Archive: Author: David Flint

Stagefright (1987)

Posted on by David Flint

By the time Stagefright emerged in 1987, the Italian exploitation film scene that had managed to outlast most of its European counterparts was on its last legs. Within a few years, the slew of horror, action and sex films that had been churned out since the 1960s was reduced to a trickle, and then more or less ground to a halt. The home video boom that had helped make Italian cult cinema so popular also killed off the international market for new titles. While movies were still being made, few of them were memorable and only a handful have achieved the lasting popularity of their predecessors from just a few years earlier.

Stagefright is one of the few. Director Michele Soavi was seen as the great hope for a new generation of Italian horror directors, though in the end, his career was brief and – with the exception of the critically acclaimed Dellamorte Dellamore – fairly undistinguished. However, Stagefright suggested a potential new talent emerging. It’s not that the film is particularly original, but Soavi brings a definite visual flourish to the rather basic story.

Often seen as a late-era Giallo film, Stagefright is actually closer in style to American slasher movies of the 1980s, replacing the black-gloved killer and whodunnit approach of the Giallo with the established idea of the masked maniac, here an escapee from an asylum who is terrorising a group of young people. However, the film offers its own twist on the concept.

The film opens deceptively – viewers might groan, expecting the worst, as a cliched looking 1980s hooker walks down a stagey looking street and is attacked by a maniac who is, bizarrely, wearing an owl head mask. As people run to see what is happening, things get odd. Is the killer dancing? The camera pulls back to reveal that this is, in fact, a theatrical performance, the rehearsal for a genuinely dreadful-looking (and so impressively authentic) dance musical that just isn’t coming together. Director Peter (David Brandon) is a dictator who has ego and ambition but no talent, and his cast of hapless nobodies in search of their big break seems equally lacking in ability. When leading lady Alicia (Barbara Cupisti) hurts her ankle, wardrobe lady Betty (Ulrike Schwerk) breaks the director’s rules by leaving the building and taking her to a hospital. OK, so it’s a psychiatric hospital, but they still have doctors, right?

This somewhat laughable contrivance allows psycho killer (and former actor) Irving Wallace to escape and hide in their car, travelling back to the theatre with them and then killing Betty as Alicia goes inside to face her director’s wrath. As the police arrive to investigate the crime, Peter has a cunning idea – if they change the unnamed killer in their play to Irving Wallace, they can cash in on the murder (he tells the press that Betty was an actress in the play) and attract massive crowds. He locks the doors of the theatre and prepares to rehearse his cast all night. What could possibly go wrong?

Of course, the real killer has slipped inside too and is soon offing the performers using the sort of handy tools you often find backstage in theatres – axes, power drills, chainsaws and so on are put to use in a frantic second act where the deaths come thick and fast. Soavi delivers these murders with a sense of grandeur and plenty of gore, showing the influence of Dario Argento in his extravagant setups and a touch of Lucio Fulci in his use of graphic violence. The killer – for no good reason, when you think about it – has donned the owl mask previously worn in the stage show by the ultra-camp Brett (Giovanni Lombardo Radice, here performing under his John Morghen pseudonym), and once he’s killed everyone except the Final Girl Alicia, the film takes an odd turn. As she desperately tries to find the keys, the killer positions the corpses on stage in a grotesque tableau and then plays baseball with the severed heads! It’s a weird moment, and definitely eerie in a strange way, the masked murderer sitting in a chair waiting, feathers flying in the air, dead bodies surrounding him. It briefly suggests that the film might have more ideas going on than the average slasher, but it eventually gets back on track and ends in classic slasher style, complete with an unstoppable killer who is never quite dead.

Soavi certainly gives his film a visual polish that is missing from many a slasher movie, and it is this that perhaps most closely ties it to the Italian Giallo thriller tradition. He certainly wears his influences on his sleeve, and that’s no bad thing visually. Luckily, he also manages to keep the story moving along, and the screenplay by Anthropophagous himself George Eastman, while chock full of cliches, wastes no time and keeps the action centred within the theatre (we get occasional cuts to a pair of useless cops – one of whom is Soavi – parked outside the theatre, but this isn’t damaging in the way that, say, the sudden cut to exterior action in Demons is). Soavi certainly knows how to get the best out his basic story, and brings a Grand Guignol sense of the grotesque to the action with a series of grisly, if not especially inventive killings. Simon Boswell’s score is interesting – at best, it is a neat variation on the electronic rock of Fabio Frizzi and Goblin, at worst, it is ultra cheesy, though this is presumably deliberate, as it is supposed to be the soundtrack music of the equally cheesy stage show being rehearsed.

Stagefright is far from perfect, of course. The acting is variable, the dialogue terrible and there are several moments that are likely to induce unsolicited laughter. There’s no escaping the fact that the owl mask is ludicrous, though once you get used to it, it becomes more effective. And it’s certainly an exercise in style over substance, all effort doing into making the film look great rather than hold together as a story. But it holds up rather better than you might expect for a film so wedded to Eighties imagery. It might ultimately be little more than fluff, but it’s entertaining fluff.

Stagefright (1987) gets a fresh release from Shameless Films on December 27th 2021.

Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat (1989)

Posted on by David Flint

I’ve long had a rather dismissive attitude towards 1989 movie Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat, a film that never struck me as a wildly attractive proposition. I’d managed to miss it as festival screenings and although I thought that I had subsequently seen it, rewatching the film proved otherwise (God only knows what film I’ve been confusing it with…). It’s not the most attractive proposition on paper – a comedy-horror-western with a title that is best described as ‘clumsy’ isn’t something that I’d go out of my way to see and I was even reluctant to check out the new Blu-ray.

So inevitably, Sundown turned out to be a LOT better than I could’ve possibly expected. I’m not going to say that this is a lost classic or unsung masterpiece because clearly, that’s not the case – but   it’s a lot better than you might expect and while ultimately a bit of fluff rather than a memorable work of substance, Anthony Hickox’s film is unexpectedly great fun.

Sundown takes place in the town of Purgatory, a small community in the middle of the desert that is entirely populated by vampires. Under the leadership of Count Mardulak (David Carradine), they are attempting to assimilate themselves into the real world – factor 100 sunblock and UV lighting, artificial blood and the façade of normality has given the persecuted bloodsuckers a degree of safety as they prepare to re-enter society and live alongside the humans. But habits and addictions die hard and a disgruntled rebellion, led by Ethan Jefferson (John Ireland) is plotting to overthrow Mardulak and return to the old ways. Into this tense world comes a steady stream of outsiders – the designer of their artificial blood plant and his family, some passing tourists and Robert Van Helsing (Bruce Campbell), who is carrying on the family tradition of hunting down vampires. In the case of the latter, his mission is somewhat complicated by the romantic attentions of vampire waitress Sandy (Deborah Foreman), while for David Harrison (Jim Metzler) and family, his seemingly simple task of fixing the synthetic blood machine is complicated by the presence of Shane Dennis (Maxwell Caulfield), a former love and work rival who is intent on winning back David’s wife Sarah (Morgan Brittany) by vampirising her.

It sounds like a lot is going on in Sundown, and indeed there are several plot strands at work. But everything ties together nicely within the main ‘vampire civil war’ plot, each individual strand connecting with the main narrative. A lot of films with multiple sub-plots struggle to both balance the various characters and finally connect the stories – how often do we see films where seemingly important side stories simply fizzle out? That’s not the case here and everything reaches a satisfactory climax where no characters are simply forgotten about. Similarly, the film manages – just about – to balance its varying styles. This is, after all, a modern day western, a vampire movie, an action film and a comedy, and making those things mesh together is a tall order. The film is helped by its contemporary setting – there’s a long tradition of the vampire western but it is not a particularly noble one, having more misses than hits. Sundown works because it isn’t restricted by the tropes of the western – it can pick and choose which elements to play with and generally, Hickox and co-writer John Burgess make the right choices. Most significantly, this includes a remarkable and epic score by Richard Stone that very much plays on the great western movie tradition and makes the film seem much bigger than it otherwise might. This, and the vast landscapes that form a backdrop to the story which Hickox uses to great effect give this film a grand scale that is unusual in a horror movie. This is one of the few vampire films to take place primarily in the daytime and it works well.

As you’ve probably already noticed, the film has a cast dripping with cult icons – alongside Carradine, Campbell and Scream Queen Foreman, there are appearances from M. Emmett Walsh, Dana Ashbrook from Twin Peaks and Thundercrack’s Marion Eaton. Performances vary – Campbell is a bit too broadly comic at times for my taste, his Van Helsing being a goofy buffoon who seems a bit much. Carradine – who by all accounts was drunk throughout – offers a restrained but oddly effective performance as the vampire leader (whose true identity you will guess immediately) and Caulfield is impressively slimy and loathsome as the smug Shane – you will judge Sarah somewhat for having ever slept with him, because he was no doubt just as awful when human.

The film is unexpectedly light on gore – an early beheading and a few blood squibs are about the height of it and that actually feels like a good thing – the overall lightness of the film does not demand excessive splatter. There are some hilariously cheesy talking bats – both stop-motion and puppets – that would have scuppered a more serious film but here seem part of the fun. In fact, the film positively revels in featuring vampire movie cliches and while it pokes fun,  it at least does so from a place of affection.

Again – I’m not suggesting that Sundown is essential viewing. But the 104 minute film flew by – I genuinely thought I’d been watching for about an hour when the film moved into its climactic scenes, and that was so refreshing – so many films now feel as though they are twice as long as the actual running time. This is solid, old-school entertainment that, even in its weaker moments, has a genuine charm about it, filled with characters that we actually like and it’s never dull for a moment.

Actually, you know what? I’m think I’m going to say that Sundown IS essential viewing. God knows, we all need a bit of disposable fun in our lives. If you simply want entertainment, you’ll be well served here – and in the current climate where genre films increasingly seem intent on hammering home The Message and favour half-baked mumblecore self-indulgence at the expense of actually being fun, movies like this feel all the more vital. I’ll take this over a dozen Shudder Originals any day.

Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat is available on Blu-ray via Vestron Video.

