, naturally, so that the fiercely-loyal Elsa can uncover any wrongdoing as the SS officers get jiggy with her frauleins. Elsa essentially becomes a brothel madam, but one who still dresses in the uniform – except, that is, when she appears in lacy underwear and thigh-high boots. In both Ilsa and Elsa, each woman has their fair share of lacy undies and kinky boots, and each is sexually voracious, with bad things happening when their libidos get thwarted in any way. Would it really be exploitation cinema if each director didn’t remember to have them disrobe fairly regularly? And, in each film, it is a failed love affair which threatens their mission, in one way or another. Ilsa has her half-German, half-American – the only man who hasn’t been a rampant disappointment in the bedroom; Elsa has the disillusioned SS officer Hans, and his slow rejection of her steadfast Nazism is a significant factor in her increasing on-screen wickedness. Each of the women is, after all, a flawed sadist – each woman represents a mismatch between the required cruelty of doing well in the SS and being feminine, or at least, having sexual needs beyond their desire for total power over others.

Each film plumps for a somewhat different look at the realities of war, however. Elsa: Fraulein SS is spliced with real war scenes, particularly at the beginning of the film, whereas Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS keeps a closer focus on its own footage and versions of events – but Ilsa is by far and away the nastier of the two, not only because director Don Edmonds is so unflinching in what he shoots, but also because there are real historical precedents for some of the experiments shown. This is ramped up to an unprecedented level in the Chinese film Men Behind the Sun (1988), China’s bright red scream about Japanese war atrocities and a piece of cinema which truly deserves to be called horrific; you see the same experiments in Ilsa and Men Behind the Sun a decade later – each director has simply shot versions of ordeals which really happened, making for a sickening sense of deja-vu. Ilsa may be choc-full of nudity, but it never allows viewers to be diverted by this for very long before smashing our face into some gratuitous scenes of human torment. I’ve seen many people scoff at Ilsa as ‘not that bad’ in terms of its unpleasantness, but for me it’s still a genuinely very nasty film. Elsa keeps the violence and torture rather lower in the mix, and there are only a few scenes which would really qualify, but as the leading lady unravels she certainly goes some way towards playing catch-up with her would-be contemporary.

But what of their fates? Each of them does, of course, fail in their ultimate goals and in each film a pesky resistance movement comes along to threaten their ‘good work’ – aided and abetted by the women they’ve been working with, i.e. Ilsa’s medical subjects and (some of) Elsa’s women of pleasure. Each commander’s weakness for a certain man in their lives is also a key factor in their downfalls, plus in Elsa’s case, espionage simply breeds more espionage – there’s a moral in there somewhere, folks. There’s something about viewing Nazism even through an exploitation cinema lens that makes filmmakers feel they have to end things in a way which broadly mirrors the real-life end of the war, and really speaking, this kind of highly sexualised spin on Nazism had done what it needed to by the end of the decade, not really resurfacing in a similar way again (although Nazis pop up as zombies, generally tediously, quite a lot these days).

That said, both Don Edmonds and Patrice Rhomm found it difficult to simply wipe out their anti-heroines in one fell swoop. Their deaths are left fairly ambiguous; Ilsa even popped up again and again in different roles and parts of the world – though I’m not suggesting that this happened in a coherent narrative across all of the films, of course. As for Elsa, did she even die? The jury’s out, though I’d say her demise was just as ambiguous as Ilsa’s. It’s as if we have to see the good guys win, sure, but an interesting female character in good boots with entertaining sexual proclivities is just too precious to get rid of entirely.

Now, as far along in time from the films which comprise the Nazisploitation genre as the films themselves were from the events they were loosely based on, we can perhaps still appreciate that, whilst enjoying this oddball array of films along the way.