The Dark Eyes of London (1939)

Posted on by David Flint

Prior to the Hammer age, Britain did not produce many horror films. It was a genre frowned on both by censors and producers, and during the war years was actively discouraged – it was felt that there were enough horrors to face in real life. With the exception of the vigorously outrageous Tod Slaughter’s series of lurid romps, few films explored the morbid, filmmakers preferring the murder mystery and wartime thriller when they wanted to examine the dark side of human nature. All the odder, then, that The Dark Eyes of London was made in the UK in 1939.

Or perhaps not. Alongside Slaughter – whose films were very much based around his theatrical melodramas – the main exception to Britain’s unofficial fatwa against the horror story on film was the work of Edgar Wallace. Wallace was hugely popular in the first half of the 20th Century (and beyond), and while his novels were primarily crime dramas, there was a dark edge to much of his writing that – at least when filmed – often blurred the line between thriller and horror. At a time when the horror film was still seen primarily as the fantastical and supernatural, his psychological thrillers probably slipped past the beady eyes of the censor, meaning that films like The Terror – essentially a body count psycho horror story – could be produced even as American-made horror films were being censored or banned.

While Boris Karloff had already returned to the home country in 1933 to star in The Ghoul, this was Bela Lugosi’s first film outside America since he’d reached fame as Dracula. By 1939, his career was already somewhat on the slide – his ego and awkwardness, not to mention his rather old-fashioned acting style would see a fall from the big leagues of Universal towards the less respectable world of Monogram and Republic Pictures – but he was, nevertheless, a name that audiences would recognise. His presence here turns this film from a dark crime thriller into a horror film, and unsurprisingly, the US release made the connection even clearer, retitling the film The Human Monster. This is one of a handful of films to receive the infamous ‘H’ (for Horrific) certificates from the BBFC (thrillingly, the BBFC certification card appears at the start of the new Blu-ray edition).

Lugosi is Dr Orloff – yes, Dr Orloff, the name that Wallace fan Jess Franco would use in his breakthrough movie The Awful Dr Orloff and its various sequels and spin-offs over the years – an insurance salesman whose clients have the unfortunate habit of turning up drowned. While he is presented as a charitable man, willing to help out clients who are in financial difficulties, our suspicions are aroused because, well, he’s Bela Lugosi – and that usually means that he’ll be a bad egg. So it is – Orloff is involved in some sort of nefarious insurance fraud scheme that brings him into contact with a master forger, just extradited from America, and this connection, in turn, alerts police inspector Larry Holt (played with square-jawed intensity by Hugh Williams) and American Lieutenant Patrick O’Reilly (Edmon Ryan), who has come over on some sort of training exchange (but whose role in the film is really just to help sell it to American audiences).

Orloff is a patron of the Dearborn Home for the Blind, the sort of place that you won’t find today – here, blind men are given menial tasks to perform in an effort to make them useful to society once again. One of these tasks – at least for the hulking Jake (Wilfred Walter) – is helping Orloff bump off his clients in a secret room at the back of the institute, unknown to everyone else. As the police close in (thanks to some impressive forensics work), Orloff vanishes. In search of more evidence against him, Larry persuades Diane (Greta Gynt), the daughter of his latest victim, to take a job at the Home as secretary to its kindly owner Dearborn, hoping that she might uncover proof of his crimes and a clue to his whereabouts – but as anyone who has ever read a Wallace story or seen one of the many film adaptations will have already guessed, Dearborn is actually Orloff in disguise – his voice dubbed by O.B. Clarence just to throw audiences off the scent – and he sends Jake out to finish off Diane…

While essentially a crime film more than a horror story – Orloff’s motives for murder are, after all, strictly financial – the production is given a gothic luridness by director Walter Summers that removes it from the other British Wallace movies, most notably the series of films made in the 1960s that were very much straight-ahead crime dramas for the most part. Summers was a journeyman director – though he had previously made the last British silent film of note, another horror film called Chamber of Horrors – but he brings a real verve to this, keeping the comic relief that sometimes overwhelms films of the era under control and adding a sense of creepiness and unease to the story. The character of Jake is a classic horror movie henchman, large and brutish, and the film is – for the time – unexpectedly grim on occasion, with the dead bodies looking genuinely unsettling.

Lugosi is on good form, though some of his long, drawn-out sentences and intense stares into the camera are perhaps overdone – I think even the dopiest copper might have had his suspicions alerted by this sort of behaviour. But this is amongst his best films, one that still holds up surprisingly well today. It’s great to see it getting the remastered Blu-ray treatment and for anyone unfamiliar with Lugosi, Wallace or 1930s horror in general, this is as good a place as any to start.

The Dark Eyes of London will be released by Network on 11th October 2021. For more details, please click here.

Baphomet (2021)

Posted on by David Flint

It’s possible that Baphomet benefits from the power of reduced expectations. This is a low budget horror movie of the sort you might find propping up the arse-end of Amazon Prime listings, complete with gimmicky casting or ageing and perhaps not all that fussy genre icons, and so you might understandably expect it to be shocking in all the wrong ways. So the fact that it is a fairly efficient production is perhaps more satisfactory than ‘thoroughly average’ might otherwise seem. Your life isn’t going to be elevated in any way by seeing this, but equally, it won’t be the grim ordeal that you might fear.

The film cherry-picks themes and moments from assorted other movies with its tale of a farming family out in the sticks who find themselves terrorised by a group of Satanists who want their home. To be fair to the Satanists, they initially try the polite approach, making an offer to buy the place which is rather rudely turned down by angry Richardson family patriarch Jacob (Colin Ward) – and part of me can’t help but think that everything that subsequently happens is a bit deserved because of his brusqueness. Manners cost nothing, after all.

The cult, led by Henrik Brandr (Giovanni Lombardo Radice – better known to 80s Italian horror fans as John Morghen) wants the farm because it covers a TERRIBLE SECRET, and won’t take no for an answer. Soon, the Richardsons find themselves assailed with a terrible curse that results in the  death – by shark attack! – of Mark Neville, the son-in-law of Jacob and husband of his pregnant daughter Rebecca (Rebecca Neville). Mark is played by Matthan Harris, who also writes and directs then film, and while such triple whammies sometimes have good results, it often feels as though someone is stretching their talents – or belief in the talent – a bit far. Harris is not the worst actor in the film, but that’s not really a compliment.

Still, everyone is an Oscar contender compared to Dani Filth – yes, the man from Cradle of Filth – who pops up to literally phone in – or Zoom in – an appearance. Seasoned readers might recall his appearance in the unbearably bad Cradle of Fear, and so will be shaken to hear that he is much, much worse here – possibly because he has actual dialogue this time round, which is delivered with all the stilted emotion of a man reading off a malfunctioning autocue. There are those who claim that Mr Filth is some sort of great thinker and artistic visionary; this film does little to help that rather questionable argument. Luckily, his entire appearance is just a few minutes long and entirely consists of him talking into a camera as he offers faltering occult expertise and cheery encouragement to Rebecca. That’s right – he doesn’t even play a sinister character. His appearance is clearly just for name value, which suggests a strange optimism in the ongoing and international popularity of Cradle of Filth.

Rebecca decides that she won’t take her husband’s death and the constant terrorism by the Satanic cult lying down, and consults a local witch who is, it must be said, more powerful than most – she brings Mark back from the dead, complete with a regrown leg, to help battle the occult forces as a final reckoning looms. You’ve seen enough of this sort of thing to know how it will all go.

Surprisingly, there are moments in Baphomet are more impressive than they have any right to be. The shark attack, as ludicrous as it might be, is actually pretty well handled – the shark looks good and the scenes (both actual and flashback) are actually well crafted. The occult sacrifices are equally intense and, by modern movie standards, pretty extreme – nudity AND gore! There are some good creepy set-pieces and a solid sense of dread throughout much of the film as the threat from the Satanists grows. It looks better than you would expect and builds atmosphere quite impressively – and despite some lengthy moments of no much happening, it manages to keep the narrative moving along at a steady pace.

Unfortunately, as with many films like this, the acting is pretty variable – and by ‘variable’, I mean that it runs the gamut from extremely wooden to reasonably efficient. Radice is actually pretty good – definitely better than I’ve seen him in similar movies where he’s been roped in for fan recognition. But too many not-especially-good actors have too much long-winded dialogue that even the most seasoned performer might find a mouthful, and the leads struggle to convince that they are undergoing any real emotional trauma.

But, you know what? In truth, I expected Baphomet to be a train wreck and it is far from that. As a Satanic Panic horror film, it does what it sets out to do with solid efficiency. I’ve seen much worse – some of it being praised to high heaven at major festivals. I can’t pretend that it is revolutionary or even remotely original, but it’s not awful by any means – a decent, ambitious effort let down mainly by a misguided belief that a faded rock star would help sell more copies.

Small Soldiers (1998)

Posted on by David Flint

Joe Dante is an interesting director. He’s worked almost entirely in the mainstream, on movies that are ‘family entertainment’ – sometimes for Spielberg, sometimes for other highly corporate filmmakers. His films are often glossy, expensive-looking affairs. He, and his movies, ought to be very annoying. Yet I find myself really enjoying his movies, albeit as passing fancies – Gremlins is great, Gremlins 2 is possibly even greater, The Hole is fantastic, and even though The ‘Burbs winds up as a QAnon fantasy brought to life, it’s still excellent up to those last five minutes or so.

And then we have Small Soldiers, which feels a bit like a reboot of Gremlins – a suburban street is invaded by tiny monsters – and perhaps more than most of his movies ought to be an annoying teen fantasy, laden as it is with CGI effects and just enough violence to get a PG-13, but not enough to upset anyone. In essence, Small Soldiers ought to be the sort of cynical rubbish that the various sub-divisions of Disney grind out every summer.

That it isn’t is almost certainly down to Dante, who brings an entertaining sense of cynicism to the story and fills it with amusing side characters, played by the likes of Dick Miller. The story itself deals with the end results of using military-grade microprocessors to enhance toys – after weapons contractor Globotech buys the Heartland toy company (no subtlety in the names there) and new boss Dennis Leary, playing the sort of bastard he always seems to play, demands more realism in the products. These chips don’t just enhance the toys, they effectively bring them to life. The monstrous, alien creatures known as Gorgonites are peace-loving eccentrics, but the crew-cutted GI Joe-style Commando Elite figures designed as their enemies are a different kettle of fish, and are soon out to kill the “Gorgonite scum” and anyone else who stands in their way. That means teenager Alan Abernathy (Gregory Smith) and his neighbour and crush Christy (Kirsten Dunst), after Alan foolishly persuades delivery man Joe (Dick Miller) to slip him a crateful of the toys early to sell in his dad’s toy shop.

The film is, on the one hand, standard teen action fare – there are lots of explosions, just-violent-enough battles with the Commando Elite and the kids saving the day as their wacky parents bumble around. But Dante avoids the mean-spirited nature and faux sentimentality of a lot of these films. Alan is a misfit, but not so much so that the point is laboured; Christy’s boyfriend isn’t the unpleasant bully that you might expect. The relationships feel real, and even the adults – while still played as buffoons a lot of the time – seem more realistic than in most films like this. As for the small soldiers themselves… well, the Commando Elite (played by cast members of The Dirty Dozen, a fun little in-joke lost on the target audience, I imagine) are suitably right-wing and psychotic, while the Gorgonites have just enough charm and dignity to override some of the slapstick that they are involved in. They are, of course, much more fun visually than the commandos, and immediately much more appealing as characters. It perhaps says something about some film critics that at the time of the film’s original release, some were surprised that the bad guys would be the militaristic humans. Despite the violent action, this is definitely one of Dante’s lighter films – the digs at the military aside, there isn’t the edgy nature or dark comedy of some of his other movies here. Instead, it’s just a fun romp that isn’t going to upset anyone (well, maybe army types) and is consistently entertaining. It doesn’t feel like a film of any real significance, but as something to sit down and watch with the family on a Sunday afternoon, it’s better than a lot of stuff out there.

Fantasia 2020: For The Sake of Vicious

Posted on by David Flint

I’m aware that all the good movie titles, like all the good band names, have been taken. But For The Sake Of Vicious (2020) is as clumsy a name as any I’ve heard. It has no particular relevance to the film – at least not to the point where it was necessary – and is surely going to put some people off. I’m always suspicious of retitled movies, but this one is almost begging a distributor to slap some generic horror title on it.

I’ll be honest here – while this film starts off at a pace, my heart rather sank as the plot unfolded. A nurse, Romina (Lora Burke), arrives home from a Halloween night shift to find a beaten, unconscious man and his attacker in her house. The attacker is Chris (Nick Smyth), the father of a child whom his captive Alan (Colin Paradine) allegedly raped five years earlier. Romina finds herself being pulled into Chris’s revenge trip against a man who may or may not be guilty of the crime that he was acquitted for, and after twenty minutes or so, it feels as though we’ve been here before in films like Big Bad Wolves, or – if we want to go back to 1971 – the British film Revenge. Here, we immediately have too many cliched elements that we’ve seen already – the man driven insane by a need for justice (or perhaps to divert blame from his own crime), the victim who may or may not be a monster (the more reasonable he seems, the more likely it is that he is guilty, right?) and the woman who is the voice of reason, but who is also rather easily manipulated by a man who broke into her home with someone whom he has been torturing. But her trust is constantly shifting – there are problems with Chris’s story, Alan has too many answers for his questions, and his attacker seems too driven by insanity to be able to see the truth.

At this stage, the film seems to be an efficient but not especially interesting rehash of ideas that we’ve seen before, and you think that you can see where this will go – a series of doubts and double bluffs before we are finally shown the truth – and you can even guess what that truth would be, because those earlier films – while exploring the dubious nature of vigilantism and false accusation – eventually end up in the Death Wish tradition, suggesting that the vigilantes were right all along. But just as we seem to settling into this familiar territory, For the Sake of Vicious suddenly twists into another direction. We might be getting into spoiler territory here, given that the shift happens some forty minutes in, so those of you worried about such things might want to skip the rest of this review.

Romina allows Alan to make a phone call. We see a mysterious figure in a biker bar answer, and two masked figures show up to the house shortly afterwards, as Chris is torturing the hell out of his victim, in a scene that packs a real bunch in terms of brutal intensity and out-of-control mania. But they are not here to rescue Alan, and things start to get very odd immediately, as Chris is forced to defend himself, Romina and – by default – Alan from these invaders. This he does rather well, but these three home invaders are just the first wave of a biker army – the Splitting Skulls – who descend en masse.

The film’s shift in tone – from intense torture horror to ultra-violent home invasion action movie – is what ultimately saves it. In a sense, the opening half of the film is a tease, aimed at misdirecting us from what is to come, and once the film kicks in, it’s a fairly relentless and extraordinarily brutal affair that takes all our expectations and messes with them. Admittedly, the biker gang seem remarkably ineffectual at dealing with just three people, one of whom has already been crippled – and unless Chris is some sort of special forces action man, his ability to off multiple attackers is a bit much. This is the sort of film where people can virtually shrug off crippling injuries – multiple stab wounds to the stomach, a claw hammer embedded in the eye – to carry on fighting. It’s a shame, because there is, otherwise, a genuine intensity and savagery to the attacks, which are painfully intimate and ferociously gory – throats are slit, heads are crushed, limbs are snapped, all in loving detail.

There are some interesting performances – Paradine keeps you guessing, while Smyth is suitably psychotic, perhaps too much early on but more impressively as things develop. Burke, unfortunately, feels like the weak link -possibly through no fault of her own – and it’s hard to warm to her. She feels like a token ‘final girl’ and the film might have been more intense all round without her interfering in the twisted relationship between the two men.

But all told, this is a much better film than you would expect early on. It doesn’t stop for air and there are enough genuine twists and ambiguities to keep you guessing through to the end. There’s a pumping score that keeps things going and directors Gabriel Carrer and Reese Eveneshen ensure that the film’s savage intensity doesn’t descend into incoherence. This is impressively nasty stuff and well worth sticking with.

For the Sake of Vicious premiered at the Fantasia Film Festival on 2nd September 2020.

Horrors of Spider Island (1960)

Posted on by David Flint

There’s a case for the poster for Horrors of Spider Island appearing under the dictionary definition of ‘exploitation film’, so perfectly does the movie encapsulate everything about the genre. On this basis, the only surprise about the new Severin blu-ray is why it has taken the label so long to release it, as perfect a match for their catalogue of outrageous Euro-sleaze as it is.

Shot as Ein Toter hing im Netz – “The body in the web” – and released under various titles including It’s Hot in Paradise, depending on just which market it was being pitched at, the film stretches its meagre horrors out, having more interest in the sexy antics of a gaggle of dancers who we first see auditioning for theatrical impresario Gary Webster (Alexander D’Arcy) before setting off for a series of shows in Singapore. But when their plane crashes – literally breaking in two – the dancers, Webster and his assistant (who are, miraculously, the only survivors) wind up on a life raft that washes up on a mysterious, deserted and uncharted island. The discovery of the body of a uranium-hunting professor, hanging from a giant spider web, might be a clue that this is not the tropical paradise that it seems, but these girls are a hardy lot, and are soon settling in. Webster is a bit of a cold fish, even when a particularly slutty stripper throws herself at him – not for him the potential pleasures of being the only man on an island of sweaty, increasingly horny and scantily clad nubile hotties. No, he instead wanders off for ‘a walk’, only to be attacked by an impressively weird spider monster, which he kills – but not until it has bitten him, transferring its evil spider venom into his veins and turning him into a ferocious beast with a hairy face and giant claws (this seems to have gobbled up the entire make-up budget, as the rest of him stays resolutely human).

The film is now nicely set up to allow the spider-man to terrorise the women, picking them off one by one in the classic horror tradition. But after excitedly dispatching the aforementioned stripper while the other girls are out looking for him, Webster pretty much vanishes from sight for most of the film. Instead, director Fritz Böttger concentrates on the girls as they bitch and frolic. Well, why not? Among them is the striking Barbara Valentin, the very definition of ‘blonde bombshell’ and later something of a muse for both Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Freddie Mercury; the film ensures that her top is pulled open to expose a spectacular bosom (sorry if that sounds sexist, but credit where credit’s due) during one particularly vigorous cat fight – though in one of the many continuity errors caused by apparently shooting hotter versions for some markets, she has miraculously acquired a bra in the next shot. Still, the smattering of nudity is not what you might expect from a 1959 horror film, even one made by those decadent continentals. No wonder it gave the British censors palpitations and was banned in the UK.

After some considerable time of the film being a lightweight glamour girl retread of Lord of the Flies, a couple of remarkably unappealing men turn up on the island to drop off supplies for the professor, and their shock at his death is quickly mitigated by the bevy of beautiful girls, all of whom have been starved of male attention for a month by this point – Spider Webster seemingly as disinterested in them as his human self was. Cue some saucy skinny-dipping and a long topless dance routine, plentiful jealous pouting and the two men having a jolly punch up that ends with a laugh and a shake of the hand. Boys will be boys.

Eventually, someone of the production remembers that this is supposedly a horror film, and Spider Webster reappears to cause some minor level havoc and kill off a couple of characters before everything is neatly wrapped up.

Horrors of Spider Island is gleefully trashy – even at the time, you can’t imagine that it could’ve escaped the filmmakers just what they were making, and so any criticism aimed at it seems pointless. It plays like a collision of The Island of Dr Moreau and a Mamie Van Doren juvenile delinquency flick, and the mostly-female cast definitely give it their all. The gratuitous nudity is tame stuff by modern standards, but you’ll still be impressed at just HOW gratuitous it is, and there are great moments of over AND under-acting, sometimes in the same scene – a face-slapping moment is so extraordinarily non-committal that I couldn’t stop thinking about it for the rest of the movie, and the scenes with Spider-Webster are equally bland (he’s one of those monsters who reaches out to touch a girl, but then shyly retreats into the bushes if she turns around – hardly the sort of thing to strike terror into anyone) and precious little makes any sort of sense. But of course, it’s huge fun if you like this sort of thing, and of course, I do. The spider creature is rather fabulous if you ignore the visible wires moving it around, the music is bombastic and frequently inappropriate and there’s a cheerful trashiness about the whole thing that is hard to resist. Naturally, I implore you to watch the dubbed version rather than the original German soundtrack.

This is a film that has been knocking around for years as a questionable ‘public domain’ title, but Severin’s new disc is worth a punt nevertheless. The film has been restored, with a handful of scenes never seen before (and not dubbed in English); the disc also contains the alternative US version, which is shorter and perhaps trashier. You’ll definitely want to watch it more than once, if only because you might otherwise convince yourself that the first viewing was some sort of fever dream, so it’s an ideal opportunity to compare and contrast.

For more information on this release of Horrors of Spider Island, please click here.

Mr Vampire (1985)

Posted on by David Flint

In a world of Elevated Horror, Intelligent Horror, Woke Horror and horror that desperately wants to be ‘of the moment’, there’s a definite pleasure to be had from seeing a film that does not hold both the genre and its audience in thinly-veiled contempt. The joys of Mr Vampire are, for the most part, lightweight and disposable, and are all the better for that.

Ironically, back in the day, Mr Vampire was – somewhat accidentally – revolutionary stuff. Horror has long been a global industry, but it’s fair to say that few Hong Kong genre movies had made it to the West beyond those caught up in the 1970s martial arts craze, until a handful of movies – A Chinese Ghost Story, Zu Warriors of the Magic Mountain and this one being at the forefront – broke through to find a whole new audience who were understandably dazzled by their originality. Alongside the bullet ballet films of directors like John Woo, Chinese horror felt unlike anything that we’d seen before – visually beautiful, dynamic, breathlessly fast-paced and with a winning combination of action, humour and melodrama, this new generation of films (one that was just as groundbreaking in Hong Kong, to be fair) felt like a breath of fresh air in a genre that was, at the time, becoming increasingly stale and directionless.

Mr Vampire was the pioneer of the movement – a 1985 hit in Hong Kong that spawned several sequels, spin-offs and imitators, it was a shot in the arm for the Hong Kong film industry and set the template for many films to come. It’s a hugely important film because of what it helped spawn, but of course, ‘important’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘good’. Many a film – many an Eighties film in particular – can feel clumsy and lacklustre when watched again, especially if you are to take the rose-tinted glasses of youth off. Thankfully, this is not the case here – watching the film again for the first time since the early 1990s, I was struck by just how well it holds up, even after years of glossier, faster-paced Hong Kong movies.

The film follows the adventures of Master Kau (Lam Ching-ying), an expert on the supernatural and burial master, who – along with his buffoonish students Man Choi (Ricky Hui) and Chou (Chin Siu-Ho) are tasked with re-burying an unquiet corpse. Unfortunately for them, the corpse turns out to be a vampire, who is soon causing chaos as it rampages through the locale, trying to vampirise his granddaughter (Moon Lee).

This is the film that introduced Western audiences to the idea of the hopping vampire, a distinctly Chinese variation on the undead, and that – alongside the very localised methods of combating the overly active corpse, including the use of sticky rice and magic spells – still feels fresh now. The vampires here are arguably sometimes more like zombies (especially the animated corpses that Master Lau and his associates transport around), but the titular character is both comedic and creepy. And that’s a good way to describe the film as a whole – this is a horror comedy, and the humour is often very broad. Hong Kong films didn’t, by and large, go for subtle humour, and if you don’t like slapstick, wild facial mugging and exaggerated hysteria, then this might not be for you. But it works within the story, where everything is somewhat over-the-top, and doesn’t feel contrived in the way that some of its Western contemporaries do. This is a film that revels in its silliness and pokes affectionate fun at both Chinese folklore and the martial arts film tradition, while still knowing when to play things straight – there are moments of suspense and relentless threat, as well as a hauntingly sweet subplot involving a romantic ghost.

The most significant aspect of Mr Vampire, when seen again, is just how fresh it feels. Despite the hopping vampire being run into the ground by countless films, this still works remarkably well. It’s not a film that tries to do anything other than entertain, and it does that very well indeed. Life is currently grim enough and there’s a lot to be said for a film that doesn’t leave you feeling worse after you’ve seen it. This is joyful, charming and – in the best way possible – pleasingly throwaway, and all the more worthwhile because of that. Hop to it!

Mr Vampire is available now from Eureka! For more information, click here.

Death Ship (1980)

Posted on by David Flint

Death Ship has often been dismissed as a nautical rip-off of The Shining, but we should note that both films opened in the UK at almost the same time – not that such facts necessarily mean anything, given how long Kubrick’s film was in production, but this might be less a copycat and more one of those odd genre coincidences that often see themes explored simultaneously and coincidentally. To muddy the waters further, Death Ship only vaguely resembles The Shining anyway, and we need to remember that the idea of bad spirits taking over an individual were not exactly a new idea – indeed, The Amityville Horror had explored that very theme a year earlier, and so could equally be held responsible for Death Ship. But I digress.

Made in 1980, Death Ship was something of an anomaly at the time – while the ghost story was having something of a revival (with The Changeling, The Hearse and, a year later, Ghost Story all joining the aforementioned titles), the film didn’t quite gel with those films; neither did it fit with the slasher movies, the zombie gorefests or the exploitation movies of the time, even if it tries to channel aspects of many of those films from time to time. That’s not a bad thing, especially seen decades out of context – originality should never be sniffed at. But in truth, Death Ship often seems to be a film drifting as aimlessly as its characters, never quite sure of what it wants to be – one minute playing with atmospheric imagery, the next engaging in gratuitous excess.

The film opens with Captain Ashland (George Kennedy), a cruise ship captain making his last voyage. Ashland is the Basil Fawlty of cruise ship captains, so it’s no surprise that he has been given the boot. Making things extra awkward is the fact that his replacement, Trevor Marshall (Richard Crenna) is along for the trip, complete with wife and annoying children. In classic disaster movie style (and this is as much influenced by the likes of The Poseidon Adventure and such as anything), we are introduced to assorted characters early on who will be the survivors once the Bad Thing happens, including sexpot Lori (Victoria Burgoyne), her love interest, crewman Nick (Nick Mancuso), and ship’s entertainer Jackie (Saul Rubinek). There’s only a token effort to establish these supporting characters, unfortunately, before the film steams ahead into disaster – in this case, the mysterious appearance of a ship that seems hell-bent on a collision course, and rams the cruise ship, sending it to the bottom of the sea with just a handful of survivors, most of whom seem to be crew. No Titanic spirit here, clearly. Or maybe this ship had even fewer life boats than that infamous vessel, given that this handful of survivors are all clinging to a piece of wreckage. They find Ashland floating, unconscious, and pull him on board before bumping into the mysterious ship that had rammed them. And I do mean ‘bumping into’, as apparently no one on the raft noticed a huge ship until it was on top of them.

This odd lack of observation and curiosity continues, as no one – not even the crew members who were aware of what had caused the collision – seem to connect this ship to the accident, no one really questions why the ship is entirely deserted and even when Jackie is caught up by a cable, hoisted into the air and then plunged into the sea – actions that could not have happened unless things were being controlled by some force – there is no suspicion voiced.

This rather casual attitude to danger and mystery continues, even as everyone sits down to enjoy a 1930s film in a projection room and fellow survivor Mrs Morgan (Kate Reid) is suddenly aged terribly by a piece of hard candy found in the ship’s storeroom – a warning, if any were needed, that noshing on fifty-year-old food in an abandoned ship is not something to do casually. Rushing from the room, she encounters a suddenly-awoken Ashland, who promptly strangles her. These events also seem to cause surprisingly little concern. But Ashland has now become possessed by the spirits of the ship’s crew, and this is not just any crew – they are Nazis. Real, Third Reich Nazis, by the way, not just someone being contrarian on Twitter. The ship turns out to be a floating torture chamber – because the Nazis definitely had those – and the spirits of the dead – tortured and torturer alike, it seems – live on.

Eventually, even the laid-back survivors start to feel that the ship is probably an unhealthy environment, but too late – the ship’s spirits have lowered the life boats, preventing any escape. A psychotic Ashland is on the prowl. Things are looking bad. So obviously, Lori decides to take a shower. Well, why not? This is, after all, a 1980 horror movie and it has been oddly lacking in gratuitous nudity so far. Unfortunately for Lori, the shower starts pouring blood instead of water, and the door is locked. While Nick runs around looking for help (because of course, everyone seems to have chosen cabins as far away from each other as possible), Lori spends an unusual amount of time cowering naked, covered in blood. Oddly though, this scene – widely dismissed as unnecessarily gratuitous – is perhaps the one moment where Alvin Rakoff’s film shows a real sense of visual style, with impressive overhead shots and constant cutting between the shower and the panicked Nick. It’s impressively intense, shocking and creepy, and you wish that the rest of the film had shown a similar gumption.

After this, it all becomes rather plodding again. Ashland – dressed as the Nazi ship captain – wanders around trying to bump off the remaining cast, sometimes barking orders at his ghostly crew. He stays lucid long enough to explain that the ship is hunting down other vessels in order to feed on the blood of survivors, and this lust for blood will prove to be his undoing, as the ship’s needs eventually override even the orders of its new captain…

If there is one overriding problem with Death Ship, it is this: the film is too restrained for its own good. The odd visual set-piece aside, it all too often plods through the events with a lack of urgency that is frustrating. It’s frustrating because there’s talent to spare here – a solid cast of decent character actors, decent production values and a good idea lurking in the background, sadly undeveloped. You have to wonder what Jack Hill – a director who has never made a boring film – would have made of this, had his story (originally called Bloodstar) been developed into a screenplay and he taken the directorial helm. Alvin Rakoff has done some interesting work for both cinema and television, but horror does not seem to be his forte, and this is a film that perhaps needed a bolder vision to make the eccentric premise work. As it is, the film feels somewhat caught between a desire to be a ‘respectable’ horror film and the commercial requirements to be shameless exploitation, eventually falling between the two stools and not really satisfying anyone.

Nucleus Films have, at least, gone out of their way to make this new Blu-ray appealing. As well as presenting the newly extended and remastered edition, the disc features a commentary by Rakoff (who opens by saying that he never wanted to make the film and then continues to make excuses) and a retrospective documentary (in which everyone makes excuses), plus alternative TV scenes and, most significantly, trailer galleries featuring the work of Rakoff, Hill and producer Alan Greenberg (who produced a lot of exploitation and horror classics) – 78 minutes of trailers for films like Spider  Baby, Mondo Keyhole, The Big Doll House and Coffy (and that’s just the Jack Hill selection). Essentially worth the price of the disc alone.

Death Ship is available now from Nucleus Films. For more information, click here.